Myths of the American Mind: Scientism

all right let's get going slow slow so we'll just the plunge is plenty of people we don't want anymore thank you all thank you all for coming out this is the second lecture in the midst of the modern American mind the first lecture was on intelligence or what I call smartness and that was a subcategory of what we want to talk about tonight which is scientism as distinct from science the scientism is an exaggerated belief in and an inappropriate use of the methods of science in places where those methods are not applicable combined with an exaggerated sense of what science can do even as methods are appropriate this is just a quick idea of what scientists am is to understand this I want to start with a sort of you know your brief sketch of the origins development and what the hell science is anyway now generally speaking I gave you a nice definition there from the English Oxford English Dictionary it's a method or procedure that has characterized natural science of the 17th century consisting in the systematic observation measurement and experiment and the formulation testing and modification of these hypotheses which is a you know pretty straightforward way of saying what science does different from other things this is important to notice it's a very distinct method or way of looking at the world that's all science is it's a way of looking at the world and of generating results very powerful one but what it means is that it works a couple of different ways but in brief you come up with a hypothesis I think the world is like this no people have been doing this forever that's not new and then you test a hypothesis with direct experimentation that's relatively new and then the results of those experiments or evaluations or whatever it is that you've done with them must be shared and replicable that's brand new that's really one of the breakthroughs that you get with science and we'll look at some of these key dates and once they've been replicated reproduced then the hypothesis is situated within the existing field of scientific knowledge so this is ongoing swing between I have an idea I test the idea I get the results back from the idea and then I incorporated into existing knowledge and on it goes back and forth sometimes data will look at examples of this generates new problems challenges existing hypotheses in which case you have to then go back and change those and run more tests the testing never stops right because you're always new ideas new things new information that needs to be tested I'm very simple I mean exactly when the scientific method develops is of course a huge realm of argument a lot of people point to Copernicus as the revolution of heavenly spheres which is one of the early work that could maybe be working in this direction and then you know your Bacon's know the Morgana where he really talks about this is the methods of science his was purely though he had a very pure idea of science that nobody can follow you only believe the data it turns out that's not workable because because you don't ever have all the data and none of it's all been Testaments you're always having to build models but it was certainly a huge breakthrough boil sceptical chemist was a big step forward and systematizing and creating a large theory of testing scientific hypotheses Newton's príncipe Mathematica is the opposite of of Bacon's method because if people familiar with Newton he was actually a great experimentalist but in his in his Principia he was almost entirely a speculative philosopher it was really he just dreamed stuff up in his mind and then demonstrated it mathematically there was essentially not much testing at all involved in that part of his thinking so he sort of as a theoretical hypothetical end of science boil and bacon may be the the concrete Infernus look at the data and it's really a few those things coming up with theories running a bunch of tests seeing what the tests come out with doing a bunch more theories it sounds simple but this is brand new in the world and this is what's important about the scientific method up until the development really given 17th century certainly by 1800 this is just going full-steam how did you know something was true there was a couple of ways one is everybody else said it was true always a good really thought this sort of we've always done it this way if so fact oh it's a good way to do things not not so very terribly unreliable because if you were alive that meant you had been doing something right but of course you see that the potential errors that creep into your thinking when is just what you've always done second thing waiting to do anything was you appealed to an authority for much of Europe that would have been Aristotle for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years whatever Aristotle said that was true why because he's Aristotle right that's all you needed to know and so you can talk about debate about what Aristotle meant but really the fact that Aristotle might be wrong was sort of unheard of by the way this is what Galileo got in trouble for he was not an Aristotelian he was an anti Aristotelian he didn't get in trouble for looking at the heavens he didn't get in trouble for saying the earth was me this is not it it was his central assault on the theories of Aristotelian ISM that got him in trouble all the other stuff which is tangential to that Amin so it was his disbelief in the dominant philosophical hierarchy of it's time for explaining things this is this is how Galileo gets in trouble with the church and so that you another important turning point but it is is you if you want to tell me to be true you just refer to a reference in Aristotle if you were in the Arabic world there were a number of Arabic scholars to choose from we're standing to Aristotle and the Western world if you were in China you could go to Confucius right if you want to know why it's this way well Confucius said therefore well that answers your question question solved of course also religious texts Oh fill this void as well well it's in the Bible that's what the Bible says now or in the Koran you know in some words in your sacred Buddhist texts and so scholars spent all their time arguing about the interpretation of things within their tax that didn't really occur to them to run actual experiments on any of this this is important to know and there's a couple of reasons for this one is the social hierarchy of the ancient world and this is all over the ancient world this isn't just the west or the east or the Arabic world this is all over people who worked with their hands were servants or lower caste people who had education could read and write it's extraordinarily rare in the ancient medieval and even late medieval world did not work with their hands that