I do not know if the comfortable (conservative) boomer mind, in its innermost heart of hearts, actually changed at all between 1941 and 2015.
I mean most conservatives of all ages have learned not to describe the world's various 'colored'* people as inferior -at least not in public .
But I do not know how they actually feel about them in private.
(*Colored people as in 'not-pink colored' people presumably.)
But the uncomfortably minded boomer does seemed to have gone through quite a sea change between 1941 and 2015.
In 1895 future King Edward II was reported to have said "we are all socialists nowadays" and it seemed that all of the uncomfortable , at least while young and unsettled in good jobs, were a bit bolshie in the Era of Modernity.
But somewhere along the line as Modernity faded out, the young stopped being socialist - either of the bolshie red kind or of the barely pink democratic socialist kind.
I know this was my personal trajectory - being a strong democratic socialist from age of 18 until my late thirties (coincidentally when a whole lot of young people in the bolshie east of Europe declared they felt the same way).
Socialists like pie , being merely unhappy that it isn't divided fairly, with a much bigger slice going to the ordinary worker.
And an absolutely bigger pie to them was always better - even if their relative slice size failed to reach what they deemed fair.
To use Schnaiberg/Dunlap/McCright's term, they were pro 'production science' --- bigger was always better.
But green minded people began to feel that it was the constant chasing after the ever bigger pie (and even the pie itself) that was making them unhappy - sick and unhappy.
Industrial pie making was making their families and the environment sick and now it appeared that it would certainly kill off the planet in a way that the pre-1989 capitalist versus socialist nuclear arms race had merely threatened to do.
Greens dislike uncontrolled production science and want to see its excesses tempered by more 'impact science' - again to use Schnaiberg/Dunlap and McCright's term.
That is, they wanted scientists to monitor the ratio of all the bad outputs of industrial production against all the good things it gave us.
And that is what happened to me --- I gradually saw more and more clearly how socialists could ruin the Earth just as quickly as capitalists could.
The sin they held in common - I saw - was Modernity.
I was becoming post or anti Modernity without becoming what the textbooks called postmodernist.
I prefer to think of my new faith as being more an 'involuntary open commensality' with all of the planet's beings .
Not exactly lambs lying down with lions, but there you have it....
Showing posts with label production science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label production science. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Today's Conflicted Boomers : typical of any Transitional Generation
The main reason why the long dead Adorno and Horkheimer still get the big bucks in intellectual currency, while you and I pal pick about for chicken feed, all comes down to a mimeographed collection of turgid speculative essays the pair circulated among a few friends at the end of WWII.
At the time, all the rest of the world was beaming in self-satisfaction about Modern Science's obvious success (here insert A-Bomb) at beating back 'Barbaric Age' Axis science.
But Adorno and Horkheimer alone suggested that Janus Year 1945 really meant that the world was now in a 'transitional era' between a fading Modern Science (aka 'modernity') and a rising postmodern world.
But as the humble mimeographed nature of their book (The Dialectic of the Enlightenment) suggests, the pair were completely ignored at the time.
So what was first noted about all the kids being born between the early mid-1940s to the early mid-1960s was simply that : their extraordinary large numbers : hence 'Boomers'.
But would their highly unusual behavior during their plastic formative years been any different if their birth numbers had been considered 'normal' or low ?
I argue not.
The coincident fact that the peak of the transitional era's passing turbulence coincided with the Boomers' crucial formative years would have produced 'The Sixties' irregardless.
At the time, 'The Sixties' social conflict was neatly explained away by simply pointing to the Boomers' extra large numbers as sufficient explanation.
So the transitional nature of The Sixties was never recognized.
In particular no one looked at who all was retiring at the world's High Schools and Universities, instead of looking simply at who was newly coming in as students -- and then promptly protesting.
For in all times of transition, tides go out just as much as they come in.
Unlike their parents raised in unconflictedly modern schools - or their children raised in unconflictededly postmodern schools - the boomers got it from both barrels.
Early on : taught by moderns; later on : taught by post moderns : who now to believe ?
Before 1989, those Boomers who took the postmodern science way of viewing physical reality dominated their peers and the news pages.
But I argue that since "The End of The Cold War", those Boomers who went on to rule the world after 1990 - and who still do rule our world - held more to the older 'modern science' way of viewing physical reality.
I argue their rise to power was itself transitional .
