Right?
One of the things that the giftmas season demonstrates is the American preoccupation with “getting it right”. Not just doing something well enough, or some other metric of benefit, but “getting it right”. Hence I have spent some of this holiday season reflecting on this matter.
I have to admit to being provoked into this thought train by an article in the New Yawk Times that deals with growing assertions in the anthropological community that Jared Diamond indeed did not get it right. [Link] Normally I would not consider defending Diamond, the substance of whose writings I consistently find banal, simplistic in presentation, and simplistic in content. In the spirit of the season and seeking to say something positive I should say that he is an artist of constructing sentences – a shallow artist admittedly but still quite accomplished as a writer.
It is also not unexpected that anthropologists should be rather critical, even aggressive, of Diamond. After all, he is a geographer who has dared to trespass on their sacred domain. And if all this were only a petty academic social squabble, I should be silent, but it is not.
Under the guise of asserting that Diamond did not indeed “get it right”, what he is really being pilloried for is analytical integration and aggregation. One of the aspects of the political correctness cancer that has been destroying higher learning in recent years is a rejection of any generalization and an adulation of the specific. Such, of course, is rather well suited to the minds of petty scholars eminently capable of retaining individual facts but unable to grasp what lies beneath or behind. Hence, there is an aspect of this criticism that is that Diamond has not “gotten it right” because he came up with generalizations that transcend the facts.
This is not to say that there are some aspects of Diamond’s analyses that are contrary to facts, but there is also no sign of any interest in determining why. Somehow the who idea of testability-falsifiability seems to have left this social science.
Happily, I happened across an article in American Scientist on the periodic table. [Link] (Note, this is a subscription journal so do not be distraught if it asks you to login or spend money.) This article too is fraught with traps. When I find a contemporary physical scientist actually saying that electrons orbit nuclei, I have to wonder what his education was? I was exposed to such ideas, as historical facts, on the way to a more robust view of the stochastic nature of quantum mechanics.
That however, is not the meat of the article – which leaves out the most interesting to me parts of periodic tables – the debate over the “right” structure for a periodic table. There are several being considered, evidently as a result of some idea sparked among philosophers of science that there is some Platonic form of periodic table that is realizable.
“Moose Muffins!” to quote the character of COL Sherman T. Potter is the conclusion I came to at the end of the article. The periodic table is an icon, a visual representation of some greater meaning, in effect, a model. Its form is dependent on how well it conveys that information. Thus, I concluded in a somewhat different direction than the author advanced, the proper form of a periodic table should be the one that conveys the information to the individual. If it conveys no information to an individual, one who has no idea of what a periodic table is, for example, then the form is arbitrary because the information transfer is zero.
To me, chemistry is largely about electrons in special groups. Thus, to me the information conveyed by the periodic table is sets of quantum numbers of electrons. To me that information seems best conveyed by the classic form of the periodic table – the one in use when I was an undergraduate. This is not the only view; to classical chemists the periodic table conveys information about how elements react. To a certain sense this is also conveyed by the classic form. But what counts here is that the information in the model be conveyed.
And this is what is being ignored or at least attacked about Diamond’s work. It conveys information as a model, and that model is being ignored. Whether he “got it right” or not is hidden by arguments that are going off in different directions. It is just not at all clear the detractors even realize this.
