What science is for, part one

The January 16 issue of Science News features an opinion column by Eric D. Isaacs, whose author bio describes him thusly:

In May 2009, University of Chicago physicist Eric D. Isaacs took the helm of the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. Earlier in his career, Isaacs spent 13 years at Bell Laboratories, where he directed semiconductor and materials physics research.

In it he outlines his take on "corporate research centers" (such as, completely coincidentally, Bell Laboratories) as "engines of discovery." And he wants the government labs to fill this same role.

Of course in theory I'd be more behind government science labs than corporate ones, but that theory is unfortunately the liberal myth of a government that truly represents The People, one that is not a ruthless murderous imperial juggernaut. So in reality I'm pretty damned opposed to that. But what I want to discuss now is this statement of Isaacs's's's's'ses: "If science isn't looking like a good career, young people won't sign on."

Now, it's entirely possible that this is in large part true. I'm not interested in discussing the quantitative accuracy of the statement. What bugs me is the just-so tone of the guy, the sense that "science has to be profitable or no one will want to do it" is a natural law rather than a lamentable state of affairs that should be changed. It reminds me of the justification for copyright on intellectual property, that the possibility of lingering profits is an "incentive" for people to create art. Go ahead, call me a hippie, but I think human expression should be the inspiration for creating art. If we could only change the structure of our society to remove the horrendous restraints on the human mind and the human body that the profit motive forces upon us, we would see a flowering of art such as the world has never seen, copyright be damned.

The same goes for science. While it is true that most scientific advancement in our society comes from corporate and military needs, this is not a good thing. It is not the scientific progress in itself that is bad (more on this in part two), but rather the reasons for it and the applications of it. If more people were going into science out of the love of discovery, and, more importantly, able to stay in it just for the love of discovery, rather than compromising themselves and their work in search of money, it's a good bet that our scientific advancement would be more focused on expanding our knowledge and our quality of life, both intellectual and physical* (and I mean genuinely improving, not just making more comfortable), rather than on destroying the lives of the many for the profits of the few.

Interestingly, a wonderful quote from the issue of Science News immediately following is what I will discuss in the part two.

*Incidentally I suspect we might also come back to understanding that these are not opposing aspects of life but rather one inseparable thing.

QBQ! Chapter Seven: "Why Do We Have to Go Through All This Change?"

Miller, usually known for his brevity--it's hard to be long-winded when you have absolutely nothing to say--takes up three pages here with a ludicrous story about a twelve-year-old girl named Stacey (no indication of who she is or why Miller would be telling, or even would know, her story) whose father is a pilot. They're flying one day, the engine goes out, the father calmly saves the day.

Along the way we get little jewels strewn about (all of them faceted like the QBQ):

Her father understood that new challenges and changing conditions often require different strategies. Conditions change, markets change, people change. What works one day in a given situation does not necessarily work the next. We need to develop a repertoire of responses so we're prepared when our engine unexpectedly quits.

So poetic. Or check out this one:

Stacey...quickly nodded her approval of Dad's plan. (This did not go off to the headquarters for a committee decision--a term that always strikes me as an oxymoron.)

Miller hates discussion and participation, and longs for the rule of an Emperor-God-King. But then we knew that.

So anyway, eventually Miller delivers the moral of the story, and of course now that he's actually attempting to make a point his brevity returns:

When faced with a new situation, Stacey's dad took action and solved the problem. But if he had resisted the change and instead spent his time whining and complaining, having thoughts like "Well, I've never done it that way before!" or asking IQs such as "Why do we have to go through all this change?" things might have turned out much differently.

Are you facing change? Any engines quit in your life lately? If so, ask a better question. Here's one that really works: "How can I adapt to the changing world?

When I first saw that one of his primary "IQs" was "Why do we have to go through all this change?" I thought it was referring to, I don't know, updating computer systems or something. But from the anecdote, and what he says about it, it's clear that what he's actually talking about when he talks about lovechange is layoffs. His story is about going from having what you need to do what you're doing to not having it. Going from having enough people working with you to get your work done to having to do the work of several people for no more pay. Going from having a stable work environment to living in constant fear of losing your job--or actually losing it. Adapt, John G. Miller tells us from the comfort of his luxurious living room, but what he really means is fucking deal with it and settle, you low-class piece of garbage.