Mostly due to others abruptly retiring, due partly to old age but mostly because of satisfaction at completing their life work : defeating Communism.
The new bosses, like the old bosses, were a hard,mean,uncharitable lot but their target and hence its solution, had greatly changed.
Their target was now environmentalists, not communists .
No longer was conflict over direct questions of ideology, basically 'trickle down' theories versus claims of 'human equality of access to basic life necessities'.
Now the conflict had become modern production science confronting postmodern impact science (over climate change in particular) to use Allan Schnailberg's highly influential formulation.
The dying-off Old Guard (the Modernist cum Greatest Generation) could find almost none among the Gen X and Millennials to carry on their battle against their true mortal enemy, the postmodern majority among the Boomers.
But not all Boomers resolved the conflict between modern and postmodern schooling in 100% favouring postmodernity.
This minority, the Rogue Boomers, (Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott come to mind) swallowed their internal doubts (that as conflicted Boomers they must have had) and made a big career advance - nailing their Boomer colours 100% to the fading modernist cause.
For these relatively young leaders have always found most of their votes among those much older than themselves - rather than among their peers.
But the older voter is always a constantly wasting resource.
Soon Boomers, more and more, will become the true older voter (because voting falls off sharply after age 75 - and all of the Greatest Generation will be over 75 in 2016's presidential election year.)
Because of their higher - age-related - turnout, Boomers will be the key voter up until the climate crisis's tipping point.
The fate of our world will thus turn not on a conflict between nations, ethnicities, religions, classes, genders or even generations - Fox and CNN to the contrary.
It will turn on a conflict within a highly conflicted transitional generation : the Boomers ....
At the time, all the rest of the world was beaming in self-satisfaction about Modern Science's obvious success (here insert A-Bomb) at beating back 'Barbaric Age' Axis science.
But Adorno and Horkheimer alone suggested that Janus Year 1945 really meant that the world was now in a 'transitional era' between a fading Modern Science (aka 'modernity') and a rising postmodern world.
But as the humble mimeographed nature of their book (The Dialectic of the Enlightenment) suggests, the pair were completely ignored at the time.
So what was first noted about all the kids being born between the early mid-1940s to the early mid-1960s was simply that : their extraordinary large numbers : hence 'Boomers'.
But would their highly unusual behavior during their plastic formative years been any different if their birth numbers had been considered 'normal' or low ?
I argue not.
The coincident fact that the peak of the transitional era's passing turbulence coincided with the Boomers' crucial formative years would have produced 'The Sixties' irregardless.
At the time, 'The Sixties' social conflict was neatly explained away by simply pointing to the Boomers' extra large numbers as sufficient explanation.
So the transitional nature of The Sixties was never recognized.
In particular no one looked at who all was retiring at the world's High Schools and Universities, instead of looking simply at who was newly coming in as students -- and then promptly protesting.
For in all times of transition, tides go out just as much as they come in.
Unlike their parents raised in unconflictedly modern schools - or their children raised in unconflictededly postmodern schools - the boomers got it from both barrels.
Early on : taught by moderns; later on : taught by post moderns : who now to believe ?
Before 1989, those Boomers who took the postmodern science way of viewing physical reality dominated their peers and the news pages.
But I argue that since "The End of The Cold War", those Boomers who went on to rule the world after 1990 - and who still do rule our world - held more to the older 'modern science' way of viewing physical reality.
I argue their rise to power was itself transitional .
Mostly due to others abruptly retiring, due partly to old age but mostly because of satisfaction at completing their life work : defeating Communism.
The new bosses, like the old bosses, were a hard,mean,uncharitable lot but their target and hence its solution, had greatly changed.
Their target was now environmentalists, not communists .
No longer was conflict over direct questions of ideology, basically 'trickle down' theories versus claims of 'human equality of access to basic life necessities'.
Now the conflict had become modern production science confronting postmodern impact science (over climate change in particular) to use Allan Schnailberg's highly influential formulation.
The dying-off Old Guard (the Modernist cum Greatest Generation) could find almost none among the Gen X and Millennials to carry on their battle against their true mortal enemy, the postmodern majority among the Boomers.
But not all Boomers resolved the conflict between modern and postmodern schooling in 100% favouring postmodernity.
