The Lightbulb Does Not Need to be Changed.

Q: How many sociologists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: The lightbulb does not need changing. It is society that must be changed.

 

I thought that I might pursue a doctorate here at the University of Texas because the school will pay for up to 5 credit hours per semester for an employee. The plan died aborning. I sent a letter to the sociology department and received a rejection in 15 minutes. The essential message was, “Go away.” 

My Query Letter

The Reply

 

When I was majoring in criminology at Eastern Michigan University, I had a lot of sociology classes, of course. One of my classmates was about a year ahead of me and we had a couple of classes together for a couple of semesters. One day, walking in from the parking lot, he asked me, “Why do think that conflict theory is the one they teach best here?” I did not understand the question.

Has a special interest in criminology

Conflict theory is among about 50 explanatory or predictive narratives that describe the facts about individuals in society. Pure conflict says that individuals are naturally aggressive toward each other and society (reified) holds us together by means of its institutions by preventing, mediating, remediating, or negating conflict. Variations include class conflict, gender conflict, race conflict, and others. Those become “critical” when they assert that the conflict is unnatural. Critical class conflict theory is congruent with Marxism, for example: fix society’s problems and conflict will abate and perhaps disappear entirely. But I could tell that my friend was asking a rhetorical question. And he asked another: “Why don’t we have a department chair?”

 

Has a special interest in criminal justice reform.

At EMU, sociology, anthropology, and criminology were all under the same office in the College of Arts & Sciences. At that time, no one wanted to be the chair. You would think that any tenure track professor would take the two-year rotation, even if they had been the chair perhaps ten years earlier. But no. As a new undergraduate, I was not in stream with the idle chat about department politics, but I knew that some of my professors were unhappy with their organizational leadership. Then came the defining crisis: a murder on campus.

 

Has a special interest in law and regulation.

As I recall, there was a general mandate from the University administration to all professors and staff not to talk to the press or other news media. But they are called “press” for several reasons and the reporters pressed the criminology department for quotable quotes. And my professor for White Collar Crime (Crim 307), Andreas Tomaszewski, offered his opinion. Then, his application for tenure was denied. He did still show up for class, but he basically stopped teaching. At the end of the semester, he moved to Canada. 

 

Has a special interest in juries.
I wonder if she has read
Young S. Kim, Gregg Barak, and Donald E. Shelton
from Eastern Michigan University on the CSI Effect.

The facts of the crime and the response of the University were at issue. EMU claimed that they did not want the perpetrator to flee, so they left the cause of death as “natural” as indicated by the (acting) county medical examiner. Eventually, another enrolled student was charged with the crime and convicted. However, EMU was fined over $800,000 for violation of the Clery Act, which requires the reporting of crimes. The university president, the EMU chief of police, and several others resigned. 

 

Has an interest in policing.

Here and now, my request for an informal meeting with the chair of the UT sociology department was answered by the acting chair because the chair is on sabbatical. Despite Dr. Lin Ken-Hou’s protest that UT is not the place to study white collar crime or misconduct in scientific research, several professors in the department do claim relevant interests. 

 

More to the point, if I had had the opportunity to talk out the options, even if it were true that none of their sociologists is interested in crime, that in itself would have been a good reason for me to do just that and complete some original and significant research for the department. 

Just one option would have been to work with the Institutional Review Board, which audits research and investigates lapses in ethics. 

That is especially relevant because UT is a research university, not a teaching college. Our classes here are taught by graduate assistants (and post-grads). At EMU, the school motto is “Education first.” If your name is in the book, then you are the person standing in front of the class. In my last year there (2010), plans were made to allow graduate students in physics to do some teaching but it was then a notable exception. Like Texas State University here in San Marcos, EMU was the old Normal College, the school where teachers were trained. When EMU sought to ramp up its game by joining a sports conference with more television money, they hired an athletic director at three times the salary of a department chair, $300,000 versus $90,000 per year. Wags with spray paint went around campus: Education first—and 10! 

