The limitations of science (The limitations of science)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, September 13, 2010, 21:01 (5183 days ago) @ David Turell


> > Remember, with me you're dealing with an engineer: How do we understand something without trying it? 
> > 
> > To me, the river project you discuss is exactly the kind of thing that we can only learn by doing, there's no way, we could have figured out the importance of that river to the everglades if we hadn't f***ed it up. 
> > 
> > A mistake is worth a hundredfold of a success.
> 
> Screw up parts of the world so we can learn? Isn't the world screwed up enough? And now we have a giant dam on the Bio Bio in southern Chile, right smack dab in an earthquake zone. One hellava disaster waiting to happen. Use nuclear power, not hydrologic. Dams have a rated lifetime, because every dam built is silting up at various rates. Did you ever hear the story how the Glen Canyon dam almost failed becasue the snowpack runoff was miscalculated. I can give references.
> 
> Engineer what you can understand and acurately predict.-And my counter to that is: Then we will learn nothing. We can build all the computer models we want, but we won't get it right until we actually DO it. I see it happen all the time: I'm not saying don't plan, don't calculate, but forgive me if I'm wrong, but most of the information we have on ecosystems NOW simply didn't exist when the Florida engineers did their thing? They wouldn't have learned that if they hadn't done it wrong. -I said it once, I shall say it again: Man learns by doing. Far too much haunch-sitting in my generation. Too much caution. In the case of the Glen canyon dam, there needs to be outside corroboration. If it's done by the Army Corps, get an outside group to come in and verify the results. It costs more up front, but much less than a mistake.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"