This minority, the Rogue Boomers, (Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott come to mind) swallowed their internal doubts (that as conflicted Boomers they must have had) and made a big career advance - nailing their Boomer colours 100% to the fading modernist cause.
For these relatively young leaders have always found most of their votes among those much older than themselves - rather than among their peers.
But the older voter is always a constantly wasting resource.
Soon Boomers, more and more, will become the true older voter (because voting falls off sharply after age 75 - and all of the Greatest Generation will be over 75 in 2016's presidential election year.)
Because of their higher - age-related - turnout, Boomers will be the key voter up until the climate crisis's tipping point.
The fate of our world will thus turn not on a conflict between nations, ethnicities, religions, classes, genders or even generations - Fox and CNN to the contrary.
It will turn on a conflict within a highly conflicted transitional generation : the Boomers ....
Friday, December 6, 2013
Science's internecine war : simplifying production science vs complicating impact science
A production scientist, indoctrinated by parents to keep things neat and tidy and to see things as neat-able and tidy-able , grows up seeing his or her job as a very simple one.
"Dig up uranium as cheaply and quickly as physically possible, full stop".
(And what happens afterwards is not any of their business.)
An impact scientist, raised differently, says wait a doggone minute, that uranium was lying beneath the earth's surface for millenniums, not disturbing the endless generations of humans living above it.
It wasn't lying there as a metal either - but bound together to some highly reactive (chemically reactive) compound.
Now the millions of tonnes of rock above the ore body has been disturbed, along with many underground water flows.
That highly reactive compound is now free in the air and water to tightly bind to other materials (maybe human livers) and the uranium metal will have many many diverse effects upon the world it has now been loosened into.
God, the production scientist whines, those impact scientists can make things seems so complicated !
They can do so, because that's the way things actually are.
Just as messy and as impossible to divorce from your day-job, as your or my extended family are impossible to divorce from our home life....
"Dig up uranium as cheaply and quickly as physically possible, full stop".
(And what happens afterwards is not any of their business.)
An impact scientist, raised differently, says wait a doggone minute, that uranium was lying beneath the earth's surface for millenniums, not disturbing the endless generations of humans living above it.
It wasn't lying there as a metal either - but bound together to some highly reactive (chemically reactive) compound.
Now the millions of tonnes of rock above the ore body has been disturbed, along with many underground water flows.
That highly reactive compound is now free in the air and water to tightly bind to other materials (maybe human livers) and the uranium metal will have many many diverse effects upon the world it has now been loosened into.
God, the production scientist whines, those impact scientists can make things seems so complicated !
They can do so, because that's the way things actually are.
Just as messy and as impossible to divorce from your day-job, as your or my extended family are impossible to divorce from our home life....
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Pace Schnaiberg : simplifying science vs complicating science
Canadian-born sociologist of Science Allan Schnailberg , in a seminal article from more than 40 years ago, explained-in-advance today's Science Wars , with his proposed division of scientists into those oriented to production and those oriented to studying the impact of that production.
So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.
I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.
Because I want to suggest that the random working-out, in all directions, of the collective effect of individual science and technology efforts, was to do two wildly different things at the same time.
One was to greatly advance humanity's simple control over apparent reality.
The other was to greatly reduce humanity's simple control over actual (complex) reality.
Steam ships, lighthouses, radio, radar (works of technology basically : production science) all seemed to make our predictive control over ocean weather conditions far more assured.
But further weather research (basic science research, impact science) revealed just how complex ocean weather actually was and how unlikely it was that we could ever 100% predict the ocean weather , even three days ahead.
Nineteenth Century science claimed it was well on the way to finding the one 'Theory of Everything', and soon science would be able to show (reduce) all reality to the effects that a few basic forces have on a few basic particles.
But even if you don't give a tinker's damn about science, ask yourself if there has been a news headline that suggests that science has newly discovered less, rather than more ?
Never, never never : trust me.
The earth is older than thought, as is the universe - which is also much bigger than expected and rapidly expanding. More and more species are always being found, living in more and more extreme environs and Life's start is constantly is being pushed back.
More elements, more isotopes , more basic sub- atomic particles.
More interactions, more complexity, more chaos theory.
Very, very, rarely is ever revealed that only one faulty gene can cause a disease - it always seems to be the interacting of thirty genes that may or may not give us a statistical greater chance of having that disease.
Ever better instrumentation and more serious research projects focussed on highly particular questions has revealed ,again and again ,that the surface simplicity of reality is false.
