Active or passive?
Random thought, mainly for my own memory...

I've been using science and anti-science loosely.

Science is both a passive and an active verb. As a passive verb, it was defined best by Carver.

Look about you.
Take hold of the things that are here.
Talk to them.
Let them talk to you.

Or in more conventional terms, observe patterns and check them.

= = = = =

As an active verb, science really means engineering. Find a problem and solve it. Do what works.

BUT: All real problems have already been solved. So real engineers are cautious slow improvers, not innovators. They use methods and equipment and materials that have been tested for thousands of years, and occasionally adopt a new method or material AFTER it has been intensely and thoroughly proved superior to the old.

Elon isn't anti-science, he's the ultimate anti-engineer. He takes problems that have been OPTIMALLY solved, problems that don't even need improvement, and tries to do what never worked.

Lockdowns fit into that category. We have already OPTIMALLY solved the question of immunity. KILLING THE ENTIRE COUNTRY was never IMAGINED until this year, and anyone who proposed it would have been instantly disdained, mocked, and tinfoiled. (Well, it was imagined and accomplished in several places like Ukraine and Germany in the '30s, and Cambodia in the '70s, and Uganda in the '90s, but until now we pretended to disapprove of those older Social Distancing projects.)(Hmm. Come to think of it, there was one Social Distancing project that was equally effective, and we heartily approve it. Dixie in 1861. Not a coincidence.)

= = = = =

Where does public health belong in these definitions of active and passive?

Public health is MUCH more engineering than science.

Public health is primarily sanitation. Indoor plumbing, refrigeration, vacuuming and mopping. Exterminate insects and rodents.

Public health also involves border control, which means fences and gates and buildings to house the inspectors.

Public health also involves vaccinations, which are derived from medicine but mostly need equipment to manufacture the vaccines efficiently and safely, and equipment to inject the vaccines.

Engineering, not science. Only marginally intersecting medicine.

Labels: Asked and properly answered, Carver

  ¶ 1:21 PM