From the Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. blog:
Henk Tennekes Resigns from Dutch Academy
Henk Tennekes is well known to the visitors of our website. A few days ago, he told me that he submitted a letter of resignation to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences on Saturday, January 23. He wrote to me “I don’t want to remain a member of an organization that, like AMS and NAS, screws up science that badly.” The Dutch newspaper NRC-Handelsblad apparently got hold of a copy of the resignation letter and ran a News Flash on Saturday, January 30. In the letter to the Academy, Henk complains that he submitted the manuscript of his essay on Hermetic Jargon (which I am happy to reproduce here below, with his permission) to the Academy President at that time, Frits van Oostrom. The President, however, did not bother to respond. The NRC news flash, translated by Henk himself at my request, reads:
Tennekes Quits
By Karel Knip
“I have had it. Farewell.” With these words Henk Tennekes concludes his final letter to the Executive Board of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He wrote his letter of resignation on January 23. A unique occurrence in the history of the Academy, which obtains its membership by co-optation. Normally, a member of the Academy loses his membership only when he dies. Tennekes is still alive.
For many years, Tennekes was director of research at KNMI. He also was a professor at the Pennsylvania State University and at the Free University in Amsterdam. In 1982 he became a member of the Academy. And now he steps out. “There is light out there” is the closing sentence of the essay “Hermetic Jargon” that he now gives a broader distribution.
Why quit? Is he mad about the global warming hype? Tennekes has often spoken up against alarmist language concerning the greenhouse effect and against the hubris of climatologists who pretend to know precisely what will happen to the climate in the future.
No, Tennekes uses the ultimate tool he has to object to the conflicts of interest within the Academy. It is supposed to be the highest independent scientific advisory body in the country, but at the same time it runs a number of research institutes, and has to lobby for their budgets. “That conflict of interest is breaking the wings of its advisory function,” he says. The Strategic Agenda of the Academy, currently being finalized, offers no hope for improvement.
Is that all? The essay “Hermetic Jargon” gives yet another impression. In it, he protests the inaccessibility of modern science, with its habit to restrict quality control (peer review) to the inner circles of each discipline. And he is annoyed by the dominant position of physics in the world of science. He wants to promote more dialogue between disciplines, but he discovered that the walls between them cannot be broken down. Stepping out is the final choice.
In response to our request Robbert Dijkgraaf, the current President of the Academy, states that the Academy regrets the departure, but respects it.
This picture will appear in the second printing of Simple Science of Flight by H. Tennekes, currently in press.
Hermetic Jargon
Farewell Message to the Dutch Academy
As soon as scientists and scholars from different disciplines talk to one another, confusion creeps in. In everyday language, words evoke clusters of associations, suggestions, hints and images. This is why an intelligent listener often needs only half a word. But the words that scientists use in their professional communications are usually safeguarded against unwanted associations. Within each separate discipline this helps to limit semantic confusion, but outsiders have no chance.
Disciplines are divided by their languages. Incomprehensible journal articles and oral presentations, ever-expanding university libraries, endless bickering over the appropriation of research funds, resources, and post-doc positions: The Temple of Science has become a Tower of Babel. A Babylonian confusion of tongues has become the organizing principle. As soon as more than a couple dozen scientists unite around the same theme, another specialist journal is created, comprehensible only to the in-crowd. If this is science, I want to get off.
Many years ago, two members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences tried to call attention to the problem. One was the leading art historian and Director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Henk van Os, the other the retired methodologist of the social sciences, Adriaan de Groot. The two elderly gentlemen arranged a discussion meeting on the peer review system at Academy headquarters. Being an Academy member myself, I eagerly participated. In their introduction van Os and de Groot explained how all disciplines have a tendency to develop their own ‘hermetic jargon,’ the secret language that eliminates the risk of having to discuss the foundations of one’s discipline with the outside world.
