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Is A Rational Nation Ruled By Science A Terrible Idea? (newscientist.com)
Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes an article from Jeffrey Guhin, an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA:
Imagine a future society in which everything is perfectly logical. What could go wrong...? Last week, US astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson offered up the perfect example of scientism when he proposed the country of Rationalia, in which "all policy shall be based on the weight of evidence". Tyson is a very smart man, but this is not a smart idea. It is even, we might say, unreasonable and without sufficient evidence... employing logic to consider the concept reveals that there could be no such thing...
First, experts usually don't know nearly as much as they think they do. They often get it wrong, thanks to their inherently irrational brains that -- through overconfidence, bubbles of like-minded thinkers, or just wanting to believe their vision of the world can be true -- mislead us and misinterpret information... And second, science has no business telling people how to live. It's striking how easily we forget the evil that following "science" can do. So many times throughout history, humans have thought they were behaving in logical and rational ways, only to realize that such acts have yielded morally heinous policies that were only enacted because reasonable people were swayed by "evidence".
First, experts usually don't know nearly as much as they think they do. They often get it wrong, thanks to their inherently irrational brains that -- through overconfidence, bubbles of like-minded thinkers, or just wanting to believe their vision of the world can be true -- mislead us and misinterpret information... And second, science has no business telling people how to live. It's striking how easily we forget the evil that following "science" can do. So many times throughout history, humans have thought they were behaving in logical and rational ways, only to realize that such acts have yielded morally heinous policies that were only enacted because reasonable people were swayed by "evidence".
Allow me to introduce you to Eugenics. It was perfectly valid and rational system in it's day, backed by what at the time was believed to be hard scientific data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
...according to someone who many or may not actually be rational about any given subject.
I've met a lot of high-reputation scientists and academics over the years, and far too many of them are pretty useless outside of their chosen profession. A significant number of them are pretty useless INSIDE their chosen profession, too - and those are the ones who would be talking the loudest about whatever government policies were in question. You wouldn't be getting Richard Feynman advising you about physics. You'd be getting that sociology professor who blathered their way to a doctorate setting everyone's social policy, with no way of stopping them.
Until we can figure out a way to rationally measure rational thinking, we'd be falling into the trap of believing "experts" who actually let their own self-interest control them.
In general I would rather have experts in charge than careerists - who account for 90% of politicians.
Having said that I remember an encounter with a mathematician colleague who was looking under the bonnet (hood) of his car for an electrical fault because both headlamps were out. It took only a little lateral thinking - and a bit of persuasion from me for him to accept that probably he'd been driving on just one, and hadn't noticed it till the second one failed. Nevertheless he accepted the counter argument, just imagine any politician doing that.
How about "Greatest utilitarian happiness?"
http://utilitarianphilosophy.c...
Right now, our society(ies) are being managed for the increase in happiness of the 1%, which is contradictive to maximizing utilitarian happiness (which seeks the highest degree of happiness for all members of the society.)
It appears to me that a scientifically guided society would favor utilitarian happiness as the utility function.
The same thing holds true for public policy. Do you want "most lives saved?" Do you want "greatest economic output?" Do you want "Least tax burden?"
So independent of any other consideration, there is huge judgement and therefore huge variation when trying to conduct 'rational policy' by what you choose as your utility function.
It sure would be nice to have a universal utility function for all public policy. But in the meantime, what if we just said that any of those (lives saved, economic output, lower tax burden) are an acceptable foundation for you to base an argument on, but "because my ancient book of sacred texts says so" isn't?
This wouldn't lead to 100% logical consistency in policy, but it would surely be an improvement over the current system, don't you think?
Allow me two literary examples, that will surely illustrate the quandry better than can I, myself.
First, I propose Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Anybody embarking on a discussion of technophillic, purely-rational society without having read this book, speaks from a deficit. That supposedly well-educated men like De Grasse Tyson make shallow, straw-man proposals are a strong argument that Huxley's literary presentation is as valid today, as it was in 1931.
Wikipaedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
The full text of the novel: Brave New World
A second point is made metaphorically, by Gothe, in his "Sorcerer's Apprentice". It is a poem, and suffers in English. For the purpose of our argumentation, it is sufficient to be familiar with the presentation of this material in Disney's "Fantasia" - provided that an audience is equipped with an ability to understand allusions, and to make practical intuitions.
In the end, I suppose Dr. De Grasse Tyson - a delightful fellow - is adept at understanding and representing the powerful creative and intellectual efforts of others, while exhibiting little individual insight or power for deep thought.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
How policies are designed is only one side of the coin. The other side is deciding what to create policies for. That's where things start to get dangerous; the weight of evidence and rationality alone are not sufficient to set the scope of government. In the past there have been some rational arguments for race segregation, killing old people at age 75, and so on. Even if something seems rational and can be proven to be more efficient (for society), it still might not be a good idea, so you still need a set of rules to protect our civil liberties. What is rational and efficient depends on your principles as well, for example: do you believe in distribution of income and to what extent?
Also, people are not rational and there's little chance that they ever will be. Your policies will need to reflect that. You can try and ban religion "because it's stupid" but you're going to have some nasty riots on your hand. For that reason I don;t believe in a "rational society", but I do believe at the very least that we should apply some "weight of evidence" to the kind of policies we are making today.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Marxism is unerring in its diagnosis and analysis. In fact, a fantastic application of scientific method, or at least scientific spirit of inquiry, to political thought. Allowing for the biases and limitations of mid-19th century knowledge.
