by Nikolai V. Shokhirev
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety".
Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790), Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
Up (Popular science) | >> How to quantify subjective estimates?
"The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an
exception".
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
This is not about a political science (I even do not know what is this). This is an attempt to apply a scientific approach or just a common sense to political and social issues (where it makes sense). Here I am not promoting my viewpoints. Instead I try to give a tool for checking your own ideas (for those who want this).
As almost in all fields of human activity, the problem with political and social issues is that people prefer to be fooled and live in the world of dreams and illusions.
Below you can test yourself.
Was inhered to your country/nation anything from the following?
Answers:
Interpretation:
1 or 2 - You belong to a current or former big nation and you objectively evaluate the history of your country (nation).
3 - Either you do not know the history of your nation (or do not want to know) or you belong to nation which is a victim of the above actions.
The historic fact is that all great powers gained their strength by consuming various resources from the other countries, nations and ethnic groups. This can sound unpleasant but this is not the fact itself, this its interpretation. Various persons can interpret the same facts quite differently. Scientific approach is based on facts, but facts are only a part of information.
You can find more extended definition of scientific approach here. However, at the most basic level, it reduces to the following two items:
Mixing, blending and combining of these items is a major source of confusion and delusion, as well as deception.
Our simplified approach reduces to these two steps:
A fact can be either true (real, correct) or false (incorrect, falsified), and its interpretation (theory) can be either true (correct) or false (incorrect, inadequate, incomplete, wrong).
There are the following combinations of (Fact, Interpretation):
| Interpretation | ||
| Fact | False | True |
| False | 1 | 2 |
| True | 3 | 4 |
The resulting information can be characterized as follows
| Fact \ Interpretation combination | Information | |
| 1. | Fact is false, Theory is wrong | False *) |
| 2. | Fact is falsified, Theory is correct | False |
| 3. | Fact is correct, Theory is wrong | False |
| 4. | Fact is correct, Theory is correct | True |
| *) This is not a formal logic. | ||
Now you can analyze any information using this simple tool (if you want to). Obviously even the use of this simple tool require some mental efforts. However, in our information age it is getting easier to get information.
There are tons of "information" around. Unfortunately radio and TV news currently are the part of entertainment industry and the quality of such "news" is questionable. Scientists routinely use a cross-validation of the information from different sources. Fortunately all news agencies and newspapers deliver the information in various languages. For example, if you heard something about France in American news, check this in some French source or, better, in German one. Now all this is a click away.
Try this approach. Very soon you select several reference sources of information.
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Please e-mail me at nikolai@shokhirev.com |
ŠNikolai V. Shokhirev, 2004-2007