In 2008, The Times Literary Supplement included [CP Snow’s 1959] The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution in its list of the 100 books that most influenced Western public discourse since the Second World War. (
Will Wilkinson had a simpler explanation for the two cultures. He gave it orally at an LF seminar on the Snow book. The science culture relies on observation, primarily material. The literary culture relies on introspection. STEM studies what is outside your head, while the literary culture studies what is inside your head. So if you are depressed, a STEM type will assume that your brain chemistry needs to change. A literary intellectual will look at your thought process.
Also, I think your views on signalling, status and loyalty explain the fundamental tension between these two approaches.
The STEM approach fundamentally focuses on the truth of the claims at issue, independent of their implications or associations. The cultural approach is practically concerned with raising or lowering the status of various issues in our society.
Sure, you can try to figure out what is true about culture in the same way science tries to understand what's true of physics but that just gets you into the social sciences not the cultural approach.
If what you're trying to do is raise the status of some things and lower that of others you just can't respond only to the truth of the claim in question. No matter how true it might be that "X is a type of eugenics" if you are trying to raise the status of X agreeing to that claim will be harmful.
And you can't even admit that this is what you are doing because admitting you aren't saying what's literally true is harmful.
While I appreciate the style involved in trying for evenhandness here, it's worth remembering that the Sokal hoax was literally a case of the humanities side of the fence being unable to distinguish publishable work in their fields from pure bullshit. This was then followed by an immediate and overwhelming response to double down in favor of the bullshit.
I think your analysis makes too many positive assumptions about 'cultural' thinkers.
Basically, why should we assume that what they are doing is truth-conducive in the first place? When we used to apply similar methods to figuring out scientific claims we got crap explanations about gods and other bullshit that served cultural needs (rather than being correct).
Yes, I agree that what you describe is what would be necessary to reach true conclusions but the problem is that there are lots of other incentives at play which influence what conclusions someone reaches. Even in the sciences it's frequently quite a struggle for the evidence to triumph over other pressures on our judgement.
If the incentivizes favoring getting the correct answer get too weak relative to other incentives there is a phase change and the whole system no longer even trends toward correctness. Unfortunately, I see little evidence this isn't the case when it comes to the cultural style.
That doesn't mean you can't say true thing in that arena. You certainly can. But it calls into doubt the existence of expertise in the area or accumulated knowledge. If you haven't read and absorbed the scientists who have gone before you then you're virtually guaranteed to be less accurate than those who have but it's not clear the same is true regarding the cultural area.
A tip of the hat to ever-provident serendipity; I published on a very similar subject to this just a few days ago on my own stack.
My view of this situation is that while there are certainly contrasts in disposition, approach to reasoning, and susceptibility to certain prejudices between culture (or 'humanities')-driven people and the scientifically minded, the really interesting divide is between the systematically-minded, as you also define them here (that is, people who interrogate the world in systematic terms), and the abstract-minded (that is, people who are more comfortable with contingency and interpolative understanding of the world). My grounds for calling this 'the really interesting' part is because it confounds organisation according to the heuristic of educational background.
For instance, software engineers bear a lot of traits of systematisers, but so do German rationalist philosophers. Lots of elite engineers might be very effective systematisers, meanwhile scientists working in very-early-stage experimental sciences might have more in common with a very abstract-minded poet than with the engineer, the engineer who might have more in common with a very systematic-minded novelist like Tolstoy than with a clearly very abstract-capable physicist like Feynman.
I'd argue this is a very important thing to understand because most of the really influential positions in our world are staffed with systematising intellects of VERY different hues (software engineers, mechanical engineers and consultants rule the markets; postmodern thinkers driven by the critik system dominate academia, media and corporate HR) and we have a real dearth of very able abstract thinkers in most domains.
Either way, I think this both starts with a rough humanities/science dichotomy and then just gets more interesting from there.
