It’s like the previous anonymous poster said, “When a viewpoint is not productive” (i assume the writer meant a viewpoint on the authority’s side that is irrational) it’s best to let things go, do some deep muscle relaxation exercises, and get to a place where the bullshit no longer baffles your brains.

As an aside, i was honest, patient and polite and eventually i found out from ex-coworkers of mine most of the higher management had been terminated/quit/laidoff. Didn’t get my job back, even though the law stated i could, but man it was great to realize i wasn’t crazy…well, except that i had tried to reason with people intoxicated (with power)

heck, i’d even had a raging drunk for a girlfriend during that time and dumped her within a week of sending in my appeal to WCB (BC, canada) which got me fired. fun eh?

Definitely seek counseling.

thanks for pointing to Altmeyer….
Cheers,
T.

“External” Authority is either by agreement (which makes it a contract between equals) or it’s not (e.g. tyranny). Altmeyer details the consequences of not understanding this well.

[http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/]

Nevertheless, I simply like this guy. Berlusconi is the right type of guy for Italy – including you – and any sourball like Prodi et al. is bound to be counterproductive.

Cheers,
T.

- Letter from Galileo to Kepler, 1610.

‘In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.’

- Galileo Galilei, 1632.

‘There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.’

- J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted in Life, October 10, 1949.

But Oppenheimer was a terrible censor! See Freeman Dyson’s video account of Oppenheimer’s horrendous attacks on Feynman’s path integral work on QED in 1948:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-77014189453344068&q=Freeman+Dyson+Feynman

““… the first seminar was a complete disaster because I tried to talk about what Feynman had been doing, and Oppenheimer interrupted every sentence and told me how it ought to have been said, and how if I understood the thing right it wouldn’t have sounded like that. … we couldn’t tell him to shut up. So in fact, there was very little communication at all. … I always felt Oppenheimer was a bigoted old fool. … Hans Bethe somehow heard about this and he talked with Oppenheimer on the telephone, I think. …

“I think that he had telephoned Oppy and said ‘You really ought to listen to Dyson, you know, he has something to say and you should listen. And so then Bethe himself came down to the next seminar which I was giving and Oppenheimer continued to interrupt but Bethe then came to my help and, actually, he was able to tell Oppenheimer to shut up, I mean, which only he could do. …

“So the third seminar he started to listen and then, I actually gave five altogether, and so the fourth and fifth were fine, and by that time he really got interested. He began to understand that there was something worth listening to. And then, at some point – I don’t remember exactly at which point – he put a little note in my mail box saying, ‘nolo contendere’.”

Tony Smith points out at http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=189#comment-3222 that Oppenheimer was later a dictatorial tyrant to David Bohm:

“Einstein was … interested in having Bohm work as his assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study … Oppenheimer, however, overruled Einstein on the grounds that Bohm’s appointment would embarrass him [Oppenheimer] as director of the institute. … Max Dresden … read Bohm’s papers. He had assumed that there was an error in its arguments, but errors proved difficult to detect. … Dresden visited Oppenheimer … Oppenheimer replied … “We consider it juvenile deviationism …” … no one had actually read the paper … “We don’t waste our time.” … Oppenheimer proposed that Dresden present Bohm’s work in a seminar to the Princeton Institute, which Dresden did. … Reactions … were based less on scientific grounds than on accusations that Bohm was a fellow traveler, a Trotskyite, and a traitor. … the overall reaction was that the scientific community should “pay no attention to Bohm’s work.” … Oppenheimer went so far as to suggest that “if we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him.” …”. (Bohm biography Infinite Potential, by F. David Peat (Addison-Wesley 1997), pages 101, 104, and 133.)

Tony Smith at the page http://www.tony5m17h.net/goodnewsbadnews.html#badnews additionally quotes Feynman on the problem of the false ‘authority’ of ‘critics’ who dismissed (for bogus reasons) his path integral formulation of QED. These authority figures were not just Oppenheimer, but included other expert physicists such as Teller, Dirac and Bohr at the 1948 Pocono conference:

“… take the exclusion principle … it turns out that you don’t have to pay much attention to that in the intermediate states in the perturbation theory. I had discovered from empirical rules that if you don’t pay attention to it, you get the right answers anyway …. Teller said: “… It is fundamentally wrong that you don’t have to take the exclusion principle into account.” …

“… Dirac asked “Is it unitary?” … Dirac had proved … that in quantum mechanics, since you progress only forward in time, you have to have a unitary operator. But there is no unitary way of dealing with a single electron. Dirac could not think of going forwards and backwards … in time …

” … Bohr … said: “… one could not talk about the trajectory of an electron in the atom, because it was something not observable.” … Bohr thought that I didn’t know the uncertainty principle …

“… it didn’t make me angry, it just made me realize that … [ they ] … didn’t know what I was talking about, and it was hopeless to try to explain it further.

