Opus 2011-100, Logical or Scientific, part 3

Part 1
Part 2

After a long period of trying to evaluate social phenomenon with a scientific approach, which produced Sociology, and Political Science, we are now trying to evaluate physical phenomenon with social measures, which will produce superstition and weakness.

We have developed ways of doing things that can at best be described as bells and whistles or smoke and mirrors.  Popular wisdom, ne foolishness, says it is the way to do things and no one seems to be able to stop the nonsense. 

One example is what is called cooperative learning.  It has many variations but is some kind of group work that assumes that the students are loaded with wisdom and a desire to learn.  They share what they know and write the result.  We also do this in faculty meetings.  What happens with the adults is exactly what happens with the kids.  One, maybe two, people will be real earnest and desiring to please.  One will do the writing, the other will present or “share out.”  The rest of the small group will sit around an talk about whatever they feel like.  The work of the two little worker ants will but put on a large sheet of paper and later posted on the wall.  The leaders will feel like we have made a real contribution of the progress of education.  The rest of us count the years until we can retire.  This is one reason why education is going down hill.

We also emphasis appearance over substance.  One time a math teacher was sharing some student work.  The class was working on graphing.  He brought some really colorful charts and graphs.  Everyone was very impressed and full of praise until I asked a simple question, “What are these graphs showing?”  Simple question.  You would think it would have a simple answer.  He stammered awhile and finally admitted they did not show anything.  In other words they were just pretty art projects that had nothing to do with any equations or data.  Most people still did not understand how meaningless they were, after all, they were pretty.  I was the one condemned for being critical.

I wish people could remember that correlation is not causation.  Just because you do a “study” and find data the goes up at the same time does not mean that one caused the other.  My favorite illustration is one I read somewhere, years ago.  It proved that tomatoes kill people.  The researcher showed that everyone who had eaten tomatoes two hundred years ago was now dead.  This is 100% correlation.  According to social science we have a match.  Anyone who can count their change will see that this is foolishness.  It does not stop modern thinkers.

Think of what we saw in the 2008 presidential campaign.  In a taped interview Barak Obama admitted that raising capital gains taxes would lower the amount of money collected.  A scientist or a Christian believing in absolute truth would say that the obvious thing to do is not raise the tax.  Soon-to-be President Obama said the tax should be raised anyway, because it was “fair.”  In what way is it fair?  If less money comes in then the “rich” are paying less in taxes.  It is not even robbing the rich.  If less money comes in there is less to give to the poor.  Robin Hood would have been a failure with this philosophy.  But this is the logic of our modern age.

Keep your eyes open.  Keep your mind engaged.  Don’t ever accept that an expert knows anything or that a study proves anything.  They may, they may not.  Don’t be fooled.

homo unius libri