This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This particular trail of insight is not new. I don't believe it has a proper name, so I like to call it "science-denial" not in the petty sense people use today to mean heterodox belief but in the noble, anti-realist, sense of denying that empiricism has a truer grasp as the universe than most. I believe some call this position "mysticism".
The essence of this view is to regard progress in technics as the result of trial and error and "science" not as the method used to foment that trial and error but rather the ideological interpretation of such results by formulating just-so stories to explain them. The denial is not so much of the ability to learn about the universe through experiment rather than the ability to learn about the universe by making up theories to explain those experiments. It argues the theorizing doesn't produce knowledge, but merely justification.
The most powerful argument for this view you lay out yourself: empiricist epistemology has become a motte and bailey. The motte is strict adherence to a logical experimental protocol, the likes of which you used to see in physics, the strict discipline behind Popper's demarcation. But the bailey is everything else, every sort of theorizing that allows itself to be formalized and uses the right fonts in their PDFs, publishes in journals and wears the right colored labcoats. That is also science, somehow, and draped in the same prestige.
I don't believe the industrial revolution is that hard to explain for this viewpoint, we learned there about many things that were extremely applicable and useful, and you can indeed pin a lot of the success on engineering rather than fundamental research. People of this view like to, rightfully, point out that a lot of those usable discoveries were made by cranks. Which has been a glaring problem for Epistemology forever and is at the core of the more contemporary postmodern views on it. Kuhn's massively influential work on scientific revolutions is all about this.
I do think this denial is throwing the baby with the bathwater however, as I can point to specific insights that could only have been made with the existence of a model (atomics in particular). So I personally prefer to sidestep this whole issue by embracing Naturalism and the belief that science is not some special method of thought invented at some point in history but a process of modelling the environment using energy efficiently that every organism is engaged in.
Consider how simplistic rules, the likes of which religions provide, are actually better and more usable models of the world in most situations than detailed understandings of quantum mechanics.
The "demon" you're pointing at is indeed not science, it's a particular way of engaging with this process that focuses solely on quantity and has no regard for maintenance. And that's where the issue is, not in us building more sophisticated models, but in us building models that are as sophisticated as possible with no regard for what use we get out of them or what human capital we are burning by taking our most clever and sacrificing them on the altar of making more convenient doodads.
I laughed at Rabelais' facile quote when I was taught it: "Science without conscience is but the Ruin of the Soul". But the older I get the deeper the meaning of it strikes me. Though knowledge itself is value neutral, yearning for it at any cost can be a bad thing, and building society on top of it and nothing else the way the Enlightenment has done is indeed ruinous.
I hesitate to say people have rejected science, as I said above, to the vast majority of people who don’t work in the sciences, or know people who do (and to be honest the same could be said of most academic subjects) they don’t understand it at all. They’re not rejecting a subject they don’t understand, they’re rejecting narratives and a “priesthood” of The Science. They don’t know the work of science, they don’t understand the process, they don’t understand the arguments.the reason for anti-realism and anti-science is that once you lose your trust in the basal religion of you society and suspect that those you trusted to explain the universe are either ignorant or untrustworthy.
I think some disciplines tend to over-theorize, especially astrophysics and the like. Most of the stuff about the ultimate structure of the universe are basically no more empirical than any cosmology invented by any ancient religion. There’s no direct experiment or observation that could conceivably show air castles like String Theory or Multiverses to be reality. There have been no observations of dark matter or dark energy. All of these things might be true, but we have no data, and no empirical evidence of any of it. It’s mostly based in mathematics. Mathematics that was based on other observations, but mathematics. And I think the honest answer to these sorts of ideas is “we don’t know”.
More options
Context Copy link
One of the rare times I agree wholeheartedly with you. Outside of Kuhn what are some other good writers in this vein?
Funnily enough I have a deep burning hatred of Kuhn because he moved from reasonable critiques of the way science works to straight up denying the existence of objective reality. Nevertheless he is one of the key authors to understand contemporary epistemology since he pretty much dealt the killing blow to logical positivism.
If you want to understand naturalistic epistemology, which he inherits from, you should read Quine and Goldman.
If you want further polemic as to the validity of methodology you can read Feyerabend, whose most famous book is literally Against Method and has an anarchist position. I find a lot of it ridiculous but he makes some very valid points.
If you want to understand the roots of the culture war, you can read about the Positivismusstreit, the theoretical debate between logical positivism and critical theory that sowed the seed for much of what is playing out today.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You may be interested in Terence Tao's There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs. He also postulates that truly advanced thinking means going beyond rigour.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link