In a message dated 98-07-13 10:03:27 EDT, WILSONDO@phibred.com writes:
Dale Wilson writes:
Dear LionKuntz...
> Misplaced trust in authority institutions is no better than misplaced
trust in
> individuals with personal experience.
>
Exactly. Distrust of authority is one of the bases of science.
Credibility is not the same as authority. Individuals with credibility
submit their ideas and claims to evaluation by the community. Mutual
trust and communication are essential.
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Lion replies: Much of life is unreplicable. People with pure academic
interests can indulge themselves in satisfying their curiousity with abundant
repetitions, but they usually don't have to depend on the food they eat to be
grown by themselves. Many real people learn by anecdotes from several
"trustworthy people" and that counts in their way of reckoning, but it does
not count in academia. Academia requires one trustworthy person do all the
repetitions, and then other individuals duplicate the repetitions. 100
farmers doing "x" for two seasons is usually worth more to a farmer than 100
academicians doing "x" 100 times, because the farmer can't do it the way the
academician did, but can do it the way those other farmers did. Farmers trust
anecdotal, and their paid employees (extension agents) ought to make that
information available.
Especially if the subject involves zero-bought-in inputs, such as
biodynamics or many organic regimens, since there is no product sales to
motivate corporate-funded research, or joint corporate/ag-school sponsored
research, and there are no paid lobbyists pressuring government to spend any
money on above. Not very "scientific" anecdotal information is the only
information available. The drawbacks are countered by the many anecdotal
sources, which constitutes a knowledge-bank of something actually working.
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Dale Wilson writes:
> ....[When slick marketing enters the picture, it gets even worse.
> There is no end to the biodynamic/enzymatic/microbial stuff people are
> trying to sell. Much of it comes with scientifically reasonable
> models, but only with anecdotal information and possibly contrived
> data. People are susceptible to being swindled, when they strongly
... snip. stuff omited] ...
I have always been interested in biological control methods and IPM, and
have been performing field-oriented research on them in academic and
private contexts for the last ten years. I would love to see all this
stuff work, but much of it does not. At Pioneer, a constant parade of
seemingly fly-by-night companies come to our door trying to sell us
wacky products and ideas. A colleague and I have instituted a small,
quiet effort to try out some of these agents and methods in production
research.
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Lion replies: OK. Now you have explained your hostility to slick salesmen,
but that has nothing to do with free anecdotal information given to people who
can't find a scientifically researched method, and they want to grow a crop
this year. Your "adamancy" is that ONLY research-based information be given
to a person who doesn't want corporate-sponsored research on how to pollute
the land for ten generations with chemicals which have not been fully
researched (only their short-term benefits have been researched, not their
long-term harm). The paid employee of the farmer, his/her extension agent, is
giving the only knowledge which exists in response to a legitimate request.
Your position is to herd the farmer back to the slick salesmen who sold the
government and sold the universities to do only research that makes them
profits. The record is quite clear. There hasn't been much from the USDA on
earthworms in decades, even though there is plenty of anecdotal books on how
to raise them. Even you probably could succeed in raising earthworms by
reading one of these anecdotal books.
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Dale Wilson writes:
> You are handicapping yourself by your narrow closed mind
>
Why so hostile? I try to be open-minded about everything.
> refusing to learn from the experience of others who are not interested
> in swindling you, and you are spreading infectious memes by
> propagating your preconceived conclusions in public.
>
Slick-sounding, amazing-claim products should be approached with
caution. But they should be tried in realistic field plots.
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Lion replies: I am hostile to the notion that since
acadamia/government/corporations refuses to research no-poison, no chemical
agriculture, that these subjects are taboo and should not be practiced or
allowed to pass the word of their successes. That is what the extension
agents were doing which you objected to. I applaud them for doing the job
that the people who pay them asked them to do. Slick claims of the safety of
ag store products, and the same kind of hired gun experts that the tobacco
lobbyiests or OJ Simpson defense team can trot out, should be approached with
caution. Farmers, their families, and their customers are being killed by the
slick advice which gets all the research funds because the slickers are the
source of the research funds. EDB was banned in the USA in 1984, so why is it
in the wells in Watcom County, Washington State, USA in 1998? Whose slick
advice was this?
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... snip. stuff omited] ...
Dale Wilson writes:
> There is still plenty of room to learn from other "experiments" which
> are only available as anecdotal information.
>
Legitimate science embraces public attempts at verification. Sure, most
information we get is in some sense anecdotal, but when lots of reliable
people try something and find it to be true, the knowledge is more
reliable than what a lone door-to-door salesman might say.
> Not only do scientists have the right to describe reality in terms of
> their choosing, but so do priests, poets, novelists, and farmers. The
> problem is not that these others have nothing to say about reality,
> but thatone group usurps authority to be the only ones allowed to
> speak.
>
All these groups should be willing to submit their truth-claims to
community verification. But, I suppose we should restrict our
discussion to falsifiable claims (sensu Popper).
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Lion replies: I don't suppose any such thing. Whensoever any system of
thought attempts to answer three fundamental questions it is a religion: (1)
where did this all come from, (2) what is the meaning or purpose of all this,
and (3) What is the end result, or whither are we going?
Popper is a special kind of priest of a religion. For outsiders it can
be hard to figure out the clergical duties of a tibetian bhuddist of the black
hat faction, or the differences between a franciscan and a dominican monk of
the catholic church, so too Popper's role is cloaked in mystery to some.
Popper? What does he grow? How does his garden grow? The people who
are bringing life out of the dark moist soil are the experts, and there is
nothing falsible to discuss. People are interested in getting a crop in the
ground and a harvest now, not someday when academia gets around to telling
them how to do it. The proof of the pudding in in the eating. Even Popper
can't get around that truth. The proof of alternative anecdotal agriculture
is in the eating.
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... snip. stuff omited] ...
Dale Wilson writes:
I get the feeling you are arguing with a straw-man caricature of me. I
suspect we agree on more than you think.
Dale
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Lion replies: Yes, but this gulf of disagreement is wide. There is a
deficiency in research-based knowledge, and this deficiency will persist until
academia gets off its ass and does the research. Meanwhile, nobody will pay
their salaries to find out how to grow food without slick products (which
would cause elimination of a vast population of unneeded middlemen), so people
have to rely on anecdotal information whether YOU like it or not. "Biosphere
2" the failed research-based experiment in Arizona is the end result of
research-based experiments going on globally. Aquifer depletion, climate
changing carbon-emissions, ozone-killing gases, transmissible spongiform
encephelopathies, 1,000 species extinctions annually -- these are a few of the
research-based agricultural results from slick salesmen. People don't just
want to get a crop in the ground and a harvest, -- they want to know how to
do that without killing the world. Academia has less answers than the
anecdotalists when the question is put in that perspective. This is how far
apart we are. I trust people to know what they actually saw and did in their
lives, and most combinations of circumstances are unique once-in-a-universe
events. I'm truely frightened by people who feel that science knows it all,
or even knows close to enough.
Sincerely, Lion Kuntz (LionKuntz@aol.com)
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