Pat might just be interested in this - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-collapse/ - which is very clever stuff on physics I found I could only handle in parts. My brain is much less capable in both maths and being bothered with deep riddles these days. I play only as an amateur. There's some sort of argument in this stuff that allows a realist view of macroscopic space-time - i.e. that the moon is where it is without anyone looking and our old chestnut tree crashes to the ground as likely when we aren't looking - that is consistent with quantum-level theorising. I'm a tropical fish realist - if I want to know about, say, India on the ground, I'd ask Vam or people with direct experience I've actually worked with. If more than interest was at stake, I'd go. Even reading, incidentally, indicates that standard 'white people's histories' I soaked up from Hollywood-BBC are false. I tend to like my climate science from climate scientists, not the guff from Hollywood-BBC. It's hard to get stuff from the 'horse's mouth', and of course even when one can, there remain problems of knowing enough to understand - as a minute with the link above will indicate. I often find little to distinguish the academic and presumably accurate material and, say, some of the barking on Epistemology. I tend towards the experts in science.
This general attitude of mine does not extend to politics and economics. Here I find the experts vapid, generally untrustworthy and speaking in code or some sort. The dominant dross in economics since I started teaching it has been broadly neo-classical and so vapid it's models ignored debt. You can find the criticism and a more realistic model in the work of Steve Keen who puts his work out free. This is the model I teach - though I take a more narrative-behavioural line based on the question 'what's happening to you'? Quite a few of my undergrad and postgrad students find this so unusual that they start to look like shock and awe victims. The follow up question (the first is more difficult than any quantum- waffle) is 'what is happening to other people'? Towards the end of 101 we might get to whether current economics as actually described in textbooks in a manner similar to that in books about keeping tropical fish describe how to keep the fish. Such matters can broaden out into how a science research programme has a core and periphery (Lakatos, Kuhn) and allows evidence and explanation to change these. One can point to much information that demonstrates economics only works for a small proportion of people, but the idea is to let people get on with their own enquiries. You may be surprised how few respond well to this. Steve Keen's lectures are all available free on line I tell them - why waste £9K a year getting them from a bum like me? Some of the kinder answers involve me being a teacher, but teaching people to think for themselves. Some of them turn me into a very good teacher. I fail with loads. They demand instruction. You'd think more people would want to explore knowledge,but there don't seem to be many. And I have to say, on first sight of me, most struggle with both the first questions. I'll repeat them in that patronising manner of teacher training: 1. what is happening to you? 2. what is happening to others? I can, of course, put the answers in statistical form. 1.you're being screwed. 2. they're being screwed. Comments by free thinkers more than welcome!
