Well well, just to oppose my last opinion, I will explain exactly why the problems appear on science, which was the reason of writing the last post. In other words, I will explain a bit of this huge emergent mechanism called Science.
Summarizing, the last post was about 2 things, one is the lack of ingenuity and the other is the lack of integrity. And both of them was questionable respectively on the grounds that people in general do not wish to work with imprecisions and to unite or approve the union of knowledge (because of lack of knowledge itself).
But those things are slightly explained if we think of Science as a mechanism, trying to survive the huge amount of garbage it receives day after day. And it is not about being logical, it is about surviving the intense flow of knowledge.
So ingenuity is very similar to absence of knowledge, which makes it sound like the garbage, so it normally does not pass the filter. Simple like that. Although, if you are powerful enough, you can make people hear your ingenuity or garbage (as we have to learn a lot of unuseful and sometimes even illogical knowledge). Here I am complaining again... hehe. But, dont take those complains in vain, I salient those points in order to bring a solution to all of them altogether. I made a proposition before about a new type of educational institution, but it still has some problems, which I wish to rewrite in the next 20 years and make it solve all those "complains".
This way, the ingenuity could only be passed to Science homeopathically in a logical darwinistic way (a way focusing on the survival of Science and on the maintenance of its represented logical properties).
And what about the lack of integrity? Well, the Science survives by use, not only by logical sense. We normally cannot reason under things and arrive at a common conclusion (maybe it is a lack of educational processes, but I am assuming this as an axiom here), therefore everything is built with comparisons. Which makes more important than logic, the ability to integrate the science with our own results.
That is, the fundamental basis of Science and somewhat invisible, is the communication. Exchange of information and not logics. Therefore, a small lack of integrity comes in exchange for easy communication. And the integrity is done by Reviews, instead of astonishing papers with groundbreaking logics (which are rare and more often than not mere false presumptions).
Science is but a natural emergent mechanism with the objective of surviving while uniting a logical ground among all his fields and subareas. Its fundamental pillars are, rather recursively the communication logics themselves.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
The Big Problem of Science - The lack of ingenuously and integrity
Hi,
It is somewhat interesting the fact that science, like culture, have lot of difficulties in learning. And in science, things get even more slow and hard to change.
First, I will talk about Integrity.
It is pretty normal these days to find someone telling that there are too many information to read and how hard it is to collect the most important ones. But, what I would like to talk about is how difficult things can get, even when you did a good job at collecting the best information. To make things simple, I will give an example:
Suppose there is a guy named Jone, who happened to read around 500 articles to find the most important ones, from which he would like to create his PhD project. Now, when he compiles (integrates) everything in his new project, making the research proposal full of references and following a logical path of thought. From which he ingenuously thinks to be going deep in the science and doing a work worth of it.
His project undoubtedly has some small errors, but overall it is very promising and bringing innovation from various branches of science to propose something that is at the same time innovative and logical. Poor Jone, he may be good at this work, but he is a newbie in science.
As soon as he sends his work to be reviewed he finds out. No a single person could understand what he wrote, he may not even get it. But the reason why this happened is a consequence of the lack of integrity, because when someone integrates, the other people lacks the complete understanding of the whole to follow the process.
But Jone is unstoppable and not yet understanding the illogical rational processes of the human beings, he send his proposal to a bunch of professors, which is kind of a desperate movement, but that may somehow explain why there is nobody understanding a simple path of thought connecting different areas with well established articles.
And this was when, a professor named Claudio answers with a positive understanding. Even commenting on improvements and possible obstacles he may be wanting to study more. And then Jones gets even more perplex, why would one person understands? why not the others? what is happening?
Complicated questions and one big strange thing was that Claudio not even researched the same field that Jones was proposing to work into. So how can that be? Jones could not guess, he then asked Claudio:
- "How could you understand my project, when no other person in my area could even grasp?"