“I gave up, I simply gave up …”.

- The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, by Jagdish Mehra (Oxford 1994) (pp. 245-248).

It was just as well that after Feynman had given up, Dyson and Bethe managed to convince Oppenheimer to take it seriously. I think this kind of story about authority problems in physics should be widely known. There is too much hero worship of mortal famous authority figures whose judgement is worth damn all assessing new work.

They can be both of positive and negative signs and they can be respected for both good and bad reasons.

Ideally, authorities are respected for what they have done and for their potential, not for irrational superstitions and not because of pure fear or the instincts based on the childhood, as Tommaso pointed out.

We don’t live in the ideal world and authorities may thus be extremely counterproductive, especially if they become extremely powerful.

So I would join Tommaso in not giving authorities a universal sign. They can have both signs and their absolute value is usually greater than for non-authorities.

‘Problems come with this definite consensus in a number of ways, for instance when:
1) seems to leak out and apply to decisions out of its initial scope.
2) becomes fixed, neglecting new knowledge
3) is altered via opinion instead of knowledge.’ – Alejandro Rivero, comment #4

‘Problems arise when authority is misused.’ – Tony Smith, comment #10

I like the following quotation about authority from Feynman:

‘It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.’ – Feynman, http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/RichardPFeynman/RichardPFeynman.htm

In politics and in the media, beauty, intelligence, star-quality, and fame are more important than facts. String theory is currently being hyped by authority criteria (beautiful, intelligent, star-quality and famous). Here’s a personal example of how authority deals with unwanted facts:

Sent: 02/01/03 17:47
Subject: Your_manuscript LZ8276 Cook …

Physical Review Letters does not, in general, publish papers on alternatives to currently accepted theories. Yours sincerely, Stanley G. Brown, Editor, Physical Review Letters

It’s a falsehood that there is a ‘currently accepted theory’ predicting gravity, because although Edward Witten claimed ‘String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity’ (April 1996 issue of Physics Today), this claim was repudiated by Roger Penrose on page 896 of his book Road to Reality: ‘in addition to the dimensionality issue, the string theory approach is (so far, in almost all respects) restricted to being merely a perturbation theory’. String theory does not predict anything falsifiable about gravity. So this is a good example of how authority is abused.

When I challenged it, editor Stanley just got his associate editor to email me a message ignoring my point completely, claiming falsely that I was complaining, and stating that he supported the editor’s decision (I was asking for the mainstream theory prediction that my theory is allegedly merely an alternative to). At IoP’s Classical and Quantum Gravity, the editor tried to be more reasonable but sent my paper for ‘peer-review’ by a string theorist (not a ‘peer’!), who came back saying that the paper should not be published since it was not based on string theory.

There is no inferiority complex required in order to have a problem with authority. All you have to do to be falsely attacked by an authority, is to challenge that authority using empirical facts which the authority can’t find a rational basis to reject. If you look at the example of the USSR, e.g. Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed (Trotsky was of course famously murdered with an ice-axe in Mexico on Stalin’s orders), you see the problem is not with the dissenter, but with the authority which can’t find a rational way to respond. Doubtless Stalin thought he was doing what was best…

Dear Somamandal, I will look into it if I have time.

Anon, your advice is very wise: “it is sometimes best to say nothing rather than to risk a personal argument developing”. Unfortunately I come from Venice, and people from Venice are known to be unable to shut up when they have something to say!

Andrea, interesting lead. How come you read that book ? Just stumbled into it, or had somebody advising it ?

Cheers all,
T.

it will surely take a while, but I like to talk about different things in this blog, and the topic will be certainly worth a more serious post once I get instructed.

Cheers,
T.

You’re welcome. I hope someday to see a summary of your investigative results. It’s one of those topics that I’ve always been curious about, myself. Ocassionally I’ve had people suggest to me that it’s because I have an authority problem, but I’m quick to assure them that I only have a problem with false authorities.

Best,

D.

Kea, the trigger was nothing else than a conversation with my wife about the issue.

GW, yes, a superiority complex is also a problem with authority, but an intelligent person knows how to behave, usually.

Alejandro, I understand your problem. I also try to act “friendly” to my students, and often find myself struggling when I try to get them to do something by force.

Marco, see above. No trouble, just pure thought…

Cheers all
T.

What prompted this post by you if I can know? Authorities are always a concern for everybody.

Marco