Aha, but toughness / 5.4620008x10^17 = tensile strength. I know this because 5.4620008x10^17 is the total force of the bomb dropped at Hiroshima, divided by the area of a football field. Toughness thus joins the league of questionable made-for-TV units of measurement.
Dig hard enough and I'm sure you'll find equally arcane.NET setups. Remember, kids: the only difference between Java and.NET is that Java was paved with good intentions.
For the time being, I'm content with picking nits, and saying that while the Arab Spring is indicative of a social paradigm shift, it was precipitated by the Internet indirectly, and constituted its own distinct shift in the cultures of the countries that it included. But, y'know. Splitting hairs, for the time being.
I don't really want to drag it out either, but I'm pretty adamant that the church's problem with heliocentrism had ontological underpinnings. Roughly speaking, the subject-object problem considered by Kant is affected by whether or not humans are the centre and/or purpose of the universe, and that, in turn, is both an epistemological and ontological issue.
But at any rate, I think I'd stand by the argument that instant, effortless communication does not constitute a very deep epistemic shift, even if it may permit subsequent ones. I'd like to go back to something I mentioned briefly earlier, the idea of a change being irreversible, as perhaps key to deciding whether or not it's a complete enough change to be called a paradigm shift. Newton not only supplants Aristotle in terms of moving away from Aristotle's errors, but a Newtonian would never take Aristotle seriously; conversely, an Aristotlean would have trouble defending his or her viewpoint from Newton. Yet people can be removed from the Internet indefinitely and still maintain the same standard of interpersonal communication as long as geography isn't prohibitive... and if it is, then we must consider the impact of mountain ranges and other physical barriers equivalent to distance (as they impede travel), in which case I feel it's bizarre to suggest that the peculiarities of the Earth's surface should be allowed to have a role in defining something that is otherwise so general.
No, the core fairy hypothesis wasn't suggested by experimental evidence. None of the experiments or findings support the existence of fairies, only that water makes plants grow. You haven't developed an experiment that actually confronts the question of whether it's the water or something in the water that is important to plant growth, and you have no rationale for why fairies exist in the first place. You only have anecdotal evidence that water makes plants grow, which you then verify scientifically.
Personally, I would be much more concerned about the effects of indoctrinating our youths with 1-sided Linear Time in place of the 4-sided Truth, but the hospital's firewall considers timecube.com a hate site, so you'll have to settle with a big fat "no" instead of full-force trolling.
That's just doing the same thing at a finer level of resolution. Why stop at individual studies or papers when we can push it to 11 and say individual sentences within a paper are scientific or unscientific? You can assume that, unless we are discussing the very smallest, most fundamental statement, that by branding something 'scientific' or 'philosophical' I mean 'essentially' or 'predominantly' scientific or philosophical. To worry over anything else, as you are now, is wasteful and neurotic.
...and no, the N-ray study was scientific, because it involved the detailed critique of evidence. Both Blondlot's presentation to Wood and Wood's disproof of Blondlot proceeded in a completely empirical manner. Your statement about fairies was no more scientific than Aristotle's arguments about gravity, because fairy theory has generated no testable hypotheses, much like Carl Sagan's garage dragon, and it is grounded in folklore rather than a maximum-parsimony explanation of the evidence, which was exactly the reason in which alchemy is distinguished from chemistry (i.e. Occam's razor does not approve.) If you replaced "fairies" with "God", you'll get something equally flawed.
Ah, but the Copernican revolution had a huge ontological impact. Kuhn:
To describe the innovation initiated by Copernicus as the simple interchange of the position of the earth and sun is to make a molehill out of a promontory in the development of human thought. If Copernicus' proposal had had no consequences outside astronomy, it would have been neither so long delayed nor so strenuously resisted.
It meant that humans were no longer the centre of the universe! How much more fundamental can you get?
I'm not sure exactly where to place the line on change largeness, but with Copernicus classified as ontological, that problem seems to me like an argument over the definition of where ontology ends and mere knowledge about the world begins.
