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Benjamin Franklin, Civic Scientist
Guinnessy writes "Neal Lane, the ex-science advisor to President Clinton, has written an article in Physics Today magazine, that explains why he thinks Benjamin Franklin, was an early American prototype of a civic scientist, i.e. someone who would 'probably address many of today's concerns with wisdom, practicality, and a deep sense of civic responsibility.' Ironically the same issue has an example of a modern day civic scientist, a profile of Richard Meserve, a physicist who became a lawyer. Interesting stuff."
Where are the modern civic scientists? How come they are not important government officials any more?
My most sincere apologies if this gets even a little political. I am going to attempt to walk a very fine line of talking about where the visionaries are today, why they are not in politics and compare them to politicians.
I am attempting to make a point that isn't really politicaly biased, but I will talk about subjects I know about. Please try to look beyond my conservative slant for the points I am going to try to make.
You asked a really good question. Why is it that the only people that run for high office are not really worth a shit, but the people that are worth a shit wouldn't think of running for high office?
First do not discount the people that run at the local and state levels. If you really want to see the visionaries that are politicians, try looking there first. Those people have a much greater effect on your life then you probably give them credit for anyways.
Lets start with people that do have a political slant. Let's say Rush Limbaugh. Love him or hate him you simply cannot deny his popularity. I have been a loyal listner for a few years now. Every once in a while someone will call in asking why Rush of all people won't run for President.
I have heard him give 2 answers.
One is kind of a joke, he would have to take a pay cut.
The President of the US doesn't even clear a milliion a year. I think it is in the 200 or 300 thousand range. A pittience when you put him against CEO's of major corporations.
His serious answer does cut to the heart of it. The job is entirely too demanding and it would require a compromise of his beliefs.
Look how the conservatives treated Clinton, look how the liberals are treating Bush. It is a wonder that either one of those men got anything accomplished at all. It seems a rare day when someone isn't gunning for them.
When the house and the senate are split pretty near the middle it is very hard for a President to take a polarizing hard stance in line with there political beliefs. If every single democrat is bound and determined to vote against you, wether you are right or wrong, then you got to be damned sure that every single republican will vote for you. If two or even one republican let you down you have problems. That is the current situation, GWB has no real choice but to allow some liberal slant to his beliefs.
Rush has stated that this being the case someone like him is more comfortable having a venue where he can take a hard conservative approach and not have to compromise his beliefs.
I am really not certain that I would consider Rush a 'visionary' so much. I kind of think of him more like someone that is very good at sorting through the junk and showing people what lies beneath it. In some respects a conservative like him cannot be a visionary, a visionary implies that he has new ideas, a conservative by definition says that if it was working in the past then why are we screwing with it?
Let's look at someone with a far, far more liberal slant then Rush.
Technically a registered Republican, I think of him as a liberal, Arnold S. of the California debacle fame.
On the surface we have someone whom we don't entirely understand. The image he is portraying is that his intentions are good. He obviously has a very strong belief system and he is saying that he wants to pay the US back for the opportunities we gave him.
That is all well and good - but it is going to take a hell of a lot more then good intentions to fix Californias mess.
You can't tell me that Arnold is the brightest bulb on the tree. If you insist on digging on GWB then you can't ignore Arnold, or you are a hypocrite.
Arnold is niether a visionary, or especially smart. But Arnold is something that GW is not. The boy is an actor. He can read a mean script. Seriously, that might be all it takes.
What if Arnold's heart is in the right place? What if Arnold knows exactly what his weaknesses is? What if Arnold surrounds himself with smart advisors that he agrees with and listens too?
Here is a place in the Califor
I realize this is a troll, but I'm getting sick of the slashdot stereotype.
After spending all week working hard at a business I've started with a partner, and all week (evenings) playing with my 3 kids and flirting with my wife (after 3 kids you don't have sex anymore, you just flirt), I'm relaxing. I'm looking forward to cleaning up the yard tomorrow hoping to chase off the field mouse that has recently arrived, and to prepare the yard for winter. It's going to be a long, hard weekend, and I'm happy to relax on a Friday night and read slashdot.
Like what I said? You might like my music
The almanac is the legacy of Franklin and it was nothing but a collection of sayings directed towards simple-minded, conservative, church going farmers that were often misleading and which he himself did not follow by any means.
The one that particularly pisses me off is "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, welathy and wise."
It is a fact that this is completely contrary to the sleep requirements of human beings. Here was can see a good example of where Franklin was not a scientist at all, his primary focus was on coining, or borrowing and touching up, aphorisms that would appeal the lifestyle of a gullible, poorly educated rural audiance.
Researchers who actually study sleep cycles rather than just making up sayings for the popular press have found that the human sleep cycle tends towards adding an hour or so of time to each day so that the time a person becomes tired and is properly prepared to sleep is constantly changing relative to the previous night's sleep.
Early to bed and early to rise most likely leads to a kind of mental depression from inadequate sleep that infects the majority of nine to fivers and no doubt may partly account for American's political apathy, obsesity and need to buy products like viagra. And for what? So this shady book publisher can be remembered as an icon of American scientific prowess?
Franklin understood something about politics, law, publishing, business and invention that most have forgotten:
It all comes down to a dietary issue in the end.
Food, clothing and shelter.
Everything else is frills and frippery when it comes right down to it.
Now he was hardly a man who eschewed frills and frippery, but he always knew they were frills and frippery and kept things in some sort of perspective.
I'm not sure I would have found him likeable, although he was one of the most sought after dinner guests on more than one continent, but was clearly a remarkable man. In more modern times he would have been a candidate for multiple Nobels in science (electricity, the Gulf Stream and other discoveries) as well as the Peace Prize and multiple Pulitzers (Just for Poor Richard's alone, let alone his other writings) and lord knows what all awards.
