A Short History of Group Think

I started looking at the phenomenon of group think today. One of the sparks was a post by my good buddy Ultra Guy on his blog new wineskins. It seemed to me that a salient point in his argument was the decimation of the German Theoretical physics community during the 1920's and early 1930's as the tide of antisemitism drove some of the leading physicists out of Germany.
The term groupthink was coined in the early by William H. Whyte:

Groupthink being a coinage—and, admittedly, a loaded one—a working definition is in order. We are not talking about mere instinctive conformity—it is, after all, a perennial failing of mankind. What we are talking about is a rationalized conformity—an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well.

Ultimately group think is about defending unexamined assumptions about things. As Galileo discovered with his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Challenging the reigning world view can be hazardous to your life. In 2008 the Church completed the rehabilitation of Galileo Galilei a process begun some 300 years after declaring him a heretic.

In our own era state sponsored and organized group think rose to new levels in Germany and the USSR. The German version, Gleichschaltung was particularly invidious and the name in German calls forth images of a system like a Gyro compass with, repeaters dutifully following the master compass. The Soviet flavor, Lysenkoism, had devastating effects throughout Soviet Society and Science. The essential core of Lysenkoism was the doctrine that acquired traits were inheritable. While the concept was not new to Lysenko, having been epressed by such worthies as Buffon, Lamarck, and giving it a patina of respectability Aristotle.

The current manifestation of group think trumping the scientific method are the conjoined triplets of liberal elitism - The Population Bomb, The Coming Ice Age, and Anthropogenic Global Warming. In each case the operating principle is the same. All research that supports the group position is loudly proclaimed, contrary research is suppressed. In the next phase research funding is filtered through a combination of peer reviewed publications ensuring that reports match the desired outcome. Funding from all sources is then based on previous publication and probability of the research being publishable in a peer reviewed publication. In the last phase, to show even handedness, contrarian research is requested and then heavily redacted to ensure that even the dissenters support the core thesis.

The final nail in the coffin and the result that proves "Mark Twain, was right when he said; "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." The recently released Index of Environmental Indicators, you owe it to yourself to see just how much we know about our environment that isn't so. The 70 page report also shows the progression towards impotence of most attempts to actually do something about a problem degenerate into. That one fact alone should give hope to all the AGW deniers around the globe.

Turn About

Many years ago I took several procedural programming language classes. Assembly language and FORTRAN (pre-Fort 77), were the major players. I then spent about twenty years of my life in the US Navy in electronics where periodically I was exposed to some basic computer theory as well as control system applications. Through out all of that I had an unexamined position regarding one of the languages that I had used at a superficial level. I like many of my peers considered BASIC to be a language with training wheels.

In spare moments over the last week I've been building a small application to do a work related task. Writing the application allowed me to learn the basics of the process that I was programming. The language that I wrote this in -- VisualBasic! The ineresting thing is that none of the programmers that I know have used FORTRAN in years.

That is not to say that FORTRAN is dead, just that it is now a niche language, useful in its place but not a general use language like Java or C.

Busman's Holiday II

Quick update, I'm now at my SIL's place. It is in Western NY, but just barely, a few miles south is PA and Maybe an hour west is PA again. North eventually becomes Canada.

Turns out that her computer has been a little slow, and needed some TLC as well as the removal of a really bad infestation of trojans and other viruses. Specifically some really nasty stuff from the vitumonde family of trojans. I've butted heads with virtumonde before and ended up walking away both bowed and bloody. Did a bit better this time. Lucky for me the folks at Major Geeks have worked out a method for killing off virtumonde. The link will take you straight to their page on cleaning your computer.

Tomorrow is more of the same at my MIL's place where I'm setting up a printer, and a dial up account for the in-laws.

Floss, Res Publica, Public Service and Me

I've been spending the last year or so reading, copying and reformatting a series of volumes from the Library of Congress. The latest one is Jonathan Elliot's five volume debates on the Constitution of the United States. Elliot collected not only the best records from the Constitutional Convention, but the Debates of the State Conventions that met to determine whether or not the Constitution would be adopted.

The primary value for me is that it shows that the founding fathers and their contemporaries were a lot like us. The had the same fears, the same desires, and the same foibles as we do now. This turns out to be important because there are some who argue that the Constitution, is no longer relevant because of the changes in technology that have occurred since the Constitution was written. On the other hand the era of the Constitution's writers was a time of great change. All of the basic scientific principles that under gird our modern technology. Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy and the other sciences were in ferment. At the same time the English speaking world had just experienced the Great Awakening, and innovative theologians were looking for ways to meet the needs of an emerging industrial society.

One of the basic principles of our government that was adopted from the examples of Greece and Rome was the concept of Res Publica(1) -- the public thing. What we call a Republic, derives from the concept of public things. The Roman's embraced a definition that included public service, public property (Parks, Baths and other things). In the modern age, the public thing includes all of the records of Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Judiciary. America despite its occasional failings is the best exemplar of the public record. The few exceptions have almost always been associated with material that was prudent, to keep secret for a period of time. Over time, our Federal, State and Local governments have accumulated a tremendous collection of documents, diaries, and other records.

As we have moved into the digital age, the quantity of information has increased and shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. As we have moved from computers like Babbage's Difference engine to the latest Intel(r) or AMD(r) powered computers the problem has gotten even worse. Since I have been working with computers word processing has moved from WordStar(r), WordPerfect(r) to Word(r). The problem becomes one of incompatible technologies. Have you ever wondered why "cop speak" for a recording device is a "wire." It comes from one of the first commercial recording technologies that used metal wire as the recording medium. I can remember reel to reel tape recorders, cassette tape recorders, 8 track recorders, and a host of other systems. Before the high definition disk wars, back in the ancient 80's there were Beta and VHS.

Now imagine for a minute what happens if all of our court, legislative and executive branch records are all generated and maintained in a paperless format that does not allow for a simple conversion to readable material. That brings me to the last item not covered in the lede for this post. Stanford Professor Don Knuth, became concerned with the degradation of quality in typesetting. He was writing what for many is the essential series on computer programming. After the second volume was written, he discovered that the publisher was no longer using a Linotype(r) machine, but had moved to a digital system. He turned his expertise in computer programing to the production of TeX. TeX and it's children LaTeX and LyX have become the standard fixtures in Academic Journal production. One of the great benefits of TeX(2) and it's derivatives is that the actual words can be read with something as simple as WordPad, Notepad or any text file reader. By adding "style" modules everything from perfectly formated term papers to a Hollywood Screenplay can be written and consistently formatted. So based on the typical method of doing business in our society you would expect something this powerful and sophisticated to cost a lot of money. Surprisingly, it is available to anyone with a computer at no cost other than the effort of downloading and installing the files. Not only that but like a '57 Chevy hotrod, you can get under the hood, and see just how things are done, or if you like to tinker, you can make changes to the way things work. That is FLOSS(3).

I'll close with a plug for three web sites that operate in the spirit of res publica:

Christian Classic Ethereal Library
Project Gutenburg
Congress

References:
(1) res publica
(2) TeX
(3) FLOSS