Long ago in physics I learned of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Then in computer science I learned of Computer Professionals For Social Responsibility. Each struggled to gain respect. Later I saw how economists treat policy. In all these areas, I saw most “scientists” taking roughly this stance:
To be an effective policy advocate in an area with big unknowns, by definition you need to take liberties with the facts. Climate change is a good example: the IPCC reports paint a fairly nuanced picture, which the policy advocates then amp up to 11 in order to motivate action. You have to erase the asterisked equivocations. I'm not saying this is good, but it's how the sausage gets made.
For a scientist to participate in this directly brings an obvious risk to academic credibility, if they are seen as distorting/omitting the facts in the course of advocating for a position.
«To be an effective policy advocate in an area with big unknowns, by definition you need to take liberties with the facts.»
Yup. But this is mostly not due to malicious deception or dishonesty. And it's not a bad practice, but a painful and necessary one.
This is also owed to the fact, that you can spend time and energy only once. So your building your "understanding of it", "understanding of what to do about it" and "making people do those things" compete for the same resources.
"understanding of it", "understanding of what to do about it" has diminishing returns in how they improve the next entry in the chain and thereby terminal value (which you get directly only from the last part). "making people do those things" usually ends up being the bottleneck.
If your problem is multi-faceted like cultural decay, climate change or just highly complex, you will need to prepend "understanding of subfield 1" to "understanding of subfield n" in parralel to that chain. During all steps you must discard (or never bother developing) your more precise understanding for more wieldly models, if you ever want to finish your reasoning process! And in that last step especially, you're bottle necked additionally by the understanding/attention span/cognitive resources of the people, you need to make do things.
In the end, you must muster the courage and act anyway, knowing that whilst you are doomed to an ever-shaky epistemological grounding, the results will still be better than what all the other fools would accomplish (or fail to), were they listened to instead. [and may you be right in that!]
Addiction to rigor often is a smokescreen for cowardice. It took me many wasted years to realize that flaw within myself.
Could it be that instead they avoid policy talk because it is *not* scientific, never mind how it "seems"?
Scientists like results that can be demonstrated objectively, with measurements and statistics showing a significant result. Such results are more reliable than just people's opinions, which are often wrong, no matter how prestigious the people may be.
Whenever you have a community where people's opinions just feed back into each other, without an external governor in the form of "hard data," that community doesn't tend to make intellectual progress over time. Instead, the opinions of such a community drift in a random walk popularity contest, disconnected from reality. Religion; conspiracy theorists; flat earthers; homeopaths; astrologers; clothing fashion; literary theorists.
Sticking to scientific discussion *is* a policy, and a good one!
Almost everything that is done in the world does not make steady intellectual progress over time.
Progress is generally driven by hard data. Better technology, data-driven marketing and logistics. The non-data-driven fields go in circles. Has poetry gotten better since 1800?
It is not scientific but it's due to the subject matter, not the tools and in either case statistics is hardly a good tool. That and measurements are by definition not "objective" and "objectivity" is ambiguous anyways.
Also you're forgetting the fact that science is a development of philosophy. In any sense of progress that science makes, philosophy does at the very least in the framework that gave us that type of science. Also math develops and so does religion, conspiracy theorists (I mean they wouldn't be so annoying if they didn't) and all that. You're using a very biased conception of progress and all that.
Re: "So you're sacrificing your genetic fitness for your cultural fitness, so to speak" - for me this indicates an issue with Peter Richerson's perspective. Your genes share a body and their fates are mostly tied together - so it makes sense to talk of a "genetic fitness" for an individual. However your memes have many different fitness which are mostly unconnected. They have different lineages. They are similar to your bacteria and viruses, in other words. Maybe a few chaste priests have heads so full of their religion that the fate of most of their memes is heavily linked together - but even then. There is no "cultural fitness" for human individuals. Instead, there are many different cultural fitnesses for their memes.
Boyd and Richerson have at least one other oddity. They are obsessed with the distant past. They have lots of theories that relate to time before the current interglacial, and how horrible it was back then. There are lots of theories about the impact of climate on cultural evolution. The distant past is interesting, but the present is so much closer and more detailed - and it is also more relevant to current policies. As far as I understand it, this is a weirdness partly associated with their academic backgrounds and funding sources.