The problem with Marx and his rational followers is in their prescription for remedy of the ills of class, and unfettered, imperial capital.
Marx's anachronistic history, where he doesn't see class an hierarchy emerging from agrarian technologies and the need to order societies for harvest and surplus, are not too bad a failing. He could not have anticipated the rise of anthropology and of archaeological discovery, as yet unmade.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
the premise for having deltas and gammas was that there is labor that no intelligent person would want to do. (cleaning toilets all day, for instance.)
Given sufficient advancement in technology, there is no legitimate reason to produce deltas and gammas (which were created on purpose, specifically to fulfill these service roles), since artificial servitors can fill those roles, both more reliably, and more affordably.
Since we are "Nearly there" in terms of automation eclipsing manual labor in service industry positions, his supposition is not incorrect.
Huxley just did not envision an artificial servitor class satisfying the necessary role. That's why he created the Delta and Gamma classes in his fiction.
Dehumanization is, sadly, a requirement for any society greater than 300 persons.
The human brain is simply not equipped to handle additional humans as fully operating human actors at population densities greater than this.
EG-- the people you live with are real people-- the people across town are an abstract conception.
Unless you want to make a society that does not have humans in it (instead, having post-humans of some kind), the grim reality is that dehumanization of some degree is going to be necessary.
> They weren't wrong
No, they were wrong. Very wrong, in fact.
The basic idea is to separate good traits by some kind of (genetic) selection. Unfortunately, that's not so simple. I myself fell under that misleading notion some decades ago -- not exactly regarding Eugenics, but also regarding how Genetics work. I questioned a teacher, he was right (but not in his best day to provide a good answer). Years later I found he was really right and I posed as idiot to myself. I digress -- but just to say that the reality is sometimes more complex than what we understand at a given moment. Same goes for nuclear reactors, IMHO.
The basic idea is that e.g., a couple with a 80 IQ can have a 200 IQ child, while a 140 IQ couple might only have 120 IQ children for instance. Mutations are involved and one should not evaluate the outcome by the inputs. The result must evaluated itself; it follows that the best strategy is to allow all possible combinations (which is the opposite of the Eugenics idea).
The more I get old, the more wise I think is the phrase "Don't judge".
> and it's means it is.
Yes. And it doesn't help that English uses " 's " to denote a possessive, which could explain that some mistakes " it's day" for "day of it" (which also is not a possessive, BTW).
Science once proved the existence of Miasma as the source of disease, Looked long for the bacteria that caused Scurvy, showed how Jews and Africans were inferior, and blamed ocean warming on the loss of coral reefs when it was the poison in snorkelers' sun-block that was killing them. The role of science is not to make human decisions for civilization, just as the rules of business have little place in a government. Business rules eliminate all losses, so a business-government would stop mail and protection services to states that received more than they pay in taxes, and just let old folks without money starve while poor sick people die at the entrances of hospitals that will not accept them without payment.
The role of developing morals has always been a spiritual concept. We have 100,000 laws based on 10 Commandments, and even then, most of our other laws and morals are the result of ancient religions beliefs that still resonate within the human soul. While humans apparently have a desire to re-frame ancient morals into self-serving modern concepts (such as ISIS and the hate found in many so-called Christian Fundamentalists groups), scientists apparently will find evidence for almost anything to pay their bills when they are funded by political, ideological and industrial special interests. Look at the apparently both "science" from the warming 'deniers' and the warming 'alarmists.' This cold-hearted elimination of humanity from life is a poison that unfortunately pollutes modern science. "Science" decided that humans were so unimportant that it ignored the nine planets discovered by humans, and decided on some obscure rules to denigrate Pluto and its human discoverer to unimportance. Computer run telescopes and CCD plates now get credit for discovering objects in the heavens- humans just don't count. Science without humanism is a monster. It is unlikely but possible that Neil deGrasse Tyson is actually an AI seeking to subvert humanity.
Tyson is nonsensical.
Science is a tool and a methodology for acquisition and extrapolation of quantitative states.
What's interesting is that we've seen the same emphasis on quantitative states in the tech industry over the last decade or so. I wonder if the pedistalization of numeric "Data" over any other type of analysis is related to the fact that there are people who in some fit on insanity could possibly think that Rationalia is a good idea.
Big Data without domain knowledge is useless; and logic without philosophy is flat out dangerous.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
society must adapt to new situations, and science only helps one interpret pre-existing data,
On the plus side, there is one whole heck of a lot of pre-existing data and truly novel situations generally arise slowly and rarely. Religious extremists popped up about the same time as religion, global warming evidence was first published almost a century ago, and even ubiquitous government surveillance has been done many times to great effect.
Is there something in particular that you see happening recently that would exploit your flaw? Also, "do/change nothing" is a perfectly rational choice that requires no experimentation while the data flows in.
You assume that you are at least a Beta not a Delta or a Gamma.
Any problems in the society described in "Brave New World" are constructs of the author to create conflict for the plot. The society as a whole is an example of a near Utopian society once to insert a more realistic form of genetic engineering and workplace automation. Once you add those there is no reason for the different classes.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke