One of the startling things about the modern era is that, by admitting that we don't have a clue about the gods, about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, we have paradoxically learned more about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything than we ever imagined.
OK, so back in the Age of Reason we figured we had it all figured out. I suppose that was what Descartes was all about. But through the British empiricists and skeptics we finally arrive at dear old Kant, who famously declared that we could not know things in themselves, only appearances.
Does that mean that science is impossible? Not at all. It means that science is merely a theory about things in themselves. If the theory is a good fit with the appearances of things, then it is a good theory, and we can go ahead and use the theory to, e.g., make LED lamps based on the assumption that quantum mechanics is true.
But then we have Gödel's incompleteness theorems. The point here is that every theoretical system begins with assumptions. And then there is Tarski's theorem about the undefinability of truth. The short meaning of this is that science will always involve guesses and leaps in the dark, not the careful unraveling of reason and logic.
Or, if you like, Thomas Kuhn's assertion in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science is a social endeavor, where most scientists most of the time act like conformists, staying within the boundaries of accepted doctrine, and only occasionally do total crackpot scientists dare to step outside the consensus to propose a new theory, or paradigm, that brings the consensus science into question.
The dear old Atlantic has a confirmation of Kuhn's notion. It's an article by Bianca Bosker "The Nastiest Feud in Science" about the brouhaha among paleontologists about the great dinosaur extinction -- or Ct-P extinction event to us chaps in the know -- 66 million years ago. Was it an asteroid strike, right here in Yucatan, as physicist Luis Alvarez proposed in 1980? Or was it a 100,000 year outbreak of volcanism, belching volcanos pouring out all manner of eevil pollutants just like in the modern era with our fossil fuel mania, as proposed by rough tough Swiss-born Gerta Keller?
Yes, you knew there had to be a rough tough kick-boxing girl scientist in there somewhere. Otherwise no article in The Atlantic. Because everybody knows that the real scientists were women all along, like Einstein's wife. Remember her?
As you can imagine, where liberal academicians are involved, the whole argument about the Ct-P extinction event has been a 30 year pissing match where partisans have deep-sixed academic articles they didn't like and used their power to retard the careers of rising academics that didn't properly toe the line. In other words, exactly like climate science.
Yeah. Read the whole thing.
All very interesting. Because we humans love to obsess about the End of the World.
But I must say that the takeaway for me was the notion that these scientists sure are having a ball spending money on our dime. Who wouldn't grab at the opportunity to travel all through the Deccan Traps in India, where a lot of the volcanic lava back then seeped out into the innocent environment and where you can get a look at the evidence by finding useful rock outcrops and confusing the natives.
See, I think it is time to do a radical reform of the universities. And my first priority would be to stop government financing of research. Really, research is a rich man's hobby. For chaps like Darwin. Or Einstein in between important bureaucratic deadlines working as a patent-office clerk.
And the study of "toxic masculinity" and the rest of the lefty racist sexist agenda should be for rich girls to play Mean Girls with other Mean Girls. But not with money taxed from deplorables.
All this stuff, from Yale-Harvard graduates getting a lock on Supreme Court seats and NYT house racist slots to the general uselessness of all the people in the foreign policy/intelligence bureaucracy, is just jobs for the scions of the elite -- the kind of guys satirized by Trollope as Sir Raffle Baffle -- and I don't hold with any of it. It is all bullshit.
Yeah, it would be really cool to know how the various extinctions occurred. Asteroids, Deccan Traps, Aliens. You name it.
But really, people should be paying for the opportunity to do this stuff. It's a game for rich kids, like wineries and the new craze for craft breweries and distilleries. And I'm all in favor of it: science and craft breweries.
I just don't think that anything improves when it is associated with politics. It's the old story. When you mix ice-cream and ordure, the resulting mixture is ordure.
And you can tell what is going down in The Atlantic article about extinction events when it inevitably gets into climate change. Surely, Bianca Bosker, you are better than that.
Like I say, the only warrant for political power is existential peril. If the Persians aren't messing with the Hebrews or the Mongols aren't messing with the Russians or the Nazis aren't messing with Jews, or good faithful progressives, then the only thing to scare the ordure out of people is climate change.
