Deniers of “The Truth”: Why an Agnostic Approach to Warfare is Key

The speaker mentions the Oxford dictionary definition (?) of the scientific method:

“A method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.”

What, then, is systematic observation? How does Design differ in terms of observation? It’s a form of observation, under its own idea of non-systemized systemization?

Anyway, point of discussion. I don’t know. I never know. I just like to ask questions. The beginning of any discipline of study 🙂 ….

Part of the confusion stems from how the author conceives of this study. It is a bit of a retrospective observational study, a type of study with its own weakness and strengths.

The author looks at his own descriptions of different groups, including a roughly ‘control’ group, that he commanded.

Based on his own observations, he is attempting to mine and organize the data in a retrospective fashion.

A little discussion on the nature of study design might help but time is limited and I won’t go into it (and it’s not my best area, to be honest). I’d actually prefer if someone else dug into it, lazy creature that I am….

Oh, good grief:

THE FUTURE OF SOF EDUCATION: A VISION FOR GLOBAL SPECIAL FORCES EDUCATION
By: COL Imre Porkoláb, Hungarian Army

In early March 2013, Dr. Sugata Mitra, one of the pioneers in online learning (also known as e-learning), was awarded the TED Prize, which comes with a $1 million check and the commitment of millions of TED community followers to help fulfill a wish of the winner.1 Dr. Mitra’s vision forms the first step toward what is being called in the education community “Online Learning 2.0.” Dr. Mitra’s ideas are clearly pushing toward the day when access to education will become far easier and considerably less expensive than it is now, ideas that are very much in line with NATO’s current force education efforts as well. Programs like Smart Defence and the Connected Forces Initiative (CFI) offer NATO member states innovative solutions in many areas of the defense industry, particularly in the areas of training and education.2

AN EDUCATION REVOLUTION
Whether we realize it or not, education systems as we know them are changing at lightning speed. Critics declare that the time-honored liberal arts model of a broad classical education may be an expensive anachronism, while others observe that the lives of entrepreneurial heroes such as Steve Jobs suggest that accomplished and creative high school students may be better off avoiding formal post-secondary studies altogether….

https://globalecco.org/the-future-of-sof-education-a-vision-for-global-special-forces-education

What is it with the TED, Silicon Valley fixation of some western elites? It’s as if someone makes money in one field, and then that person automatically has wisdom in all others. Does that make sense? Is that logical?

This is happening in medicine too, the push to make everything online, nd you know what? Students routinely tell me (there is good literature on this) that what they really want is a good clinical teacher, someone to interact with from time to time. They may prefer watching a lecture online to going to class, but they want to interact with a real live person at some point, someone that knows what he or she is doing.

Well, flexibility is fine but to get rid of something completely without understanding what you will replace it with is just a giant gamble, and if it doesn’t work? Who picks up the pieces then?

I’m not sure deniers of the truth is the only way to look at it. Another way may be a refusal to search for truth, to insist that there is no search for truth or beauty, that the answers are only to be handed to you, without any work, without any effort. Effort and struggle are interesting things whether we are dealing with feelings, emotion, intuition, measurement, collecting observations, or the scientific method.

Yet the practice of scientific observation is not quite as simple as it might seem to us at first glance today. As the essays collected by Daston and Lunbeck show, scientific observation has been beset over the years by numerous difficulties and problems. To what degree ought an observer to rely on instruments, as opposed to the naked eye? What about the many circumstances in which different people view the same phenomena and see different things? How might one be able to observe such fleeting and seemingly invisible objects as atoms in motion, or radiation? By exploring the rich history of these kinds of dilemmas, Histories of Scientific Observation offers the reader an invitation to look at the history of this key concept—and thus the history of science itself—through a focused yet luminous lens.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/thinking-about-looking

Post modern observations about science can strengthen scientific study and alter its social construct. Certainly not a novel or new thought. For instance, including minority groups in clinical trials or other health studies, especially where previously under-represented in the medical literature.

Post modernists make many valid–again, here is the word observation–observations about the social construct of science but where some go astray is in a certain level of scientific ignorance.

Linear and non-linear is blurred in reality. It’s a strange way for post modernists to talk, because they themselves argue that knowledge doesn’t accumulate in a linear fashion but moves in fits and starts.

The two strengthen each other, if done correctly. But I think a certain amount of scientific literacy is required to understand this.

Man feels and man observes that he feels. Woman feels and creates memory which is feeling plus time. Feeling, observation, memory. The artist, the scientist, the post modernists. Lines blurred. Fits and starts. There is room for this in science, in the scientific method itself. And scientific knowledge isn’t frozen in time.

What else is complexity theory but a theoretical type of mathematics?

I can’t help feeling that some post modernists don’t want to listen, but to dictate.

Back to junior high or whatever:

Inferences vs. Observations Observation: You use one or more of your five senses to know or determine something.

