| Friday,
March 8, 2002 Well, the column is done and off. Now the
cleaup. I am NOT going to let things go back to the chaotic mess I usually
live in.
And another virus warning.
Of course the Internet connections have stopped working when I want to
upload this to my site. Very odd.
I have sent a mailing to subscribers. Many have been returned. I have
listed all those on the updated today badmail
page .
If you subscribe and didn't get the mailing, your mailbox may be
full (a common cause of returned mail) or you have subscribed under an
address that is no longer valid. If the latter please send me mail,
subject SUBSCRIBER ADDRESS CHANGE and include
old address = your old email address
new address = new email address.
I need the old one to make the change. Thanks
Incidentally, excite @ home just says it can't deliver. It doesn't tell
me to whom it couldn't deliver, so I can't ever list those in badmail.
Excite @ home doesn't exist any longer...
I have 19 messages returned because they have excite @ home addresses.
Next week I am going to eliminate all entries in the subscriber list that
use that domain address.
Note that I intend to prune this list of those whose mail bounces and
do not show renewals. If you think you subscribe
and have not heard from me in a while, it may be time to renew,
and it's almost certainly time to send me an update to your email address.
I send these warnings out when I think appropriate.
On Voodoo Science
Roland got this cookie today:
The difference between science and the fuzzy
subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects
merely require scholarship. -- Robert Heinlein
It's a good aphorism, but it does itself require the use of reason:
what is a "fuzzy subject"? Is law? History? Certainly good
history requires both reasoning and scholarship.
The "social sciences" are perhaps the worst here, in that
they do require something like scholarship, and generally nothing like
reasoning.
Robert was a dear friend and a brilliant man, but I would love to
debate this one with him. It certainly contains the germ of a truth, but
it is far to easy to apply it far too broadly...
It is also certainly the case that what Edith Efrom called "Regulatory
Science" which is what many "environmental scientists"
approve requires scholarship. It also requires reasoning, but the
reasoning is on the closed system that emerges from scholarship; and that,
I think, is where the real truth lies.
I long ago did an essay on "The Voodoo Science" in which I
pointed out that novelists require only plausibility, lawyers need
evidence, but science requires data -- and also requires that ALL the data
be taken into account, which means going outside closed systems to check
with the real world. And that, I think, is the real difference between the
fuzzy subjects and the sciences and the humanities: if you endlessly apply
logic to a closed system with no chance of checking against reality, you
had better have chosen the right closed system -- and we have no way of
knowing what that one is.
Vanderbilt's restatement of Pournelle's critique of
Heinlein's aphorism:
The difference between science and the fuzzy
subjects is that science requires accounting for _all_ the data.
I suspect there is a close inverse correlation
between the amount of relevant data either carelessly or carefully ignored
and the uselessness of the resultant "science".
Henry
Good point.
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