And I don't hold with that.
OK, so back in the Age of Reason we figured we had it all figured out. I suppose that was what Descartes was all about. But through the British empiricists and skeptics we finally arrive at dear old Kant, who famously declared that we could not know things in themselves, only appearances.
Does that mean that science is impossible? Not at all. It means that science is merely a theory about things in themselves. If the theory is a good fit with the appearances of things, then it is a good theory, and we can go ahead and use the theory to, e.g., make LED lamps based on the assumption that quantum mechanics is true.
But then we have Gödel's incompleteness theorems. The point here is that every theoretical system begins with assumptions. And then there is Tarski's theorem about the undefinability of truth. The short meaning of this is that science will always involve guesses and leaps in the dark, not the careful unraveling of reason and logic.
Or, if you like, Thomas Kuhn's assertion in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science is a social endeavor, where most scientists most of the time act like conformists, staying within the boundaries of accepted doctrine, and only occasionally do total crackpot scientists dare to step outside the consensus to propose a new theory, or paradigm, that brings the consensus science into question.
The dear old Atlantic has a confirmation of Kuhn's notion. It's an article by Bianca Bosker "The Nastiest Feud in Science" about the brouhaha among paleontologists about the great dinosaur extinction -- or Ct-P extinction event to us chaps in the know -- 66 million years ago. Was it an asteroid strike, right here in Yucatan, as physicist Luis Alvarez proposed in 1980? Or was it a 100,000 year outbreak of volcanism, belching volcanos pouring out all manner of eevil pollutants just like in the modern era with our fossil fuel mania, as proposed by rough tough Swiss-born Gerta Keller?
Yes, you knew there had to be a rough tough kick-boxing girl scientist in there somewhere. Otherwise no article in The Atlantic. Because everybody knows that the real scientists were women all along, like Einstein's wife. Remember her?
As you can imagine, where liberal academicians are involved, the whole argument about the Ct-P extinction event has been a 30 year pissing match where partisans have deep-sixed academic articles they didn't like and used their power to retard the careers of rising academics that didn't properly toe the line. In other words, exactly like climate science.
Yeah. Read the whole thing.
All very interesting. Because we humans love to obsess about the End of the World.
But I must say that the takeaway for me was the notion that these scientists sure are having a ball spending money on our dime. Who wouldn't grab at the opportunity to travel all through the Deccan Traps in India, where a lot of the volcanic lava back then seeped out into the innocent environment and where you can get a look at the evidence by finding useful rock outcrops and confusing the natives.
See, I think it is time to do a radical reform of the universities. And my first priority would be to stop government financing of research. Really, research is a rich man's hobby. For chaps like Darwin. Or Einstein in between important bureaucratic deadlines working as a patent-office clerk.
And the study of "toxic masculinity" and the rest of the lefty racist sexist agenda should be for rich girls to play Mean Girls with other Mean Girls. But not with money taxed from deplorables.
All this stuff, from Yale-Harvard graduates getting a lock on Supreme Court seats and NYT house racist slots to the general uselessness of all the people in the foreign policy/intelligence bureaucracy, is just jobs for the scions of the elite -- the kind of guys satirized by Trollope as Sir Raffle Baffle -- and I don't hold with any of it. It is all bullshit.
Yeah, it would be really cool to know how the various extinctions occurred. Asteroids, Deccan Traps, Aliens. You name it.
But really, people should be paying for the opportunity to do this stuff. It's a game for rich kids, like wineries and the new craze for craft breweries and distilleries. And I'm all in favor of it: science and craft breweries.
I just don't think that anything improves when it is associated with politics. It's the old story. When you mix ice-cream and ordure, the resulting mixture is ordure.
And you can tell what is going down in The Atlantic article about extinction events when it inevitably gets into climate change. Surely, Bianca Bosker, you are better than that.
Like I say, the only warrant for political power is existential peril. If the Persians aren't messing with the Hebrews or the Mongols aren't messing with the Russians or the Nazis aren't messing with Jews, or good faithful progressives, then the only thing to scare the ordure out of people is climate change.
And I don't hold with that.
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