I should soon be out of this tangle and be able to write about more interesting things.

Furuya, Feb 25:

Many assume that the “mind leads the body.” It does, but because the mind is so elusive, difficult to control and beyond even our own self understanding, (which we cannot deny), we, on a practical level, train the mind through the body.

Salon’s latest plea has finally worked for me. I will be subscribing. Heck, I guess instant access to This Modern World alone is worth a couple bucks a month. I’m praying we can turn back the tide of McCarthyism Redux, but I’m also brushing up on my French.

Travel Throes and Woes. Back from Los Alamos for two short days before departing again, now back a day late.

I’m soon to take on a major reading /blogging project, with a few others, to run parralel with this one.

I may not qualify as a ‘disciple’ of JD, but his blog is certainly one of my primary models. The new project will be very similar to his Wittgenstein project: three (or more?) physicists try to digest the Critique of Pure Reason. Sounds like a real hoot, eh?

I’m off to Los Alamos. Trust music.

Russell:

[Scientific t]echnique conferred a sense of power: man is now much less at the mercy of his environment then he was in former times. But the power conferred by technique is social, not individual; an average individual wrecked on a desert island could have achieved much more in the seventeenth century than he could now.

I believe I stated this before as: what is adaptive for the institution is often maladaptive for the individual. People often think of hunter-gatherers as primitive & dumb, but drop your average burger-flipper somewhere on Baffin island and see how long he survives.

This is a point still often lost on those who agree in principle: human beings have had the same minds for 100,000 years. For instance, regarding the population of Pacific islands & North America, or the building of impressive stone monuments. Should these achievements really be surprising for so clever a species?

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science.

…[I]t is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.

�The reign of law had established its hold on men�s imaginations� [i]n 1700 the mental outlook of educated men was completely modern; in 1600, except among a very few, it was still largely medieval.

I fear that by 2100 it will again be wholly medieval. This serves the purposes of corporations (and the W admin) just fine. A populous that adheres to dogma is a convenient thing if you get to pick the dogma. Of course, the key word above is educated men (gender biased language aside)� now we have people who can do advanced calculus but still don�t understand the basic nature of science stated above (read: intelligent design apologists).

Who was it who said the greatest mystery of philosophy is how the many are so easily ruled by the few? (Nietzsche?) I think this is no longer much of a mystery (see previous discussion on social order and the cult of celebrity), but is still quite a spectacle.

From Curt G’s diary, addressing a topic that appeared here a few days ago:

One of the outcomes of this disillusionment is a fairly high attrition rate. If it were an organization, or a business, or a movement, or a religion, or a cult, we would have to do something to soften these blows so that we wouldn’t lose so many people. But, Guitar Craft is none of those things, and “success” is not measured in the size of its “membership”. It is a “way”, and it is there for those for whom it is the right way.

Interesting. There is a delicate balancing act for any “way”- in being structured enough to be available to the right people, while not losing its center. I think GC and Aikido are on opposite sides of this line.

The idea of a craft as a “way” is fairly alien to western culture. We are now accustomed to the idea in martial arts, but not so in other (performing) arts. I think the former came at a cost: martial arts became very watered down and has often lost its center entirely.

GC is rather unique in that it is a western construct. In Japan the crafts of war became ways when they were no longer necessary. A deep history of technique was brought to serve personal refinement. Furuya often says the most difficult thing to understand in martial arts is the paradox of the “sword of death, sword of life”, i.e., pursuing martial arts as a means of peace (please note this has nothing to do with the philosophy of deterrence). A related paradox occurs in how the aim of Guitar Craft does not so much as mention a guitar.

Obviously, there is a deep history of guitar technique, and I wonder how this has come to be applied as a way. Especially in a culture with little or no history of making this leap.

There was a time when the best minds of Germany and the Soviet Bloc fled to the United States to escape tyranny. Now, I’m afraid, the tide has shifted. This whole issue with Michael Dini is just the latest example of the punishment one can invite for pissing off the militant Christian autocracy. America has a long history of anti-intellectualism, so much that the very word intellectual is used with contempt, but until recently I think the high courts tended to side with rationality. Now it seems the pervading feeling among those that think for a living is that the country has been hijacked by fundamentalists. We survived one McCarthy era. I don’t think many of us want to stick around for an encore.

I’ll add my name to the list of people withdrawing anything nice they said about Colin Powell. He used to speak his own mind. Apparently the W admin has castigated him into another pathetic ditto head.

The process of peer review, which I have discussed before, is starting to come under professional scrutiny. Need I say, preliminary conclusions report the system does little in sorting important science from garbage. How to fix it? Flush it all away.

The whole system of scientific publication it outdated. Why should one have to pay to see the results of publicly funded scientific research? First of all, the massive print distribution of ordinary papers must stop. The volume of papers and obscurity of the work makes its difficult to fairly evaluate the quality of the work.

The answer is in XXX, a.k.a. the ArXives. It can serve as a starting point for a new model of distribution scientific information. It needs to

1. Institute a hierarchical system of categorization, like the PACS system, with an additional lower level topical list.
2. Organize a system of for online reviews, sort of like Amazon, where both works reviewed and the reviewers have ranks. Obviously, some form of registration would be required. Reviewers should also be organized hierarchically, so each field obtains external validation of its significance.
3. Encourage the collection of papers on the same topic into larger, coherent, self-contained subject reviews. Papers need not all be in agreement, but should recognize one another. This would allow those higher up in the chain to validate the scientific integrity of the field as a whole.

The problem with this, of course, is that the current system of publication is tied so tightly with the performance evaluations of scientists. To break from tradition is to invite unemployment. However, the tide is starting to turn. The ArXives started with a simple concept and their use exploded. But the idea is getting old. Information technology has come a long way since. I think an upgraded, distributed system for scientific peer review and publication would prove equally successful. The time is ripe.