The Saw of Science

Tools are inert. Every tool must be wielded by a person. People use tools to achieve goals. The result of wielding a tool is a product of the skill and intent of the wielder, and the suitability of the tool to the task. Consider a tree saw: it can be used to destroy a tree, to kill it, or it can be used to prune a tree, cutting away deadwood and diseased limbs to strengthen it. The way in which it is to be used is up to the person wielding it. Is either way "true", or "good", in some objective sense?


What happens next depends on you.

Consider science: it is also a tool which can be used to destroy or improve, not physical objects but ideas. A person can choose to destroy an idea by cutting it off, or improve it by pruning away the bad branches. You might reply: "Science depends on truth and so it can only cut away the bad. If it cuts down the idea, the idea was bad." This isn't honest. All ideas are subject to denial. All ideas depend on assumptions which can be shown to be suspect or "wrong" given the right context. The result of wielding the saw of science is very strongly dependent on the intent of the wielder. This intent is often an a priori attempt to disprove challenging ideas. This is a terrible way to use such a powerful tool.

It seems to me that a person interested in truth should turn science on their own ideas as a skeptic. One way to do this is by attempting to find the truth in those things that are challenging. If we do this we will find and fill the gaps in our own ideas. This goes beyond science to things about which science has nothing to say as well. In our lives, as we consider the ideas of other people we know to be sincere and intelligent, it damages us if we do not consider their ideas as seriously as we consider our own. The world is vague and as much as we want to have clear lines we cannot.

Clarity

Anything completely clear is wrong, or not very interesting.

 

Redeeming Social Value

Now that something about 150,000 of you have visited this post, and about 19,000 of you have made links to it, perhaps I can do something to redeem all the attention paid to it. In a way loosely coupled to INSERT COIN, the campaign to save trees, through reminding people where we get paper, came to my attention.


What can be better than reminding people of what they already know?

I have modified the program (available here) to be a little friendlier and have a fixed message, "Remember... These Come From Trees". It is easy to use, you just need to give it a hostname or IP address on the command line. More information on making it work can be found in the context of the original post. For most smaller displays the message will scroll, marquee-like for a nice effect. The bigger displays may benefit from printer-specific formatting with spaces in the message string (in the quotes on line 47).

I hope this can do a bit to conserve paper. I am particularly interested in conservation as a way of improving the world. Saving energy and natural resources by not wasting them is a no-brainer. It is very clear to me that not conserving when the opportunity easily comes to hand is ethically indefensible.

Order some stickers, too, for those things that aren't HP printers.

Relatively Monstrous

Today, Shlomo (our youngest, at 6), came walking stiff-legged into the room and up to my wife.



Where did Igor get that brain?

Shlomo:  I am acting like Frankenstein. E equals M C squared.
Shoshi:   That's Einstein.
Shlomo:  Oh.

Sometimes Shlomo says things that leave us scratching our heads. I still don't know where he learned about E=MC².

You Are What You Eat

Around here the squirrels can be a bit nutty. They get used to humans and lose much of their fear. This leads to odd behaviors. I have seen squirrels do this in the trees but never like this, on the ground.


In spite of appearances, the little guy did not just come from the tree

It is very hard to avoid assigning human emotions to animals. I don't know if this squirrel was really having fun but it certainly looked that way.

I like squirrels, I think I will take more photos of them.