Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on November 4, 2013 | 4 Comments
Well, busy times here at Small Farm Future just now – our editorial team have been travelling the length and breadth of the country giving presentations and consultations and writing articles for Statistics Views and letters to The Guardian. All good stuff, until Mrs Spudman put her foot down this morning and made us actually go to the farm and pick some bloody vegetables for the box scheme for a bloody change. The ignominy! The team were just about to head back indoors to write a blog post when we discovered that the chicken coop door closer needed fixing…and a sheep had its head stuck in the fence…and a field drain needed some attention…and, well anyway…
Meanwhile, back in the blogosphere I’m aware that I still need to answer Clem’s sociological question about settlement scale. And I’ve also got postings in the offing on amongst other things permaculture, composting, potato growing, a revolutionary new cultivation tool, Vallis Veg Version 2.0 and all the other posts that I’ve been promising to write over the last year but haven’t yet. In the mean time I have to give another talk next week and start upping the ante with our house move onto our farm site. Ah well, at least all these trying labours keep me from contemplating the dreadful half-emptiness of my glass.
And so for now I’m going to have to fob my readership off with nothing more than a link to my recently published article on The Green Revolution. Was it a good thing? You might think that thousands of highly trained social scientists would at least be able to come up with a robust answer to a simple question like that. But if you do, you’d be sadly mistaken.
In other news, Small Farm Future’s editor-in-chief has a letter in today’s Guardian criticising Professor Dale Sanders FRS, director of the John Innes Centre. Truly a clash of the intellectual titans, then. Sanders wrote in support of golden rice, a topic on which this blog has cogitated lengthily in the past, and so was well prepared to issue a stinging counterblast. My intervention has already generated some hate mail. Well, perhaps ‘hate’ is too strong a word, but ‘slightly miffed mail’ doesn’t sound quite right. Anyway, now that I’m a veteran of the GM wars of several months standing I’m already getting wearily familiar with the standard tropes of the pro-GM brigade: ‘ideological opposition to GM’, ‘let them eat broccoli’, ‘rich westerners who can afford to oppose GM’ etc etc. Is it too much to ask that we rich westerners who find ourselves on opposite sides of the GM debate could agree that we all want the poverty and suffering of non-rich non-westerners to be alleviated, but we happen to have very different views about how best to go about it? Yes, thought so.
More soon…
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Fob us off on… well, I for one like the link to counterfactuals and the green revolution. Haven’t gotten to the other controversy yet – but certainly will.
Norman Borlaug is something of hero in the circles I travel in. Shuttle breeding, while not a super visionary notion on par with relativity is still a very commendable invention. And so since college I’ve always lived in the camp that respects the Green Revolution as an example of what Agronomists, Plant Pathologists, and Plant Breeders can accomplish for the good of humanity. And now your piece in Social Statistics gives me reason to at least ruminate on a different interpretation.
At what point does one reach for Occam’s Razor? Excuse me if I leave this question out as both a tease and possible philosophical trap. I have always struggled with the value Occam’s Razor brings to scientific debate. Perhaps my trouble comes from counterfactual definitions of problems that have been cherry picked for their comparative value(s).
Thanks, Clem. Interesting points on Borlaug – I’m sure there are aspects of the GR that are worth respecting, particularly when you come at it from a plant breeding perspective. My background in the critical social sciences tends to place the emphasis elsewhere, with my general refrain being ‘technology means nothing without social context’, but that’s obviously not really true – the technology does mean something in and of itself….however, it matters how we go about finding solutions and what we choose to do with them when we’ve found them.
Not sure I quite follow your line of argument about Occam’s Razor, but I’d be interested to hear more.
Oops, seems I missed your reply.
So – Occam’s Razor; too briefly: the simplest explanation is best. A possible interpretation from a statistical viewpoint: don’t overfit your model. Which is good advice, but too simple.
I’m no longer sure where I was going with the thought earlier. The difficulty I’ve always had applying Occam’s Razor as a rule is the difficulty of trying to squish massive amounts of information into nice little boxes. Context matters. And often there is more value in the data then our little boxes can hold. Just lump off the extra and fertilize the carrots?
And if you’re wearing a beard, what need have you of a razor in the first place?
But this is just more digression.
Yes, I like it. I read somewhere recently about Occam’s Razor in a medical context – if a patient presents with a whole bunch of symptoms, diagnose the single disorder that maximally accounts for them. To which the rejoinder was nothing ever stopped a patient being ill in lots of ways at once.