🚀 go-pugleaf

"Steve Coile" <scoile@nospam.thanks> wrote in message 
news:1168891271.14771@nospam.thanks...
>>> Such words accurately describe the existential problem 
>>> of modernity
>>> as it overtook the certitude and meaningfulness that 
>>> tradition offered,

Including certitudes such as "Anyone not of our tribe is our 
enemy and must be killed" and "The earth is the center of 
the universe and anyone who says otherwise is wrong and must 
be punished."  Not all tradition, certitude, and 
meaningfulness is good or even useful.

>>> as well as the deliberation that weighed all 
>>> possibilities and avoided
>>> drastic imbalances. That type of thinking has been 
>>> eroded and lost.

Nonsense.  It's still there.  Innovation, whether by science 
and technology or by other means, has been continually 
forcing mankind to examine its existing traditions in the 
light of new knowledge.  Not surprisingly, tradition 
therefore is continually being revised, by discarding some 
of it, modifying some of it, and by adding new components. 
The only difference now is that such changes have been 
happening at a faster pace because of science and 
technology.

>> Actually, it hasn't been lost; rather, the deliberation 
>> that weighed all
>> possibilities and avoided drastic imbalance remains with 
>> most of the
>> scientific community. Where those qualities have been 
>> "lost" may in fact
>> be places where such qualities never were: with salesmen, 
>> managers who
>> can't look beyond the next quarterly statement, in the 
>> pulpit and the
>> soapbox of the preacher and politician.
>
> Philosophers were once the thought leaders of society, but 
> as society
> "progressed" after industrialization, social goals shifted 
> to pragamatic
> materialism and philosophers no longer had a purpose and 
> consequently
> didn't appear.

You have an unfortunate habit of overstating your points, 
which is why you are drawing so much fire.  Indeed, you 
undercut your own absolutist statement here in your very 
next sentence.

> Instead, pragmatists took the lead and showed what was 
> physically possible,

Arguably true, but not in itself a necessarily harmful 
condition.

> leaving no place for deliberators or voices capable
> of applying brakes to any slowly accelerating insanity.

Nonsense.  Another absolutist statement.

>> I've got a very simple morality for the modern world. I 
>> stole it
>> straight from the self-proclaimed "witches" and it works 
>> for me, with a
>> tiny bit of expansion. "If it harms none, do as thou 
>> wilt, and reck ye
>> well what harm may be done".
>
> Most minds in the modern world are incapable of 
> considering the harm of
> their actions.

More absolutist rant.

> Therefore harm must be preemptively stopped by preventing
> potentially harmful possibilities from being performed on 
> a wide scale.

More nonsense, when stated in your absolutist manner.  Would 
we have been better off if cavemen had refused to utilize 
the ability to create and use fire?  Even if they had been 
able to imagine its negative future implications (uses) - 
which they weren't - any attempt to stifle or even limit its 
use would have, and should have been been ignored in light 
of its benefits for them.  Even now, with the benefit of 
full hindsight knowledge, no rational person is going to say 
that on balance, we'd be better off without it.

>> I'd argue that your campaign against Science would be 
>> better directed as
>> a campaign against Recklessness.
>
> Except what I've described is recklessness caused by 
> scientists.

Oh, puh-leeze.  There is a complex relationship between 
innovation (in this case, science and techology) and how it 
is accepted and employed by society.  You simply cannot make 
simplistic, absolutist statements about the role of any of 
the actors in this process.

If I'm a pharmacist and I dispense to you a bottle of 
opiates to eliminate pain after surgery, does that "cause" 
you to abuse them by becoming an addict or selling them on 
the street to an addict?  Why not?  If it weren't for me and 
my action, that never would have happened.  I should have 
anticipated the possibilty and refused to dispense them, 
right?  So pharmacists are the "cause" of a certain 
percentage of drug addiction and abuse, right?

Not.  Again, you keep sabotaging your credibility and what 
might have been an arguable, limited thesis, with 
simplistically absolutist, extreme statements.

> You
> are arguing for scientific leadership, but these are 
> precisely the same
> people whose thinking created the problems we suffer. It 
> is an old
> political trick for someone to create a problem and then 
> proclaim a
> solution, each time making things worse.

Okay, now we're back to something that has a kernal of 
accuracy.  Innovators of science ("scientists") and their 
products inherently are neither good nor evil.  As I said, 
the complex process of accepting and using these 
innvovations is where the trouble can start.  Let's parse 
that into two branches:

1. Advocating the acceptance and use of innovation for 
personal reasons, which includes poltical philosophies (uh, 
oh - that is a "traditional value, is it not?) and baser 
reasons, such as personal gain.

