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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (82799)	9/7/2008 4:59:43 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541647

I don't think, if you appreciate science, that you ever stop appreciating science. You might give it short shrift sometimes for expediency, but you don't change your stripes. There are evolution people and creationism people. They are from different planets. That's a permanent condition. I disagree. There is a very fundamental but somewhat subtle difference between science and most other pursuits in the modern world. Many people think the conflict is between science and faith, and you can find all the books, articles, and internet contend you could ever want on this subject. It is not IMO, the main issue. The conflict is between the methods of science and the methods of commerce. In science, the goal is obtaining the best answer. In commerce, it is about winning. Intelligence, creativity, education, hard work, determination, etc, help in both fields. But in commerce, there are other important issues, like marketing and branding. Optimal solutions are not the goal of commerce, and market share is not the goal of science. Putting lipstick on a science pig does not help, in fact it harms things. If the theory is bad, marketing it does not change the fact, although it might delay people from finding a better solution, hence the harm. In commerce, a good product certainly helps, but competition generally abounds, and the issue is not who is the "best", it is who is commercially more successful. We are saddled with all sort of poor solutions due to historical facts (lots of examples in computers) that have dominant market share, but the goals of commerce are not to produce the best solutions for us. The methods of religion are more aligned with the methods of commerce than with science, hence the problem in the USA is conflict between science and commerce/religion. The real damage on this front was done by Libertarian Think Tank science (Cato and others) who advocated the notion that an agenda can carrier the day in science, just like it can in commerce. It can't. A very large fraction of the Rep base suffers from this problem. Palin definitely. McCain only marginally understands this if he does at all. BTW, the flip side is that many on the left, including lots of science/academics, don't understand that in commerce, action is often of more utility than "optimal" solutions. Even if you get significant things wrong, you might still succeed simply by having tried rather than dithering around because no pleasingly good solution occurred to you.