Incidental holy shit: I was just scanning the acknowledgments page, where I had noticed earlier there was a list of his seven children (three adopted!) and their names, to make sure that I wasn't missing some kind of weird joke where the father in the story was John G. Miller, and I just noticed that one of them is named "Jazzy." I kid you not. I pray this is a nickname, fear it isn't, and wonder if that would even make it any better anyway. For comparison, the rest of the kids have real names.

QBQ! Table of contents

Ground Control to Major John

Going away, but don't panic: posting will continue!

I'm gonna be going away (nowhere exciting, for no exciting reason) this week. I'll be back late late late on Friday. My computer access is going to be extremely limited, so this is going to be a kind of semi-hiatus. The Baronette's gonna be around, but I don't know if she's gonna feel inclined to post anything (you never can tell with her).

I have a post written and scheduled for every day I'm gonna be gone, because I'm extraordinarily poised and prepared like that, but if you want to get into a discussion on any of them I won't be around until Saturday to take part in it. I promise I will when I get back, though, so definitely go ahead and leave comments should you feel the desire.

Also, I know you've all come to expect piercing commentary from me into current events in real time as they happen, but you'll just have to go without for a week.

Who Made the West

i just started reading Stolen Legacy by George GM James this week. while i find its re-evaluation to be admirable - and sometimes pretty persuasive - i can't stop thinking about one particular issue. but before i get to my thoughts, i should provide a little background.

with this book, James aims to prove that the Greeks pillaged and bastardized the teachings of the Egyptian Mysteries. in doing so, he hopes that the philosophical and scientific contributions of Africa will be illuminated and that the perception of the continent as "backwards" will dissipate. on top of this, he writes it in a manner that attempts to break from traditional European academia. clearly, pretty great aspirations.

now, the school of the Egyptian Mysteries ran off of a hierarchical model and had very strict tenets - particularly those dealing with secrecy. (all knowledge was to be passed down to Initiates through tradition, never written down. societal structures determined eligibility.) tenets like this obviously fostered exclusivity within ancient Egyptian society - a trait that defined academia in ancient times and to this day.

what is vexing me is that in establishing Africa's contributions and simultaneously attempting to escape traditional academia, James suggests drawing pride from a philosophical tradition that was just as rooted in exclusivity - and therefore, oppression - as any other.

i just wonder if it is something he considered while writing this book.

Kim Stanley Robinson beats me to the punch

I have a couple of posts in the works on how I feel about science, but I can tell they're going to be kind of big messes, so it's convenient that Kim Stanley Robinson just said everything I was going to say, elegantly. If you want to read this instead of what I'm going to be posting fairly soon on the topic, feel free; you'll probably be better served. The source, if you want to see more, is here.

[S]cience is a Utopian project; it began as a Utopian project and it has remained so ever since, an attempt to make a better world. And this is not always the view taken of science because its origins and its life have been so completely wrapped up with capitalism itself. They began together. You could consider them to be some kind of conjoined twins, Siamese twins that hate each other, Hindu gods that are permanently at odds, or even just a DNA strand wrapped around each other forever: some kind of completely imbricated and implicated co-leadership of the world, cultural dominance--so that science is not capitalism's research and development division, or enabler, but a counterforce within it. And so despite the fact that as Galileo says that science was born with a gun to its head, and has always been under orders to facilitate the rise and expansion of capital, the two of them in their increasing power together are what you might call semi-autonomous, and science has been the Utopian thrust to alleviate suffering and make a better world.

He's a bit more optimistic and positive than I can be, but other than that, um, yeah.

Once in a blue moon

If you change "your fellow Americans" to "people" in this Melissa McEwan post, I actually agree 100%. Just mentioning.

Strictly local field effects

This is quoted in the fairly poetic wikipedia entry on the observer in quantum physics. It comes from somebody at NASA, but it's a bit unclear who actually wrote it. I have nothing to say about it, I just like it.

