At 12:23 PM 5/5/2010, Terry Blanton wrote:
On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 9:31 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<a...@lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
> At 08:22 AM 5/5/2010, Terry Blanton wrote:
>>
>> I presume he meant "veracity of the W-L theory." Or did he mean it
>> was all consuming? :-)
>
> Well, it ate Krivit, didn't it?
>
IMNSHO, vice versa.
When you swallow something, and then it absorbs you and takes you
over, it's more informative to say that it ate you.
I wish that Krivit had put his efforts into providing a clear and
understandable description of W-L theory, but I suspect that might
have been way too difficult. Still, he could have gone around and
looked for people who could explain it, starting with W and L
themselves, of course.
I think the problem is that W-L theory is basically looney, so that
then the people he talked about it with told him it was "looney," so,
since Krivit knows that an orthodoxy can develop that will not
seriously consider something new, he went with that explanation. But
sometimes a looney theory is just that, not a misunderstood
breaktrough. A neutral reporter would not have swallowed either side,
ever, but especially not without thorough investigation.
Krivit isn't a scientist, he doesn't have the training or, in fact,
the way of thinking. He really should have been far more careful in
the first place about swallowing things because a "PhD said them."
Had he done his job better, we might all be ahead. Really, I don't
want to reject W-L theory out of ignorance, but neither am I going to
give up the obvious objections because it's hard to understand W-L
theory, and because I know that; rather, I'm leaning on, "If it's a
sound theory, it should be possible to write better explanations of
it that address the obvious objections," even if, and especially if,
those objections are rooted in ignorance.
I will answer separately with some observations about what I've found
on W-L theory. Krivit does have a portal linking to stuff, but I
haven't yet found a "popular explanation" that stands out, that
doesn't just wave away or ignore the obvious explanations. But more
in that other mail....