Alright. I dug up some further numbers. Most sources recommend keeping exposure below 85 dB. Prolonged exposure to 90 dB and above can cause hearing loss, and pain begins at 120-125 dB. With the right headphones, the old iPod Nano puts out 90 dB at half volume, which is enough to cause permanent damage after eight hours of continuous exposure. So, yeah, you're thoroughly right. Forget the logarithmic thing; I had that backwards. Definitely been too long since I looked at sound stats.
Don't be so quick to judge based on bleeding audio, though; at least not unless you get a good look at the headphones in question. The listener might not be wearing the headphones properly (hence causing leakage) or the headphones may have an open-back design meaning they leak more than usual. I have a pair of (rather old) AKG K240s which do this, and because they're very bulky people assume they must be operating at an exceptionally powerful level—but it's just the lack of a solid casing around the drivers.
You're off to the left a bit on that one. I was making the precise distinction you did when you pointed to string theory, that when an idea is so theoretical as to be utterly untestable, like Freud and most of string theory, no scientific method is at work and hence the theory isn't really science. (Not so much N-rays, as that appears to have been possibly a little fraudulent.) Eventually these fields evolve into having testable premises and become functional and scientific, as psychology has, but at their inception they're like Aristotlean physics—assumed, not inferred or even really suggested by the data at hand.
So, relax. I'm not actually targeting the social sciences here; the only blame falls on 19th century positivism for inventing the term 'social science' before the fields it was applied to were actually scientific. Most of these fields have grown out from being purely philosophical into being able to generate and test real hypotheses, but, say, gender theory is still almost exclusively a priori and/or confabulatory, and should not be lumped with more concrete fields like cognitive (or even behaviourist) psychology.
Sounds like the Wikipedia article needs some re-mangling. Both "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" cite only Handa, and the former draws up a '86 paper with the particularly ghoulish title "Peace Paradigm: Transcending Liberal and Marxian Paradigms", which I quite honestly am glad I cannot find a copy of. At any rate, the claim is repeated that Handa introduced the concept. (Note to self: stick to science and history sections when reading Wikipedia.)
...anyway, I think with the Pirages and Ehrlich definition, I can still hang on to the assertion that we're talking about something which is more or less ontological, and that the Internet alone just isn't dramatic enough in its impact on value systems to qualify as a social paradigm shift. Certainly "it's normal to wish John a speedy recovery from the flu even when he's thousands of miles away" is some kind of change in values, but it pales in comparison to the depth and irreversibility of things we know for certain deserve the label, like the rejection of slavery or the writing of the Magna Carta.
Because the decibel scale is logarithmic, hearing damage is not something most music listeners subject themselves to except at concerts and dance parties. People are much less likely to turn up their headphones until they feel pain than they are to go to a concert and accept a bit of pain in exchange for the experience.
Well... I tried to avoid making arguments specifically about Kuhnian paradigm shifts and to consider other established senses of paradigm shift as well. Wikipedia uses the term "worldview" in its description of how Kuhnian paradigm shifts occur, but it specifically says "entire worldview", which I've been taking to explicitly require a substantial shift in ontology. There is a separate description given for a notion of a social paradigm, but it's uncited and goes back particularly to the context of education in the 1970s by a researcher who left little in the way of a legacy (M. L. Handa), in a book so obscure I can't even find it in the library of the place where he or she worked.
Without knowing more about what Handa thought, I don't think it's fair to call anything a social paradigm shift unless it's as fundamental a change in society as a Kuhnian paradigm shift is in science. In that case I would say the notion should be applied to the introduction of ideas like the elimination of aristocracy (i.e. John Locke), the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and other major cases where the fundamental nature of social order and social structures changed significantly. I guess you can kinda-maybe-sorta count Facebook activism as a paradigm of something or other, but that's pretty obviously a paradigm prompted by the tool revolution of instant communication.
The important step, I think, and the key thing that the article ignores, is when those sketchy beliefs start being thrown out. The author (following on Kuhn) perpetuates the idea that the social sciences just keep refining untestable models and can never really settle on an empirical basis... but we know, certainly, that lots of fields have achieved legitimate use of the scientific method in their modes of inquiry. The problem seems to be that pre-scientific researchers like Marx branded their fields as "scientific" prematurely because it was in vogue, when really they should've stuck to just calling them philosophy until statistically rigorous studies were a part of their processes.
