[Stoves] Paradigm shifts

Thu Nov 23 14:16:40 CST 2017

Dear Friends

I am posting a comment from Cecil (with permission) from a discussion about changing the dominant testing paradigm.

Thanks Cecil

Crispin

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…I was trying to capture and constructively redirect the increasingly bitter and irrational conflict between the different stove testing "parties", clans, or maybe just factions on the stove science equivalent of a  Michelson-Morley experiment that would practically resolve the matter of which metrics and design & development procedures result in the "best" stove for a well characterized target community of stove users.  Therefore the "trumped up" shoot out at the OK CORRAL between the certifiers and the contextualers which are two schools of stove science.

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IMO this fight is likely to persist for a century. That was the conclusion of Kuhn in his historical assessment of the way science progresses. The big paradigm does not shift until the authorities literally die off and the younger generation pulls off a revolutionary paradigm shift (see Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It takes time to kill off mistaken orthodoxies once they take root.

I have seen how "progressive" orthodoxies can quickly form in the USA and dominate the discourse for a generation or more. Nikhil and I are old enough to have surfed our way through more than a couple of enthusiastic waves of mistaken sciences. My judgement is that the direction of most sciences is controlled by  artisan-scientists who invent new instruments that enable the observation and precise measurement of nature, including human nature, at increasingly more micro and macro scales of observation and interaction. This was something I learned from the horse's mouth in lectures at LSE  by Karl Popper. Forgot what book talks about the role of lens makers in the development of astronomy and micro biology; maybe Conjectures and Refutations.

I was trying to divert stovers from the politics of astronomy AKA theories of stove testing stage & science and focus the different schools of stove making on what I see as the main mission of stove science and testing. My personal aim is to get stovers to focus on the different steps in the process by which more appropriate domestic stoves are in developed, tested, fabricated, & disseminated to particular communities of use. We are so stuck in testing stage that we are not experimenting systematically with how to optimize each step in the stove development process and then ultimately how to get the best possible combination of steps and critical factors.

To me we are looking for a mythical best or most perfect stove for a given community. That is not how reality works. You know about the best being the enemy of the good (enough). If we remember we are a diverse team of stove makers who are going through an exciting learning process together, and stop worrying about identifying generic stoves intended for industrialized mass production in China I am sure we will make much with more progress toward understanding the differences between contextually appropriate vs inappropriate domestic stoves.

Perhaps if you can accept  my objectives - which is not the establishment of well contextualized national and regional teams competent to design & develop a series of culturally and environmentally appropriate domestic stoves - then maybe you will understand my strategy to refocus the discussion away from the self aggrandizing politics of special interest groups of INSIDERS and OUTSIDERS.

Otherwise we allow ourselves to be "the playthings of the ignorant".

That's what comes to mind Xavier and what did Einstein say about solutions to problems in science and life? Something about the solutions residing outside the paradigm or world view i have which the problem(s) are characterized.

A LUTA CONTINUA!

Cecil the Cook
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