….. or in the case of physics [celestial mechanics], if one is to describe the forces acting upon (and the trajectory of) an asteroid, the Investigator must himself be an asteroid; otherwise he lacks the requisite world experience und weltanschauung ahem! world-view, to take the matter in hand and give a thorough account.

Since no asteroids have yet been interviewed by human astrophysicists, it is presently unclear whether a correct epistemological approach has been taken in this instance.

The electrons and amoebae are strangely silent also.

explains the absurdity of that stance as it relates to women and feminists.

However, it’s a much wider problem, bedevilling serious social science. Suppose the Investigation plans to sample within Australian adults. One of the sample members is a blind Cypriot poet. The Investigation Team clearly then must include a Cypriot Poet. This person must have suitable research training. Ethically, she cannot be a rival poet or a staunch critic of the sample member. The Ethics Committee is highly unlikely to sanction blinding her, if she isn’t herself already unsighted.

And that was just one sample member dealt with properly.

If the sample number is ‘N’ we may need as many as 1.89*N extra Investigators added to the Team, depending on the range of sociological/demographic/psychological/ethnic characteristics admitted in the Investigation. (This explains both the small sample sizes, AND the hugely generous ARC grants for social research.)

The Impossibilist School of Epistemology holds that the difficulty referred to, can never be overcome reliably. The Reductionist School holds that, in essence, only an Autobiographical Study (of the Investigation Team, by said team qua team) can be valid.

The Abbott School ignores methodological inexactitudes at its peril.

We shall deal with other sciences in a later bulletin.

It’s just about
winning elections!

Another perspective on that is that being a good teacher, or even a very good teacher, is no guarantee of being good parent. I loved teaching but it never occurred to me that I could carry home the persona of the teaching day. That’s it, isn’t it? A lot of the time at school we adopt a style, an extra layer as it were, whether to defend ourselves or to better project. At home you have to be yourself and sometimes that makes you vulnerable.

It’s late. This may not make sense tomorrow morning!

Spana, just having kids doesn’t make one an authority on kids. Plenty of parents belted their kids for bedwetting and insisted on forcing the poor little buggers into eating liver. Just having kids doesn’t make you an expert on child-rearing.

A recent survey reports that an increasing number of women are having extra-marital affairs and of course one of the outcomes is pregnancy.

Having said all that, the remark was intended as a light hearted jibe at Jack Strocchi.

ROFLMAO! Especially after checking out the full paper (thanks for the link), with its neo-classical “modelling” of individual decisions about sex:

Direct attention now to a female youth’s decision about whether or not to engage in premarital sex. On the one hand, if a female youth is abstinent then she will realize an expected lifetime utility level of U(c) + bAf’(y’; 0). On the other hand, if she engages in premarital sex she will realize the enjoyment h, but will become pregnant with probability 1-p. Her expected lifetime utility level will be U(c) + h + pbAf’(y’; 0) + (1-p) [bAf' (y'; 1) - D(s)]. She will pick the option that generates the highest level of expected lifetime utility…

The historical material presented in the paper is irrelevant to the past 100 years covered by the “data analysis” (unless you think the 17th century actually lasted 300 years).

As for the “obvious” idea that technology determines culture – well it ain’t so obvious. If creating technology is considered as a cultural activity, then it’s culture that determines technology, reducing that “obvious” proposition to the tautology “culture determines culture”.

@AndyC, @Helen Microtools? A tool of some description.

@Katz Precisely. And it’s not clear to me that fighting noise with noise is workable given it’s the authoritarians default tactic. I’m concerned to educate the non-authoritarian; I see far too many commentators falling into the same argumentative traps time after time and Altermeyer’s work is partly a response to that. I blab on a bit more here.

@tigtog #221 Indeed. The word Trotsky is like a bug-light for Strocchi. Gotta address the commie threat first.