TP or NP? Trial ballon goes up

[Joseph Tracy]

While I agree that the scientific method of understanding nature produces dramatic changes and allows powerful innovations for retooling culture, it is just as sentimental to call these "successes" as to compare  one's beloved to a summer day. Progress in the hands of greedy, power addicted chimps  and chumps and champions of the modern is looking rather tenuous right now. Science is capable of generating nuclear fission and just as capable of  endorsing its role in massive global destruction. If you can't put out the fires you start your progress will be short lived. 
On Jul 30, 2012, at 5:36 PM, Monte Davis wrote:

> On “efforts to crystallize experience” [which in the case of algebra I’d call abstracting or generalizing]… I’ve probably posted this Dewey/James parlay from Experience and Nature before:
> ---
> Genuine science is impossible as long as the object esteemed for its own intrinsic qualities is taken as the object of knowledge. Its completeness, its immanent meaning, defeats its use as indicating and implying.
>    Said William James [Principles of Psychology, II, 605-606] , "Many were the ideal prototypes of rational order:
> teleological and esthetic ties between things... as well as logical and mathematical relations. The most promising of these things at first were of course the richer ones, the more sentimental ones. The baldest and least
> promising were mathematical ones; but the history of the latter's application is a history of steadily advancing successes, while that of the sentimentally richer ones is of relative sterility and failure. Take those
> aspects of phenomena which interest you as a human being most... and barren are all your results. Call the things of nature as much as you like by sentimental moral and esthetic names, no natural consequences follow from
> the naming... But when you give the things mathematical and mechanical names and call them so many solids in just such positions, describing just such paths with just such velocities, all is changed... Your 'things' realize the
> consequences of the names by which you classed them."
>  
> Of course it demands both common sense and tact to recognize what you’re giving up in the abstraction process; the development of a science typically involves so much analysis – breaking complex phenomena down to manageable pieces – that you can forget the goal is to reassemble them into a richer understanding of what interested you as a human being in the first place.
>  
> The old-timers here will recall that I’ve ranted on this before: Pynchon’s take on technology, science, and occasionally math is so much more knowledgeable and interesting than a cheapjack-Romantic “unweaving the rainbow,” “we murder to dissect” blah blah blah….
>  
> From: Ian Livingston [mailto:igrlivingston at gmail.com] 
> Sent: Monday, July 30, 2012 4:49 PM
> To: Monte Davis
> Cc: pynchon -l
> Subject: Re: TP or NP? Trial ballon goes up
>  
> True, I admit it. And there are some mathematicians who write very well. So, by way of atonement, I offer this old favorite:
>  
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re3-xo9bRc8
> 
> On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 12:12 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
> Ian Livingston sez:
> 
> Algebra just makes no sense. I stand with Laurie Anderson on the principle that x=x, not y base 8 times z to the minus fourth power. Efforts to crystallize experience, which is fluid and non-repeating, are purely mystical and have little real meaning. The results of "progress" based on changing reality into something else have been, well, catastrophic, to euphemize the result…
>  
> This sounds like engineers I’ve heard fuming about their frustrations in English class:  “What was all that ‘symbolism’ crap about? Why can’t writers just say what they MEAN instead of going on about albatrosses and  white elephants?”
> 
> 
>  
> -- 
> "Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant