The distinction between 'seeing like a state' (abstract) vs. local cultural is valuable and somewhat novel to me as an articulated concept (although I am a cross-cultural psychologist). Anthropologists and other social scientists traditionally haven't spoken this abstractly, although they discuss related ideas like high and low context; emic vs. etic perspectives, etc). This idea can explain flaws in the goals of rich countries to improve living situations in low-income regions. I also like the analogy with this idea and the STEM/humanities contrast. And I appreciate the flood / small town example.
Hansen notes that people do not want to give up their decades of local contextual information in favor of the abstract 'view from nowhere' principles. Why that reluctance is rational: Those ideas could be pinned down incorrectly. One needs an intense amount of knowledge to accept that those abstract principles will actually be helpful rather than an attempt for a group foreign to you to enrich itself (or signal their virtuosity and get promoted as in some of Scott's examples).
The above is most relevant to extensions of the flood scenario and less relevant to cultural drift. As far as I can understand Hansen, the negative outcomes expected for contemporary US and global cultures are decreased innovation and low fertility, which will mean high-fertility groups will take over, and those groups have norms which many of us moderns find aversive (such as controlling female agency to increase fertility). But those outcomes are both far off and far from certain.
For these reasons, it is hard for Hansen to galvanize his audience to take action against cultural drift. People feel more motivated by fixing what they view as clear and/or current problems like wealth inequality, political oppression and discrimination.
Great piece. You may be interested in "Seeing like a State University," showing how higher ed is structured by the Dept. of Ed in ways that prevent the integration of STEM and the humanities when the new goal is "job placement" not cultural expansion. I offer the case of a future plumber wanting to get a degree in English & the impossibility of doing so in ways the State approves. https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/seeing-like-a-state-university
Notice that I'm not saying that state ways of seeing lead on average to too much misguided reform or government. Here I'm seeing some big values in seeing like a state.
STEM basically means the spectrum. And it is worth reflecting on how we spectrumy people remade the world in our own image throughout centuries. I will bring one example. There were periods of history when your fortunes depended on how much the king likes you. We are not good at being likable. So we came up with the whole machinery of the rule of law. A machine running on recipes from lawbooks.
What does Tyler Cowen say about this? I feel like this is just back-handed way of saying economics or any formal analysis of cultural or social stuff is value-free, or more importantly, free from bias from the modeller. Something Tyler was totally against.
Saying STEM view gives you neutral view of things, alright then well how did so many STEM-people believed in communism which ended up causing deaths of god knows many. (Still do, I know plenty). To me this is not the failure at math or modelling, its much deeper judgement-related bias that cannot be easily fixed. For example I ran into very heated debate with some so-called rationalists who were very hostile to idea of prediction markets to judge doom-AI scenario, and they were very math-skilled. Yes I can imagine what you'd say but that's exactly the relativity of bias -- we always think we're better than the average driver.
You still run into knowledge problem, and after all I doubt you are the one who thinks government can outsmart the market consistently in the long run.
Thanks, Robin. I don't think that idea had occurred to me before. I'm still not sure I buy the parallel. In the Middle Ages, STEM also operated like the humanities still do today. Its shift from being grounded in culture, to being legible and objective, was purely good, with no negative effects that I can think of. I suspect there is an analogous way for a humanity to be STEMized, and that I would call that good as well.
I think a culture may not be the analogue of an academic discipline, in the same way that a culture is not anthropology. Anthropology is a discipline which aspires to be capable of interpreting any possible culture. Likewise the discipline of literature should ideally be capable of explaining the literature of any culture. So the discipline should be universal, while any specific culture that discipline studies must set many parameters to values that are basically arbitrary, such as their color palette, the phonemes of their language. The discipline should be objective; the instance cannot be.
Scott is an anarchist. He doesn't think we can just do away with the state and its way of seeing but he isn't exactly a fan. Of course you know that. It is possible, indeed common, to make a decision based on a 'view from nowhere' and regret it, wishing you had trusted your intuition or feelings instead. Moving to a new town is a good example of that kind of decision. I've done it myself at least once. And its not exactly uncommon for a person, or a culture, to believe there are more important things than survival. "When a man does not know when to die, he does not know how to live," is the quote I am thinking of but I am sure everyone can think of many sentiments of this kind.
