You probably understand that a full answer to this question would require an enormous amount of space (and time), and that it would involve all kinds of diversions into controversial topics. But since you’re curious, I will try to provide a cursory outline of my views that are relevant in this context.
About a century ago—and perhaps even earlier—one could notice two trends in the public perception of science, caused by its immense practical success in providing all sorts of world-changing technological marvels. First, this success had given great prestige to scientists; second, it had opened hopes that in the future science should be able provide us with foolproof guidance in many areas of human concern that had theretofore been outside the realm of scientific investigation. The trouble with these trends was that around this time, dreams and hopes fueled by them started to seriously drift away from reality, and as might be expected, a host of pseudo-scientific bullshit-artists, as well as political and bureaucratic players with ready use for their services, quickly arose to exploit the opportunities opened by this situation.
This has led to a gradually worsening situation that I described in an earlier LW comment:
The trouble nowadays is not that governments are not listening to scientists (in the sense of people officially and publicly recognized as such), but that the increased prominence of science in public affairs has subjected the very notion of “science” to a severe case of Goodhart’s law. In other words, the fact that if something officially passes for “science,” governments listen to it and are willing to pay for it has led to an awful debasement of the very concept of science in modern times.
Once governments started listening to scientists, it was only a matter of time before talented charlatans and bullshit-artists would figure out that they can sell their ideas to governments by presenting them in the form of plausible-looking pseudoscience. It seems to me that many areas have been completely overtaken by this sort of thing, and the fact that their output is being labeled as “scientific” and used to drive government policy is a major problem that poses frightful threats for the future.
This, in my view, is one of the worst problems with the entire modern system of government, and by far the greatest source of dangerous falsity and nonsense in today’s world. I find it tragicomic when I see people worrying about supposedly dangerous anti-scientific trends like creationism or postmodernism, without realizing that these are entirely marginal phenomena compared to the corruption that happens within even the most prestigious academic institutions due to the fatal entanglement of science with ideology and power politics, to which they are completely oblivious, and in which they might even be blindly taking part. Just the thought of the disasters that our governments might wreak on us by pushing policies guided by this pseudo-scientific input should be enough to make one shiver—especially when we consider that these processes typically operate on bureaucratic auto-pilot, completely outside of the scope of politics that gets public attention.
Whether or not you agree with this, I hope it clarifies the reasons why I have such strong interest in topics of this sort.
Actually, my question was broader in intent—I was expressing curiosity about your personal values/tastes in general rather than about the matter at hand in particular. But from the way you took my question I imagine that the matter at hand figures in prominently :-).
Concerning
You probably understand that a full answer to this question would require an enormous amount of space (and time), and that it would involve all kinds of diversions into controversial topics.
I understand that doing so would require a lot of time and energy, I wouldn’t want to divert your attention from things that are more important to you, but will express interest in reading a carefully argued, well-referenced top-level posting from you on a relatively uncontroversial topic expressing some small fraction of your views on science and government so that I can have a more detailed idea of what you’re talking about.
Most of what you’ve said so far has been allusive in nature and while I can guess at some of what you might have in mind, I strain to think of examples that would provoke such a strong reaction. Of course, this may be rooted in a personality difference rather than an epistemological difference, but you’ve piqued my curiosity and I wonder whether there might be something that I’m missing.
At present: I think that various sectors of science have in fact become debased by politicization. This may have made the situation in certain kinds of science worse than it has been in the past, but I don’t think that this has made the political situation worse than it has been in the past. As far as I know, there have always been issues of people putting manipulative spin on the truth for political advantage and I suspect that manipulative appeals to the authority of science are no more problematic than other sorts of manipulative appeals to authority were hundreds of years ago.
Incidentally, I was drawn toward math in high school by the fact that the the truth seemed to me to be much more highly valued there than in most other subjects. I soon came to appreciate Beauty in Mathematics but a large part of my initial attraction was simply grounded in the fact that exposure to a subject grounded in reason was so refreshing relative to most of what I had seen before (both in and out of school). I perceived an almost spiritual purity attached to justifying each step systematically.
Most of what you’ve said so far has been allusive in nature and while I can guess at some of what you might have in mind, I strain to think of examples that would provoke such a strong reaction.
Well, to fully explain my opinions on the role of institutional science and pseudoscience in modern governments, I would first have to explain my overall view of the modern state, which, come to think of it, I did sketch recently in a reply to an earlier question from you. So I’ll try to build my answer from there (and ask other readers to read that other comment first if they’re confused by this one).
