On Fri, 18 Aug 1995, Michael McMaster wrote:
> What stops these theories and processes catching on like wild-fire is
> a question that interests me greatly. If the aproaches are so good -
> and some are - then what is preventing them? I don't buy the
> variants of "resistance" and "vested interests". They exist but they
> explain away rather than help with the problem. I think that we need
> to take on the kind of learning that John suggests and becoime
> masters at developing the process of learning/teaching/sharing so
> that these things that work are much more widely used.
I DON'T KNOW THE TOTAL ANSWER TO WHAT STOPS THEM, BUT I KNOW SEVERAL OF
THE FACTORS:
(1) An erroneous belief that "my" organization or "my" industry is unique,
so it doesn't really matter if some other place had good results.
An organizational inventory of similarity and dissimilarity will often
reveal that "my" organization differs from others in perhaps 5% of its
persona, but is similar in the other 95%.
(2) Decisions to "buy" based on reputations of the seller, typically
involving "prestigious organization X", in which the good reputation is
no longer warranted, having been developed two or more decades ago, and
never corrected.
(3) No time to study or, what is equivalent, anti-intellectualism, since
really novel things do require thought and creativity.
(4) The Galileo/Lavoisier/Peirce, et al, effect--which is to vilify,
imprison, or kill a person who starts to say things that you don't
believe, and which contradict entrenched authority , and which make you
uncomfortable.
(5) The power of high-powered marketing of superficial ideas,
accompanied by the implication that they have just been discovered, plus
attaching popular metaphors dealing with evident major difficulties.
(6) And, most importantly, the "publish or perish" rules or their
practical equivalent that keeps academics (and thereby their students)
from taking the time to study; accompanied by the desire to be original.
It's a miracle that we don't have a new law of gravity every day.
MORE GENERALLY, the term "Mindbugs" can be assigned to all of those
things that cause human beings to "crash" a la modern pcs.
>I am humbled by the thought that, once widespread, each of the ideas
> will turn out to be primitive and only provide a platform for what is
> next. But without the platform - which requires that we make it
> accessible and available - we will continue at our same relatively
> low level trumpeting the value of what is and miss the possibility of
> what might be.
SEVERAL YEARS AGO I STARTED TO WRITE A BOOK ON "PLATFORM THEORY". I
really like the term "platform". Individuals can use platforms in a
serious way, unlike our US political parties, who use them as recreational
devices to avoid thinking. UNFORTUNATELY I GOT DIVERTED BY THINGS LIKE
LIST SERVERS AND MEETINGS.
AS USUAL, CHARLES S. PEIRCE HAS DEALT WITH MANY OF THESE IDEAS IN A
BETTER WAY THAN I.
-- JOHN N. WARFIELD Jwarfiel@gmu.edu.