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LAMPPOST

                                             October 16, 2008

It's often seemed to me that you can
characterize people by the favorite
joke that they like to tell.

I think this one is mine:


   A cop is walking down the sidewalk one
   night, and he finds this drunk on his hands
   and knees crawling around under a bright
   street light.

   The cop asks "what are you doing?"

   The drunk says "Looking for my car keys."                    In telling the
                                                                joke, this line
   The cop looks around and says                                gets a laugh,
   "You lost them somewhere around here?"                       too.

   The drunk says "No, no... I lost 'em over                    It's often the
   there!", pointing out into the                        case with
   darkness.                                                    Jokes: there's
                                                                something
   The cop says: "Then why are you looking over here?"          embedded in
                                                                the middle
   The drunk responds: "The light's better over                 that makes
   here."                                                       them work,
                                                                it's not just
                                                                setup and
                                                                punchline.
And what's really funny about this joke, is
that it describes the scientific method.

You don't ask yourself what you'd *like* to know,
you ask yourself what *can* be known.  Better to
have some hope of learning *something*, even if it
isn't precisely what you'd like to learn.

                              And I can't claim any
                              originality whatsoever
                              in this parallel:
                              I believe I first
                              encountered this joke      Pschology has been
                              in an introduction to      beaten up for being
                              a psychology textbook,     "unscientific" for so
                              where it was used to       long that they go out
                              make the same point.       of their way to
                                                         explain the way
                                                         science works to
                                                         their students.

                                                            In hard science
                                                            disciplines,
                                                            you're expected
                                                            to have figured
         "The sciences, even the best,--                    it out on your
         mathematics and astronomy,--                       own already.
         are like sportsmen, who seize
         whatever prey offers, even                         (E.g. statistical
         without being able to make any                     significance is not
         use of it."                                        a core part of the
                                                            curriculum.)
              --Ralph Waldo Emerson,
                "Plato, or, the Philosopher"
                p. 309, Viking Portable ed.






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