So our incomplete knowledge of reality is indeed a dangerous thing ---- as it always seems to feed our ready tendency to technological hubris.
Let us get concrete for a minute : and think about what 19th century fingerprinting was really doing for us.
Yes, it offered us simple control over reality by determining which criminal was actually at the crime scene (hurrah !) but only by suggesting this unexpected complexity about reality : that every human that ever existed has unique fingerprints.
In fact, like snowflakes, fingerprints should have reminded us that universal random thermal noise ensures that everything in reality - from living clones to pure mineral crystals - is , and must be, subtly different ... if only we look close enough.
Linear and reality live on separate universes : because everything in our universe vibrates randomly and constantly and so zig-zags itself to every new chemical combination at its own unique pace.
Identical twins start off life with the exact same instructions of growth, but within seconds are subtly different as the carefully timed iterations when genes get turned off and on are subtly smeared by the random effects of thermal noise speeding or delaying each competing process.
May I suggest that the Enlightenment Project made a simple but fundamental error in thinking that knowing more about reality was the same as offering up more control over reality ?
Because what really had to be decided was this : was reality simpler than it looked or was it more complex than it looked?
A truly open mind, a mind agape - like that of Henry Dawson - would look to see what the evidence revealed before deciding.
But the utopian (unconsciously fearful of loss of control ?) minds of most Modernist scientists (I am thinking here particularly of the progressive scientist Einstein and fascist scientist Hitler) went into the question already convinced, in advance of any evidence, that reality was simpler than it looked.
Knowing that a person is utopian (ie, believes it is even possible to attempt to plan and micromanage social and economic reality) really tells us very little about their politics, but it tells us a great deal about their physics .
Because they must believe that physical (and above it social) reality is so fundamentally simple and predictable that it is possible to set forth an economic Five Year Plan for an entire nation without worrying that we might fail to foresee a possible earthquake, volcano, hurricane or meter crash .
Let alone considering that a possible war, drought, epidemic or social revolution might make their five year planning goals unobtainable.
Most utopians in fact seek a 'one world government' so confident are they that a few skilled technicians can successfully micro-manage an entire world for years in advance.
So 'simplifying science' is fundamentally utopian while 'complicating science' is fundamentally anti-utopian : hard to avoid a 'science war' with those opposing world-views facing off.
This is why I propose to 'prism' the WWII Florey-Dawson conflict over wartime penicillin development as an early example of a battle in a 'science war' between simplifying and complicating views on ultimate reality.
An enormous 'science war' happening beneath the better known but much smaller military war...
So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.
I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.
Because I want to suggest that the random working-out, in all directions, of the collective effect of individual science and technology efforts, was to do two wildly different things at the same time.
One was to greatly advance humanity's simple control over apparent reality.
The other was to greatly reduce humanity's simple control over actual (complex) reality.
Steam ships, lighthouses, radio, radar (works of technology basically : production science) all seemed to make our predictive control over ocean weather conditions far more assured.
But further weather research (basic science research, impact science) revealed just how complex ocean weather actually was and how unlikely it was that we could ever 100% predict the ocean weather , even three days ahead.
Nineteenth Century science claimed it was well on the way to finding the one 'Theory of Everything', and soon science would be able to show (reduce) all reality to the effects that a few basic forces have on a few basic particles.
But even if you don't give a tinker's damn about science, ask yourself if there has been a news headline that suggests that science has newly discovered less, rather than more ?
Never, never never : trust me.
The earth is older than thought, as is the universe - which is also much bigger than expected and rapidly expanding. More and more species are always being found, living in more and more extreme environs and Life's start is constantly is being pushed back.
More elements, more isotopes , more basic sub- atomic particles.
More interactions, more complexity, more chaos theory.
Very, very, rarely is ever revealed that only one faulty gene can cause a disease - it always seems to be the interacting of thirty genes that may or may not give us a statistical greater chance of having that disease.
Ever better instrumentation and more serious research projects focussed on highly particular questions has revealed ,again and again ,that the surface simplicity of reality is false.
So our incomplete knowledge of reality is indeed a dangerous thing ---- as it always seems to feed our ready tendency to technological hubris.
Let us get concrete for a minute : and think about what 19th century fingerprinting was really doing for us.