"STEM folks tend to see culture people as sloppy, bullshitty, and tribal, while culture folks tend to see STEM folks as boring, narrow, having poor social skills, unable to navigate non-system concept spaces, and too trusting of their systems’ key assumptions."
Something that strikes me as ironic is that if you follow the longstanding debates in high energy physics around string theory, you'll wonder if this dichotomy actually makes any sense.
I think you're being very diplomatic. As a physicist my Rule 0 is: Human intuition is excruciatingly bad outside the domain of everyday experience. Any argument about something non-obvious that starts and ends with intuition or introspection is wrong 100% of the time. Not most of the time. All of the time.
We can see what happens when the cultures collide in specific academic fields. For example paleoanthropology (the study of early hominins) was a culture-dominated field for many decades, until the 1990s when scientists began to obtain DNA and isotopic data. Take one guess which approach won out.
I'm also quite tired of at least our state media using soft science fields like gender studies, sociology etc. as some sort of authoritative "experts". Especially weak reasoning skills, making basic philosophical errors and presenting own value (projections) as some sort of scientific facts. This could be just an unfortunate lack of reasoning skills but I feel like dipping all soft-scientists into hard science field to prove anything would reduce the amount of BS they produce later in soft science.
On the other side, I think the criticism about assumptions is quite right. I think outside hard science fields, when you cannot prove anywhere near say HEP accuracy, it's too easy to bore down an assumption hole without seeing the forest for the trees. Didn't you and Tyler have that frozen heads chat about this. If we only had a market...
I just want to add that one important issue here is that the motives and intents of the two types of people may not determine the actual outputs or behaviors.
Building knowledge is hard and it's a constant fight against all sorts of bias and other barriers. In the cultural domain we often don't have as good correction mechanisms. That may mean that we just don't succeed in net knowledge creation there no matter how similarly epistemically virtuous the participants are.
> “culture” is our name for stuff where these things are harder; in “cultural” areas, our systems don’t work so well. Culture thinkers thus have to get used to vaguer definitions, weaker claims, qualitative concepts, and more disagreements and differing perspectives.
My understanding of the humanities has long been that they have the tools to deal with domains that are vaguer than the systems you mention. It is not just culture. It's also education, ethics and cognition, and it included language, decision making and others, that have been taken over by STEM. Why? Because the humanities were successful! They managed to eventually narrow down and crystalize the knowledge. Information theory was originally philosophical, until Shannon managed to formalize it. Language was attacked from multiple angles until we could slowly make progress with formal grammars and now machine translation. Learning is right now being transformed with machine learning. The handover from humanities to STEM is not always a happy one. I guess many a linguist feels that his work is taken apart without recognition of the important parts left. The parts that the STEM people can't see because in their domain the value of precision is obvious: "See, we can translate this automatically." While the part that remains culture - the ethics, the pragmatics - is hard to grasp for STEM.
Over time the humanities necessarily shrink until we have formalized everything human. "Software eats the world," they say. This is true of the boring everyday stuff, such as bookkeeping, logistics, administration. But it is more generally true: Eventually, we will run out of human stuff that needs further formalization. It is ongoing with cognitive science. It will become clear what consciousness is and we will see formalization of culture and ethics soon.
So funny you wrote this, because a couple days ago I wrote your name in my book proposal where I'm coining a system called SPAM (science, philosophy, art, mathematics).
I think integration of these concepts is crucial moving forward or else science is going to dry up. (As if it weren't pretty dry already, amirite?)
The thing I wrote in the proposal was that passing through nihilism may be a component of the Great Filter. We won't know unless we explore the concept of nihilism from multiple perspectives.
We need a big slice of SPAM... which is a lot juicier than STEM. 🤣
Extremely good analysis of a very important topic.
