Thursday, August 6, 2015

Why Won't More Scientists Peer-Review Reality? Citizens Too.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Scientists are hopless. Not THAT beer reviewed journal, silly. I mean ones critical for democracy.

Let's get serious.

Why do our rulers carry out winning political campaigns in trashy tabloids ... rather than peer-reviewed journals? :(

Prof. Brad Lewis notes that "I think many economists just ignore it because it's not in the peer-reviewed stream" - which brings up fundamentally interesting questions about power, politicians and scientists.

And overall, that's just not good enough. After all, if war is too important to be left to the generals, surely every process is too important to be left to the presumed process owners?

So why won't more scientists peer-review reality?

In science programs, we're taught everything about science, except WHY to pursue it, and how best to leverage it for mankind. That's stunning, if you stop and think about it.

Rulers & politicians like their scientists meek, malleable, and above all else, submissive.

Pair that with how little it takes to bribe & neutralize scientists & academics, and you have our quasi-feudal NeoLiberal state.

Here's my contention:

'The most important question in every science field - in fact in every human discipline - from day 1, may well be:
"how do we coordinate current & emerging knowledge in each discipline, with current & emerging knowledge in all disciplines?" '
That, after all, is how aggregates evolve.

Move over combinatorial chemistry. Combinatorial Cultural Evolution is demanding it's due. Or else!

Let's drill down a bit deeper into this same topic.

Why don't more scientists use "Design of Experiments?" There are some fundamentally solid reasons in key instances (i.e., when experimental space or "policy space" includes discontinuities such as phase-changes, rather than smoothly extrapolated functions), but let's leave that question to later. The bigger & more immediate conclusion is that asking why more scientists don't use "Design of Experiments" is a relatively trivial question - asked most frequently by investors and accountants.

The far bigger question?
Why don't more citizens at least refer to Design of Experiments - and constantly enlarging perspective - when trying to run their [supposed] democracies?
That's a far more fundamental question, and the answer is known. Our entire education system, from top to bottom, trains citizens to seek overly simplistic solutions to a series of increasingly complex tasks. Doh!

Increasingly, our schools stunt, trap and enslave students intellectually, rather than setting them free. If that doesn't change, we can't change, fast enough. Specifically, our Adaptive Rate won't meet the demands of an accelerating Future Shockwave - unless we fundamentally & continuously improve our K-12 schools, so that all citizens act like owners of democracy, and practice contributing to where we're going, instead of leaving it to a small bevy of sociopathic "owners" practicing Central Planning.


If we don't selectively increase our rate of interactions .... we're dishonestly making a mockery of the scientific method, and of evolution.

We already know that aggregate evolution is leveraging the increasing inter-dependencies among growing numbers of components, across multiple levels of organization. That's why we have molecules, cells, cell-types, organs, physiologies, human cultures, and multi-nation alliances.

The way all aggregates handle an unpredictable stream of transient contexts is by reconnecting everything to everything, on-demand, before transiently settling into a relaxed organizational state continuously tuned (but not over-tuned) to a given context. That's exactly what we do every night when we go to sleep. Upon waking every morning, we've done the best we can to make sense of yesterday's data deluge, and interpret it per ongoing models ..... OR ... we've determined that it's time to re-assess everything (which we do mainly by replacing parent models with offspring models).

It seems reasonable to conclude that national aggregates of humans need a sample/assess wake/sleep cycle every bit as much as our personal aggregates of CNS neurons do. If citizens don't do periodic After Action Re-assessments at a quite fundamental level, then we don't have a democracy. Worse, if we don't educate and train citizens to be up to that frequent re-assessment task, then we can't have a democracy.

3 comments:

Peter Pan said...

Scientists are speaking out on the topic of climate change. Ecologists such as Guy McPherson are particularly concerned with that part of reality, and have spoken out on topics outside of their field. Does that answer one of your questions?

In theory, freedom of expression. In practice, negative consequences.

Dan Lynch said...

"national aggregates of humans need a sample/assess wake/sleep cycle."

Mother Nature may be in the process of slapping us with a wake/sleep cycle in the form of climate change.

"If citizens don't do periodic After Action Re-assessments at a quite fundamental level, then we don't have a democracy. Worse, if we don't educate and train citizens to be up to that frequent re-assessment task, then we can't have a democracy."

We don't have a democracy. I'm not sure that we have ever had a real democracy. Most of human history has not been democratic. It's not clear that democracy is that important to human happiness. But in any event, climate change is on a collision course with our so-called democracy. People aren't going to voluntarily give up their SUVs, their ATVs, their McMansions, their vacations to Vegas, their heat in the winter, or their 19 kids. When Florida is under water and millions of Americans don't have food to eat because crops failed, democracy will be the least of our concerns.

Peter Pan said...

Increasingly, our schools stunt, trap and enslave students intellectually, rather than setting them free.

Force children to sit quietly in a classroom for hours, and give them medication if they do not comply. I suppose this is more progressive than child labour or child soldiering.