Perhaps the words above are too abstract, but they seem to apply to the cases of paradigm conflict that I know of, including one of particular interest to me, which has dragged on a long time, without resolution, for want of an umpire.

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/legend.html

We have a multi-faceted paradigm conflict, with many subjects facing, and being suppressed by, one imperative - the desire/need not to change. Individuals, all of us, are being guided in this by government propaganda. Do you think that anything that the government of any organized western democracy doesn't want us to hear, will reach our ears if said government doesn't want it to? Of course not. I'm talking about a vast right-wing conspiracy, naturally. To me there are several entry points: the Kennedy Assassination, Cattle Mutillations, Roswell, the face on Mars or the city on the moon. Doing one's homework on any of these subjects will lead to suppressions in archaeology, physics, means of transport, fuels, religion, earth and universal history, and most importantly, psychology. Through a penetrating knowledge of individual and mass psychology, the truths which would allow all of us to break through many paradigms, are kept from us.

> "Do you think that anything that the government of any organized western democracy doesn't want us to hear, will reach our ears if said government doesn't want it to?"

I don't think government is that ubiquitous, or that monolithic, or that effective, at least usually. I don't agree with your examples. But there do seem to me to be serious examples, most that come to my mind involving the Cold War. The military statistics justifying the idea of a "dominant Soviet threat", seem to have been amazingly overstated, for decades.

Things people want to believe, that the government also wants them to believe, can summon powerful belief, and do so for long times.

With the web, including the GUARDIAN's work as an example, the world of ideas is more porous than it used to be. Some old horrors might be more difficult now.

But motivation, and established consensuses, still count, even when they happen to be distorted or wrong. The historical dialog about evolution, (with interesting aspectts cited in the WONDERFUL cite by bNice2You just above) offers many examples where motivation plays a stong role. Not always an entirely logical role. Here's a joke-story I like, on that point.

A lady was on her knees, praying about Darwin.

"Oh Lord, let it not be true ....... "But if it IS true .......

"Give us the STRENGTH to suppress it.

Governments, and populations well convinced by them, may show such "strength." So, I'd guess, may all other human beings, one time or another.

But when you ask: "> "Do you think that anything that the government of any organized western democracy doesn't want us to hear, will reach our ears if said government doesn't want it to?"

I'd have to say .... "maybe not every time ... but sometimes, such ideas can and do get through."

The CIA was formed in 1957, 3 months after Roswell. Their secret but highest priority was then and still is now, to suppress information about ufos. Shortly after that President Eisenhouer met with a group of aliens that have since been called 'the greys' at Edwards Airforce Base in California. We still don't know the exact details of the deal which was eventually hashed out. However one aspect of it was absolute secrecy on both sides. Over the years the secrecy has deepened until it has encompassed every aspect of our lives. Unbelievable technology has been obtained and is being used. It is the most important issue of our time because the gap between what they know and what we know is enormous. This is the multi-faceted paradigm. In this case you are naive to think 'not every time' because in this case it has to be every time. Every time a piece of solid evidence surfaces, and it does from time to time, the men in black go to work. Two weeks ago some artifacts from a wrecked ufo were being sent to a lab where they could be studied. They were intercepted at the post office by government officials. You are naive to think government is 'not that ubiquitous or monolithic' because it has forced itself to be. The stakes are too high. They are having all the fun and reaping all the knowledge. They, a deliberately vague they, will keep it secret for another 50 years if they can. The stakes are just too high.

Ideas off the norm can be wrong as well as right, and believed for all sorts of reasons. A key question is "How do you check?"

Myself, I doubt that the governement and the press could be counted on to suppress the existence of something real behind UFO's. I don't think the government interests, or the press interests, are disciplined or homogeneous enough for that.

The interesting cases of paradigm conflict don't involve "government suppression" in any case. They involve group psychology - including kinds of group psychology that are, most often, highly functional.

The Semmelweis case offers a good example of "hard" and "easy" aspects of paradigm conflict.

On the one hand, Semmelweis said "Just wash your hands ---- fewer women in your care will die." ...... Easy.

On the other hand, to do that, doctors had to entirely change their view of how disease occurred and spread, and face up to the idea that they'd personally, though unwittingly killed people. ......Hard.

Those sorts of problems are outside government. The problems don't involve conspiracies in any simple sense. The paradigm problems I know of are mostly of this kind.

nice to see someone other than myself referencing Berger and Luckman...

bNice2NoU2!

http://elan.library.emory.edu/Staff/Mhalbert/Research/Guides/bergerluckmann.html http://www.sfu.ca/~wwwpsyb/issues/1995/spring/krygsveld.htm

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WmsPage/endRefs: http://www.americancomm.org/~aca/acjdata/vol2/Iss1/essays/bollispecci.htm

It's much more comfortable to have put 2 and 2 together as you have. 'The problems don't involve conspiracies in any simple sense.' No they don't but in a 'vast conspiracy', the picture is different. After about ten years of research into these questions, a certain amount of mud has stuck to the wall of my credulity; even gullible as I may be. Let's take television interviews with politicians and government officials. The interviewer knows: 1. that there are some subjects which are off limits as too wierd to be in the mainstream press. 2. that if he/she asks really tough questions the interviewees won't come back and their colleagues won't come either. This is more true in the States than in Britain, where a somewhat more lively tradition of debate exists. However this difference illustrates that the mould of tradition (paradigm) stifles facts and ideas emerging. Very obvious I know, but talk about ubiquitous!

bNice2NoU gave a great citation, http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/legend.html that says some interesting things about the word "paradigm", and illustrates some difficulties about the word (difficulties that involved Thomas Kuhn in multiple definitions from the beginning.) Notions of "hypothesis" "explanation" "schema of explanation and interpretation" and "creed" are connected, and all linked to notion(s) referred to by the word "paradigm" Dictionary definitions of PARADIGM are worth mentioning as well. (Merriam-Webster, Britannica web site)

1 : EXAMPLE, PATTERN; especially : an outstandingly clear or typical example or archetype

3 : a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated

Checking at the level of stark logicalist positions can be done. It should be available, especially, when a new idea faces strong hostility - a hostility that means that, if the idea holds up together at the stark logicalist level, it may hold great promise, exactly because it DOES change ideas.

Stark logicalist checking can be done in specific cases. But in the historical cases I know of, where desirable paradigm shifts have been tragically postponed, such checking has been denied. As a result, the advocates of the new idea have had no academic validity at all, no place to stand in the academy, where they can make their case.

An important, more recent example of this is the case of homocysteine. More than 30 years ago, a postdoc at Harvard Medical School, Kilmer McCully, linked this amino acid with artheriosclerosis, the central cause of most heart disease. At the stark logicalist level, he had a compelling case, but a case that was not checked or acknowledged because his work was dissonnant with the then prevailing view that cholesterol was "everything". The sad story is well told in Michelle Stacey's THE FALL AND RISE OF KILMER MCCULLY NYT, Sunday Magazine, Aug 10, 1997. Now, much later, homocysteine is recognized, and foodstuffs are supplemented with B vitamins to neutralize (at least some of) its ill effects. But the decision happened about 30 years later than it might have. Reasonable estimates, I believe, indicate that this one rejection of a paradigm shift proposition may have wasted as many years of American life as were lost due to the Vietnam War.

McCully could not get his case considered at the stark logicalist level. And so he was ostracised, called crazy, and shunned. Much was lost. If he'd been checked in an academically valid way, McCully would have had a place to stand within the academy, and could have proceeded, thereafter, in "normal channels." As it was, most of McCully's career was destroyed, because he was right in a way that, through no fault of his, happened to conflict with the "situated, socially constructed working knowledge" of working practitioners in research cardiology.

I've got a particular, personal case I'd like to make. It may, in fact, be in the process of being accepted, after a decade of struggle. The history of that struggle, I believe, illustrates how useful it would be to find ways where paradigm shift propositions, once they'd met certain standards, could be competently checked, so that they could gain (or lose) the validity needed for further consideration. My case involves at its core what is, surely, a "stark logicalist position" concerning the inference of differential equations from coupled physical circumstances.

The core point I need validated by mathematicians is this:

If one had, each day, to say the names of the people who died the day before of ventricular fibrillation, it would be more than a dispiriting exercise. It would take more time than you'd have. For reasons like this, I've kept working on this problem. I've felt morally compelled to do so. On this issue, I'm for the right answer.

http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/nterface begins as follows:

"…. Why does the universe appear to follow mathematical laws?"

We may never know WHY, in every sense of that word, or in any deep sense at all.

But we should be able to ask: "What are the arithmetical rules that connect measurable circumstances to abstract math?"

Arithmetical rules that work should be logically and experimentally consistent when we test them.

Here is a fair question, OUTSIDE of abstract math: Do we have a good analogy, or don’t we?

Here's a case where the "good analogy" question matters:

When coupled physical circumstances are represented in finite increment equations, we must make a decision about how we notate them. According to current procedure, never proved, and now over 300 years old we proceed as follows. The terms that stand for crosseffects now include the numerical value of the same spatial increment multiple times, once for every physical effect that interacts together. Infinities and infinitessimals, that have been causing trouble for centuries, come from this arbitrary, but now deeply habituated procedure. The correct procedure, if evidence is a basis for correctness, is not yet accepted. This new procedure represents the single spatial increment ONCE in each single term. This gives rise to crosseffects that represent emergent properties - the effective inductance that matters in neural conduction is such an emergent property.

Put in a way that happens to be more general, the rule, experimentally but not axiomatically derivable, is this:

When we derive a finite increment equation from a coupled finite increment physical model, that equation will include crossterms that represent several physical laws in interaction together over space. We must insist on algebraic simplification of these crossterms at UNIT SCALE.

I appreciate the Guardian's space, and the interest of those of you who have read this.

Gosh rshowalter, we're neighbors. I live down the road in Chimayo New Mexico. Isn't the Guardian wonderful!

Hey, whatever blows your skirt up !

As in take that Paradigm off my shift? Leda!!

It might be possible to fix the core reason for misfiring paradigm conflicts, now or soon, because of the web, and videotape. It would take a bit of social invention, and a small shift in standards of morality and politesse, but perhaps not too much.

Consider a thought experiment, based on an anachronism. Suppose that the web, and current web videotape capabilities, had existed in Semmelweis' time, or, thirty odd years ago, when Kilmer McCully needed a hearing, and could not get it.

If Semmelweis, or McCully had been able to state his case on videotape, with people in objection stating their case, too, and with a mediator, the discussion of the stark, logicalist points Semmelweis or McCully had to make could have happened in a very clear way, and perhaps in a fashion that would have been a model of civility. That videotape, on the web, would have had logical, moral, and practical force. Both experts and outsiders could have looked at it, and could have judged it according to their personal standards. The presence of outsiders, with their "ordinary" and "common" sense of community standards and decency, might have changed outcomes that were, in fact, tragic misfires and miscarriages of justice.

Both Semmelweis and McCully were right at the stark level of logic and evidence. Resistance to their cases was based on a mass of deeply felt, socially constructed "knowledge" in the heads, and embedded in the culture of, a body of experts. Subjective feelings aside, that "constructed knowledge" was logically and evidentially baseless.

The proposals of Semmelweis and McCully were not illogical at all, but disruptive. In their own time, the "experts" were taking a position that, in public, would have appeared indefensible. Videotapes on the web are public, at a level that text cannot be.

Semmelweis's had evidence, circumstantial and statistical, that showed that hand washing and care about cleanliness radically reduced rates of infection from prepleural fever (complications of childbirth.) The same cleanliness was later shown to be important all through hospital practice.

Semmelweis's case was "I have this evidence - the human consequences are important -- doctors should wash their hands ....... No, I don't know exactly why, but no one knows enough about why these deaths are happening, and this care with cleanliness works well, and is now well tested. ,,,,,"

The doctors had nothing but aversion, and appeals to diffuse bodies of ideas, to place against Semmelweis.

But without an audience, or virtual audience, of outsiders, that was enough. In the event, the doctors shunned Semmelweis, shouted him down, and were able to ostracize him and those few who backed him. They didn't have any sensible logic or evidence against him. But they didn't WANT to listen. They didn't WANT to believe that what he said could be true. There was no one to watch the judges,l and doubt them, and notice their behavior.

In written text, the motivation of the medicos who ostracized Semmelweis might have been hidden. On videotape, their positions and motivatgions would have been much more clear, and would have looked outrageous. Semmelweis would have had a chance.

A cousin of mine, who is an epidemiologist, estimates that something like fifty million years of human life were lost because Semmelweis could not make his case. So here is a procedural issue that matters.

The medicos wouldn't necessarily have been converted if they'd been watched. But Semmelweis might have been able to find some support, some place to stand, from others. Given time, the medicos might have seen reason, and perhaps fairly quickly. We'd live in a better world. Of course, the web and web video weren't available in the 19th century. They are available now, and they offer new opportunities.

The analogies in McCully's case are, I believe, striking and one-to-one. McCully had solid experimental results indicating that homocysteine was involved in artheriosclerosis - that cholesterol wasn't the whole story. The working practitioners in research cardiology were committed to cholesterol, and regarded this as a distraction. A distraction to be violently rejected. McCully was marginalized, called crazy, and shunned, though he was completely right, and there was no reasonable argument, ever, put against him. Losses in life this time were probably very large too - perhaps about the size, in human years, of American losses in the Vietnam War.

If McCully had been able to state his case on videotape, with people in objection stating their case, too, and with a mediator, the discussion of the stark, logicalist points McCully had to make could have happened in a very clear way, and perhaps in a fashion that would have been a model of civility. That videotape, on the web, would have had logical, moral, and practical force. I believe that McCully's career, and many lives, could have been saved. He wouldn't have necessarily converted his colleagues, at least not right away. But he would have had SOME credibility, some place to stand.

My case is similar, and though I don't think I'll be stopped now, the combination of the web, videotape, and a small change in social usages might have saved me a decade. I've requested a mediated hearing of my case, on videotape, and so far the idea has been rejected, though other accommodations seem to be occurring. I still think the idea a very good one, and believe that it would be social innovation that might go a long way toward eliminating the occasional, but sometimes very expensive, costs of paradigm conflict misfire.

I'd like the following claim discussed on a videotape that would be placed on the web. I'd like to discuss it with the most distinguished working mathematicians available:

More generally, I believe that, with the new technologies the web offers, especially with web broadcasting, old patterns of tragedy-farce-crime that have characterized paradigm conflict may be much better handled.

Would it take coercion to motivate such hearings? Quite possibly. But the force needed might be quite limited. Clear requests, from journalists, might be force enough to motivate the hearings. If a senior reporter from the Guardian, or The New York Times asks an academic officer for something, he can expect an attentive hearing.

Here's a tragedy that haunts me. Kilmer McCully went all over North America, trying to get help from journalists, so he could get a hearing, on a matter that he was clearly and correctly regarding as a big scale matter of life and death. He was denied. Perhaps, given print paper usages, he had to be, though I'm not sure of that. (The main problem, may have been that journalists couldn't imagine that an entire group of experts could be radically, vociferously wrong.) In any case, videotaped hearings on the web, had they been available, might have gone a long way toward solving McCully's problem.

Could a reporter, on the basis of a journalist's broad powers to question, ask for such a hearing now? With academic usages organized as they are, I think the answer might be yes.

Perhaps in my case, and, I feel certain, in cases that must be expected, such requests might greatly facilitate the usages of scientific and technical culture. The tragedies and crimes of paradigm conflict misfiring in the past need not, I believe, apply in the same horrifically expensive and monotonous way to the future.

With current technology, a few phone calls from reporters, in circumstances that appear to be paradigm conflict impasses, might make a deal of difference.

I very much appreciate the chance to post here.

One noted Showalter said a problem was the thinking that dendrites were 'passive', yet later they were seen to be active (as per S-K model) here are active dendrites: http://www.ph.tn.tudelft.nl/PRInfo/reports/msg00260.html

..... "paper I've posted on the Los Alamos web, that's not been found

wrong .... http://xxx.lanl.gov/html/math-ph/9807015 . My results say that the current values of effective inductance (linkage between di/dt and dv/dt) in neural lines are understated by more than ten orders of magnitude" - Above relates to post 40

and ..."effective inductance (coupling between di/dt and dv/dx) now attributed to heart muscle is understated by a factor around 10^10."

10 orders of magnitude sounds 'big' AS IN a potential for big mistakes to be being made currently in matters that can be life/death situations for 1 person in 4.

Thanks for the references ! I'm following up. There are a lot of neuroscientists who are getting open minded about the S-K stuff. The core challenge that remains is to get a simple fact about modeling checked.

You make an argument that I agree with, that doesn't always work in these affairs. To say that there's a big payoff for getting at the truth, and a big penalty for missing it, would seem a coercive argument. But in past cases of paradigm conflict impasse, that kind of argument has often seemed powerless.

For a decade, I worked with Professor S.J. Kline, of Stanford and the National Academy of Engineering, and we both dropped a lot of what we were doing, because we felt this issue was morally compelling - a big scale matter of life and death. Steve and I worked together for many years - for several years, Steve took half time leave from his professorship to work with me on a commercial project. When we saw data that, to us, could only be explained by crossterms, http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/regandat we both dropped almost everything, and worked on the problem every day, just because we thought the work so important. We were both capable, disciplined engineers. Before Steve died of pancreatic cancer, he wrote this recommedation letter, that described the work, and asked for help. I don't think very many better recommendation letters get written by academics, and I'm very proud of it http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klinerec.

While Steve was spending so much time with me, he was also supervising the thesis of a man who became an astronaut.

We worked on this modling because we found the issue morally compelling - neural models were off, on inductance, by huge factors. Lives were at stake, and much research effort, as well. After we saw David Regan's data (which was ignored by others) we couldn't see it any other way. We were both modelers, used to doing hard modeling problems with differential equations. Steve had written a classic book in the field SIMULATION AND APPROXIMATION THEORY.

We never had reason to doubt our results. But we couldn't get others to look, or to admit they'd looked in public. We were saying that an error, that turned out to be over 300 years old, was embedded in modelling. People simply said "you're crazy" (selectively in Steve's case, more generically in mine.)

That's an argument for umpires, or hearing that involve some "outsiders."

Thanks for the references ! I'm following up. There are a lot of neuroscientists who are getting open minded about the S-K stuff. The core challenge that remains is to get a simple fact about modeling checked.

You make an argument that I agree with, that doesn't always work in these affairs. To say that there's a big payoff for getting at the truth, and a big penalty for missing it, would seem a coercive argument. But in past cases of paradigm conflict impasse, that kind of argument has often seemed powerless.

For a decade, I worked with Professor S.J. Kline, of Stanford and the National Academy of Engineering, and we both dropped a lot of what we were doing, because we felt this issue was morally compelling - a big scale matter of life and death. Steve and I worked together for many years - for several years, Steve took half time leave from his professorship to work with me on a commercial project. When we saw data that, to us, could only be explained by crossterms, http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/regandat we both dropped almost everything, and worked on the problem every day, just because we thought the work so important. We were both capable, disciplined engineers. Before Steve died of pancreatic cancer, he wrote this recommedation letter, that described the work, and asked for help. I don't think very many better recommendation letters get written by academics, and I'm very proud of it http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klinerec.

While Steve was spending so much time with me, he was also supervising the thesis of a man who became an astronaut.

We worked on this modling because we found the issue morally compelling - neural models were off, on inductance, by huge factors. Lives were at stake, and much research effort, as well. After we saw David Regan's data (which was ignored by others) we couldn't see it any other way. We were both modelers, used to doing hard modeling problems with differential equations. Steve had written a classic book in the field SIMULATION AND APPROXIMATION THEORY.

We never had reason to doubt our results. But we couldn't get others to look, or to admit they'd looked in public. We were saying that an error, that turned out to be over 300 years old, was embedded in modelling. People simply said "you're crazy" (selectively in Steve's case, more generically in mine.)

That's an argument for umpires, or hearing that involve some "outsiders."

Sounds as thought there ought to be a cash-rich body or foundation set up via philanthropy, that sets out to 'check maths'(and new theory) ... but isn't that a role the academic entities must undertake. Aren't real Universities geared up to develop and test 'New Knowledge'? Isn't that their role?

I don't think I’m hearing the American Universities are 'poor', rather that there is 'selective' amnesia with regards to checking when the status quo may be required to accommodate new knowledge.

Doesn't this contrast with the current communications age where 'new knowledge' is actively solicited to promulgate IT? The IT establishment actively seek change to stay ahead of the competition in their game.

If this is so, then why wouldn't the maths establishment see potentials for an improved quality of 'product'!

How come maths people who deal in the abstract can't foresee the tangible outcomes to be derived from the implementation of new knowledge?

There are plenty of good, able, well intentioned people in control of foundations. There's a great deal of money in foundations, and there are many foundations, most funded by people hoping to serve the public good. There are also many peer reviewed journals, referreed by people of ability, sound training, and good faith.

In paradigm conflict, a stark logicalist position is in deep conflict with the situated, socially constructed body of ideas and knowledge of a group of working practitioners.

When that happens, it is in the public interest to have the stark logicalist position checked. Suppose, as sometimes happens, that the stark logicalist position happens to be right at the level of logic and evidence. This was true in the Semmelweis case, in McCully's case, in the case of those standing against the frontal lobotomy craze, and the case where S.J. Kline and others stood against the completely statistical model of turbulent fluic mechanics. SUPPOSE, BY SOME MEANS, CREDIBLE CHECKING HAPPENS. Then the paradigm conflict impasse has broken, and the case reverts to the ordinary usages of academic persuasion.

Once a paradigm shifting proposition is CREDIBLY CHECKED, it has an excellent chance to be funded in the usual way, by foundations and government agencies already in place. Once the paradigm shifting proposition is CREDIBLY CHECKED, the work is essentially certain to be published according to the usual academic stanards of propriety in peer reviewed jounals.

Paradigm conflict impasses occur because that credible checking is unavailable.

BNice2NoU makes sensible points.

" How come …. people .. . . .. . can't foresee the tangible outcomes to be derived from the implementation of new knowledge? "

They can't because they can't imagine that the proposed new knowledge can be correct. It is unthinkable to them, they hold the new ideas probability of correctness to be 0. ………..

"Aren't real Universities geared up to develop and test 'New Knowledge'? Isn't that their role?"

Yes it is, and usually new knowledge is developed by people who are "members in good standing" of working groups, with group traditions, according to those socially constructed usages. Universities are adapted (and sometimes very well adapted) to support this productive and necessary work. Paradigm conflict impasses are rare events. Checking WHEN A NEW IDEA IS IN CONFLICT WITH ESTABLISHED USAGES is typically unavailable, if the established working group objects at all strongly. ………….

As BNice2U put it ….. "there is 'selective' amnesia with regards to checking when the status quo may be required to accommodate new knowledge." But that needs qualification. Academic operations are in "the business of producing progress" in their own terms. Most of the time, there are good reasons to ask for new knowledge to fit with the old, if that is possible. Usually it is possible.

The new guys aren't always the "good guys." So far as I can tell, most new ideas turn out to be wrong.

Problem is, that when the stakes are high enough, that should be checked, and not assumed. Paradigm conflict impasses happen because our social arrangements, which are efficient and productive in so many other ways, aren't set up so that the checking happens.

An essential problem is moral. People, even people with independent power, such as foundation people or journalists, won't exert their power to see that something is checked, if there's any significant chance that they might lose status by doing so.

Now, with the internet, videotape, and other social flexibilities, the problem may amount to much less than it has.

The answer to the question "why do paradigm conflict impasses happen" is that credible checking is denied. The solution is to find ways so that new ideas can be checked at the level of logic and evidence, when these ideas happen to conflict with the socially constructed body of ideas held by a professionally established group.

I believe that this should be possible with a miraculous minimum of change to existing arrangements, and that the change would do much good.

I think that, from a distance, the moral and practical arguments for doing this are compelling.

But the argument for this rests on an insight that seems uncommon. The doctors who shunned Semmelweis were not monsters, though in retrospect they look like monsters. They thought they were doing the right thing. They were very wrong, and acted brutally, no matter how sincere their incorrect beliefs may have been. The costs were enormous. The doctors who shunned McCully were not monsters, though if they are judged solely by their relation with McCully, from my distance, they look like monsters. They were able, accomplished research MD's, at a good institution, who must have thought they were doing the right thing. Even so, they were very wrong, and acted brutally, and the costs to society were very great. From the perspective of the past, this may be unpleasant, but it is fairly easy to hold in your head. WHEN ONE THINKS ABOUT THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE, IT IS HARDER. But it is important to see that patterns of behavior essentially similar to those in the Semmelweis case, and the McCully case, can happen in the present, and can happen in the future.