Yes, it offered us simple control over reality by determining which criminal was actually at the crime scene (hurrah !) but only by suggesting this unexpected complexity about reality : that every human that ever existed has unique fingerprints.
In fact, like snowflakes, fingerprints should have reminded us that universal random thermal noise ensures that everything in reality - from living clones to pure mineral crystals - is , and must be, subtly different ... if only we look close enough.
Linear and reality live on separate universes : because everything in our universe vibrates randomly and constantly and so zig-zags itself to every new chemical combination at its own unique pace.
Identical twins start off life with the exact same instructions of growth, but within seconds are subtly different as the carefully timed iterations when genes get turned off and on are subtly smeared by the random effects of thermal noise speeding or delaying each competing process.
May I suggest that the Enlightenment Project made a simple but fundamental error in thinking that knowing more about reality was the same as offering up more control over reality ?
Because what really had to be decided was this : was reality simpler than it looked or was it more complex than it looked?
A truly open mind, a mind agape - like that of Henry Dawson - would look to see what the evidence revealed before deciding.
But the utopian (unconsciously fearful of loss of control ?) minds of most Modernist scientists (I am thinking here particularly of the progressive scientist Einstein and fascist scientist Hitler) went into the question already convinced, in advance of any evidence, that reality was simpler than it looked.
Knowing that a person is utopian (ie, believes it is even possible to attempt to plan and micromanage social and economic reality) really tells us very little about their politics, but it tells us a great deal about their physics .
Because they must believe that physical (and above it social) reality is so fundamentally simple and predictable that it is possible to set forth an economic Five Year Plan for an entire nation without worrying that we might fail to foresee a possible earthquake, volcano, hurricane or meter crash .
Let alone considering that a possible war, drought, epidemic or social revolution might make their five year planning goals unobtainable.
Most utopians in fact seek a 'one world government' so confident are they that a few skilled technicians can successfully micro-manage an entire world for years in advance.
So 'simplifying science' is fundamentally utopian while 'complicating science' is fundamentally anti-utopian : hard to avoid a 'science war' with those opposing world-views facing off.
This is why I propose to 'prism' the WWII Florey-Dawson conflict over wartime penicillin development as an early example of a battle in a 'science war' between simplifying and complicating views on ultimate reality.
An enormous 'science war' happening beneath the better known but much smaller military war...
Friday, September 20, 2013
even DENIERS can govern well in abundant times , but ...
... when the available per capita resources get small, look to the small to govern best.
Former and soon-to-be-former PMs Howard and Harper are in the news again this week , charged with leading a renewed "war on science" (so called) but I doth protest - again.
These two, and their ilk, love science : Production science.
The science of dig it up, tear it up and burn it up.
The science of greed. Their science is so bright, you gotta wear shades.
The science they do hate is the science of second-guessing, of naysayers, of the cautious and the skeptical.
Impact science.
Canadian-born sociologist Alan Schnailberg's seminal 1980 division of science into these two branches should be the foundational mother's milk of every Green intellectual wannabe - but sadly ( Elizabeth ??!! ) it doesn't .
Impact science denies ( OMG, he used the D-word !) the world's resources are infinite and it denies that the world's capabilities to be a toxic garbage dump are infinite.
The DENIERS merely deny the denial ; deny there are any limits to Man's god-like powers over nature and reality.
They deny the claim that we will never ever be able to replicate our Earth-like experience at a mass-level on any planet but this one.
The DENIERS have had a good run of it - with a planet this rich and the past population of humans so small and so technologically simple, they couldn't miss.
But now we are hitting the wall and their political parties and intellectual leaders are running out of moral authority and intellectual gas.
With three varieties of DENIER parties offering to form your next government, what can any fully-visioned voter do - besides cry in despair ?
Former and soon-to-be-former PMs Howard and Harper are in the news again this week , charged with leading a renewed "war on science" (so called) but I doth protest - again.
These two, and their ilk, love science : Production science.
The science of dig it up, tear it up and burn it up.
The science of greed. Their science is so bright, you gotta wear shades.
The science they do hate is the science of second-guessing, of naysayers, of the cautious and the skeptical.
Impact science.
Canadian-born sociologist Alan Schnailberg's seminal 1980 division of science into these two branches should be the foundational mother's milk of every Green intellectual wannabe - but sadly ( Elizabeth ??!! ) it doesn't .