Hermetic jargon: what a beautiful neologism! Hermetic: referring to airtight sealing, my Random House dictionary says. Words are at their best when they seed a whole cloud of meanings and associations. In this case my mind reacted instantly, grasping at such concepts as occult science, alchemy, and esoteric writing. Esoteric, accessible to the initiated only, is the qualification given by the philosopher Lucian to some of Aristotle’s writings. Hermetic sealing was the standard laboratory practice of the alchemists. The net effect of hermetic jargon is that outsiders cannot argue with the high priests who wield the words. They can only accept the occult writings in awe.
Looking at the academic enterprise this way, I come across a lot of issues that bother me. The first that comes to mind is that hermetic jargon makes it impossible to conduct mature, scientific discussions of the paradigms, dogmas, and myths that drive each discipline. The claims of the mainstream physics community worldwide, for example, are outrageous. All science is Physics, period, is what these priests claim. All other disciplines, including chemistry, biology, engineering and the earth sciences, are mere derivatives. Physicists glorify their Nobel prizes without ever contemplating whether the Nobel prize system might be based on a nineteenth-century assessment of the world of science. Hermetic jargon is also a very effective means of excluding outsiders from negotiations for research funds. The system by which professional colleagues judge each other’s performance is called Peer Review. Only peers in the same discipline may pass judgment on their colleagues’ funding requests and on the quality of their papers. Only high-energy physicists are allowed to participate in debates concerning the funding of high-energy physics, only micrometeorologists are allowed to review micrometeorological manuscripts. This makes a lot of sense, of course, because outsiders are in no position to judge the intricate technical details of the measurements and calculations involved. But such judgment is only a necessary first step. The key challenge for a meaningful peer review system would be to make explicit the underlying paradigms, and to subject them to scholarly scrutiny. This, to me, should be the essence of the duty of a National Academy, and perforce of each Academician.
Chances for a mature dialogue will improve when hermetic jargon is taken for what it really is: a way to defend barriers. There are plenty of unresolved issues and dilemmas in the interstices between the disciplines. Almost nobody dares to take a peek, but Gregory Bateson, the originator of the Kantian idea that Mind and Nature form a Necessary Unity, did. Angels Fear is the title of the book his daughter Margaret compiled after he died. The subtitle of that beautiful but rather messy book is Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. The term ‘sacred’ should not be construed as referring to theology, but to the central problem of all epistemology: how can we know anything, how can we evaluate, who are we to make judgments? In Kant’s own words: “Reason suffers the fate of being troubled by questions which it cannot reject because they were brought up by reason itself, but which it cannot answer either because they are utterly beyond its capacities.” Yes, only fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
In oral presentations, to give another example, it would behoove the speaker to speak openly about the questions looming behind the research successes, behind the never-ending propaganda for scientific progress. I myself tried this a few times, but to no avail. In my induction speech for the Academy, in January 1984, I introduced the limited predictability of the weather as a prime example of the uncertainties associated with the sensitive dependence of nonlinear systems to initial conditions and to mismatches between Nature and the models we use to compute its evolution. I told my audience that the prediction horizon, in 1950 estimated by John von Neumann at 30 days, in fact is only three days on average. I dwelt only a little on the implications of this for the myth of endless progress in science. Apparently, meteorology is approaching the no-man’s land between the unknown and the unknowable, I said. This was enough to alert the cognoscenti. The moment the discussion period following my lecture started, the famous astronomer Henk van de Hulst stood up from his chair in the front row and said: “Henk, that is a sermon, not a lecture. Sermons are not appropriate in this Hall.” And the President, David de Wied then, closing the meeting and thanking me for my speech, said in front of the microphones: “Henk, I really don’t understand what you said, and I believe I don’t want to understand either.”
The two Academy members who had arranged the meeting on peer review apparently had concluded that voluntary changes in the peer review system were very unlikely. They opted for a direct confrontation. They proposed to amend the review system such that a number of colleagues outside the discipline concerned would have to participate in the evaluation of proposals for research funding and debates on the desired direction of research programs. Ask psychologists to look over the shoulders of meteorologists, involve theologians in the evaluation of astronomical long-term planning, let sociologists and engineers review each other’s professional papers, and so on. As soon as you do that, hermetic jargon loses the rationale for its existence.
