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."

Comments

Re:EXCUSE ME....

[fucksl4shd0t]

I realize this is a troll, but I'm getting sick of the slashdot stereotype.

....but what the fuck are all you assholes doing reading and posting comments to Slashdot this late on a Friday night? Do you really have nothing better to do than sit in your dorm rooms and play Wolfenstein with your Internet friends? Get out and fucking do something with your lives, losers.

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.

Re:His Seven Great Virtues

[kfg]

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

Re:Where are they now?

[Corgha]

What if Arnold knows exactly what his weaknesses is? What if Arnold surrounds himself with smart advisors that he agrees with and listens too?

[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.

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 /. and acting condescending to users turn out not to be so hot after all when it comes down to it.

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 /. for instance ;)

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

Re:Franklin built himself on aphorisms, not scienc

[Pig Bodine]

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.

Re:Where are they now?

[crawling_chaos]

Here's the flaw I see in it: incompetent people have been shown [apa.org] to be less capable not only of judging their own performance, but also of judging the performance of others.

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."