Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"The full and intimate quantification of any science is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Nevertheless, it is not a consummation that can be effectively sought by measuring." -- Thomas Kuhn, "The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science" What Kuhn is getting at here is that the ability to make meaningful measurements is the end product of the quantification of a science, and not the road to its quantification. Social scientists would do well to remember this point, especially when they try things like "measuring" happiness by asking a bunch of people to rate their own happiness on a scale of 1 to 10. They have no theory of what, exactly, they are measuring, of how their "device" purports to measure it, or as to what sort of quantitative relationships they expect it to have with other measurements. Physical scientists took over a century of experimenting with thermometers to figure out what they were measuring and how it w...

Of course, we never expect exact fit: there are always instrument imperfections, environmental influences that could not be fully screened out, and so on. (In fact, an exact fit is a sign of fudged results.) What we expect is thjat the measurements are "close enough." But how close is that? Here is Thomas Kuehn's finding: "I now conclude that the only possible criterion is the mere fact that [the measurements] appear, together with the theory from which they are derived, in a professionally accepted text." -- "The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science"

Let us say that you are an anthropologist who has found a people who were obsessed over everything green.  They paid great to anything green they could spot in their vicinity, watering it, feeding it, cleaning it, maintaining it, as appropriate. This is extraordinary to you, as all of the grey buildings, their brown animals, their red flowers, and so on, and completely neglected. When you point this out to them, they tell you, "You are being irrational! Naturally enough, if all of the green things are getting better, we must assume everything else is as well!" They have a cult of greenness, and the very thing that is making everything that isn't green get worse, their fixation on what is green, they believe to be also the best way to attend to non-green things. Well, Western Civilization has been increasingly caught up in a cult of measurement for the last 400 years. BUt, I have learned it is irrational to think that being fixated on what can be measured might lead u...