Claudio answered:
- "In my research I do not focus in your area, that is right. But we are trying here to solve complex large scale problems, which happens to be the same problems that you want to solve. And differently from other researchers, I read a lot of different approaches to solve those problems (my approach is not chosen randomly or by status, but clearly justifiable logically). Therefore I can understand well your thoughts, also when they are not the same as mine. But it is normally hard to find researchers that follow an area with the integrity of the whole."
In other words, the more you integrate logically the science the less people can understand you. And if science is this bunch of branches without a connection, what you are doing is much superior than science.
Second, "the more knowledge one has, the better it gets in a job" is true. But researchers fall in the same error as all the people on a job. Because to innovate, to create is not to get better, but sometimes also to get ingenuous.
Einstein was pretty ingenuous at his questions and by trying to answer them, he got big important theories. People usually think of the science as the truth, one of the reasons is that it was based on a logical principle of precision and truth (which seems very different than the logical behind animals). That is, not the only logic and by no way the best one.
Maybe only the easiest one to understand and reason.
Ingenuousness has been normally seen as the opposite of Knowledge. This may even make sense in the most used mathematical logics, but there are plenty of other mathematical logics that would see them as complements and supplements.
It is somewhat interesting the fact that science, like culture, have lot of difficulties in learning. And in science, things get even more slow and hard to change.
First, I will talk about Integrity.
It is pretty normal these days to find someone telling that there are too many information to read and how hard it is to collect the most important ones. But, what I would like to talk about is how difficult things can get, even when you did a good job at collecting the best information. To make things simple, I will give an example:
Suppose there is a guy named Jone, who happened to read around 500 articles to find the most important ones, from which he would like to create his PhD project. Now, when he compiles (integrates) everything in his new project, making the research proposal full of references and following a logical path of thought. From which he ingenuously thinks to be going deep in the science and doing a work worth of it.
His project undoubtedly has some small errors, but overall it is very promising and bringing innovation from various branches of science to propose something that is at the same time innovative and logical. Poor Jone, he may be good at this work, but he is a newbie in science.
As soon as he sends his work to be reviewed he finds out. No a single person could understand what he wrote, he may not even get it. But the reason why this happened is a consequence of the lack of integrity, because when someone integrates, the other people lacks the complete understanding of the whole to follow the process.
But Jone is unstoppable and not yet understanding the illogical rational processes of the human beings, he send his proposal to a bunch of professors, which is kind of a desperate movement, but that may somehow explain why there is nobody understanding a simple path of thought connecting different areas with well established articles.
And this was when, a professor named Claudio answers with a positive understanding. Even commenting on improvements and possible obstacles he may be wanting to study more. And then Jones gets even more perplex, why would one person understands? why not the others? what is happening?
Complicated questions and one big strange thing was that Claudio not even researched the same field that Jones was proposing to work into. So how can that be? Jones could not guess, he then asked Claudio:
- "How could you understand my project, when no other person in my area could even grasp?"
Claudio answered:
- "In my research I do not focus in your area, that is right. But we are trying here to solve complex large scale problems, which happens to be the same problems that you want to solve. And differently from other researchers, I read a lot of different approaches to solve those problems (my approach is not chosen randomly or by status, but clearly justifiable logically). Therefore I can understand well your thoughts, also when they are not the same as mine. But it is normally hard to find researchers that follow an area with the integrity of the whole."
In other words, the more you integrate logically the science the less people can understand you. And if science is this bunch of branches without a connection, what you are doing is much superior than science.
Second, "the more knowledge one has, the better it gets in a job" is true. But researchers fall in the same error as all the people on a job. Because to innovate, to create is not to get better, but sometimes also to get ingenuous.
Einstein was pretty ingenuous at his questions and by trying to answer them, he got big important theories. People usually think of the science as the truth, one of the reasons is that it was based on a logical principle of precision and truth (which seems very different than the logical behind animals). That is, not the only logic and by no way the best one.
Maybe only the easiest one to understand and reason.
Ingenuousness has been normally seen as the opposite of Knowledge. This may even make sense in the most used mathematical logics, but there are plenty of other mathematical logics that would see them as complements and supplements.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)