 

Let us ask a simple question: When you look up at night and "see" a star, what is "really" going on? A Newtonian philosopher might answer that you are "really seeing" the star, since, in Newtonian physics, the speed of light is reckoned as being infinite. An Einsteinian philosopher, on the other hand, would answer that you are seeing the star as it was in a past epoch, since light travels with finite velocity and therefore takes time to cross the gulf of space between the star and your eye. To see the star "as it is right now" has no meaning since there exists no means for making such an observation.

A quantum philosopher would answer that you are not seeing the star at all. The star sets up a condition that extends throughout space and time--an electromagnetic field. What you "see" as a star, is actually the result of a quantum interaction between the local field and the retina of your eye. Energy is being absorbed from the field by your eye, and the local field is being modified as a result. You can interpret your observation as pertaining to a distant object if you wish, or concentrate strictly on local field effects.

Unexpected

Business Week: Initial Jobless Claims in U.S. Unexpectedly Climbed

Unexpectedly according to whom, exactly? Certainly it comes as no surprise to me. And I'm not that bright.

 

The lede: "More Americans unexpectedly filed first-time claims for unemployment insurance last week, indicating companies lack confidence the economic recovery will be sustained."

 

Later on: "An unemployment rate that's projected to average 10 percent this year will likely weigh on consumer spending, preventing the biggest part of the economy from accelerating. Without additional gains in sales, companies will be forced to keep cutting costs, limiting staff in order to boost profits."

 

Still later: "Worker productivity kept surging in the fourth quarter as companies squeezed more out of remaining staff to boost earnings, another report from the Labor Department also showed."

 

I was going to comment further on this, but all of a sudden I'm just too tired. Instead I'll just repeat these wise words a friend of mine said to me today: "I just love your sense of humor. You take care now!"

A story kept by businessmen

Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepeneur, Diplomat:

 

John Smith developed into a writer of some skill. It is from his True Relations, accounts of his voyages and adventures, along with a few other contemporary accounts, including records of the Virgina Company business affairs, that the bare skeleton of the story of Pocahontas is known. It is an English story. It is a story kept by businessmen and adventurers. It becomes an American story, base narrative of a nation where "the state of the nation is business," as President Coolidge so aptly informed us. Despite its origins, it becomes a romance, lending a mystique to those original corporate executives and their struggle for power within the company that would otherwise be lacking.

 

It's funny how one can be very aware, how one can strip away layer after layer of the fundamental, unspoken assumptions that make up our societal psyche, and always have more work to do. Until I read these words, Allen's point here had never occurred to me, at least not directly. I knew that the American founding myths were about a bunch of assholes, but it had honestly never occurred to me that they were about a bunch of corporate assholes. The stories of "those original corporate executives and their struggle for power" having been imbued with the romantic qualities Allen discusses is a central sickness in American society.

 

We idealize and idolize these early CEOs and middle managers. They romanticized their own narratives and we bought it, repeated it, exaggerated it. We learn about these supermen incessantly from early childhood, starting long before we're capable of understanding what these stories mean, so by the time we might be able to question them, we don't think to because they've become so ingrained. And while we rarely discuss their nature as company men explicitly, the message comes across and we transfer this idealization, even if only subconsciously, to contemporary company men. We learn to overlook the plain fact that these men's greed led to mass death, so we are able to overlook it when it happens now. And we need to knock it off.

PSA

Tonight at 8:00 EST your friend and mine, John G. Miller, is hosting a "webinar" on Outstanding!, his recent book, which I am almost (but not quite) tempted to read. The link to register for the "webinar" (webgister) is on his blog. I'm going to be doing worthwhile things with my time (watching the season premier of LOST, which is waiting tantalizingly for me on my computer, and then probably exercising and reading about Pocahontas, if you're interested), but if you've got nothing better to do it might be hilarious (weblarious).

Not recommended

 

On the way to work this morning I thought I'd put Nina Simone on on my headphones. I had to turn her off, though, because how could I ever have gone into work after listening to "Sinnerman"?

Further proof of the moral superiority of the Obama administration

We have shown ourselves able to get "useful, actionable" intelligence about Yemen without torture!