Personally, I don't think that lightening the burden of communication constitutes a change of anything significant on its own, but after thinking on the matter for a while I'm starting to get the feeling that the real problem is that the article used the term "worldview" as a placeholder for ontology, which is what Kuhn was really discussing when he made the argument that the Aristotlean and Newtonian concepts of motion are incomparable. We shouldn't have been discussing worldview at all as a lemma to deciding whether or not the Internet is a paradigm shift.
Returning to that original topic: elsewhere in this comment thread, someone brought up the idea of a tool-driven revolution that presents new puzzles which must be solved. If anything, the Internet would be better described as one of these, not as a change in paradigm. It affects the challenges people are faced with (i.e. they can now communicate with a lot of other people rapidly), but it doesn't constitute a change in anything fundamental, only in how people are organized. It's allowed scientists to probe questions about social dynamics which were previously hard or impossible to explore (cf. 4chan, trolling), just like X-ray crystallography let us probe the physical structures of complex molecules, or the synchrotron let us look at high-energy particle collisions, but no views were shattered. It wasn't like discovering a new culture and realising that the world isn't as simple as one's own culture (which is what I thought you meant by travel at first), nor was it like realising that "the growing of a child into an adult was a similar process to that of a rock falling to the ground: each is moving toward its natural end, the place and state where it belongs" is nonsense. No gods were challenged, except maybe by William Gibson.
I witnessed it personally; I'm afraid I haven't been able to find any citations. Access was blocked after installing several games from DVD media; after removing one game, access was restored, but vanished again following a reboot.
Access to information means little or nothing if you don't do anything with it. Please, feel free to indicate what metaphysical assumptions of yours were shattered when you discovered the iPhone and no longer had to carry around a thousand pounds of telephone books.
That was kinda my point. narcc eventually focused on travel as an example of something that changes an individual's view of the world, so I went along with more of an individual-vs-whole-population distinction (i.e., if someone's already done it, you're learning nothing new), but I also feel that, since we started out discussing Kuhn paradigms, talking about cultural shifts (however dramatic they may be) is a bit off to the side.
A cubic centimetre is exactly one millilitre, so that should make things easier for you—although the cc unit is mostly used in medicine; in biology and chemistry we use mL. A kilogram is slightly more than two pounds.
And to be honest, I (as a Canadian, if that wasn't already clear) was never expected to know more than the prefixes relevant to everyday use, so it sounds like your teacher and/or curriculum was overcompensating.
I think you may be screwing up our attempt to define what contributes to a worldview by using the word in your answer like that... but anyway. The point I really want to get at is that people were already capable of travelling. You could phone up someone in another country, or develop a pen pal, or simply go there. All the Internet added was a thick layer of convenience; it didn't enable anything that had previously been impossible for a person to do. (At least, not on its own.) While it may have given many people an opportunity to improve their individual worldviews, they could at best catch up to others who had already travelled or pen-palled or racked up massive long distance charges.
FWIW, I think there's some wiggle room in deciding which social sciences should be called sciences. Certainly behaviourist psychology generates testable hypotheses ("Does putting Jimmy in the box with all of the spiders cure him of his phobia of spiders?"), but there have been some theories like Marxism which were produced out of a love of an idea ("Hegel is not a dunce") where there was a significant gap in reasoning, little or no empirical motivation, and a lot of bad things that followed. Marxist ideas wouldn't persist if hard evidence could be presented that says it's all rubbish, but they continue to evolve anyway. (And if you want to pick nits about Marx, then substitute in the horror that is Juche instead.) Such things should be forced to call themselves philosophies until they generate testable hypotheses.
(In particular I'd like to point a finger at the people who coined the term 'social science' and applied it to themselves before their fields were actually scientific.)
(Also, I agree that the author is a bit of a twat, particularly for cherrypicking bad theories to talk about, and avoiding good, solid developments like cognitive science.)
I think we're now at the point of arguing about what "works" means, quite honestly. Do you believe something changed about how people view the way in which the world "works" when the Internet was introduced into their lives? If so, what?
Slashdot Mirror
LSD. Honestly, all this time I thought that was LSD talking.
