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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".
For the children, of course.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
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
Maybe, but it would still be better than allowing religion or money telling people how to live.
“Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence[.]”
All the reaction to that tweet is based on what people assume he meant by it. This is obviously a sociologist's dream topic to discuss because it can mean whatever you want it to mean and debate it endlessly without ever reaching a conclusion.
... which is essentially a corrupt theocracy. I'd gladly live in a society run by rational ideas over what we have now.
I don't respond to AC's.
Let's compare Science against the philosophies that current rule our societies.
Nationalism? Capitalism? Fear? RELIGION??!
I'll take science....
Any optimization approach/algorithm is set up to maximize the value of its utility function. Consider two utility functions for getting from "A" to "B", 'fewest miles' or 'fastest'. A direct route that takes you down 10 miles of roads at a speed limit of 30 MPH, compared to 20 miles on an interstate at 65 MPH, will win under the first utility but not under the second.
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.
...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.
What's wrong with eugenics?
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..."
> 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
Yes, but
1) Most are willing to admit they are wrong when an experiment result contradicts their theories.
2) Most are looking for the right answer, not the most profitable one.
I'd take that over our current Golden Rule model every time. Just look at leaded gasoline, waste disposal, or climate change to see examples of the golden rule hurting the average person. We have gotten rid of leaded gasoline, but it took one scientist nine years to convince the government that big business was lying. We're still fighting big business for good, long-term waste disposal and to minimize climate change
The only challenge I see is that, if we ever did switch to the Science Rule model, greedy idiots will claim to be scientists and put the true scientists in the minority, which would bring us back to the Golden Rule model anyway.
(I say Most in the bullets above because I'm pretty sure folks in it for the money these days wouldn't be scientists. But I also know there are a few bad scientists, so I sure as heck won't say 100%. I have no idea of how to test a scientist to see if they are good or not, other than to have well educated folks review a scientist's previous work.)
Tyson is nonsensical.
Science is a tool and a methodology for acquisition and extrapolation of quantitative states.
Presuming to base a society solely on quantitative basis, and imagining that qualitative determinations will be irrelevant in the face of self-evident data analysis is fundamentally flawed. By negating the existence of assumptions and bias - and the very real experience of people individually and collectively beyond their units of measure, Tyson proposes a world more deeply subject to unconsious forces - grown more powerful, because they are assumed not to exist!
He should call such a society "Bias-o-topia" NOT "Rationalia".
In the end, his proposal amounts to little more than an elaboration on the fantastic notion that the world should be ruled by measuring tapes and telescopes - perhaps by means of a gearbox.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Actually, I never read Brave New World as a dystopia. It sounded pretty sweet - plenty of responsibility free sex and drugs, no anxiety, and no pesky religion to muddy everything up and do the evil that religion does. Sounds great to me! I wish we were doing half so well now.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
I think the OP is falling into an anti-science fear-mongering state of mind that misrepresents the core idea of evidence-based policy making. The best thing about science is that it is constantly improvingâ"getting closer to what we might call (with some inherent romanticism) the truth. The anti-science knee-jerk reaction to this is that, because scienceâ"at some given point in its progressionâ"has not yet reached "the truth" then it is wrong and therefore worthless. I argue that there is no better way to move consistently in the direction of truth than the rigorous application of evidence and careful testing that is true science. When it comes to the application of what is learned through the scientific methodâ"a moving target that is constantly improvingâ"to public and governmental policies and laws, there is more than one way to use it, depending on the nature of the government installed. A totalitarian society might tend towards additive applicationâ"creating new laws and rules for society to limit its bounds. A case of "science says this change is optimal so this change will now happen," for example. This is not a methodology that most of us would find comfortable. But in a representative society that values fairness and freedom, such as what we aspire to here in the United States, the application should be of a subtractive nature. Science should be a filter to prevent patently wrong and harmful laws for being enacted and a measuring stick to judge the validity of laws created in more ignorant times. With science-based knowledge continuously improving, something no other form of knowledge acquisition can claim, applying that knowledge to prevent oppressive or dangerous laws is an obvious choiceâ"far better than letting the laws bend to the wills of lobbyists and political powerhouses which have no secure claim to truth or accuracy and, in fact, are often dead-set against them. There is no inherent imperative that science should or would be used to inflict legal restrictions upon American citizensâ"that form of application requires a more totalitarian government. (A form of government that a scientific analysis might steer a society away from.) We should embrace the benefit of scienceâ"more accurate knowledgeâ"and not ignore what we've learned by sticking our heads in the sand and claiming tradition, expediency, selfishness, and ignorance trump truth.
