M.Blackmore wrote:
[snip]
As "they" have extensive databases on "us" and won't hesitate to
eliminate "us" by any means necessary, perhaps "we" should start
building up our intelligence of who "they" are - names, addresses,
habits and contacts...
[snip]
Yes, let us see the obvious: that the nomothetic (predictive) sciences
of man (or
at least what are called that...) are almost without exception focussed
on the
study of the objects of power [the people], for the sake of enhancing
the power of the
subjects of power [the CxOs, high-government bureaucrats, et al.] *over*
them.
I think we need to do more behind-the-one-way-mirror research
on corporate board members and other such, both in their private
lives and also in their work life. But to what end? They
certainly would not use the information to manipulate themselves,
and nobody else has access to the control panel of the social world.
This week's (6Feb06) The New Yorker has an article which
echoes Jurgen Habermas's fundamental thesis about man as the
object of nomothetic (predictive, as opposed to hermeneutic aka
interpretive) scientific research:
"When we say that pit bulls are dangerous, we are making a
generalization, just as insurance companies... when they charge young
men more for car insurance... (even though many young men are perfectly
good drivers), and doctors... when they tell overweight middle-aged men
to get their cholesterol checked (even though many overweight
middle-aged men won't experience heart trouble). Because we don't know
which dog will bite someone or who will have a heart attack or which
drivers will get in an accident, we can make predictions only by
generalizing. As the legal scholar Frederick Schauer has observed,
'painting with a broad brush' is 'an often inevitable and frequently
desirable dimension of our decision-making lives.'... Smugglers may once
have tended to buy one-way tickets in cash and carry two bulky
suitcases. But they don't have to. They can easily switch to round-trip
tickets bought with a credit card, or a single carry-on bag.... Maybe
the reason some of them switched from one-way tickets and two bulky
suitcases was that law enforcement got wise to those habits, so the
smugglers did the equivalent of what the jihadis seemed to have done in
London, when they switched to East Africans because the scrutiny of
young Arab and Pakistani men grew too intense. It doesn't work to
generalize about a relationship between a category and a trait when that
relationship isn't stable -- or *when the act of generalizing may itself
change the basis of the generalization*." (Malcolm Gladwell, "Annals of
Public Policy: Troublemakers. What pit bulls can teach us about
profiling", The New Yorker, 06Feb06)
Nomothetic (predictive) social science can only "work" when the objects
of the
prediction are not aware of the predictions. Therefore is it important
that "no child's behind be left", and that education hypertrophically focus
on everyone trying to get good test scores -- lest, God forbid!, the
students --
or even parents and teachers --
start questioning why they *should* let themselves be tested in the
first place, and tell the ETS et al where to shove it by, like the
victims of Comminterm persecution during the Cold War,
"voting with their feet"..
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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