It's been a couple weeks since I posted. I appologize to my legions of readers who depend upon my weekly complaints. Today I sit here still not sure what to talk about. I guess I get too many things ponging around in my head over two full weeks without venting. I'll try my best.
I recently read one of the articles of the year in the National Post and it's subject was just another of many things I've been railing about in here before: overprotection. More specifically, in Canadian schools where fears of lawsuits, obsessions with safety and fixation on image, (and outperforming other schools on the STUPID standardized tests), lead to insanities far beyond the substitution of actual education for teaching to the test. So many examples were given! A ban on peanut butter and peanut butter substitutes; a hugging ban in a London, Ont. school; a kindergartener in Laval, Quebec punished for bringing his lunch in a plastic bag rather than a reusable plastic container; a choir teacher told he has to stop touching all students; an Ottawa teacher told he couldn't use replica guns for a Remembrance Day ceremony; supervised recess in which some students aren't allowed to RUN; and the most famous one, the school that banned the use of all balls because a parent was hit in the head with one and got a mild concussion.
American Mom, Lenore Skenazy, who was voted America's worst Mom for allowing her 9-year-old son to ride the subway alone says, "We have become a society that views everything through a prism of risk." Is it the same in Canada? Is the universalist policy of blanket solutions in schools across our country the same paranoid reaction we will be letigiously applying to our adults? Will be? Are we already? And has the corporately successful anxiety fostered to our south gone airborne and infected its way into the mainstream of Canada?
Come to think of it, I wouldn't have a job now if it weren't for rich people living in dread of losing their excess. So I probably shouldn't slag it so badly. But I will anyway. Think of all the things you do every single day that require trust. Just about any of them could, with the right, (or wrong), legal representation, be turned into a lucrative lawsuit if the person or people trusted proved untrustworthy. I probably trust many thousands of individual people every day. In the morning, (or for me in the evening), I wake up to an alarm I trust will go off at the right time. I turn on the tap in the shower trusting the water heater will work and the water won't have any toxic chemicals in it. I use soap that has been passed by the, (hopefully un-bribed), Canadian Standards of Approval board. I just trust that it won't burn my skin or give me a rash. I put on clothes I believe will not unravel as I walk down the street. I wait for a bus I trust will pick me up. I have faith the driver won't jerk the wheel and drive us all into oncoming traffic in a fit of suicidal rage. I use the elevator to get to my office and hope the cables don't break. I cross the street to the mall and hope someone doesn't speed up to hit me with his/her car. I could go on and on and on.
The point is, if we get too carried away with this mistrust we'll go bonkers. Without trust our society would come to a grinding halt and we'd all be Howard Hugheses saving our urine and growing our fingernails. Sometimes we trust people and we get burned. So we can't be senselessly trusting. But let's not just stop trusting everyone or we'll lose one of the nicest things about this country, and about life. Nobody would ever fall in love if there were no trust. Think of how many of our parents would have been too scared to meet; how many corny movies and awesome songs wouldn't have been made; how many inventions would not have been thought of by people with love, (in all its forms), as their ulterior motive for creativity. If every part of Canada adopted the big city "I don't know you and I don't care" attitude I'd just go the hell back to Asia. Thank goodness, we still haven't but I've seen a lot more of it since my return.
Smarten up Canada. This is something we DON'T want to import from other countries.
Another article I read about that just bolstered a long cherished mistrust of science was about a prominent Dutch social psychologist named Diederik Stapel faking results on dozens of well respected, "scientific" experiments. It just goes to show how stupid it is to try to statistically analyze human behaviour. It's like trying to mathematically learn how to speak a language. You'd have to imagine every conceivable social setting, everything that could be said to you in such a setting and then memorize them all. The retrieval necessary might even be beyond computer capacity never mind the brain. Trying to understand human behaviour by analyzing a hundred billion people in one social setting still couldn't get all the possible variables. And it's all dependant upon mood, geography, religion, laws, environment, sex, and about a zillion other variables. Even testing one person in the same setting a hundred times wouldn't result in a dependable prediction of behaviour. A vast amount of what we are trained to believe, and are religiously obedient in believing IS scientific, is just not. And more and more people are braving the scoffing and scorn of the mass Soma-sanguine conformists and actually speaking out against the religion of science.
It is now, (finally), gaining popularity to believe that any claim coming from an observational study is most likely to be wrong in the sense that it will not replicate itself rigorously. This depends upon that. This is a rarity scientifically speaking. True dependancies like that are SO rare that for a long time "trust-me" science has spent time and money investigating, (and proporting as fact), the false ones. Indeed, modern psychologists have so much flexibility with numbers and statistics they can literally prove anything according to "False Positive Psychology" published by a trio of leading American researchers. Researchers are more likely to find false evedince that an effect exists than they are to correctly find evidence that it doesn't. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This has been the mainstay of guys like Dawkins and other atheists like the recently departed, (and canonized (eye roll)), Hitchens, in quite spuriously creating "evidence" that God does not exist.
Jonah Lehrer wrote, "Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true." People still choose what to believe after the experiments are all done.
I recently talked with two brothers who are obviously very knowledgeable in some of the abstract areas that have been scientized of quantum physics or quantum mechanics, which is essentially the same thing as formulaic language acquisition or human behaviour only on a MUCH more massive scale. This is the "science" of providing a mathematical description of particle and wave behaviour in energy and matter. Most of our conversation was taking place about 5 feet above my head but the gist of it all was after two lifetimes of study their conclusions were that the very building blocks of all quantum physics are highly nebulous. And they are very close to proving that. That is, they are working on scientific proof that science is very unscientific.
I can't wait till that study comes out. It won't matter much in that people will still believe in what we call science, it'll just be exposed for the religious faith it actually is. Most of it anyway. And that'll be nice. At least that's the way I see it.
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