next message in archive
next message in thread
previous message in archive
previous message in thread
Index of Subjects
white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px
On 7/28/2011 12:13 AM, Christopher Majka wrote:
> On 27-Jul-11, at 10:49 PM, Andy Moir/Christine Callaghan wrote:
>
>> What you say is exactly why the whole of the scientific community
>> suffers a credibility problem.
>
> I'm afraid I disagree. The credibility problem is with the political
> masters who decide what studies are funded (and what are not) and how
> this information is used (or misused).
* the whole interface between the scientific and nonscientific ways of
thinking is the root of the problem here. Compared to the ways
politicians think, real science - faith in doubt - is so inside-out that
politicians, commercialites, lawyers, and other representatives of the
advocacy-based world views just don't have any idea what they're dealing
with when they have to interface with scientific data and conclusions.
Science is so much about the falsifiable hypothesis that's always
inviting everyone to prove it wrong, and about always knowing that one's
ideas are tentative, and about being *terrified* that one's personal
point of view, or influences put on one by others, may distort one's
concept of the best explanation for something, and about peer-review by
the entire concerned community before coming to a conclusion, and also
about acting on the basis of the best available ideas, while being
prepared to change them, that it's just incomprehensible to the
advocacy-based community at large. It's also true that the scientific
method is so effective that it can produce useful results for those who
don't understand it, resulting in biostitution and "military science"
and other heretical deviations from the ideal of a community of
disinterested lovers of understanding.
So in the case of marine aquaculture, this was an hypothesis (that it
could be done successfully), with a lot of auxiliary hypotheses about
how it might be done, and where and how the farm-nets should be
positioned. As someone interested in benthic invertebrates, I'd have
thought the main problem would have been how to position the farms in
relation to currents in order to use the wastes and waste food to
maximize the production of clams and crabs and Lobsters on the
surrounding seabed, but I don't know anything about the details of the
decision-making processes that were used.
The important thing, from a scientific point of view, would be to regard
the whole thing as an experiment, for the government to have financial
safeguards in place to compensate the experimenters if the experiment
was an ecological failure, and for the experimenters themselves to be
constantly vigilant for evidence that their experiment was having
unacceptable consequences. In fact, it seems that both aquaculturalists
and governments, on both coasts, are actively committed to these
enterprises and are prepared to distort and conceal data about them
which they feel may falisfy the idea that the "farms" are not
appropriate to situations in which they've been emplaced.
We've helped NIMBY's in a number of struggles against habitat
destruction, and it seems that a big part of their problem is stating
their concerns in scientific terms, since they seem just as unaware of
the inside-out character of scientific reasoning as government
bureaucrats and "biologists." One flag of this is that when anyone on
any side of a discussion uses the term "scientific proof" they have
tipped their hand that they don't know what science is about, because
all scientific conclusions are tentative by nature - see the quote from
Bunge at http://pinicola.ca/kitchen.htm#four
I suggest that it's only by stating their case in falsificationalist
(scientific) terms that unfunded groups have any chance of arguing
against industrial- or government-supported damage to the environment,
since advocate-funded studies related to these projects tend to be
irrelevant to the larger hypotheses about the projects, and it's only by
challenging the proponents to falsify plausible hypotheses about the
possible consequences of the project that there's any chance of getting
them to understand what they're doing. Such reasoning may be ignored,
but it's less likely to be mocked than if the same ideas are presented
as "feelings" or inchoate folk knowledge, and it may be useful, at
least, to reveal the unscientific reasoning of the proponents.
While it's possible to write about properly scientific projects in terms
that aren't explicitly scientific, and data can be gathered in an
advocacy way (i.e. by competitively-motivated listing or atlassing) and
then be used in scientific reasoning, directly scientific reasoning is
so effective that's it's hard to not wish it was more widely and
directly used among those interested in nature and their environment.
I've written about some of this at http://pinicola.ca/AdoptX.htm
fred.
=======================================================
* see some collected definitions at http://pinicola.ca/kitchen.htm#scidef
Science: the discipline of creating secure agreement from ignorance and
discord by agreeing to value stories only for their vulnerability to
being shown to be incorrect, and by agreeing to believe stories only to
the extent that they have survived attempts to falsify them and are
consistent with other such unfalsified stories. (FWS: November 2004, Jan
2006, June 2008, Dec 2009).
------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
Bishops Mills Natural History Centre - http://pinicola.ca/bmnhc.htm
now in the field on the Thirty Years Later Expedition -
http://fragileinheritance.org/projects/thirty/thirtyintro.htm
Daily Paintings - http://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.com/
RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
(613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca/
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
next message in archive
next message in thread
previous message in archive
previous message in thread
Index of Subjects