I think the big issue is they're using a contemporary framework for everything and a statistical framing sorta engenders that (and statistics isn't science and neither is social commentary and the both of them together is still not a single axiom of any known scientific framework) to the point where they by definition cannot see any issue. Certainly technology which is tied to a society (of a relationship bonding community and not, say, a video game subculture) is going to actualize the society in pair bonding ways. There's no overarching philosophy of technology which really examines the axiology of technology in terms of different cultures. That and we should keep in mind cities are ambiguous. There's no reason to singularly ontologize them. Modern cities are based in some liberally derived values but even assuming every city behaves this population limiting way is no reason to assume they have to be after all cities obviously differ in birth rates and villages do die from underpopulation.
There's no macro economical position for marriage nor kids. There's no technological argument for said things. In a large sense things developing on their own has in some sense made politics more extreme throughout the past century maybe through alienation although I hate that word. In a sense I think I share the opposite feeling, I think that if our population does shrink to a certain size then we will in a sense be forced to rely on each other for food etc and the technologies we accept and use will center around that.
By anabaptist I assume they mean Amish. Their birth rate decreases with modern technology. In any case, my position is we need a general framework which singularly encompasses these human processes and that policies is like using a bucket on a sinking ship (excuse the metaphor because as I said I'm rather optimistic in either case).
Edit: Sorry, I think this refounding technology, economy etc grounds into a singular narrative may have to happen again later but we'd have a higher floor and ceiling but it's not too hard to think of events or technology which can separate our wants and needs as humans from, say, our wants and needs as some virtual level 45 viking magician in some metaverse or whatever. Also metaverses are too particularizing, not universalizing but you get the idea.
I’m curious: if you were (a very limited) “king for a day”, and could change academia and its structure (as opposed to, say, rearranging all academic minds…) to have a better focus on the culture issues you’re describing, what would would you propose: the creation of a new academic field that is analogous to economics that studies culture and is designed to study and make public policy recommendations for culture? Something else?
This would seem to improve academia overall, as I understand it.
If done, then little doubt on the margin it would help re this topic (given the reasonable assumption that enough others are likely to agree with your sentiment).
My question was intended to be about what you would change to increase the focus on culture / culture policy specifically if you could do so unilaterally. Pie in the sky, but within semi-reasonable limits, if you will, on the narrow topic you introduced in the piece.
To be an effective policy advocate in an area with big unknowns, by definition you need to take liberties with the facts. Climate change is a good example: the IPCC reports paint a fairly nuanced picture, which the policy advocates then amp up to 11 in order to motivate action. You have to erase the asterisked equivocations. I'm not saying this is good, but it's how the sausage gets made.
For a scientist to participate in this directly brings an obvious risk to academic credibility, if they are seen as distorting/omitting the facts in the course of advocating for a position.
«To be an effective policy advocate in an area with big unknowns, by definition you need to take liberties with the facts.»
Yup. But this is mostly not due to malicious deception or dishonesty. And it's not a bad practice, but a painful and necessary one.
This is also owed to the fact, that you can spend time and energy only once. So your building your "understanding of it", "understanding of what to do about it" and "making people do those things" compete for the same resources.
"understanding of it", "understanding of what to do about it" has diminishing returns in how they improve the next entry in the chain and thereby terminal value (which you get directly only from the last part). "making people do those things" usually ends up being the bottleneck.
If your problem is multi-faceted like cultural decay, climate change or just highly complex, you will need to prepend "understanding of subfield 1" to "understanding of subfield n" in parralel to that chain. During all steps you must discard (or never bother developing) your more precise understanding for more wieldly models, if you ever want to finish your reasoning process! And in that last step especially, you're bottle necked additionally by the understanding/attention span/cognitive resources of the people, you need to make do things.
In the end, you must muster the courage and act anyway, knowing that whilst you are doomed to an ever-shaky epistemological grounding, the results will still be better than what all the other fools would accomplish (or fail to), were they listened to instead. [and may you be right in that!]
Addiction to rigor often is a smokescreen for cowardice. It took me many wasted years to realize that flaw within myself.
> they avoid policy to seem “scientific”.
Could it be that instead they avoid policy talk because it is *not* scientific, never mind how it "seems"?
Scientists like results that can be demonstrated objectively, with measurements and statistics showing a significant result. Such results are more reliable than just people's opinions, which are often wrong, no matter how prestigious the people may be.
