[FRIAM] The Verifier

[Prof David West]

An old book, but still interesting and relevant - Knorr-Certina, The
Manufacture of Knowledge, looks at how science is really done and really
written about and biases, blind-spots, and paradigms.  A good complement
to the even older work of Paul Feyerabend.

davew


On Sun, 05 Aug 2007 18:15:18 -0400, "Phil Henshaw" <sy at synapse9.com>
said:
> I see those biases a lot, and use finding my own sloppy patches as keys
> to where I'll discover new things.    One exceptionally common bias of
> current interest is the tendency of scientists to ignore the time lags
> between cause and effect, that when not ignored lead to the discovery of
> the independent developmental process that are functional necessities in
> the occurrence of the response.   An example?   Any process of entropy,
> seems to requires the local development of individual self-organizing
> complex systems to carry it out, and when you look you find them.
>  
> I've been reading 'Linked' by Barabasi, and thoroughly enjoying his
> insightful discoveries of telling structural patterns in the topology of
> networks, and how the distribution of densely connected hubs changes
> network behaviors entirely, among other things.   What's totally
> remarkable is that despite observing that this 'scale free' distribution
> of connections, as it has become called, develops as the network adds
> and then abandons links (branching followed by selection) to produce the
> final form, he attributes no causal contribution to the direct process
> by which system producing the network develops, i.e. to what happens.
> Instead he extremely consistently phrases the cause of the pattern as
> being the benchmark indicator of having an inverse square distribution
> of nodes with high degrees of connection, a statistical property
> discovered after the fact.   I'm going page after page after page
> wondering when is he ever going to credit the evolutionary process by
> which the pattern develops in the overall causal scheme of things,...
> and the answer seems to be, well, never!!    It's stunning how so many
> hugely productive insights are so obviously being looked at squarely and
> then skipped over again and again and again, evidently just not fitting
> the question and purpose of his otherwise brilliantly observant
> examination of the facts!
>  
> I'm wondering if the blind spot this exposes is embedded in our tools,
> since he obviously sees the actual behaviors producing the patterns and
> is very creative in identifying the resultant patterns associated with
> them, but is just not drawn to studying them.   If used for the purpose,
> these same patterns would lead us to investigate how the direct causal
> mechanisms do actually operate, in detail, but he keeps consistently
> declaring the resultant pattern to be the cause and the behavior to not
> exist.    Just g.d. remarkable!   Could it be that our forbearers were
> just so totally obsessed with control, that our traditional tools were
> built in a way that can't describe anything else?   
>  
>  
> 
> Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> 680 Ft. Washington Ave 
> NY NY 10040                       
> tel: 212-795-4844                 
> e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com          
> explorations: www.synapse9.com <http://www.synapse9.com/>     
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: friam-bounces at redfish.com [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On
> Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
> Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2007 12:47 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: [FRIAM] The Verifier
> 
> 
> Here's an article about a kind of meta-analysis that looks for cognitive
> biases among groups of researchers.
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/business/yourmoney/05frame.html?ref=bu
> siness
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/business/yourmoney/05frame.html?ref=b
> usiness> 
> 
> -- rec --
> 
> 
> 
> 
>