Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Politics

Journal freejung's Journal: Paradigm Shift 30

Journal by freejung
The concept of a paradigm shift was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 in his landmark work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." During a paradigm shift, a very interesting phenomenon occurs. Some people adopt the new paradigm early and defend it vigorously. Others are gradually swayed as the evidence supporting the new paradigm mounts. But there are always some diehards who simply refuse to give up on the old paradigm no matter what. Regardless of what new evidence comes to light, they will make a series of increasingly unlikely assumptions in order to force the new data to fit into their obsolete worldview. This is of course completely permitted by the rules of logic, so the decision to abandon the old paradigm is inherently subjective -- at some point, you just have to decide that the logical contortions being undertaken by the fanatical adherents of the old theory are just plain silly.

Thus many people continued to believe that the Earth was flat, even long after people had actually circumnavigated it. They presumably thought it was all a vast conspiracy of cartographers. Thus many highly intelligent and skilled physicists, including Einstein, refused to accept Quantum Mechanics even while they were busy building it, because they could not abandon the idea of determinism. Thus many people still refuse to accept evolution, long after overwhelming scientific consensus and the vast preponderance of evidence clearly support it, because they simply cannot fit it into their worldview. The irony of this is that evolution isn't inconsistent with Christianity any more than a round Earth is -- if God wants to create a spherical planet, He can, and if He wants to create life by a process of evolution, He can do that too, He's God.

It's not that these people are stupid. Einstein was clearly one of the most intelligent people our species has ever produced. He just got stuck on something, and he couldn't get over it. He could not bring himself to accept that the universe contains a basic element of randomness, because "God does not play dice with the universe." Why not? If God wants to play dice with the universe, He can do that, He's God. But Einstein couldn't get over it, and he went to his grave trying to find some set of assumptions or "hidden variables" which would allow him to rescue determinism from the ravages of the Schrodinger's Cat "paradox." People are just like that. It happens to most of us, sooner or later.

It has been highly amusing to watch the contortions that pundits and the corporate media are going through to explain the recent theft of the erection. Exit polls are almost never wrong, and, as pointed out by Prof. Steven Freeman at the University of Pennsylvania, the odds that the exit polls were wrong in the same way in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are 250 million to one. If this sort of thing were to happen in some two-bit banana republic, everyone would immediately draw the obvious conclusion, especially if the results happened to favor the deeply entrenched incumbents and the incumbents' supporters happened to be in a position to tamper with the ballots.

But let the same thing happen in the US, and they immediately begin inventing spooks and specters, positing a shadowy Democratic conspiracy to fix the exit polls. They have no evidence for this, of course, nor have they proposed a mechanism by which it could happen or even a plausible motivation for doing so, and the alleged conspirators immediately backed off from their conspiracy, disavowed the exit poll results, and actually modified the results to fit with the official election tally. But they have to make this assumption, because they cannot bring themselves to abandon the idea that the system works, that corporations and government and the Republican party are benevolent and trustworthy and serve the real interests of the American people.

Oh sure, they will admit that there are some problems with these institutions. But they cannot abandon their faith in the basic goodness of the system itself. So they have to continue, in the face of evidence which has been steadily mounting for decades if not centuries, to make an ever more ludicrous set of assumptions in order to protect their worldview from the ravages of reality.

You must understand, I'm not just talking about conservatives here, mainstream "liberals" do this too. Their first loyalty is to the system, however liberal they may allegedly be.

A paradigm shift is occurring in our culture, and has been for some time now. Any paradigm shift begins with the observation that the old paradigm is inadequate, though that is only the beginning, and a new paradigm must be developed to replace it, subsuming the old paradigm and explaining its successes while expanding into new territory. And indeed, the new paradigm taking shape does this, combining elements from such diverse fields as Quantum Mechanics, Eastern mysticism, Christianity, anthropology, psychology, and general weirdness to form something completely new and radically expansive. But it begins with the insight that the system is broken, that the old paradigm has failed, that the hard, cold, mechanistic social darwinism (which often takes on the guise of "fundamentalist" religion, oddly enough) that gave rise to the industrial revolution and the ascendance of corporate capitalism is destructive and dehumanizing and fundamentally flawed.

