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Invasor
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Location: On the road
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 Posted: Mon, 11th Jul 2016 02:20 Post subject: Rationalia |
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| Quote: | I won’t attempt eloquence at this. Many people, like National Review correspondents Jonah Goldberg or Kevin D. Williamson, have eloquently criticized famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s ill-conceived Tweet of last week: “Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence[.]” His Tweet was followed by a compilation of photos of prominent scientists such as Carolyn Porco and Richard Dawkins holding a sign stating, “Citizen of #Rationalia.”
The reason this reductionist type of thinking—beyond its simplicity—is problematic should be quite obvious: Evidence alone is not enough.
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| Quote: | A rational nation ruled by science would be a terrible idea
magine a future society in which everything is perfectly logical. What could go wrong?
“Scientism” is the belief that all we need to solve the world’s problems is – you guessed it – science. People sometimes use the phrase “rational thinking”, but it amounts to the same thing. If only people would drop religion and all their other prejudices, we could use logic to fix everything.
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. Of course, imagining a society in which everyone behaves logically sounds appealing. But employing logic to consider the concept reveals that there could be no such thing.
There has always been a hope, especially as elites became less religious, that science would do more than simply provide a means for learning about the world around us. Science should also teach us how to live, pointing us towards the salvation that religion once promised. You can see this in any of the secular utopianisms of the 20th century, whether it’s the Third Reich, scientific Marxism, or the “modernisation thesis” of Western capitalism.
Yet each of these has since been summarily dismissed, and usually for the same two reasons.
Flawed science
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.
Rationality is subjective. All humans experience such biases; the real problem is when we forget that scientists and experts are human too, and approach evidence and reasoned deliberation with the same prior commitments and unspoken assumptions as anyone else. Scientists: they’re just like us.
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 realise that such acts have yielded morally heinous policies that were only enacted because reasonable people were swayed by “evidence”.
Phrenology – the determination of someone’s character through the shape and size of their cranium – was cutting-edge science. (Unsurprisingly, the upper class had great head ratios.) Eugenics was science, as was social Darwinism and the worst justifications of the Soviet and Nazi regimes.
Scientific racism was data-driven too, and incredibly well-respected. Scientists in the 19th century felt quite justified in claiming that “the weight of evidence” supported African slavery, white supremacy and the concerted effort to limit the reproduction of the “lesser” races.
It wasn’t so long ago that psychiatrists considered homosexuality unhealthy and abhorrent. There is at least one prominent, eminently rational psychiatrist who hasn’t come around on transgenders. And many scientists decided that women were biologically incapable of the same kind of rationality you find in men, a scientific sexism reborn in contemporary evolutionary psychology.
Positive vibes
And yet, despite its abysmal track record, people continue to have extremely positive opinions of “science.” As a sociologist, I do a lot of fieldwork with creationist evangelicals, and I’m struck by how rarely any of them dislike “science” as such; they don’t like certain scientists, and they especially don’t like evolution, but “science” is always just fine.
And for those who more strongly identify with the idea of rational thinking, their commitment is immutable. Just ask the 25 million people who “fucking love science”.
Part of the problem here is that nobody really knows what science means. Most people define it as the exploration of the world we live in, which is a fair if simplistic description (and not much on which to base a nation). The academic definition is frequently debated, without any really clear headway. (It’s hard even to figure out how to define physics, chemistry and biology.)
What is rational?
Philosopher Susan Haack has argued that science is, at its most basic, just thinking rationally. This is as good a definition as any, even if it leads to another problem: what do we mean by the word rational?
My work with creationists shows how impossible it is for humans to behave rationally. We are always informed by our biases. For example, a careful analysis of creationists’ scientific knowledge shows that they know as much science as anyone else. It’s just that they deny scientific claims.
In my fieldwork at one creationist evangelical high school, I found students perfectly capable of correctly answering every question about evolution in a biology exam. They simply used phrases such as “scientists believe” in their answers so as not to betray their creationist bona fides. This is actually an extremely rational way for them to handle the discrepancy between their faith and mainstream science.
In fact, creationism has a lot more in common with scientism than people such as Tyson or Richard Dawkins would ever admit. Like Tyson, creationists begin with certain prior commitments (“evolution cannot be true”, for example, substitutes for “science cannot be wrong”) and build an impressively consistent argument upon them. Just about everyone is guilty of some form of “motivated reasoning”: we begin with certain priors, and then find a way to get the evidence to do what we want.
The past mistakes of science should make us sceptical that it could be used to build a utopia. But, the scientists might say, science is most important for its ability to self-correct. Psychiatry has come around on homosexuality, for example. This may be true, yet it presents the precise reason why attempting to act only accounting for the “weight of evidence” is so flawed.
The elusive truth
Science may give us data, but it doesn’t mean that data points to truth – it’s just what we currently understand as truth. So how we act on the data requires nuance and judgement. It’s philosophical, maybe religious, and certainly political.
