Science is a Sacred Cow (Bookreview)

     Standen, Anthony: Science is a Sacred Cow (1950) I got this book for Christmas, from my son, who is able to find all kinds of good things in used book shops. This is one of those good things, even though Standen's rant in the end fails to convince any but those who want some sticks to beat science with.
     Standen writes well, and makes many valid points, but overall his book doesn't satisfy. He isn't attacking science so much as scientism - the belief that Science is the final answer to everything. He does capitalise Science, which shows he knows that he is attacking an attitude towards science rather than science itself. He was a scientist himself, actually.
     But his arguments, relying as they do on shifting definitions and vague concepts, as often miss the target as hit it. The problem begins with his use of the word science or Science. Most of the time he is clearly talking about some people's attitudes (most of them, like himself, academics, by the way.) Sometimes, he is talking about science as social, political, or economic activity, or of some combination of these three. Yet he almost always fails to state explicitly what he's attacking, which is a pity, since his attacks on scientism are as valid today as they were back in 1950. Sometimes, usually when he's saying something nice, he is talking about science as a human activity. And while he writes in an easy to understand style, that doesn't mean he writes clearly. In fact the colloquialism of his style often hides the muddiness of his thought. Perhaps he thought that by being more precise he would leave "the interested layman" trailing after him wondering where on earth (or elsewhere) Standen was leading him.

     Besides, much of his specific criticism has failed as science has continued to discover new things since 1950. His critique of psychology, for example, rests on the (correct) observation that Freud, Jung et al were in fact poets, and that novelists do a much better job of what these men set out to do. Since his day, these men's psychological theories have found some use in literature departments, and among those people whose malaise is one of the imagination rather than of the nervous system. Standen also believes that psychology of the more biological kind is pointless because man has a soul. So he really rejects psychology as a science.

     Standen himself has a blind spot: he believes that science aims for Truth, and so of course he's upset when it produces merely probable truth. Thus mathematics, in which one can know (his emphasis) that one is right is the best science of all. Here and there he drops hints about God and morality which suggest that the major reason he rejects Science is that it conflicts with his beliefs in absolute moral truths. But he tends to disguise this attitude in the (correct) claim that there are questions that science can't answer, and that many of these questions are even more important than the questions science can answer. Which of course is true, and immediately raises the question about what questions are worth asking, and how to answer them. On this he makes wise comments, pointing out that science can only supply a more or less accurate description of what happens, and what is likely to happen if one chooses one or another course of action, but that the choice is an ethical question. But he fails to allow that precisely because science can predict a wide range of consequences, it is essential to any decision-making. One of the criteria for any ethical choice is that its consequences do less harm than the problem that raised the ethical issue in the first place. That is, choices based on moral judgements are only as good as the reach of those judgements. Too many are made with insufficient analysis of probable consequences, and so often lead to more harm than they are intended to prevent.
     Since scientism is a common attitude in universities and colleges, Standen has found many quotations from science texts, and these make for both hilarity and appalled fascination. He makes too few comments on the kind of science education that should be offered so that the ordinary person has enough of the scientific attitude to facts that (s)he can make sense of the rather complicated questions that must be resolved, such as climate change. Standen's type of critique has had its effects: Scientists rarely give certain answers these days. Something is happening to the weather, and the best guess is that it's caused in large part by our spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But since the mechanisms are poorly understood, and at best the models lead to only more or less probable scenarios, many people think that climate change itself is a merely probable guess about what's happening, and that nothing is actually happening after all.
     Ironically, many religionists, who believe in absolute certainty, refuse to accept the probabilities that science offers because they also believe that Science is about Truth. Which is Standen's attitude, too, so that in the end Standen is hoist by his own petard. He rejects scientism because it assumes that all sciences are equally about Truth. Yet that is not so, and it doesn't take a scientific training to have that insight. Standen grades the sciences on a descending scale, with math at the top because it provides certainty, and the social sciences at the bottom because they provide at best correlations. So he, too, wants Science rather than science - and his rant is perhaps as much the whinge of a disappointed believer as that of a coolly skeptical critic of self-aggrandising experts. But he writes with wit, so the book is pleasant reading. **

Our Garden

I admire but don't like regimented gardens, with flowers and shrubs and so on neatly arranged in rows, each kind in its own place, none of them mixed up with any others. Our front garden has a mess and mass of different flowers and shrubs: Bleeding heart (white and pink), oriental poppies (red and peach), arabis, dianthus, liatris, lilac, sedum (four varieties), euonymus (two varieties), irises (pale yellow and light purple bearded, dark purple plain), roses (seven varieties), rhododendron, Russian olive, day lilies, creeping thyme, mother of thyme, honeysuckle, Japanese spurge, elderberry, cedar, lavender, heuchera, daffodils, tulips, spirea (two varieties), creeping juniper, violas (volunteers, as they say, but we let them be), white violets, matricaria, grape hyacinths, white hyacinths, columbine, dahlia, hibiscus (a hardy variety), an Alberta spruce, red leaf sand cherry, hollyhocks, pulmonaria, crocuses, creeping phlox (white and pink), campanula, leontipodium, periwinkle, peonies, morning glories poking up their two-leaved seedlings, nine bark, hydrangeas, plus a dozen or so more whose names I forget.