Inference: You make an explanation for the observation.

https://teacher.ocps.net/tiffany.lohman/page20.html

Observation versus intuition:

But, as Lévy told me recently, “sometimes you are inhabited by intuitions that are not clear to you.” On February 23, the philosopher was in Cairo watching television images of Muammar Qaddafi’s retribution against the rebel towns around Benghazi, which the dictator and his sons had threatened to drown in “rivers of blood.” Lévy is most fully himself in stark humanitarian crises, when defending what he calls “the memory of the worst.” He is also the heir to a vast timber fortune, wealth that allows him a license to act on his instincts, and so he promptly found the name of rebel leader Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, arranged for a cameraman and for a private plane to fly him near the front, and within a few hours was in a hired car, driving off to war.

http://nymag.com/news/features/bernard-henri-levy-2012-1/

He has moved on to Ukraine, it seems:

Bernard-Henri Levy will perform his ‘Hotel Europe’ play in Kyiv’s opera house on Feb. 21

headline in Kyiv Post ( I think this link doesn’t work, the comment disappears if I use it)

I bet a fair number of thought leaders, political leaders, and military leaders rely on intuition, “gut feeling”, and tell themselves that is reason.

Not that intuition is necessarily wrong.

But it odd that others pick up the pieces.

Bill M, I think, had mentioned the medical history of Helicbacter pylori in the Council some time ago.:

This is a timeline of the events relating to the discovery that peptic ulcer disease is caused by H. pylori. In 2005, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery that peptic ulcer disease (PUD) was primarily caused by Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium with affinity for acidic environments, such as the stomach. As a result, PUD that is associated with H. pylori is currently treated with antibiotics used to eradicate the infection. For 30 years prior to their discovery, it was widely believed that PUD was caused by excess acid in the stomach.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_peptic_ulcer_disease_and_Helicobacter_pylori

But the part that really pertains to the larger discussion is this:

1940
Freedberg and Baron observe spirochetes in autopsies.[16] Freedberg abandons his research, however, after his boss advises him to move to another subject. In 2005, Marshall speculates that Freedberg would have won the Nobel Prize in 1951 had he continued his work.[17]

“….after his boss advises him to move to another subject.”

So outside pressures cause a scientist to abandon a key observation. (Those working in the realm of policy relevant work are smiling a bitter little smile at this….). The time line that I linked is very useful to this discussion and I think it may help some of the Design proponents to see where they misunderstand the nature of the hard sciences. Well, maybe that is not correct either. But for sure, there is better scientific method and better post modernism and the “better” stuff is not so opposed, I think.

And artists have a very nice way of talking about observation and intuition, again, one that is not so rigidly opposed, so that a life time of observation creates a rich inner life upon which artistic intuition draws.

It’s funny, isn’t it, where others are often interested in differences I seem to want to see the connections between two supposedly different things.

I’ve been going through the links posted in this thread to see if I could organize them into anything useful. It’s pretty scatter shot but a key discussion point is on the nature of education, both institutional and personal.

Recently, I’ve seen a variety of articles on the many advantages the US possesses. One advantage discussed is the ‘world class American university’, as a category of advantage.

From the World Bank:

The case studies presented suggest that a faster and more effective approach to achieve world-class university status is to establish a new institution.

New universities can grow into high-quality research institutions within two or three decades when talent, resources, and governance are adequately aligned from the beginning.

Outstanding research universities do not operate in a vacuum; they evolve from a tertiary education ecosystem which affects the performance of individual institutions.

http://go.worldbank.org/9SJDQ5U020

I am actually worried about what I see as the “corporatization” of the university and the negative effects of the process on the very nature of scholarship. When I look at the desire to shove military education into an online template, I get the same feeling. Education is people and money and time and gimmicks are only that, gimmicks.

I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in a college town. The college town world I grew up in was very different from the institution-as-profit-center or “meritocratic” sorter of today. Well, those things existed but there was still the desire to support scholarship by supporting scholars.

In the world I grew up in, you could wait tables after class and on weekends, and still pay for school with very little debt at the end of it.

In the world I grew up in, you could get a tenure track position right out of you PhD program. Yes, you read that correctly, lurkers.

In the world I grew up in, scholars were recruited from all over the world, not simply a few celebrity scholars, but young newly graduated faculty and that faculty was given time to do research and the resources to do it.

The “metric” of success was publication, good publication, not necessarily in number, although numbers counted.

The overhead bureaucratic structure underscored all of this. There was very little overhead bureaucratic structure: a university President, a Dean, a Chairman/woman, and then some secretarial staff. After that, professors. Now everything is advertising, marketing, alumni, nontenured faculty scared of losing even what little they have, large classes and little time for research, with big dorms and gyms and wifi supposedly making up for all of it.

But the main point was to support the sort of people that wanted to do real and serious scholarship. The “usefulness” of it was to create the environment. The utilitarian part of it was the creation of the thing itself.

I’m sure I’ve created a little bit of a rosy-eyed-from-memory picture but it’s still a fairly accurate picture.

Why post this here? Well, one of the articles that mentioned America’s world class universities was by Gen. Petraeus (Belfer Center) and I thought, “good, bring that up but understand how that particular world is being hollowed out.” Or is it being hollowed out? These things are hard to see, sometimes, and hard to understand.

Well, in a comment sure to irritate everyone reading (is anyone still reading?), might as well use his powers for good instead of evil.