It shall come as no surprise that these thoughts were torpedoed the moment they reverberated through the august Academy assembly hall. Everyone knew instantly the very idea was a land mine under the science establishment. Nobody understood that the proposal was rather modest in the sense that bureaucrats, politicians, and taxpayers would be excluded, and that the proposal in fact could be construed as reinforcing the power of the scientific nomenclature. The current practice is that spokesmen for each discipline negotiate directly with bureaucrats in government agencies, and refuse to be drawn into evaluations of the claims of other disciplines.
So all hell broke loose, right there in the meeting, the scene suddenly similar to that in a typical Knesset session, with Academicians jumping up, shouting, and cursing. Within half an hour, the President of the Academy, Pieter Drenth this time, stepped in, stating ex cathedra that the current review system was functioning well enough, despite minor flaws. He closed the meeting, and the Executive Board of the Academy decided to abort the idea altogether.
Following in the footsteps of van Os and de Groot, I have tried to fantasize about the fierce battles that might result if their proposal were put into effect. The central myth of cosmology and astrophysics, for example, is that the human mind is more powerful than the Universe. Stephen Hawking writes: when we discover a theory that unifies gravity and quantum mechanics, we will (I shudder as I write this) “know the Mind of God.” Martin Rees, then the Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom, wrote a book called Before the Beginning, subtitled Our Universe and Others. Indeed, it has become common in astronomy to talk about Multiple Universes, an oxymoron if I ever saw one. Unfortunately, mainstream theology continues to propagate a similar myth, i.e. the stupid idea that one can talk with insight, and write scholarly publications, about God himself. That, in my mind, is an unforgivable epistemological fallacy. Readers not versed in the Bible might find it useful to read the story of Moses stumbling into a psychedelic thorn bush in Exodus 3. Moses hears voices and asks: “please tell me your Name, so I can tell my people who sent me.” The Voice answers: “I am whoever I want to be, that should be good enough for you.”
Being an engineer myself, I would be delighted to participate in a debate between engineers and sociologists. In both cases, the interaction between the discipline and society is central to the field of inquiry. Take cell phones. The technology is straightforward, but the sociology is complex. Engineers are servants to society. Their work, which uses physics, chemistry, and countless other disciplines, ought to be analyzed by sociologists. I confess that I know no sociology to speak of, but I know enough about engineering to claim that something must be amiss if the best book on technology I know of is Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
As to my own position, I can illustrate that with another incident at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. I was elected into the Academy in 1982, and assigned to a small group of scholars not bound to a specific discipline, the Free Section. This group was the envy of several others, because the much coveted expansion of disciplinary sections was hindered by our presence. There were 100 chairs in the Science Division at the time, and several other sections claimed to need more. The powers behind the scenes argued long enough for the Executive Board to cave in to the demands to eliminate the Free Section, and lodge its members into disciplines. I was tentatively assigned to the physics section, which did not appeal to me at all. So I wrote to the then President, Piet van Zandbergen, saying that one could imagine putting me in the Engineering Section because I was raised as an engineer, in the Physics Section because my area of expertise is turbulence theory, which is a branch of theoretical physics, and in Earth Sciences, because that would correspond to my current position. Instead, I wrote, I would prefer to be assigned to the Theology and Philosophy Section because of my growing interest in epistemology. The President, eager to avoid any written record of the nuisance I had created, called me one night by phone, saying: “Henk, philosophy belongs to the Arts and Humanities Division of the Academy. The division between them and the Science Division is laid down in our Charter. You cannot cross that Wall however much you want to. That Wall cannot be breached.”
But one can step outside. I did. There is light out there.
“The claims of the mainstream physics community worldwide, for example, are outrageous. All science is Physics, period, is what these priests claim. All other disciplines, including chemistry, biology, engineering and the earth sciences, are mere derivatives.”
Yeah, those vainglorious bat-surds. As everyone knows, all science is (derivative from) Mathematics — not Physics.
The nerve!
