Posted by
Marcus G. Daniels on
Jun 30, 2015; 6:34pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/A-New-Society-for-the-Study-of-Cultural-Evolution-tp7586275p7586296.html
"There's only 1 reason to interfere/intervene in the milieu around you, that is to participate. "
Is a search engine a participant in people's web browsing? One can define it that way, but that's not the usual business model. The usual model is to watch and learn, and sell their observations in some way to a third party. Most science is about teasing apart causation in as much detail as possible in a controlled setting. And engineering is about putting it back together in useful ways. Not everything can be understood or controlled that way, but the parts and pieces often can be. That's a fine thing to do, just not the only thing to do.
I have no problem with activism. If there's no knowledge about how the parts and pieces of a social system work, nor experience with similar system dynamics behave, then, by all means dive in to the blood and muck, if that sort of thing is fun for you. But if I'm going to spend time debating, say, potential legislation, with people that don't share my particular preferences, then it is a good if we negotiate a protocol for identifying good and bad arguments, so we don't just talk about our preferences all day. The failure to find and maintain such a protocol means the activity becomes political, and is no longer a good faith discussion, but a rivalry. The fewer mutually accepted rules -- the nastier or more pointless the discussion may become. And the faster it gets nasty, the sooner we can found out who the big dog is, because that's all that is at stake.
And it is not about objective reality, it's about precision of terminology. What is nailed down sufficiently-well for an analysis about the logical consequences of the nailed-down thing or system of things. It's not clear what this group of people is willing to nail down, even temporarily. Just like it isn't clear what climate change deniers are willing to nail down. It is bad faith, not skepticism, when people put their monetary or ideological goals ahead of the evidence, and then claim they are interested in the evidence. That's what I mean by corruption.
Marcus
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