“The eccentric, “absent-minded professor” with “crazy” ideas has been replaced by a new breed of scientist, more like a “yuppie” executive than the quirky genius of old academia. These peers cannot afford a nonconformist, or unpredictable, thinker because every new, alternative hypothesis is a potential threat to their own line of research. Albert Einstein would not get funded for his work by the peer review system, and Linus Pauling did not (for his work on vitamin C and cancer even though he received two Nobel Prizes). The only benefit of the numerous cascades of competitive tests and reviews set up by peer review is the elimination of unsophisticated charlatans and real incompetence. In sum, the review of too many by too many achieves but one result with certainty: regression to the mean. It guarantees first-rate mediocrity. As these armies of new scientists flood the peer review system, they even act to suppress any remaining dissension by the few remaining thoughtful researchers. Peer review, after all, can never check the accuracy of experimental data; it can only censor unacceptable interpretations. A scientist’s grants, publications, positions, awards, and even invitations to conferences are entirely controlled by his competitors. As in any other profession, no scientist welcomes being out-competed or having his pet idea disproved by a colleague. Former ‘Science’ editor Dr. Philip Abelson presciently described the pressures against dissenters who raise questions publicly:
‘The witness in questioning the wisdom of the establishment pays a price and incurs hazards. He is diverted from his professional activities. He stirs the enmity of powerful foes. He fears that reprisals may extend beyond him to his institution. Perhaps he fears shadows, but in a day when almost all research institutions are highly dependent on federal funds, prudence seems to dictate silence.’
Few scientists are any longer willing to question, even privately, the consensus views in any field whatsoever. The successful researcher-the one who receives the biggest grants, the best career positions, the most prestigious prizes, the greatest number of published papers-is the one who generates the most data and the least controversy. The transition from small to big to megascience has created an establishment of skilled technicians but mediocre scientists, who have abandoned real scientific interpretation and who even equate their experiments with science itself. They pride themselves on molding data to fit popular scientific belief, or perhaps in adding nonthreatening discoveries. But when someone strays outside accepted boundaries to ask questions of a more fundamental nature, the majority of researchers close ranks to protect their consensus beliefs.”
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been
overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and
testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically
the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery,
has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research.
Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract
becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.
For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of electronics
[sic] computers … The prospect of domination of the
nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations,
and the power of money is ever present-and is gravely to be
regarded.”
This is a post I made on the TZM forum regarding the economic calculation problem, as proposed by Mises.
The economic calculation ‘problem’ assumes that people’s values of over consumption cannot be changed. It assumes that people will want more than what the earth can provide, given our technology at a given time. This assumption is essentially the human nature argument redressed.
Let me put it this way. If human demand for a widget is higher than societies ability to produce such a widget, the next question (after, of course trying to find other ways meet this demand adequately, perhaps by using some other widget that performs a similar function, etc, etc… but let’s just say that isn’t possible for some reason) is not ‘how do we ration the widgets?’, the question is how do we, as a people, reconcile this demand overrun? I am assuming we are discussing demand for items that are essentially ‘wants’ in the first place, since I believe it’s been well established within this movement that we can meet everybody’s NEEDS. The problem is that there is too much demand, not that we can’t produce enough widgets. We can’t change reality. If we can’t physically meet a material demand, we don’t start rationing, we adjust our view of reality to include the FACT that we can’t meet this want for everyone.
The libertarian assumption is that humans cannot change their innate ‘wants’, or they will inevitably conflate wants with needs. This is provably false. Like I said earlier, it is the human nature argument redressed. Humans have no specific behavior pattern, or list of ‘wants’ encoded into their DNA. Cultivating a mindset in people of truly valuing reality, who realize that ‘nature is a dictatorship’, we will find that people WILL NOT WANT things that can’t be produced sustainably and abundantly.
I know there are a million caveats to what I’m saying here, such as outliers who don’t share this value, transitional issues, or a myriad of other stuff I’m sure I could touch on, but for the sake of being succinct, I am going to leave this post how it is, because I think it is the rational train of thought that needs to be followed when considering the need to ration at all. I will gladly try to answer questions in the comment section, but:
Basically rationing is only a need when we can’t meet NEEDS. We can certainly, technically, meet people’s material needs in a very short amount of time (and mental needs over a longer time through education + science). All it would take is a shift in global production and distribution focus. When we are talking rationing wants, we are asking the wrong question, because it is the want itself that should be challenged.
eventually I’ll be integrating the feed from this page into my website, as a sort of news-source type thing (similar to my personal facebook feed now, but with more content).
do me a favor and hit ‘like’ (as of when this note wsa written I need 12 more people to be able to fully set up my page name/url).
There’s no such thing as information that has not been filtered. Every word of it has been spun this way and that by each observer, writer, and editor it passed through on it’s way from reality to your brain. First hand experiences are filtered and defined by our own cognitive structures so as to be integrated with our previous thought patterns, and the information becomes further diluted as it is passed from person to person, from bias to bias. Information Filtration is the art of using the hand or mind to shape how and what information is presented or deemed important, and therefore how we perceive that information, what conclusions we draw from it, and how we repeat it to others.