That's right: we can now find useful pretexts for murdering hundreds or thousands without ritually mutilating any individual beforehand!

Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!

Just occurred to me

The use of ludicrous corporate-speak in the workplace might function for some people as a sort of magical means of separating work-life from real-life. Saying, as I just overheard someone say, "What's your estimation of their receptivity?" might serve as a ritual reinforcement of I-am-at-work, where the more human "Do you think they'll like you/be interested?" would tear down the boundaries between work and life and create a harmful rift.

 

I don't know if anyone actually uses it this way, consciously or unconsciously, and if anyone does, I don't know how many do. Nor do I know how effective it is. But thinking of it this way makes me less inclined to hate it. Anything that helps remind us that our time of being exploited is or at least can be separate from our time of being what we want is a positive thing.

QBQ! Chapter Six: "Why Is This Happening to Me?"

The question (incorrect question! incorrect question!) that serves as the title for this chapter was introduced back in Chapter Four, wherein Miller said it was "not a very productive thought," one that makes you feel "powerless, like a victim" (and between then and now we sure learned what a terrible thing it is to be a victim!). I begged to differ.

Here's how Miller frames his in-depth, less-than-a-full-page-of-text investigation into why this question is "incorrect":

Stress is a choice. Do you buy that? Some people have a hard time with the idea. They think it's the people and events in our lives that stress us out...but it isn't true.

Yes, bad things happen: The (sic) economy sours, our business struggles, the stock market tumbles, jobs are lost... Life is full of these. But still, stress is a choice, because whatever the "trigger event," we always choose our own response.

If you're wondering what I removed with the ellipses, it's just boring lists of interpersonal difficulties: "someone doesn't follow through," that kind of thing. I left in the portions of the list that I left in because I find it illuminating that these bad things that Miller tells us "happen" are not things that just happen. His phrasing reminds me of these plaques they have up at the rest stops on the New York Thruway: "History Happened Here!" These things aren't natural disasters or random accidents. The economy souring and jobs getting lost? That does not just "happen."

People with vast wealth and power make these things happen in their efforts to gain still vaster wealth and power for themselves. Because "the economy"? It doesn't exist. It does what it does because people decided that it does that. Sure, there may or may not be a central cabal of people consciously running things this way, but there sure are a handful of people who could just decide one day to stop.

I'd also love to see Miller have his big house in Denver with the living room bigger than a convenience store and his wife with the Sarah Palin jacket he spent several years of my income buying her and his seven children (three adopted!) and all of his speaking engagement fees and the respect from the corporate world and his appearances on Fox News programs all taken away. What kind of "decision" about stress do you think he'd make?

Now pay attention:

Stress is also the result of our choices. When we choose to ask a question like "Why is this happening to me?" we feel as if we have no control. This leads us to a victim mindset, which is extremely stressful.

Do you see this?

I'd like to point out first that Johnny G-Man does not actually explain why asking "Why is this happening to me?" leads to feeling out of control. The reason he doesn't do this is that it's impossible, because his premise makes no sense. In fact it is diametrically opposed to reality. In reality, "Why is this happening to me?" is a response to feeling--more to the point, actually being--out of control. Things happen that are beyond our control, and we ask, "Why is this happening to me?"

And as I said in my commentary on Chapter Four, this is the most empowering question we can possibly ask. So long as we don't duck the question with "everything happens for a reason" nonsense (a bit of "folk wisdom" designed to serve the ruling class every bit as much as "money can't buy happiness"), asking the question is an important step into becoming aware. And the more people who are aware, the more likelihood there is that we can work together to change things.

This, of course, is exactly why John G. Miller and the people he serves don't want us to ask the question, why they try so hard to convince us not to. As a matter of fact, Miller addresses this very truth directly, if opaquely, in the final sentence of the chapter:

Even in cases where we actually are victims and our feelings seem justified, "Why me?" thinking only adds to our stress.

As we are told time and time again in this excrescence/excrement of a book, self-education, awareness, and efforts to retain our humanity are terrible things to be avoided at all costs, no matter how justified these actions might "seem."

QBQ! Table of contents