Given that insight, the moral and practical argument for effective checking follows.

On Credo thread I noted the concern that Scientists were insufficiently respected. I was thinking this may be due to the fact they they do 'background' work, important work that serves as a backdrop to industry and commerce .... and possibly on a salary rather than as an entrepreneur. Yet Showalter here (57) is really demanding that they act as Leaders.

Could it be that the failure of the 'best in their field' folk to activate leadership qualities is why Posters within disciplines feel that their professions are seen as Second Class? Leadership: http://www.pfdf.org/leaderbooks/L2L/spring99/bennis.html

Fear of CHANGE limits the flow of ideas http://www.brainconnection.com/topics/?main=fa/circuitry-fear

http://www.welchco.com/sd/08/00101/02/93/11/30/002549.HTM#L161848

bNice2NoU points to a common concern. Sometimes the notion of the "scientific" seems to be the highest status value society has. And yet, the status of scientists sometimes seems insecure and inauthentic.

Warren Bennis' article http://www.pfdf.org/leaderbooks/L2L/spring99/bennis.html is wonderful, and highly recommended. He says important things about leadership. An essential one is that leadership requires integrity, in terms of what is expected of the leader by those he leads, and those he is responsible to. What does society hope for from scientists, and what does it most expect? What do most people mean by "scientific" when they revere that word? I feel that the first definition of "science" that Merriam-Webster gives is the central one.

science ..... the state of knowing : knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding

Science is held to be the source of knowledge that can be trusted.

Trust one of the most central needs of integrated individuals and groups.

Most people in the world, including the readers of elite papers like the Guardian, don't know much or think much about the vaguaries of paradigms, or social constructions. Most scientists, when you talk to them, don't either.

When people revere science, and invest their hopes in it, they are mostly thinking about science as a source of knowledge about the world that they can trust. I think that may be as true of science reporters, and other sophisticates, as it is of "the (wo)man on the street."

When people feel that science and scientists have fallen short, I think they mean, more than anything else, that scientists have somehow not lived up to the implicit commitments to truth that are expected of them.

I'm making an argument that effective checking is needed under the rare but sometimes important circumstances when a "paradigm shift proposition" conflicts with "socially constructed usages" in a science. I feel that, if scientists are to get and deserve high status, in the eyes of the community, and in terms of their own ideals, that checking is a primary obligation, because science is committed to getting right answers. Nobody ever claimed that had to be easy.

I'm arguing that, for real people in real groups, this checking may take some specialized, though probably simple social arrangements - some new "social architecture". My argument relates to matters where status, and practicality, and the morality of honored trust are inextricably linked.

I feel individual scientists, and scientific groups, have a duty to permit and facilitate valid checking, even when that checking requires the subordination of specialized "peer groups" to larger groups. I think that's what "the average reader of the Guardian" would expect.

One of the reasons it doesn't always happen, as bNice2NoU points out, is fear.

rshowalter, that was interesting. As I have tried to explain elsewhere (in rather inarticulate terms since I was furious) there seems to be a mismatch between the world of science I know (a research scientist) and the world of science as perceived by the wider community, represented here by Guardian readers. I agree that the interface between science and society needs to be rationalised, and that some form of ratification of scientists endeavours by the broader community would be desirable. At present I cannot envision how would this work in practice - any suggestions? On a more personal level, how can I as a scientist persuade people that science, as practiced, can be very different to science portrayed in the popular press and many 'popular science' books?

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/dynapage.taf?file=/neuro/journal/v3/n8/index.html

The influence of urgency on decision time pp 827 - 830 B A J Reddi & R H S Carpenter

Interesting title re Paradigm - for subscribers

CJ, I answered part of your question on the Credo web. I'll answer the other parts, all good questions, after some thought and necessary business.

I would like to comment on B Nice 2 you's point about TIME and URGENCY from a historical perspective. I'll add a more personal perspective in a while.

The historical perspective is less controversial. The Semmelweis case, and, much more recently, the McCully case, happened, and were as expensive as they were. In both cases, urgency did not motivate a necessary hearing, under conditions where a new idea, supported with data, went against established socially accepted usages.

I've suggested something more formal, set out from an American perpective. I'm copying a submission #381-383 I made on the SCIENCE IN THE NEWS forum, a science forum on THE NEW YORK TIMES web site.

07:43am Jan 4, 2000 EDT (#381 of 1140)

In "Geniuses, Crackpots and a Grand Unified Theory" JAMES GLANZ makes an important point. People with ideas off of the mainstream, right or wrong, are a nuisance. There's an extraordinary presumption against them. That presumption is statistically justified. Nor are individual scientists, or scientific organizations, or journalistic operations, well set up to handle them.

There's another side of the story, one I set out, with my friend and colleague, the late Professor Stephen J. Kline, of Stanford University and the National Academy of Engineering, a man who the Japanese Society of Mechanical Engineers suggested was the most distinguished theoretical and computational fluid mechanician of the 20th century. We decided that there was an error in the derivation of differential equations from coupled physical models. We couldn't get our work checked to a reasonable closure. He and I wrote this, and posted it in a TIMES forum about six months before Steve's death. I believe it fits today - it makes the case that "deviant" work COULD be valid, and ought not to be rejected out of hand. http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/whytimes2 I spoke at Steve's memorial service at Stanford - people with some interest in the kind of work Steve did, and the difference it made to his field, might enjoy http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klineul Pieces of this eulogy were published by a professional journal thereafter.

Steve and I asked for something difficult in the world as it stands - an institutional ability to respond, in a timely manner, to points that could be reasonably described, right or wrong, by the term "paradigm conflict." I mean by "paradigm conflict" a pattern where people with different ways of thinking systematically misunderstand each other.

Steve and I both understood the "crackpot problem" and both did our best to offer clear argument. Efforts through channels were made, before efforts outside channels were initiated.

Anybody who claims an impasse, at the level of paradigm conflict, about an issue in science, medicine, or engineering ought to meet some careful standards to get a hearing. But the standards ought not to be impossible. And the consequences ought not to be draconian for the people involved.

It helps to focus on the kind of question that is likely to involve a perceptual conflict that leads to an impasse. In retrospect, such impasses always look pretty simple in a logical sense. But there are human difficulties. A central point is this:

"He who troubleth his own house will inherit the wind."........ Proverbs 11 29

A central requirement for an umpiring process is that the umpires be SEPARATE from the "house" of either parties. Competence is needed. Distance, and connection to widely held social standards of good sense, are needed as well.

Our society is not well set up for handling such problems (or, for fielding crackpots) - both aspects of the same job of considering new ideas. The place where such problems are handled best is the United States Patent Office, particularly since the Re-examination procedures have been available for cases with real economic stakes.

One of the things government does, and has to do, is umpiring that takes distance from the interests of the particular stakeholders. Often that umpiring is done, wholly or in part, by "government bureaucrats." At other times, advice comes from people whose status comes, in part, from government association. For example, the national academies ( NAS, NAE, and IOM ) are government institutions that scientists and politicians respect, with reason. Members of the b National Academy of Sciences , or the National Academy of Engineering , or the Institutes of Medicine , are a carefully chosen and widely respected elite among scientists, engineers, and medical people. There are more than five thousand of them, in all. Membership in the academies is by election of members, and is carefully done.

The government needs outside advice, and has institutional interfaces to get it, but government does a lot of essential work itself, as well. Some government institutions are necessarily rule-based bureacracracies. Intellectual standards in these institutions can be very high, especially when there is much institutional distrust, at many levels, that results in careful checking for right answers.

The United States Patent Office does too much work to be infallible, but it is very well organized to consider any and every technical issue that comes before it, has close connections all through the civilian and military parts of the government, and has, in my experience, the most impressive reference system for technical purposes anywhere. When the PTO lacks expertise, it can do a very good job of finding it. Patent examiners are specialists, and they are in the business of evaluating ideas, by clear rules, and killing off most requests. The standards of clear description required at the Patent Office are the clearest I know - meticulously so, in a way that must weary journalists, who are different kind of descriptive business.

When the Patent Office examines a non contested patent, the process involves resources that are limited. Oversights happen.

When a patent is contested (when there are real chips) there is a re-examination procedure that is much more careful, and very much more credible. Stakeholders are heard, and any expertise, from anywhere, can be brought to bear. I admire the reexamination procedure a good deal. The courts have come to respect it, and defer to it, though essentially every step in the re-examination procedure is subject to appeal in the courts. The reexamination procedure is one of the reasons why patents are now far more valuable than they used to be, and patent litigation is now much more predictable than it once was. (The other main reason is the institution of a Court of Patent Appeals.)

I do not know and do not believe that there is any matter in science or math likely to involve a perceptual impasse that the Patent Office couldn't judge pretty well, and considerably better than either of the contestants involved. The PTO does similar things, every day, and money and egos are involved almost every time.

Again, anybody who claims an impasse, at the level of paradigm conflict, about an issue in science, medicine, or engineering ought to meet some careful standards to get a hearing. But the standards ought not to be impossible. And the consequences ought not to be draconian for the people involved.

I'd suggest a process where a modification of the U.S. Patent Office Reexamination Procedure was made available, at the Patent Office's discretion, on the recommendation of two (perhaps three) members of one of the national academies (NAS, NAE, or IOM).

If I were consulted, I'd suggest that the recommendations of the academicians be confidential, as much NAS correspondence is.

On receipt of the recommendations, and a clear request for a hearing according to established PTO procedures, the PTO could determine whether it would examine the case or not. If PTO did not find the request credible, or did not find that it had the competence to examine the issue, examination could and should be denied. I'd suggest that the PTO have the right to deny a hearing, at its sole discretion, without chance for appeal.

Suppose the PTO agreed to hear the case. Re-examination rules already in place would work well, with minor modifications. Stakeholders would be consulted. PTO reexamination is a tough, fair, careful public business.

The result I'd suggest would be a clear written decision, on the merits of the issue, by the PTO. The decision need not be binding on anyone at all. But it would carry weight. Not all the weight in the world, but enough weight that it would go a long way toward resolving the impasse.

Would there be people, including scientists, who might laugh at the decision? Sure. Nothing wrong with that. Even so, the decision would carry weight, either for a conceptual change, or against it.

The kinds of cases involved are likely to be SIMPLE in a logical sense.

In the case of fluid mechanics, the question was whether turbulent fluid flow was a statistical process decoupled from any sensible connection to fine scale Newtonian physics, or whether if was a process with structure, connected to the differential equations that govern other physics, and other fluid flow. This was a question of fact and logic, together. In retrospect, the people on the statistical side (almost everybody) seem to have suffered from a group delusion. The PTO could have resolved the issue cleanly, and in a way that would have saved a decade, and much ugliness.

In the case of McCully, the question was whether McCully's data made sense, or whether he was delusional, in a circumstance that was technically and morally quite clear. . Again, the people who shunned McCully (everybody who mattered for McCully's careeer, and for scientific decision) seem to have suffered from a group delusion. The PTO could have resolved the issue cleanly, and in a way that would have saved decades, and many lives.

I believe that a relatively minor modification of our institutional usages could resolve paradigm conflicts, at low cost, and make our scientific usages much more efficient than they are now, in the places where current usages look worst.

None of the people involved would be need to be "mere government payrolled bureaucratic obscurantists." For the issues that matter in conceptual conflicts, it is entirely reasonable to ask of a full enough grasp of the scientific issues involved. In the cases I know about, those issues have been quite simple.

No human group is perfect for everything. Nor can any set of instititions be perfect for everything. The people who populate institutions, after all, have the limitations of consciousness, so well discussed in this forum. That means they are fallible. It seems to me that a minor change in procedures for dealing with conceptual conflict might be useful insurance, so that very serious mistakes, that we know occurred in the past, might be avoided, or made less expensive, in the future.

There would be another use. If a scientist, to scientific group, or journalist, was faced with a person claiming paradigm conflict, they could say:

"We have an institutional arrangement for that. The procedures are rough, but fair - go through channels."

Anybody who had a good idea (and any academic group which had a good reason to contest the stance of another) would have a good chance of both being heard, and being validated to a limited but significant extent, by such a procedure.

And the crackpots, who really do exist, would be less trouble.

Again, anybody who claims an impasse, at the level of paradigm conflict, about an issue in science, medicine, or engineering ought to meet some careful standards to get a hearing. But the standards ought not to be impossible. And the consequences ought not to be draconian for the people involved.

I'd suggest a process where a modification of the U.S. Patent Office Reexamination Procedure was made available, at the Patent Office's discretion, on the recommendation of two (perhaps three) members of one of the national academies (NAS, NAE, or IOM).

If I were consulted, I'd suggest that the recommendations of the academicians be confidential, as much NAS correspondence is.

On receipt of the recommendations, and a clear request for a hearing according to established PTO procedures, the PTO could determine whether it would examine the case or not. If PTO did not find the request credible, or did not find that it had the competence to examine the issue, examination could and should be denied. I'd suggest that the PTO have the right to deny a hearing, at its sole discretion, without chance for appeal.

Suppose the PTO agreed to hear the case. Re-examination rules already in place would work well, with minor modifications. Stakeholders would be consulted. PTO reexamination is a tough, fair, careful public business.

The result I'd suggest would be a clear written decision, on the merits of the issue, by the PTO. The decision need not be binding on anyone at all. But it would carry weight. Not all the weight in the world, but enough weight that it would go a long way toward resolving the impasse.

Would there be people, including scientists, who might laugh at the decision? Sure. Nothing wrong with that. Even so, the decision would carry weight, either for a conceptual change, or against it.

The kinds of cases involved are likely to be SIMPLE in a logical sense.

In the case of fluid mechanics, the question was whether turbulent fluid flow was a statistical process decoupled from any sensible connection to fine scale Newtonian physics, or whether if was a process with structure, connected to the differential equations that govern other physics, and other fluid flow. This was a question of fact and logic, together. In retrospect, the people on the statistical side (almost everybody) seem to have suffered from a group delusion. The PTO could have resolved the issue cleanly, and in a way that would have saved a decade, and much ugliness.

In the case of McCully, the question was whether McCully's data made sense, or whether he was delusional, in a circumstance that was technically and morally quite clear. . Again, the people who shunned McCully (everybody who mattered for McCully's careeer, and for scientific decision) seem to have suffered from a group delusion. The PTO could have resolved the issue cleanly, and in a way that would have saved decades, and many lives.

I believe that a relatively minor modification of our institutional usages could resolve paradigm conflicts, at low cost, and make our scientific usages much more efficient than they are now, in the places where current usages look worst.

None of the people involved would be need to be "mere government payrolled bureaucratic obscurantists." For the issues that matter in conceptual conflicts, it is entirely reasonable to ask of a full enough grasp of the scientific issues involved. In the cases I know about, those issues have been quite simple.

No human group is perfect for everything. Nor can any set of instititions be perfect for everything. The people who populate institutions, after all, have the limitations of consciousness, so well discussed in this forum. That means they are fallible. It seems to me that a minor change in procedures for dealing with conceptual conflict might be useful insurance, so that very serious mistakes, that we know occurred in the past, might be avoided, or made less expensive, in the future.

There would be another use. If a scientist, to scientific group, or journalist, was faced with a person claiming paradigm conflict, they could say:

"We have an institutional arrangement for that. The procedures are rough, but fair - go through channels."

Anybody who had a good idea (and any academic group which had a good reason to contest the stance of another) would have a good chance of both being heard, and being validated to a limited but significant extent, by such a procedure.

And the crackpots, who really do exist, would be less trouble.

Drop a copy of this into US President Think Tank .... it's been my experience that Politicians rarely think ... until after the thinking has been done and is placed in/on their lap!

A while back i was researching philanthropy (U$ - is awash with the endowed good intentioned seeking their cause celeb), sounds as if there's a need for a

Science Paradigm Foundation

with the independent objective of getting innovative concepts checked, in the sense that such a Foundation would have the dollar momentum of prestige and also record the processes re checking from the social to mechanical expectation.

The pay off for a foundation would, from the above posts, be, an improvement in the 'quality' of product and process that will assist humankind within their multiple-environments.

The verso of not getting knowledge out, is getting knowledge out. The mysteries of the universe can be depleted as knowledge sits in the general norm.

A for example here relates to women and dress.

When 'scientists' put out the information that

'women dress revealing cleavage at the optimum time of their cycle for reproductive issue'

then such knowledge might create a cultural paradigm whereby women either (a) become self conscious - moving toward the muslim head in a paper bag syndrome; or, (b) women dressing outrageously as a matter of principle

There may be other similiar examples where 'knowledge' knocks natures' paradigms out of sink ... who knows !?

Studies on dung beetles may be of interest here.

I can visualise a dung beetle dressing in flashy LURE-x for the ugly bug ball (not termites). Item was 'heard' rather than read .... but i certainly took notice. Can only suggest u browse for it.

On termites .... they are indestructible .... interesting critters .... close weave wire mesh is the latest protective method to keep them at bay. Are you in Termite country ... or UK? Should be heaps on Termites in my part of the world ..... they're an ANTish colony

termites like wood,concrete, and moisture.

don't like dryness, close wire mesh, or mercury poisoning.

--

With fruit flies they have bred a mutation that leads to non-fertile stock.

The fruit fly is well studied.

Perhaps this approach could be considered for termites.

Echidna eat termites

DrCj (62) asked me "what I might suggest" and I suggested a specific institutional arrangement, a particular piece of "social architecture." The institutional arrangement I set out was pretty simple - the PTO would serve, under carefully controlled circumstances, to adjudicate disputes at the level of fact and logic related to science, using a small modification of procedures already in place. I think the change, under a special condition, would be practical, and would serve both the public and scientific interest.

I think such an arrangement, under "special conditions" might work well in Great Britain, also, though people who know your institutions by touch would have a much better feel for that.

But the "special condition" is crucial, and that condition is now lacking. The consensus required to institute such a change would have to exist. Without that consensus, the proposal couldn't be implemented, and wouldn't be workable if it was implemented. That consensus doesn't exist.

If the consensus required to product the institutional change existed, the institutional change might no longer be necessary. Existing institutions might serve very well. Checking under conditions of paradigm conflict impasse seems, after all, a small thing to ask for. The problem is that people don't understand how paradigm conflict impasse happens, either while it is happening, or afterwards. The problem is at the level of understanding.

Paradigm conflict impasses seem surreal, both while they are happening, and after they are long past. There is a standard optical illusion illustration, where a picture is either one thing, or another (facing faces, or a vase, for example). One sees one, or the other, but not both. In circumstances of paradigm conflict impasse, it is very hard to see everyone involved as fully sentient, fully moral, and fully human. Take the McCully case. McCully was marginalized, called crazy, and shunned by people who felt quite comfortable and justified in doing so. McCully was reduced to a status less than fully human - the rejectors were the ones of respectable human status. Now that McCully is known to be right, McCully is the human one, and his rejectors, who were the humans before, now look like monsters.

Something is going on here that we, as a culture, don't understand, don't judge well, and handle badly. New understanding is needed. If the understanding was there, the problem might not occur in the same way, with the same severity, ever again.

I'm making an argument that effective checking is needed under the rare but sometimes important circumstances when a "paradigm shift proposition" conflicts with "socially constructed usages" in a science. Science is committed to getting right answers. Nobody ever claimed that had to be easy. In paradigm shift circumstances, it is very hard.

A central reason, I think, involves the fact that most of what any individual or group knows is a body of associations and constructions that are both more and less than logical. A stark, logicalist "paradigm shift proposition" that looks simple to people not much involved with these constructions may look impossible to the real people involved.

Another reason involves power. People are social, and power relations in groups are fundamental to human function. These power relations are much more complicated in people than in other animals, and are different in kind to this extent. For people, idea systems are essential parts of power relationships. This can make "science" in the sense of "a neutral seeking after truth" difficult. Natalie Angier wrote a profound and entertaining piece in the Sunday NEW YORK TIMES Week In Review section "In the Crowd's Frenzy, Echoes of the Wild Kingdom" (Jul 9, 2000).

It includes these lines "Clearly we are party animals by nature. ...... Highly social species are, as a rule the smartest and most sophisticated species the planet has produced. ........ So why is it that there can be nothing stupider, nothing more primitive and dangerous than a crowd of people? ..... If human sociality has its roots in our primate past - and it surely does - and if the advantages of living in a group predate the evolution of Homo Sapiens, it's worth asking whether the menacing side of a human crowd likewise resembles group behavior among nonhuman species. " Angier sets out fine examples of those resemblances, and connects them to memorable images and captions. But human groups are also different from other animal groups, including groups of other primates. Our power systems depend in important ways on our ideas.

Adolf Berle's POWER says basic things about power in human groups of all kinds, that I think are fundamental. Here are his "Five Natural Laws of Power," taken from his preface:

One: Power invariably fills any vacuum in human organization.

Two: Power is invariably personal.

Three: Power is invariably based on a system of ideas of philosophy. Absent such a system or philosophy, the institutions essential to power cease to be reliable, power ceases to be effective, and the power holder is eventually displaced.

Four: Power is exercised through, and depends on, institutions. By their existence, they limit, come to control, and eventually confer or withdraw power.

Five: Power is invariably confronted with, and acts in the presence of, a field of responsibility. The two constantly interact, in hostility or co-operation, in conflict or through some form of dialog, organized or unorganized, made part of, or perhaps intruding into, the institutions on which power depends.

If these tensions were fully understood, I believe there would be many different ways, most graceful, to make paradigm conflict impasses less likely, and less expensive, than they now are.

In the sciences, the pursuit of certain knowledge may be the fundamental ideal, and the ideal most easily communicated to, and respected by, nonscientists.

But in the sciences, knowledge is property, and connections between ideas, status, and power are close. This is true for both individual scientists and scientific groups.

So while objectivity may be especially important to scientists, the stakes involved can make objectivity especially hard.

Careers are at stake, or are percieved to be at stake, when questions of fact or interpretation are seriously raised, and the consideration is real. A scientist's whole professional life may rest on his acceptability to his peers, and the web of people around them. The stakes, in emotional and real money terms, are often high, and indeed life threatening. That can produce a hesitance to judge issues that could be dangerous, and can also produce some bias in the judging.

How could it not?

Under conditions where a paradigm shift proposition would change a good deal if it were right, that can make checking hard to come by. Ideals of truth may be compelling, and may be felt to be compelling. But other costs and risks can be intense, as well.

That's good reason to try to soften the risks that go with checking in science.

It is also a good reason to ask that certain kinds of checking get done by people who have some possibility of making a disinterested judgement, motivated primarily by a wish to arrive at an unbiased truth.

In addition, scientists are BUSY, and have to limit what they attend to. And the new idea may have the lowest possible credibility, and the lowest possible status, to real human scientists. There are good reasons for this unfortunate circumstance.

In science, people are constrained by the requirement that the new must be consistent with what they already "know." Jame Gleick quotes Richard Feynman in GENIUS.

"The whole question of imagination in science is misunderstood by people in other disciplines. ...... "They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know . ....... "we can't allow ourselves to seriously imagine things which are obviously in contradiction to the known laws of nature. "

Under paradigm conflicts, new ideas, that are right, are also obviously wrong to the working group of scientists who judge them.

"Obviously wrong" , for most people, at most times, means something like "in tension with a current body of socially (and logically) constructed ideas and "working knowledge"

The case of Semmelweis illustrates this. Semmelweis was on solid statistical ground when he said that sanitation, and especially hand washing between examination of different patients, saved much misery and death. But to the doctors of the time, he was obviously wrong - to believe him, they had to doubt large bodies of interconnected logic and belief in their minds. Instead, they looked away from evidence and argument, and attacked Semmelweis. One may ask, thinking of the ideally coercive value of truth in this case, how they could have done so. One may also ask, in human terms, how they could have done otherwise.

Under paradigm conflicts, new ideas, that are right, are also obviously wrong to the working group of scientists who judge them. That's true in all the cases I've studied, and is surely true in my own case, ( whether I turn out to be right or wrong.). Here's a basic argument for having outsiders look at scientific controversies, especially heated or protracted ones. That wouldn't be hard to arrange, in many different ways, and the internet has increased the number of ways available. But according to the culture of science, outsiders are barred from making such judgements. For normal science, that's almost always right. For paradigm conflict, that stance may guarantee pathological results. I believe that it does.

rshowalter, there is one hell of lot of stuff there to go through, and some excellent points. Would you mind if I started with the last?