Way too many words have been said while beating around this simple bush:
Any conclusion about how something "should" be is a combination of two elements:
1) how things already are
2) our preferences
Science gives us #1. Our values give us #2. Eliminate either from the equation, and you have all kinds of stupidity and suffering.
That is really all there is to it.
First stop politicizing science, then give me a call.
You assume that you are at least a Beta not a Delta or a Gamma.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Using scientific reasoning to rationally choose between potential decisions is a great idea, but it doesn't solve the problem of deciding the basis of the questions. Logic can really only solve for one variable at a time. People will still have to decide which societal variables to solve and how to balance the weight of multiple variables. Fair is never fair to everybody. You are always having to make trade-offs between forms of fairness: equity, equality and welfare.
-rd
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.
What is it with this recent trend of anti-expertism? This arguement was used in the Brexit as well as several political campaigns of recent times. People confronted with evidence that something isn't working rather than address the evidence move straight into either:
a) attacking something about a study that has nothing to do with the evidence e.g. who commissioned it or the fact that it disagrees with an own internally biased study (see Australian election where the Coalition attacked Labor's economic credentials as non existent despite their treasurer winning awards for his policy and the direct impact of his policy keeping a country out of a recession.
b) attacking people who believe in studys saying things like "The public is sick of experts". Interesting this is a statement often made by a career politician rather than their far more educated advisers. Damn those smart people with their fancy degrees, what would they know.
This is the rise of President Camacho
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.
science has no business telling people how to live.
Is the author seriously suggesting science shouldn't tell people that smoking is dangerous to their health and the health of those around them? That for their own well being they shouldn't smoke? What about pregnant mothers who do drugs? Does the author truly believe that women shouldn't be told how they're poisoning their unborn child through drugs?*
If the author is a scientist (I didn't check), they should have their credentials revoked. It is well within the realm of science to tell people how to live their lives BUT not force them to. People should be free to determine their own course of action based on the scientific evidence and in so doing, can not later complain no one told them something was bad for them (see cigarette lawsuits for a perfect example of such a situation).
* I only bring this up because of the whiners who talk about abortion killing a person yet remain absolutely silent when pregnant women poison that same person for nine straight months. Apparently poisoning is perfectly acceptable to them so long as something comes out. After all, they're not the ones who are going to pay for the mentally/physically deformed kid.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Huxley probably could imagine an extrapolate automation in labor.
His object was not to demonstrate flaws in a society built on supposed rationality. His target was more basic - that satisfaction of the human condition cannot be met by full rationalization and meeting of physical needs in a structured external world. In fact, the presence of Soma was to indicate a function of SUPPRESSING those human aspects that were entirely unable to be satisfied by the purely rational and practical.
Huxley's target for criticism is not a future, optimized society, but the culture that we live in today, as emerged from the Cartesian revolution - the "enlightenment".
Again, an appreciation for parables is an indication of the capacity for insight.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Not exactly.
The morlocks are the descendants of the working class-- Factory workers, specifically. The Time Machine is strongly colored by the industrial age it was written in. There was a huge divide between the landed gentry, who owned everything-- and the working poor, who despite automation, were now slaves to the machines they maintained and operated.
The Eloi were the descendants of the privileged classes.
The mismanagement of the Eloi's descendants toward the living and working conditions of the Morlocks, led to a degeneracy of both-- The eloi lost all concept of what must actually be done for things to come to fruition, and the morloks became degenerate subhumans, who's management of the mechanistic side of things was purely instinctual.
Due to this divide, the eloi failed to meet the needs of the morlocks, and the morlocks satisfied those needs, by eating the eloi. The eloi continue to be sustained by the instinctual actions of the morlocks in the tunnels underneath their havens-- and the two, now distinctly inhuman populations, live in a delicate symbiotic balance, both through pure instinct, and not through reason.
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.
Eugenics is NOT about measuring people's head to determine intelligence, it is about artificial selection and much needed quality control. That was just the tool used at the time, turned it is wrong, doesn't mean eugenics is wrong. For example, medicine was treating sick people by bleeding them, we know that's BS today, does that make medicine BS? Sure enough, medicine is BS today, but not because it used to treat people by bleeding them dry, but because it has turned into a very profitable business that makes money on sickness and has zero interest of preventing it, as long as there are enough healthy slaves to meet labor demand.
