Ian,
Sorry about the long lines. Hope this helps.
GLENN:
Irrationality is the tendency to draw a conclusion before
thinking it over very critically and
before confirming this conclusion against experience.
IAN:
Which, in many cases in life, is an impossible task. Often time is
more important as an element in a situation that the actual value of a
response. Sometimes we must trust to blind luck and just do
<whatever>.
I don't know about *many* cases, but it's a good point nonetheless.
There's the famous fight or flight syndrome where you have to act
before you can think. I'm sure police officers and combat troops
would concur that this is an important ability.
IAN:
In debate, this would seem to be a crucible where we can bounce our
impressions off others. That is, it is often beneficial to bounce
something one has discarded off someone else to see what data they
bring to <the problem>.
Perhaps.
IAN:
It's the "looking at it with beginners eyes" syndrome. Our first
impressions may well be correct. It is all too easy to be dissuaded by
argument from an entirely correct impression.
I think if you bring in somebody new to look at a problem with "fresh
eyes" then that's a good idea but I would want it to be somebody who
was an expert in the domain of the problem, not a beginner. If a
beginner gets something right I'd call it "beginner's luck".
GLENN:
Such conclusions are usually wrong.
IAN:
Would you care to substantiate that? I can accept the above with the
precursor "In my experience ..."
Actually it's more persuasive if I can find evidence outside my own
experience. All you have to do is read a good book on the history of
science that details all the wrong ideas about how the physical
universe works, before they got straightened out. The ancient greeks
were great thinkers, but they were lousy scientists. Aristotle and
others speculated a lot on physical nature but rarely got it right. In
those days it wasn't fashionable to get your hands dirty and test your
ideas. Consequently they didn't even know they were wrong. For example,
[
The Greeks believed that plants derived their nourishment from the soil
only. Not until the 17th century did the Belgian scientist Jan Baptista
van Helmont show that, although only water was added to a potted willow,
it gained nearly 75 kg (165 lb), whereas the soil it stood in lost only
about 60 g (about 2 oz) of weight over a period of five years.
"Botany," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000. © 1993-1999 Microsoft
Corporation. All rights reserved.
]
IAN:
Take an historical belief that our world was infested by demons, imps,
sprites and all sorts of malevolent beings. Along comes Copernicus,
our modern scientific rational emerges (with it's obvious benefits)
and such beliefs are laughed at. To the point where Lister was
ridiculed for the idea of bacteria.
I hadn't heard of Lister so thanks for bringing him up cos I
learned some things. For the benefit of others, Lister was a
British surgeon who lived in the mid-1800s. The mortality rate
due to operations (which was usually an amputation in those
days) was 50% and most of that was due to infections started
around the wound. No one knew what caused infections, so he
investigated. He developed a hypothesis that it was due to
some contaminant in airborne dust particles. It was a good
guess, but it was wrong. He tried spraying carbolic acid into
the air but patients still died at the same rate.
Then he read about Pasteur's work on microorganisms that cause
putrefacation of animal matter, and this gave him the idea to
apply carbolic acid directly to surgical instruments, the
dressings, and the wound itself. Mortality rates dropped to 12%.
Pasteur himself disproved a well-entrenched idea called
"spontaneous generation". This was the wrong idea that new
life springs up spontaneously in animal matter (think maggots
around a carcass). He was able to show through some elegant
experiments that the life was instead introduced through the
environment (flies laid eggs).
Before Darwin's ideas took hold many scientists believed in
Lamarckism, [the idea that living things could consciously strive
to accumulate modifications during a lifetime and could pass
these traits on to their offspring.
"Evolution," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000. © 1993-1999
Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.]
Before Galileo got it straight, people believed heavy objects fell
faster than light ones, and legend has it that he dropped stuff
off the tower at Piza to prove otherwise.