The last posting is especially pertinent to me at the moment since, as I write, my project is lumbering to a possible paradigm conflict. This slow motion drama involves three large Ivy league groups. We have a new, unexpected result, which conflicts with currently accepted dogma. This result, if looked at objectively stands alone and is entirely consistent with the (extremely careful) control experiments performed within this project. However, as my boss pointed out that will not be enough since we will lock horns with two large and powerful groups - we can be different, but not too different. So now I am in a situation where I will have to back-pedal, and design experiments to fill in the gap between the old and the new bodies of knoweledge. In practice this will involve publishing a first paper to smooth our way. Thus I am having to devise practical strategies to deal with the problems you so succinctly outlined in #84.

Anyway, I'll write some more later - since as you pointed out, scientists are busy folk. Later.

Picking up randomly here:

A crowd - might be cp to chaos in that it has no structure. The structures, controls and hierarchies of the 'new' crowd have to be fixed for the crowed to function in unison. If the crowd gets the wrong 'fixer' .... as in evil genius, then the crowd may be manipulated and empowered to run riot on animal instincts ... ?!

CJ: re your having to 'expand' the experiments ... perhaps think like this ...

Most people can only move from a to b and slowly. The project you are doing has to be funded. People who have funding have to completely understand the how's and why's of the use of the funding involved. Your role is therefore not just that of a scientist finding new information, but, also one of giving to your negotiator for funds the tools to translate your work into a series of stepping stones that no-one falls off whilst crossing the new stream of knowledge.

http://app.4anything.com/nf/ink-i618-f/http://www.c-spanstore.com/c-spanstore/122139.html

http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/Kuhn.html

CJ: bNice2NoU is profoundly right, about funding, and taking things from A to B. I found your last post stimulating. Got me to thinking about administration. You're involved with negotiations about meaning, in a world of particular human relations you know and I don't - but mulling over what you said, I thought about C.P Snow (recommended!) and went back and read his SCIENCE AND GOVERNMENT - a book of Harvard lectures that tells two stories of England's scientific war, both cautionary tales, both much connected to paradigm conflict, in real, power involved human groups. After reading about Sir Henry Tizard, a great administrator in SCIENCE AND GOVERNMENT , I thought some about administrative perceptiveness and competence, and gave thought to Major Sasser , the Nazi heavy in CASABLANCA - perhaps one of the best portrayal of a good administrator in action I can remember from the movies - though Sasser had his faults ! The similarities between Tizard, and Sasser are real. But the differences are, too, and many are at the level of ideas. More on that later.

I think Angier's piece "In the Crowd's Frenzy" is profoundly right about animal basis of much group behavior, including some of the ugliest. The last three paragraphs are especially perceptive and dark. So is one of her captioned illustrations. But the view, dark as it is, is incomplete. With groups of people, and their idea systems, things can be stranger and uglier than anything I know of among nonhuman animals.

Your research negotiation point is telling, and important. If you haven't read Snow's novels, especially THE MASTERS, you might enjoy them. Truth and power relations must coexist in science. You're talking of a major problem in the pursuit of truth as you "lumber toward a paradigm conflict."

One things clear. People in groups have to agree to work, so they have to persuade each other.

bNice2NoU's cites are wonderful. Here's the start of THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS by Thomas. S. Kuhn Outline and Study Guide http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/Kuhn.html

Chapter I - Introduction: A Role for History.

Kuhn begins by formulating some assumptions that lay the foundation for subsequent discussion and by briefly outlining the key contentions of the book.

1.A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs (p. 4).

> 1.These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice" (5).

> 2.The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs exert a "deep hold" on the student's mind.

2.Normal science "is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like" (5)--scientists take great pains to defend that assumption.

3.To this end, "normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments" (5).

4.Research is "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education" (5).

5.A shift in professional commitments to shared assumptions takes place when an anomaly "subverts the existing tradition of scientific practice"

(6). These shifts are what Kuhn describes as scientific revolutions--"the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science" (6).

> 1.New assumptions (paradigms/theories) require the reconstruction of prior assumptions and the reevaluation of prior facts. This is difficult and time consuming. It is also strongly resisted by the established community.

> 2.When a shift takes place, "a scientist's world is qualitatively transformed [and] quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory" (7).

Chapter II - The Route to Normal Science.

In this chapter, Kuhn describes how paradigms are created and what they contribute to scientific (disciplined) inquiry.

> 1.Normal science "means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice" (10).

> 1.These achievements must be

> 1.sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity and

> 2.sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners (and their students) to resolve, i. e., research.

2.These achievements can be called paradigms (10).

3."The road to a firm research consensus is extraordinarily arduous" (15).

2."The successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science" (12).

I've quoted the beginning of the much more extensive STUDY GUIDE here. This outline, though no substitute for reading Kuhn's book, is a fine summary.

I'm suggesting that a paradigm shift proposition be checked, by competent people not immersed in the social constructions of the particular scientific community, or checked in ways where such competent outsiders may look on, not as a substitution for "scientific revolutions" at the level of persuasion, but as a way of avoiding logical misfires that now occur. This is no substitute for the "persuasive revolution" that would be required to change scientific practice. But it would give the new body of ideas and evidence a minimally validated "place to stand" where persuasion might be possible, and extermination of a new idea might be less likely. I'm suggesting that if this happened, tragedy-farce-crimes such as those that occurred in the case of Semmelweis, McCully, and many others, would be much less likely.

Another tragedy-farce-crime, involving science in a classified government discussion, has psychological similarities, and is described in detail by C.P. Snow in Chapters 8, 0 of SCIENCE AND GOVERNMENT . That tragedy, again, would have been prevented if a sensible means of umpiring had been in place. Such umpiring, had it existed, might have shortened the "Hitler war" by a year or more, and saved millions of lives.

In 1942, Britain made the decision to commit all the manufacturing and manpower resources it could to area bombing, directed to hitting the houses of working-class Germans. (Military targets were not targeted, except in propaganda, because they were too hard to find and hit. The decision was in large part the idea of F.A. Lindemann, Churchill's scientific advisor, who circulated a paper that was accepted as truth. The paper claimed that

"given a total concentration on production and use of bombing aircraft - it would be possible, in all the larger towns of German (that is, those with more than 50,000 inhabitants) to destroy 50% of all houses."

Distribution of the paper went to ministers, and a very few scientists, including Tizard and Blackett, the scientist-administrators most responsible for radar.

Snow goes on:

"The paper went to Tizard. He studied the statistics. He came to the conclusion, quite impregnibly, that Lindemann's estimate of the number of houses that could possibly be destroyed was five times too high." ....."Independently, Blackett came to the conclusion, also quite impregnibly, that Lindemann's estimate was six times too high."

The bombing survey after the war showed that Lindemann's estimate was ten times too high. The actual effort in manpower and resources that was expended on bombing German was greater than the value in manpower of the damage caused. The loss of high-quality manpower squandered will never be recoverable. The military effectiveness of Great Britain was far less than it could otherwise been.

Great Britain never would have spent its resources and blood in the way it did, if it had understood the mistake that had been made.

The mistake was made because of a scenario not unlike those of "paradigm conflict". Here is Snow:

" I have used the phrase "closed politics" before. I mean any kind of politics in which there is no appeal to a larger assembly - larger assembly in the sense of a group opinion, or an electorate, or on an even bigger scale what we loosely call "social forces." .......... "In my type specimin (the bombing decision) during the whole of his conflicts with Lindemann, Tizard had no larger body of support to call on. If he had been able to submit the bombing controversy to the Fellows of the Royal Society, or the general population of professional scientists, Lindemann would not have lasted a week."

For reasons of personal politics, Tizard and Blackett were ignored, and they could not (or at least, did not) get to other competent people who could judge the matter. To an extent amazing under the circumstances, they were marginalized, called crazy, and shunned. After reading Kuhn, one might be less surprised.

Here is Snow:

"I do not think that, in secret politics, I have ever seen a minority view so unpopular. I sometimes used to wonder whether my administrative colleagues ......... would have acquiesced in this one, as on the whole they did, if they had had even an elementary knowledge of statistics." ........ "The Air Ministry fell in behind the Lindemann paper. The minority view was not only defeated but squashed. The atmosphere was more hysterical than usual in English official life; it had the faint but just perceptible smell of a witch hunt. ..... Strategic bombing, according to the Lindemann policy, was put into action with every effort the country could make."

Kuhn describes all scientific groups as examples of "closed politics."

The key issue is that when there was credible reason to doubt a "established" decision, checking was denied.

Or ask for checking, as a right in both the moral and the operational sense.

That would take some change in mores, or some "social architechture". But not much.

This 'checking' is important.

Just figuring how they worked out the 1:5 1:6 1:10 figures re German dwellings. May have been from the UK capability approach.

In war time the government would be 'closed', a coalition, non-questioning.

Checking would have a cost. Checking here affects decision making. Decision making is weighting, and weighing against other alternatives. Preference in decision making could be 'doing what you like' regardless of the evidence ... this is an authority decision style, without reference to the democratic foundations.

Out of the above would have come the decision to bomb Dresdon (pottery), the firestorm leading later to 'ban the bomb, Russell, and film 'the war game' officially banned from the bbc. I saw this at CPSnow inspired Keele uni (which then made arts people do science and science people do arts - for 1 year) situ in EngPotteries where PMT was-is the name of the bus company.

Checking: Have to presume that the S-K maths is complex ... otherwise, it would be more readily checked.

Yet you raise the point that there are non-interested parties not wanting to know.

How to make the non-interested interested ... most often comes down to 'balance sheets' and staying in business or moving with the trend up into a new-er business. Here the Sigmoid curve figures ... jump to the next before the old sinks. This is cp to Paradigm shifts.

S-K usage .... could be that US is too inward looking ... and the stimulus of competition doesn't hit - wham!

So, the S-K it about velocity, pulsing and voltages .... as applied to the body and the physical world, offering improved accuracy within process.

At some point this has to emerge re commerical applications > modelling > prototyping > production. Replacing current maths.

So within this must be a high dollar cost to initate usage and move away from current less than satisfactory maths to S-K model.

These things most often come down to costing out the benefits when the NEW is introduced and used.

Isn't this what the WarCabinet failed to do?

MrDag is noting the 'differenced' between digital tv in UK and homeState. The BBC is getting the acholades .... homeState subject to a carve-up between 2-3 media giants who finance local government .... here, the public lost out.

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/

http://www.monmouth.edu/monmouth/academic/dna/sigmod.htm

http://www.monmouth.edu/monmouth/academic/dna/res10.htm

Great references ! I’d like to get back to these references after getting to an issue that I feel is more fundamental just here.

The economic reasons to check S-K are compelling, the strictly technical difficulties in doing so are small, and there is abundant good faith on the part of many people close to the problem. That has been true, by ordinary and high social standards, for a long time. Even so, there has been an impasse. Costs, in my view, have been severe, and remain so. I’d like to relate the impasse to the second story C.P. Snow cites in SCIENCE AND GOVERNMENT .

In Snow’s story of the bombing decision, a bad statistical argument was not checked because of social usages. There were grave and long lasting consequences. This story is interesting both because the consequences were so important and negative, and because the people involved were so able, patriotic, motivated, and bureaucratically able. Nothing venal or “stupid,” by conventional standards, happened here. Yet the consequences were as bad as they were.

No one involved wanted the mistake that happened to happen.

The essential problem was that the need to check work, though it may have been recognized by many or most of the parties, was subordinated to other considerations. I’m trying to make the point that, in cases that matter enough, under carefully enough defined circumstances, the need for valid checking should be morally forcing.

This sort of issue occurs regularly in issues in the sciences, but also elsewhere, in many of the most important and vexing stories of our times. I think problems involving the rise, function, and fall of totalitarian regimes, and the problems of picking up the pieces of societies that have a totalitarian history, are much involved here. I feel that this difficulty is the most important, and intellectually interesting, unresolved moral problem that I have ever seen.

(An interestng book on “picking up the pieces” is THE HAUNTED LAND: Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism by Tina Rosenberg. This is a haunting book, and won the Pulitzer Prize, perhaps the highest literary award in America. The book, even with “Winner of the PULITZER PRIZE” attached, sold very, very poorly. People found the book painful to read, full of problems painful to think about, and without solutions. The history of Russia and other countries since the fall of the Soviet Union has been a wrenching mystery to essentially everyone involved. Richard Cohen’s piece in THE NEW YORK TIMES today http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/082100germany-immigrant.html connects to this. I believe that this sad, complicated, interlocked history, and many other sad and complicated problems, including the problems of paradigm conflict misfire, rest on an unsolved difficulty that can be solved. If people can't face checking of checkable facts and ideas, whole societies can get stumped, and stay stumped for a long time. Other societies can go gruesomely wrong.

Snow’s bombing decision example is a good one to consider, because of the sharpness of the case, and of Snow’s personal force and clarity.)

I can’t resist quoting this from Science and Government In Ch 11:

“We can collect quite a lot of working tips from the Tizard-Lindemann story. For instance, the prime importance, in any crisis of action, of being positive, and being able to explain it. It is not so relevant whether you are right or wrong. That is a second-order effect. But it is cardinal that you should be positive. In the radar struggle Tizard and his committee were positive that theirs was the only hope and Lindemann had only quibbles and fragmentary ideas to set against it. Over bombing, Lindemann was positive that he had the recipe to win the war. Tizard was sure that he was wrong, but had nothing so simple and unified to put in its place. Even at the highest levels of decision, men do not really relish the complexity of brute reality, and will hare after a simple concept whenever one shows its head.”

Let me repeat the part that haunts me most: "the prime importance, in any crisis of action, of being positive, and being able to explain it. It is not so relevant whether you are right or wrong. That is a second-order effect. But it is cardinal that you should be positive."

A crucial practical and moral problem is that people can be subjectively certain, simple, clear, and still wrong. So can groups be. This is a practical difficulty of crucial importance.

The difficulty has moral-operational and intellectual aspects. The problem is primarily an intellectual rather than a moral problem, in the sense that, if the difficulty was understood, the moral and operational solutions would be found directly. There would be many possible solutions, linked to circumstances. I feel that the PTO procedure I’ve suggested would go far to address the problem in scientific paradigm conflict. But if the problem itself were well understood, and accepted, that institutional arrangement, though it might be useful, might also be unnecessary.

Intellectual understanding and morality are linked. Handwashing is an important example. Now, there are many circumstances where the duty to wash one’s hands has moral force, widely supported by almost everyone. That’s true in hospitals, eating places, and all over societies. Duty and reflex are also linked. Few feel oppressed by the need for handwashing. It is taken for granted. The handwashing happens in an informed context. There are plenty of times where hands need not be washed. There are other times when handwashing is obligatory. People know the difference. If it were otherwise, the world would be unimaginably worse, and populations much smaller.

In Semmelweis’ time, the need for handwashing wasn’t understood. It is now. A change in intellectual understanding, much reinforced by experience, has changed the morays of the world.

I feel that, in cases that matter enough, under carefully enough defined circumstances, the need for valid checking should be morally forcing. Practical questions of fact and logic that can be checked, and that matter enough, should be checked.

“Matter enough” should be a question discussed, and subject to negotiation, in terms of consequences (just as the question “when does handwashing matter enough” is discussed today.)

I feel that, in clear cases, checking should be morally forcing. That view seems to be as rare and strange now as the view that handwashing was obligatory was in the 1830’s. I believe that has to change.

I think that paradigm conflict misfire is a particularly clear case of the need for checking. But it seems to me that there are many other cases, almost as clear. I believe that the holocaust is another particularly clear illustration. Hitler went unchecked.

Often, it seems to me, objective truth is one’s only hope for good results. That implies a close coupling between morality and checking. A close enough coupling that the need to check should be morally forcing even when it is difficult (perhaps especially when it is difficult.)

That is the opposite of the social-moral-practical reality today, even for the most elite, morally careful individuals and institutions society can show.

Change that, and I believe the world would improve, both scientifically and in other ways. I feel that the improvement might be great enough to compare to the improvement that came with improved sanitation.

I believe that the S-K case is now a remarkably clear, well documented illustration of the need for this change. The S-K case is technically clear, the history is beyond reasonable question, and nobody involved makes a good candidate for dehumanization.

bNice said this:

>This 'checking' is important.

Yes it is.

She's right that thinking in terms of money helps.

>Checking would have a cost. Checking here affects decision making. Decision making is weighting, and weighing against other alternatives. Preference in decision making could be 'doing what you like' regardless of the evidence ... this is an authority decision style, without reference to the democratic foundations.

As far as paradigm conflict misfires go, the future can be better than the past.

the future can be better than the past

So, indecisive procrastinators who step back or to the side of an oncoming paradigm, rather than check it out, to then step into a new era, may be compared to those within a chaotic situation. Within civil war or major national strike, the pawns live within a churning environment.

The total framework and structure of the war/stike is not understood by the players in these evolving situations.

Knowledge is an evolving situation. The checking and acceptance of new paradigms is the way to move through the churn onto a plateau of renewed intellectual peace. From this plateau of new knowledge the new inputs of process can be established.

If the new paradigm is not recognised within the culture, it may be adoped by an external culture. If checked by a separate socio-political block, and adopted, then the initial culture will loose and fall behind in the strategic power game of knowledge and future visions encompassing change.

nb a for example: Who said 'Transistor' ?!

Time & checking & discussion worked here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/horizon/fermat.shtml

"So, indecisive procrastinators who step back or to the side of an oncoming paradigm, rather than check it out, to then step into a new era, may be compared to those within a chaotic situation."

bNiceFrUtoSee a book on the academy that I've enjoyed LEADERSHIP AND AMBIGUITY: The American College President by Michael D. Cohen and James G. March Harvard Business School Press

There may be a newer edition than my 2d ed, but the summary chapter of that ed is titled Leadership in an Organized Anarchy

The chapter has the following subtitles: The ambiguities of anarchy; Leadership response to anarchy; The elementary tactics of administrative action; The technology of foolishness

Indecisive procrastination may be less common in the academy than it used to be, but precedents do exist. I may add that this book (especially the 1st and last chaps) makes sobering reading, when taken in combination with Kuhn's THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS , which describes the logic and politics of the many scientific groups the university contains.

In the academy, tragedies of priority are distinctly possible.

I sometimes think of life as time blocks, with the individual travelling along a series of pedestrian moving elevators. You are locked in for a period, the moving walkway has sides. Everything is the 'same' within this plateau, but, you know it won't stay the same. Eventually you'll come to the end of the automated travel and hit the regular pathway which demands negotiation for new directions.

A migrant in from Serijavo (Yugoslavia) had been locked into a walled city for a time period and subjected to a crazy war. His father was shot by a child sniper and died ..... slowly ..... gradually ... and with great pain. Every evening at Seven he and his friend listened to the news. The news later proliferated into three sectional newscasts and they listened to three news programs. He told me, "we listened, and listened, and yet still we were NO WISER, we didn't know what was going on, or why! The 'best place in the world' to live had become our nightmare." Still traumatised, travelling in a new time phase, a recovering migrant, he had no conceptual understandings as to why the Yugoslavian chaos arose. Perhaps he was too close to the everyday to be able to distance himself, stepback, and fit the chaos experienced into a framework that included the big domino superpowers jockeying for positions in a new global game. After a civil war, in which the players may not know the 'game' and are confused, the 'settling' down period may be extensive as factions really didn't know the game, and less so the rules.

Back to paradigms: Perhaps within redunadant paradigms the game is over, the 'rules' don't fit new needs, and the big picture is not understood, resulting in energy wasted on factional warfare.

So too with paradigms (perhaps), newKnowledge

Beautiful. And human sympathy and understanding are essential.

An old teacher and friend of mine, who was amazingly adept at talking to people of all sorts, said something basic, that I've come to respect more and more. I haven't often heard it from others. He said:

"If you can't talk to somebody, you don't know something."

He meant that intellectual understanding was essential for working communication and for sympathy. He felt that, usually, breakdowns of communication involved a large intellectual element. I think that's right.

Some degree of sympathy is essential if people are to avoid dehumanizing other people, or themselves.

So understanding can be essential for changing a demoralized and dehumanized situation into a humanly workable and more pleasant one. The last chapter of Tina Rosenberg's THE HAUNTED LANDS starts:

" . . . history does not march. It lurches. Worse, it lurches in circles, hiccupping and banging into walls, unable to control or even be aware of its compass."

Stories of paradigm conflict are much like Tina Rosenberg's passage. People, and groups of people, who understand their lives together, do better than that.

With better understanding, we may have a brand new game.

Reluctance of USA History to widen the paradigm http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/082600history.html

Ditto Australia: http://www.abc.net.au/specials/lingiari/default.htm

seeking truth http://www.transparency.de/

[ http://hoshi.cic.sfu.ca/~guay/Paradigm/Hypertext.html ]

And in todays NYT there's another piece, on what I think is a profoudly related topic.

Confined, in prisons, Literature Breaks Out by Ralph Blumenthal

http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/082600prison-writing.html

More people may live in "prisons of ideas" than live in prisons. Paradigms that don't work may be thought of a "prisons of ideas."

Liberation from "mental or psychic prisons" is mostly thought of as an "emotional" issue - but the workings involved have a very large intellectual content.

Paradigm conflicts, both when they work well, and when they do not, are "negotiations about meaning" where all concerned may be locked in ... till insight (the intellectual kind) permits something emotionally and practically workable to be crafted. (Prison writing is a clear example, and symbol, for a lot of negotiation about meaning.)

If people are stumped at the level of the checkable facts on which right ideas must be based, then there may be neither an intellectual nor an emotional solution to be had. People may stay in chains that knowledge could sever.

Sometimes, guilt can be washed away with intellectual understanding.

Other times, informed anger may be exactly what's called for.

In stories such as the Semmelweis story, understanding can make it much easier to see all concerned as human beings. That makes the story believable. People neither believe nor remember stories that involve human actors acting in ways that seem not only blameworthy, but inhuman.

But with understanding, emotions are informed, not set aside. I believe the more you understand about paradigm conflict impasses, in practical terms, the uglier they are, both in their large-scale consequences, and in terms of what they show about social groups in action. The more these matters are understood, the more reason there is to clean up the reasons why they happen. It may still make sense to look back wit some informed anger.

I feel that blame, if it is blame for the right thing, is indispensible. Dehumanization, which is now the common response to the telling of paradigm conflict impasse stories, is not a useful response. It informs neither the heart nor the head.

Dismissals of these histories as "misunderstandings" that are "nobody's fault" are too simple, and don't fit into our understandings. So we're left with intellectual-emotional scar tissue related to things we should be able to think about, and learn from.

I feel that, when checking of checkable fact and logic matters enough in a reasonably clear bookeeping sense, checking should be morally forcing. That's an intellectual position, but an emotional one as well. The better our hearts are informed about the matters involved here, I believe, the more compelling the notion of an obligation to check becomes. Acceptance of that would take some change in hearts, minds, and institutions.

Tragedy here is that most of you express yourselves in such obscure usages you drive us back to OED too often to enjoy what ever line of reasoning you may have meant.

Is driving us to puzzle out your arcanities a likely way to enlist or enlighten?

I think not.

Hoib - enjoyed your wonderful posting on 'bunnies' - implying that the PR releases for the glossy mags were somewhat different to business reality. Possum likes to checkup words, looking up 'arcane' gives 3 illustrative meanings which i will discuss in relation to paradigm:

(1) ar·cane är-kn) adj.

Known or understood by only a few: arcane economic theories. See Synonyms at mysterious. [Latin arcnus, secret, from arca, chest.]

(2) arcane \Ar*cane"\, a. [L. arcanus.] Hidden; secret. [Obs.] b``The arcane part of divine wisdom.'' --Berkeley.

(3) arcane adj : requiring secret or mysterious knowledge; "the arcane science of dowsing"

The paradigm matter is simply this:

New knowledge that will advance the reservoir of knowledge is denied us, because the status quo think they have a stake in the old knowledge.

The arcane takes precedence over the new.

The board is 'exactly opposite' to your presumption.

The question is 'why isn't the new knowledge - that is to become the standard ... the new plateau ... blocked, when it could easily be checked and allowed forward - with authority'

Showalter, here, a countryman of yours, has new knowledge - and yet, the intelligencia 'establishment' in USA are not prepared to check it. Were they to have done so a decade ago, Showalter believes that the last decade of scientific research in many areas would have been on track and fruitful.

The reason his new knowledge is known and understood by only a few is because the knowledge - although not disproven - and available 'sitting' on the WWW for a decade, has yet to be accepted by the US scientific community.

The link above puts up illustrations of new Knowledge that is initially rejected .... but because it is a new truth ... it eventually becomes the accepted norm.

The interim period is one when a 'quality' of life is denied society at large.

Being an American, Hoib, you know that a dollar price can be fixed on such losses.

Perhaps Showalter will put up a few click links on his next posting.

