Claymore

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

(Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 159–167)

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zornhau.livejournal.com

Horatio: Where? Can we commercialise them?

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Hamlet: Get thee to eBay. Hie thee to Amazon.

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'Tis true.

That said...if something works, companies will use it to competitive advantage. For example, dowsing: if it actually worked, why aren't oil companies and mining companies using it? Their multi-billion dollar businesses depend on them being able to accurately find oil and mineral deposits, and they have heaps of expensive high-tech equipment and plenty of highly experienced researchers doing that. If dowsing worked even only 10% of the time, any such company using it would have an immediate and massive lead over its competitors.

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Dowsing is how they used to find sites for mining at least through the seventeenth century (Paracelsus, who among other things was a mining engineers) describes, as I believe, does De re metallica. They fact they gave it up in favor of scientific geology say something.

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capnoblivious.livejournal.com

True enough - though it took sterilisation and hygeine a long time to become accepted.

(We're better at evidence-based medicine these days, of course.)

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And let's not forget that we can always trust the government, the military and big business to have consistently chosen the best, cheapest, cleanest, most efficient, most innovative and least wasteful methods to run the world, all of which work perfectly in every way for all concerned.

No.

If something works, it might change the way things are done, assuming you can get past hidebound, moribund, reactionary, greedy, penny-pinching, self-serving, conservative, clueless or just plain stupid attitudes of those people, groups and institutions who have the say.

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Heh. Who's the cynic now? :)

If there are innovations that result in improved profits for shareholders, those companies that don't implement them get left behind, and/or go out of business. Consumers/shareholders drive corporations...

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You're maybe assuming a rather utopian view where the high priests (scientists) approach the pharaoh (big boss or quango) and explain the vision they had (my experiment works!). In a fit of religious fervour, the pharaoh shouts let it be so and the religion spreads among the masses like wildfire...

Pharaoh didn't have committees, cost/benefit analysis, consultants, shareholders who won't countenance even the slightest dip in profit for retooling or R&D, long held beliefs and prejudices in the face of evidence ("the pharaoh wasn't born in Egypt and he's trying to destroy us!" or "This newfangled stuff is crap, the evidence is wrong - frogs and locusts? Ha! The firstborn would never all die! What we need are more pyramids"). Nor did he have a populace and advisors of the lowest common moral stance and popular beliefs, which DO NOT WANT change. People want the way their daddy did things and the way their daddy's daddy did things.

More often than not, everyone huddles together letting one poor fool try something new, clucking and nodding when it fails, and frantically scrambling onto the bandwagon if it does and someone else has taken all the risks. Then they wait for the cost to come down to make it worth their while...
And I haven't even touched on religious beliefs (stem cells? What stem cells?)

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ihlanya.livejournal.com

I have to say I agree with Ereneth. I'm not a religious or spiritual fanatic by any stretch of the imagination. However, I do believe that science can't answer everything. A hundred years ago they wouldn't have credited any notion of the internet, or mobiles, or man landing on the moon. And science back then was considered to be the All Knowing.

The problem is that science is just another religion that believes their own answers.

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*cough* "From the Earth to the Moon", Jules Verne, 1865. :)

Science is not a solution - it's a way of doing things. The answers science gets are because of the research that's done in investigating the questions. Sometimes it's wrong, and usually it needs refinement - but science has a damn good track record.

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Yep, Jules Verne...

And 100 years later, give or take, they finally did it, but only after spending a few years actively discrediting Robert Goddard and not paying too much attention to Tsiolkovsky. I daresay it took the lunacy of the 3rd Reich to even allow Von Braun to put his ideas into form.
Funny how often advances are only countenanced by the notion of how useful they would be to kill others, and then it's because of artificial urgency ('get them before they get us') or real urgency (same example, but in a war). Because war doesn't allow the usual bickering and delays.

But yeah, it took a century for us to catch up with the scientific notion. By that same reasoning, it'll probably take another century or so for some other notions to even be taken seriously enough to test properly, or filter through prejudice. Psychology, same thing - took a long time...
The notion of washing your hands before surgery? Took a long time...
5 mainframes should be all the world ever needs - took a long time...
Relativity into GPS - took a long time...

Just because science hasn't 'proved' a thing, doesn't mean it's false. Sometimes we just need the century...

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I think you just walked into a minefield.

Tarot - 500 years.
Homeopathy - 215 years, and disproved.
Dowsing - at least 500 years, and disproved.
Auras - millennia.
Curses - millennia.
Remote viewing - 150+ years.

Ditto most of the rest.

How long should we give them, given that we know what they're *supposed* to do?

As for spaceflight - while it may have taken 41 years, during all that time the theoretical frameworks were being developed and improved, and there was real progress in the related fields, like Goddard's solid-fuel rockets, in liquid fuels propellants, in nozzles, etc. All very concrete.

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Funny how so many things that were around for so long and never 'proved' are still around, having been accepted and validated for so long by so many people. Just because 'modern science' never got its claws into these things, doesn't mean that those other cultures were backward. Take acupuncture for example.

And science is beginning to revisit things and look at them again. Doesn't mean that they were invalid for all that time that science was forming itself. It just means that modern science is finally getting over itself and thinking that maybe there are more things than can be touched and seen with fairly primitive tools.

How can you say auras are invalid? I know folk who can see auras (Even I can every so often - not well, but I can) Likewise, I've seen people dowsing and it worked. We were trying to catch them out and it still worked. And tarot actually works very well indeed for me, and has even shocked some sceptics of my acquaintance.