Aha, but toughness / 5.4620008x10^17 = tensile strength. I know this because 5.4620008x10^17 is the total force of the bomb dropped at Hiroshima, divided by the area of a football field. Toughness thus joins the league of questionable made-for-TV units of measurement.
Dig hard enough and I'm sure you'll find equally arcane .NET setups. Remember, kids: the only difference between Java and .NET is that Java was paved with good intentions.
...maybe. Maybe. Thinking we're done here. Pleasure chattering with you. I like the sig.
For the time being, I'm content with picking nits, and saying that while the Arab Spring is indicative of a social paradigm shift, it was precipitated by the Internet indirectly, and constituted its own distinct shift in the cultures of the countries that it included. But, y'know. Splitting hairs, for the time being.
I don't really want to drag it out either, but I'm pretty adamant that the church's problem with heliocentrism had ontological underpinnings. Roughly speaking, the subject-object problem considered by Kant is affected by whether or not humans are the centre and/or purpose of the universe, and that, in turn, is both an epistemological and ontological issue.
But at any rate, I think I'd stand by the argument that instant, effortless communication does not constitute a very deep epistemic shift, even if it may permit subsequent ones. I'd like to go back to something I mentioned briefly earlier, the idea of a change being irreversible, as perhaps key to deciding whether or not it's a complete enough change to be called a paradigm shift. Newton not only supplants Aristotle in terms of moving away from Aristotle's errors, but a Newtonian would never take Aristotle seriously; conversely, an Aristotlean would have trouble defending his or her viewpoint from Newton. Yet people can be removed from the Internet indefinitely and still maintain the same standard of interpersonal communication as long as geography isn't prohibitive... and if it is, then we must consider the impact of mountain ranges and other physical barriers equivalent to distance (as they impede travel), in which case I feel it's bizarre to suggest that the peculiarities of the Earth's surface should be allowed to have a role in defining something that is otherwise so general.
No, the core fairy hypothesis wasn't suggested by experimental evidence. None of the experiments or findings support the existence of fairies, only that water makes plants grow. You haven't developed an experiment that actually confronts the question of whether it's the water or something in the water that is important to plant growth, and you have no rationale for why fairies exist in the first place. You only have anecdotal evidence that water makes plants grow, which you then verify scientifically.
Personally, I would be much more concerned about the effects of indoctrinating our youths with 1-sided Linear Time in place of the 4-sided Truth, but the hospital's firewall considers timecube.com a hate site, so you'll have to settle with a big fat "no" instead of full-force trolling.
That's just doing the same thing at a finer level of resolution. Why stop at individual studies or papers when we can push it to 11 and say individual sentences within a paper are scientific or unscientific? You can assume that, unless we are discussing the very smallest, most fundamental statement, that by branding something 'scientific' or 'philosophical' I mean 'essentially' or 'predominantly' scientific or philosophical. To worry over anything else, as you are now, is wasteful and neurotic.
...and no, the N-ray study was scientific, because it involved the detailed critique of evidence. Both Blondlot's presentation to Wood and Wood's disproof of Blondlot proceeded in a completely empirical manner. Your statement about fairies was no more scientific than Aristotle's arguments about gravity, because fairy theory has generated no testable hypotheses, much like Carl Sagan's garage dragon, and it is grounded in folklore rather than a maximum-parsimony explanation of the evidence, which was exactly the reason in which alchemy is distinguished from chemistry (i.e. Occam's razor does not approve.) If you replaced "fairies" with "God", you'll get something equally flawed.
Ah, but the Copernican revolution had a huge ontological impact. Kuhn:
To describe the innovation initiated by Copernicus as the simple interchange of the position of the earth and sun is to make a molehill out of a promontory in the development of human thought. If Copernicus' proposal had had no consequences outside astronomy, it would have been neither so long delayed nor so strenuously resisted.
It meant that humans were no longer the centre of the universe! How much more fundamental can you get?
I'm not sure exactly where to place the line on change largeness, but with Copernicus classified as ontological, that problem seems to me like an argument over the definition of where ontology ends and mere knowledge about the world begins.
