science political

There comes a time when the sense that something big is up becomes pervasive. These two articles - one on global warming and the other on scientists gathering seem to me to be an amplification in the rhetoric that buries science even further away from the rationalizationability of the general amerikan public. Not being a box-watcher, i missed seeing the 60 minute rhetoric on global warming this weekend. But, too many people are running around masquerading as scientists to the public, when they no longer are (or never have been) involved in the process of collecting data and trying to really interpret the results.

Experimental design is critical - demonstrating phenomena requires observation and deep thought about what could cause the data pattern. It's not just what you read in books, it's how you interpret what the books say - when they are right and when they are not. Blind faith in texts in annoying. If you understand your topic well, then books are the boundary of where you get off the train : the become reference when you need them to explain concepts to others, not things you need, except to look up specific facts and new areas and, well, you get what i mean. You need books, but really, you need to be ahead of your books in your field to be doing anything significant, scientifically.

So congress needs some people of science to correct fallacies that many members have by assuming the common knowledge of science is in fact correct. I would gather that every field of endeavor that takes itself seriously in addition to science likely feels the same way about their level of consultation in the affairs of the world. I see a major realignment to a horizontal lattice from the current vertical lattice, but perhaps it would be wise to look at politics in three dimentional space and construct a curve that fits the data collected from reality, not from the minds of the fellows currently serving up DC on the potomac.