 

So, it is here at UT. You can find a webpage about our Nobel laureates: https://news.utexas.edu/2019/12/09/longhorn-laureates/ In fact, none of them is here. The last two on campus both died. Steven Weinberg was enticed to retire here. He continued to write essays. John Goodenough taught chemistry at the the UT Cockrell School of Engineering and among his achievements was the invention of the lithium-ion battery. As for the other Nobel laureates, biology professor Hermann J. Muller was forced out for being a communist. (After quick turns in Germany and then the USSR, he returned to the USA. Later, Carl Sagan was one of his students.) UT alumnus John Maxwell Coetzee earned his doctorate here in 1969 and then went to South Africa. He was not allowed to come back because he had published a protest against the war in Viet Nam.

 

Back in 2005, when Weinberg was reputed to be the highest paid professor at $400,000 football coach Mack Brown was paid $2.1 million. Today, coach Steve Sarkisian is paid $10.6 million and quarterback Arch Manning earns $1.6 million from Name Image and Likeness (NIL) under NCAA rules in place since 2021. Weinberg was awarded a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2020 just one of several such honors over the years. That being as it is, the fact remains that an undergraduate playing football earns three times more than the best paid professors and eight times more than the average professor’s salary. (See: https://texascollegesalaries.com/institution/17)

 

A card-carrying criminologist will tell you that crime knows no neighborhood. In other words, there are no bad neighborhoods, just different crimes in them. In the suburbs, they don’t beat up strangers, rob the corner liquor stores or snatch purses, they just work at corporations that dump toxins into the aquifer and then they try to delete their emails. That being so, it remains that you don’t find a lot of broken windows and absentee landlords in the suburbs. In poor neighborhoods, the people lack more than anything else social status and social capital. The broken windows theory explains why the sociology department does not welcome outsiders into their academic ghetto. You can argue the cause and effect of broken windows and broken homes but when a culture, a society, is in decline, fixing the windows will not solve the deeper problems.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

The Pretense of Sociology 

Sociology: A Defense and a Call for Reform 

Sociology is a Science 

Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History 

 

Where are the Augurs?

Originally, the Romans were seven hilltop villages under Etruscan domination. The nominally Roman deities Minerva, Mercury, and Vulcan were Etruscan. The Romans eventually ascended, absorbing their Tuscan, Latin, Samnite, and Greek neighbors.

The words in red come from Latin. This is based on a poster
in a classroom at Lincoln High School in Cleveland where
Nida Glick taught Latin for many years before my time.
(During WWII, she was a cryptologist. See her biography at
 https://www.military.com/coast-guard/lt-cmdr-nida-glick-uscgr.html )

The Roman Senate was only the topmost assembly. While the Roman Senate was culturally conservative, it also could be fickle when making and repealing laws. As the republic matured over decades, lifetimes, and centuries, young men ascended through increasingly responsible (and therefore powerful) appointments in public service. Being the moneyer for two years let you get your name out there for people to see, typically by honoring the public service of an ancestor.

 

Jean-Antoine Houdon's George Washington (left)
and Horatio Greensnborough's George Washington (right).
Washington was called "The Father of His Country" by
people who had been educated to read Latin.

When political conservatives insist that we are a republic and not a democracy, they are glossing over some contextual facts. It is true that in the Athenian assembly citizens voted directly—and they could change their collective minds. If a law remained in force, it was transcribed from painted words on wood to being carved in stone. It is also true, though, that the assembly voted to install officials in charge of the harbor, the mint, etc. On the other hand, Rome had a different tradition. 

 

Imperial Rome continued the fiction of being a republic and not a kingdom. The emperor (imperator: military commander-in-chief) was the “first citizen” and one of two consuls, and often granted the title “father of his country. ” Around the head on the obverses of many denarius coins of the empire the abbreviation PP stands for Pater Patriae: father of his country. But it refers to a deeper tradition of privilege (privis + legis = private law), when the senior elder of a family held life-and-death ownership over everyone on the farm. 

The coins of Roman emperors also give their years of consulship: COS III, for example, meaning that the Senate had re-elected them to their third term of office. Silver coins generally came from the private holdings of the imperator. The Senate issued the official copper coins of the government. The abbreviation SC meant Senatus Consulto. 

Copper sestertius of Marcus Aurelius.
Minerva with Owl and S C.