It’s funny, some of the GWR’s clerics want to be Cosmocrators (world rulers) like Hermes Trismegistus (three times sage), though in this case they would be the contrary.
My father would make sure that we were able to articulate our thoughts so that they were clear to others. He used a sentence that can easily be misconstrued when spoken. ” Jim Burns leaves on friday”, or “Jim burns leaves on friday”. Identical except for capitalization. It helped us to understand that what we say might be taken a completely different way than intended. He explained to us that it was easy in our own mind to understand how to get from home to school, but to clearly describe that journey to someone else so that they could follow those same directions and end up in the same place, was something altogether different.
Reminds me of one of the Grooks of Piet Hein, a Danish mathemetician and philosopher.
“When technology is master, we shall reach disaster faster.”
s. graves (10:07:04) :
“I have been watching the development of Arctic sea ice indicated by the JAXA graph above in the right column. Since the beginning of the year there has been, on my screen and I assume yours, a random red dot evident in the mid-February time frame…a tiny piece of graph line standing alone among the ice extent lines for past years. Red, of course, is the color of the 2010 ice extent line. I now note that the developement of the 2010 ice extent will come very close to that red dot that has been there since the first of the year. In fact, it appears that it may just meet the red dot precisely. Is this random? How is it possible that the red dot just happens to be on the path of 2010 ice development? Any thoughts?”
It will be interesting to see if the line coincides with the fragment. Perhaps JAXA have a method of predicting the future area of ice? I’ve saved a copy for comparison, just in case the fragment disappears before the date is reached.
40 Shades of Green: Global Warming is a philosophy.
DCC (10:21:39) :
“Immediately underneath it is an embedded (?) video for Scientology with light emerging in the distance dispelling the darkness, and the word ’scientology.org’. Is this a sick prank by miffed members of the Dutch academy or what?”
“Nothing nefarious. Just a randomly inserted Google ad based on parsing the last sentence of text.”
Funny. Didn’t see the words “abusive cult” listed in the last sentence.
Welcome Henk Tennekes to life outside the “Box”. The internet blogisphere is the new city of knowlage. 60 years ago I realized that I could not function in a box like normal people. After 40 years of running around the city of knowlage looking in the windows and doorways I found I had a good Idea of all that was in the entire city. Very enlightening being able to see the whole forest. Often the clues needed in one box are hidden in an other.
HELLO out there, any of you REAL SCIENCETISTS please use real people language on the internet so we dumbies can follow along with out a specialest dictionary! Who knows maybe we can help you better understand your speciality or not. 😉
“Hermetic jargon”
Hermetism is/was the study of magic, astrology, mathematics, alchemy and philosophy as pursued by the Platonist and Pythagorean academies of the Classical Greek world.
ie: what passed for science at that time
Apparently revealed to mankind by a semi-divine figure called Hermes Trismegistus, thought be a Greek version of the Egyptian god Thoth.
In amongst the blind alleys followed, such as astrology and magic, the Hermetics are the ones responsible for the advances in maths from that time eg pi, phi, Pythagorus’s theorum etc.
(Hey, you need reliable maths to work out astrological charts, even if the “settled science” of astology is nonsense!)
All this Pagan stuff, both the nonsense parts and the proto-science went underground in the West until the Renaisance, when the Church began to lose its stranglehold on thought.
Issac Newton began his career as a Hermetic alchemist, following the quest to convert base matter into gold. He kept vast amounts of notes, approaching this fruitless task in the scientific method.
He didnt have much luck, but struck solid gold when during his experiments, he noticed that the flame from different burning chemicals, would split into their own distinct colours when viewed through a prism.
After that, he gradually gave up sorcery and eventually wrote a quite a famous book…
This is a sad event for a sad reason. this new reality of Blogosphere Science is more a system of distributed processing. But how to sort the Wheat from the Chaff. Who has the time? Hermetics! just Joking… um
If hermetic jagon intends to isolate individual scientific niches from understanding and criticism, it really helps the Untouchables if their terms are also not defined so as to make any sense to begin with. Then they control the defintions such that others can never catch up with their shifting meanings.