The permanent bureaucracies that in fact run our modern governments, in almost complete independence from the entire political circus we see on TV, are intimately connected with many other, nominally private or “independent” institutions. These entities are formally not a part of the government bureaucracy, but their structure is, for all practical purposes, not separable from it, due to both formal and informal connections, mutual influences, and membership overlaps. (The workings of this whole system are completely outside the awareness of the typical citizen, who instead imagines something surely imperfect but still essentially similar to what the civics textbooks describe—although they are subject to no secrecy at all and thus hidden in plain sight.) There are all kinds of such institutions, each with its peculiar Siamese-twin connections with some parts of the government: the mainstream media, too-big-to-fail businesses, “non-governmental organizations” (boy, are some people protesting too much!), public sector unions, etc., etc. -- and last but definitely not least, the academia and its purveyors of official science.
Now, in theory, the connection between the bureaucracy and official science is supposed to mean that we have a professional civil service using the best knowledge and expertise to implement the will of the people as legislated by its elected representatives, and our great institutions of scholarship supplying this expertise forged by its tireless seekers for truth and their magnificent institutions such as the peer review. In reality, well, it’s not hard to imagine how this situation can lead to all sorts of perverse incentives that might compromise various elements of this idealized picture, about which I’ve already written in my earlier comments.
To take the most blatant example, just observe the way economic “science” is involved in our government system. The government does lots of things that you may support or oppose in the ultimate analysis, but which would have been clearly recognized a century ago for what they are: wealth transfers, currency debasement, nationalization, patronage, amassing debt, raising and lowering of trade and migration barriers, etc., etc. Yet nowadays, we have a whole profession of pseudoscientists who are weaving webs of abstruse and vapid theory around such things, until neither their essence nor their likely consequences are possible to discuss with any reference to actual reality. The present economic crisis might be only a mild preview of the disasters that may befall us in the not so far future thanks to the utterly irresponsible and reality-ignoring policies that this pseudoscience has been rationalizing and excusing for decades already. It’s far from certain, but far from implausible either.
While this is admittedly an exceptionally bad example (though bad enough by itself!), the same pathologies can be found to a smaller or greater degree in almost any branch of the Kafkaesque bureaucracies that rule over us. In some cases, it’s not easy to discern how bad the corruption really is, as e.g. in the case of climate science, where I’m still not quite sure what to think. But it’s clear that many fields of official science nowadays operate solely for the purposes of their symbiosis with the government, and any actual advances of knowledge that result from them are merely a by-product, and hard to distinguish from the accompanying bullshit. (For example, any field that has “public” in its name is almost certain to be in this category.)
I’m not in a position to assess your comment’s accuracy as I don’t know very much about either of the workings of the government or the state of the field of macroeconomics, but you’ve offered me some food for thought.
If I find Carl’s subsequent postings potentially convincing grounds for political involvement I’ll look more closely into the aforementioned topics and may ask you some more questions. Up until now I haven’t had reason to carefully research and think about these things.
I’m not in a position to assess your comment’s accuracy as I don’t know very much about either of the workings of the government or the state of the field of macroeconomics, but you’ve offered me some food for thought.
If you’re interested in these topics, as an accompaniment to my fervent philippics, you should check out some more mainstream materials on the issues of administrative rulemaking and the Chevron doctrine. Googling about these topics will uncover some fascinating discussions and examples of the things I’ve been writing about, all from unimpeachable official and respectable sources.
(I’m sticking to the U.S. law and institutions because it’s by far the easiest to find good online materials about them. However, if you live anywhere else in the developed world, you can be pretty sure that you have close local equivalents of all these things I’ve been talking about.)
Oh, and here’s one more fascinating link. Before you click on it, think about the average citizen’s idea of how the laws of the land come into being. And then behold the majesty of this chart: http://www.reginfo.gov/public/reginfo/Regmap/index.jsp
(Though it should be noted that there are still visible vestigial influences of traditions from the old times when the de facto constitution of the U.S. resembled the capital-C one much more closely. Notice how the process is described as rulemaking, and by no means as legislation. It would still be unacceptable to use the latter name for something that doesn’t come directly from the formally designated legislative branch, even if their practical control over the law has long since disappeared in favor of the bureaucracies and courts.)
In some ways, things have gotten better, not worse. Both communism and Nazism claimed scientific backing. I don’t see anything like that on the horizon.
On the other hand, people became disenchanted with them because of disastrous results—I don’t think there’s any public recognition of the poor quality of science they used.