Some political conservatives claim to be Constitution originalists who insist that today we should return the intentions of 1789. At that time, political parties were private associations, not public institutions. Even when parties first erupted, conservative Anglophile Federalists versus liberal Francophile Republicans, the Vice President and President were elected separately and could be from different parties. 

This one-ounce silver commemorative issued by the
U.S. Mint would have spoken well to ancient Romans
with both the personification Libertas and the eagle of Jupiter  
carrying olive branches and its mottoes and legends: 
Liberty, United States,
E Pluribus Unum.
The numerals would be foreign to them
but they could sound out the letters.

Today, the VP is still the President of the Senate but seldom sits there, giving over the daily work to a president pro tempore, chosen by the Senate. You have to wonder what life would be like with President Donald Trump and President of the Senate Kamala Harris. President Harris (her proper title under the original Constitution) would vote as a senator in case of tie balloting. 

 

Previously on Necessary Facts

Etruscans and Americans 

The Cure for a Failing Empire 

Tycoon Dough is Democratic 

The Mercury Dime 

If a Philosopher Falls in the Forest …

I thought that I might pursue a doctorate here at the University of Texas because the school will pay for up to 5 credit hours per semester for an employee. The plan died aborning. I sent a letter to the philosophy department and they never answered. While I was waiting, I checked out some books from the library to read over Christmas. Among them were two from the department chair, David Sosa, and an anthology on epistemology by a group of Objectivists. I cannot see myself engaged in such meaningless discussions based on unstated, arbitrary assertions. I actually think well of philosophy and invest time in it and if this is the best that they can do, then I confess to hubris here: It is not that I know more than they do but that I think more clearly.

The Mantis Shrimp sees things that you do not.
It is the same universe for all of us.

When I say “red” and you say “red” are we talking about the same thing? People who are color blind adapt to the world around them. It is only by the application of a special visual test—given to aircraft pilots, medical doctors, and others—that we can establish that a person is color blind. These philosophers seem to be disengaged from the experiential world. Their limiting cases are people with eyeglasses. And they gloss over the problem of what it means for tree to appear “fuzzy” as if bark were made of acrylic sheets. 

Microscopes at right reveal details not visible to
the naked eye. It is the same universe.

Is Perception Infallible?

Consider Salmieri’s instructive example of the myopic man looking at a tree without his glasses. While he sees the same tree he would see if he was wearing them, he sees it blurrily, and this blurriness is part of the way or form by which he sees the tree. As Salmieri notes in his section, “Epistemology and the Nature of Awareness,” “An especially naïve realist would take the blurriness to be a feature of the very tree in front of which the man is standing.” Such a naïve realist is, of course, mistaken, for he mistakes a way he perceives an object for a feature of the perceived object. -- Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology, Allan Gotthelf, Editor; James G. Lennox, Associate Editor; Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies, University of Pittsburgh Press; 2013; page 217, “In Defense of the Theory of Appearing: Comments on Ghate and Salmieri,” by Pierre Le Morvan.

 Onkar Ghate is resident expert in Objectivism at the Ayn Rand Institute. He received his doctorate in philosophy in 1998 from the University of Calgary. Gregory Salmieri completed his doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh in 2008. Pierre Yves Le Morvan earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Syracuse University in 2000.

Orion Nebula (Messier 42) and the Moon and the 
consumer goods that bring them to your iPhone camera.

Spectroscopy kits for amateur astronomers and other
citizen-scientists.

Data available to anyone who wants to explore the 
Universe otherwise unrevealed to the naked eye
(Image at right from "The Revival of Amateur Spectroscopy"
by Maurice V. Gavin. Sky & Telescope, July 2006.

It is not only my Objectivist comrades who are lost in the woods. This passage starts off sounding very technical, promising close analysis. In the end, though, it comes down to a sophomoric failure. It is well known that so-called “natural language” allows nonsense. And this is an example of it.

If philosophers were pursuing new knowledge, they would be formalizing the integration of perception across many transducers from your own senses to the most sophisticated instruments. How and why do all of these outputs describe the same objects? 