Take the by now the at least irritating terms “climate change” and “post normal science”. It turns out that the only answer to understanding their “meaning” is to show that they are literal nonsense or gibberish – words only appearing to make sense because they are otherwise known or explainable by definitions and consistent use within a practical, public context, but then instead deceptively used and directed at another pupose, usually involving the very destruction of meaning itself. And from there on to showing that their use is intentionally directed as a means toward control, by the usual suspects – purely mere brute force totalitarians, and thought controllists, who also finally aim at the employment of brute force to ensure their control as the only “meaning”.
In Communism, for example, “the ends justify the means” sounds possibly justifiable, but the problem is that there is no justification given for the ends themselves, other than the usual mystical utopian goals which are themselves vague and unattainable themselves almost by [lack of] definition.
And it finally turns out that the means to a Communist Utopia, thought control, are the same the ends, thought control.
“Social justice” and “sustainability” are similar terms which are actually only covers for thought control, which itself can lead to or involve every other kind of practical control = total enslavement, unsurprisingly the exact thing which the Communists claim they are going to deliver everyone from.
Back when I majored in pre-postmodern Philosophy, but which now apparently operates no differently from Climate Science, we could have had the endeavors of current “environmentalism” and “climate science” hoisted up for anyone to see on the white hot pitchforks of reason in fairly short order, as no more than nonsensical controllist Cults, or “postnormally” conspiratorial clones of the same Cult.. Their abdication from using the Scientific Method was quite clear early on from such “telltale” signs as simple as publishing the results of their “science” months before they revealed even their alleged actual “science”, and so on.
Even the primary subject of their “science”, “global warming”, doesn’t have an easily apparent definition, other than that it’s the unscientific and ad hoc way they measure it, which the controllist cultists and their enablers and useful idiots are still intentionally trying to conceal to this day. Hopefully it is they who will be therapeutically hermetically sealed by us and from us..
Ive often wondered if the Greek schools of thought had not been bulldozed aside by the Church, whether an Issac Newton character would have emerged centuries earlier and made the same Newtonian discoveries.
In retrospect, its not rocket science- well yes it is.
Where would our science be now, with two thousand additional years behind it?
“The net effect of hermetic jargon is that outsiders cannot argue with the high priests who wield the words. They can only accept the occult writings in awe.”
That is essentially what the alarmists want when I speak with them, they want me in awe of the claims of the alleged AGW hypothesis. They want me to join their cult and “believe in AGW” as they do. When it becomes clear that I’m the sort of human that requires hard evidence for claims, and especially for extreme claims, then become agitated. Usually they get more annoyed when I point out that they are in awe of those that they believe (Al Gore, David Suzuki, …) and that they really don’t have any substance to support their belief other than shiny awe.
Science requires the elimination of awe and belief. Science is about hard facts so you don’t need to believe. No belief needed in science. No belief permitted in science. If only climate science would figure that out we’d all be the better off for it.
The Hermetic Language inflicts not just science but also technology. As a systems scientist I work with many different systems and many different programming languages. Each computer language has it’s own “culture” and it’s own aspects of being “hermetically sealed” off from the rest. It’s own buzzwords. To be a successful systems scientist one needs to become a polyglot, a person who speaks many languages and who can cross “cultures”.
The Common Ground is the Objective Reality of Nature. Well in theory anyway.
“In my induction speech for the Academy, in January 1984, I introduced the limited predictability of the weather as a prime example of the uncertainties associated with the sensitive dependence of nonlinear systems to initial conditions and to mismatches between Nature and the models we use to compute its evolution. I told my audience that the prediction horizon, in 1950 estimated by John von Neumann at 30 days, in fact is only three days on average. I dwelt only a little on the implications of this for the myth of endless progress in science. Apparently, meteorology is approaching the no-man’s land between the unknown and the unknowable, I said.” – Henk Tennekes
As a systems scientist I concur with Henk. Stephen Wolfram (in chapter two of A New Kind of Science) proves that some systems, including some very simple systems, are inherently unpredictable. They generate internal randomness so even knowing the initial conditions or the external “forces” or “inputs” or “forcings” upon them won’t enable you to predict them.
