Comment 72831

By Mahesh_P_Butani (registered) - website | Posted January 07, 2012 at 18:20:06

Jason,

Respectfully -- there can be no virtually forgone conclusions in planning or for that matter even in bearing passionate hatred for opposing views.

"Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch." ~ Novalis

This amazing quotation is found at the beginning of The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper - one of the most important and fascinating books of the last century - which is well worth reading to bring a new focus to our conversations on city building.

Planning, just as political criticism, in my view is essentially an activity that is best grasped through a Probabilistic Approach to Human Reasoning via Bayesian Rationality:

"What kind of theory might be more suited to explaining practical action in an uncertain world?"

"The Logical mind should be replaced by the probablistic mind."

"Negative conclusion bias arises when negations are used in conditional statements, for example, If a bird is a swan, then it is not red. In Evans’ (1972) Negations Paradigm, four such rules are used: If p then q; if p then not-q; if not-p then q; if not-p then not-q. The most robust finding is that people endorse DA, AC, and MT more when the conclusion contains a negation."

"As Popper (1935/1959) argued, logically one can never be certain that a scientific hypothesis is true in the light of observed evidence, as the very next piece of evidence one discovers could be a counterexample. So, just because all the swans you have observed up until now have been white, is no guarantee that the next one will not be black. Instead, Popper argues that the only logically sanctioned strategy for hypothesis testing is to seek falsifying cases."

~ Précis of Bayesian Rationality

Indulge me here for a moment. I would like you to take a very close look at these thoughts below in light of broad claims made of transit systems, urban intensification, walkability and tall structures on urban form:

Now, test the two LRT reports you presented here with their sweeping inferences against the search for proofs in the above thoughts.

Can you still bring the same conviction which you had when you published this article to your conversations on transit planning and urban development in Hamilton?

If you still can, then it only means that I will have to work much harder to convince you :) But, if you cannot - then it may well be the beginnings of some very tempered and truly transformative conversations on this forum - which take into account such emerging realities:

“We are in a new normal now when it comes to new programs...We are in an era now of prioritization and rationalization - Good programs don’t cut it. They have to be great programs.~ Brad Duguid, Economic Development Minister

Thank you Jason for maintaining your sense of humour thru all of this, while a few others on this forum are choosing to crash and burn by clinging on to the weight of false notions of proof.

"...Thus he thinks that the 'proof' indubitably establishes the truth of the naive conjecture, that its certainty is beyond doubt. But his 'certainty' is far from being a sign of success, it is only a symptom of lack of imagination, of conceptual poverty. It produces smug satisfaction and prevents the growth of knowledge..."

~ Proofs And Refutations, The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, Imre Lakatos

Mahesh P. Butani

Comment edited by Mahesh_P_Butani on 2012-01-07 19:02:48

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