“A simple account teaches us that argument validity is a matter of truth-preservation: roughly, an argument is valid just in case the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. A bit more precisely, a set of sentences G of a language L entails a sentence s of L just in case, (for any model M), whenever all elements of G evaluate to the truth (in L, and M) so does s. Then we can say that an argument is valid, just in case (for all models), the premises entail the conclusion(s). On this account, then, entailment is characterized as a relation between sets of sentences and a sentence (a conclusion); and arguments are individualized as sets of premises and conclusion(s).

“But this simple account becomes instantly more complex once we are dealing with inference patterns in natural languages. One immediate problem is ambiguity. For instance, consider the following:

(1)   Ambiguity

a.     If John is at the bank, he will deposit a check

b.     John is at the bank.

c.     He will deposit a check.

“Suppose that ‘the bank’ in the big premise, (1-a) refers to a financial institution and in the small one, (1-b), to the bank of a local river.”

Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Language (2 vols), edited by Ernie Lepore and David Sosa; Oxford University Press, 2022. Vol 2. 7; “The Anatomy of Arguments in Natural Language Discourse,” by Una Stojnic, page 184.

Ole Miss journalism interns working for ESPN use
parabolic reflectors to capture voices on the field.
If a tree falls in the forest, they will hear it.

The failure of so-called “natural language” to explain the truly supernatural is an old lesson.  To hang an argument on a pun--bank versus bank; and no mention of turning an aircraft-- seems frivolous. 

(ii) Yet sometimes men are led by a natural tendency to think and speak of God as if He were a magnified creature — more especially a magnified man — and this is known as anthropomorphism. Thus God is said to see or hear, as if He had physical organs, or to be angry or sorry, as if subject to human passions: and this perfectly legitimate and more or less unavoidable use of metaphor is often quite unfairly alleged to prove that the strictly Infinite is unthinkable and unknowable, and that it is really a finite anthropomorphic God that men worship. But whatever truth there may be in this charge as applied to Polytheistic religions, or even to the Theistic beliefs of rude and uncultured minds, it is untrue and unjust when directed against philosophical Theism. The same reasons that justify and recommend the use of metaphorical language in other connections justify and recommended it here, but no Theist of average intelligence ever thinks of understanding literally the metaphors he applies, or hears applied by others, to God, any more than he means to speak literally when he calls a brave man a lion, or a cunning one a fox. 

“The Nature and Attributes of God”

New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06612a.htm

It is a fact that if all of the boulders, rocks, and stones between Mars and Jupiter were gathered into a single body, it would be the size of our Moon, hardly a planet, and yet we still call them “asteroids” as if they were star-like. The first quasar was identified as a pulsar. And Pluto is no longer a planet. And that is just one science. 

I have several books from the library on genetics. As much as we know, we still describe basic knowledge with footnotes and exceptions. Just for one fun fact: sometimes for a gene to be replicated the transcription RNA must “read” the molecule backwards. And yet here we all are, even if we do not know everything about how and why. 

Science proceeds by accepting ambiguity. Philosophers want to argue it away—in English. If you want to fall down the rabbit hole of analytic philosophy, read what many philosophers think that Immanuel Kant meant by “Das Ding an sich.” The problem is the word “an.” It sounds like “on” but it means “next to” or “nearby. “ Hans ist an den Wandtafel. (John is at the blackboard.) And it could be “in” “of” “with” and so on, depending on the context and the acceptance of idiomatic expressions. 

  

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Galileo and Saturn: Epistemology not Optics 

An Objective Philosophy of Science 

The Scientific Method 

Harriman’s Logical Leap Almost Makes It 

The Big Whimper of Modern Philosophy 

Understanding Objectivism 

 

 

 

Humans Will Live Beyond Earth, Thrive Well, and Travel Far

The discovery of seven likely Dyson Spheres suggests the possible existence of civilizations beyond our own. Whether or not that claim is ultimately supported, the fact that was made at all is an important element in the broader search for extra-terrestrial intelligences (SETI). It is highly unlikely that billions of galaxies with billions of stars most with planets all exist without intelligences, except for us here on Earth. Contrary to that, on the astronomy discussion board Cloudy Nights, Sky & Telescope editor, Tony Flanders, has been hosting an open exchange of opinions -- his own and from several other writers -- that overwhelmingly assert that human colonization beyond Earth is unlikely, or impossible, or unnecessary, or undesirable. I believe that it is inevitable. 