IAN:
Now, perhaps I'm leaping to an irrational conclusion but, I do not see
that there is much difference in the conclusion. We label these things
bacteria and now keep our operating theaters clean but I do not really
see that the underlying reality has changed. Any "shamen" or herbalist
in the past whom used a compound "to ward off sprites" on an open
wound would achieve success if that compound were, what we now call,
antibacterial. The only difference is the label which we have attached
to these organisms.
There's an important difference. In Lister's case it turned out
carbolic acid worked OK, but it wasn't very efficient and it
was irritating, so this led to better antiseptics. Scientists
found them by studying carbolic acid and trying other compounds
with similar but not identical chemical properties.
When scientists discovered insulin could treat diabetes, they needed
a cheaper way than extracting it from the pancreas of dogs. This
led to the analysis of the moleculer composition of insulin by
Sanger so that it could be artificially synthesized.
Galileo wasn't through when he showed light and heavy objects fell
at the same speed. He went on to discover the laws of motion and
with these you can calculate the speed at which they hit the ground
given the height of the tower.
The point is that science is able to build on prior knowledge to
gain further insights and a deeper understanding of phenomena.
The shamen or herbalist you speak of lacks a deep understanding of
the herb or for that matter the sprite and is unlikely to make
further progress except through trial and error.
IAN:
The virus follows a similar path. It seems to me that often we can
observe the same phenomenon, with the same result. One is scientific,
the other is folklore.
Are you suggesting that viruses are understood through folklore?
I'd be more impressed with folklore if it came up with things like
global telecommunications, air conditioning, photocopy machines,
and space craft.
GLENN:
It's a common occurrence and nothing to be truly ashamed of,
especially because getting something exactly right is incredibly
difficult. The hallmarks of wrong or dubious conclusions are
inconsistency (the conclusion contradicts the pertinent data) and
incompleteness (not as bad as inconsistency but here not all the
pertinent data is explained).
IAN:
This differs from the scientific method in which way?
Uhhh, say again?? Oh, you say the scientific method itself is irrational
but I think you mean the initial wrong-headed scientific conclusions.
IAN:
To my knowledge
there have been no major leaps forward in a universal field theory
since Quantum Theory and Relativity were introduced.
It's not enough to be impressed by quantum mechanics and relativity
in the first place? Now you want a UFT? You're a tough customer, Ian!
IAN:
Which, as I'm sure we all know, display this " inconsistency
(the conclusion contradicts the pertinent data) and incompleteness".
Yet we accept quite happily that we can use one in the macro-scale
and the other in the micro scale.
As far as I know both theories work in either scale. It's just that
physicists will use simpler equations on scales where quantum and
relativistic effects are not pronounced.
GLENN:
Irrational arguments are based on false premises, bad logic,and
misdirected logic (suddenly the problem changes in mid-argument).
There might be more but that's all I can think of at the moment.
IAN:
The key words are, I guess "pertinent" "false premises" and
"misdirected logic". These change over time I've found. Sadly a very
great number of people hold their opinion and their identity to be
near the same thing and "emotionality" causes the scientist the same
problems of refusing to let go it's progeny as the mother.
You mean old ideas die hard? Agreed. It took Lister's work 15-20 years
to be accepted, for example.
IAN:
The case of "inspiration" is where ZAMM explores this. In the
multiplicity of possibility the scientist must choose what to look
for.
In the course of a scientist's career he might spend years on a single
problem or theory and suffer many wrong turns and false starts and
other auto metaphors (sorry, I'm tired). But when he finally succeeds
and gets famous and is written up in history books these experiences
are left out or skimmed over because these are boring and we go
straight to hearing about his "aha" experience. To the uninitiated
reader it seems as if the scientist was hit by a bolt of inspiration
at that moment and everything came to him, but he's really been thinking about the problem so long and so hard that when the solution comes he
immediately knows it's right.
Glenn
I also used Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000 to learn about
Lister and verify facts about diabetes and spontaneous generation.
Direct quotes from this reference are bracketed in the text.
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