In some ways, things have gotten better, not worse. Both communism and Nazism claimed scientific backing. I don’t see anything like that on the horizon.
These political systems, however, are now distant in both time and space, and their faults can be comfortably analyzed from the outside. The really important question is in what ways, and to what degree, our present body of official respectable knowledge and doctrine deviates from reality, which is far more difficult to answer with any degree of accuracy. This is both because for us it’s like water for fish, and because challenging it is apt to provoke accusations of crackpottery (and perhaps even extremism), with all their status-lowering implications.
You probably understand that a full answer to this question would require an enormous amount of space (and time), and that it would involve all kinds of diversions into controversial topics. But since you’re curious, I will try to provide a cursory outline of my views that are relevant in this context.
About a century ago—and perhaps even earlier—one could notice two trends in the public perception of science, caused by its immense practical success in providing all sorts of world-changing technological marvels. First, this success had given great prestige to scientists; second, it had opened hopes that in the future science should be able provide us with foolproof guidance in many areas of human concern that had theretofore been outside the realm of scientific investigation. The trouble with these trends was that around this time, dreams and hopes fueled by them started to seriously drift away from reality, and as might be expected, a host of pseudo-scientific bullshit-artists, as well as political and bureaucratic players with ready use for their services, quickly arose to exploit the opportunities opened by this situation.
This has led to a gradually worsening situation that I described in an earlier LW comment:
This, in my view, is one of the worst problems with the entire modern system of government, and by far the greatest source of dangerous falsity and nonsense in today’s world. I find it tragicomic when I see people worrying about supposedly dangerous anti-scientific trends like creationism or postmodernism, without realizing that these are entirely marginal phenomena compared to the corruption that happens within even the most prestigious academic institutions due to the fatal entanglement of science with ideology and power politics, to which they are completely oblivious, and in which they might even be blindly taking part. Just the thought of the disasters that our governments might wreak on us by pushing policies guided by this pseudo-scientific input should be enough to make one shiver—especially when we consider that these processes typically operate on bureaucratic auto-pilot, completely outside of the scope of politics that gets public attention.
Whether or not you agree with this, I hope it clarifies the reasons why I have such strong interest in topics of this sort.
Thanks for your response.
Actually, my question was broader in intent—I was expressing curiosity about your personal values/tastes in general rather than about the matter at hand in particular. But from the way you took my question I imagine that the matter at hand figures in prominently :-).
Concerning
I understand that doing so would require a lot of time and energy, I wouldn’t want to divert your attention from things that are more important to you, but will express interest in reading a carefully argued, well-referenced top-level posting from you on a relatively uncontroversial topic expressing some small fraction of your views on science and government so that I can have a more detailed idea of what you’re talking about.
Most of what you’ve said so far has been allusive in nature and while I can guess at some of what you might have in mind, I strain to think of examples that would provoke such a strong reaction. Of course, this may be rooted in a personality difference rather than an epistemological difference, but you’ve piqued my curiosity and I wonder whether there might be something that I’m missing.
At present: I think that various sectors of science have in fact become debased by politicization. This may have made the situation in certain kinds of science worse than it has been in the past, but I don’t think that this has made the political situation worse than it has been in the past. As far as I know, there have always been issues of people putting manipulative spin on the truth for political advantage and I suspect that manipulative appeals to the authority of science are no more problematic than other sorts of manipulative appeals to authority were hundreds of years ago.
Incidentally, I was drawn toward math in high school by the fact that the the truth seemed to me to be much more highly valued there than in most other subjects. I soon came to appreciate Beauty in Mathematics but a large part of my initial attraction was simply grounded in the fact that exposure to a subject grounded in reason was so refreshing relative to most of what I had seen before (both in and out of school). I perceived an almost spiritual purity attached to justifying each step systematically.
multifoliaterose:
Well, to fully explain my opinions on the role of institutional science and pseudoscience in modern governments, I would first have to explain my overall view of the modern state, which, come to think of it, I did sketch recently in a reply to an earlier question from you. So I’ll try to build my answer from there (and ask other readers to read that other comment first if they’re confused by this one).
The permanent bureaucracies that in fact run our modern governments, in almost complete independence from the entire political circus we see on TV, are intimately connected with many other, nominally private or “independent” institutions. These entities are formally not a part of the government bureaucracy, but their structure is, for all practical purposes, not separable from it, due to both formal and informal connections, mutual influences, and membership overlaps. (The workings of this whole system are completely outside the awareness of the typical citizen, who instead imagines something surely imperfect but still essentially similar to what the civics textbooks describe—although they are subject to no secrecy at all and thus hidden in plain sight.) There are all kinds of such institutions, each with its peculiar Siamese-twin connections with some parts of the government: the mainstream media, too-big-to-fail businesses, “non-governmental organizations” (boy, are some people protesting too much!), public sector unions, etc., etc. -- and last but definitely not least, the academia and its purveyors of official science.
Now, in theory, the connection between the bureaucracy and official science is supposed to mean that we have a professional civil service using the best knowledge and expertise to implement the will of the people as legislated by its elected representatives, and our great institutions of scholarship supplying this expertise forged by its tireless seekers for truth and their magnificent institutions such as the peer review. In reality, well, it’s not hard to imagine how this situation can lead to all sorts of perverse incentives that might compromise various elements of this idealized picture, about which I’ve already written in my earlier comments.
To take the most blatant example, just observe the way economic “science” is involved in our government system. The government does lots of things that you may support or oppose in the ultimate analysis, but which would have been clearly recognized a century ago for what they are: wealth transfers, currency debasement, nationalization, patronage, amassing debt, raising and lowering of trade and migration barriers, etc., etc. Yet nowadays, we have a whole profession of pseudoscientists who are weaving webs of abstruse and vapid theory around such things, until neither their essence nor their likely consequences are possible to discuss with any reference to actual reality. The present economic crisis might be only a mild preview of the disasters that may befall us in the not so far future thanks to the utterly irresponsible and reality-ignoring policies that this pseudoscience has been rationalizing and excusing for decades already. It’s far from certain, but far from implausible either.
While this is admittedly an exceptionally bad example (though bad enough by itself!), the same pathologies can be found to a smaller or greater degree in almost any branch of the Kafkaesque bureaucracies that rule over us. In some cases, it’s not easy to discern how bad the corruption really is, as e.g. in the case of climate science, where I’m still not quite sure what to think. But it’s clear that many fields of official science nowadays operate solely for the purposes of their symbiosis with the government, and any actual advances of knowledge that result from them are merely a by-product, and hard to distinguish from the accompanying bullshit. (For example, any field that has “public” in its name is almost certain to be in this category.)
Thanks for writing this; upvoted.
I’m not in a position to assess your comment’s accuracy as I don’t know very much about either of the workings of the government or the state of the field of macroeconomics, but you’ve offered me some food for thought.
If I find Carl’s subsequent postings potentially convincing grounds for political involvement I’ll look more closely into the aforementioned topics and may ask you some more questions. Up until now I haven’t had reason to carefully research and think about these things.
multifoliaterose:
If you’re interested in these topics, as an accompaniment to my fervent philippics, you should check out some more mainstream materials on the issues of administrative rulemaking and the Chevron doctrine. Googling about these topics will uncover some fascinating discussions and examples of the things I’ve been writing about, all from unimpeachable official and respectable sources.
(I’m sticking to the U.S. law and institutions because it’s by far the easiest to find good online materials about them. However, if you live anywhere else in the developed world, you can be pretty sure that you have close local equivalents of all these things I’ve been talking about.)
Thank you for the references. I live in the U.S. so these should be relevant.
Oh, and here’s one more fascinating link. Before you click on it, think about the average citizen’s idea of how the laws of the land come into being. And then behold the majesty of this chart:
http://www.reginfo.gov/public/reginfo/Regmap/index.jsp
(Though it should be noted that there are still visible vestigial influences of traditions from the old times when the de facto constitution of the U.S. resembled the capital-C one much more closely. Notice how the process is described as rulemaking, and by no means as legislation. It would still be unacceptable to use the latter name for something that doesn’t come directly from the formally designated legislative branch, even if their practical control over the law has long since disappeared in favor of the bureaucracies and courts.)
In some ways, things have gotten better, not worse. Both communism and Nazism claimed scientific backing. I don’t see anything like that on the horizon.
On the other hand, people became disenchanted with them because of disastrous results—I don’t think there’s any public recognition of the poor quality of science they used.
NancyLebovitz:
These political systems, however, are now distant in both time and space, and their faults can be comfortably analyzed from the outside. The really important question is in what ways, and to what degree, our present body of official respectable knowledge and doctrine deviates from reality, which is far more difficult to answer with any degree of accuracy. This is both because for us it’s like water for fish, and because challenging it is apt to provoke accusations of crackpottery (and perhaps even extremism), with all their status-lowering implications.