The split between humanities and STEM - or something roughly congruent with it - seems like it's actually the most important split in our society. The two sides are great at annoying each other and terrible at hearing each other, I think.
I think it's easy to think of humanities types who are infuriating because - in your metaphor - they insist they are still living in their old hometown, as they knew it growing up, and which they knew was never going to flood. If there is news of a flood, then that is because we have made some mistake quite recently, or some bad people have forced us to. If there are any truths about the universe that seem to show floods are inevitable (and not due to some bad mistake or bad person after the town's golden age), then those truths are suspect. They can be vaguely written off as 'materialist' or something, or just kept out of focus. This is really annoying and, yes, dangerous.
But I think there is also a STEM equivalent, and it's to cling to a variable rather than an image. Utilitarians, for example, cling to the variable of suffering. It is comforting to them, it is a rock. We imagine that, if we can just optimise reduction of suffering according to some particular formula then we will know what to do. If people suggest that there might be more to life than reducing suffering, they tend to get snarky. They like to keep talking to people who, like them, believe this is just obvious. I think this is probably just as much of a false comfort as clinging to the image of the perfect beloved world before the Fall. I think the complex image, which cannot be reduced to a single variable or even to a set of variables (at least not practically), is going to contain important things that are left out of the variable.
So I think that you are maybe focused too much on 'chances of our civilization/species surviving' as the one important thing, and too dismissive of the other parts of the picture. They *must* be just the useless old/local stuff that has to be cast aside in order to navigate the map. I think that is probably wrong. Certainly there is, at least, a very good chance that it is wrong.
People like Scott tend to flop when it comes to vaccination against smallpox and subsequently immunization. The idea that the state makes up abstract diseases of zero relation to how people physically hurt and suffer to control and convert unsuspecting subjects into objects of government manipulation never occurs to those who believe in science and utterly lack rounded knowledge of physics, arts, languages as well as the physical art of suffering.
The main resistance that I'm aware of comes from rationalist claims that it's impossible to have a view from nowhere, and so anybody who claims to have a view from nowhere is really just trying to legitimize an oppressive power structure.
It is totally possible, and often easy, to have a view from nowhere if you measure things with real numbers instead of rationals or integers. Classical Rationalists believe there is no view from nowhere because they rely on Boolean logic, and so any change in your belief set requires flipping one belief between Yes and No. This is a large change, which triggers an avalanche of other large changes; the flipping process will generally either never end, or will get stuck in a cycle. So with Boolean logic, it matters a lot what your starting assumptions are. If a single starting assumption is wrong, you're doomed.
Bayesians and empiricists work with continuous probabilities, so they can do iterative optimization, and usually all Bayesians and empiricists will come to the same conclusion regardless of their starting point. Rationalists reject iterative optimization as being circular logic. Which it is, but it's /good/ circular logic, because it rarely takes you in circles, but generally takes you closer and closer to optimal. This is proven again every time a neural network is trained successfully, because they're all initialized with random weights. Every neural network in the world does precisely the thing that all philosophers today (AFAIK) say is impossible.
Understanding this difference is the single most-important fact about epistemology, and AFAIK not one respected philosopher in the world has ever understood this difference.
“I need people to see their precious culture . . . via a neutral STEM-like view from nowhere.” Science takes a neutral view from nowhere. Many people do not want to be scientific about their local attachments, so they refuse to engage with social science (except for social science about *distant other people*).
But it is not quite right to say that “our aesthetic, moral, and cultural judgements” *resist* “STEM-like standardized views from nowhere”. These are just different judgments. The resistance comes from some (not all) of the people making judgments of the former kind: they do not want also to make judgments of the latter kind.
