Krubozumo Nyankoye
Posts: 15
Joined: June 2008
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On the topic of professional dishonesty, it happens in all fields. There are dishonest judges, dishonest doctors, etc. etc. In most cases this may not involve intellectual dishonesty except in some narrow context where it is easier and more lucrative to sell snakeoil than succeed in a competitive marketplace. There are many examples.
What is odd is that there are only a few fields in which dishonesty appears to be an actual requirement. As Huckleberry Finn so aptly put it - "Faith is believin' what you know ain't so."
Another worthy quote is Feynman in Louis' signature line. In my experience one of the most difficult things to do in science is to maintain a reasonably objective perspective on whether or not what you are working on leads to something, or is just flat wrong. Unfortunately, obtaining a meaningful answer to such questions can take decades of work and still be a dissapointment. If you can manage to avoid fooling yourself, about the only option upon discovering you have been pursuing a dead end, is to go back and start over.
I am not an academic geologist doing research per se. I am more of an economic geologist, but to provide any service of value to my clients I have to stay aware of the current pertinent research, and I have to treat my own efforts and results as if they too are research. In a way this is more difficult that research in academia because what the explorationist seeks is some more efficacious method of detecting the very weak and complex signals of an undiscovered deposit, or the discovery of entirely new kinds of deposits that are economically viable. In my specialty pursuit of the former is more promising than pursuit of the latter.
After 35 years of effort investigating a fairly straightforward hypothesis to enhance the resolution of exploration methods such that identifyable targets can be more highly constrained as to the probability they are viable for production, there is no conclusive result. This is far from a unique idea, I have many colleagues both in and out of academia who are working on the exact same problem though in different ways.
I trust their intellectual honesty. Often in the passage of time we have encountered one another and argued with earnestness inf favor of our approaches. In the field of proprietary work it is not often that we get to share our results in detail but after a time everyone comes to know whether or not a particular undertaking has succeeded or not. And of course you can always simply ask, and depend upon getting an intellectually honest answer. "Did it work?" "No it didn't." Often because of the competitiveness and secrecy of exploration, you don't even know what "it" was.
Surrounding the small constellation of colleagues whom you trust is a much larger assortment of others who in some way touch upon the same aims. Some are professionals of otherwise good repute but who have some taint that pushes them off the main track and into the bush. That group grades smoothly into hacks and cranks who have nothing but claim everything and whom, I guess manage to make a buck at it. Which is their only motive. Farther out still you have those who enrobe themselves in a science-like costume and then go forth to spew massive lies and defamation of anyone who disagrees with their foregone conclusions. They seek to trade on the credibility of real science. As Russell put it so clearly, "For years we were told that faith could move mountains, and no one believed it. Now we are told that atom bombs can move mountains, and everyone believes it.
To some extent, I think the most irksome thing about the dialog with creotards is simply the fact that they have no skin in the game. They are essentially reading from a script.
So the topic I offer up is essentially this, is it possible to believe in something and not be a liar?
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