Alright. I dug up some further numbers. Most sources recommend keeping exposure below 85 dB. Prolonged exposure to 90 dB and above can cause hearing loss, and pain begins at 120-125 dB. With the right headphones, the old iPod Nano puts out 90 dB at half volume, which is enough to cause permanent damage after eight hours of continuous exposure. So, yeah, you're thoroughly right. Forget the logarithmic thing; I had that backwards. Definitely been too long since I looked at sound stats.
Don't be so quick to judge based on bleeding audio, though; at least not unless you get a good look at the headphones in question. The listener might not be wearing the headphones properly (hence causing leakage) or the headphones may have an open-back design meaning they leak more than usual. I have a pair of (rather old) AKG K240s which do this, and because they're very bulky people assume they must be operating at an exceptionally powerful level—but it's just the lack of a solid casing around the drivers.
You're off to the left a bit on that one. I was making the precise distinction you did when you pointed to string theory, that when an idea is so theoretical as to be utterly untestable, like Freud and most of string theory, no scientific method is at work and hence the theory isn't really science. (Not so much N-rays, as that appears to have been possibly a little fraudulent.) Eventually these fields evolve into having testable premises and become functional and scientific, as psychology has, but at their inception they're like Aristotlean physics—assumed, not inferred or even really suggested by the data at hand.
So, relax. I'm not actually targeting the social sciences here; the only blame falls on 19th century positivism for inventing the term 'social science' before the fields it was applied to were actually scientific. Most of these fields have grown out from being purely philosophical into being able to generate and test real hypotheses, but, say, gender theory is still almost exclusively a priori and/or confabulatory, and should not be lumped with more concrete fields like cognitive (or even behaviourist) psychology.
Sounds like the Wikipedia article needs some re-mangling. Both "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" cite only Handa, and the former draws up a '86 paper with the particularly ghoulish title "Peace Paradigm: Transcending Liberal and Marxian Paradigms", which I quite honestly am glad I cannot find a copy of. At any rate, the claim is repeated that Handa introduced the concept. (Note to self: stick to science and history sections when reading Wikipedia.)
...anyway, I think with the Pirages and Ehrlich definition, I can still hang on to the assertion that we're talking about something which is more or less ontological, and that the Internet alone just isn't dramatic enough in its impact on value systems to qualify as a social paradigm shift. Certainly "it's normal to wish John a speedy recovery from the flu even when he's thousands of miles away" is some kind of change in values, but it pales in comparison to the depth and irreversibility of things we know for certain deserve the label, like the rejection of slavery or the writing of the Magna Carta.
Because the decibel scale is logarithmic, hearing damage is not something most music listeners subject themselves to except at concerts and dance parties. People are much less likely to turn up their headphones until they feel pain than they are to go to a concert and accept a bit of pain in exchange for the experience.
Well... I tried to avoid making arguments specifically about Kuhnian paradigm shifts and to consider other established senses of paradigm shift as well. Wikipedia uses the term "worldview" in its description of how Kuhnian paradigm shifts occur, but it specifically says "entire worldview", which I've been taking to explicitly require a substantial shift in ontology. There is a separate description given for a notion of a social paradigm, but it's uncited and goes back particularly to the context of education in the 1970s by a researcher who left little in the way of a legacy (M. L. Handa), in a book so obscure I can't even find it in the library of the place where he or she worked.
Without knowing more about what Handa thought, I don't think it's fair to call anything a social paradigm shift unless it's as fundamental a change in society as a Kuhnian paradigm shift is in science. In that case I would say the notion should be applied to the introduction of ideas like the elimination of aristocracy (i.e. John Locke), the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and other major cases where the fundamental nature of social order and social structures changed significantly. I guess you can kinda-maybe-sorta count Facebook activism as a paradigm of something or other, but that's pretty obviously a paradigm prompted by the tool revolution of instant communication.
The important step, I think, and the key thing that the article ignores, is when those sketchy beliefs start being thrown out. The author (following on Kuhn) perpetuates the idea that the social sciences just keep refining untestable models and can never really settle on an empirical basis... but we know, certainly, that lots of fields have achieved legitimate use of the scientific method in their modes of inquiry. The problem seems to be that pre-scientific researchers like Marx branded their fields as "scientific" prematurely because it was in vogue, when really they should've stuck to just calling them philosophy until statistically rigorous studies were a part of their processes.