In the side and back gardens we have an apple tree, an oak tree, a number of pin cherries (good for jelly and syrup), a couple of crab apples too young to have bloomed yet, clematis, raspberry, more roses, lily of the valley, woodruff, goat weed (a good ground cover under the deck), more bleeding heart, creeping phlox, irises, periwinkle, and day lilies, wolf willow, a white lilac, oriental lilies, lady's mantle, ferns, pansies, foxglove, delphinium, chrysanthemum, monkshood, phlox, several maples, more cedars, a rowan, primulas, bloodroot, and so on. We also have three beds of vegetables, but apart from the strawberries which come every year, and onions and beans, we haven't decided what to put in yet. By the end of next week, the vegetable beds will be planted and seeded.

Only the veggies are lined up in rows. The rest of our plants grow every which way, they look as if they had arrived and found their places and spaces as best they could. Which is pretty much the way we actually planted them, in patches of three or five plants, and most have spread to many other places. They bloom at different times, so starting with the crocuses, we have something blooming from April to October. We don't rearrange them much. Once in a while, we give away clumps of arabis or creeping phlox, or a bundle of iris roots, or whatever else we happen to have too much of.

We have a few annuals every year. I like large patches of impatiens and snapdragons, my wife likes pansies. The alyssum and forget-me-nots self-seed every year. We try out a few new things every year, this time it will be osteospermums, and purple and white verbenas.

Other people have very neat gardens, which have their own charm. But while I admire them, I don't want my garden to look like them. I like the way our garden looks: it looks as if it's grown there forever.

Ephemera

If you like 1920s and 30s poster and advertising art, you'll like this site of travel posters. I especially liked the Austrian ones, nostalgia is a weakness of mine. Poster and advertising art of the 1950s recalled that earlier period, so much of it will look familar to anyone growing up some 50 years ago.

I collect ephemera myself, mostly railway related. I resize the posters and print them out for gluing to my model (HO and O) buildings.

I was browsing around looking for icons, and found Pixelgirl (google it). Very nice icons, suitable for children and kittens. I downloaded a few for Marie's laptop, since I don't like the bland icons offered by MS. They also have icons for the Mac, in fact some are available only in that format.

Then I looked at a few links on Pixelgirl's page, and found this: also very nice. Interesting photos etc. Liu is a designer. Go have a look, and see if you share my taste in photography.

http://www.cmliu.com/

Snowstorm

     When I drove to Elliot lake about noon today, the roads were dry. When I left E.L. about 2.5 hours later, fine snow was blowing down from the sky and sticking to the asphalt. I kept the speed at 80kph or less. The car held the road well, the winter tires (or tyres) made the difference. The snow muted the colours, reducing even bright reds and greens to softer earth tones, and shifting the dull blues and browns that we Canadians love for our cars into mildly tinted greys.
     Highway 17 showed some bare asphalt, and I could push the car to 90 occasionally. The snow swirled up from the wind of other cars' passing, the oncoming traffics trailed a haze of white dust behind it. I passed no cars between the turnoff and Blind River, and no cars passed me. Eastbound traffic came in short bunches, less than usual: the gathering storm, moving in from the southwest, must have convinced many casual travellers to stay home. The forecast this morning told of 15 to 30cm of snow, and much wind, with freezing rain in the south. Marie just talked to Cassandra, RoRo's flight landed an hour late, and Cassandra said she'd advised RoRo not to drive in from the airport. Bria said they couldn't stand up on the sidewalk. Jon said he wanted to walk to NoFrills for coffee, but decide he could do without it.
     And that's the weather report for this evening.

Turtles

 

Just caught a glimpse of sea turtles as I clicked back to TVO and turned off the TV. I love the way they move through the water, flying in slow motion, their flippers such inadequate wings in air but perfect for water. They are among the oldest species on Earth, hardly changed in tens of millions of years. As they move past the camera, their indifferent gaze reminds us that what we call life is as remote and inhuman a phenomenon as the stars and galaxies. We live, but the life we think we live is an illusion, a play of shadows cast on the screen of consciousness, observed by an observer who cannot observe itself. The body continues to do what it does, and we notice almost none of its functions; yet we flatter ourselves into believing that what we can know of it and the world in which it moves is all the reality there is. We identify our experience with reality. I think the divine injunction against idolatry warns us against just this misidentification.

The turtles don't, apparently, suffer from mind; self sufficient and focussed on the operations of survival, they fly through the oceans and demonstrate grace.

All Creatures Great and Small (book review)

All Creatures Great and Small

I've had enough of politics for a while. Watched the debate last night -- Steve Paikin is an excellent moderator, and kept the debate going smoothly. He really likes politics, and politicians, too, a rare sentiment these days.

I've just finished reading the first Herriot omnibus, a very pleasant book. I didn't read his books when they first came out, but I watched the TV series several times. It reran for years on PBS. So while reading the book, I saw the characters as portrayed on TV, which both helped and hindered, as some of the descriptions were at odds with the appearance of the actors. Never mind, it was a pleasant read, a series of anecdotes that add up to a portrait of the writer and his clients.