Stephen Wolfram writes (on page 39 of ANKS, http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-39-text): “… it takes only very simple rules to produce highly complex behavior. Yet at first this may seem almost impossible to believe. For it goes against some of our most basic intuition about the way things normally work.
For our everyday experience has led us to expect that an object that looks complicated must have been constructed in a complicated way. And so, for example, if we see a complicated mechanical device, we normally assume that the plans from which the device was built must also somehow be correspondingly complicated.
But the results at the end of the previous section show that at least sometimes such an assumption can be completely wrong. For the patterns we saw are in effect built according to very simple plans–that just tell us to start with a single black cell, and then repeatedly to apply a simple cellular automaton rule. Yet what emerges from these plans shows an immense level of complexity.
So what is it that makes our normal intuition fail? The most important point seems to be that it is mostly derived from experience with building things and doing engineering–where it so happens that one avoids encountering systems like the ones in the previous section.
For normally we start from whatever behavior we want to get, then try to design a system that will produce it. Yet to do this reliably, we have to restrict ourselves to systems whose behavior we can readily understand and predict–for unless we can foresee how a system will behave, we cannot be sure that the system will do what we want.
But unlike engineering, nature operates under no such constraint. So there is nothing to stop systems like those at the end of the previous section from showing up. And in fact one of the important conclusions of this book is that such systems are actually very common in nature.”
Moreover “Wolfram’s concept of computational irreducibility — that some complex computations cannot be short-cutted or “reduced” (cf. NP-hard) , is ultimately the reason why computational models of nature must be considered, in addition to traditional mathematical models. Likewise, his idea of intrinsic randomness generation — that natural systems can generate their own randomness, rather than using chaos theory or stochastic perturbations …”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science
Essentially what this means is that various systems – including those found in Nature – can’t be “reduced” or “short-cutted”… you have to take the long road and actually observe the systems as they compute. You can’t guess the answer by short-cutting your way there. In Nature that means actually observing things in real time as they happen to find out what will happen. You can’t “predict” what will happen due to the inhernet nature of the systems in play. You can’t “short-cut” or “soothsay” your way to knowing the future.
Using hard math Information Science trumps all the “long term climate predictions” (attempts at short-cutting the irreducability of many Natural systems) of climate science which are essentially no different than soothsaying dead tree entrails regardless of how many super computers you throw at it. Oops.
Funny enough Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” is a book that had a major impact upon my systems science, computer science and engineering carrer. The quality of Quality is crucial for successful technological systems. It’s why the iPhone tears a new one in the Blackberry.
What we need in climate science is some of the actual quality of science that has been successful in the hard sciences.
Reminds me of a story about my uncle, a fisherman.
He was invited to work with some scientists studying the fish population. The scientists were trying to catch some fish with a seine but it wasn’t working. My uncle didn’t want to say anything because they were big scientists and he was just a fisherman. Finally after many attempts they asked for his input. You have the seine upside-down he told them.
Problem solved.
klausb (12:35:53) :
“I may be corrected, but wasn’t it Arthur C. Clarke in a SF-Novel from the late 60ties describing exactly that problem?
I think it could have been ‘The Voyage of the Space Beagle’ by A.E. Van Vogt which used the term ‘nexialists’ to describe the science of everything?
ScientistForTruth (09:29:22) :
Given that the ads are generated by Google, I simply take this as evidence that strong AI does not yet exist.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It is interesting how cloistered most scientists appear to have become. I find this paradoxical. Scientists should be seekers of truth, and it would seem to me that inspiration often comes from unexpected associations. This is something the human brain is specifically well suited to do.
Personally I have always enjoyed hearing from individuals from any discipline and fail to understand why many people in the more esoteric science arenas would not. One excellent example I can think of was the “Oyster Club” we had at the Colorado School of Mines. Every Thursday evening a bunch of us (lecturers, students, whomever) would get together, listen to a passage of prose (preferably short), shuck and eat oysters and partake of a brew of some description. Free conversation naturally flowed and it was invariably entertaining and mind broadening.
