A Silly Little Reflection

So, I heard something on the radio at around 6 pm last Friday, and it has been rolling around inside my head ever since. This has been the first time I have really had to pause and write about it - just too many other things, both important and unimportant, going on to sit down and write for the five minutes it will take to bring this up.

So, as I said, it was about 6 pm, I had just finished a game of Infinity at Gamescape in San Francisco, and I was on my way home. I had the radio on, I was driving (but I wasn't runnin' down a dream at that moment, oh fans of Tom Petty), and one of those hourly news breaks came on. It made a mention of the new divider for the Golden Gate Bridge, and how it would still be quite some time before it would be completed, mainly because they still had to file an environmental impact report before they could proceed with the project. This has pissed me off ever since hearing it.

Don't get me wrong - there are times when these reports provide valuable information and can guide our decision making process, but for the most part they have devolved from their original intent into a hodgepodge of delays and bank account paddings for various agencies and interest groups. I could even tolerate that, if it was a necessity (like we were planning on paving over the only environment of an endangered species for no good reason) and we needed the information, but really!

What kind of environmental impact is a movable divider going to have on an environment that is not in the slightest bit natural to begin with? Could someone help me out here? Are there birds or bugs whose flight patterns will be affected? If so, I would suggest that the cars whizzing by might just have a greater impact on those species. Is the device used to lay out the divider and move it inordinately polluting? What the f*** kind of impact could this report have?! What significant environmental knowledge will we gain from this study?!

I really would like an answer to any of these questions, this is not rhetorical. I fear that I am having such a visceral reaction to the idea of it, that I may not be noticing something obvious. To me, it just seems like one of many ways that are priorities are skewed in this day and age. Why expedite the saving of lives from head-on crashes, there is a superfluous report that must be filed. Why put up a suicide barrier or a net for minimal cost, we should definitely sacrifice the mentally ill who have fixated on the bridge just so that we can have our iconic landmark always looking the same - besides, stopping them would be violating their liberties. Don't they have the right to choose whether to love or die?

It just seems that we are really not paying attention to things that should be actual priorities; I know that I have, in the past, made a case for fairly ridiculous applications of the law for the sake of consistency, and I suppose that the argument for the environmental report could be similar: if we allow them to slide on this, then soon more and more will be allowed to get around this rule and then the rule will have no effect. The old "slippery slope" argument - and while it can be valid, I would argue that we have already slipped down that particular Slip-n-Slide for environmental impact reports - they do nothing to save species or help the environment, they are just there to keep a bunch of bureaucrats employed at the state, local, and federal level. (Just wait til I start my rant on the ESA of 1973 - another day, another day, how many times have I written that and not gotten to it, but I really will try, promise)

And just to add insult to injury, I think that I will make some mention of the person who responded to my last blog, ed darrell of Millard Filmore's Bathtub. I appreciate his attempt to inform, but he went about it entirely the wrong way. He picked out one small statement that was factually inaccurate in my last blog (that is debatable, but my assertion wasn't entirely correct, I will cop to that - sorry, heat of passion in writing, and I didn't fact check everything - it wasn't the point of that little rant, anyway) and then he conveniently ignored every other statement that I made that he could not easily refute. Instead, he implied that I was ignorant and claimed the moral high ground of science.

Just a couple of things here - nothing undercuts a discussion like implying one person or the other is stupid. He may have felt that I was misinformed; he could have stated that politely, rather than adopting a haughty and smarmy tone. Perhaps I misinterpreted and am over-reacting, but that was how it seemed to me. Ed is a history teacher, and I am not going to hold that against him. Just because one is not a "scientist" doesn't mean that one has no right to make comments on science. He does, and may be well-informed. However, he fell into something that I am shocked a history teacher would fall into.

You see, history is always written by the winners. Assuming that every shred of historical "fact" has not been colored by this is naive. I am not saying that history is false, or untrustworthy, but I am saying that it is open to interpretation and should be examined with a skeptics, the same way any good science should be. Simply falling back on "the EPA must be right" or "virtually all scientist except a couple of kooks" as an assertion is ridiculous (quick note - these are not direct quotes from Ed, but paraphrasing his assertions - I am not putting words in his mouth - look at how he responded to the September 11, 2008 blog here: https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=4180701337873637099&postID=1997712873844578555). This misses the entire point of a good history education - do not just look at one source of history. If you read Carson's book, her religious fervor is obvious,her rhetoric is extreme, and her science is cherry-picked. Many, many people (reputable people, not just shlubs like me online) actually have documented that. Denying that there could be anything political in science is ridiculous. Science has always had politics in it, simply because there are people involved. The politics in science has become more extreme since our societal model shifted from privately to publicly funded science (I am not saying that this shift is bad, just mentioning that a side effect of the shift is increased politicization).