The distinction between 'seeing like a state' (abstract) vs. local cultural is valuable and somewhat novel to me as an articulated concept (although I am a cross-cultural psychologist). Anthropologists and other social scientists traditionally haven't spoken this abstractly, although they discuss related ideas like high and low context; emic vs. etic perspectives, etc). This idea can explain flaws in the goals of rich countries to improve living situations in low-income regions. I also like the analogy with this idea and the STEM/humanities contrast. And I appreciate the flood / small town example.
Hansen notes that people do not want to give up their decades of local contextual information in favor of the abstract 'view from nowhere' principles. Why that reluctance is rational: Those ideas could be pinned down incorrectly. One needs an intense amount of knowledge to accept that those abstract principles will actually be helpful rather than an attempt for a group foreign to you to enrich itself (or signal their virtuosity and get promoted as in some of Scott's examples).
The above is most relevant to extensions of the flood scenario and less relevant to cultural drift. As far as I can understand Hansen, the negative outcomes expected for contemporary US and global cultures are decreased innovation and low fertility, which will mean high-fertility groups will take over, and those groups have norms which many of us moderns find aversive (such as controlling female agency to increase fertility). But those outcomes are both far off and far from certain.
For these reasons, it is hard for Hansen to galvanize his audience to take action against cultural drift. People feel more motivated by fixing what they view as clear and/or current problems like wealth inequality, political oppression and discrimination.
Great piece. You may be interested in "Seeing like a State University," showing how higher ed is structured by the Dept. of Ed in ways that prevent the integration of STEM and the humanities when the new goal is "job placement" not cultural expansion. I offer the case of a future plumber wanting to get a degree in English & the impossibility of doing so in ways the State approves. https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/seeing-like-a-state-university
Notice that I'm not saying that state ways of seeing lead on average to too much misguided reform or government. Here I'm seeing some big values in seeing like a state.
That seemed not obvious at all from reading Scott. One wants multiple points of view. The state may have caused the flood.
Robin,
STEM basically means the spectrum. And it is worth reflecting on how we spectrumy people remade the world in our own image throughout centuries. I will bring one example. There were periods of history when your fortunes depended on how much the king likes you. We are not good at being likable. So we came up with the whole machinery of the rule of law. A machine running on recipes from lawbooks.
What does Tyler Cowen say about this? I feel like this is just back-handed way of saying economics or any formal analysis of cultural or social stuff is value-free, or more importantly, free from bias from the modeller. Something Tyler was totally against.
Saying STEM view gives you neutral view of things, alright then well how did so many STEM-people believed in communism which ended up causing deaths of god knows many. (Still do, I know plenty). To me this is not the failure at math or modelling, its much deeper judgement-related bias that cannot be easily fixed. For example I ran into very heated debate with some so-called rationalists who were very hostile to idea of prediction markets to judge doom-AI scenario, and they were very math-skilled. Yes I can imagine what you'd say but that's exactly the relativity of bias -- we always think we're better than the average driver.
You still run into knowledge problem, and after all I doubt you are the one who thinks government can outsmart the market consistently in the long run.
Thanks, Robin. I don't think that idea had occurred to me before. I'm still not sure I buy the parallel. In the Middle Ages, STEM also operated like the humanities still do today. Its shift from being grounded in culture, to being legible and objective, was purely good, with no negative effects that I can think of. I suspect there is an analogous way for a humanity to be STEMized, and that I would call that good as well.
I think a culture may not be the analogue of an academic discipline, in the same way that a culture is not anthropology. Anthropology is a discipline which aspires to be capable of interpreting any possible culture. Likewise the discipline of literature should ideally be capable of explaining the literature of any culture. So the discipline should be universal, while any specific culture that discipline studies must set many parameters to values that are basically arbitrary, such as their color palette, the phonemes of their language. The discipline should be objective; the instance cannot be.
Scott is an anarchist. He doesn't think we can just do away with the state and its way of seeing but he isn't exactly a fan. Of course you know that. It is possible, indeed common, to make a decision based on a 'view from nowhere' and regret it, wishing you had trusted your intuition or feelings instead. Moving to a new town is a good example of that kind of decision. I've done it myself at least once. And its not exactly uncommon for a person, or a culture, to believe there are more important things than survival. "When a man does not know when to die, he does not know how to live," is the quote I am thinking of but I am sure everyone can think of many sentiments of this kind.