Impact science denies ( OMG, he used the D-word !) the world's resources are infinite and it denies that the world's capabilities to be a toxic garbage dump are infinite.
The DENIERS merely deny the denial ; deny there are any limits to Man's god-like powers over nature and reality.
They deny the claim that we will never ever be able to replicate our Earth-like experience at a mass-level on any planet but this one.
The DENIERS have had a good run of it - with a planet this rich and the past population of humans so small and so technologically simple, they couldn't miss.
But now we are hitting the wall and their political parties and intellectual leaders are running out of moral authority and intellectual gas.
With three varieties of DENIER parties offering to form your next government, what can any fully-visioned voter do - besides cry in despair ?
Saturday, October 13, 2012
"DENIER science" aims for the stars : but sometimes hits London instead...
 |
| To Stars..or LONDON |
Well obviously I strongly disagree with my good pals or this blog would have no purpose!
Not C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" but rather "Two Sciences"
Let me begin my friendly disagreement with them, by myself denying there is any one thing called "Science" .
Instead, I see ( per Canadian Allan Schnaiberg's famous distinction) two main types of science : Production science aka science of the first law of thermodynamics (wildly optimistic skygod science) versus Impact science of the second law of thermodynamics (cautiously grounded earthling science.)
Production science is very good at building rockets but is very indifferent as to the tragic consequences when they fall on London and Brussels rather than ascend to the stars ( to re-use an old, old gag about Nazi-American patriot Wernher Von Braun !)
Denier science is indeed "building" our human civilization but it is also killing our human civilization and our planet, in the process.
My job - as I see it it - is to stop them and I hope you will consider starting up efforts to stop them as well.....
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Allan Schnaiberg's 1980 nightmare : pollution-producing SkyGods vs impacted-upon earthlings
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| SkyGod Machine in earthling Garden |
But as I have written in an earlier post in SVE, I didn't stumble upon Schnaiberg's seminal concept until I chanced upon the work of Myanna Lahsen --- thanks to the wonders of Google search.
She casually mentioned the concept of earlier-dominant production science versus the contested rise of today's impact science, as if all her readers would know what it meant.
But I didn't --- or rather I did.
It sounds an awful lot like my concept of earlier (pre-war) SkyGod scientists versus later (post-war) earthling scientists.
I eventually traced the meme back to Schnaiberg and a time period almost 40 years ago.
Long past overdue, then, for the concept to be a commonplace and a cliche in the vocabulary of every warmist earthling environmentalist green.
Basically it can be seen as a variant of my beloved contrast between the fundamental second law of thermodynamics (matter and energy gets less and less useful to humanity (aka more and more of it becomes useless particulate pollution and heat pollution) and the derivative first law of thermodynamics.
The sciences of half-truthfulness...
The first law says (as a half truth) that matter and energy can't ever be destroyed but only changed into alternative forms.
A half truth because converting the concentrated energy in the gasoline that powers your Piper Cub into ever so slightly heating the entire Universe does not destroy that energy --- but it certainly ruins for all time its further usefulness for humanity.
In fact, if that waste heat in the air helps heat up the entire atmosphere --- en route to the frozen reaches of the universe --- it is likely to ruin all of humanity as well.
Similarly, impact science is fundamental science while production science is but a half truth science derived from it.
Production science produces a machine which makes lots of widgets, very cheaply and profitably - apparently the end of story.
Impact science visits that once-successful widget machine cum factory in the town of Anywhereville Quebec and discovers that the factory is throwing off deadly pollution that is ever so slowly poisoning the employees at the widget factory. As a result, they are producing less widgets per hour.
It is this, not unfair competition from the Japanese, that is the real cause of the factory owner's declining profits.
Production science is about The Machine, Impact Science is about The Machine in the Garden, with both garden and machine complexly interacting with each other in unpredictable ways.
(Hat tip to Leo Marx for re-applying his famous meme!)
Deniers cum skeptics who deny change in geology, biology, climate and physics still only see science in the simplistic terms and certitudes of production science.
Warmists accept that changes happens and happens unpredictably and are much less sanguine about our ability to correct our own mistakes in time to prevent real harm.
Climate deniers - I steadfastly affirm in the face of zillions of scientist-bloogers who argue to the contrary - do believe in Science.
But it is the older, out-dated, hubristic SkyGod science - not current earthling science .....
