slimmouse » Tue Dec 09, 2014 2:49 am wrote:I should add that I believe that one of the major problems here to me is the nature of language. Our method of communication sucks fundamentally. Some of what we talking chimps have achieved with such a low tech model of warbling sound waves at one another is actually quite impressive when you think about it. But this model of communication itself is open to any amount of interpretation, which the ruling minority have exploited to the full, via their political, financial and religious lackeys.
I strongly suspect that in ages past, we were probably capable of less ambiguous means of making ourselves understood to each other - although I also fully understand this is in itself a speculative statement.
An eloquent point, and one that makes your aversion to science all the more baffling. Especially in this regard: you're engaged in the same kind of crazy-making reification you lament by treating the noun "Science" as a semantically meaningful commodity, it is not. Hopefully quoting a Druid will be amenable to both our biases...
Central to the entire strategy is a bit of obfuscation that treats “science” as a monolithic unity, rather than the complex and rather ramshackle grab-bag of fields of study, methods of inquiry, and theories about how different departments of nature appear to work. There’s no particular correlation between, let’s say, the claims made for the latest heavily marketed and dubiously researched pharmaceutical, on the one hand, and the facts of astronomy, evolutionary biology, or agronomy on the other; and someone can quite readily find it impossible to place blind faith in the pharmaceutical and the doctor who’s pushing it on her, while enjoying long nights observing the heavens through a telescope, delighting in the elegant prose and even more elegant logic of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, or running controlled experiments in her backyard on the effectiveness of compost as a soil amendment. To say that such a person “hates science” is to descend from meaningful discourse to thoughtstopping noise.
I would propose -- gently, gently -- that lamenting the corruption of "science" is essentially the same gambit. We can discuss specific scientists, specific fields (geology's capture by the energy industry? academia's perverse incentives?) but to speak generally of "Science" is rather analagous to not speaking at all, in terms of information and communication.
And yet none of that is my point.
My point: we do have a "less ambigious means of making ourselves clear," and best of all, it has quietly grown into a genuine "global language" -- I am talking about math, and to the extent there's a difference, music. Numbers surely lie, but that's a data problem -- not some inherent flaw in mathematics.
Few things altered my post-adolescent brain so much as endeavoring to truly understand probability. I still don't, of coure, but along the way I learned that most of my baseline, sensible heuristics were flatly wrong. That alone was worth the journey.
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