Herriot can be sentimental, he's at his best in straightforward story telling. He has a talent for the illuminating detail or remark. His courtship of Helen Alderson was expanded for the series; perhaps Herriot advised on some of the details of what he merely refers to: the long walks they took, the times Helen came along on his rounds, and so on. Herriot doesn' t pretend to be better than he is. He has a temper and self doubts. He doesn't let us in on his innermost thoughts very often, and when he does, we get a fair amount of his feelings for the Dales and their inhabitants. As I've said, these tend towards the sentimental, but his delight in the landscape, the people, and his profession is genuine, as is his regret for the passing of some of the old ways, tempered by his recognition of the value of much of the new. The book isn't exactly a page turner, but its anecdotal structure and plain style (leavened with a dry and pleasant wit) makes it a good bedtime book, one that one may put down and take up again without losing one's place. I will never read it again, but I will give it to someone who can appreciate its plain virtues and pleasures.

Politics: Accountability

     Listened to Rex Murphy's Cross-Canada Checkup on CBC today [January 6, 2008]. The usual mix of rant, hope, trust, cynicism, and naive expectation that if only some pet reform were instituted, all would be well with the world. Well, at least with Canadian politics. Herewith some random comments.

"Accountability"
     A caller from Alberta wanted politicians who represent us to be prosecuted if they make a promise that they don't keep, on the grounds that such a promise is a lie. The man has obviously never been elected to any office in any organisation. The first thing you learn when you are elected is that the largest part of the job is compromise. Usually, you simply can't do what you want to do, or what you said you would do when you want to do it, as there are always people who don't want you to do it.
     Besides, how can you tell whether a politician lied? There are still people here in Ontario that claim that Harris did what he promised. Yes he did - but he very carefully changed certain key definitions before he did it. In my eyes, that amounts to a lie.
     For example, Harris promised to "increase classroom spending." Then he redefined classroom spending very narrowly, so that it amounted to about 50% of the total expenditure on schools, and increased that by 10%. However, he reduced spending in other areas, so that the net result was a decrease in overall spending of about 10%. But he kept his promise! I had predicted exactly this result when my senior high school class asked what would happen now that Mr Harris was Premier. I said: "Mr Harris will keep his promises, but he will first redefine terms so that there will be no actual increase in spending, and there might well be a decrease overall." What's more, Harris increased the provincial debt, a little fact that the NDP haters gloss over or even ascribe to the NDP (I'm sure not intentionally, it's just a slip of the mind. :-))
     The issue of recall is even thornier. Why should a majority of disgruntled voters have the right to recall an MP? [There are always disgruntled voters.] What about the minority of disgruntled voters bwho want to keep him or her in office? What's their recourse? Why should they be deprived of what they consider a reasonable voice in Parliament?
     IMO many voters think that once a person is elected, that person is accountable directly to them. They forget the thousands of other voters, most of whom will disagree on at least one major issue, and many minor ones. They also forget that the MP is accountable to all the people, not just those who voted for him or her.

"MPs represent us, and must do what we, their constituents, want."
     There are several problems with this attitude, the most obvious being that an MP represents not only those who voted for him or her, but also those who didn't. Whose views should prevail? Especially when you consider that most MPs [in Canada] are elected with considerably less than half the total vote, and often with only about a quarter of the eligible vote.
     There is also the subtle difference between representing someone as a negotiator (the US model of legislators) and representing someone as an advocate (our model, also called "responsible government.") A negotiator tries to get what the client wants. An advocate tries to get what's best for the client, whether the client wants it or not, or even knows what it is. The fact is, we have to trust our MPs to do their best for us and the country as a whole. If you have a concern, write. MPs do pay attention to what their constituents put on the record.

"Proportional Representation"
     It might or might not work. My problem is, that there are several systems. Would we have proportional representation nationally, or by Province? If the former, how would the parties ensure that the regions would be well represented? I foresee bitter fights within parties. If Provincially, we might get bitter fights within each province.
     And at what threshold of the popular vote would a party be entitled to a seat?1%? 5%? 3%? 10%? We have over 300MPs, so the threshold matters a lot. 1% of the House is 3 MPs, which could be a significant number when cobbling up a coalition.
     Some suggest that some mix of regional or local representation and national vote should be used. That would result in effectively two elections: one for the leadership and one for the local MP. But we tend to value our local MPs more highly than our national leadership (Illogical, yes, but there it is.)
     Many advocates for PR point to the many democracies that use it. The argument that "Everybody else does it" has never been a good one, as every parent knows. So I'm surprised that apparently sensible people use it. [Besides, there are major differences in the "proportional representation" systems. Moreover, every election system will disgruntle some voters.]

"Why don't the candidates discuss issue X?"
     Because the party's polling has indicated that other issues matter more to more voters.

 Update 2021-09-23: We've just gone through another Federal election, but there was no change. There were a few flips from one party to another, but overall the numbers are almost exactly the same. I fixed a couple of typos, added clarifications, and inserted clip art.