Also relevant:
- David Chapman's work on Meta-Rationality
- Brian Cantwell Smith on Theories of computation and the "middle distance"
- Ethnomethodology, which is both a systems-based approach to understanding culture (close technical observation of how tacit and implicit knowledge is developed and shared) and also looks at how systems of technical knowledge are grounded in soft, non-explicit "cultural" practices (eg the culture of laboratory science, the tacit knowledge of Xerox repairmen, etc)
- The Code books by Ross Bernstein on the complementary function of rules and customs in sports. Great EconTalk with Mike Munger about this one.
I have a... sense? ... at the moment that the next iteration of this war, after 'two cultures' and 'science wars' is going to be centred around the work of Iain McGilchrist (whether or not Iain McGilchrist himself would approve of that).
I by no means think this work is bullshit. However I came away from the talk feeling suprisingly angry and actually rather scared on behalf of 'left hemisphere' types. Though I think many readers here would probably see me as dangerously 'right.' (Using terminology from the talk itself here).
I followed your reasoning up until the point when you zoomed out to say "STEM folks tend to see culture people as sloppy, bullshitty, and tribal, while culture folks tend to see STEM folks as boring, narrow, having poor social skills, unable to navigate non-system concept spaces, and too trusting of their systems’ key assumptions." I see no basis to separate STEM vs Culture people - if you'd said STEM vs Humanities, the conclusion might hold. As a business executive with a STEM b/ground, Culture (in the business context)can be diagnosed/articlated/improved in a holistic & quite hard edged way even if it can't be measured like say temperature. (Dave Hanna wrote a seminal book almost 30 years ago on this subject).
But I love the external/internal framing from your previous post that got me thinking. I wonder if the confusion has semantic origins meaning the words got used in different domains with different meanings altogether (think desert (sand) vs desert (-ed) as a somewhat trivial example)
Will Wilkinson had a simpler explanation for the two cultures. He gave it orally at an LF seminar on the Snow book. The science culture relies on observation, primarily material. The literary culture relies on introspection. STEM studies what is outside your head, while the literary culture studies what is inside your head. So if you are depressed, a STEM type will assume that your brain chemistry needs to change. A literary intellectual will look at your thought process.
This seems to match up with the modern humorous insultings between "rotators" and "wordcels"
AND
with IQ research: The biggest non-straight-G portions of IQ are
"shape rotation" and "verbal fluency"
AND
with the Simon Baron-Cohen line of systematizers vs. empathizer model.
There's a lot of folks pointing in directions that line up with what you're suggesting.
Also, I think your views on signalling, status and loyalty explain the fundamental tension between these two approaches.
The STEM approach fundamentally focuses on the truth of the claims at issue, independent of their implications or associations. The cultural approach is practically concerned with raising or lowering the status of various issues in our society.
Sure, you can try to figure out what is true about culture in the same way science tries to understand what's true of physics but that just gets you into the social sciences not the cultural approach.
If what you're trying to do is raise the status of some things and lower that of others you just can't respond only to the truth of the claim in question. No matter how true it might be that "X is a type of eugenics" if you are trying to raise the status of X agreeing to that claim will be harmful.
And you can't even admit that this is what you are doing because admitting you aren't saying what's literally true is harmful.
While I appreciate the style involved in trying for evenhandness here, it's worth remembering that the Sokal hoax was literally a case of the humanities side of the fence being unable to distinguish publishable work in their fields from pure bullshit. This was then followed by an immediate and overwhelming response to double down in favor of the bullshit.
I think your analysis makes too many positive assumptions about 'cultural' thinkers.
Basically, why should we assume that what they are doing is truth-conducive in the first place? When we used to apply similar methods to figuring out scientific claims we got crap explanations about gods and other bullshit that served cultural needs (rather than being correct).
Yes, I agree that what you describe is what would be necessary to reach true conclusions but the problem is that there are lots of other incentives at play which influence what conclusions someone reaches. Even in the sciences it's frequently quite a struggle for the evidence to triumph over other pressures on our judgement.