I had the good fortune to be raised in the new paradigm. I knew that the system was broken by the time I was five years old, so none of this comes as a shock to me. Indeed, the only thing I find surprising is the tenacity with which people hold on to the old paradigm in the face of all the available evidence. There has been a massive backlash (I highly recommend this article, it's incredibly insightful and a wonderful read) against the cultural revolution, one of the most bizarre cultural phenomena in history, "a working class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working class people." Did you know that the "heartland" of America was a hotbed of socialism 100 years ago? Now, of course, they have fallen for what may well be the biggest and most expensive con in history.

But this should not come as a surprise. This always happens. There are always those who will not accept the new paradigm no matter what, and will fight to the death to stop it. They will go to their graves clinging desperately to the tattered shreds of their archaic worldview. It doesn't matter. Eventually, the adherents of the old paradigm simply die off, and their beliefs die with them, making way for the dawning of a new day. And so it goes, and so it will go again and again. Provided, of course, that they don't take the rest of us with them this time around.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Paradigm Shift More

Paradigm Shift

Comments Filter:
  • Upon you; a Precious Person of this Splendid Realm, I bestow the Order of
    Saint Jude and dub thee Sir Knight FreeJung of the Realm of Humanity.
    >
    Do not fail in your mission (until death) to right wrongs (if possible),
    go where others see no path and will not follow (until we get there, if
    possible), fight the apparently un-winnable war (Greater be the victory, if
    possible), defeat the un-beatable foe (bullies deserve an ass-kicking, if
    possible). This display of character will keep you in good standing with th
  • 1. Kuhn writes his famous work on scientific revolutions.
    2. Everyone accepts his thesis, as they see it's an accurate description of the situation.
    3. Some time later, it turns out that there is an even more accurate description of...progress in science.
    4. The new "paradigm" (if we can call it by this name at all) is adopted. Kuhn's idea, while deemed to be sufficient for some purposes, is abandoned as THE "paradigm."
    5. Voila -- the idea of Paradigm Shift has been "paradigm shifted." But does this valida
    • Interesting question and I think it's deeper than mere semantics. However, the new paradigm must explain and reproduce the success of the old paradigm. So the new paradigm would have to provide an expanded explanation of the process by which it itself was created, without contradicting the limited but still successful explanation of that process by the old paradigm.

      In a sense, a real new paradigm does not invalidate the old, but rather contains it as a special case or explains it as a limited understandin

  • n/s (Score:1)

    by subgeek ( 263292 ) *
    ah, yes, rosentcranz and guildenstern are dead

    and i don't believe in it anyway.

    in what?

    england.

    just a conspiracy of cartographers, you mean?
  • We are a being under fixed circumstances in a certain condition. We can be very liberal outspoken when we are put in a free state. I mean because we live in a country where we are guaranteed to speak out whatever we want.-Where we can make a limitation-that is self-restraint, not against the public benefits. Because we live in a free country, we can hold and express independ opinions. However, same person cannot speak out their opinions in their containment-for fear that they might be harmed by authority. R
    • Unless we ourselves change, we cannot see things as they are

      "The universe may be not only stranger than we think, but stranger than we can think."

      "Your theory is crazy. On that we are all agreed. What remains to be seen is whether it is crazy enough to be true."

      -- Neils Bohr


  • by no less than the New York Times and Washington Post. I'll find the links later.

    Really, its time to get a grip and realise that >51% of the USA doesn't accept your 'paradigm'.
    • its time to get a grip and realise that >51% of the USA doesn't accept your 'paradigm'.

      Actually, I would estimate that far fewer than 49% of the USA accept my paradigm. Most "liberals" still have faith in the system. On the other hand, some conservatives do not. And many in the new paradigm take no real stance on the system at all, but simply work in their own ways to make the world a better place in a manner which is totally orthogonal to the system, or even within it. We are a minority. But we are

    • Explain this [berkeley.edu]!

      • Who needs to?

        At best they estimate 130,000 extra votes for Bush in Florida which is just over a third of the way to altering the results of the election.

        They say that a large majority of these machines were placed in Democrat counties, and they mean to push targeted conspiracy. But that is as problematic as arguing that Rove planted the fake memos for CBS to report on. If CBS, and the Democrats in that county were asleep at the switch, then you are barking up the wrong tree going after Diebold.

        Never the
        • It doesn't matter whether it alters the results. The election results are not going to change no matter what. It shows that there was almost certainly a "machine error".