Thursday, July 19, 2012
The WICKED Rev Whewell and how the denier Skygods might just be doing us Earthlings a big favour
Breaking Up : for the Sake of the (human) Family...
"Boring" alert : I have been doing some heavy thinking.
(The result of reading (via the ever-alert Mike at Watching the Deniers) of Graham Readfearn's account of how the deniers will soon be taking over Australia's government and education, from top to bottom.)
Yep,the deniers are breaking up Science: dividing it up into their science and our science.
And yet, in a strange sort of way, that is exactly as it should be - and as it as it should always have been.
The fact that it not, can be laid at the feet of that versatile, if wicked, polymath the Reverend William Whewell.
One of the many privileges of being a minister in the Established Church of England was to the ability to yoke two together, forever.
Between 1833 and 1840, the beastly Whewell did just that : forcing the unholy marriage between Natural Philosophy and Natural History and calling the spawn of this un-natural union by one word : Scientist.
Natural Philosophy goes under many names today, because all these names ( and sciences) contain bits of the core values of natural philosophy.
Theory-oriented science, lab/experimental science, production science, K-selected science , two-bodied science, Newtonian classical science, science of the First Law ( of Thermodynamics), linear (machine) science.
Natural History actually lives on, weakly, but many sciences also contains bits of its original values in their core.
Observation-oriented science, real world science, impact science, r-selected science, three (or multi) bodied science, Quantum science, science of the Second Law (of Thermodynamics), chaotic (garden) science.
Using Leo Marx's extremely useful metaphor of "The Machine in the Garden", we can see how these two original sciences should have worked against each other, for our and Nature's greater good.
Theory science is very good at creating new "machines" in the laboratory for the betterment of humanity.
They do so at great ultimate cost, though.
By strictly, narrowly, focusing on only the new machine's invention and excluding all thought of the unexpected consequences when it is introduced into a chaotic, dynamic, resource-restrained real world, they merely postpone the inevitable.
Call them eternally cock-eyed optimists..... or deniers*.
(Albeit, only as deniers of material limits to human invention.)
Other kinds of personalities - call them worriers, doubters and yes, even, sceptics and cynics - are needed to discover and warn us about what happens when the shiny new machine leaves the Lily-white walled laboratory and heads out into the great big dirty, noisy, untidy, unpredictable, real world, aka the garden.
Skygod science and Earthling science are meant to clash - we only get their full benefit when they do clash.
Now, I will argue and you are free to disagree, that we earthlings do accept the right of production science to exist (pardon me while I check to see if my latest i-pod touch 4 is fully charged !)
But as well , we fully support the right of impact scientists to fully interrogate production science's impact upon the real world, for good or bad.
Reality ate my homework....
(Think of it this way : we earthlings think every teenage student should have the right to spout off whatever they want on the exam paper. But we also fully support the right of their teachers and parents to fact-check their work afterwards.)
Skygods do not : intellectually they are still the same 16 year old boys at the very back of the classroom who already know everything, and are bored beyond reason with futher schooling --- they see themselves as doers, not thinkers.
Despite this, they paradoxically take their old (pre-1970s) high school science teachers at their word (!).
That word being there is only one kind of science and it's job is to produce and produce and produce an ever growing cornucopia of stuff : from biological food stuff to nuclear radioactivity stuff.
Deniers tell us that production scientists and their kindly employers can be fully trusted, by us the voter and consumer, to make sure nothing bad ever happens ; we promise -- this is why we are firing all those unnecessary interfering (impact) scientists that work for the government.
Deniers, very much against their own ultimate wishes (be very careful of what you ask for !), are busy taking us back to a pre-Whewell era when two sciences duked it out, with two opposing, alternative, visions of this single planet : skygod vs earthling.
Consider it my life's work to help the deniers tear Science apart : for the betterment of the world......
Saturday, July 14, 2012
the only war that Climate Skeptics ever lost was WWII (and we have the SF books to prove it !)
People who like to contrast the big finned car culture of the Fifties with the counterculture hippie dropouts of the Sixties must remember a lot different 1950s that I do.
In the bright daylight, we sure were an optimistic bunch of baby boomers, I'll grant you that.
But at night, before the glowing screen ?
Totally dif.
It was all about invading body snatchers and slimy Blobs and radioactive mutant ants eating New York.
My mom wasn't alone in liking to read sci fi short stories and by 1961, so did I.
Most had been written between the 1930s and the 1950s, long before being bundled in science fiction hard cover anthologies in the early 1960s - these were not your current SF, by any means.
Even as a twelve year old I could tell that the older stories (which I now know were written in the pre-war late1930s and early 1940s) had a totally different atmosphere from most of those set in my own time (actually written from the very late1940s onwards, ie in the post-war period .)
Adult re-reading only confirms it ---- and the literary critics, much more SF-oriented than me-- helped explain why.
Hard SF ,"production SF", really suffered a loss of faith after 1945, while soft SF, "impact SF" became what the SF magazine readers got to read (because, perhaps, that was all that talented SF writers felt like writing !)
Now I have borrowed (and adapted) the terms "production science" and "impact science" , originally conceived by Canadian-born sociologist Allan Schnaiberg in 1980 --- I first came across these terms in the work of Myanna Lahsen who I feel offers the best grained explanation for the reasons why famous scientists become infamous deniers.
Best as in , natch , 'cause it agrees with my assessment.
Production science was about the scientists who designed and built linear, deterministic, discrete, man-made "machines" : successfully, on time and under budget, end of story.
Impact science was the scientists who went outside the lab or worksite, into the garden where the machines had been placed and asked, how did this new machine react to all its human, biological and physical neighbours - and them to it.
It was a complex, chaotic science and so unpredictable and unexpected results were the norm of their discoveries.
As in "atomic bomb tests, done to defend America from Communist attack, end up creating mutant giant killer ants from harmless American garden ants - and they destroy New York - while the sneaky Russian Commies sent in humanitarian aid and assistance to a grateful New York state".
Hard "production' SF is Denier porn ; soft "impact" SF is sci fi for Greens .
Hiroshima Atomic Energy and Auschwitz Eugenics had made many an optimistic 1939 NY World's Fair SF Convention attendee lose a little faith by late 1945 - and it showed in their writing : most SF writers became proto-greens but some remained proto-deniers.....
In the bright daylight, we sure were an optimistic bunch of baby boomers, I'll grant you that.
But at night, before the glowing screen ?
Totally dif.
It was all about invading body snatchers and slimy Blobs and radioactive mutant ants eating New York.
My mom wasn't alone in liking to read sci fi short stories and by 1961, so did I.
Most had been written between the 1930s and the 1950s, long before being bundled in science fiction hard cover anthologies in the early 1960s - these were not your current SF, by any means.
Even as a twelve year old I could tell that the older stories (which I now know were written in the pre-war late1930s and early 1940s) had a totally different atmosphere from most of those set in my own time (actually written from the very late1940s onwards, ie in the post-war period .)
Adult re-reading only confirms it ---- and the literary critics, much more SF-oriented than me-- helped explain why.
Production SF pre 1945 vs Impact SF post 1945
Hard SF ,"production SF", really suffered a loss of faith after 1945, while soft SF, "impact SF" became what the SF magazine readers got to read (because, perhaps, that was all that talented SF writers felt like writing !)
Now I have borrowed (and adapted) the terms "production science" and "impact science" , originally conceived by Canadian-born sociologist Allan Schnaiberg in 1980 --- I first came across these terms in the work of Myanna Lahsen who I feel offers the best grained explanation for the reasons why famous scientists become infamous deniers.
Best as in , natch , 'cause it agrees with my assessment.
Production science was about the scientists who designed and built linear, deterministic, discrete, man-made "machines" : successfully, on time and under budget, end of story.
Impact science was the scientists who went outside the lab or worksite, into the garden where the machines had been placed and asked, how did this new machine react to all its human, biological and physical neighbours - and them to it.
It was a complex, chaotic science and so unpredictable and unexpected results were the norm of their discoveries.
As in "atomic bomb tests, done to defend America from Communist attack, end up creating mutant giant killer ants from harmless American garden ants - and they destroy New York - while the sneaky Russian Commies sent in humanitarian aid and assistance to a grateful New York state".
Hard "production' SF is Denier porn ; soft "impact" SF is sci fi for Greens .
Hiroshima Atomic Energy and Auschwitz Eugenics had made many an optimistic 1939 NY World's Fair SF Convention attendee lose a little faith by late 1945 - and it showed in their writing : most SF writers became proto-greens but some remained proto-deniers.....
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