Eugenics is NOT scientifically invalid, the measurement of intelligence by head circumference is. A big difference, not even subtle.
> 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).
Not if some religion is true.
Ok, which bit is true? How do you propose to objectively prove it? How do you tell the difference between the "false" religions and the "true" one(s)?
Rhetorical questions of course. Religion by definition cannot be objectively true because it depends of belief in something which isn't falsifiable. If it cannot in principle be measured or observed (with past, existing or future technology) then it cannot be true.
(Here we begin a predictably unresolved debate about religion, rationity, what constitutes evidence, limits of human ability to reason soundly, straw men, etc.)
You're the one that brought it up...
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,
The problem is that science, if done well, can tell us what the observable consequences of our actions might be, but it will never tell us what outcomes we should value. For instance, do we value equality or progress? Do we value the happiness of animals as much as that of humans? Do we value freedom or security? The answers to none of these questions are self-evident (and saying that they are self-evident does not make it so).
These are all the province of moral philosophy, and that field gives no easy answers.
Dan
The
Nice tits is a desirable trait. Doesn't mean I'm practicing Eugenics when I chase the tits owner/operater.
Eugenics practiced by society isn't bad just because the traits being bred for were wrong. It was bad because it put too much power in the hands of government, which can't be trusted.
Even if their were an absolute genetic ideal, it would still be a bad idea to give government that much power. They will run with it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Oh come on. If something is seems good on paper, but turns out to be bad in reality, that means that the theory is actually pretty much shit; you just haven't thought hard enough about it.
You can't find fault in the logic underlying Marxism? How about the central assumption that cooperation will naturally overcome competitiveness? Does anything about what you've observed in human nature suggest that that's a valid assumption across the entire species (not just some exceptions)? I mean, think of the prisoners dilemma, and extend that across broader society. All it takes is one group of people understanding that collusion, at the expense of the collective, can produce an outcomes that vastly favor themselves, and you've got yourself a power/resource imbalance. See every failed communist state ever.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
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.
Marx's diagnosis of the problem was flawless - capitalism is fundamentally exploitative. The investor class abuses the worker class.
Competitiveness is not a magic solution. When a pharmaceutical company brings a drug to market, it's patented and over time other companies can sell generic versions and conduct their own research with it and variants of it. But when a pharmaceutical company researches a drug and the drug is deemed to ineffective or unsafe to bring to market, it's buried - and there's a good chance a dozen other pharmaceutical companies will have researched and then dropped the same drug. Or look at planned obsolescence. Do cars need their styling tweaked every four years, and the cupholder layout rearranged? How about smart phones, wonderful pieces of engineering that consumers are expected to discard in two years because it's better for the vendor - not the consumer - if they do. How about foods and large food portions laden with extra salt and sugar because they sell more? And I don't begrudge Jane and John Doe their choice when they take a 5500 pound SUV to drop off their only child at elementary school, but you can't call that model an efficient use of resources. Competition is not always efficient.
I do agree that Marx's cure for capitalism is unworkable, for the reasons you describe. But I think his criticisms are rock solid.
Whatever else you may think of him... Marx was right about one thing, capitalism was and is hugely exploitative, fundamentally unjust and flies in the face of freedom. He repeatedly warned against achieving socialism through violent revolution because he correctly surmised that doing so would lead to abusive autocracies, he believe it MUST be achieved democratically if it was to have any chance at all of success.
The proof that capitalism was all the evils he called it - is that revolutions DID happen, against his advice, and despite ending up exactly as he predicted. The blame for everybody ever killed by a communist dictator belongs squarely with capitalism. If capitalism had not been so entirely evil, the revolutions would never have happened and those dictators would never have come to power. Revolutions do not come easy. People will put up with a LOT before they are willing to risk personal life and limb to change a social order they are now unlikely to live to see. Revolutions come - when the majority of people have been so thoroughly exploited that they have absolutely nothing left to lose.
If capitalism had not left the world with millions of people who had nothing left to lose - then Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao would never have been in power. Marx said the machines of capitalism are oiled by the blood of the workers and I would add -and fueled by the burning corpses of the colonized.
The end result of capitalism is severe inequality and the INEVITABLE result of severe inequality can only ever be violent revolution.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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