Word: projectively
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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David Bruck's critique of the Cambridge Project is obviously far above the spirit of Luddism of those who have been posting images of IBM cards reading "saturation bombing only 31% effective. try a little gas" in a crude effort to ?mobilize a docile public opinion for the Friday rally. Still, it needs rebuttal, most seriously regarding the professional ideologies of social scientists...
...fortunate property of social science that its discoveries are knowledge, not implements, and it is generally accepted in the profession of it that this knowledge is to be distributed without restriction to all who can make use of it. (Mr. Bruck acknowledges that the Cambridge Project proscribes secrecy.) Applications to come from the "basic methodological" researches into the uses of large data banks (the major part of which research will comprise efficient technologies of information retrieval, to furnish the equivalent of an entire archive at every attached time-sharing terminal) will have no intrinsic connection with policies of repression...
...deaths may be used by the Panthers to sell political awareness. But one has to have a little faith in the radical studentry of this country, whose drive to sniff out inconvenient facts from a mass of inertial archives is legendary and often very embarrassing to authority. The Cambridge Project is not at all restricted in its use to organizations with stratospheric methodological sophistication: first, because, as I have indicated, much of the 'methodology' is hidden in the inner workings of the computer programs: second, because there just isn't any such thing as stratospheric methodology in the social sciences...
...saying that the discoveries of social science are knowledge, not implements. But certain implements are required in order to bring knowledge to bear on the real world, and these implements are not so widely distributed as telephones or even as the technology to be developed in the Cambridge project. It is possible, even if unlikely, that the Panthers or the "radical studentry" could learn just as much as the U.S. government from, for example, MIT Professor Ithiel de Sola Pool's ComCom project, which is concerned with the dissemination of propaganda in communist and underdeveloped countries. But the Panthers...
...other hand it may be that the behavioral sciences are indeed as futile as aichemy, and that no knowledge of any use to anyone will ever come out of the Cambridge Project. I doubt, however, that this is a view with which Mr. Brookstien or the particpants in the Cambridge Project would care to justify their work...