I have read very little EO Wilson, but I’ve been informed at several cocktail parties that I probably am, or would be, a fan of his stuff. This is probably true <3
I do think myrmecology is awesome, and my understanding is that EO Wilson got pretty into that :-)
Consilience as described there seems like “a reasoning tactic that any bright person with common sense probably derived for themselves when they were eleven or so”?
However, also… when I read about the unity of science I find myself puzzled by the way people seem to be dancing around in weird ways. Like Wikipedia currently says:
Jean Piaget suggested, in his 1918 book Recherche[12] and later books, that the unity of science can be considered in terms of a circle of the sciences, where logic is the foundation for mathematics, which is the foundation for mechanics and physics, and physics is the foundation for chemistry, which is the foundation for biology, which is the foundation for sociology, the moral sciences, psychology, and the theory of knowledge, and the theory of knowledge forms a basis for logic, completing the circle,[13] without implying that any science could be reduced to any other.[14]
It seems weird. There is ONE THING, which is “all of it”.
That thing is a certain way and that thing is internally consistent and able to be understood. Right? It is out there. It is “the territory”. It is what it is.
This is one of those things that “goes without saying” most of the time, except instead of being about how “the social world can be non-fake” (as in Sarah’s essay there) I’m talking about how “the world itself can be non-fake as well!”
Any ways of measuring or thinking about what exists that are right will gain consistency with each other by virtue of being “about that one thing that is a certain way”.
Any true and real contradiction between any two fields of study making claims about reality means (1) at least one of them is wrong or else (2) humans have finally discovered a glitch in the matrix, such that the seemingly academic question has just teleported us from two adjacent laboratories having a collegial debate about the halflife of protons (or whatever)… all the way to chapel perilous (in the Wilsonian sense).
However, from the ways that EO Wilson comes up, and that summary of Piaget, I don’t get the sense that they are taking “reality being real” for granted? Or maybe they aren’t talking to an audience that takes “reality being real” for granted?
I instead somehow get a sense that they are trying to manage status hierarchies between squabbling academic departments (or something)?
One problem I’ve seen around consilience is that some people say “well, clearly you don’t think that there is one thing” when what they actually have evidence for is “you don’t agree with my analogies across distant fields”. So “believing in the unity of science” can get conflated with “agreeing with a particular set of analogies.”
Andy: “Evolutionary biology proves that capitalism is the correct economic system, because competition produces fitness among firms as it does among organisms.” Betty: “I’m not sure you can directly draw inferences from biology to economics like that, without dealing with a whole bunch of disanalogies between the objects of those fields.” Andy: “What, do you deny that biology and economics are both studying the same world?”
I think Andy is just probably being stupid in your example dialogue.
That dialogue’s Andy is (probably) abusing the idea of consilience, or the unity of knowledge, or “the first panological assumption” or whatever you want to call it.
The abuse takes the form of trying to invoke that assumption… and no others… in an “argument by assuming the other person can steelman a decent argument from just hearing your posterior”.
FIRST: If panology existed as a sociologically real field of study, with psychometrically valid assessments of people, then Betty could hypothetically not grossly insult Andy by calling him stupid and leaving, but could instead say “Oh… huh… Maybe you’re a more competent panologist than me, and you might be charitably assuming that all the disanologies I can think of, perhaps at the level of High School evolutionary biology and High School economics, are all resolved somehow by reasoning that is clear to someone with a PhD in evolutionary biology and a PhD in economics. Panologically speaking, what is your current weakest field and its level?”
This would be an extremely humble and refined way for Betty to call Andy a idiot engaged in bad faith reasoning, if they are actually both very smart and learned, but also it might truly help angry babies (ie genius 15 year old boys?) and potentially be heard by them as humble kindness, and potentially lead to good teaching and learning outcomes <3
SECOND: Sadly, Andy might be applying the rhetorical strategy of thinking very deeply and then simply repeating his current true posterior over and over over to Betty, interspersed with calls for her to think harder… and this is technically valid based on Aumann! If his posterior never moves, and she is good enough at Aumancy to detect that he’s honest and that his posteriors would move if she said anything surprising, then she might say new things in each ply of the conversation, until eventually she talks herself into having imagined what he has seen, believing he saw it, and updating to share his posteriors.
THIRD: This is part of why high quality psychometrics to assess panological capacities might actually be very efficient to create! If would give all of the “foolish Andies” (who are wrong and need to learn more) help in assessing their real level and finding good tutors to efficiently repair their largest learning gaps, and would also give the “half wise Andies” (who are technically right) something wildly more useful to say, in order to give stronger and more helpful hints during an Aumantic conversation with a random “Betty” who would, with infinite time, eventually converge… but in actual linear time is more pragmatically likely to find Andy’s shitty tutoring very unhelpful and simply “agree to disagree”.
