The social structure being what it is, has little room for creativity because everybody is too busy earning a living. Opening up new avenues of thought generates a larger amount of work to redirect focus and getting back into the equilibrium of pace becomes difficult. Dr. Lenny was exposed to a different culture and it helped him synthesize the nature of the culture that he is returning to.
Rural communities face different challenges from urban communities. Our school system teaches that we face equal challenges - the diversity of opportunity depends on how you apply it. Current myth can be played to advantage by any individual that can work the system, but truth be known only if you had the first hand experience and could convey that reality to colleagues in context of their framework of knowledge.
The one size fits all approach to knowing, as demonstrated by the parade of experts at the carbon conference, leads me to amazement at the extent of groupthink and non-rigor of the current academic system. The worship of experts without regard for the facts was displayed by the entire manner of presentation, although the planners were good to have a skeptic and a regular forestry guy on the program - to demonstrate that there are different levels of understanding and interest. The economists and the state functionaries have constructed a paper fantasy system that sounds good, but doesn't yet meet the reality of the way things seem to be, from my different point of view.
I guess that i have formed a thought system for myself that requires different inputs from the ones that i received at the conference. From the experience that i had carbon counting property with wonder earth partners, i could see that the same concepts that i could not make work for the landowner involved five years ago are the very same concepts that they are introducing today - still not developed to the point where they have a working system for the people that grow trees - in fact, forestry carbon appears to be discounted by the current carbon operating system. But that happens when economists and politicians influence everyone to think that they run the show. And they do. Which really does influence the ways the scientists think in their approach to chasing the money in a rapidly changing priority society.
But , the current model is not the way nature actually works. Large groups of scientists don't make discoveries, individuals do. Galileo, Newton, Einstein, didn't accept the status quo from the consunsus of the public understanding at the time. What we choose to measure dictates what results we see. The proximity of our interest, as observer or participant influences what results we see. The analysis of results 'on the fly' allows development of new methodolgy for measuring phenomena that is not recognized by the system. Current science process does not allow the scientist the latitude to change theory on the fly, because the results are dictated by the source of the funding.
The same people that are angered by Exxon-Mobil paying scientists to deny global warming , fund a counter-groupthink effort that insists that 'you and only you can prevent global warming '. We've heard that line before from government - cute and cuddly smokey the bear dictated an awful forest management practice of denying fire a role in the toolbox, which has contributed to the severe fuel loads on federal forests today.
Science information needs a two-way flow - between reality and theory, with the latitude to observe and change while observing from different scales of operation. There really is no room for political influence, while only a marginal role for economics - with more rigor in the mathematics and less in the tracking and accountability. The schools fail to convey the essence of scientific reason.
This will cause difficulty until people accept that their own thinking ability is equivalent to the experts in all areas that the expert has not focused attention. Understanding comes with applied time and effort toward that understanding and anyone who focuses their attention on something can figure out how that something works. We all focus our attention on things we are interested in and try to do them well, so we are experts ourselves in the things within our grasp, that we apply and use. It is the recognition that there is more out there than we know that spurs us to find out more and introduces us to new fields of interest. Which take more time to learn and even more time to apply.
So now, onto substantive work.
No comments:
Post a Comment