The split between humanities and STEM - or something roughly congruent with it - seems like it's actually the most important split in our society. The two sides are great at annoying each other and terrible at hearing each other, I think.
I think it's easy to think of humanities types who are infuriating because - in your metaphor - they insist they are still living in their old hometown, as they knew it growing up, and which they knew was never going to flood. If there is news of a flood, then that is because we have made some mistake quite recently, or some bad people have forced us to. If there are any truths about the universe that seem to show floods are inevitable (and not due to some bad mistake or bad person after the town's golden age), then those truths are suspect. They can be vaguely written off as 'materialist' or something, or just kept out of focus. This is really annoying and, yes, dangerous.
But I think there is also a STEM equivalent, and it's to cling to a variable rather than an image. Utilitarians, for example, cling to the variable of suffering. It is comforting to them, it is a rock. We imagine that, if we can just optimise reduction of suffering according to some particular formula then we will know what to do. If people suggest that there might be more to life than reducing suffering, they tend to get snarky. They like to keep talking to people who, like them, believe this is just obvious. I think this is probably just as much of a false comfort as clinging to the image of the perfect beloved world before the Fall. I think the complex image, which cannot be reduced to a single variable or even to a set of variables (at least not practically), is going to contain important things that are left out of the variable.
So I think that you are maybe focused too much on 'chances of our civilization/species surviving' as the one important thing, and too dismissive of the other parts of the picture. They *must* be just the useless old/local stuff that has to be cast aside in order to navigate the map. I think that is probably wrong. Certainly there is, at least, a very good chance that it is wrong.
People like Scott tend to flop when it comes to vaccination against smallpox and subsequently immunization. The idea that the state makes up abstract diseases of zero relation to how people physically hurt and suffer to control and convert unsuspecting subjects into objects of government manipulation never occurs to those who believe in science and utterly lack rounded knowledge of physics, arts, languages as well as the physical art of suffering.
Is the resistance to the stem view tied to its ‘nowhereness’? A perspective that doesn’t privilege any subject can find you superfluous.
The main resistance that I'm aware of comes from rationalist claims that it's impossible to have a view from nowhere, and so anybody who claims to have a view from nowhere is really just trying to legitimize an oppressive power structure.
It is totally possible, and often easy, to have a view from nowhere if you measure things with real numbers instead of rationals or integers. Classical Rationalists believe there is no view from nowhere because they rely on Boolean logic, and so any change in your belief set requires flipping one belief between Yes and No. This is a large change, which triggers an avalanche of other large changes; the flipping process will generally either never end, or will get stuck in a cycle. So with Boolean logic, it matters a lot what your starting assumptions are. If a single starting assumption is wrong, you're doomed.
Bayesians and empiricists work with continuous probabilities, so they can do iterative optimization, and usually all Bayesians and empiricists will come to the same conclusion regardless of their starting point. Rationalists reject iterative optimization as being circular logic. Which it is, but it's /good/ circular logic, because it rarely takes you in circles, but generally takes you closer and closer to optimal. This is proven again every time a neural network is trained successfully, because they're all initialized with random weights. Every neural network in the world does precisely the thing that all philosophers today (AFAIK) say is impossible.
Understanding this difference is the single most-important fact about epistemology, and AFAIK not one respected philosopher in the world has ever understood this difference.
“I need people to see their precious culture . . . via a neutral STEM-like view from nowhere.” Science takes a neutral view from nowhere. Many people do not want to be scientific about their local attachments, so they refuse to engage with social science (except for social science about *distant other people*).
But it is not quite right to say that “our aesthetic, moral, and cultural judgements” *resist* “STEM-like standardized views from nowhere”. These are just different judgments. The resistance comes from some (not all) of the people making judgments of the former kind: they do not want also to make judgments of the latter kind.
Yes, it is people who resist the STEM like views, not the other ideas themselves.