The Oyster Club concept was borrowed from a British (Scottish?) tradition a couple hundred years old, if memory serves, but links are not springing to hand on Google.
The point is, the Oyster Club concept seems to be the antithesis of the hermetic science Henk speaks of. Inclusion rather than exclusion.
Ahhh here we go – this will do:
“Oyster Club
In the 18th century, there was a frightfully important club that was founded in Edinburgh, called the Oyster Club, by an impressingly famous scientist called James Hutton. Mr Hutton passed his evenings at the Oyster Club in the company of men such as economist Adam Smith, the chemist Joseph Black and the philosopher David Hume, as well as occasional visiting sparks such as Benjamin Franklin and James Watt. They took the opportunity to discuss politics, the economy and the implications on the world of science.”
Source: http://www.oyster.net.au/new/tales/
@ur momisuglyMike D in Alberta (12:51:17) :
NickB @ur momisugly 10:59
I’ve always be interested in discussing the elements that make up the body politic. In my final year of studying engineering I was at a party and was introduced to a gentleman who disagreed with me on almost all aspects of politics. He was finishing his final year of sociology (so we were both thoroughly steeped in the this-is-how-someone-in-your-profession-thinks process of university). After 5 minutes we both realized that discussion was futile because we didn’t agree on how the world worked. I favoured a mechanical universe (with occasional fuzzy-logic interactions) where his thinking seemed to me to be all emotions and feelings (keep in mind that I didn’t speak his language, so I might be mistaken in that). You need a common language before the type of synthesis you were discussing can occur. Even in mathematics, 1+1 = 10 and 1+1 = 2 depending upon your reference frame.
I work in IT for a very, very large company that specializes in the field (shhh, don’t tell anyone okay? 😉 and one of my strong points, which matches well with one of the biggest challenges in our industry, is being able to speak about your area of expertise in your area of expertise, to be able to communicate to non-technical clients/administration (really more summarization and business acumen), as well as technical experts from other areas of expertise (this is where the challenge is).
There are two approaches one can take and be successful: 1.) to know everything (I have a couple people who work for me that actually fit into this category) or 2.) to know enough about other technologies to speak to those experts on their terms, and to be dead solid about how your area and their area intersect/interact. Also, while there are core differences in outlook from where the different parties come from, they can often be set aside or ignored if both parties are trying to work together towards a common goal… and that goal probably can’t be just any goal, but one that requires the oil and water to mix to get to a result. Lets see if I can come up with an example:
So an engineer and a sociologist walk into a bar… (haha) and by their very nature butt heads – sounds reasonable and predictable. Now say that the engineer and the sociologist walk into a bar to discuss impacts/effects of… idk… the kindle adoption at school libraries instead of traditional printed books. The engineer has his scope (the technology), the sociologist has his scope (changes in behavior) and if the temperaments and personalities don’t clash too badly some interesting conversation could take place and potentially some new hypotheses could be formed for further study.
For science we’re talking to some extent about the Salon concept (which seems to occur here on a daily basis), in my line of worked it’s by necessity (projects, troubleshooting outages, etc)… but I think the important part is that it’s not easy, for most people it doesn’t come naturally, and by its very nature (unless you’re one of the ones that knows everything – which I’m not) it requires a level of humility that really intelligent people often tend to lack.
So in summary, I think there’s hope if the interactions are scoped (i.e. focused on common interests that lie at the intersection of subject matters) and the parties involved are invested in the process and outcome. Granted, my experience might not be so easily applied to science and academia, so FWIW, that’s my $0.02
The most interesting thing is that if you replaced the word ‘science’ with the word ‘religion’. That article would read as a perfectly rational and logical essay on the problems the world’s major religions. People sometimes forget that the separation of science and religion is a relatively recent event in human history. Perhaps there is something in human psychology that causes science to naturally try a trend back towards its roots.