Scientists are people, too, and, like every industry, not all of them are geniuses or on the right side of the bell curve or any other super-intelligent moniker you would like to apply. Some just gutted it out through college and got there degree, and kept going. Here's my analogy (it happens to be a lot like one that Voltaire used in Candide to criticize Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" argument - forgive me, but it does convey my point as well):

Suppose that there is a master carpenter. He is a genius, and has some of the most inventive designs and masterful wood-working the world has ever seen. He takes on a number of apprentices, all of whom are smart and capable themselves, but none of whom are quite of his caliber. They are all intelligent and gifted enough to recognize their master's genius, but not quite enough so to reach that level of innovation themselves. However, they have a great deal of pride because of his selection of them, and feel that because of their exposure to such genius, they must be special to. So they embark on fruitful lives and careers doing a superb job copying him and paying him tribute, but never rally innovate, themselves. In fact, they do not even always grasp the subtlety of what their master is doing, so they often fail spectacularly, but spin things into their favor by invoking the power of their master's name, or referring to themselves as geniuses, or as specialists - people who the commoners could not possibly ever understand. Of course, they never grow, never really achieve greatness, but they become renowned, and they choose a caliber of student even lower than themselves (they could not jeopardize their self-esteem by choosing a more talented student who might shame them), and instill in those students the same sort of religious fervor.

Now just substitute science for carpentry and we can see how genius gets diluted. For ever one brilliant physicist like Einstein or Fermi, there are dozens if not hundreds of others who simply engage in mental masturbation to prove to each other how smart they are (because they are deathly afraid that they may not be as smart as they think). To think that science would somehow escape this oh-so-very pervasive aspect of the human condition is patently absurd. Of course I do not expect that we should chuck out all science - that is absolutely ludicrous. We should, however, approach science as good scientists - biased skeptics (it is too much to hope to actually be unbiased, but we strive for that) who recognize their biases and try to minimize the impact of those biases by looking at as much of the data and drawing appropriate conclusions.

The problem with science is that it tends to be self-fulfilling. If you have a model of the world, an ecosystem, or the universe, you tend to look for evidence that supports that model and exclude evidence that doesn't. This is why particle physicists are still looking for a gravity particle and will never find one. For their model to work, it must exist, but all indications point to the fact that it doesn't. Rather than accept this fact and modify the theory accordingly, they just blindly keep pursuing idiocy. If you think I am being harsh or unrealistic, I got this from a conversation with a doctor of physics who did research and published his dissertation working at a particle accelerator in Switzerland, I believe. He spoke three languages, had an excellent command of particle physics and mathematics (and, incidentally, bathed too infrequently and was a lousy teacher), and had a near religious zeal about particle physics. He said that the gravity particle was the holy grail of his field, and he confessed that they would probably never find it because it probably didn't exist, but the model worked better with that piece of information in it.

I am not saying all science is like this, but because it is a human endeavor, we tend to want to validate the perspectives of those we admire. This is why there is so much conflicting science out there, and that is okay. We just need to sift through the debris from time to time, and do are best to sort it all out. For ed darrell to think that because he has some scientific data that backs up some of his perspective is fine, but to believe that he is guaranteed right because he has a line on absolute truth is the same perspective as the fundamentalist Christian ideals that I was mentioning in the last blog. Ironic that he proved the point of that last blog by responding in that way, and if he is reading this as well, I hope it will give him pause before he starts spreading his brand of truth.

Always remember, history is written by the winners. On occasion, those winners may be self-conscious enough to admit wrongdoing a hundred years down the line (as the US has for a few things), but we can't always count on that. Just because we feel more sophisticated than the Greeks or the Romans, doesn't mean that we can avoid bias in history or in science. In fact much of contemporary historical studies focus on disentangling historic fact from fiction (which, in its own way can verge on the rewriting of history as well, if you are not careful about your biases).

So what hope does this give us as a species? Not much, I guess, if you are a pessimist. I am in a somewhat more optimistic mood right now, so I guess that I would say that this perspective is what has lead us through cycles of repression of information and revolution (not necessarily violent, just revolutions of thought in these cases), and, ultimately, it is these cycles that have lead to our intellectual growth as a species. This offers little comfort to the individual, but, as a whole, we seem to have done pretty well advancing ourselves using this flaw punctuated with bursts of intellect and intuition. In many ways, one could argue that the repressive nature of the second and third generation "craftsmen" are what challenges men and women to rebellious ideas that can lead to earth-shaking discoveries.

Or maybe I am just full of crap.