How does this idea relate to consilience, particularly in E.O. Wilson’s sense of the word?
I have read very little EO Wilson, but I’ve been informed at several cocktail parties that I probably am, or would be, a fan of his stuff. This is probably true <3
I do think myrmecology is awesome, and my understanding is that EO Wilson got pretty into that :-)
Consilience as described there seems like “a reasoning tactic that any bright person with common sense probably derived for themselves when they were eleven or so”?
However, also… when I read about the unity of science I find myself puzzled by the way people seem to be dancing around in weird ways. Like Wikipedia currently says:
It seems weird. There is ONE THING, which is “all of it”.
That thing is a certain way and that thing is internally consistent and able to be understood. Right? It is out there. It is “the territory”. It is what it is.
This is one of those things that “goes without saying” most of the time, except instead of being about how “the social world can be non-fake” (as in Sarah’s essay there) I’m talking about how “the world itself can be non-fake as well!”
Any ways of measuring or thinking about what exists that are right will gain consistency with each other by virtue of being “about that one thing that is a certain way”.
Any true and real contradiction between any two fields of study making claims about reality means (1) at least one of them is wrong or else (2) humans have finally discovered a glitch in the matrix, such that the seemingly academic question has just teleported us from two adjacent laboratories having a collegial debate about the halflife of protons (or whatever)… all the way to chapel perilous (in the Wilsonian sense).
However, from the ways that EO Wilson comes up, and that summary of Piaget, I don’t get the sense that they are taking “reality being real” for granted? Or maybe they aren’t talking to an audience that takes “reality being real” for granted?
I instead somehow get a sense that they are trying to manage status hierarchies between squabbling academic departments (or something)?
One problem I’ve seen around consilience is that some people say “well, clearly you don’t think that there is one thing” when what they actually have evidence for is “you don’t agree with my analogies across distant fields”. So “believing in the unity of science” can get conflated with “agreeing with a particular set of analogies.”
Andy: “Evolutionary biology proves that capitalism is the correct economic system, because competition produces fitness among firms as it does among organisms.”
Betty: “I’m not sure you can directly draw inferences from biology to economics like that, without dealing with a whole bunch of disanalogies between the objects of those fields.”
Andy: “What, do you deny that biology and economics are both studying the same world?”
I think Andy is just probably being stupid in your example dialogue.
That dialogue’s Andy is (probably) abusing the idea of consilience, or the unity of knowledge, or “the first panological assumption” or whatever you want to call it.
The abuse takes the form of trying to invoke that assumption… and no others… in an “argument by assuming the other person can steelman a decent argument from just hearing your posterior”.
FIRST: If panology existed as a sociologically real field of study, with psychometrically valid assessments of people, then Betty could hypothetically not grossly insult Andy by calling him stupid and leaving, but could instead say “Oh… huh… Maybe you’re a more competent panologist than me, and you might be charitably assuming that all the disanologies I can think of, perhaps at the level of High School evolutionary biology and High School economics, are all resolved somehow by reasoning that is clear to someone with a PhD in evolutionary biology and a PhD in economics. Panologically speaking, what is your current weakest field and its level?”
This would be an extremely humble and refined way for Betty to call Andy a idiot engaged in bad faith reasoning, if they are actually both very smart and learned, but also it might truly help angry babies (ie genius 15 year old boys?) and potentially be heard by them as humble kindness, and potentially lead to good teaching and learning outcomes <3
SECOND: Sadly, Andy might be applying the rhetorical strategy of thinking very deeply and then simply repeating his current true posterior over and over over to Betty, interspersed with calls for her to think harder… and this is technically valid based on Aumann! If his posterior never moves, and she is good enough at Aumancy to detect that he’s honest and that his posteriors would move if she said anything surprising, then she might say new things in each ply of the conversation, until eventually she talks herself into having imagined what he has seen, believing he saw it, and updating to share his posteriors.
THIRD: This is part of why high quality psychometrics to assess panological capacities might actually be very efficient to create! If would give all of the “foolish Andies” (who are wrong and need to learn more) help in assessing their real level and finding good tutors to efficiently repair their largest learning gaps, and would also give the “half wise Andies” (who are technically right) something wildly more useful to say, in order to give stronger and more helpful hints during an Aumantic conversation with a random “Betty” who would, with infinite time, eventually converge… but in actual linear time is more pragmatically likely to find Andy’s shitty tutoring very unhelpful and simply “agree to disagree”.