From: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 10:00:02 +0800
To: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>
Subject: Re: rant on the morality of confidentiality
In-Reply-To: <v03102800b0dac9cd1f90@[207.167.93.63]>
Message-ID: <199801090042.QAA02172@netcom11.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




every respondent to my post has missed the key points.
I will post soon the list an article demonstrating my
anger at the betrayal of sound government by a sinister state
that has hijacked it.

>Scientists even in schools and foundations are often secretive, too.
>
>The notion that "science" is about blabbing one's latest discoveries or
>theories is overly simplistic. Many scholars and scientists choose not to
>publicize their work for years, or decades, or, even, never.

if so, they are not SCIENTISTS. a key aspect of SCIENCE is publishing
results. science cannot advance without it. name me one scientist
who did not publish an important result, or is considered a good
scientists for doing so!

>Consider Andrew Wiles, Princeton math professor, and the prover of Fermat's
>Last Theorem. He labored in secrecy for many years, only going public when
>he felt his results were complete. (As it turned out, they were not, and he
>needed another year or two to fill in some gaps.)

but he PUBLISHED his results, he gave a LECTURE on his findings. I am
not saying that secrecy and science are mutually exclusive in this way.
secrecy is a useful tool, I am not in general against secrecy. but
secrecy can be ABUSED, and our government is ABUSING it. 

have you
been following that Clinton was just fined $286,00 for lying to
a judge? what do you think it was about? the government LIED that
health hearings were being attended only by federal employees, and
were thus exempt from mandatory public hearings. a law requires that
if private individuals attend, the hearing must be OPEN and not
SECRET!! for good reason!! our government is hijacked through
SECRECY. in fact the hearing could be public even
with federal employees only, and the law should have gone further
but only stopped where it did!!

>Corporate scientists now outnumber academic or foundation scientists, and
>they are quite understandably under various restrictions to keep results
>secret, at least for a while.

"at least for a while" is the key phrase. "forever" would be false.
again, secrecy is a tool.

>Science does not "only advance through the open literature." There are many
>other checks and balances which accomplish the same effect.

name one.

 I could give
>dozens of examples of where the open literature either did not exist or was
>not used...and science still advanced.

but science eventually published the results. the lack of publishing
held back science collectively. science had to rediscover something
that had already been discovered. it is misleading to suggest that
science "advanced" as you do here. those findings that are withheld
from the scientific literature do not advance science as a collective
human endeavor. how can you argue with something so obvious?

all this is uninteresting to me-- I was making a moral point in an
essay that is obviously unintelligable to most people here. its my
big mistake in this world, to pretent that morality plays a role.
as EH once said, normative philosophies are a waste of time. what
room does the world have for someone who thinks only in terms
of how things should be? things ARE, PERIOD. good lord, no wonder 
Ayn Rand is so uninfluential.