          These were not Diebold machines. But it doesn't matter. I don't see how you can attribute it to Democrats being "asleep at the switch." The machines gave extra votes to Bush. This is a clear instance of vote fraud.

          Regardless of whether it would have changed the outcome of the election, any election in which provable large-scale fraud too

          • I don't see how you can attribute it to Democrats being "asleep at the switch."

            I expect that they should have known better.

            any election in which provable large-scale fraud took place is illegitimate in my book.

            Their analysis fails to show statistical significance, and they themselves say that statistics is the only tool they have at their disposal.

            You can pardon my incredulity but I have the impression that you simply having problems accepting that the USA judged Bush the way it did. Voter fraud does
            • Their analysis fails to show statistical significance

              That turns out not to be correct. Their analysis shows that there is less than a 1/1000 probability that the correlation between extra votes for Bush and evoting is due to random chance.

            • I expect that they should have known better.

              Wow.

              Just. Fucking. Wow.
              • Yeah, I didn't know exactly what to do with that statement either. Presumably he means that they should have known better than to try to run an election in a Democratic precinct under a Republican oligarchy. What were they thinking?

                • There were two parts, and I explain because I'm in a good mood and aren't overpowered by malicious uncomprehension.

                  CBS Memos:

                  They were obvious fakes, CBS should have known. In fact they did, most of their experts told them it was most likely a forgery. Look if Charles Johnson could figure out they are fakes, why couldn't CBS? Because they didn't want to, that is why.

                  Florida Elections:

                  They have the power to decide their own voting methods (within reason). They could have chosen any number of means, but t
                  • there is something smelly afoot

                    Well, it's not my feet!

                    You think the democrats have faked the exit polls and these voting irregularities to call the election into question. If that's the case, why aren't they challenging it? Only the Greens and Libertarians are challenging, Kerry is sitting on a fat wad of cash and doing nothing.

                    I think it is safe to assume that everyone will cheat to some extent, but you can easily tell who cheats the most: they win.

                    Show me an instance where the voting irregulariti

                    • You think the democrats have faked the exit polls

                      No I don't. Exit polls are simply inherently fallable (because they are statistical samples). There was some demonstrated oversampling of urban areas, but I don't have any reason to blame that on partisan politics.

                      and these voting irregularities to call the election into question.

                      I think the UC professor, and others are working independantly of the Democrat party. I think their work simply needs more peer review. So far it looks like they are simply mis
                    • Exit polls are simply inherently fallable

                      No. The odds against these discrepancies occurring by random chance are 250 million to one [truthout.org].

                    • As said previously, they aren't random discrepencies. Come on, am I the only one who knows basic statistics here?
                    • Er -- did I mention I'm a former quantum physicist? Yeah, I understand statistics. You're saying there's a systematic error in the exit polls, but I have yet to see an explanation of what that might be.

                      Granted, I'm being a little confusing by switching topics. I'm now talking about the general discrepancy between the exit polls and the election results. The only way the exit polls could be wrong is by systematic error: for example, if for some reason republicans are less likely to answer exit polls than d

                    • did I mention I'm a former quantum physicist?

                      Nobody's perfect.

                      I'm now talking about the general discrepancy between the exit polls and the election results.

                      Theres two competing schools of thought that I've found on this subject. The first is that exit polls are so accurate that they are used in third world countries to detect voter fraud. The second is that exit polls are notoriously unreliable, and often require adjusting according to actual poll results.

                      But first the oversampling. Its been reported
                    • I agree that it matters less what the actual election results were than that we learn a lesson from this fiasco and fix the voting process. That means more than getting rid of the machines or having a paper trial -- it also means having adequate numbers of machines in poor neighborhoods and a concerted effort to make sure everyone who wants to vote has a chance to and has their ballot accurately counted. As long as that happens, I'm happy. I don't expect the election results to change in any case. I just th
  • you should consider a name change to "freefreud", bearing in mind your "theft of the erection" mispell. ;-)

    Interesting stuff, though.
  • As usual...great stuff. It certainly explains what I'm up against in my little war against IP. I'm still looking for a logical argument that adequately justifies their position. If anyone can, maybe you can. so far, all I'm getting is "But she's got a new hat." [64.233.179.104].(look near bottom of page.)

Slashdot Top Deals

Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

Close