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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?
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).
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.