Paradigm: The word "paradigm" was originally one of those obscure academic terms that has undergone many changes of meaning over the centuries. The classical Greeks used it to refer to an original archetype or ideal. Later it came to refer to a grammatical term. In the early 1960s Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) wrote a ground breaking book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he showed that science does not progress in an orderly fashion from lesser to greater truth, but rather remains fixated on a particular dogma or explanation - a paradigm - which is only overthrown with great difficulty and a new paradigm established. Thus the Copernican system (the sun at the center of the universe) overthrew the Ptolemaic (the earth at the center) one, and Newtonian physics was replaced by Relativity and Quantum Physics. Science thus consists of periods of conservativism ("Normal" Science) punctuated by periods of "Revolutionary" Science.

Paradigm Shift : When anomalies or inconsistencies arise within a given paradigm and present problems that we are unable to solve within a given paradigm, our view of reality must change, as must the way we perceive, think, and value the world. We must take on new assumptions and expectations that will transform our theories, traditions, rules, and standards of practice. We must create a new paradigm in which we are able to solve the unsolvable problems of the old paradigm.

Paradigm Addiction: What occurs when a paradigm and its most ardent supporters are addicted to the paradigm to the point where they lose the realization that they are even in a paradigm at all? Ardent paradigm supporters have equated paradigm survival with their own personal survival, and will manipulate and control a society in order to prevent any social or cultural advancement out of the existing paradigm, ignoring or suppressing public knowledge of anomalies, equating perception of anomalies to "personal abnormality" in order to intimidate populations to remain within the status quo control paradigm. Addiction to a paradigm results in either paradigm death or death of those who maintain the paradigm.

http://www.trufax.org/paradigm/everyday.html

Thanks leda Excellent...now I've got to figure out how you can support "faith" elsewhere?

Like the playboy club?

The paradigms in business have moved from the Army Style downstream management with the boss on the apex and the worker at the base, through horizontal company structure where workers work as teams , and to the complete inverse of the Army style, where the long base line of triangulation has the customer sitting at the TOP, and the CEO servant of customer, company and share holders at the bottom ..... excuse me while i just check servant ceo salary listings - again!

The enabler for the new business structures was IT. Offering: initial improved processing, horizontal communication within the entity, and the potential for higher level management to have knowledge and awareness (with stats) of the day to day performance of an Organization.

Hoib: waiting for the Paradigm re Playboy clubs ..

Dag, the paradigm re the restructuring of management models and strategies in line with advances in IT must be contrasted with the issue re new knowledge.

IT has universal acceptance because the SPEED of communications is said to REDUCE the cost of product to consumer. This is reflected in lower prices as measured in the costPriceIndex (cpi).

The problem for new knowledge is that even though, were it used, it can offer the simmilar advantages as IT, yet, because it is hidden, then the populance at large are denied knowledge of it, it, and the ultimate product uses, advantages, and cost savings - as against current redundant product.

Meme:workshop:final remarks

http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1999/vol3/cambridge_conference.html

Many participants observed that despite the shared belief that an evolutionary approach to culture was necessary, significant barriers to communication remained between those from different disciplines. This perhaps derived from the varying histories these disciplines have with evolutionary approaches. In particular, social anthropology has a long history of such thought, which has generally not proven successful. Indeed, a common refrain among those social anthropologists participating in the meeting was "been there, done that." It was difficult for "believers" in memes to convince these historically mindful and hence reticent social scientists that this time around things might be different. Similarly, it was difficult for the anthropologists to explain exactly what went wrong previously, or specifically how the memetic perpsective was likely to go wrong itself, even if given a clear run at explaining culture.

This incommensurability of ethos led to an undercurrent of dissatisfaction on both sides. One side seemed to feel that having to address the concerns of "non-believers" kept progress back, while the opposite side felt that the believers "just weren't getting it." Nevertheless, most agreed that bringing both sides together decreased the likelihood that proponents would engage in unchecked, hubristic claims about having explained culture (along with other conundrums such as consciousness), or that social anthropologists would continue to ignore the memetic alternative. Nevertheless, while I don't think anyone was persuaded to jump from one camp to the other, both sides did go away with a lot to think about, and increased respect for those who disagree with them.

A general disappointment was the lack of discussion about what might be called "applied memetics." More time certainly needs to be devoted in future to thinking of ways to do memetics. This should include discussion of existing empirical studies that don't go under the banner of memetics but which could be interpreted as falling within the general purview of this incipient discipline, as well as the development of methodologies for conducting specifically memetic studies in the future. This is because the ultimate test -- which would preempt theoretical objections -- is whether memetics can produce novel empirical work or insightful interpretations of previous results. Everyone agreed it has not yet done so, but must do so in the near future, given the extensive theoretical work already accomplished and the high level of current interest in the subject. Otherwise, it is likely that memetics will soon be perceived to be a failure. This might be considered unlikely if only because, as one participant remarked, just being able to assemble such an eminent, multidisciplinary group to discuss the topic underlines how these ideas are coming to have real force in contemporary intellectual discourse.

Great stuff, possumdag !

Paradigm conflict impasses, in the past, have been SIMPLE, and much clearer than some of the language about memes.

A big step is getting the impasse defined.

A format that does that amazingly well, and the only "meme" format I know that really works in a nutsy boltsy way is the patent description. The patent office may be said to be in the business of judging and comparing memes expressed in a surprisingly clear, stark, and commensurable format stripped entirely of "social constructions."

That's why I think the Patent Offices of the world are uniquely qualified to judge issues of logic and evidence with respect to the fit (or nonfit) of conflicting "memes" to evidence. Patent people do that sort of work every day.

For example:

1. When going from patient to patient, does sanitation matter, or not?

2. Does homocysteine relate causally to artheriosclerosis, or not?

3. Do the axioms of pure math have a domain of definition, or not? If they do, and you are outside that domain of definition, can you do experiments (symbolic and model-physical system matching) or not?

When these questions are nested in a mass of cultural-social-emotional construction, they may be invisible, and resolution of them may be humanly impossible. At the stark level the Patent Office is built for, these same questions are clear, and easy to answer.

Interesting people have worked @Patent, trying to conjure up here a picture of MagThatcher arriving daily at patentOff and thereby developing clear vision in relation to a new BLUE PRINT for the cultural-social-emotional-reconstruction of the UK in the Eighties! Can social policy be laid down as a 2dimensional pattent?

Social policy could be EXPRESSED in the format of a patent, with words, pictures, and quantitative issues, including complexities, well expressable, in stark essentials, within that medium, that format. Scientific ideas can also be EXPRESSED in that format, and in my view, would often be much clarified if they were expressed according to the Patent Office's stark, time tested, much evolved disciplines.

Especially if a poet fully astride both cultures was also involved, in interfacing from the starkness, to the warm, messy, more humanly complicated and "socially constructed and muddled" world.

Perhaps MT kept red roses in her handbag!

ummm

The roses represent a very human side of Thatcher; or, do the red petals symbolise the blood spilled by the miners, in the Faulklands, additional to the civil war of change engendered in the polarised UK of the Eigties?

Thatcher herself a rose - between two thorns, the East, West, and of course Europe!

Don't know why ? Easy route is to BLAME the parents: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_901000/901760.stm

Perhaps the roses are best thought of in both senses. Thatcher's example has offered a conceptual shift, a memetic shift, and in a way a paradigm shift, in our ideas of the capacities, and roles, of first rate human animals who happen to be female.

(This is independent of how you feel about her politics, which happens to be distinctly to the right of my own.)

But MT's a notable role model, an example of what a woman can be and do, and still be feminine. Her role as a model of just this is much respected in the United States. People, including especially women, go long ways to have a chance to listen to her, and see her for real. (A niece of mine graduated from William and Mary College, in Va, not long ago, and got to shake M.T.'s hand -- she lit up talking about that royal touch - MT had given her an example, a new way of thinking of feminine function in the world. My neices mother, a college president, was proud to have touched MT's hand, too, for similar reasons.) In that college, as elsewhere, MT will be (reduced to or elevated to) a "meme," and exemplar of what a powerful woman can be.

There IS one exemplary lesson that MT may have clarified for herself at the Patent Office. Patents are stark - EVERYTHING is stripped away in the format but logical and evidential essentials. The patent usages are built to ideals of stark clarity and unsentimental, sharp comparison. Logically, sex is far away. There's nothing masculine or feminine about the format at all.

That means the stark, clear virtues that patents show can be shown by a woman, without compromising or even touching on her femininity at all. Margaret Thatcher has shown that by example, and that, for many women, has been a "paradigm shift."

'EVERYTHING is stripped away in the format but logical and evidential essentials.' .... sounds persuasive ..... yet MT stripped the guts out of the Mining Towns - needlessly, and will never be forgiven - hence her romance with the U$A.

No contradiction between #132 and #133, though there is, of course, a tension.

So Mr Showalter, are you related to Elaine Showalter by any chance?

Leda .... i've thought of a good TERMITE ref ... CSIRO oz .... i'll look for it ... just up the road :)

http://www.cat.csiro.au/automation/

http://www.cmst.csiro.au/

Queensland Technology Court Pullenvale Qld 4069 PO Box 883 Kenmore Qld 4069 Australia

Tel: 61 7 3327 4444 Fax: 61 7 3327 4681 Fax them re Termites

Leda, Elaine Showalter is one of those submissive women who take her husband's name. So the relation is only by marriage. And the sad fact is, though I can trace the blood relation to her husband, we've never met. I spent some time in Princeton once, but did not look her up.

All FamilyNames have travelled down the patriarchal line.

Women not using their husbandName use fatherName.

Names most often related to occupation.

Evenso, some are novel as per 'The Dags'

REF: 'one of those submissive women who take her husband's name' husband's name'

Thx Robert, and have you read any of her work?

Yes, she's an EXCELLENT feminist postmodernist.

And she and her work show, in form and content, some of the beauties and tensions of that.

Gotta run. Maybe I can say a few things later about Elaine Showalter, though. They fit the paradigm thread pretty well.

It'll be a while.

Have you read any of her stuff?

Sexual Anarchy ... Brilliant!

Denis Thatcher was reading The Times and became very excited when he saw that some of his shares had made a huge gain on the stock market. He rushed into the bathroom where his wife was having a bath and shouted, 'My God, look at these share prices.'

'How many times must i tell you Denis,' she smiled at him, 'that when nobody else is present you may call me Margaret.'

Des MacHALE

Where in this small-talking world can i find a longitude with no platitude?

ChristopherFry, The Lady's not for buring.

The Board of Longitude would not welcome a mechanical answer to what they saw as an astonomical question. [Dava Sobel]

With your "blasts" and your "tearing down" you over-estimate the power of the humorist: Macmillan and Thatcher were treated far more harshly by satire than Major, yet they sailed blithely on acquiring all the necessary barnacles of gravitas.

And the satirist can only play with what is already there: if one attempted to portray Blair as pompous and belligerent or Hague as snobbish and lily-livered it wouldn't work. http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/highlights/irony/index.html

These days, even the most senior politicians spend hours polishing their god-awful puns-- "the lady's not for turning," and so on--and more often than not the Blair/Hague exchanges in the Commons are judged solely on which one of them made the better jokes. When I was a parliamentary sketchwriter, my colleagues would say "good day for you Craig, ho, ho!" after this or that MP had cracked a joke or two. But of course they were completely wrong: humour succeeds best against a backdrop of high seriousness.

In other words, although I still maintain that satire, irony, parody, what-you-will, are the sign of a healthy society (not a lot of jokes under Hitler, yet quite a few, even at the height of war, under Churchill), I think we can agree that there is a danger that, if the wind changes, this country may be left with a permanent smirk on its face. The serious and the comic certainly need each other, and should perhaps be encouraged to canoodle, but for their own good they should never tie the knot.

Longitude: Harrison .>>>

'Eventually' he got the prize fo literature.

Longitude: Harrison .>>>

'Eventually' he got the cash prize.

The paradigm of Harrison follows the pattern of the need for checking and resitance to admitting that the Guy had developed an instrument for sailors to use for longditude - and find their way around the seven seas.

Checking, coming from the outside, or being shown to outsiders, is TERRIFYING to people and groups who don't really understand their situation, really know it, and have covered that up with an elaborate web of compromised statements or ideas.

So checking is a fear provoking challenge to all people, and all groups, some of the time.

THERE IS LIKELY TO BE THE MOST FEAR, AND THE MOST RESISTANCE, WHEN THAT CHECKING IS NEEDED MOST.

http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/hilbert/toc.html http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/hilbert/

Truth: http://www.wgquirk.com/

Background Information: The Constructivist Philosophy of The 1995 Massachusetts Mathematics Curriculum Framework Versus The Traditional Philosophy of Math Education http://www.wgquirk.com/Massmath.htm

Is whistleblowing in science really necessary?

Lecture Theatre 342, Mechanical Engineering Building (17)

Whistleblowers, politicians, journalists, lawyers, academics, executives and trade unionists discuss the pressures which lead to whistleblowing in science and how the scientific community can minimise the need for it.

13:00 Lunchtime debate Professor StevenRose Open University

13:00 Lunchtime Debate IanGibson MP

13:00 Lunchtime debate Dr AndrewMillar British Biotech

14:00 Impact of commercialisation on public science Professor AndrewWebster University of York What has been the impact of the commercialisation of public science on the integrity of science, on the flow of scientific information, and on the maintenance of public confidence in science?

14:30 Maintaining integrity in the scientific community Mr NickWinterton Medical Research Council The need for whistleblowing can be prevented by instilling integrity through the scientific socialisation process and providing a climate where constructive dissent within organisations can flourish.

15:00 The role of whistleblowing Mr GuyDehn Public Concern at Work A practising barrister outlines the pressures which lead employees and others to whistleblow and describes how to create an organisational environment in which it is safe and acceptable to raise concerns.

15:30 General Discussion

16:15 Independence, integrity and inclusion – The Way Forward - a Debate Dr JeromeRavetz How can we move towards a charter aimed at preserving independence for basic science; integrity for science in the corporate sector; and inclusion in the pursuit of public and policy related science?

Chair: Dr Ian Gibson MP

Organised by Science Alliance

instilling integrity through the scientific socialisation process and providing a climate where constructive dissent within organisations can flourish.

Independence, integrity and inclusion – The Way Forward

Did anyone make the BA Festival of Science?

Or has anyone seen a write-up on the above post?

Minsky:re Humour/Jokes : "In civilized communities, guardians display warnings to tell drivers about sharp turns, skaters about thin ice. Similarly, our philosophers and mathematicians display paradigms -- like the Barber, the Tortoise, and the Liar -- to tell us where to stop -- and laugh. I suggest that when such paradigms are incorporated into the mind, they form intellectual counterparts to Freud's emotional censors. This would help explain why purely logical nonsense so often has the same humorous quality as do jokes about injury and discomfort -- the problem that bothered Freud. The cake-joke reminds us, somewhat obscurely, to avoid a certain kind of logical absurdity -- lest we do ourselves some vaguely understood cognitive harm. Hence our thesis: since we have no systematic way to avoid all the inconsistencies of commonsense logic, each person must find his own way by building a private collection of "cognitive censors" to suppress the kinds of mistakes he has discovered in the past." http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt

LEDA : how'd you go with the Turmites?

The Bug-Busting experts called in to wipe out Britain's only colony of termites at Saunton have been back to check on progress. And the experts, part of a £190,000, 10-year Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions initiative, reported that the eradication programme was progressing "most satisfactorily". Scientists laid a chemical bait containing Hexaflumoron at the two affected houses last year in a bid to stop the termites reproducing. The poison had to be granted a special licence to be used in Britain but experts believe they have used enough to wipe out the sensitive strain of the insect. The latest visits by the team, led by Dr Robert Verkerk and Dr Tony Bravery, have revealed no termite activity within the treatment zone. Their official report states: "The fact that there was no activity anywhere in any of the monitoring stations containing palatable, untreated wood is extremely encouraging and indicates that the termite activity has been radically suppressed." During the team's April visits, no evidence of termite activity was found "except for a few individuals" in one of the 695 monitored areas. The report added there had been little evidence of feeding and the "unhealthy appearance" of the termites suggested they had taken some of the chemical bait. In March, no termite activity had been found within the treatment zone, scientists said, but when some decayed timber was removed, a "very small, discrete collection of termites was found". The report added: "This small colony appeared to be sustained by the moist and decayed timber without any ground contact." During visits in February, some "minor termite activity" was detected in two of the monitoring stations which were close together. But the report said: "This represented substantially less activity than detected in February 1999." A "marked decline" in termite activity had been recorded between June and September last year. A DETR spokesman said between June and October the team will check for evidence of termite activity, install fresh treated baits and renew untreated baits.

The whole history can be culled from the North Devon Journal Herald archives. Thanks for your link Possumdag, it took me to a miningco??

I understand lobotomies--a paradigm shift--are still being done some places. Does anyone know where, and how many are done in such places?

Termites are major miners! Most active in the warmer weather.

If you book in on the GoldCoastOz a DrJulian(nickname) someone did think of them as a lastResort good idea. I trust he's been thrown off pulic radio. Does labotomy appear on the feeList ... that's the fleece?

Paradigm shift : Canada Government http://www.psc-cfp.gc.ca/prcb/rd/hrsystem/levlegie.htm

Beautiful stuff Possum! And the new, hard, practical ideals will take careful checking and honest bookkeeping.

Gordon Bennett!

Serbia : a new paradigm

Serbia: a new paradigm ... or is it. The move by the right was to restore the old Serbian Empire, four wars - suffering and deaths later - the tack is to opt for democracy ( a better economic outcome that will enable aid to restore the country). The Serbian paradigm is to opt for what is seen as a best case senario, under changing circumstance.

Yes, Possum - and if they can carefully enough understand their circumstances (INCLUDING THEIR PAST) then it can work!

But will they want to look at their 'immediate' past?

They better. If they can't, or don't, there will be too many pitfalls for a workable interface with the rest of the world.

Lies get more and more complicated, at an explosively increasing rate, as circumstances get complicated. The Serbian situation is far too complicated to be workably redeemed by anything but rather careful truth.

All around the world, there are problems like this, where, though the truth may be "too weak , it is, nonetheless, the only possible hope for workable accomodations involving the complex, ongoing cooperation that this world really involves.

Paragdim shifts are intresting in that they are not only an argument of how science works, the accepting of a modle or set of models, by a scientific community, but I think they can also give some insite into the direction that science moves in at any one time, wether science is racist, sexist or any other ist. If scientific ideas are accepted and rejected by communities, then it follows that the values and any bias that that community holds will also be influential in deciding if a shift between paragdims occurs. It could be argued that these are the only factors that decide if a paragdim is accepted or not, because one paragdim is incomensurable, or incomparable if you like, with another. This means "good" science is not replacing "bad" science, rather one story line is being replaced by another story line, not better just diffrent. Where things get interesting for me is when ideas seem to be rejected because they are being proposed by the powerless and replacing the stories of the powerful. For example the early history of jumping gense, or transposons, as they are known in the trade, shows how gender bias steers the direction of science. Barbra McKlintock was a woman who loved maize, and spent many years studying how smoooth the corns were and the colour of them. From her observation she developed a model of jumping genes, able to move in and out of a maize genome, turning diffrent genes on and off, an example of environment changing the structure of DNE. This, may I add, was put forward long befor the technology for seeing genes was around. Because all powerful Watson, as in Watson and Crick, doulble helix fame, had set the Central Dogma, DNE to RNA to Protien, and thats is the way it shall always be, then no one would believe a woman, working alone (a bit neurotic hu?), could come up with this idea that the environment, the moving of transposons in and out of cells could be true. Only with the advent of new technology, and the addition of the vioces of men, was Barbara McKlintock's work eventually accepted, altering if not changing the paradgim of the central dogma. Our science, because of paradigms will always be molded by out culture and the problems found within it will always be echoed in the paradigms we choose.

That's a good reason for umpires.

The ideas held by "the culture" (in science, a particular specialist subculture) can be wrong, when they are checked. But if checking by outsiders with respect to the subculture is taboo, then the checking can't occur.

If "civility" means "deference to established intellectual property rights, and territorial divisions" then "civility" is the death knell of certain essential kinds of progress.

When it is important enough, there need to be mechanisms to get questions of fact and logic in science CHECKED. When the stakes are high enough, that checking needs to be morally forcing.

The idea that checking should be morally forcing seems new, and is a distinctly minority position.

But for want of that ethical stance, some really terrible choices have been made in the past, and will be made in the future. This thread has largely been about that.

electrinos : http://www.newscientist.com/features/features.jsp?id=ns226015 :

A lone researcher says he can cut an electron in two. If he's right, quantum physics is dead.

Interesting post dag, demos the difficulty of working with ideas and concepts on the edge of knowledge. Is a wave tangible?

Applying the thread header to the MiddleEast situation:

Moving knowledge along can be exhausting - the old knowledege is reluctant to make way for the new .... how many truths have to wait for the old guard's acceptance. Kick butt or let time assert itself?

In the Paradigm:

'The old knowledge' may relate to the differing cultural styles of the Israelis and Palestinians.

'The new knowledge' has to be the improved cultural mindsets that have to be adopted by all parties.

That a new truth has to be explored has to be accepted by 'the old guard' .... the new truth has to be a move towards a peaceful integrated Israel and Palestine that offer stability with a thriving economy giving a means of survival and growth.

The 'kicking of butt' has to be the infuence and attitudes of countries regionally, who want to see; improved integration, justice for Palestinians, and a settled peaceful zone.

The old Knowledge was he ebbing tide dragging Palestinians out to sea

The new knowledge is the incoming tide, ridden by the international community

The new paradigm of truth is a boundary of rope that encompasses both Palestine and Israel ... how long before it becomes accepted ?

In some ways, the notion of Paradigm Shift in this thread ought to be politically important. It seems as if many or the conceptual and emotional impasses in the Middle East involve the same kinds of mutual incomprehension and hatred that occur in scientific paradigm conflicts.

And again, there is a difficulty establishing what the facts are, even when the facts, from an objective distance, seem clearly demonstrable.

The argument has been made in this thread that IN scientific paradigm conflicts, there are times with UMPIRES are essential.

When analogous conceptual impasses occur in politics and group identity, UMPIRES may be essential for exactly analogous reasons.

Can we really have an umpire who is truely outside of any confilict. Also, as one paradgim can not be compaired to another, on what should the umpire make their decision on, one can not say that apples are better than highlighter pens, they are not doing the same thing. Have I missed an idea here? I guess I'm just asking who the umpire should be, because you can always argue that they are supporting one paradigm or the other, even if they are not, they can't help it, they would have to be part of a culture or society.

Umpires can't and shouldn't deal with "judgement calls", or with emotions, under circumstances of impasse. People have the emotions that they have. What umpires CAN do, and in situations of impasse, sometimes MUST do is check disputed FACTS that are of logical importance in the impasse.

For the purpose of checking FACTS - that is, things that are actually checkable by a matching process, MANY people or groups can serve as umpires. Generally, it is the will to check, and the will to accept checking, that are lacking. The mechanics of checking, and the complexity of the things to be checked, are comparatively simple.

Definitions, and differences in definitions, can also be facts -- it can be a fact that one group is using a word in one way, and another in another way, so that "agreements" aren't really agreements, or so that "logically compelling" arguments are really degenerate.

In this thread, circumstances of impasse where issues of FACT CHECKING have been decisive are reviewed. So far, these have been tragedies that have occurred because checking has been denied. In the cases in history I know of, the serious impasses have involved clear, checkable matters of fact, that should have been resolvable at the time - at the level of facts.

In every case, after facts were clear, much conceptual and emotional adjustment would have been necessary, and that would have taken more time, and some tact as well.

But the decisive problem is that people have not felt, and not been MORALLY FORCED to check decisive facts.

Very many people OUTSIDE of the particularly interested parties can determine these facts, if arrangements are set up to permit this. I'd like to refer you back to the Semmelweis story, near the beginning of the thread, where the essentials of this are discussed, in reference to an example that ought to be studied by very many people who want to take care about what human limitations actually are.

When two groups, after a long time, can't agree on basic facts, an umpire is needed. If that notion became widespread, and clear checking became a morally forcing imperative, the world would be a safer, more interesting, more efficient place.

Many times, I believe, discussion on the internet, in places such as this, may serve an umpiring function.

What if disputes are based on things that are beyond facts? For example faith, what if someone is saying this is my land because my faith tells me that is so? They may well only accept one umpire, that of their faith. What I am saying is the umpire will only work if all of us are willing to play the game, and I am sorry to say that too many people will take their bat and ball home when they are not getting what they want. The umpire does not decide their position, the players do!

Agreed, rshowalter.

