[Fis] Fwd: Re: Scientific communication

[Pedro C. Marijuan]

Dear Mark and FIS Colleagues,

Apart from the very interesting "elevated" comments, let me refer to 
more mundane aspects of scientific communication.

First, is really publishing the essential form of scientific 
communication? Or is it complementary to other more basic form? My bet 
is that oral exchange continues to be the central vehicle. It is the 
"Brownian Motion" that keeps running and infuses vitality to the entire 
edifice of science. The success of some new techs (eg, emails, 
discussion lists) is that they share some curious characteristics with 
oral discussion groups. "Publishing", is very old too (Plato, Aristotle, 
Alexandrian Library...), and saves time and space constraints, and 
provides "textual" shared memories as well, but without the face-to-face 
contact it does not mark efficiently changes of thought. Learning 
Institutions carefully preserve the infrastructure of lectures, 
seminars, conventions, conferences, congresses, "casual" encounters... 
Otherwise the system languishes into bureaucracy and stagnation.

Second, publications have had an important interference derived from 
scientific massification (even before the current info era). Given that 
publication records were taken the world around as indicators of 
scientific productivity (linking thus salaries, reputations, careers, 
investments, etc.) they took central stage and became functionally 
"independent" of communicating the advancements of thought beyond 
spacetime constraints. The budged of research and innovation has 
escalated in most countries to more than 2% of GDP. Management of these 
colossal figures does not get very close to the scientific ethos of 
"sharing of knowledge", conversely it carefully controls the indicators 
and procedures for their own sake.

Third, another related factor impinging is the enormous scale of the 
whole scientific enterprise itself. Around 6,000 disciplines, millions 
of practitioners the world over (20 or 30 million scientists and 
technologists?). With every passing generation after the industrial 
revolution, the R&D system has approximately doubled. Besides, the 
recent incorporation of China and India and other countries to the most 
advanced research areas, has more than doubled the share of the present 
generation. The publishing management and the factual miscommunication 
between so many fields create really dense problems.

Together with the invasion of the new info techs, the factors mentioned 
(neglect of the oral, indicator effect, untamed massification) create a 
lot of pressure to change the system "from within" probably. Personally 
I befriend the Open Access movement and the likes, but I do not welcome 
the big burden of screen-time implied (less reading, less talk, less 
creativity). A new version of the "barbarianism of specialization" 
(Ortega y Gasset) is breeding.

Thanks for listening!

Best--Pedro

El 10/10/2016 a las 21:56, Mark Johnson escribió:
>
> Dear Dai, Rafael, Loet and all,
>
> Thank you for your comments - the theological connection interests me
> because it potentially presents a paradigm of a more vulnerable
> and open dialogue.
>
> Loet, clearly the redundancy is apophatic, although one has to be
> cautious in saying this: the domain of the apophatic is bigger than
> the domain of Shannon redundancy. At some point in the future we may
> do better in developing measurement techniques for 'surprise' in
> communication (I wonder if Lou Kauffman's Recursive Distinguishing is
> a way forwards...). Shannon's formulae have served us well because
> we've constrained our digital world around them. "Surprise", from a
> phenomenological perspective, is a much more slippery thing than the
> measure of probability. There are, as Keynes and others identified,
> fundamental ontological assumptions about induction which do not
> appear to be sound in probabilistic thinking. These questions are not
> separable from questions about the nature of empirical reasoning
> itself (Keynes used Hume as his reference point), and by extension,
> about the communication between scientists. I still don't know what
> information is; I've simply found it more helpful and constructive to
> think about constraint, and Shannon redundancy presents itself as a
> fairly simple thing to play with.
>
> Back to scientific communication, I've been looking at David Bohm
> whose thoughts on dialogue are closely related to his thinking about
> physics, and to my own concern for constraint. He writes:
>
> "when one comes to do something (and not merely to talk about it or
> think about it), one tends to believe that one already is listening to
> the other person in a proper way. It seems then that the main trouble
> is that the other person is the one who is prejudiced and not
> listening. After all, it is easy for each one of us to see that other
> people are 'blocked' about certain questions, so that without being
> aware of it, they are avoiding the confrontation of contradictions in
> certain ideas that may be extremely dear to them. The very nature of
> such a 'block' is, however, that it is a kind of insensitivity of
> "anaesthesia" about one's own contradictions." (Bohm, "On Dialogue",
> p.4)
>
> The blocks are complex, but "published work" and "reputation" are
> important factors in establishing them. I was at a conference last
> week where a highly established figure castigated a young PhD student
> who was giving an excellent but challenging presentation: "have you
> read ANY of my books?!". The student dealt with the attack elegantly;
> everyone else thought it revealed rather more about the constraints of
> ego of the questioner (confirming a few suspicions they might have had
> beforehand!)
>
> Our practices of "Not communicating" in science are, I think,
> well-demonstrated by considering this encounter between Richard
> Dawkins, Rowan Williams and Anthony Kenny.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bow4nnh1Wv0
>
> I think it's worth pointing out the constraints (or "blocks") of their
> respective
> positions, which (particularly in Dawkins case) are very clearly on
> display. My reading of this is that they attempt to communicate by
> coordinating terminology/explanations/etc. All the time they are aware
> of the fact that they have fundamentally different constraints: there
> is no overlap of constraint, and really no communication. The medium
> of the discussion is part
> of the problem: it structures itself around the 'topics' for debate,
> and then it becomes a matter of not making oneself vulnerable within
> that frame (this is what Bohm advocated avoiding). Yet for
> communication (or dialogue) to take place between
> these people, mutual vulnerability (I suggest) would have to be the
> starting point. The discussion is also framed by the history and
> reputation established through the each participant's published work.
>
> One of the reasons why I mentioned the theological work (and why I
> think this is important) is that it is much harder to talk about
> theology without making oneself vulnerable - or at least, an
> invulnerable theology comes across as dogmatism... of the kind that in
> this instance, is most clearly exemplified by Dawkins!
>
> What's missing is usually our vulnerability.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Mark
>
> --
> Dr. Mark William Johnson
> Institute of Learning and Teaching
> Faculty of Health and Life Sciences
> University of Liverpool
>
> Phone: 07786 064505
> Email: johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com
> Blog: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com


-- 
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Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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