Assuming you’re doing the book justice and it really can be summarized as such, it comes off as an instance of the STEM mindset overstepping its boundaries. Did the author have any familiarity with the social sciences? I understand that the whole idea was to import the hard-science paradigm into the study of how to ensure the success of societies, but I’ve read scientifically-minded commentaries on society that didn’t seem this… off. It’s like he doesn’t even know how the other side of academia approaches the matter, which I find hard to believe given that he wrote a book on essentially their subject matter. I mean come on, he thinks mechanical engineers are relevant to basically any discipline and role in society.
Moreover, the perspective of the book is, if I can call it so, pan-STEM and that appears to render individual contributions from all sciences useless. You can make use of evolutionary biology to understand matters such as human sexuality and morality. You can employ cybernetics to design and improve social networks. You can use math to get precise answers to problems in micro- and macroeconomics. You can analyse biomolecules in the brain to draw inferences about how the mind works and how to alleviate its pathologies. But what baffles me is how, by viewing society through all of the sciences, you can negate the insights derived from any of them, and abandon all of social science on the way.
To give a few examples of what I mean when I say the author sounds like he doesn’t know his Social Sciences 101: dividing people by class into the rich, the poor, and the intellectuals is not so much a categorization as it is a trivial game of “odd one out”; the analogy human:cube::animal:square is so bad it’s not even wrong, and there was no point in bringing up dimensionality here aside from pushing this strange notion of “time-binding”; related, saying that humans are animals is not a category error, it’s a truth yet not exploited to its full capacity; knowledge of nature and science is not a remedy from, but orthogonal to, the failure modes of capitalism and socialism; chapter 9 is totally not how you build institutions; ethics changes less than one may think; economics is mostly not a study of transgenerational endeavours; prehistory is not just like history but older, etc.
Maybe it’s the age of the book, and maybe it sounded insightful at its time, but going by this summary, to a modern reader it might justifiably sound sophomoric. Then again, I haven’t read it and do not know exactly what the author claims in the book.
From reading his later book, I got the impression that he let himself get carried away easily with his ideas. Bayesian thought hadn’t yet become respectable; so while he talks a lot about “the logic of probability”, and much of what he says about it seems exactly right, he never seems to use the laws of probability or lessons drawn from them. He’ll talk about the importance of recognizing uncertainty, and then suggest we should have known a priori the Universe was finite but unbounded. I don’t know if he ever really tried to disprove his more unique ideas, or find evidence to distinguish them from alternative hypotheses.
On the other hand, I wonder if mainstream semiotics committed even greater crimes against probability, in which case the honest people in the field might have benefited from some Korzybski.
Assuming you’re doing the book justice and it really can be summarized as such
Yeah, there is a risk I missed or misunderstood something important. I would appreciate if someone else would also read the book and either confirm what I wrote or add what I missed. The book it quite easy to find on the… uhm… shop.
it comes off as an instance of the STEM mindset overstepping its boundaries.
That was my impression, too. Actually, I think I toned it down a lot.
Well, this was the less famous of his books; the other one was written 12 years later and I am starting to read it now. Also, the guy was rather impressive in his era—maybe it’s because most of his good ideas already became so popular that they seem obvious in hindsight, and only the wrong ones stand out in the text.
Assuming you’re doing the book justice and it really can be summarized as such, it comes off as an instance of the STEM mindset overstepping its boundaries. Did the author have any familiarity with the social sciences? I understand that the whole idea was to import the hard-science paradigm into the study of how to ensure the success of societies, but I’ve read scientifically-minded commentaries on society that didn’t seem this… off. It’s like he doesn’t even know how the other side of academia approaches the matter, which I find hard to believe given that he wrote a book on essentially their subject matter. I mean come on, he thinks mechanical engineers are relevant to basically any discipline and role in society.
Moreover, the perspective of the book is, if I can call it so, pan-STEM and that appears to render individual contributions from all sciences useless. You can make use of evolutionary biology to understand matters such as human sexuality and morality. You can employ cybernetics to design and improve social networks. You can use math to get precise answers to problems in micro- and macroeconomics. You can analyse biomolecules in the brain to draw inferences about how the mind works and how to alleviate its pathologies. But what baffles me is how, by viewing society through all of the sciences, you can negate the insights derived from any of them, and abandon all of social science on the way.
To give a few examples of what I mean when I say the author sounds like he doesn’t know his Social Sciences 101: dividing people by class into the rich, the poor, and the intellectuals is not so much a categorization as it is a trivial game of “odd one out”; the analogy human:cube::animal:square is so bad it’s not even wrong, and there was no point in bringing up dimensionality here aside from pushing this strange notion of “time-binding”; related, saying that humans are animals is not a category error, it’s a truth yet not exploited to its full capacity; knowledge of nature and science is not a remedy from, but orthogonal to, the failure modes of capitalism and socialism; chapter 9 is totally not how you build institutions; ethics changes less than one may think; economics is mostly not a study of transgenerational endeavours; prehistory is not just like history but older, etc.
Maybe it’s the age of the book, and maybe it sounded insightful at its time, but going by this summary, to a modern reader it might justifiably sound sophomoric. Then again, I haven’t read it and do not know exactly what the author claims in the book.
From reading his later book, I got the impression that he let himself get carried away easily with his ideas. Bayesian thought hadn’t yet become respectable; so while he talks a lot about “the logic of probability”, and much of what he says about it seems exactly right, he never seems to use the laws of probability or lessons drawn from them. He’ll talk about the importance of recognizing uncertainty, and then suggest we should have known a priori the Universe was finite but unbounded. I don’t know if he ever really tried to disprove his more unique ideas, or find evidence to distinguish them from alternative hypotheses.
On the other hand, I wonder if mainstream semiotics committed even greater crimes against probability, in which case the honest people in the field might have benefited from some Korzybski.
Yeah, there is a risk I missed or misunderstood something important. I would appreciate if someone else would also read the book and either confirm what I wrote or add what I missed. The book it quite easy to find on the… uhm… shop.
That was my impression, too. Actually, I think I toned it down a lot.
Well, this was the less famous of his books; the other one was written 12 years later and I am starting to read it now. Also, the guy was rather impressive in his era—maybe it’s because most of his good ideas already became so popular that they seem obvious in hindsight, and only the wrong ones stand out in the text.