The merits of intellectual relativism are overrated. Generally, there is "right", and there is "wrong". And, as you say, given the will, it is usually possible to decide which is which.

But does that will exist.....? Yet.....? Or are we moving towards it, as yet another spin off from the end of the Cold War....?

Mind sets relevant to one sphere have a habit of spilling over into others.

Does that will exist? .... Maybe it doesn't yet exist to a sufficient degree.

But when impasses matter, and some are life and death, determination of crucial facts matters to that degree of mattering.

And to that degree, which can be a large degree, the determination of crucial facts needs to be morally forcing.

In business there is a move to 'Quality' regarding standards. When information and knowledge of the highest, latest, best, quality are used in a process or procedure the outcome is most valid. So too for Science which may be higher up the decision chain of flow-on effects!

religion, responsible for holding back the truth. I think so but hey, religion and politics, well nuff said..

A day in politics .... has a different end to the beginning ... showing acceptance of 'change'.

There will be a LOT of agonizing reappraisal, whatever happens, after Nov 7 in the USA. How could it (whatever) happen? Lots of people will be CLEAR after the fact.

Texas Baptists To Hold Back Funds

Updated 8:28 PM ET October 30, 2000

By RICHARD N. OSTLING, AP Religion Writer

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (AP) - Texas' 2.7 million Baptists dealt a severe blow to the Southern Baptist Convention on Monday, withdrawing $5 million in funding on the grounds that the denomination is becoming too conservative.

After a brief, civil debate, the 6,000 representatives of the Texas Baptists approved the move as a sizable majority held up voting cards.

The vote is considered a watershed by both sides in the doctrinal conflict that has long roiled the nation's largest Protestant denomination, which has 15.8 million members.

Texas accounts for 17 percent of the members and 13 percent of the money that supports Southern Baptist Convention programs.

Texas Baptists spokesman, Kenneth Camp, said the group was at a crossroads and called the meeting "the decisive turning point for the next century."

In recent years, the Southern Baptists have barred female pastors, declared that wives should "submit graciously" to their husbands, boycotted Disney and issued resolutions condemning homosexuality.

Earlier this month, former President Carter severed ties to the Southern Baptist Convention because of its "increasingly rigid" creed.

Fossilation has to be halted!

Baptists "used" to have the most liberal ideal around - that a person had the right to interpret the Bible as seemed right to her or him, after careful attention. Lots of Baptists, outside the SBC, still believe this.

Wilesmith's conclusions--that scrapie and rendering were to blame-- and the assumption that scrapie was "safe" were endorsed in 1989 by the advisory committee set up to examine BSE, chaired by zoologist Richard Southwood of the University of Oxford. This now seems surprising, because scientists had known for 10 years that once a spongiform encephalopathy, such as scrapie, jumped the species barrier it could become more pathogenic to other animals.

"That was known among researchers at the time," says Moira Bruce of the Neuropathogenesis Unit in Edinburgh. Indeed, in a confidential memo given to the inquiry, Raymond Bradley, head of pathology at the Central Veterinary Laboratory, wrote in 1986 that while scrapie in sheep didn't infect humans, scrapie in cattle "might have posed a different risk".

But the Southwood working party's conclusion that BSE was unlikely to have any implications for human health was repeated by government ministers whenever they were asked about the safety of beef. The working party's warning that "if the assessment was incorrect, the implications would be extremely serious" was quietly buried, says the Phillips report. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns22633

&

Roy Anderson, then of Oxford University, told the inquiry that in 1991 a mathematical analysis could have shown infections caused by SBO were continuing. MAFF refused to give Anderson data to do the calculation.

[ Wow!! Statistical checking not permitted!]

&

Many of these gaps, delays and errors in the research programme could have been avoided, says Phillips, if a research "supremo" had been appointed. But "there was a reluctance on the part of the scientific community to be overseen in this way".

[ Demonstrated the importance of Centralised Quality Checking - to override petty interdisciplinary territories begging the question - what happened to ethics, does ethical accounting have a role, and how do you measure one terrible death replicated up to an estimated 100,000 times --- and do those listed in the report have any understanding of why they oughtn't to have played 'God' in their power zones? ]

[ Big Brother Government didn't let the public in on RISK FACTORS. Therefore people were not able to make informed decisions regarding their intake of meat/ products. ]

BSE a particularly peculiar British disaster - but is it? http://www.independent.co.uk/argument/Leading_articles/2000-10/leader_a291000.shtml

Ethics, morality, the UK and BSE.

In 1988 the UK was aware that BSE was spread via the Meat and Bone Meal (MBM) that included the 'mechanical' scrapings from infected beasts at slaughter houses.

Determining it was too dangerous to feed MBM back to home cattle by march 1988, it set out to export the MBM.

MBM was increasingly sold into:

Czech Republic, Nigeria, Thailand, South Lebanon, and Sri Lanka.

In 1996 a worldwide ban on the sales of MBM came into effect.

Compare this (MBM) with countries that legislate against Tobacco at home yet export into the third world. Example: USA's pushing heavy tar addictive tobacco onto Chinese peasants against the expressed wishes of the Chinese Government -- evenso blackmailed re wishing to trade with the US.

Groups of people, who usually are responsible to each other, according to some rules, can be astonishingly callous toward "outsiders" - people outside of their group. In paradigm conflict, a "group" is a group of practioners, and they mobilize to exclude any ideas from outsiders from serious consideration. In politics, outside groups may be treated with murderous irresponsibility. In conflict situations involving military conflict, outsiders are "enemies" to be feared and killed.

Standard human group behavior, which usually works well, and usually keeps the world sized at a level real people can tolerate, nonetheless produces systematic misfires - some horrific. It is a legal, moral, and intellectual challenge to find ways so that the interface between groups can be more truthful, responsible, and constructive, so that less damage is done, more complex cooperation is possible, and more hopeful chances, that do disrupt group conceptual patterns, can be accomodated.

In all these areas, we're going against basic human patterns that may be millions of years old, and mostly adaptive, and must accomodate more complicated conditions in ways that are comfortable and workable.

Thread seems to be moving towards ETHICS & Business.

The waste product from the UK slaughter house processed through as MBM and was sold back into the UK. Here the UK farmer, using the above analogy was an outsider - to company profit. (Here i'd like to know the name of the animal feed company/companies, and examine ownership).

When UK market closed the company looked to export markets - not functioning first world economies, rather those without an ability to carry out CHECKING.

And by excluding "outsiders" from its operational definition of "human" -- that company committed statistical murder - probably on a quite large scale.

The dead of The Great War, and subsequent wars, are brought to mind on rememberance day 11/11 via an acknowledged silence at 11 a. m..

The Poets had measure of the human consquences, the futility and hopless madness of the 14-19 trench war that obliterated a generation of men whilst condemming their women to demographic spinsterhood.

Analysts looking back on military strategy see a failure to take account of technical innovation.

Change demanded a new paradigm.

The pace of change, forever acelerating, requires and necessitates novel solutions.

Staying ahead requires vision and foresight.

This in turn demands an understanding of past and present.

Knowing where we've been, who we are, and, where we want to go.

I think a great book might be written, if truly poetic, and gifted literary people could combine with military historians, and political historians, to give a HUMANLY ACCESSIBLE sense of "where it all went wrong." Bertrand Russell felt that many of the most hopeful things in Western society were snuffed out by WWI, with WWII a gruesome, downward spiraling reprise.

To get people to understand this, not only in some thin "intellectual" sense, but imaginatively, and viscerally, at the level where sympathy and grieving can happen, would be a great contribution to humanity.

Because, if people could imagine the long running, gruesome, desperate instanity of that War, as it was, then they might have both the insight and the courage to make wars of all kinds much less likely, and do away with nuclear wars - something technically easy to do, that morally and socially eludes us. IMHO, xpat and I would have fun, and pull our weight, as parts of the team needed to do that.

http://www.lambent.com/art1.htm re patterning

Memorandum from Dr Karin Von Hippel, Centre for Defence Studies, King's College, London

THE COMPLEX EMERGENCIES UNIT

The Complex Emergencies Unit, established in 1997 at the Centre for Defence Studies, is responsible for a three-stage project that integrates operational lessons learned from recent responses to complex emergencies into a broader analysis. The aim is to develop a more co-ordinated and composite response that addresses both causes and symptoms. At the end of the first phase of our research, we have identified seven component issues that need to be addressed before a new and more effective paradigm for international response can be developed. These are:

(1) Civil-military relations in peace support operations;

(2) The privatisation of security and the influence of non-state actors, particularly war-lords;

(3) The child-soldier phenomenon and the proliferation of light weapons;

(4) State collapse, political reconstruction and the empowerment of civil society;

(5) Refugee flows and hostage populations;

(6) Security for aid workers, relief supplies and humanitarian space;

(7) The role of the private sector.

(...more... )

Dr Karin von Hippel

Centre for Defence Studies

June 1998

( from: Select Committee on International Development: Minutes of Evidence )

http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/cgi-bin/empower http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/cgi-bin/htm_hl?DB=ukparl&STEMMER=en&WORDS=paradigm+&COLOUR=Red&STYLE=&URL=/pa/cm199899/cmselect/cmintdev/55/8063009.htm#muscat_highlighter_first_match

http://mysearch.looksmart.com/cgi-bin/intrasearch2?crid=7f281b956d9f5aa0&csid=&query=paradigm&session=973347068 TheDawn.

xpat , I'll be spending much of the weekend preparing things to contact Dr. Hippel, and some others who I think may make sense to contact, and do hope that I'll be able to participate, along with you if at all possible, in focusing a new paradigm for complex emergencies, which embody, in large part, all the difficulties and tragedies of war.

Once again, you've given me hope. Thanks so much.

Alot of the sciences seem to be stagnating. An example. In astronomy, the crowd seems to only want to push the big bang theory to the point that the patches being used to fill the gaping holes in this theory are getting more and more ludicrous. Alot of this wasted time and energy would be better spent studying the universe instead of trying to prove some particular theory. This whole issue is becoming like religious dogma.

Many other sciences are going thru similar debates where the majority are pushing a particular theory and wont let in different views. Is anyone else annoyed with this state of affairs?

Many people are, I think, and the Science Times section of The New York Times often sows "subversive" doubts.

But there remains the core procedural problem that, these days, checking is not morally forcing if it discomforts stakeholders, or otherwise involves explicit conflict.

Because this is true, theories remain "sacrosanct" far longer than would be good for the scientists themselves, or for their customers. i We'd all be much safer, and progress would be faster, if people CHECKED theories against key tests, in public, and rejected them when that was indicated.

"I don't know" is a humbling phrase, but a useful one.

My own view is that, if checking of questions of fact decisive to destinguishing between theories became morally forcing the economic productivity of the sciences would more than double, the intellectual progress would accellerate similarly, and the sciences would be more comfortable, polite places for people of all ages and conditions to work.

I also believe that the ability of the scientists to justify their work to each other, and to the wider culture that funds them, would substantially increase.

When scientists appear to others to be "blowing smoke" to avoid criticism, that hurts the cause of science. When that appearance is true, there should be changes made to make the science a better fit to the ethics science claims in the culture.

It took 37 years to get the Plimsoll line painted on ships representing the level to which a ship might sink down into the water on loading and still proceed with safety. Unseaworthy Vessels Bill. Samuel Plimsoll MP http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Lshipping.htm

British History is filled with legislation that little by little improved the QUALITY of existence - see: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/legislation.htm from: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/industry.html

Many accidents that happen today represent a failure to follow procedures and quality guidelines. The recent runway smash of a Singapore Airline for example holds the following:

Failure of Pilots (3) to read information and documents issued to them at Taipai airport. Failure of Taipai airport to have ground radar installed. Failure of Pilots to defer to Health and Safety when a typhoon was inprocess. Failure of runway lighting to indicate runway out of action . Failure of passengers (customers) to have the right not to travel in dangerous conditions. Failures in terms of Quality.

Plimsoll line:

Disraeli, the Conservative prime minister, changed his mind on the issue and in 1875 gave his support to an Unseaworthy Vessels Bill.

The following year Samuel Plimsoll managed to persuade Parliament to amend the 1871 Merchant Shipping Act. This provided for the marking of a line on a ship's sides which would disappear below the water line if the ship was overloaded. A further amendment in 1877 imposed a limit on the weight of cargo which vessels were permitted to carry and created rules governing the engagement of seamen and their accommodation on board ship.

xpat , these are wonderful citations, that make vivid the human implications of CHECKING, and its moral association to human welfare.

Again and again, resistance to checking, and to simple changes of rules based on plain facts, is based on notions of "politesse." To discomfit the powerful is "impolite."

The notion that checking is a moral duty seems unnatural in social groups. But the costs of denying that notion have been grisly in the past, and will continue to be.

Re the need for handwashing (above)

Note that the spread of the Elboe Virus, in Northern Uganda, relates directly to their custom of washing the copse and then the hands of all attending in that SAME BOWL of water.

This compares with adding fluids from bovines, MadCow infected, to the hamburger mix and distributing though a National Chain (France).

And re-utilisation of sterilised instruments infected with prions ... when normal sterilising at 134c fails to kill these.

All of the above demonstrate the need to compile and check through information and findings using appropriate methodologies to determine truths and from this develop suitable policies; or, where an invention to accept the new and from it innovate to maximise utility for mankind.

Garden Pesticide link to Parkinson's / James Meek, Guardian science correspondent Monday November 6, 2000

It was only ever a matter of time before scientists pointed to one of the toxic agrochemicals pervading the world and linked it to a major disease of unknown cause.

Today, Professor Tim Greenamyre, of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, will do just that - suggesting at a conference in the US that exposure to rotenone could cause Parkinson's disease, the crippling brain illness which brings suffering to 120,000 Britons.

But, ironically, it is a connection that will shake some of the most ardent opponents of the use of synthetic pesticides in farming. For rotenone is no post-war insect killer cooked up in a corporate lab, but a natural product, extracted from the derris plant, and a mainstay of organic farms and gardens.

The findings of Prof Greenamyre and his team, to be published next month in the journal Nature Neuroscience, show that rats repeatedly given rotenone not only develop the symptoms of Parkinson's - trembling and loss of muscle control - but acquire the distinctive microscopic lumps in the brain, known as Lewy bodies, that are a sure sign of the disease.

"These results," the scientists write, "indicate that chronic exposure to a common pesticide can reproduce the anatomical, neurochemical, behavioural and neuropathological features of Parkinson's disease."

Parkinson's see: http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,393329,00.html

Paradigm / Aussie Centre

ARTS-SCIENCE notes :

In the Tweed Valley there is a Science-Arts centre that aims to connect the traditions of 'creative endeavour and rational enquiry'

Notion that investigation can be inspiration

That Art can lead us into the truths of life

Links with : pre Socratic philosophers, medieval mystics and quatrocento humanists

Robert POPE is Science-Arts director - likes KANT & metaphysics

Joint authored ti: 'two bobs worth' in 1988 with Robert Todonai

Pope collaborated with leading edge scientific thinkers from 1980's onwards:

Chris Illert mathematician - studies of form in nature follow Darcy Thompson's path

Dr Bevan Reid (medical visionary) proponent of 'non-local energy waves' as key factors in disease. Reid wrote paper with Sydney doc - Brian HAGAN (speculative scientists re elaboration of ideas in maths, physics and medicine) have work in prose - wave diagram of Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Don Eldridge x-printer - interested in evolutionary theory.

And to the work of Australia's most established paradigm breaker - Ted STEELE (microbiologist). Seeking to modify Darwin theory re Jean Baptiste de Lamarck.

Book: ti: Descent of Spirit / E. L. Grant Watson (Primavera Press, 1990).

Quote: 'What all these thinkers share is a certain responsiveness to the realm of the imagination, and a sense that establishment, peer-assessed, institutional science has become hidebound, calcified and trapped even, by its cultural prestige and track record of public acceptance.

Time for revision and rethinking of the grand models of science.

Pope believes that mankind stands still before vital phase transition. He is working on an internet concept that would gather together ALL the new ideas, sift them, and select and promote those that are life enhancing … via a marriage of scientific and humane traditions. (from Rothewell, N 'Spine' The Australian's Review of Books (page 7) 8nov00)

http://www.isss.org/98transc/jl201100.htm

C.P. Snow: The two cultures:

The humanist The technocratic Both are sides of the same thing.

They are two aspects of the same thing, like two sides of a coin.

Humanity is the search for differences in things that appear to be same Science is the search for similarities in things that appear to be the same.

Life itself: losing the aspects of the whole:

In Renaissance, divided life into work, play, learning and inspiring. Thus, divided institutions into 4 categories. e.g. church, golf course ... Have destroyed the potentiality for creating a high quality of life, because there's no way to integrate the four.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Chris+Illert++&btnG=Google+Search

http://www.google.com/search?q=Robert+Todonai++&btnG=Google+Search

Dr bevan reid, a Sydney University cancer researcher, who also has been roasted for his novel ideas about 'life-forces', told me last year, "Traditional ... www.science-art.com.au/med_observer.htm - 10k - Cached - Similar pages (see Medical Observer)

Notable Australian World Firsts ... CANCER DETECTION Research by Dr Bevan Reid lead to the invention of a computerised device which reliably detects cancerous and pre-cancerous cells. ... apc-online.com/twa/firsts.shtml - 25k - Cached - Similar pages

Health and Medicine - Can we expect to live longer? ... simply by scanning a probe across the cervix, was instigated by Dr Bevan Reid. The development of the unique algorithms were performed under the direction of ... apc-online.com/twa/health2.shtml - 74k - Cached - Similar pages

OBGYN.net Medical Professional Booklist ... Approach to the Cervix, Vagina & Vulva in Health & Disease ( American Lectures in Gynecology & Obstetrics, 106 by Malcolm Coppleson, Ellis Pixley, Bevan Reid. ... www.obgyn.net/hysteroscopy/links/mp_books.htm - 17k - Cached - Similar pages

INFORMER - Trends ... by two Australian medical academics, Professor Malcolm Coppleson and Dr Bevan Reid (Victor Skladnev joined later), out of concern that insufficient progress ... www.brw.com.au/stories/19990611/2617.htm - 19k - Cached - Similar pages

A Treatise on: COMMUNITY CONTROLLED PARLIAMENTS ... Dr. Bevan Reid (Med): ... can best be summarised by the assertion that no society can prosper, or has the right to prosper, until it takes full account of ... www.biblebelievers.org.au/parliamt.htm - 68k - Cached - Similar pages

http://www.google.com/search?q=%2F+E.+L.+Grant+Watson+&btnG=Google+Search

http://www.google.com/search?q=-+Ted+STEELE+microbiologist&btnG=Google+Search

http://www.google.com/search?q=Don+Eldridge+printer++evolutionary+theory&num=50&hl=en&lr=lang_en&safe=off&btnG=Google+Search

Interesting world refs here: scientists giving reasons why they are scared, and noting how Governments have not looked logically at problems in the past, including MadCow. http://www.natural-law.ca/genetic/NewsJuly-Aug99/GEN7-17MalayUkUsJapWScient.html

BNice

Great link - THANKS.

"You're welcome!"

xpat, the rationale behind your sudden burst of screed-like URLs lists is not apparent, but to take one at random, could you explain to what or whom the URL at #215 is supposed to be a reference? I see a few misspelled references to the works of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge (note correct spelling) on the subject of their theory of speciation entitled "punctuated equilibria", a reference to Lewis Carroll, a few references to the Perl FAQ, and so on. How are they all linked, other than via the surname Eldridge? Am I missing something?

xpat don't dump a smorgasbord of raw research browser data on poor Gnidrolog !

The above posts set out to show that people with new ideas are not accepted readily by their establishment(s).

bnice - got your message. I'll be at "home" if you read this. Whazzup?

Too late for me...good night!

Empirical evidence links the old and the new, where proofs are tangible and therefore exist. Historical documentary evidence is testimony to this.

Yes, that's true, but the fight can be terribly long, hard, and costly. The case of Semmelweis is a key one, and dramatic - and cost millions of lives. The case of Kilmer McCully shows a much more recent case, where delay probably cost more years of American life than the Vietnam War - because a man was shunned, and a priority decision was made wrongly. The case of prefrontal lobotomy - where a whole profession ran amok, and more than 40,000 patients were maimed, is another example.

Under circumstances of paradigm conflict, for reasons set out in this thread, the "community of practice" committed to a pattern may not be able or willing to consider or see evidence. It may effectively suppress its publication. This happened in fluid mechanics for an almost 15 year period, in a situation that looks astounding in retrospect. My late colleague, S.J. Kline, was the central figure in setting this right - some of the following eulogy got printed in a major fluid mechanics journal http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klineul .

There is no question that empirical evidence MUST link the old and the new. Logic must as well.

It is astounding how difficult it is, to get necessary checking. I've been gathering more evidence than I would have wished, about how hard it is, and how it is hard.

I'm in the middle of what may be something new- something that could be a contribution to society in terms of pattern - a possible peaceful resolution of a paradigm conflict, with face saving, and nonviolent resolution. There is a good deal of effort, on all sides of my case, to come to a right answer. My results have not, for some time, been questioned in my hearing - people are being polite, and casting about for a good way to deal with the situation - perhaps even a way consistent with truth.

But a decade has been wasted, and billions of dollars, and many many scientific chances, and much of my life, because checking (and in the area of paradigm conflict, something else - witnessing of experiments) was denied. The reasons it was denied are set out in this thread, but I believe they are easier to understand in terms of the ideas in Mankind's Inhumanity to Man and Woman - As natural as human goodness? (Society thread.)

Under conditions of paradigm conflict, the person or people with the new idea become "OUTSIDERS", who are dehumanized, and denied standing.

To fix this problem, which has been enormously costly to the sciences over the years, will require a change in moral priorities, or some social invention.

When matters of fact can distinguish between systems of ideas, checking is morally forcing to the extent that the ideas are important.

A discussion of a pattern that might work well for handling paradigm conflict, discussed also on b THE NEW YORK TIMES boards, is set out in #64-67, this thread. rshowalter Fri 18/08/2000 15:47

Rshowalter

I've just read your paper titled:

< An error at the interface between the measurable and our culture's equation-representations has been made. Our culture's limiting arguments have been applied to invalid terms. Terms have been mislabeled as 0's or infinities as a result of this mistake. >

and found at

http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt

- it's pretty amazing, and that's an understatement!!!

It defines a problem, and suggests a way towards the solution, a solution of immense importance. It tackles an issue that is at the heart of this thread, an issue that can be understood in the question 'who's getting there?' when it is applied to the relationship that exists between our modelling of reality (for historical/economic reasons very limited) and our attempts to put those models to better practical effect.

Have you read ET Whittaker seminal math papers?You can find them here:

http://www.csonline.net/bpaddock/scalar/

I think you might find them very interesting! Whittaker shows that there can be no zeroes in our models of reality, only combinations of terms that sum to zero, just as you mention in your title 'Terms have been mislabeled as 0's or infinities'!

Good luck with everything!

K

Kessinger, Thanks!

I care about the technical result in differential equation modelling very much - I've devoted my life to it, and I believe many good things will come from getting this old, old problem fixed.

An oversight, and basically a simple one, has been causing trouble since the 1690's. The oversight happened (or maybe, better, condensed) in the discourse of the 1650's. If there's anybody to "blame", you'd blame Newton's old boss, Isaac Barrow.

I hope to use the math, in breaking pieces of the code of the brain, in a few places in pure science, and in engineering problems, too.

But I've come to hope that something else good will come from the work, and maybe something more important. I'm speaking of a sense of how paradigm conflicts occur as human interactions, and a sense of how, with some fairly simple, easy changes in social patterns, these problems may be much better solved in the future.

These are human dramas - they are a special, interesting kind of tragedy.

If that sense of how paradigm conflict occurs is right (and I'm hoping it is) then the future may be, in significant ways, better than the past. That insight came from a partnership - the combination of some stark, even dehumanized work of mine combined with insights of surpassing grace and power from my main co-writer on this thread. For many years, I had much of the stark part, without it seeming coherent or whole - without the jelling, dash, grace and deep insight that she's brought to it.

I'll be writing of these things at more length.

For me, the human insights have come harder than the technical ones, and seem more important.

Thanks!

rshowalter, I tried to read your article at

http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/

but found it to be laid out in a such manner as to render it almost unreadable. For instance, one paragraph that I encountered early on contained an entire paragraph expressed as a HTML "H4" header, containing four changes of font colour two changes of font presentation (normal, underlined, bold), and a quite unnecessary mixture of upper and lower case. Whilst this may look impressive to the naive reader, it can hardly be expected to encourage anyone seriously interested in whatever ideas you might have to present. Add to this your rather eccentric treatment of a rejection letter in response to your attempt to use Nature as a free checking service, one does wonder if you could possibly have set about this paradigm shift business in a way more calculated to get up the noses of those whose minds you supposedly wish to change. Was this choice of technicolor splurge and crankspeak deliberate?