See here for the 40+ comments "Will Humans Ever Settle in Outer Space? - Science! Astronomy & Space Exploration, and Others - Cloudy Nights" https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/947257-will-humans-ever-settle-in-outer-space/ 

 Seven possible Dyson Spheres from 

MNRAS 531, 695–707 (2024) 

https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae1186 

Advance Access publication 2024 May 6 

In that discussion, the objections to human colonization beyond Earth are that the environments of the Moon, Mars, Venus, the asteroids, etc., and the space between them all is worse than hostile: it is irremediably lethal because of the electromagnetic energies (“radiation”) that exist. (We are protected here by our magnetic fields and atmosphere.). Moreover, water is critical to life for us and rare almost everywhere else. And food must be created and no other planet has soil that is amenable to the lifeforms that we depend on. Having evolved in a gravity field, we find living in zero-gravity debilitating of our muscles and bones. And those are just the gross structures. At the cellular level, zero-gravity is just as bad for us, if not worse in the long run. We are not at all adapted to that environment. 

Virgin Galactic 11 July 2011

Further objections grew from the economics of trade: there is none. In other words, spaceborne manufacturing so far has been in batches too small for commercialization. It has all been proof-of-concept, at best. Mining the Moon, Mars, or asteroids was also dismissed as difficult to impossible in the first place. Consequential to any success the economics of mining suggest that anything initially rare enough to justify the expense becomes too common to support it. 

Space-X Crew 5 Oct 7 2022

 Overall, I found the objections especially disheartening because they came from people whose hobby is observational astronomy. They have the technical knowledge and special interest that I expect from enthusiasts rather than nay-sayers.

Learning to fly in the 20th century.

 

Working at NASA Exchange in the 20th century.

I can project several scenarios that take humans beyond Earth. All of them come from known science fiction and are merely extrapolations of known history, as science fiction must be: “if this goes on…”; “unless this changes…”; “if this takes over…”; “if this is forgotten…”; and so on. 

 1.     New propulsions. Beyond chemical rockets or plasma engines or huge sails, something we have not expected and could not expect but may be hinted at now will come along. We have had the steam engine, electric motor, internal combustion engine, jet engine, … balloons, airships, and airplanes … and the International Space Station. Something new but understandable in retrospect will change how people leave the planet.

2.    New technologies. The unexpected cross-use of existing tools will open new opportunities. The transistor is a case in point. The “transfer of resistance” by crossing two diodes solved one limited problem in one field. Now, we have power transistors pushing over 200 amps with potentials over 4000 volts. And we have very large scale integrated circuits with a million tiny transistors. 

3.    New biologies. The “people” who go into outer space may not be recognized as “people” today. Modified by microorganism that themselves were modified, they will be engineered to thrive in environments that right now are lethal to us. Those people will engage with symbionts that also were engineered for their environments. Not knowing fully what those ecologies will be, we could allow them to evolve through planned but open epigenetics.

4.    New sociologies. You do not need to take your tribe with you or go with them. Rather than as colonies and settlements, we may burst forth as a billion individuals. Individuals in individual carriers can be linked into complex social engagements. Some intelligent actors can be long-distance communicants while others will be mechanoids like dogs or cats aboard your ship. 

5.    Radiation is energy. The electromagnetic wavicles that are dangerous are also the dynamos that can power the transformations we need. Elements can be created and from them molecules. 

6.    Space is rich. Hydroxyl ions, water itself, and aromatic hydrocarbons are known to exist in outer space. Asteroids, moons, planets and their atmospheres are all sources of the materials upon which the abundant radiation can be put to work.

7.     New challenges. One complaint repeated is that there is no reason to go to Mars or the Moon, etc. And I can grant that. But I also point to the 7,269 people who have climbed Mount Everest—over 90% of them in the last 40 years. Some have died for lack of oxygen because the crowding prevented them from getting to their camps. In 1985 only one person had climbed the tallest summits on each of the seven continents. Now, it is regarded as “a popular challenge.” 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Space is the Place! Come to the High Frontier. 

Space Tries to Kill You (ArmadilloCon 44 Day 3)

Fantastic Voyages: teaching science with science fiction 

Monsters from the Id 

1000 Words