every respondent to my post has missed the key points. I will post soon the list an article demonstrating my anger at the betrayal of sound government by a sinister state that has hijacked it.
Scientists even in schools and foundations are often secretive, too.
The notion that "science" is about blabbing one's latest discoveries or theories is overly simplistic. Many scholars and scientists choose not to publicize their work for years, or decades, or, even, never.
if so, they are not SCIENTISTS. a key aspect of SCIENCE is publishing results. science cannot advance without it. name me one scientist who did not publish an important result, or is considered a good scientists for doing so!
Consider Andrew Wiles, Princeton math professor, and the prover of Fermat's Last Theorem. He labored in secrecy for many years, only going public when he felt his results were complete. (As it turned out, they were not, and he needed another year or two to fill in some gaps.)
but he PUBLISHED his results, he gave a LECTURE on his findings. I am not saying that secrecy and science are mutually exclusive in this way. secrecy is a useful tool, I am not in general against secrecy. but secrecy can be ABUSED, and our government is ABUSING it. have you been following that Clinton was just fined $286,00 for lying to a judge? what do you think it was about? the government LIED that health hearings were being attended only by federal employees, and were thus exempt from mandatory public hearings. a law requires that if private individuals attend, the hearing must be OPEN and not SECRET!! for good reason!! our government is hijacked through SECRECY. in fact the hearing could be public even with federal employees only, and the law should have gone further but only stopped where it did!!
Corporate scientists now outnumber academic or foundation scientists, and they are quite understandably under various restrictions to keep results secret, at least for a while.
"at least for a while" is the key phrase. "forever" would be false. again, secrecy is a tool.
Science does not "only advance through the open literature." There are many other checks and balances which accomplish the same effect.
name one. I could give
dozens of examples of where the open literature either did not exist or was not used...and science still advanced.
but science eventually published the results. the lack of publishing held back science collectively. science had to rediscover something that had already been discovered. it is misleading to suggest that science "advanced" as you do here. those findings that are withheld from the scientific literature do not advance science as a collective human endeavor. how can you argue with something so obvious? all this is uninteresting to me-- I was making a moral point in an essay that is obviously unintelligable to most people here. its my big mistake in this world, to pretent that morality plays a role. as EH once said, normative philosophies are a waste of time. what room does the world have for someone who thinks only in terms of how things should be? things ARE, PERIOD. good lord, no wonder Ayn Rand is so uninfluential.