Spiral (5-6)

Hello, WSNs.
Back again after a short coffee-break. Thanks to Chris Chass-Dunn for his 
Spiral, as to Mine, Richard and others for his reading materials. I also 
share Kyyhjoo problem to access your production in spite of our interest. 
Fortunatelly Gert Kohler kindly prepared those condensed drops to  fill the 
gap meanwhile. Those droplets made me wish  to know the river behind them.
There is a key point in the Spiral that arosed my sympathy at once: its 
stand against determinism.
I was completely mistaken about Chass-Dunn orientation (perhaps due to the 
information  gap) and thought that his main interest was to forecast the 
next world crisis and war. So sorry for that.

One of the points that strikes me the most is the obsession of positivist 
oriented sciences about "predicting" and "forecasting" the future. They 
confuse good knowledge application with prediction. They give us as an 
example the equations of planet motion, and say that in some future date, 
and time, if you orient your telescope x degrees to the sky, you will find 
Neptune, so their science has predictive power. IMO they have only reached 
a 
good understanding of Neptune's movement, including its regularity and a 
formula with good descriptive power, so if they apply all that, they just 
confirm that the model has a good analogic power with reality. Such results 
are of course very useful to design and execute any human  project related 
to Neptune. But it does not have anything to do with prediction.

In the case of social sciences the problem has reached delirant 
proportions. 
I believe it is very important to free socialist proposals from determinist 
traits inherited from the past. Recent list debates on racism, biology, 
etc. 
have been important to me because they are highly related to the struggle 
against deterministic positions frequently held by defenders of statu-quo 
and social inequality. Behind a suposed neutral science and 
positive-realism, many scientists are hiding their  moral indiference to 
the 
consequences to life, freedom, society, and environment that may derive 
from 
their research.

Another big mistake observed is the abuse of mathematics and statistics. 
When we develop a formula with variables at both sides of the equal sign, 
we 
only have a description of a balance (dynamic or static). Then positivists 
create virtual words with statements like "if all variables remain the 
same, 
except my beloved variable" then the outcome will be XYZ and I have the 
power to predict. Another dangerous trick consists of assigning arbitrary 
causal properties to any of the variables, in order to explain, "predict" 
and justify the "right" policy action. This is common in mainstream 
neoliberals as Milton Friedman (a quite poor methodologist, by the way). 
Friedman has been accused of changing variable definitions to match his 
theories everytime that they do not fit measured reality. In his famous 
essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics" (suspiciously similar to an 
article by Pareto 50 years before),  Friedman declares his method as 
realist, and positive, so the rest of us are just normative, wishful 
thinking kids.

But we have better projects than to focus on Friedman and his variant of 
determinism. Look at the possibilities open at the Spiral, for example.

Regards and thanks, Emilio

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