[discuss] [bestbits] Representative Multistakeholder model validity (was: Re: Selection RE: 1Net, Brazil and other RE: BR meeting site launched)

Mon Jan 20 17:20:15 UTC 2014

In addition to the pertinent words of George Sadowsky I quote in my 
reponse to his current proposition to bog ICANN deeper in the IG bug; 
two recent books raise two questions:

- Richard Dawid ("String Theory and the scientific method"), who 
raises the question of theories beyond testability. i.e. what we do.
- Rebecca Slayton ("Arguments that counts") who discusses the 
preceding US Governement major plan that subsidized the internet 
proof of concept and how science was used for a show, similar enough 
to what happens to day.

jfc

At 13:05 20/01/2014, David Cake wrote:
>On 19 Jan 2014, at 3:58 am, Andrew Sullivan <ajs at anvilwalrusden.com> wrote:
>
> > [cc:s trimmed]
> >
> > On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 09:56:31AM -0800, michael gurstein wrote:
> >>
> >> prove positives i.e. as for example the "validity" of this or that,
> >> but rather by demonstrating the "invalidity" (falsifiability*) of
> >> this or that

> >
> > Ah, yes, Karl Popper, the only philosophy of science that anyone can
> > understand in under 10 minutes.  The only problem is that the
> > falsifiability story falls down whenever one looks at the actual
> > historical details of significant cases of scientific progress.  So
> > that we don't drag this completely off-topic, I urge people who are
> > remotely interested in this to read Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific
> > Revolutions_, Feyerabend's _Against Method_, Davidson's "On the Very
> > Idea of a Conceptual Scheme", almost anything Ian Hacking wrote after
> > (say) 1975, and anything Donna Harraway ever wrote about science.
> > Popper's a nice story, but it is rather a long way from the final word
> > on this.  So, to drag this back onto the topic at hand,
>
>         Kuhn isn't that well regarded among philosophers of science 
> these days either (his paradigm shift argument doesn't really 
> reflect how science works (after all, physics still teaches Newtons 
> laws, even if relativity and quantum theory change the picture 
> substantially if you are dealing with conditions well outside 
> everyday experience), I would add to your reading list Irmre 
> Lakatos and his concept of a 'research programme'.
>         Or, if one doesn't want to actually become a philosopher of 
> science but simply wants a basic working knowledge of the field, 
> the book 'What is this thing called science', by Alan Chalmers, is 
> an excellent overview of the field, and a new edition came out last 
> year (I have a copy but I haven't read it yet). I recommend it to 
> anyone with an interest in this area, readable, informative, and 
> relatively short.
>
> >> So in this instance the burden of proof surely falls not on those
> >> who are demonstrating that the "multistakeholder model" doesn't
> >> provide an appropriate approach to governance but rather on those
> >> who are attempting to assert that it does

> >
> > this is poppycock.  If we're going to invoke philosophy of science,
> > then I state my belief that a scientific theory is true only if it
> > works.  More importantly for this current discussion, I think a
> > political structure is good at least partly to the extent that it
> > works.  And despite my very deep reservations about the way
> > representation can work in represtentative multistakeholder systems,
> > some kind of multistakeholder approach has been working in many
> > different forms for the Internet so far.
>
>         Very much my position. There are certainly issues with how 
> representation works in multi-stakeholder systems that are worth 
> considering, and we are not yet at the stage in the use of such 
> systems that there is a clear consensus on some issues. But it 
> appears to be an approach that is working well, and many would say 
> better than alternatives that have been presented. That doesn't 
> mean that we shouldn't continue to try to further improve it.
>
> > Therefore, I say the burden
> > of proof most certainly lies with those who want to replace it in
> > favour of something else.  An argument that the current system is not
> > perfect is by no means an argument that it must be replaced wholesale,
> > any more than troubling inconsistencies at the edges of theory were
> > trouble for Newtonian mechanics in the absence of a much better
> > alternative.
>
>         And to claim that multi-stakederism has been falsified 
> because this one time a process didn't work the way Michael 
> Gurstein thought it should is a very long bow indeed. Even by MGs 
> own argument the process could have been resolved to his 
> satisfaction fairly simply (by including the group he is a part of, 
> and that selected him, within the selection process), but certainly 
> a version of multi-stakeholderism with clearer criteria for 
> defining stakeholder groups is easy to imagine - whether we could 
> have settled on such criteria in the necessary time to select 
> representatives in time for them to usually participate in planning 
> for the Brazil meeting is another issue, however. Decisions are not 
> made in a vacuum, sometimes there are external constraints that 
> demand some pragmatic response.
>
>         Regards
>
>                 David
>
>
>
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