Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Foster responds

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:14 AM 6/29/01 -0700, you wrote:
> Particularly troubling was how he [Feynman], unwittingly, provided cover
> for the
> bumbling of understanding the Challenger tragedy.

I dunno. He stuck an O-ring in ice water and it fell apart, showing how
shoddy NASA's efforts had been, while refusing (in his curmudgeonly way) to
play ball with the bureaucrats. That's clearly not a full-scale analysis of
what went wrong, but it is a piece of the picture.

I still don't know why Barbara Herrnstein-Smith and Bruno Latour are
relevant to my quoting of Feynman.

Feynman's view that "Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself" is
obviously about what science _should be_, not what it actually _is_. Just
because many scientists do fool themselves does not undermine the point.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine "Segui il
tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.)
-- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.