From: Mark Steven Heyman (markheyman@infoproconsulting.com)
Date: Fri Aug 12 2005 - 03:59:36 BST
On 11 Aug 2005 at 10:24, Sam Norton wrote:
I think you're misplacing the point which that thought-experiment makes.
It's indisputable (I would have thought) that someone not exposed to
language etc would be unable to think on being 'released'. But that just
confirms that the social level is the prerequisite for anything higher. What
you need to come up with is an argument showing that new static intellectual
patterns are wholly determined by the social level (which I think is what
your argument entails). Or else show that the entailment doesn't apply.
<snip a lot of stuff I agree with>
msh 08-11-05:
The point is that genius without culture is impossible. That is,
there are no stand-alone geniuses. That's all I'm saying. Einstein
himself has recognized this.
Again, I'm not saying that no one ever has an original thought, only
that there is no way to tell whether that thought is unique to one
individual, and that the preoccupation with assigning that thought to
one individual is the result of an apparently common human desire to
worship heros: Scientific figures, literary figures, sports figures,
religious figures, business figures. This sort of cult of
personality is, IMO, not healthy for our evolution because it
suggests that some people are genetically programmed to achieve and
others are not; that some people are born to lead and others must
follow.
Stephen Jay Gould, no weak thinker himself, puts it in a nutshell:
"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of
Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal
talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
The reality is that there just ain't that much difference between the
dumbest and smartest of us; the environment into which we are born
and raised is far more important in determining what contributions
we'll make toward our evolution as a species.
sam 08-11-05:
And on a related point - how do you understand patents? Are they wholly
illegitimate (that's not a question of the economics of major drug
companies, it's a question of conceptual coherence)
msh 08-11-05:
Well, we'd need a separate thread to cover this subject. In general,
I believe that the idea behind patents is weak (low quality) in the
same way that the idea of the stand-alone genius is weak. The
purpose of the patent is not to reward the people responsible for an
original idea, but to reward the people who are most efficient at
filing for patents.
Let's take one example: the transistor. In 1948, William Shockley at
Bell Labs felt that the person who had the original idea for the
transistor (himself, he thought) was the sole inventor and should be
the only name on the patent. When two other scientists at Bell,
Bardeen and Brattain, members of Shockley's team, actually produced
a working transistor, Shockley insisted that the "idea" was his, even
though the working transistor bore little resemblance to what he
envisioned.
Shockley went to the BL patent lawyers, who discovered something
interesting: In the 1930s, a man named Julius Lilienfeld had filed a
patent for a device almost identical to Shockley's original idea.
Since the transistor built by B&B was undeniably different, Bell
decided to file solely on their work -- dismissing Shockley's ideas
completely. So much for the stand-alone genius.
And here's where more stand-alone genius BS comes in: Dr. Herbert
F. Mataré and Heinrich Welker, a pair of German physicists,
independently came up with the same device two months later at a
Westinghouse Laboratory in Paris.
Finally, and most important, how is it that places like Bell Labs are
able to provide environments for scientific research? Even though
such places are technically corporate-owned facilities, they would be
unable to function without massive government funding. After WWII,
such labs received for free the benefit of technology developed for
military use, and government funding flowed into basic science of all
sorts. This means that American taxpayers paid for the development
of the transistor, as well as all the technological "miracles" that
followed, including the very device I'm typing into, as well as the
communications infrastructure that will be used to deliver my message
to you.
In short, patents are a way of privitizing profits made possible by
publicly funded research and development.
Mark Steven Heyman (msh)
--
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