Gnidrolog , your points are pretty well taken, at one level. http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/ was one of the first internet pieces I ever did, and no doubt I should have done another index page in the intervening time. It was not a mathematical demonstration so much as an appeal for checking.

Checking was exactly what was needed. That's the standard case when paradigm conflicts occur.

You'd be happier with the presentation in A Modified Equation for Neural Conductance and Resonance http://xxx.lanl.gov/html/math-ph/9807015 and especially the appendices. No one's found mistakes in that work. Some things have sharpened since it was written.

But the core point, and the core difficulty, is that the S-K work is just outside the range where current mathematical procedures are validated and considered legitimate. A physical representation procedure beyond the validated axioms of mathematics has been inferred by an imperfect analogy, now over 300 years old, and been assumed. The incorrect assumption and procedure is usually an excellent approximation, but sometimes fails catastrophically.

Appendix 2 of http://xxx.lanl.gov/html/math-ph/9807015 sets out the core paradigm conflict , or change in perspective.

"Procedures for representing physical models in equation form cannot be determined from our axioms because our axioms are limited to abstract domains. But representation procedures can be examined by means of experimental mathematics. Valid representation procedures must be consistent with computational consistency tests. Current techniques for calculating the interaction of several natural laws over a spatial increment fail tests that valid representation requires, and are ruled out. A consistent technique is proposed."

My problem has been getting mathematicians to LOOK at specific cases where "Current techniques for calculating the interaction of several natural laws over a spatial increment fail tests that valid representation requires, and are ruled out."

The problem has been a classic repeat of other cases of paradigm conflict - an error, in dissonance from expectations, has been looked away from, rather than looked at, by experts deeply indoctinated within a community of practice.

One may say, "Showalter,if you're beyond the axioms, then you're not doing mathematics." Depending on how one defines "mathematics" that may be right of wrong. But if one is asking for effective representation - you must ask "what works? And for practical reasons, you need representation procedures that work. People have been having big trouble with the mathematical representation of coupled physical circumstances since Newton's time.

Here's the key logical issue: "When we derive an equation representing a physical model, reasoning from a sketch and other physical information, we write down symbols and terms representing physical effects. We may write down several stages of symbolic representation before we settle on our "finished" abstract equation. As we write our symbols, we implicitly face the following question:

Question: WHEN can we logically forget that the symbols we write represent a physical model? WHEN can we treat the equation we've derived from a physical model as a context-free abstract entity, subject only to the exact rules of pure mathematics?

We can never do so on the basis of rigorous, certain, clearly applicable axioms. There are no such axioms. We cannot avoid making an implicit assumption that says

"THIS equation can be treated as a valid abstract equation, without further concern about its context or origin, because it seems right to do so, or because it is traditional to do so. We have made the jump from concrete representation to valid abstraction HERE."

But the assumption ......... is not provably true from the axioms and procedures of pure mathematics. People go ahead and make these sorts of assumptions as they work. They cannot avoid doing so. Right or wrong, they are making "experimentally based" assumptions in their representation-derivations. People have made these implicit assumptions without recognizing the essentially experimental nature of their proceedings. It is better that this experimental nature be recognized, so that consistency checks can be applied to the unprovable steps. Any inconsistencies involved with these implicit steps may then be identified.

Unfortunately, the notion that such inconsistencies could exist has been "unthinkable." That's a classical example of paradigm conflict, where people indoctrinated in a particular community of practice become so sure of their assumptions that they can no longer look at counterexamples.

In that case, you need an umpire, so that a crucial question of fact can be determined.

I've had all the classic difficulties in getting that umpiring. Some analogous experimental results have involved analogous difficulties.

Once the question of FACT on which the paradigm shift hinges is acknowledged, more compact statements can be made. I've done a paper considerably more compact than http://xxx.lanl.gov/html/math-ph/9807015 recently.

In paradigm conflict, it is getting the key question of fact checked that is the essential problem.

Steve Kline, my partner in this work, was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and was about to be named "the most distinguished computational and experimental fluid mechanician of the 20th century" by the JSME when we worked together. He'd already fought through one paradigm conflict, and I was taking his advice, which seems sound in retrospect. By the time we made our "rather eccentric" request for checking, we had been in interaction with excellent mathematicians, at a level of intensity where issues of formality were clearly not the problem, for more than four years. Try as we might, and fit formalities as we might, we kept getting the response "we cannot tell whether you are right or wrong" - in essence we got a refusal to CHECK the core question of fact in the only way it could be checked - by the matching processes of experimental mathematics (simple checking of examples.) Every one of the difficulties of paradigm conflict was on show in that interaction. We asked for checking because Steve felt, and I felt, that it was just what we needed.

Gnidrolog , one can use derogatory words. Status laden words can be a way of cutting off consideration of fundamentals. The issue here happens to make a difference of more than 12 orders or magnitude on neural inductance. That's a big enough change to have life and death consequences. So the issue matters, whether I am a nice or decorous guy of not.

One needs checking, and in cases where the practical implications of an answer are large, that checking should be morally forcing.

Electrical Signals :

Labour day

Want to know when a baby will be born? Tune in to the womb. . . it's been telling us all along

BY THE time a woman goes into premature labour it is often too late to stop the contractions, and the baby can be born with dangerously underdeveloped organs. But researchers in Britain may now have found a way to predict labour--weeks before it happens. This would allow for intervention earlier and ensure a safer delivery.

"We could nip the whole cascade of events in the bud," says Nigel Simpson, an obstetrician and gynaecologist at the University of Leeds. He and his colleague James Walker found that the electrical signals that stimulate muscle contraction in the uterus change over the course of pregnancy. As an expectant mother gets closer to labour, the uterine muscles begin to act in unison, getting ready to push the baby out. As this happens, the number of random muscle contractions, which show up as high-frequency peaks in the signal, begin to die down.

"The uterus doesn't wake up one day and say 'Oh, I'll go into labour today,'" says Simpson. "It gradually becomes more susceptible to being activated." If the electrical changes observed prove predictable enough, doctors could then pinpoint the time of birth weeks in advance. "Up to two weeks is certainly feasible," says Walker.

To detect the signals, hospital staff place a few sticky-pad electrodes--like the ones used by an ECG to monitor the heart--on the mother's stomach. If the system proves reliable, Simpson and Walker hope that women could use personal labour-detection devices at home.

They suspect, however, that this monitoring system might prove most valuable for showing when a mother is not going into labour, rather than when she is. This would be especially useful for first-time mothers who suspect they're having early contractions. Being able to detect false alarms at home would prevent a wasted trip to the hospital.

"Anything that would aid us with an estimation on the time of labour would be nothing but a good thing," says Alan Cameron, a specialist in fetal medicine at the Queen Mother's Maternity Hospital in Glasgow. Between 6 and 7 per cent of women go into premature labour, he says, which can lead to babies being born with dangerously underdeveloped lungs and other organs. And some premature births signal other problems, like infections in the mother or child--so an early warning could help diagnose these problems.

However, not everyone approves. Mary Newburn, head of policy research at the London-based National Childbirth Trust, a charity that supports parents and parents-to-be, says wrong results from such a system could turn happy pregnancies into stressful ones. "This is another example of the creeping tide of technology," she says. "Can women not be trusted to listen to their own bodies, as they always have done?"

Nicola Jones

From New Scientist magazine, 18 November 2000. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns226522

A bit off topic, sorry:

computer chips aiming to pioneer a new kind of communication uplink. This would enable satellite users to upload files via a security protocol similar to that used by web page operators. Currently, security fears mean that satellite control systems are kept offline. http://www.newscientist.com/dailynews/news.jsp?id=ns9999170

AR :: about 3000km nne, the main thing is when the tide goes way out ( is sucked into the vaccuum of the quake), not to run down to the beach to view it. The archeolgists of the shore note the instances of quake happenings reflected in the shorelines dating back ten thousand years.

On the Electrical Signals v intuitiative feelings re body (pregancy) post, it would be appropriate to better understand them in relation to both labour and birth, and possible other bodily functionings. If the mood of the body and it's functioning can be measured and guaged then proactive actions might be developed that keeps the body functioning to it's peak.

On the sending of a Server into orbit, there seems to be a greater readiness to accept science that assists digital communication, than to accept science that may help us better understand vascular communication.

Paradigm conflicts can have horrific consequences, and they involve difficulties, including rights in conflict. I've been involved in a paradigm conflict that puts these difficulties in sharp relief. Here are questions that that history drives home to me

"Suppose a paradigm change is suggested, and testable in logic and experimentally, that evokes STRONG, VISCERALLY AVERSE REACTIONS in many stakeholders in the communities of practice involved. Aversive resonses that are not stupid or arbitrary, but responses that are there for real reasons embedded in ornate conceptual structures to which the stakeholders are emotionally, logically, and professionally committed.

Suppose the stakes, in money, life, death, and technical implication, are VERY LARGE? So that getting the right answer seems very important?

What, under current usages, can society do to deal with the situation?

What SHOULD be done?

What changes, exceptions, or insights are necessary here ?

These aren't easy questions, and they involve human dramas where it is possible to have much sympathy with all concerned.

Society needs better answers than it has - with current answers, good people, acting in good faith, and trying hard, can generate very bad results, and not get, or even check for, right answers.

Sounds like a search for a new truth ... but ... what is the VALUE of the new truth as set against the redundant knowledge it replaces.

All very esoteric unless/until ... the "what can it do for me?" question is considered.

Ultimately:

Can the value be interpreted into innovations manifested as marketable products.

If marketable then generally is there a public of consumers, and do these have to be educated regarding the potentials of an improved product. Would the improvements and efficiencies be sufficiently substantial to knock out the current as redunant.

Looping back to :

Sounds like a search for a new truth ... but ... what is the VALUE of the new truth

The plimsole liners abandoned ship - when too many ships sunk. Perhaps redundant information has sinking ships no one is talking about .... ?

Sorry if this has been asked, but;

Rshowalter - where did the resistance to your ideas predominantly come from? Was it (as I suspect) from mathematicians, or from medics and neuroscientists? It strikes me that if your eqn. models the data better, it should be relatively straightforward to get working scientists to accept it on empirical grounds, without the need for rigorous proof. From the point of view of saving lives, surely that's the important thing to concentrate on.....

De-regulation of banking has been intere$$$$ting! Adam Smith would not have forseen the ability of monetarty providers to write a contract, call it a product, and from which to (eg) sell insurance. Money moving was in his day usury and left to Jews usually.

Watching the American Election, which would have evolved the way it has to satisfy the needs of power brokers, not voters.

In Letter from America http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/letter_from_america/newsid_1021000/1021159.stm Alister Cooke outlines a few problems including election expenditures that were supposed to have been rectified - yet still haven't, leading to voter discontent.

Reviewing the current vote method, probably devised by IBM from a jacquard weave pattern, it would seem that were voters required first to mark the spot with an x and then punch, their intentions would be clearer for manual counting. The Hare-Clarke system would be an improvement for Americans ... so why don't they adopt a system that more truely reflects the complex will(s) of the peoples and enables the small parties to gain electoral funding prior to a redistribution on votes ..... presumably 'power' interests in current redundant methodology.

That the contestents of this Presidential Beauty Pagent are 'setting down the rules' rather than awaiting adjudication is the wonder. Suggesting the contest does not have a FAIR and established method run by an impartial commission.

Now, if the USA can be seen to be incapable of running a mere election satisfactorily, that equates with (1 or 0), how would America be able to demonstrate the competence to check the more complex.

Triangualtion with a checker off-shore might be a suggestion.

When progress is delayed due to paradigm conflicts, the loss, in retrospect, are often huge. In the case of Semmelweis, millions died horribly and much sooner than they might have. Other cases are almost as bad. Sometimes progress is delayed for generations. Sometimes the human dramas involve very ugly behavior, and real tragedies.

But though the stakes can be high, and acceptance of correct answers can be long delayed, the questions involved in paradigm conflicts are starkly simple. In the cases of Semmelwies, and McCully, the questions were:

1. When going from patient to patient, does sanitation matter, or not? (It matters.)

2.Does homocysteine relate causally to artheriosclerosis, or not? (It does.)

In the recent revolution in fluid mechanics, the question was

3. When a flow becomes turbulent, are the laws of Newtonian physics adjourned, so that only statistics applies, or does causality continue? (It continues.)

In my case, the key question is

4. Do the axioms of pure math have a domain of definition, or not? If they do, and you are outside that domain of definition, can you do experiments (symbolic and model-physical system matching) or not? (This isn’t settled in the profession – but YES YOU CAN.)

These questions are simple, and have simple answers. But these questions are not simple in human terms, for the people most concerned with them. When these questions are nested in a mass of cultural-social-emotional construction, they may be invisible, or emotionally charged to a prohibitive degree, and resolution of them may be humanly impossible.

For example, to see Semmelweis’s point, doctors had to rethink what they were doing, and admit that they were inadvertently killing patients. To see McCully’s point, a team of cardiologists who had organized themselves around one research subject (chloresterol) had to admit that another issue might matter as well. In may case, procedures that have become embedded in three centuries of mathematical physics practice have to be re-examined.

My late partner, S.J. Kline, one of the few people who successfully worked through a paradigm shift (in fluid mechanics, after a fifteen year fight) put it this way:

"One cannot reasonably expect successful peer review of a proposition, or acceptance of it later, if people in the profession wince at the ideas in it so much that they look away. ..... Ideas, to work, have to fit in people's heads, and in their institutions."

Here’s another statement of the “abstractly easy” but “humanly hard” point that’s taken me and Steve so much time and effort. The key point, the “showstopper” point, is at least as much a matter of recognition as of formality.

The measurable world and the axiomatic "world" of math are DIFFERENT. Mathematical models represent physical circumstances by a kind of ANALOGY. The arithmetical mechanics by which we form these analogies CAN BE TESTED FOR SYMBOLIC CONSISTENCY and CAN BE TESTED BY PHYSICAL EXPERIMENT. The analogy formation mechanism, itself, is entirely beyond the axioms of formal math as it is now taught. It is EXPERIMENTAL tests, not proof by axiomatic usages, that must be applied to evaluate the completeness and correctness of the analogy-forming procedures.

There’s a “territorial” issue that arises. At the stage where the analogy is being formed as a good representation, is “formal math” in the professional sense being done, or not? I put it this way”

The point isn't that I'm doing formal math. The point is that I'm not doing formal math, and for where I'm working, and what I'm doing, that's all right.

My objective has never been to short circuit peer review, but to get checking done, prior to peer review, that gets people past the wincing stage, so that our arguments, right or wrong, can stand on their own.

In abstract terms, the issues are easy. For the community of practice involved, this time, mathematicians, and people who have math as part of their conceptual equipment, the issue is not easy, because three centuries of practice and doctrine are called into question. Sometimes the issues are “only conceptual” – and quantitative implications are negligible. Other times, in neurophysiology, turbulent fluid mechanics, and some other complex coupled problems, the quantitative implications are huge, and explain the failures of past approaches.

Questions of value of the results, questions of “who objects” are very interesting questions. In the past, HUGE amounts of money, and values people would value in money, have been at stake, and that's true in the S-K case, as well.

It is worth remembering something very easy to forget. The core questions on which paradigm conflict hinge are SIMPLE .

It is the human relations, and the psychology, and the social usages, that are hard. Here’s an essential reason why they are hard.

Under paradigm conflict, new ideas, that are right, are “obviously wrong” to the working group of professionals who judge them.

“Obviously wrong” , for most people, means something like i--- “in tension with the current body of socially (and logically) constructed ideas and “working knowledge.”

That tension can cause extreme emotional and territorial responses, including blindness to evidence, and enough tension to produce tics, shaking body parts, and generally averse, angry responses.

When that happens, abstractly simple questions aren’t practically simple for real people. And answering these "simple" questions is problematic for real societies.

Here is a repeat of #99 and #100 of this thread:

Intellectual understanding and morality are linked. Handwashing is an important example. Now, there are many circumstances where the duty to wash one’s hands has moral force, widely supported by almost everyone. That’s true in hospitals, eating places, and all over societies. Duty and reflex are also linked. Few feel oppressed by the need for handwashing. It is taken for granted. The handwashing happens in an informed context. There are plenty of times where hands need not be washed. There are other times when handwashing is obligatory. People know the difference. If it were otherwise, the world would be unimaginably worse, and populations much smaller.

In Semmelweis’ time, the need for handwashing wasn’t understood. It is now. A change in intellectual understanding, much reinforced by experience, has changed the morays of the world.

I feel that, in cases that matter enough, under carefully enough defined circumstances, the need for valid checking should be morally forcing. Practical questions of fact and logic that can be checked, and that matter enough, should be checked.

“Matter enough” should be a question discussed, and subject to negotiation, in terms of consequences (just as the question “when does handwashing matter enough” is discussed today.)

I feel that, in clear cases, checking should be morally forcing. That view seems to be as rare and strange now as the view that handwashing was obligatory was in the 1830’s. I believe that has to change.

I think that paradigm conflict misfire is a particularly clear case of the need for checking. But it seems to me that there are many other cases, almost as clear. I believe that the holocaust is another particularly clear illustration. Hitler went unchecked.

Often, it seems to me, objective truth is one’s only hope for good results. That implies a close coupling between morality and checking. A close enough coupling that the need to check should be morally forcing even when it is difficult (perhaps especially when it is difficult.)

That is the opposite of the social-moral-practical reality today, even for the most elite, morally careful individuals and institutions society can show. (I've collected quite a lot of evidence for this - people make the moral decision that checking needs to be subordinated to "values of civility." They make this as a consistent moral decision. I believe that the priorities on this moral decision need to be changed, in cases where the stakes are high enough, because the consequences of that moral decision, now ubiquitous, are so damaging.)

Change that priority, and I believe the world would improve, both scientifically and in other ways. I feel that the improvement might be great enough to compare to the improvement in health that came with improved sanitation.

I believe that the S-K case is now a remarkably clear, well documented illustration of the need for this change. The S-K case is technically clear, the history is beyond reasonable question, and nobody involved makes a good candidate for dehumanization.

repeat of (#100)

bNice said this:

>This 'checking' is important.

Yes it is.

She's right that thinking in terms of money helps.

>"Checking would have a cost. Checking here affects decision making. Decision making is weighting, and weighing against other alternatives. Preference in decision making could be 'doing what you like' regardless of the evidence ... this is an authority decision style, without reference to the democratic foundations.

"If people asked "should we check?" and evaluated the questions in terms of money to be gained or lost, then a lot of complications would be stripped away. The really bad misfires couldn't happen, if people just thought in terms of something neutral, like money."

Money is a clean thing, compared to the welter of paralyzing checks and balances you get to if you follow Kuhn, especially if, for some reason, several disciplines have to share in the answering of a question.

But issues of "democratic foundations" - and issues of credibility and status, matter too. Now, with the internet, some past mistakes may be easier to avoid. Especially with videotape. There's a story of a lady, on her knees, praying about Darwin.

Oh Lord, let it not be true .....

But if it IS true ....

Give us the STRENGTH to suppress it .

If people on opposite sides of a question discuss things and that's shown on web videotape, the difference between open minded work, and "the will to supress" might be hard to hide.

Once the human point is somehow made that sane, credible people are raising a sane, credible issue, then the questions

"What would it cost to check? and "What gain could we get, or what loss could we avoid, by getting the right answer here?" are the right questions.

As far as paradigm conflict misfires go, the future can be better than the past.

A 35 minute talk on S-K, that sets out the basic logic simply, uses this slide show http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/nterface .

This is a condensation of WHAT ARE THE NEW YORK TIMES SCIENCE FORUMS GOOD FOR? Can newspapers really participate in science? Can they really cover it? Should they? by M. R. Showalter and S. J. Kline, http://www.wisc.eud/rshowalt/whytimes written about six months before Professor Kline's death in November 1997.

It speaks about about barriers to innovation, and the role of newspapers and newspaper fora in science.

Steve Kline knew these barriers first hand. It took him almost fifteen years, from the position of a Stanford professor, to get the most key result of his group checked. It took a showdown, enforced by the massive intervention of the U.S. Air Force, to get that checking done. Thereafter, the paper was published through the ordinary peer reviewed usages, many others followed, and a paradigm shift occured in the field of turbulent fluid mechanics.

"In business, different parts of a firm are expected to reach workable agreements about what the truth is. Commercial realities force this. Some of the forces are internal and some external. Claims a firm makes are often subject to scrutiny by public agencies, and overclaims that result in loss to customers can draw lawsuits. In engineering (particularly in fields like automotive or aeronautical engineering, where safety is a major issue) requests for right answers are "command performances." However, in the academy, major, operationally important disparities between fields can go unresolved for many decades. We believe that academic usages are irresponsible in this way, and would remain so regardless of the stakes, even if hundreds of millions of dollars, or tens of thousands of researcher years, or thousands of unnecessary deaths were at stake. If scientists are better than ordinary citizens in some ways, they are worse here.

"Still, the question arises - what happens if publishing an argument would reduce or endanger the status of the editors and reviewers who let the work be published? What happens if someone asks that a piece be published, or that an idea be considered, that questions and may in some way undermine the invisible college itself?

"In such cases, we cannot be surprised if all concerned within the invisible college recall that

"He who troubleth his own house will inherit the wind."..........Proverbs 11 - 29

"How will an idea that strongly "troubles its own house" fare? For psychological reasons, that idea may not be understood at all. But suppose it is. How will rational (and often fearful) professors and graduate students react to it?

"What happens if a member of the group champions it? How long can she do so, and how vigorously can she do so, and remain a member of her invisible college in good standing?

"What happens to her if she loses that good standing?

"What does this do to the publication prospects of an unwelcome idea?

"Editors are human, and will not like to give the gift of publication, which operationally exists in their sole discretion, under these circumstances. The same question has redoubled force if the people asking for consideration and publication are outsiders. By understandable standards of professional fairness, OUTSIDERS are not appropriate players in a competition for chits for employment and promotion. The journals now deal primarily in such chits.

"Anyone who radically questions an invisible college is an outsider by definition, or becomes one very quickly.

"Funding rules make the task of the boatrocker harder still, by penalizing anyone who becomes convinced by her. Federal grant requirements lock investigators in, so that admission of the need to change, on the basis of new ideas or new information, is an admission of defeat.

"The upshot is that our professional journals, and other semi-organized patterns of our invisible colleges are not adapted to consider or publish controversial pieces that dispute the accepted wisdom of the invisible colleges involved. The notion of fairness to new ideas or fairness to outsiders is in conflict with the specializations in place.

"The academic journals often do the jobs they are built for well. The professoriate and their subordinates and apprentices often do their jobs well. The jobs the academic journals are built for, and the professoriate is rewarded for, are essential jobs. Nonetheless,the journals are now repositories and developers of a carefully edited truth, according to self-chosen and self- enforced standards of specialized invisible colleges. The professors are engaged in the elaboration and defense of that truth. This may be ideal specialization so long as the ideas of the invisible college involved are right. This may be the usual case. Even so, these arrangements and specialized patterns are NOT adapted for discussion in the broad sense in which that term is understood elsewhere in society. In their natural, unsupervised state, these arrangements are not engines for determining truth as the notion of truth is understood elsewhere in society.

We then go on to speak of the role of forums such as this one:

" ...... forums can discuss issues that the focused journals cannot. They can deal with issues without being much constrained by issues of territory and status. They have a real, creative intellectual service to perform. Here, we believe, is how key steps in intellectual progress happen:

If one is to have hope of working out a problem, one must first sharply, carefully describe it.

,,,,,,,,,,Prior to sharp description, one may face a mystery, an unspeakable mystical strangeness in some body of relations.

.......Sometimes, after the work of sharp, careful, well checked description, a mystery may be transmuted into something much different and far more precious. The hard thought and description may have generated a sharp, defined contradiction.

Such a clearly defined contradiction is a target identified, a place to reassess and rebuild, a source of hope. A mystery is a call to awe and stasis. A contradiction is a call to thought and action.

Forums can facilitate this descriptive sharpening.

Specializations in place, admirable in many other ways, are not well adapted for checking issues on which paradigm conflicts hinge. And it this checking stage, which is a specialized need of paradigm conflict circumstances, where our current academic arrangements are lacking.

But now, the net IS making things better. And may make them much better in the future.

Because the net is weakening all sorts of established authority, and making it possible to have an audience question MANY more decisions.

For instance, maybe in a few years, it might be possible to have people take CHALLENGES seriously.