And yet among his greatest accomplishments as an inventor in his own mind was a warm stove and a comfortable chair to put by it.
Add a table, bowl of fruit and a violin and you're set.
KFG
[Sorry this is long, but it's late and I'm too tired to edit.]
People always bring up this "smart advisor" theory when discussing not-so-bright candidates, but I'm not sure I buy it.
Here's the flaw I see in it: incompetent people have been shown to be less capable not only of judging their own performance, but also of judging the performance of others.
You see this all the time when it comes to technical advisement. Some non-technical manager will think some consultant "really knows his stuff" when that consultant is really just spouting buzzwords or telling the manager what he wants to hear, and the consultant actually performs like a train wreck.
How is the incompetent candidate supposed to be able to judge who is competent among his potential advisors?
Maybe surrounding yourself with advisors that you agree with is not the best sign. And maybe you have to have a certain foundation of competence and be both willing and able to do the sort of critical thinking and analysis that distinguishes the truly competent advisors from the advisors that are just buttering you up.
Another interesting thing about the study linked above is that while the best performers tend to accurately judge how well they did in an absolute sense, they tend humbly to underestimate their own performance relative to everyone else.
/. and acting condescending to users turn out not to be so hot after all when it comes down to it.
/. for instance ;)
Perhaps that is because part of becoming competent is learning from your mistakes and pushing against your limits, which probably imparts a healthy sense of your own failings. In fact, some of the most impressively competent people I have met were, while confident, at the same time oddly humble -- perhaps because, while it seemed to me that they could do just about anything, they were more keenly aware of the vast depths of their field that they had yet to plumb.
At the same time, lots of the less-guruish but merely competent technical folks I see complaining bombastically on IRC or
Of course, the problem is that the blowhards are a lot more fun to listen to than the real gurus. Where's the fun in someone saying "emacs and vi are equally viable alternatives, and here are the cases in which each is best used"? We like people who make bold statements and who "stick to their ideals", even if it's only because they're too arrogant to consider that they might be wrong. We laugh today at "640k should be enough for anybody," but no one remembers what the other guy said.
If there were more geeks, and there such a thing as nationally-syndicated geek talk radio, those guys who hang out, start editor/distribution wars, and flame the newbies would probably get pretty high ratings, and people would probably call in and agree with them and take their turn to flame the newbies.
They'd be pretty popular, but they wouldn't necessarily be more competent. (Take
Maybe the problem isn't the spotlight or the low pay. Maybe the problem is that the world is really complicated, but we are attracted to people who see things in black-and-white. Maybe nobody wants to listen to the people who really understand things, because it's too complicated and they don't have the time. We like quick, pithy sound bites, even if they're totally off-base. Arnold is not popular because he has a firm grasp of the issues or because he's a loyal representative of his party, but because he's got some quick one-liners, and he's famous. We don't even care if some of the one-liners contradict the other ones, as long as they are funny.
When you look at it that way, coming back to the topic at hand, I can't imagine anything that would prepare you worse
This seems to be flamebait. The almanac was not his scientific legacy and wasn't even written with any pretence of contributing to science. Judging Franklin as a scientist on the basis of the almanac is like judging Newton on the basis of his theological writings.
The scientific legacy of Franklin was the "single fluid" theory of electricity. He was the first to hypothesize that electricity was a single conserved "fluid" instead of two fluids (corresponding to + and -). In fact, it was this hypothesis that gave us + (an excess of fluid) and - (a lack of fluid). After learning about electrons, we now know that he got the signs wrong. But it's hard to see how an 18th century experiment could have determined that. It seems to me that this is a pretty enormous scientific contribution. He wasn't Faraday or Maxwell, but this is probably the single most important contribution to understanding electricity made in the 18th century.
In my mind, this finding doesn't just invalidate the "comptetent advisors" theory, it also neatly answers the original poster's question as well. In a universal sufferage system, the incompetent are allowed to vote and they far outnumber the competent people and end up choosing a weaker candidate.
The problem of course, is extending the sufferage only to the competent. There's no good test to find these individuals, so we're sort of stuck with what we have. As Churchill once remarked: "Democracy is the worst form of government known to man, with the exception of all of the others."
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-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Franklin's experiment with electricity is what is called a "critical experiment." One that can only be explained by one system of hypotheses and cannot be explained in another. What the kite experiment was set to determine: was electricity a fluid or was it a particle? Quantum mechanics states it is both, but at the time of the experiment, duality was not allowed (its that Aristotelean myth of the Law of the Excluded Middle).
Having passed through the law school experience, I am positive it has general value. The dusty cases and statutes are not really that important - they merely provide background and material for instruction/practice on thinking. Law school is not about being given answers and memorizing them - the Socratic method, in which an instructor teaches by asking questions of students until the students stumble on the answers themselves, is both intense and effective. And very painful/humiliating at times.
For the most part, law students don't learn much that is directly useful, but in truth, the most useless thing we could do is memorize the law as we would the names of capitol cities. We are taught instead, a set of analytical skills that we can use to analyze potential outcomes of current situations, based on current law. Of course, along the way we pick bits of the law here and there, but really, it is about learning a way to think and analyze. It isn't fun - ask just about anyone who did it, and chances are, they wouldn't want to go through it again. It is a sort of boot camp for the mind.
I'm not saying that one can't think unless without going to law school, it is but one method to teach people how to evaluate situations. I would wager that other disciplines, especially the hard sciences, put people through and even more rigorous boot camp than law school.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
As the present administration demonstrates, we need more alcoholic womanizers in office - hell, I can respect a womanizer. It's coke heads who fail to womanize who are dangerous to America.
Bush needs an intern
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good