If the incentivizes favoring getting the correct answer get too weak relative to other incentives there is a phase change and the whole system no longer even trends toward correctness. Unfortunately, I see little evidence this isn't the case when it comes to the cultural style.
That doesn't mean you can't say true thing in that arena. You certainly can. But it calls into doubt the existence of expertise in the area or accumulated knowledge. If you haven't read and absorbed the scientists who have gone before you then you're virtually guaranteed to be less accurate than those who have but it's not clear the same is true regarding the cultural area.
A tip of the hat to ever-provident serendipity; I published on a very similar subject to this just a few days ago on my own stack.
My view of this situation is that while there are certainly contrasts in disposition, approach to reasoning, and susceptibility to certain prejudices between culture (or 'humanities')-driven people and the scientifically minded, the really interesting divide is between the systematically-minded, as you also define them here (that is, people who interrogate the world in systematic terms), and the abstract-minded (that is, people who are more comfortable with contingency and interpolative understanding of the world). My grounds for calling this 'the really interesting' part is because it confounds organisation according to the heuristic of educational background.
For instance, software engineers bear a lot of traits of systematisers, but so do German rationalist philosophers. Lots of elite engineers might be very effective systematisers, meanwhile scientists working in very-early-stage experimental sciences might have more in common with a very abstract-minded poet than with the engineer, the engineer who might have more in common with a very systematic-minded novelist like Tolstoy than with a clearly very abstract-capable physicist like Feynman.
I'd argue this is a very important thing to understand because most of the really influential positions in our world are staffed with systematising intellects of VERY different hues (software engineers, mechanical engineers and consultants rule the markets; postmodern thinkers driven by the critik system dominate academia, media and corporate HR) and we have a real dearth of very able abstract thinkers in most domains.
Either way, I think this both starts with a rough humanities/science dichotomy and then just gets more interesting from there.
"STEM folks tend to see culture people as sloppy, bullshitty, and tribal, while culture folks tend to see STEM folks as boring, narrow, having poor social skills, unable to navigate non-system concept spaces, and too trusting of their systems’ key assumptions."
Something that strikes me as ironic is that if you follow the longstanding debates in high energy physics around string theory, you'll wonder if this dichotomy actually makes any sense.
I think you're being very diplomatic. As a physicist my Rule 0 is: Human intuition is excruciatingly bad outside the domain of everyday experience. Any argument about something non-obvious that starts and ends with intuition or introspection is wrong 100% of the time. Not most of the time. All of the time.
We can see what happens when the cultures collide in specific academic fields. For example paleoanthropology (the study of early hominins) was a culture-dominated field for many decades, until the 1990s when scientists began to obtain DNA and isotopic data. Take one guess which approach won out.
Not even the famous Feynman video linked? Let me fix that!
https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo
I'm also quite tired of at least our state media using soft science fields like gender studies, sociology etc. as some sort of authoritative "experts". Especially weak reasoning skills, making basic philosophical errors and presenting own value (projections) as some sort of scientific facts. This could be just an unfortunate lack of reasoning skills but I feel like dipping all soft-scientists into hard science field to prove anything would reduce the amount of BS they produce later in soft science.
On the other side, I think the criticism about assumptions is quite right. I think outside hard science fields, when you cannot prove anywhere near say HEP accuracy, it's too easy to bore down an assumption hole without seeing the forest for the trees. Didn't you and Tyler have that frozen heads chat about this. If we only had a market...
I just generally agree with this and don't have any objections.
I just want to add that one important issue here is that the motives and intents of the two types of people may not determine the actual outputs or behaviors.
Building knowledge is hard and it's a constant fight against all sorts of bias and other barriers. In the cultural domain we often don't have as good correction mechanisms. That may mean that we just don't succeed in net knowledge creation there no matter how similarly epistemically virtuous the participants are.