On a matter of thermodynamics interesting to both engineers and physicists, Steve Kline, with a little backup from me and some professors, tried to challenge the physicists, The bet was for honor and a small amount of money ( a thousand dollars ) Could the physicists show some things, that engineers didn't think could be true, that the physicists were claiming. Well, Steve, and some other people sent the challenge all around, to ranking folks, and more widely, too. No takers. The physicists simply didn't have to answer the question.

Thermodynamics as engineers use it, and as physicists use it, remain significantly different.

If, on the web, people were SHAMED not to take up such challenges, one way or another. if such things became, after enough procedures and safeguards, "command performances," then the key needs for handling paradigm conflicts might be directly adressed. That would be a different world from now. But not unthinkably different.

Rshowalter

I am impressed by your dedication in trying to persuade professional colleagues to seriously investigate your discoveries but I would welcome some further explanation/description, in as lay terms as is possible, of electrical propagation in nerve tissues, which seems to be at the heart of your case.

Am I correct in assuming that nerve inductance has not been measured as directly as it would be in a conventional electrical circuit, but has been deduced by you at least in part by considering what bandwidth for data transmission would be necessary to account for known reaction times and sensory discrimination by the brain?

My knowledge of electronics is fairly minimal (I was a radio hobbyist of sorts) and of physiology is practically non-existent, but I recall reading somewhere that nerve impulses are partly propagated by chemical means, not simply by electric currents. I have an even vaguer memory of a suggestion that the nerve currents actually move radially in the nerve rather than axially, and this causes a progressive alternating chemical/electrical change to propagate axially along the nerve. If this is correct how do your bandwidth/inductance and other assumptions hold?

prunus ......Some progress, and a rain check.

At a meeting with a senior math professor, I got some way past the “paradigm conflict stage” and into the “normal science” stage of discourse. Felt good! In paradigm conflict, standard reponses are “can’t be” … “don’t have to look” … and “you’re crazy.” We got past that, and at least for today, I sold the notion that measurement construction was different than abstract math. I got fairly comfortable provisional acceptance of my position that there are emergent properties, that can be big, from combinations of simple effects over space.

There were questions of exposition, construction, and notation, helpfully set out. And, of course, all of them could be potentially fatal if not adressed. But the man wasn’t saying “can’t be” was looking hard, and wasn’t saying “you’re crazy.” And the exposition will be better for his comments.

I’m doing some constructions, to clarify issues he suggested, before answering your much-appreciated question.

Thanks !

rshowalter, you might like to know that I asked a zoologist friend of mine to look at your paper at

http://xxx.lanl.gov/html/math-ph/9807015

He really liked some of your ideas. Here's my personal summary of what he saw as good points and bad points:

Bad:

1. Your paper is rather incoherent in presentation, layout, and readability.

2. It would have been better to show your work to your colleagues than to dump a large swathe of largely unreviewed work on Nature that was clearly unsuited to that journal's format and function.

3. You simply don't have sufficient grounds to claim a connection between the cable properties of dendrites and visually triggered epileptic fits--that's apparently a pure guess.

Good:

4. This is an interesting and relevant problem in biophysics. You've piqued the interest of a fellow academic, and you might be right.

Uou really need to be sharpen up your paper-writing skills. Learn to write without the use of block capitals, italics, and the like. Take your papers to biophysicists, talk to them about your ideas, submit them to biophysics journals, and make sure the papers focus on one issue at a time. The first thing to do might be to write a brief, uncluttered paper to explain the derivation of the S-K formula and its fit to biological data. If you will only take the trouble to sharpen your focus and work on your presentation, I think you'll have no end of people willing to discuss your ideas.

Gnidrolog, I appreciate your comments very much, and the help from your friend. I'm sure he's right. I've been slogging on the same problem for a long time, and looking back, I've no doubt that I could have done many things better- definitely including all the things your friend points out.

My core problem, for some years, made more difficult by some problems of my own, including many of my own making, has been to get past the notion that there IS a "math like" domain cluttered with measurement constraints, and that there are some procedural rules involved in the stripping away of those constraints that lead to representions that correspond to physically real emergent properties. Some of these emergent properties are big. (One, on a piston ring, was just big enough to lose me 16.4 millions dollars, years ago.)

I've been so focused on getting past that raw existence issue, that I haven't focused nearly as well as I should on skills that people have a right to expect of me. One problem is a certain desperate optimism. If I'd known, a decade ago, that I was in for a decade long slog on the existence of emergent properties from coupled de's, I'd have done a lot of different things, and be a better academic animal, all around.

I've also been slogging through a lot of historical material about math-physics, and the sorrows of past workers, that nobody else in the world seems to care about. Doing the imagining and thinking that takes, I've lost some of the starkness and modern focus I might otherwise have.

Another problem is simply that, if you're from an unusual background, have unusual approaches and ambitions, and happen to be a tad forceful in spots, not everybody loves you.

When you say:

"The first thing to do might be to write a brief, uncluttered paper to explain the derivation of the S-K formula and its fit to biological data."

that sounds right. The KEY part of that is getting the derivation of the crossproduct terms (both the ones that are now called "infinitessimals" and the ones now called "infinities") fit comfortably into the CURRENT mathematical a physics culture. Pleasing the ghost of J.C. Maxwell, though it has long been my ambition, doesn't begin to be enough. Today there were good steps in that direction.

Gnidrolog I'm sure I owe you some apologies. Right now, I'm working, and looking around, for the first time in a while, I don't see anybody I have to worry about fighting with.

So far, though, I think the arithmetic I've been doing is holding up. If it continues to, I hope I'll be able to talk to a lot of scientists, and be of some use.

prunus (#253) Asked some great questions, and I said I’d answer them after doing some math constructions. Well, those constructions are done, I’m happy with them, and they’re ready to sleep on and check again tomorrow. Problem is, I’m tired, and I have to start driving about a third a way across America, to a family Thanksgiveing gathering. So I’ll try to clarify some things, at a more technical level, and think about writing for “lay people” – the hardest kind of writing there is, and the most important, after I’m back, or at least a little more rested.

A good writeup – fairly close to lay level, is a talk I gave at last year’s Midwest Neuroscience meeting http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/MWN_talk . It has a section on “What’s inductance – what does inductance do” that is as simple as I could make it. It also shows some EEG resonance data, from David Regan’s work, that was an inspiration to me, and that I think requires S-K levels of neural inductance.

By and large, the neurophysiologists I've talked to have been pretty receptive, if only they could have "permission to use it" from the mathematicians. It has been the math that's been the show-stopper.

Prunus said that the core of my case is neural conduction – and in terms of human interest, that’s true, though there are other places to use the work. Let me try to state my case, the way I’d try to do it to a person with some background.

I'll be talking about neural lines - not the whole complex of branching lines and connections in an neuron, and only about the kind of neural lines where the membrane is unsheathed - the unmyelinated kind.

You can think of these unmeyelinated lines as very thin walled tubes, with salt water (ionic water) inside the tube and surrounding it. You can make a model of an unmeyelinated neural line that is exactly like this - a thin walled rubber tube, immersed in a grounded (one voltage) bath, with salt water in the tube. You can then measure how signals (fluctuating voltages) move down the tube. I've done this. Results measured on this model fit my theory – conduction velocity, above a threshold, is constant for different frequencies, rather than varying as the square root of frequencies, as the current theory predicts.

Now neurons are more complicated than immersed thin wall tubes, because they are immersed thin walled tubes with membrane channels in them Channels that are tiny, molecular scale valves, which pass ions across the membrane in proportion to the voltage drop across the membrane.

Let me speak as an engineer here.

"Consider a conducting line that could be coaxial cable, or, at a different scale, with different materials, a neural conductor. Such a conducting line is called a transmission line. At any point x along the length of the line at time t there is a voltage, v, and a current i. The line has conduction properties characterized by R, resistance/length; L, inductance/length; G, membrane leakage conductance/length; and C, capacitance per length. The literature on transmission lines, defined in this way, has been extensive for many decades."

Neural lines are transmission lines with fancy and time-space variable membrane leakage characteristics because of the channels. Now suppose we think of a neural line with all the channels closed, or steadily in a single conducting state. Then both the new S-K theory and the current theory can be written as just the same form of equation.

The key difference is that the value of effective inductance/length in the new theory is about a thousand-billion to a million billion TIMES larger than in the old theory, depending on neural line diameter. That is

1,000,000,00 times larger to

1,000,000,000,000,000 times larger.

So in the old theory, you can ignore the terms in derivations that have inductance in them. In the new theory, terms with inductance in them are important.

The physical reason for the effective inductance in the S-K theory is that neural lines are so small, have such high resistance, and have proportionately so much charge stored in capacitance per volt, that the charge that flows into and out of the capacitance can’t be ignored when figuring the voltage drop across the line resistance. When line voltage is changing, a lot of the charge flow down the line, when voltage first changes, is flowing into or out of the line capacitance. The net effect, written in a way that fits in a differential equation, works out to a big fat inductance. The old theory ignores the voltage drops these capacitance charge flows produce against line resistance, and ignores this inductance.

Now, inductance makes a difference in how transmission lines operate. With high inductance, a waveform moves down a line with all the frequency components in the signal moving at the same speed, so that the waveform holds its shape as it moves. The propagation occurs with low distortion. For an “RC” line, with resistance and capacitance but neglible inductance, different frequencies move at different speeds, each proportional to the square root of frequency. Any periodic function you start with (for instance, a square wave or a musical tone) smears out to a sine wave of the period of the function very quickly. Current theory says that unmyelinated neurons are RC lines, and the distortion that occurs without impossibly fancy channel actuations to compensate for the distortion is implausibly awful. (It turns out that channels can only do a little to compensate for this phase distortion, for signals that are complicated enough to carry significant information.)

People looking at neural wave forms have noticed for decades that it would “make sense” for neural lines to have inductance. They just couldn’t find any reason that the induction could be there. And it became doctrine that there was no inductance in neurons. But here’s a reason for the inductance, and the inductance calculated is the right size to fit the data.

(There turn out to be some complications, that give a good reason why real unmyelinated neurons are so uniformly surrounded by glial clefts – that I’m not going into here.)

Neurobiologists are preoccupied with many things, but most of them don’t like mathematical physics much. They may tend to feel that a change in the conduction equation would change things that it doesn’t effect at all. So I’d like to talk about things the change in conduction theory does NOT change. The new theory changes essentially nothing now assumed about ion channels, and the electrochemistry of membrane voltages. The new theory doesn’t change the theory of the action potential (except that the action potential, which is barely possible with current theory, is very stable with the new theory).

What the new theory does, is reduce the number of membrane channels that have to open and close to propagate a signal, and makes possible the highly exact signal processing that we actually see, which would be impossible, for any channels anybody has actually measured, with current theory.

Again, a good writeup – fairly close to lay level, is a talk I gave at last year’s Midwest Neuroscience meeting http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/MWN_talk . It has a section on “What’s inductance – what does inductance do” that is as elementary as I could make it, it explains what resonance is, and shows some EEG resonance data, from David Regan’s work, that was an inspiration to me, and that I think requires S-K levels of neural inductance.

I’ve gotta start driving. Won’t be able to post much for a week. I deeply appreciate the chance to post here.

I'm making headway on the key problem I've been facing - getting the math checked, and feel that I might actually be pulling past the "paradigm conflict" stage of my problem, and into the regime of normal science.

Faster than the speed of light http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s212674.htm would there be a paradigm problem here?

No takers - yet

Re 260, I think this term "paradigm shift" is overused. It would have deep ramifications for cosmological calculations if the speed of light turned out to be subject to change. That's a big "if", of course. But the calculations are based on the existing model of cosmology where observations are synthesized into a consistent model of the universe. Nothing particularly revolutionary.

Joao Magueijo's light speed hypothesis was covered by Equinox recently, see:

http://www.channel4.com/equinox/ein_summary.html

I saw it. Nice ideas, lots of fun for cosmologists.

I see channel 4 have interesting programs, used to like C4 when i lived in the UK http://www.channel4.com/guide/listings.cfm?id=857109

Yes, Simon Singh on codes and codebreaking. He wrote a book on this last year (The Code Book). Also has directed some Horizons for BBC, including a famous one on Fermat's Last Theorem that he turned into a surprisingly readable book of the same name.

Sounds interesting read, will look it up.

Wonder if Showalter ever returned from that trip?

Surely there's something happening re the paradigm .... !

Yes, I'm trying to figure out -- OK, suppose it looks like you're OVER the paradigm conflict part of the situation --- or at least have hopes of that. How do you make peace? How do you get things across so they really move through the culture?

Think of the Semmelweis case - one of the ugliest episodes in the history of medicine, I think. Suppose, after a decade of pain and ugliness, somehow Semmelweis had broken through (of course he never did, but it is clarifying, I think, to ask the question.) He'd want to touch the minds and hearts of old "enemies" - who really had tried to kill him, but people who, given conversion to the new point of view, would want to do the right thing - but not commit psychic suicide. What could Semmelweis have done?

It wouldn't have been too productive just to yell "I told you so." There'd be healing, and selling to do, that would be more important.

I'm close enough to the point of hope to be thinking hard about that, just now. And to think hard about a misconception of mine, that make me an absolute bastard to be around, for all kinds of people, especially people of good will, who tried to help, and who I exhausted.

The only problem Steve and I had with our little proposition was that it carried to high a price for practitioners. Not that it was logically hard. Not that we were unclear. Just that the cost of saying "yes" has been percieved to be so high, even so suicidally threatening, for the people we've asked to say yes. Here's our little proposition:

At the stage of modelling a physical system from a sketch and physical laws in interaction together, before mapping into abstraction, you have to be able to write down a logically correct finite increment equation in the first place - only then can you take a limit and get the differential equation you'll want to use for everyday work. To get valid finite increment equations in the first place, crosseffect terms have to be algebraically simplified, as implicit measurements, in a dimensionally consistent way. That means unit (or point) scale. That way, the crosseffects, that logically must be finite, are finite. And by consistency tests, they are the right size.

Logically, that isn't hard, if it doesn't cost you anything to trace through the logic.

But it does cost the pros something. That proposition, which is logically prior to the calculus, would have been nice to know in the 1650's. But people made another assumption instead,and that wrong assumption led to false infinitessimals and false infinities, which have caused trouble ever since. (Big trouble - cost me 16.4 million dollars once, and has cost a lot of others, one way and another, a lot more.) And so mistakes have been built into main line mathematical physics, since the the beginning, and they've been causing problems since the 1690's.

Why not fix it? Because, at first blush, it is a lot to fix.

That's a simple problem, but an expensive one for a single practitioner to want to acknowledge. Because it means that some things have to be fixed - redone, cleaned up, starting from about 1690.

redundant information gets the short shift with respect to visions of incremental quality improvement ... is this any different a case ?

xpat , you're asking "what's new?" Well, what's new, in very large part due to work on this thread, is that the mechanics of how paradigm conflict impasses occur have been defined workably for the first time. More than half thanks to you.

Now that this definition-clarification-insight exists, problems that didn't have solutions before, do have solutions.

Now, this thread, as an entity, needs editing, and it has plenty of redundancy, as often happens when ideas are converging, coming into focus. It could do with a rewrite, or reforming into a book. But the core insights are pretty clear, and they are coming to have force, where I'm actually working. Let me go on.

Only in the course of writing this thread, with the guidance of xpat and her close friends, bNice , Possumdag , and some other perceptive posters, researchers, thinkers, and friends, did I get clear on what paradigm conflict was.

Though I'd known pieces, and Steve Kline had actually fought through and won a paradigm conflict (in fluid mechanics).

If Steve and I had understood paradigm conflict as well as I have come to, with contributions from Dawn Riley's brilliance, industry and touch that I could never have made alone, then Steve and I could probably could have solved our problems years ago. Maybe by 1993.

(I also owe an intellectual debt to John Seely Brown and Paul Deguid for their work on "communities of practice.)

But we didn't understand the things worked out in this thread. We didn't understand how paradigm conflict works in detail. We didn't understand the degree to which it can (and cannot) be resolved by an "umpired fight" We weren't coherent and clear about the essential requirement of resolution - not any particular dialectic scheme, but the point that, after an issue clearly came to matter enough, then right answers had to be morally forcing.

I feel that, with paradigm conflicts defined workably, there's a chance that the old, ugly pattern need never happen again, for anything really important, for any long time. Once it is clear how paradigm conflicts work at the level of human and logical mechanics, there are fairly clear ways to fix them.

In our case, things are coming to focus. The mechanisms by which exclusion had occurred are now very much weakened.

Steve Kline and I had the math-physics well enough worked out by 1990. (Steve describes something of that math-physics, and something about himself, in http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klinerec -- and I said this eulogy for Steve at Stanford Chapel http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klineul ).

But after that, all we knew to do was to keep trying to get our argument clearer and clearer, in the hope that we'd eventually be able to "sell it" -- we basically thought our key problem was one of perception (and it partly was) rather than "excessive percieved cost" (as it mostly was.) Steve basically felt that, after enough clarification, you could force your adversaries to stand in a fight where you could beat them - and he trained me for that. That's how he finally won his revolution in fluid mechanics - after years of struggle. Steve and I didnt' see that, if the stakes were high enough, you just couldn't get a fight, unless people were clear that the right answer had to be morally forcing.

The distinction between two kinds of argument impasse escaped Steve Kline and I, or we didn't focus on them clearly enough, for a long time.

We thought, if the LOGIC was clear enough, it would carry the day, even if people found the consequences uncomfortable. So we kept sweating with the logic (which was, in retrospect, pretty good by 1991) and hoping for some flash of insight that would make our ideas beautiful to people who had something to lose by them.

We didn't recognize that, if an idea was disruptive enough, people would find ways not to see it, unless there was some way to make it morally forcing.

The history of the work Steve and I did is interesting, and would have been different if we'd understood this.

We'd have been much more successful, and also a lot less trouble to some other people.

We'd both worked on the coupled de problem, variously, and sometimes together, for many years. Me for my whole adult life, and Steve off and on a long time, too. But we'd been stumped, and had set it aside.

Then in 1989 I saw zoom FFT EEG data from David Regan that had to show a neural inductance a thousand billion times larger than people thought. I called Steve at Stanford, and we were on the problem immediately. We both went "wow!" - and with some very perceptive flogging from Steve, I cracked the computational (though not the understanding) problem in a few days. And there we were, with a new neural transmission equation, and a recipe for doing some things in turbulent fluids that we both wanted done, and the explanation for a lot of old messes. We thought we'd hit the jackpot. I thought the main job of my life was done finally, and I could get paid for it.

That was the middle of 1989. The next 11 years have been a very clear illustration (now that I understand it) of how paradigm conflict works, and of how, without understanding what is involved, such conflicts will never close. Our paradigm conflict case has been a unique one, perhaps a uniquely clear one, in one way. Because the "penalty function" that goes with accepting our basic proposition has been so high, we've had a situation that hasn't closed despite enormous amounts of help from distinguished people and institutions, and despite an essentially total absence of coherent logical or empirical objection to the work.

Even with enormous good faith, and unusual and maybe unprecidented help from distinguished institutions, without moral force to closure, things don't close. If ever there's been a paradigm conflict well set out to illustrate the mechanics of the problem, we've been in it.

And now, thanks to the kindness and brilliant help of xpat and her close freinds, bNice , Possumdag , and some others (all of whom know each other very well) the nature of how paradigm conflict impasses occur has been clarified. And resolution is occurring.

Here is our core paradigm conflict, stated in this thread before:

Do the axioms of pure math have a domain of definition, or not? If they do, and you are outside the domain of definition, can you do experiments (symbolic and model-physical system matching) or not?

The force required to get that question resolved, and related mechanics checked, is being brought to bear. And the "bad faith" and "magical misperception" aspects, which seemed once to be much in evidence, are much harder to find now. People are admitting the core points. We're moving toward normal science.

Moral force is often a sense that somebody else is looking. These threads have been a great help with this.

Another big thing, for me, is that I was given courage to think through and come out and discuss things much on my mind, that I had not felt I could say without getting my core math done, thanks to the kindness brilliance and instruction of Dawn Riley. In the course of doing so, I've gained a human standing that has made it easier for people to look at the work.

A big problem now, and a source of trouble and delay, is the fact that people have to deal with what's happened in the past. My own view is that, as paradigm conflict impasses go, ours has been a very clean one. Things are being worked through, and I hope it can be done in a "redemptive" sense, as I expressed in the following poem in "There's Always Poetry."

rshowalter - 01:24pm Nov 4, 2000 (#129) For Jihadij and Leda,

The title of the thread is

Paradigm Shift --- whose getting there?

I'd say we are.

People have a problem - logic:

University students with this problem, and 99 per cent of them got it wrong. The reason for that extraordinary degree of error, he says, is that there is limited space in what researchers call "working memory": the low-capacity, short-term memory that supports language, arithmetic and reasoning. When we draw our mental models of a situation our working memory runs out of space very quickly. So, to save time, space and effort, we leave vital information off the "drawings". The pictures are all there, but the labels--like "this picture is only true if the other picture is false"--can go missing.

The first casualty of a full memory is anything that's not true, says Johnson-Laird. People can cope with the potential falsity of single-clause sentences, such as "Pat loves Val". If someone says that's untrue, it's clear what they mean. "But they are not so hot with the potential falsity of 'John is tall and Mary is short'," he says. If we are told that this statement is false there are suddenly a lot of options to consider. Does it mean that John is short, or that Mary is tall, or that neither is tall or short, or that we can't draw any conclusion about their heights? When anything but the simplest situation involves falsity the number of possible scenarios quickly becomes too great to hold in working memory. So, Johnson-Laird claims, we ditch the falsity and hope for the best. http://www.newscientist.com/features/features.jsp?id=ns226844

"If we are told that this statement is false ... "

Perhaps if people (who wouldn't have the ability to check) are told that an option is false ... in paradigm terms ... they close their minds to it!

everything I say is untrue

The most terrible thing about mental models, once we've become accustomed to them, is how reflexively we use them, and how confident we are in their truth.

We couldn't function, otherwise.

But when it goes wrong - ouch.

when it goes wrong, people have to 'unlearn' that what they received or considered to be wrong is actually not wrong, but right.

Unlearning is a harder task than straight learning. Rubbing out, removing a false model is hard, then not confusing the new Knowledge with the old-wrong model is also hard.

Much better to have clean straight correct models embedded directly into the culture.

xpat , as you say

"Much better to have clean straight correct models embedded directly into the culture.

And somehow, for individuals and for cultures, that is the usual case. If you look at how well many people work, and, horrors aside, how well social relations work, it is often stunning how much workably right is connected together - correct enough to use.

Except sometimes.

And as a culture, we have yet to face clearly how to handle the exceptions. The exceptions can be crucial - large scale matters of life and death, or of high stakes otherwise.

In these exceptional cases there can be compelling reasons for unlearning and relearning. The need for sanitation, handwashing and more, that was central to the Semmelweis case is an important example, with needs to raise consciousness and discipline action still much with us after a century an a half.

Unlearning is a harder task than straight learning. Rubbing out, removing a false model is hard, then not confusing the new Knowledge with the old-wrong model is also hard. So hard that there may be something like force, at the least, moral force, if the unlearning is to be motivated.

If a particular specialist group "owns" the old, misleading knowledge, and has operational power to enforce it, not subject to the disciplines of checking, much harm can be done.

As a culture, we have not solved this problem well, and I believe that this thread has gone a long way toward defining and explaining the problems involved, in a way that can really be used, and can lead to solutions.

The notion of what paradigm conflict is has been defined and elucidated more clearly, I believe, than ever before (#29 rshowalter Wed 09/08/2000 21:36 )

xpat , possumdag , bNice__ , and other posters have emphasized much more incisively than I could myself the importance of an economic and social perspective in these matters - a consideration of "what makes sense in terms of gains and losses" as a way of looking at these problems.

A very important insight, in my view, that I'd shied away from, has been focused - the notion that for certain kinds of problems, unless checking is morally forcing , right answers may never come, and huge harm may be done. rshowalter Mon 21/08/2000 18:51

That is a point that I've come to feel is absolutely essential, which would require a change in the moral usages of our culture, that would make a much better world possible. It will take persuasion, and some change in institutional relations, to bring that about.

I've seen some changes, which may not be sufficient for action, but which are real, in that direction, in my own case.

I think xpat and I may be able to help with changing the culture here. I've been in the middle of what may be as important an example of paradigm conflict impasse as any since Semmelweis - and the case, which has gone on a long time, has been very extensively documented. If it happens that I'm wrong, I'll be reduced to Menken's proverbial "grease spot." That's seeming progressively less and less likely. If I prevail, and it looks like that will happen, an extensive empirical base for the definitions and explanations of paradigm conflict impasse set out here will be available.