2. Advocating it purely for perceived benefits to society 
(which would include the further advancement of science).

We don't need to spend any time on the first.  That's hardly 
a reason for society to accept and use an innovation. 
Unfortunately, it plays a significant role in the process, 
but that's outside the scope of the argument here.

The second part seems to be more central to your issues.   I 
get your point that collectively, the acceptance and use of 
innovation can lead to negtive as well as beneficial 
consequences, and scientists don't always anticipate the bad 
side, or if they do, they do not let that stop them.

First of all, should scientists even bear a responsibility 
of anticipating the consequences?  It's not like no one else 
ever is going to make the same discovery.  The universe is 
what it is and it doesn't care who unmasks a part of it or 
when; it's going to happen.  If I discover something and 
thren suppress it, it will come out sometime, somewhere.

This is a tangential argument to the discussion, but the 
timing and by whom it is discovered can be important.  To 
put it in concrete if selfish terms, nuclear power was going 
to be discovered, period.  When that happened, I'd rather 
that it be by us than by some entity that wouldn't hesitate 
to use it on us first.  And if there were to be some kind of 
political limitation on the discovery of nuclear power, who 
do you think is more likely to comply with such 
restrictions?  The U.S. is blessed with a traditional values 
system that makes it more likely that nuclear power will not 
be abused.  Other nations do not subscribe to the same 
traditional values.  If that rings any chimes for you with 
respect to certain recent events in the news, it was 
deliberate.

(And before you run off on a bogus claim that I am 
contradicting myself because I have just asserted the 
importance of traditional values, let me state for the 
record that I recognize their legitimate role in the complex 
process of innovation.  I just don't agree with your 
repeated statements that they are dead, and/or your 
implication that they necessarily take precedence.)

And what is the alternative?  Apply brakes to scientific and 
technological innovation?  If we do that, who is the judge 
and jury?  The scienific community?  No, you've already 
condemned them.  So it must be society at large.  But which 
of society's "traditional values" will you apply?  Those of 
Southern Baptists?  Roman Catholics?  Fundamentalist 
Moslems?  Animists?  Creationists?  The "Intelligent Design" 
crowd?  Secular humanists?

I listed forms of religion here because they are the 
wellspring and guardians of most of any society's 
"traditional values".  Furthermore, since "applying the 
brakes" would of necessity be a political process, look at 
the U.S. Congress or any other nation's legislative bodies 
and consider how religious values (no matter how ridiculous) 
dominate their actions.  You can't escape the role of 
religion here, so be careful what  you wish for.

Let me introduce an analogy here, i.e., freedom of speech. 
The parallels are almost entirely congruent.  Speech can 
lead, and has led to all sorts of evils.  In fact, it's hard 
to imagine a negative societal action or consequence that 
does not require free speech at some point to allow it to 
propagate and act.  Religious persecution, racial violence, 
domestic violence, all the way up to the Hitlers and the 
Stalins, none of this could have happened if we had been 
sufficiently smart to know when and where someone's ability 
to speak to a public should have been curtailed or 
prohibited.

Yet one of the greatest "traditional values" of our society 
(it is, after all, enshrined along with freedom of religion 
in the very First Amendment) has been to favor and even 
guarantee freedom of speech even in the certain knowledge 
that from time to time, it will not only allow, but 
facilitate the perpetration of evils.

I could go on at length with this analogy, but let me simply 
note that you are in fact arguing for a form of suppression 
of free speech.

>>> Who do you think it was who created the methods that 
>>> contributed to
>>> Global Warming, or rather more accurately Climate Change 
>>> that brings
>>> us instability greater than mere heating? Who created 
>>> aerosols? Who
>>> created the processes to refine fuel and the methods to 
>>> burn fossil
>>> fuels? Are these the faults of sneaky politicians or 
>>> clever scientists
>>> who invented and discovered?
>>
>> And having created fire, then, Scientists are to blame 
>> for every person
>> who hasn't frozen to death in midwinter, as well as for 
>> every house
>> that's ever burned down due to Recklessness.
>
> Did all people freeze to death before the formalization of 
> the scientific
> method? You are presenting silly strawmen.