> “culture” is our name for stuff where these things are harder; in “cultural” areas, our systems don’t work so well. Culture thinkers thus have to get used to vaguer definitions, weaker claims, qualitative concepts, and more disagreements and differing perspectives.
My understanding of the humanities has long been that they have the tools to deal with domains that are vaguer than the systems you mention. It is not just culture. It's also education, ethics and cognition, and it included language, decision making and others, that have been taken over by STEM. Why? Because the humanities were successful! They managed to eventually narrow down and crystalize the knowledge. Information theory was originally philosophical, until Shannon managed to formalize it. Language was attacked from multiple angles until we could slowly make progress with formal grammars and now machine translation. Learning is right now being transformed with machine learning. The handover from humanities to STEM is not always a happy one. I guess many a linguist feels that his work is taken apart without recognition of the important parts left. The parts that the STEM people can't see because in their domain the value of precision is obvious: "See, we can translate this automatically." While the part that remains culture - the ethics, the pragmatics - is hard to grasp for STEM.
Over time the humanities necessarily shrink until we have formalized everything human. "Software eats the world," they say. This is true of the boring everyday stuff, such as bookkeeping, logistics, administration. But it is more generally true: Eventually, we will run out of human stuff that needs further formalization. It is ongoing with cognitive science. It will become clear what consciousness is and we will see formalization of culture and ethics soon.
So funny you wrote this, because a couple days ago I wrote your name in my book proposal where I'm coining a system called SPAM (science, philosophy, art, mathematics).
I think integration of these concepts is crucial moving forward or else science is going to dry up. (As if it weren't pretty dry already, amirite?)
The thing I wrote in the proposal was that passing through nihilism may be a component of the Great Filter. We won't know unless we explore the concept of nihilism from multiple perspectives.
We need a big slice of SPAM... which is a lot juicier than STEM. 🤣
Extremely good analysis of a very important topic.
Also relevant:
- David Chapman's work on Meta-Rationality
- Brian Cantwell Smith on Theories of computation and the "middle distance"
- Ethnomethodology, which is both a systems-based approach to understanding culture (close technical observation of how tacit and implicit knowledge is developed and shared) and also looks at how systems of technical knowledge are grounded in soft, non-explicit "cultural" practices (eg the culture of laboratory science, the tacit knowledge of Xerox repairmen, etc)
- The Code books by Ross Bernstein on the complementary function of rules and customs in sports. Great EconTalk with Mike Munger about this one.
I have a... sense? ... at the moment that the next iteration of this war, after 'two cultures' and 'science wars' is going to be centred around the work of Iain McGilchrist (whether or not Iain McGilchrist himself would approve of that).
I recently heard him speak at Cambridge. The talk can be watched here https://www.darwin.cam.ac.uk/lectures/entry/a-revolution-in-thought-how-hemisphere-theory-helps-us-understand-the-metacrisis/
I by no means think this work is bullshit. However I came away from the talk feeling suprisingly angry and actually rather scared on behalf of 'left hemisphere' types. Though I think many readers here would probably see me as dangerously 'right.' (Using terminology from the talk itself here).
I may be being foolish or paranoid.
I followed your reasoning up until the point when you zoomed out to say "STEM folks tend to see culture people as sloppy, bullshitty, and tribal, while culture folks tend to see STEM folks as boring, narrow, having poor social skills, unable to navigate non-system concept spaces, and too trusting of their systems’ key assumptions." I see no basis to separate STEM vs Culture people - if you'd said STEM vs Humanities, the conclusion might hold. As a business executive with a STEM b/ground, Culture (in the business context)can be diagnosed/articlated/improved in a holistic & quite hard edged way even if it can't be measured like say temperature. (Dave Hanna wrote a seminal book almost 30 years ago on this subject).
But I love the external/internal framing from your previous post that got me thinking. I wonder if the confusion has semantic origins meaning the words got used in different domains with different meanings altogether (think desert (sand) vs desert (-ed) as a somewhat trivial example)