It is possible, as I've said, that the Showalter-Kline case has recently passed the "crisis" stage of paradigm conflict impasse, and that results, from here on may be (at least mostly) in the domain of "normal science." That could not have happened, without this thread and the thinking on it, without other threads here, and without extensive, very long term, active, if conflicted, help from The New York Times since about six months before Steve Kline wrote this appeal -- http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klinerec -- an appeal that the NYT responded to, as best it could, in a way that illustrates vividly how essential it is, in matters of paradigm conflict impasse, to have checking that is morally forcing or in some other operational way, forcing. If our problem could have been checked, within the current social usages, which forbid morally forcing checking of respected stakeholders, it would have been, long since, through the efforts of people associated with the TIMES. I don't think it will be easy to find, anywhere else, such a clear case of how impossible closure in the absence of morally forcing checking is, in paradigm conflict impasse, than that full record, including public postings, published stories, and private correspondence. It is a story of hard work and much good faith on all sides, with competent work on all sides, and for that reason illustrates with special force the key point to be made. For cases that matter enough, checking has to be morally forcing. Otherwise, closure may never occur.

If I had understood points made clear on these theads, I might have saved more than seven years, many thousands of research years in neural medicine would have been better focused, and many billions of dollars in commercial and military expenditure would have been better focused. I also would have saved a lot of trouble for other people. I kept trying to "clarify" when, so far as I could tell, and so far as anybody could show me explicitly, things were already clear -- clear enough that anyone who wanted to understand could have. The problem was, and remains, that we've found an oversight that logically changes conclusions for the last 300 years, nobody wanted to say "yes." to that.

It wasn't the clarity - it was the price tag. So I was focusing on the wrong problem, and wearing myself and others out, for a long time- trying to rephrase and clarify. And I knew something was desperately wrong, but I hadn't pegged it.

Now, thanks to xpat and friends, that's clear. So now the problem is well on the way to solution.

In my case, the key question is

4. Do the axioms of pure math have a domain of definition, or not? If they do, and you are outside that domain of definition, can you do experiments (symbolic and model-physical system matching) or not?

(This isn’t settled in the profession – but YES YOU CAN.)

This seems to be a very expensive thing for an individual mathematician to admit to, because when the answer is "yes" then there's a lot of useful but nevertheless expensive checking that becomes obligatory, starting about 300 years ago. So it is a hard thing for an individual to say "yes" to - because of the prices "yes" carries for that individual.

Maybe this is the sort of thing that can be resolved by a fairly large standing bet. I don't think the point can be competently denied in public. Things may be moving "through channels" now -- but even so, I'm thinking carefully about crafting such a bet.

A large bet, sounds like you'd need a fairy godmother to back such a wager !?

Well, beyond a couple thousand, yes. Maybe the thing to do would be to take the bet around (there are good boards, and good departments, to take it around) and then, after surviving, with risks less, and interest more, see if I could get a REAL wager. Something to draw a crowd.

There are millions of man-years of life at stake here medically, and a lot more in other areas - somebody ought to bite. Bill Gates might be the supra-optimal - he has reason to care about the arithmetic in his own business.

For ten years, nobody's given me a single counterexample, but nobody will say "yes". And the fear level's been high. Maybe nobody has to say "yes," for a while, once it becomes clear that nobody has a reason to say "no" - - or any objection to the modelling - except that it takes some re-evaluation of some main line math modelling, starting with celestial mechanics and working back up (including some computer algorithms) to the present time.

Ask an Aussie who likes a wager and knows how to draw a crowd .... only ONE name comes to mind ..

I can't remember where i read it, but, somewhere amongst the Showalter writings, didn't is see a ref to there being a current wrong manner of thinking with respect to the workings of the heart, could you illucidate - no not on the wrong cocktail :) but i did see 'Saving Grace' this weekend, and medicinal moves are afoot in Oz re that weed.

xpat, people don’t understand how the physics of the heart beat works. They can measure a lot about it, and have done so. But they don’t have models that describe how the heart muscle operates, from the basic physics up, either in health of in disease. That means that the most basic mechanisms of the most common kind of death in industrialized countries aren’t understood.

The problem, I’m quite sure, is that cardiologiists now have the conduction equation for heart muscle wrong, with the inductance thought to be only a billionth of what it actually is. That mistake totally hides the physics that is actually going on, and hides the clinical hope that understanding so often brings. Until cardiologists (and neuroscientists) get that equation right, they can’t possibly understand how the heartbeat works, and how an uncontrolled oscillation called ventricullar fibrillation , the # 1 immediate cause of death in industrialized societies, happens.

For this reason, a question about how to algebraically simplify crosseffects in physical models – a question of what the rules are for writing down finite increment equations in the first place to represent these models, is more than an “academic” matter. It is a big time matter of life and death.

I believe that if cardiologist understood the physics of the uncontrolled oscillations of ventricular fibrillation, this killer might often be controlled easily – with a mix of drugs probably on the shelf now, drugs best picked and used by the cardiologists themselves.

But now, with the inductance of heart muscle grossly underestimated (and therefore ignored) the physics doesn’t make sense, and progress in the prevention of this killer is painfully slow and halting. Research physicians are taking shots in the dark. Nothing is really working in the clean way that things often work when the mechanism of a disease is actually understood.

The word “fibrillation” is defined as “very rapid irregular contractions of the muscle fibers of the heart resulting in a lack of synchrony between heartbeat and pulsebeat.” The contractions aren't irregular in every sense - they look periodic and wave like, not necessarily disorganized. But they don’t serve the purpose of pumping blood, and if the oscillations are strong enough, and the pumping of blood is too small, a person dies.

When you hear that a “heart stopped” it didn’t stop initially, but went into oscillations that ceased to pump blood. Sometimes, a big electrical shock can stop the fibrillatory oscillations, and set the heart back to beating in the coordinated way blood pumping takes, saving a person’s life.

In many references, the word “fibrillation” is not used – “arrhythmia” is used instead. This makes sense, because the fatal, unsynchronized oscillation maybe be large scale and orderly in many ways – but not synchronized so that the heart pumps blood.

If ever there was a major “matter of life and death” where right answers matter, this is it. We’d like to know how fibrillation, or arrythmia, happens physically, so that we can stop it effectively.

I’d like to quote from a recent article I took from MEDLINE, the US National Library of Medicine database, that summarized the current state of work. I’ll be commenting in italics, to summarize what is being said in more direct language that I believe is fair.

Geriatrics 2000 Aug;55(8):26-8, 31-2, 35-6

Ventricular arrhythmias. Preventing sudden death with drugs and ICD devices. Doherty JU, Fuchs S, Tecce MA +i Thomas Jefferson University School of Medicine, Philadelphia, USA.

Sudden cardiac death occurs most frequently in persons age 50 to 60, and serious ventricular arrhythmias are the cause of death in most cases. The underlying substrate is usually CAD, either a healed infarction or an acute ischemic event.

(The arrythmia starts at a locality of heart muscle starved for circulation, or a locality that was scarred when it was starved for circulation in the past. The arrythmia starts for reasons that are not understood.)

Early studies using antiarrhythmic drugs to improve post-MI survival led instead to increased mortality, casting doubt on this approach.

(People found drugs that tended to suppress oscillations somewhat, under some circumstances, for reasons that were not understood at the level of physical cause. But when these drugs were tried in clinical trials, they killed more people than would have died without them, and the trials were shut off early, due to the bad results, which have never been explained.)

A cascade of studies using newer antiarrhythmic drugs showed some promise in selected patients post MI.

(All sorts of new antiarrythmics have been found and tried, and some seem like they may be promising, but not very promising. Nothing really works, and the process by which these drugs work is not understood, because the basic physics of the arrythmia (or of normal hear contraction) is not understood.)

Another approach--using implantable defibrillators--may show greater benefit than antiarrhythmic drugs in patients at serious risk, but the widespread implantation of these devices may be cost-prohibitive.

(We know that shock often works to stop fibrillation, and we can put electrodes into high risk patients so we can shock them more directly and faster, but this is expensive.)

Management of serious ventricular arrhythmias is guided by the individual patient's comorbidities, cardiac function, history of ischemia, and perceived risk of sudden death.

(We’re trying hard, doing the best we can based on what little we can judge from the statistical results we see when we keep track of who lives and who dies. But we don’t understand how the ventricullar fibrillation works, and our treatments don’t work very well.)

PMID: 10953684, UI: 20409845

People have the neural (and heart muscle) conduction equation very wrong, and wrong in a way that obscures the basic mechanisms of heart oscillation, and particularly fibrillation. If they had the fiber inductance right, they could understand the physical mechanism of oscillation that is occurring (which involves inductance) and mechanisms to stop the arrythmia would be pretty self-evident - what’s needed is damping, and change in g in the heart muscle fibers. (To control epilepsy, which is somewhat analogous in brain, you’d want to increase g locally in neurons.) Mixes of drugs to produce the damping, with no other ill effects, ought to be fairly easy to prepare, once the right equation was available to the cardiologists, so that they could act on the basis of real physical understanding.

That’s because an oversight was made in derivation of physical models from coupled physical circumstances. That math should be fixed.

xpat , who might you have in mind who might take a wager, in the interest of saving lives? Could you let me know by email?

Some might be interested in reading a very simple talk I gave last year. I addressed, as simply as I could, the questions “WHAT'S INDUCTANCE?” and “WHAT DOES INDUCTANCE DO?” in a neural context. http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/MWN_TALK .

Link above is slow to open!

Ask an Aussie "Who likes a wager and knows how to draw a crowd" .... only ONE name comes to mind ..

So i take it you don't spend much time around the tables Showalter!

It is Summer in Oz - depends whose around - i'll make you a list of prospects.

Did you say that there are other problems that, if sorted, would improve life chances? What about looking at small things under microscopic lenses ... this can help people can't it?

xpat , I'm having a very slow time getting on this thread (minutes per transfer) with the rest of my connections going fine. So forgive me for moving slowly.

I need to explain more clearly why inductance matters - I'll use analogies to springs-mass-dashpots, and to pendulum-mass systems, pointing out that it makes a difference, to how the system will behave, when the mass (or, in the neural or heart muscle case, the electrical analog of intertial mass, the inductance) is underestimated by factors of billions, or trillions, as is happening now. A string with a fishing weight at the end acts like a pendulum. It is easy to see how it oscillates. A string with a tiny feather on the end, doesn't act like a pendulum. That's the kind of difference involved here. More on that later. But let me talk about magnetic lenses, as you suggested.

An enormous fraction of the whole dollar and hour expenditure in the sciences, worldwide, is now devoted to trying to find out details that we cannot see with microscopes, because electron microscope resolution is not high enough.

Atoms in molecules - shells in those atoms - bond angles - folding patterns - directly visable high resolution DNA chains, where the nucleotides could be spotted visually, or by machine, along with details of folding and bond angles -- how nice it would be to see these things! How much easier it would be, for a lot of biology and chemistry, if we could only SEE at the scales where the molecules exist, and the scale where the chemistry is happening !

The electron microscope, for fifty years, has been stalled so far as resolution goes, because of something called "spherical aberration" in magnetic lenses - a distortion so bad that, for a set wavelength of electrons, linear resolution is typically less than 1% of what it would be if the spherical aberration was eliminated. (In contrast, optical light lenses are now nearly perfect.)

Now, for fifty years, people have dreamed of getting rid of that magnetic lens spherical aberration. People have been stumped. In my view, they've been stumped, because the equations involved, which are stongly coupled, have not been correctly written down in the first place, at the modeling stage, because of an old error that needs to be fixed.

Let's suppose that's right, and that magnetic lenses could be made without spherical aberration - with 100 times better linear (10,000 X better areal) resolution for a set electron energy level.

This would be a revolution in the technological end of empirical science - especially in the biological sciences. Many of the jobs (maybe, counting dollars, most of the jobs) done in biological labs might get done tens or even hundreds of times faster than today, and with visual outputs that fit a fundamental fact - that we are a visual species, and we understand and manipulate visual information much better than any other kind.

I've looked at this, and in my view DNA reading would be 100 times faster, at least. (Much faster, anyway.) Protein folding studies, which are usually impossible for the proteins of biological and medical interest, and alway slow, would be possible when they are now impossible, and THOUSANDS of times faster for the cases where current X-ray techniques work. Studies of membranes would be possible that are not, and much faster in many, many cases.

We could see, visually, how enzymes and proteins fit together.

With better resolution, lower energy electrons could be used, and contrast schemes could be much more sophisticated than today. That would mean that biological molecules could be visualized to the level where atom type, bond angle and detailed structural information would be directly available with energy levels that didn't destroy the sample, under more natural conditions, with equipment one could hope to make routine and easy to use (working with optics is MUCH easier if you're comfortably away from resolution limits, rather than pushing them.)

Take something specific - the battle to understand cancer. The nuts and bolt work of that enterprise would be MUCH faster if electron microscopes with near theoretical resolution were available, and adapted to biological tasks. How much faster? My guess would be three to ten times more information output for person-year or money unit of input. That would save many lives, much agony, and many billions of dollars.

With the better resolution, science would be more understandable, and more aesthetically beautiful, as well.

Again, this is an issue where big-time issues of life and death are at stake. But also again, a mistake in math, now 350 years old, has to be fixed, and that's a wrench to the standard math-physics community of practice, just because the mistake is so old, and so embedded, so that there's some reworking that would have to be faced, once the mistake was faced.

(I wonder how long it will take me to get the next transfer --- here's hoping. I'll be timing.)

It was fast! - In a while, more on what inductance does to change the picture of ventricular fibrillation, and other issues of human interest.

Anything related to renal 'flows' re past, current and potentional appreciaton of kidney function is also of interest.

Does heat/cold affect flows?

FLAG: sidetracking here, but, shows COMPLEXITY: http://helix.nature.com/nsu/001214/001214-9.html

physics : Silk and soap show why flags flap JONATHAN TROUT

A silk thread flutters in a watery breeze

Using soapy water and a bit of thread, researchers have shed light on what causes a flag to flutter in the breeze — one of the oldest and most experimentally inaccessible questions in fluid dynamics.

In a set-up analogous to "a one-dimensional flag in a two-dimensional wind", Jun Zhang and his colleagues at the New York and Rockefeller universities suspended a silk thread in a fast-flowing stream of soapy water. Using monochromatic light, the researchers photographed the interference patterns created by differences in the thickness of the soapy film as it moved past the thread. They then looked at a range of thread lengths and flow rates. The results are published in Nature1.

They found that, at low flow speeds, the thread extends straight out in the direction of the flow, and remains extended. When the thread is longer, the flow forms into what is known as a 'von Kármán vortex street'2 — an alternating double row of vortices. This effect is responsible for, among other things, the sound tones generated by a wire vibrating in the wind, and the current patterns that form around a rock in a stream.

When the flow rate is higher, though, the flag starts to flap in a highly stable, regular manner. The vortex street is still present, but is flung from side to side, heavily distorted by the flapping motion, and showing striking, sinuous trailing spirals in the photographs.

"From the experiment, it is quite clear that the flapping of a 'flag' is not because of the turbulence in the wind, or the presence of the flagpole," says Zhang. "It is intrinsically embedded in the system, as a result of the inertia dynamics of the flag interacting with the surrounding fluid flow."

Previous models for a flapping flag have had little experimental evidence to back them up. The most famous of these were devised by Lord Raleigh3, who thought the flapping was caused by an instability due to quickly changing air speeds on either side of the flag.

These models also largely neglected many of the factors the New York team considers to be instrumental in the effect, such as the tension, elasticity and mass of the flapping material. The transition point between the flapping and non-flapping states, for instance, appears to be when the elastic energy of the thread is matched by the kinetic energy of the flow.

When a second, identical thread was added to the flowing soap film — a small distance away from the first, so that the two were side by side — the team noticed a new effect. The threads tended to lock into phase, flapping in tandem, and leaving the film between them relatively undisturbed.

When the threads were moved a little further apart, they locked into another stable state — one in which they flapped exactly out of phase with one another. This stretches and compresses the film as it moves through the widening and narrowing channel created by the thread 'walls'. When the tips of the threads touch, the flow is halted, leading to a build-up of pressure. The enclosed fluid is then released as large droplets when the walls part.

For certain lengths of thread there is a third mutually stable state, in which both threads are fully extended and not flapping. And when the threads are moved further apart, the coupling between them becomes less cohesive and eventually vanishes.

These models could help research into the dynamics of blood flow, or the development of valveless pumping technology, or even the fluid dynamics of flight and swimming.

Zhang’s team intends to test its results in three dimensions in the near future. "In the next few years we should be able to study dynamic boundaries and swimming fish," says Zhang. "It is well known that fish swim efficiently — who would dismiss the possibility that future marine vehicles might be propelled by flappers rather than propellers?"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns22694

The pictures in the NATURE article xpat cites above show very coordinated, structured eddies (Kharman vortices) on both sides of the model "flag".

Beautiful ORDERLY flow structures.

It used to be believed that, when flows became fully turbulent, all order ceased, and only statistical behavior remained. People went so far as to refer to turbulence as "Statistical fluid mechanics." Now we know that turbulent flows are patterned, and that regimes, though complicated, are orderly, especially at surfaces and interfaces. The there is a great deal of order, and knowledge of that order is crucial for understanding mixing, and making it faster (something I worked on ) and for studying many other things.

There are some beautiful pictures of the orderliness of flows in the literature, some of the best collected in An Album of Fluid Motion assembled by Milton Van Dyke of the Stanford Department of Mechanical Engineering (Parabolic Press, Stanford Ca.)

I tell some of the story about the paradigm impasse that Steve finally pushed through in an eulogy I gave for him at Stanford Chapel http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klineul .

Steve and I both believed that with the crossterms of coupled equations properly set out, flow patterns that could only be modelled by correllation now could be handled in more detail. One thing we hoped to model, in detail, were flows of vortex streets, such as those shown in the flag model xpat refers to.

Steve referred to the relevance of those crossterms to fluid mechanics work in a letter http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klinerec . That letter did get me a great deal of much-appreciated help. Progress has been made since, largely progress due to advances of understanding in this thread, that has defined paradigm conflict more clearly, in ways Steve would have appreciated very much. I wish Steve were still alive to see the progress.

Speaking of progress. I'm making some. Setting up for a bet, cleanly. Have to play it straight. I've gotten some help from historians of mathematics. Good ones. Generous ones. Supportive ones. From a while back. That help is useful now. There's no reason to doubt that the 350 year old mistake was made - except that it is hard to think about such an old mistake, and it is hard to face the need to start rechecking things, from so far back.

Probably the best book on measurement, and the connection of measurement to math, is a four volume set FOUNDATIONS OF MEASUREMENT by (different author orders on different volumes) David H. Krantz, R. Dunan Luce, Patrick Suppes, and Amos Tversky.

the first three men are alive, and we've corresponded. There isn't any more today, to add to this, written at the beginning of Chapter10: Dimensional Analysis and Numerical Laws.

"Taken together, the numerical measures of physics exhibit a very simple algebraic structure which, although completely familiar, and therefore not surprising, tends to be mysterious when given any thought. . .. . ."

Mysterious, and entirely without any proved foundations.

There's a gaping hole, at the interface between physics and math representation, about how you write down finite increment equations representing coupled circumstances in the first place, before the calculus even begins. Before differential equations can be defined from the finite increment equations. Logically, that hole came to exist when calculus happened - with Newton and Liebniz. Steve and I have found, that to fill that hole, crosseffects have to be algebraically simplified, as measurement calculations, done in a dimensionally consistent unit system, which means at unit scale. Done once, and specified - so there's no vanishing in the limit- no false infinitessimals, no bogus infinities.

No logical problem there. The only problem is, that the mistake-oversight is old, and fixing it will mean going back to when the mistake-oversight happened.

It doesn't look like anybody will find any objection to the S-K work, historically or analytically, except that it is distastefully old, and distastefully inconvenient, because it goes so far back.

I'm working now, and getting some help now, to set that up as a nice clean proposition that can be backed by a nice clean bet -- so that a matter of life and death, and much technical hope, can be faced, and not evaded.

Showalter - you're a Seeker of Truth !

http://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily/ http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,412354,00.html

How ideas change By David Warsh, Boston Globe Columnist, 12/3/2000 http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/338/business/How_ideas_change+.shtml is a fine review of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' . Warsh calls Kuhn (paraphrasing here) "perhaps the dominant intellectual figure in the second half of the 20th century."

The review keys off two recent books: 'Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times , by Steve Fuller, and The Road Since Structure , a collection of Kuhn's essays.

A nice quote from Warsh's review: "The sense of personal responsibility that Freud took away from humankind, Kuhn in large measure succeeded in giving back."

In this thread I, along with , xpat, possemdag, BNIce , and others, focus the notion of paradigm impasse farther than Kuhn did, with a view to resolutions of paradigm conflict impasses when questions of fact, on a crucial issue, are in dispute.

"The most striking thing in Kuhn's account is the story of how Harvard (where he did the work) denied him tenure in 1956, then declined to welcome him back to Cambridge in 1979 (he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology instead). That chilly reaction may have something to do with continuing ambivalence toward this semiunderground classic." .. from the above review .... begs the question 'Are members of formal academia 'Seekers of Truth' ?

No they're not. Truth seeking is a subordinate value, not a primary one.

If you look at THE UNIVERSITY: An owner's manual by Henry Rosovsky, long the Provost of Harvard, and read his sections on tenuring, promotion, the distribution of funds, and interdepartmental relations, you'll see much to admire. Universities are structures of great sophistication. But complicated and necessarily rule bound human structures. And "truth" is a very subordinate value indeed, beside the complicated status relations and widely distributed veto powers and customs that shape a university.

Especially when "truth" is in some way awkward for someone with effective veto power within the system.

About six months before Steve Kline died, Steve and I set out some of the difficulties in a letter to the New York Times http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/whytimes2

Once the limitations of the academy are ecognized, resolutions to paradigm conflict impasses become possible.

I believe that the core insight necessary is this. When the stakes get high enough, right answers need to become morally forcing or institutionally forcing in some workable sense.

That is not the way things are, typically, today.

A question organisations pose is

"What business are we in?"

I would have thought that Universities were in the business of extending and redefining KNOWLEDGE especially with respect to Doctorates.

The course work aspect is important, yet the knowledge extention bestows international respect and status - right?

Temperature Regulation or Heat Regulation in Living Organs

Prof. Michel Cabanac, MD.

Departement de physiologie

Faculte de medecine

Universite Laval

Quebec, Canada G1K 7P4

The difference between heat and temperature is not obvious at first glance; the Greek word thermos included both concepts. Heat is a form of energy, hence is an extensive variable. Temperature is a tensive variable. In a given body heat and temperature are related by the following equation: Q=McT1-T2, in which Q is the amount of heat added or removed to pass from T1 to T2, Mis the mass of the body, c is the specific heat, and T1 T2 are two temperatures. It follows therefore that heat and temperature tend to covary. If mass and specific heat remain constant, Q=f(T) and one might be tempted to conclude that heat is regulated. As a result In addition, the old controversy about heat and temperature was revived recently.

This will be refuted from two points of view.

1) Theoretical: Modern physiology has borrowed system analysis and model-building from cybernetics. Yet, the use of the engineer's concepts and vocabulary has capacity for two perils, semantic and conceptual. First, biologists may change the meaning of the engineers vocabulary, or may misunderstand this vocabulary. Second, a conceptual disadvantage is derived from the very origin of control theory which is mainly concerned with signal processing and less with energy flow (with the noticeable exception of the branch of space technology dealing with systems resembling living beings). On the other hand, energy and matter supply is a major problem for animal survival. It is therefore necessary to revise the whole concepts of regulation in order to face this specific problem of living beings.

2) Experimental: data will show that defense responses against thermal chalenges are triggered by body core temperature, and that the postulated heat flux sensors in the human skin do not exist. http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/Pages/Departments/

Seeker -- Interesting reference. Cabanac refers usefully to the connection between physiology and engineering systems approaches. He doesn't mention current limitations of these approaches as now practiced. To apply engineering systems approaches to physiology, one faces semantic and conceptural problems, some fundamental to the enterprise. In physiology, or the study of any other very coupled and complicated system, one comes up against the same difficulties that limit systems approaches in engineering. When coupling occurs, systems analysis doesn't do well. I'm adressing a core reason why the theory does badly -- the finite increment equations describing system behavior have to be written down correctly in the first place. Steve Kline and I worked on this coupling problem, because it was so central a cause of the unsolved problems in e