group query

[Daniel Stein]

This is a response to the discussion spawned by dpknauss and responded to
principally by jporter and Andrew Dinn.

One might assert (and someone probably has scooped me here!) that the
edifice of techno-scientific 'progress' is a 'triumph' (?HMPH?) of a belief
in the METHODS by which "facts" are established rather than of belief in
the 'facts' themselves..."Facts" found to be "wrong" get tossed
unceremoniously, and USUALLY once and for all! Only occasionally do we hear
of a renegade "scientist", ranting in the wilderness, that the
'establishment' is refusing to see the brilliance of some set of
'unorthodox' ideas...Such individuals often find the credence they seek,
but only outside the 'community'...

There's a passage toward the end of CL49 which describes the fate of pop
songs at the bottom of the Top 200 hits, lurking there, the most preterite
of entities..."songs no one will ever sing" or something like
that..."places whose /names he has never heard/"

Peer review is also the standard in other 'legitimate' academic arenas. It
just seems that for some, no idea can ever be tossed, 'once and for
all'...Sorry, Bonnie, and all the rest, literature simply CANNOT tell
science what to DO, but it CAN make us FEEL in different ways about the
results of the inquiry...All I know is that my first trip across the Zone
(completed within the last month or so) made me FEEL a lot more than it
made me THINK...Pokler only wanted at first to fly to the moon (for
whatever reasons)...it wasn't his promethean dream that was 'bad'...in the
end it took men who knew nothing of the science to make that Poisson
distribution across London...


Daniel J. Stein        {; < 0>         stein at magma.geol.ucsb.edu
Geological Sciences                http://www.geol.ucsb.edu/~stein
University of California        (805) 893-8130 (voice)
Santa Barbara, CA 93106        (805) 893-2314 (fax)

...In the country of the bland, the one odd man is king.