Whenever you have a community where people's opinions just feed back into each other, without an external governor in the form of "hard data," that community doesn't tend to make intellectual progress over time. Instead, the opinions of such a community drift in a random walk popularity contest, disconnected from reality. Religion; conspiracy theorists; flat earthers; homeopaths; astrologers; clothing fashion; literary theorists.
Sticking to scientific discussion *is* a policy, and a good one!
Almost every thing that is done in the world is not done by science methods, nor to science standards of rigor.
Almost everything that is done in the world does not make steady intellectual progress over time.
Progress is generally driven by hard data. Better technology, data-driven marketing and logistics. The non-data-driven fields go in circles. Has poetry gotten better since 1800?
It is not scientific but it's due to the subject matter, not the tools and in either case statistics is hardly a good tool. That and measurements are by definition not "objective" and "objectivity" is ambiguous anyways.
Also you're forgetting the fact that science is a development of philosophy. In any sense of progress that science makes, philosophy does at the very least in the framework that gave us that type of science. Also math develops and so does religion, conspiracy theorists (I mean they wouldn't be so annoying if they didn't) and all that. You're using a very biased conception of progress and all that.
Re: "So you're sacrificing your genetic fitness for your cultural fitness, so to speak" - for me this indicates an issue with Peter Richerson's perspective. Your genes share a body and their fates are mostly tied together - so it makes sense to talk of a "genetic fitness" for an individual. However your memes have many different fitness which are mostly unconnected. They have different lineages. They are similar to your bacteria and viruses, in other words. Maybe a few chaste priests have heads so full of their religion that the fate of most of their memes is heavily linked together - but even then. There is no "cultural fitness" for human individuals. Instead, there are many different cultural fitnesses for their memes.
Boyd and Richerson have at least one other oddity. They are obsessed with the distant past. They have lots of theories that relate to time before the current interglacial, and how horrible it was back then. There are lots of theories about the impact of climate on cultural evolution. The distant past is interesting, but the present is so much closer and more detailed - and it is also more relevant to current policies. As far as I understand it, this is a weirdness partly associated with their academic backgrounds and funding sources.
Are we not men? We are Devo!
I think the big issue is they're using a contemporary framework for everything and a statistical framing sorta engenders that (and statistics isn't science and neither is social commentary and the both of them together is still not a single axiom of any known scientific framework) to the point where they by definition cannot see any issue. Certainly technology which is tied to a society (of a relationship bonding community and not, say, a video game subculture) is going to actualize the society in pair bonding ways. There's no overarching philosophy of technology which really examines the axiology of technology in terms of different cultures. That and we should keep in mind cities are ambiguous. There's no reason to singularly ontologize them. Modern cities are based in some liberally derived values but even assuming every city behaves this population limiting way is no reason to assume they have to be after all cities obviously differ in birth rates and villages do die from underpopulation.
There's no macro economical position for marriage nor kids. There's no technological argument for said things. In a large sense things developing on their own has in some sense made politics more extreme throughout the past century maybe through alienation although I hate that word. In a sense I think I share the opposite feeling, I think that if our population does shrink to a certain size then we will in a sense be forced to rely on each other for food etc and the technologies we accept and use will center around that.
By anabaptist I assume they mean Amish. Their birth rate decreases with modern technology. In any case, my position is we need a general framework which singularly encompasses these human processes and that policies is like using a bucket on a sinking ship (excuse the metaphor because as I said I'm rather optimistic in either case).
Edit: Sorry, I think this refounding technology, economy etc grounds into a singular narrative may have to happen again later but we'd have a higher floor and ceiling but it's not too hard to think of events or technology which can separate our wants and needs as humans from, say, our wants and needs as some virtual level 45 viking magician in some metaverse or whatever. Also metaverses are too particularizing, not universalizing but you get the idea.
Very interesting piece and thesis.
I’m curious: if you were (a very limited) “king for a day”, and could change academia and its structure (as opposed to, say, rearranging all academic minds…) to have a better focus on the culture issues you’re describing, what would would you propose: the creation of a new academic field that is analogous to economics that studies culture and is designed to study and make public policy recommendations for culture? Something else?
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/more-academic-prestige-futureshtml
This would seem to improve academia overall, as I understand it.
If done, then little doubt on the margin it would help re this topic (given the reasonable assumption that enough others are likely to agree with your sentiment).
My question was intended to be about what you would change to increase the focus on culture / culture policy specifically if you could do so unilaterally. Pie in the sky, but within semi-reasonable limits, if you will, on the narrow topic you introduced in the piece.