That piece on the peer review process certainly explains, why the climate scientists were so outraged and frustrated. That nonscientists let alone non-climate scientists insisted on seeing their work. Its worst than the Pope demanding input into the Koran.
“Take cell phones. The technology is straightforward, but the sociology is complex. Engineers are servants to society. Their work, which uses physics, chemistry, and countless other disciplines, ought to be analyzed by sociologists. I confess that I know no sociology to speak of,”
Martin Cooper inventor of the mobile phone gave the commencement speech at my college graduation.
The crux of the speech? Always beware of the sociological effects of what you will invent.
“The central myth of cosmology and astrophysics, for example, is that the human mind is more powerful than the Universe. Stephen Hawking writes: when we discover a theory that unifies gravity and quantum mechanics, we will (I shudder as I write this) “know the Mind of God.” Martin Rees, then the Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom, wrote a book called Before the Beginning, subtitled Our Universe and Others. Indeed, it has become common in astronomy to talk about Multiple Universes, an oxymoron if I ever saw one. Unfortunately, mainstream theology continues to propagate a similar myth, i.e. the stupid idea that one can talk with insight, and write scholarly publications, about God himself. That, in my mind, is an unforgivable epistemological fallacy.”
I would very much like it if Henk Tennekes would let me buy him a beer or two. Scientists with humility are in short supply.
Folks,
Get a copy of Thomas Sowell’s “Intellectuals and Society” – while not specific to climate science, he does show why science ended up as it has from the dominance of the intellectuals in academia.
Those of us involved in the science of the Plasma Universe have the same problem climate science is now undergoing – and it’s essentially science versus pseudoscience.
Climate science started off with an untested assumption of climate sensitivity and from its general acceptance being right from consensus, then started to construct the AGW edifice. Of course they also assumed that the only forces operating in the earth system were gravity and solar radiation, completely ignoring any role electricity and plasma have in that system. Hence when they then did the sums and discovered that there was a thermal anomaly left over which could not be explained by the standard model, then they looked at human emission of CO2 and the effect of the Greenhouse mechanism.
Had they cross pollinated intellectually with electrical engineers etc, they would have realised the existence of another force in nature that literally dwarfs gravity and solar radiation in terms of magnitude of force and energy, and would have been able to explain the thermal anomaly in terms of known laws of Maxwell and Lorentz instead of an untested rule of climate sensitivity.
Intellectuals think in an abstract world while engineers in the physical. What happened in climate science was that the abstractionists gained control of it, and the rest is history. Remember that all the debate isn’t about the physics of the earth system, but over the consequences of an abstraction, climate sensitivity, deemed true by general agreement.
Henry Galt (10:11:24) :
Respect.
I have one quibble though. Everything, in the final analysis, is physics.
Every THING may be. Pure awareness is not physics; in fact it changes the outcomes of some of the most basic experiments regarding things … thus is clearly senior to physics.
Andrew Revkin posted a blog:
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/the-distracting-debate-over-climate-certainty
I posted two comments, the first about “one-of-the-greatest” oceanographers – a mathematician and astronomer from WHOI, MIT and Harvard, without a PhD “credential” — who lamented over and over at the end of his career that young scientists didn’t go to sea anymore, think about the earth’s systems, they only sat in front of computers….
I posted a second comment asking, pretty simply, of Revkin or others, three questions:
1. When does “weather” become “climate” and what should a lay person reasonably expect a scientist to predict successfully about weather, seasonal and long-range forecasts, say, since the 1970’s (when there was a furor about the coming ice age). And, has anyone done so with the community “consensus” of the present?
2. Are there any undisputed — and well-understood — climate changes (glacier or ice cap melt, disappearing rain forests, etc.) in contemporaneous time?
3. Is there any university funding from NSF, NOAA, NASA, ONR, EPA going to climate research for something other than not confirming the enormity of the warming?
Then, the thread deteriorated into a two-person screed about angels on the head of a pin I found incomprehensible and boring.
I thought about posting another comment about Tennekes’ resignation and hermetic jargon, but I didn’t think they’d get it. ….Lady in Red