I don't know when the quoted Feynman passage was written, but FBI and JoD stats show that crime rates, especially violent crime rates, have been falling consistently for 25 years. Of course in this country that coincides with the vast increase in the amount and length of incarceration and the federalization of a lot of crime under and since Reagan, but if what's going on is that draconian penalties are deterring crime or that longer sentences are incapacitating criminals, whatever, it's certainly working to decrease street crime. There are more civilized ways to have low crime rates; European, Canadian, and Japanese crime, especially violent crime, is inconsequential compared to the (falling) Us rates despite far less and far shorter incarceration (and in Europe, no death penalty -- Japan still has the death penalty). It would be interesting to see if the Euro-Japanese approach would work in this country -- a strong welfare safety net, treatment for (in some cases legalization of) drugs, alternatives to incarceration for first time nonviolent offenders. But I wouldn't hold my breath. Feynman is clearly wrong. about our ignorance of how to control street crime by either iron fist or velvet glove methods, however. Still, the prose is clear, you can't dispute that.
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> So far in ideology/obscurity threads three writers
> I've admired in the
> past have shown clay feet. The first was Orwell when
> references to him
> finally sent me back to "Politics and the English
> Language." Then I read
> the passage in which, according to Tayssir, he
> "answers" the criticisms
> against him. I still think of Chomsky as an
> important writer, but those
> "answers" are simply pathetic. He is not really as
> bad as he seems to be
> in that text, which shows most vividly what Justin
> described as his
> "vulgar marxism." And then I checked out the text by
> Feynman that
> Tayssir recommends, in which I find the following
> passage:
>
> ****But then I began to think, what else is there
> that we believe? (And
> I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy
> it would have been
> to check on them by noticing that nothing really
> worked.) So I found
> things that even more people believe, such as that
> we have some
> knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools
> of reading methods
> and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you
> notice, you'll see the
> reading scores keep going down -- or hardly going up
> -- in spite of the
> fact that we continually use these same people to
> improve the methods.
> There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It
> ought to be looked
> into; how do they know that their method should
> work? Another example is
> how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no
> progress -- lots of
> theory, but no progress -- in decreasing the amount
> of crime by the
> method that we use to handle criminals.****
>
> This is rather pathetic. In the first place, as
> Miles has been noting
> over and over again, those scores are _not_ going
> down. And in the
> second place, it is sad to see as great a scientist
> and as sparkling a
> writer as Feynman not notice that those educational
> theories really
> can't be reduced to "Succeed" or "Fail." There are
> too many other
> elements involved. School enrollments have been
> incrasing steadily for
> 100 years. So the _obvious_ question is what would
> have happened if the
> techniques of 1900, teaching the narrow selection of
> students who
> continued to high school, had been continued in a
> society where almost
> everyone goes to high school.
>
> We do, in fact, have a hell of a lot of knowledge
> about how to educate.
> Unfortunately, that is a discipline much more
> difficult (because so much
> more complex) than quantum mechanics, so knowing a
> lot still leaves us
> needing to know much more.
>
> Carrol
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