| Sunday, January
21, 2007
Think of this letter as a guest essay since I have not time
due to being at a convention:
Dr. Pournelle,
The conclusion of Murray's WSJ series
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009541 <http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009541>
is probably the most important for regular visitors of
Chaos Manor to read. The first 2 installments are well-written and
persuasive, but contain little that has not been previously stated in some
form by you or your contributors.
The final installment deals with the necessity of
educating those with high (120+) IQ to imbue them with wisdom. Murray states
that "The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It
requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and
fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously
missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students,
especially those who avoid serious science and math (emphasis added), go
from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher
who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course
that forces them to say to themselves, 'I can't do this.'"
With this fresh in mind, read this account of the Duke
lacrosse imbroglio
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/190uejex.asp?pg=1
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/190uejex.asp?pg=1>
There were few among the Duke faculty who were willing
to speak up for the lacrosse players early in the case. There was Steven
Baldwin, the "Duke chemistry professor who finally broke his faculty
colleagues' own wall of silence on October 24, publishing a letter in the
Duke student newspaper, the Chronicle, denouncing his fellow professors for
what he called their 'shameful' treatment of Seligmann and Finnerty and
rebuking the Duke administration for having 'disowned its lacrosse-playing
student athletes.'"
"There just wasn't anything clear in (Duke president)
Brodhead's statements that we were going to believe our own students," said
Michael Gustafson, a Duke engineering professor who has criticized the
university's handling of the March 13-14 incident. "There was obviously
conduct with which Duke did not agree--parties with underage consumption of
alcohol, hiring strippers, and if that was the whole story, then Brodhead
was absolutely right to condemn it. The problem comes into play when there's
a rape allegation. There was never a clear distinction drawn between those
incidents and rape, so there was never a clear sense that the students were
innocent until proven guilty."
The numerous denunciations of the lacrosse team
documented among the Duke faculty all come from professors of humanities or
social sciences.
I had never considered the study of math and science
important to developing wisdom (even though I have degrees in physics and
engineering). It may be more of a factor than I had thought.
Steve Chu
==
The Western World seems to have forgotten its
heritage. Plato's Academy had a sign over the doorpost: no entry without
mathematics. Geometry and mathematics encourage rigorous thinking, and for
those who will specialize in abstract symbol manipulation practice in
mathematics is essential. Real education -- which is learning to do abstract
reasoning -- is simple not possible without mathematical skills, and the
West has long known this. Dorothy Sayers in her essays on education stresses
this. (Sayers was an early advocate of higher education for women in a time
when English universities discouraged that sort of thing.) Sayers' essays on
the importance of Latin or other inflected languages, and mathematics, as
means for encouraging precision in thought and language are, of course, long
forgotten as we enter the new Dark Age.
(A Dark Age is a period in which everyone has not only forgotten how to
do something, but has forgotten that it was ever done: such as the common
knowledge that 95% of the children in American can (and did) learn to read
in first grade, and overcome ADD and ADHD without drugs.)
Most "Social Scientists" are practitioners of Voodoo.
See my essay on that. Charles Murray is
an actual scientist applying scientific method and rigorous thinking to
actual data about human beings in society. This makes him a rarity. He
shouldn't be. There are plenty of data out there, we have long had the
mathematical tools to construct predictive equations to generate testable
hypotheses about human activities, and we have for a dozen years had the
computing power to solve those equations. Before computers we could build
models we could not solve, and the result was a series of simplifying
assumptions known to be false but needed because without them we could get
no answers at all. we now can invert matrices in seconds, and apply
numerical analysis non-linear systems --but we don't in general DO it.
Instead our "social scientists" continue to teach cookbook stat in their
"mathematics for social scientists" courses (social science majors right
fear the rigor of real mathematics and never take courses in the math
department). Social science remains Voodoo.
We need clear thinking, and the rigor of mathematical training encourages
it. Alas, in general it is not to be, because we are truly entering a Dark
Age.
======
I remain at Further Confusion at San Jose, and they have a busy day
scheduled for me. I'll try to give a bit of the flavor of the place in
tomorrow's View. It's a bit like being in a real world cartoon...
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