No, you are dodging the point.  Mankind acquired knowledge 
and applied it (including its negtive consequences) well 
before the scietific method.  If there is a strawman here, 
it is your use of the scientific method and scientists as 
the culprit.  What you really are arguing against here is 
innovation  because it can bring negative consequences, 
foreseeble and otherwise.  People froze to death all the 
time, and had more limited sources of nutrition, before the 
innovation of fire.  Science formalized and accelerated the 
process of acquiring new knowledge, but that is not 
inherently bad, either.  The evil comes when we use 
society's *traditional values* to apply it.

>> Yet had we created fire, and created little else, might 
>> not enough of us
>> over enough time have cause a Climate Change and find 
>> ourselves without
>> either the intellectual means or physical tools to 
>> discover the cause?
>
> Speculating on hypotheticals does not absolve scientists 
> of blame
> for the very real harm of what they created and unleashed 
> on society.

Implying that the changes against which you rail would not 
have occurred absent science is pure speculation on your 
part.

>>> It is good scientists are finally waking up to the 
>>> damage caused by
>>> the inventions of scientists. Perhaps they will stop 
>>> being so reckless
>>> and shortsighted in the future.

So what should they do?  Shut down the labs?

>> Again, your case is against Recklessness, not against 
>> Science.
>
> My case is against the recklessness of scientists who are 
> clearly
> unfit for intellectual leadership

"Intellectual leadership" is a political process, not a 
scientific one.  Which goes back to the complex relationship 
between the innovation process per se, which is not 
inherently political, and the process by which it is 
accepted and used by society, which is mostly political. 
And the political process is entirely based on a society's 
*traditional values* so you are back to Square One on this, 
i.e., it is not the scientific process that is the culprit. 
The culprit actually is the *traditional values* system that 
you so greatly extol here.  What we really need to do is 
modify and strengthen our tranditional values system, both 
for the individual and for our societal mechanisms, so that 
we can minimize the probability of abusing new scientific 
knowledge.

> because they are proven short-term
> thinkers without any demonstrated consideration for the 
> long-term
> effects of their actions.

So who are the "long-term thinkers" who ought to be in 
charge of all this?  Be specific here.  No hand-waving 
general declarations.  Exactly who would decide the 
standards and how would they be set?  We already have 
accepted the fact that except in extremely limited 
circumstances, we are better off if speech is not curtailed, 
in part because of the "who shall watch the watchman?" 
argument.  Who is going to ride herd on the scientists?

>> Every person competent to be called a scientist has had a 
>> fairly clear
>> vision of the paths in the futures and in most cases have 
>> done their
>> very best to have no unintended consequences, insofar as 
>> they could
>> control matters.
>
> Are you saying scientists are too stupid to realize that a 
> combustion
> engine produces exhaust, or that reliance on a 
> non-replenishable fuel
> resource is an obvious form of short-term thinking?

That's not what I got from his statement.

> How do you excuse
> scientists from the reckless consequences of their 
> creations without
> proclaiming them incapable of managing their own 
> discoveries?

How do you excuse the creators and enforcers of the more 
odious "traditional values" of society for not foreseeing 
and being constrained by the reckless consequences?  How do 
you fault them for being incapable of managing their own 
doctrines?

The scientist is not resposible for the consequeces of his 
discovery or how it is used by society, any more than the 
pharmacist is responsible for what you do with your meds 
after he has sold you the prescription.  Again, what you are 
referring to is a totally political process, which in turn 
is governed by traditional values, not scientific ones.

>> Eradicating smallpox was a very good thing to do. 
>> Eradicating smallpox
>> while refusing to allow funding of education about 
>> birthcontrol methods
>> was an insane thing to do.
>
> Precisely whom needs to be educated? Western, one 
> Christian nations, are
> generally below a replenishing birthrate and aren't 
> contributing to
> overpopulation. How do you propose "educating" the third 
> world to reduce
> birthrates against their national interests? You must 
> imagine yourself
> to have some kind of powerful and clever international 
> lobby.

So a consequence of your argument here (unintended by you, 
but nevertheless there) is that since we can't educate the 
entire world on the consequences of smallpox vaccine on 
fertility and life span-ratios, we'd be better off in the 
long run if we had suppressed the vaccine.

> In case you're unfamiliar, here are Europe's projected 
> 2007 fertility rates
> from www.census.gov:

Irrelevant, except to the extent that they support an 
elitist argument that we should only give smallpox and other 
vaccines to the Europeans and certain other nations if we're 
worried about worldwide overpopulation.  "We know how to 
control our breeding, they don't."

-- John Mazor
"The search for wisdom is asymptotic."

"Except for Internet newsgroups, where it is divergent..."
-- R J Carpenter