Scientists can’t tell us if it’s right to kill a baby with a developmental disability, despite how well they might marshal evidence about the baby’s life prospects or her capacity to think or move on her own. There’s no easy answer on how we ought to weigh those things up, just like there’s no easy way to decide whether tradition is superior to efficiency or monogamy is better than lots of random sex.
Scientism refuses to see this. The myopia of scientism, its naive utopianism and simplistic faith, bears an uncanny resemblance to the religious dogmatisms that people such as Tyson and Dawkins denounce.
Back in February, some of my sociologist friends retweeted another Tyson quip: “In science, when human behavior enters the equation, things go nonlinear. That’s why Physics is easy and Sociology is hard.”
We sociologists appreciated the recognition, even if some of us resented needing a famous astrophysicist as our hype man. Yet it’s simply galling that a person who can recognise the difficulties of studying social life somehow doesn’t connect those same challenges to their philosophical and political implications. If simply studying sociology is complex, governing society with it is anything but simple.
Science is not straightforward – as Tyson himself admits. Our interpretation of it simply requires insights and wisdom well beyond what science can provide. To claim otherwise is simply irrational. |
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| Posted: Mon, 11th Jul 2016 03:08 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Scientism refuses to see this. The myopia of scientism, its naive utopianism and simplistic faith, bears an uncanny resemblance to the religious dogmatisms that people such as Tyson and Dawkins denounce. |
While equivocation is by far not the best route for argumentation, this sentence does a decent job in summarizing the problems underlying the matter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a pretty well known mathematician who specializes in probability and whose work, to my knowledge, throws the biggest shade on scienistic lines of thought, did not respond nicely to "Rationalia" idea either:
It is strange to hear the case for "Rationalia" being made by scientists - they of all people should know the inherent uncertainties in experience that make science as a discipline necessary in the first place. The primary function of the main tool of science - the experiment - is to minimize the influence of all the uncountable number of forces acting on a system at any given time to tease out a specific dependence. This is extraordinarily difficult in the simplest of cases! Doing this for policy where a myriad of mutually interacting and hidden interests are at play is beyond the scope of possibility.
As an example of a complex nonlinear system - weather forecasts can't be accurate beyond a few days even with all the sophisticated measurement equipment that is available. The nonlinear nature of the underlying equations of hydrodynamics produce solutions which exponentially blow up any uncertainties in the measured quantities. So even by making the instruments 1000 times more precise (a monumental task) one could forecast only for <3 times farther to the future.
Offering such naive solutions to complex and nonlinear interactions within societies where an action often needs to be prompt and decisive, and where information at any given time is spotty and incomplete is not very wise.
Science, with the benefit of time and hindsight can give insights on our past to inform the future. However, it is not very quick to come to conclusions and inherently has predictive power only in the simplest of cases without nonlinearities.
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| Posted: Mon, 11th Jul 2016 07:19 Post subject: |
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So if you have a patch of land, put some people on it and choose some hardcore technocrats to govern them, you now have a country? This country is supposed to withstand the tumultuous sea of history for how long? Within 10 years there will be several sects with deep rooted differences of opinion, as well as populist pseudoscientists 
Anyway, I would like to hear how decisions based on proof/evidence could be made with regards to geopolitical matters.
Also, I have to remind people that statistics are not politically correct. I can imagine the Rationalia supreme leader declaring that poor black people are not allowed in Rationalia because of their exttemely high crime tendency according to the statistics. Also, religion is banned in Rationalia because it isn't supported by evidence and to avoid racial strife. Conspiracy theorists are to be deported. People with low academic performance will not have the right to vote, unless they at least pass an IQ test. Parents will be required to take a prenatal genetic testing before they are allowed to let a pregnancy continue, in order to eliminate risks of birth defects. The weight of evidence shows that this will reduce the risks of several types of cancer and other health problems and will lessen the strain on welfare. It is the most rational decision according to the studies.
Nice utopia we are creating, huh? 
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couleur
[Moderator] Janitor
Posts: 14361
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| Posted: Mon, 11th Jul 2016 08:25 Post subject: |
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There is alot that can be said against scientism. René Descartes, one of the founders of rationalism, was sure to be able to find a "perfect morality" but only as a result of the perfect establishement of all other sciences in theoretical philosophy and their metaphysical foundations. Of course he never found such a morality. As a result the philosopher has to admit to a provisional morality:
| Descartes, Discours de la méthode, IV wrote: | | I had long before remarked that, in relation to practice, it is sometimes necessary to adopt, as if above doubt, opinions which we discern to be highly uncertain, as has been already said;[...] |
For this rationalist, all matters of practical philosophy, such as ethics, political philosophy or economy cannot, even by the rationalists standards, be resolved until all matters of theoretical philosophy, as their foundations, are.
Another reason for Descartes provisional morality is the simple fact that life and duration compel us to act. That we simply lack the time to find the "truth" before acting.
I suppose then, that Neil DeG Ty. has his theoretical foundations completely solved that he can now build upon it the perfect rational practical philosophy for the salvation of humanity.
edit: I find it even more humerous that an evolutionary biologist would support rationalia. But I suppose Dawkins would support anything that somehow furthers his cause.
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment."
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