I've said it before - a thing can only be proved if the hypothesis is correct and if the measuring tools are up to the job. How was homeopathy or dowsing disproved?

I'm afraid concrete is very often the same stuff one gets stuck in. Just because something hasn't been proven, doesn't mean that it's been disproven. One does not imply the other. To say it does is the worst kind of intellectual arrogance.

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Just because things have been around for a long time doesn't validate them in any way. People validate all sorts of things for various reasons. Look at religion - are *all* gods valid, because people have believed in them for a long time?

I didn't actually say auras are invalid; personally, I think people see what they want to see. I don't know of any credible tests for them, but I haven't stuck my neck out to say they're invalid.

As for dowsing: The Randi Prize, $1m, was out there for years, and many dowsers participated, but none ever passed a simple preliminary test that they themselves agreed to (detecting water in a bottle in a double-blind test). Homoeopathy - large scale tests have been run, and found it no better than a placebo. Apart from that, there's no basis for homoeopathy being able to do what it claims to do.

Just because something hasn't been disproven doesn't mean that it exists. You need some basis for test on - a hypothesis of sorts, and testable evidence to support that hypothesis.

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Actually, as far as I know, belief in auras only goes back to the the 1880s or so. Naturally they claim its older, but there is nothing like an aura in Classical, Medieval or Renaissance text. Along the same lines Acupuncture only goes back to Mao's era, but I have that only second hand.

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Took a long time compared to what? From Goddard's fireworks to von Braun and the Moon in two generations, compared to a thousand years for the escapement to make its way from China to Europe?

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I see I leaped in to late to provide the most basic evidence of how wrong-headed your response was. Haven't you seen the rapid and rapidly accelerating rate of technological change during your own lifetime--or are you just oblivious of it becauseyou've never known anything else?

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Tsk, cynical again. :)

We all know what happens to big companies that don't invest in innovation, and decide to sit back on their laurels. Heck, you're an Apple fan - where would Apple be if they hadn't invested in Intel and Unix architecture?

If the big companies don't innovate, the small, upcoming ones will - and if their innovations are effective, the non-innovators will be left behind.

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ihlanya.livejournal.com

Evidently you've never worked for government like I have!!!

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Ah, but government doesn't have to answer to shareholders, so they have little incentive to innovate.

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And yet they call the shots, don't they, by deciding budgets for education, universities, defence, not to mention the bureaucracies and legalities that plague and gum up everything they touch. How many innovations get held up in courts, in patent disputes, being verified by the FDA or equivalents, by religious and moral objections, by... fill in your own gaps...

And don't think that shareholders are all wide-eyed and just waiting for the next advance to come along. Human nature don't work like that.

Most innovations have to wade through all kinds of molasses just to gain credence, let alone be allowed to be put into practice. And often, the good innovations are held up by budgets, bickering or bullshit while the crap ones get implemented as a cheap and dirty alternative.

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Sure, I agree - there are many roadblocks. And yet, people do it - look at Richard Branson, for example.

People with innovations can, and do, develop them, and the pace of that progress, despite all the roadblocks, is getting faster and faster.

My company, one of the largest of its kind in the SA market, has incentives for such things. For example, there's a million Rand cash award to the person or team judged to have the best implemented innovation of the year. Naturally, there are thousands of such innovations proposed...

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capnoblivious.livejournal.com

Most innovations have to wade through all kinds of molasses just to gain credence, let alone be allowed to be put into practice. And often, the good innovations are held up by budgets, bickering or bullshit while the crap ones get implemented as a cheap and dirty alternative.

I agree with our host - the effective innovations (and, yeah, "effective" often means "cheap" and "cheap" often includes "dirty") are taken up, regardless of roadblocks.

And besides all of that, it's a bit of a dodgy argument in favour of crackpot medicines. "Revolutionary ideas take a long time to get accepted; my idea is taking a long time to get accepted; my idea is revolutionary!"

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polymale.livejournal.com

where would Apple be if they hadn't invested in Intel and Unix architecture?

Probably bankrupt. No, not because of the obvious reason, but because the return of Steve Jobs was part of that package, that contained NextSTEP and the other OS-related assets. The other contender was BeOS, and if Gassee had been a little more astute, that would have formed the basis for Mac OS X... and that might very well have been a very good thing.

So ultimately, it wasn't a matter of innovation, but of business, that determined their direction at that time.

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After the Bourbon took over Spain, a lot of French nobles gained land in Spain and tried to introduce the latest enlightenment era inventions (improved water wheels and pumps and the like), all of which was sabotaged by the peasants. As late as the first decade of the 20th century, Luis Bunuel (who was trained as an agricultural entomologist), reports that when European grape vines were blighted by a microbe introduced accidentally from California, the Spanish government supplied a new pesticides to all the viticulturists who wanted it, and in his village only one came froward to take it. He was lynched that night.

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polymale.livejournal.com

A good conversation. I'll add this:

We call some things "supernatural" (a null term if there ever was one, but I digress).. what is considered "supernatural" or the "domain of god" has decreased as our scientific understanding has increased.

If there is any validity to things like Ghosts, an afterlife, auras, and various other permutations and manifestations of such, I do expect that the process of discovery that is science will explain such things too, in time.. and it will become part of the body of knowledge we almost take for granted!

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Yes!!!

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