You're a bit late to the conversation to be swinging around vague complaints like that.
Personally, I don't think that lightening the burden of communication constitutes a change of anything significant on its own, but after thinking on the matter for a while I'm starting to get the feeling that the real problem is that the article used the term "worldview" as a placeholder for ontology, which is what Kuhn was really discussing when he made the argument that the Aristotlean and Newtonian concepts of motion are incomparable. We shouldn't have been discussing worldview at all as a lemma to deciding whether or not the Internet is a paradigm shift.
Returning to that original topic: elsewhere in this comment thread, someone brought up the idea of a tool-driven revolution that presents new puzzles which must be solved. If anything, the Internet would be better described as one of these, not as a change in paradigm. It affects the challenges people are faced with (i.e. they can now communicate with a lot of other people rapidly), but it doesn't constitute a change in anything fundamental, only in how people are organized. It's allowed scientists to probe questions about social dynamics which were previously hard or impossible to explore (cf. 4chan, trolling), just like X-ray crystallography let us probe the physical structures of complex molecules, or the synchrotron let us look at high-energy particle collisions, but no views were shattered. It wasn't like discovering a new culture and realising that the world isn't as simple as one's own culture (which is what I thought you meant by travel at first), nor was it like realising that "the growing of a child into an adult was a similar process to that of a rock falling to the ground: each is moving toward its natural end, the place and state where it belongs" is nonsense. No gods were challenged, except maybe by William Gibson.
I witnessed it personally; I'm afraid I haven't been able to find any citations. Access was blocked after installing several games from DVD media; after removing one game, access was restored, but vanished again following a reboot.
Access to information means little or nothing if you don't do anything with it. Please, feel free to indicate what metaphysical assumptions of yours were shattered when you discovered the iPhone and no longer had to carry around a thousand pounds of telephone books.
That was kinda my point. narcc eventually focused on travel as an example of something that changes an individual's view of the world, so I went along with more of an individual-vs-whole-population distinction (i.e., if someone's already done it, you're learning nothing new), but I also feel that, since we started out discussing Kuhn paradigms, talking about cultural shifts (however dramatic they may be) is a bit off to the side.
A cubic centimetre is exactly one millilitre, so that should make things easier for you—although the cc unit is mostly used in medicine; in biology and chemistry we use mL. A kilogram is slightly more than two pounds.
And to be honest, I (as a Canadian, if that wasn't already clear) was never expected to know more than the prefixes relevant to everyday use, so it sounds like your teacher and/or curriculum was overcompensating.
I think you may be screwing up our attempt to define what contributes to a worldview by using the word in your answer like that... but anyway. The point I really want to get at is that people were already capable of travelling. You could phone up someone in another country, or develop a pen pal, or simply go there. All the Internet added was a thick layer of convenience; it didn't enable anything that had previously been impossible for a person to do. (At least, not on its own.) While it may have given many people an opportunity to improve their individual worldviews, they could at best catch up to others who had already travelled or pen-palled or racked up massive long distance charges.
FWIW, I think there's some wiggle room in deciding which social sciences should be called sciences. Certainly behaviourist psychology generates testable hypotheses ("Does putting Jimmy in the box with all of the spiders cure him of his phobia of spiders?"), but there have been some theories like Marxism which were produced out of a love of an idea ("Hegel is not a dunce") where there was a significant gap in reasoning, little or no empirical motivation, and a lot of bad things that followed. Marxist ideas wouldn't persist if hard evidence could be presented that says it's all rubbish, but they continue to evolve anyway. (And if you want to pick nits about Marx, then substitute in the horror that is Juche instead.) Such things should be forced to call themselves philosophies until they generate testable hypotheses.
(In particular I'd like to point a finger at the people who coined the term 'social science' and applied it to themselves before their fields were actually scientific.)
(Also, I agree that the author is a bit of a twat, particularly for cherrypicking bad theories to talk about, and avoiding good, solid developments like cognitive science.)
I think we're now at the point of arguing about what "works" means, quite honestly. Do you believe something changed about how people view the way in which the world "works" when the Internet was introduced into their lives? If so, what?