From W.A.S.T.E. on FB. With my response. Have at it. Should be interesting.

[Monte Davis]

"...doesn't the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle apply pretty fully,
metaphorically speaking?"

No. However many thousands of times you have heard and read it abused, the
Heisenberg principle tells you exactly nothing about testing human beings,
or about history, or culture, or the Othering of Being and Nothingness, or
about ANYTHING except the limits on precision of measurement for very
small, very simple particles in very unambiguously characterized situations.

For 89 years now, it has seemed intuitively obvious to abusers that
uncertainty "way down there" must add up to greater, more radical
uncertainty at the billion billion billion times larger scale of our senses
and experience. Sorry, but the opposite is true: the uncertainty DECREASES
with the mass/number of particles involved. If it matters, Heisenberg
allows us to know the position and velocity of a V-2 to far *greater*
precision than that of an electron.

The many uncertainties in our knowledge of the world (let alone other
people), arising from many causes. are addressed in centuries' worth of
common-sense experience, folk wisdom, philosophy, and narrative art.  The
Heisenberg principle added nothing significant to that, EXCEPT to allow the
rhetorical flourish of "see, science proves it!"

Of course, we could both be right. Or wrong. Or, metaphorically, both.
Everything's relative, y'know? Einstein said so.







On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 10:06 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Or is it ALL in THE USE that is made of science?
>
>
> Whatever I think of 'science' I know I have a projective bias
> against testing human beings. Not least and surely overgeneralized by
> me---it is akin
> to what they say of torture: how do you know you're learning truths ABOUT
> REAL LIFE.
>
> Or more benignly, doesn't the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle apply
> pretty fully, metaphorically speaking?
>
> On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 9:50 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Yeah, a great quote comeback leading into further Pynchon discussion, I
>> hope.
>>
>>  How much is P's expressed anti-rationalism [correct characterization?],
>> anti-rationalization as used by Weber, esp in the current section--as
>> interpreted or over-interpreted by some, maybe me--a foray into.......some
>> kind of irrationality without guidelines.I mean, is some kind of nod to
>> anti-overrationalism, irrational?
>> Many modernists before his time--Pound, Yeats, Eliot, there are
>> others--had deep problems with expressing 'answers'--if even needed--to
>> their presentations of ordered rationality being destructive.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 9:23 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> "Another discovery was that authoritarians tended to distrust
>>> science..."
>>>
>>> On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 7:20 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/how-world-war-ii-scientists-invented-a-data-driven-approach-to-fighting-fascism/
>>>>
>>>> Mark Kohut <https://www.facebook.com/mark.kohut.1?fref=ufi> "human
>>>> character can be measured the same way the temper of a dog can be
>>>> measured"...'scientific rationality"-----just another variation on the
>>>> disease so viciously, rightly, righteously, deeply satirized by Pynchon in
>>>> Gravity's Rainbow--and one of his most profound depth charges against
>>>> America's, the West's, culture of slouching toward death.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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