Reply To: Fusion Oil

[Rezwan]

Brian H wrote: Rezwan;
Your equivalence of “generalization” and “law” doesn’t reflect how the term “scientific law” is used, except by those who are thoroughly immersed in scientific usage and terminology. It is, in fact, used by all others to refer to something (they consider to be) fixed, known as a certainty, having no restrictions or qualifications.

I know. I’m trying to extend this awareness to law in general. People like certainty, they long for laws of the second sort so they can have that certainty.

I like Rushkoff’s take on laws:

A corporation can’t be a place where rules are enforced, as much as taught, in order for them to be challenged, improved, and changed.

You can switch out the words “corporation” for a variety of other institutions (“government” “the Catholic Church”, “x”), and “rules” for “laws”.

Did you note the article’s (well-deserved) slam on government-funded science? It’s always for a purpose–the politicians’ purpose(s). Which is/are very unlikely, despite any and all assurances, to be the same as the researchers’.

Piper-payers never give up the right to call the tune.

And here, you can switch out “government-funded” with “corporation-funded” or any “x-funded” science. If it requires any sort of funding, it will require some sort of catering to a funder.

And you can also question the researchers purposes. Many of them want a paycheck and a steady career, and will often find their results at odds with that.

The blame pie has a slice for everyone. Perhaps the “government” slice is larger, but everyone has a slice with their name on it. The problem is bigger than one institution.

Like Taleb says about the pursuit of science:

Peer Cruelty
Every morning you leave your cramped apartment in Manhattan’s East Village to go to your laboratory at the Rockefeller University in the East Sixties. You return in the late evening, and people in your social network ask you if you had a good day, just to be polite. At the laboratory, people are more tactful. Of course you did not have a good day; you found nothing. You are not a watch repairman. Your finding nothing is very valuable, since it is part of the process of discovery – hey, you know where not to look. Other researchers, knowing your results, would avoid trying your special experiment, provided a journal is thoughtful enough to consider your “found nothing” as information and publish it.

Meanwhile your brother-in-law is a salesman for a Wall Street firm, and keeps getting large commissions – large and steady commissions. “He is doing very well,” you hear, particularly from your father-in-law, with a small pensive nanosecond of silence after the utterance – which makes you realize that he just made a comparison. It was involuntary, but he made one.

… [a lot more here – great essay! But long]

Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel, no Schnobel. “How was your year:” brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come.

Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.

Among other things, this brings me back to the whole etiquette thing. No need to be cruel and mocking toward anyone. As if deriding people in any way speeds up the process of discovery.