An amazing aspect of the internet is that it has democratized information filtration. Whereas in the past information flowed outwards from a few, very powerful, sources, it now flows freely in all directions. Many people have noted this phenomena, even praised it for the miracle that it is, but there is a darker side to the extreme diversity of information filtration, something called ‘comfirmational bias’. This is the tendency we have to look information that already supports a view we currently hold, and it’s not something that’s easy (or even completely possible) to overcome.
This past year I’ve gotten most of my news and information from my facebook and twitter streams, my youtube subscriptions… always feeling as if I was getting ‘the other side’ of the story. I suppose you could call it a mental oversight that, at first, I failed to realize that there is never only two sides to a story. Through the internet I’ve found large groups of loose associations through digital media to people who share similar values to mine, which is great, and has opened my eyes to many new ideas.
However, I tend to agree with more of these ideas than not, and I don’t think this is a good thing. I think a large chunk of the information I expose myself to should be information I disagree with. There are multiple reasons for this, namely:
1. Understanding another’s position is an invaluable tool in conversation, and
2. It’s important to recieve information that has been filtered through an entirely different set of biases than a person is used to. The fact of the matter is that no matter how biased a source for information is, the information is still there, and when we seek a diverse base of source-biases, we are forced to use our critical thinking capacities as we learn, rather than passively re-inforcing our same old thought-patterns.
What catalyzed perspective shift? I’ve been doing a lot of painting at my day job lately, and was looking for something to listen to on my iPod that might make me feel like I was not wasting my day. I searched iTunes for ‘philosophy’, and on iTunesU I found a lecture series called ‘Modern Philosophy’. I downloaded the batch and started listening.
What I didn’t notice, until I started listening, was that this lecture series was given at RTS (The Reformed Theological Seminary). I’m about halfway through the series, and now I know why Marx never wrote anything worth thinking about…. because he was a godless statist, of course! But jokes and sillyness like that aside, I really have learned a lot about modern philosophy that I did not know, and I actually appreciated sorting through the perspective that professor Ronald Nash projects onto the philosophies of these great thinkers. People I’d never actually heard of like Kant and Hegel, or those I had like Marx, Nietzsche, or Rousseau (all of whom were near-worthless idiots, according to Nash :D).
Nash is an expert on these people’s philosophies, but the ever-present, transparent Christian bias that goes completely unnoticed by Nash and his students (even as he rails on the logical contradictions in certain philosophies while continuing to fall back on a logically contradictory version of Christianity) is an brain churning example of information filtration that stimulates the neurons to no end. It’s interesting to learn about philosophy from someone I fundamentally disagree with, because as I listen and absorb the real information he’s putting forward, I’m forced to use my critical thinking facilities to understand which statements are based on reality, and which the Christian delusion Nash holds so dear to his heart, as he makes casual reference to the impending Rapture, the unsaved, and joking ‘amen’s’ and ‘halleljia’s’ from his enthusiastic students.
Having never heard a lot of this information before, it was nice to hear it from a bible believing Christian. I can’t wait to hear some more perspectives.
I recently heard about a report that discovered when people listen to someone we percieve as an ‘expert’ in a given field, our critical thinking capacities all but shut down. I have no tests to back this up, but I think if we are listening to experts who have valid insights and information, but also have fundamental disagreements with our own personal philosophies, and therefore constantly arriving at different conclusions than we would, our critical thinking faculties may not be so dormant.
Hey guys, I took down the two Epic Fail Production vids VTV had a really great talk with the user who we were responding to (here), and he took down his anti-tzm videos.
So you may have noticed that I haven’t been posting much, I’ve been focusing on videos. I’d like to promise more posts in the future, but I’m gonna stop doing that. Every time I post, saying I’m gonna do something (more photo albums, moving forward review), it ends up not happening.
Anyways, I’m helping the communications team with video creation (see: tzm responds to wikileaks), also, I’ve begun workign with VTV, of v-radio.org on a new series of response videos inspired by Capitalism? Epic Fail!. The first of which can be found here.
We like to wrap ourselves in security blankets. We cling to things that make us feel ‘secure’; our jobs our homes our religions our identities, or should I say, our identifications? To identify with ‘something’ separates us from ‘something else’, and while some of these separations are more ‘real’ than others (our separate bodies compared to our separate possessions, or professions), all physical and energetic forms are inherently temporal, therefore unstable and hence any felt separation, or even any unity that is felt, is ever elusive, since both are concrete realities.
The experientialization of our reality, then, can be discerned by one or both of these realities, to ever-varying degrees. So the question then becomes; which discernment is better? A hollow question, I know, but I asked it that way on purpose, because I want you to think of what your gut reaction was. Betterment is subjective, and idealism can twist it to its own needs. I say all this merely to point to the importance of realizing the origins and bases of our own ideas of ‘better’.
I, for one, cannot imagine life without my separations. That is, of course, because ‘I’ am the one making that statement, and ‘I’ have to seperate ‘I’ from ‘you’ in order to make the statement.
I cannot imagine life without my security blankets. My anxieties and fears and percieved separation from society manifests itself as a protective barrier that protects me from much human interaction. ‘I’ seem to need them even though I don’t want them. ’I’ would feel exposed, rather than liberated.
All the while I yearn to throw the blankets off but they can be too heavy. I do lust after detachment… of pure, unadulterated freedom, of a life lived free from suffering, of living in the space of no attachments, no responsibility, no failures, no successes, no fear, no hate, no love, nothing. Everything.