was your doesn't almost by definition if you got your hands muddy messing around with things then you were relatively lower status or a slave this is why many of the artisans in the in the Greek world had no standing we don't know who most of them are because well they worked with their hands and so they're artisans which is to say dirt you know that's we just you wanted nothing to do with to have science and have experimental science you have to have this meeting of a willingness to think philosophically to have reason and logic and have the education necessary to record your results again a very rare and a willingness that didn't get in and get mucky with things you know famously medical science was held up for years because of superstitions and cultural resistance to having people dissect corpses well the next step was to get educated people willing to dissect corpses now this took place occasionally but generally if you were educated it was precisely so you didn't to do a key things like nine section horses or butcher mules or tan hives or anything to do with dead things or if you're talking about mining and geology it was not you know going into the ground and inspecting mind you had servants who went into the ground and inspected mines famously by the way Goethe was a mind inspector he actually did the stuff he liked it he was fascinated by it but everybody but that but the nobles the true nobles at the court where he worked in fire who would not do it you hired a lower person which is hilarious thinkin Goethe it down in mines collect but he did he did this he was fascinated by pretty much everything you said he was the new man that we're coming to but this starts to break down the the the appeal to just authority people start saying well maybe it doesn't have to be this way one of the thing that leads this by the way is it is of course the Reformation the splitting of the Catholic in the process all authority into question if you can have a divine right of kings if you don't know what to divine it is right you know you can't appeal to the Pope because maybe you don't agree to put and so in this ferment and stir that is thrown up in part by the Renaissance in part by the Reformation you get this new sort of rising class of people often from the business world not necessarily from the nobility because increasing middle class and by good by the 18th century you really have progress underway with science and now it's important to make a distinction here because this is going to become important as well you can have technology without science the steam engine was developed without science you had trains before you had any understanding of thermodynamics we didn't have a theory we had no workable theory at all kinds of crazy theories we had an actual good working understanding of the relations and pressures and heat and temperature and steam and gas is not we just didn't exist when the steam engine was developed trial and error a platoon new technology you can do an amazing amount with technology by experiment Haitian in the sense of trial and error without any overarching theories without any systematic structure in which that is put this is really the magic of science it takes all the experimentation that people have always done systematize it records it very important makes it reproducible you can't have a one you can have assigned to the experiment that runs once it has to be reproducible in theory of course has to be reproducible and then somebody else can reproduce and then incorporates it into a larger philosophical system one reason Scotland is so important here is because the Scottish universities as opposed to Cambridge and Oxford and England had funding from industrialists and did not have the weight of the church holding them down so they were able to do a lot more mucky things with their hands you didn't just go to university and learn about you know the classics always good or the church always do this you know as you she sort of you had opportunities to do some like lab experimentation for the first time and so this gets rolling in the 18th century or 1800 through I mean really going and the transformation that takes place over the next hundred years of course it's you know is famous I mean all kinds of technologies you know the steam power is perfected and and transportation is accelerated this is a revolution of up until you get the train you the world moved at the pace of human walking except for on ships you know it was different sailing ships are slightly different on land which is where almost everybody was all the time the speed of everything was as fast as a human being could walk horses over long distance travel about the rate that human beings walks and they don't really help you particularly don't have good relatives when you get a steam engine so the acceleration there it was 50 60 miles an hour so all of a sudden you can move 20 times faster than anybody has ever been able to move before this is an extraordinary acceleration so if you think about a jet a transport jet that you fly on around the United States today that probably travels about four or five times faster than a good steam engine did in 1900 so that's faster but it's not twenty times faster I mean that's the acceleration from three miles to 50 60 70 miles an hour is you know it's extraordinary it's an immense leap for people and the experience just sort of blew their minds so now you're traveling at 80 miles an hour and all of a sudden you get to Telegraph an application of the understanding of electromagnetism batteries all kinds of technology to make wires material science insulators you get to Telegraph how fast the telegrams travel speed of light give or take um now that is really mind-blowing now information for the first time is traveling from across Europe across the world not quite instantaneously because they have to stop and recode it and there's but really really damn fast what used to take six months might take a day or two maybe the the trip from before the rail line went across the United States used to have to sail from San Francisco all the way around South America all the way to very long time consuming could take you months or if weather was bad assume you didn't die a year well then they got the Transcontinental railway now it takes you five six seven days and then you lay the Telegraph you can tell your friends you arrived in San Francisco and they'll get the message an hour or two after you get there and that transformation took place in like 50 60 years in a lifetime you would live to see oh well if you want something you want to we'll get to San Francisco it's gonna be a long walk from New York to oh I picked up a telegram you got to New York an hour and a half ago two hours I mean this is just transformation of the world in a number of ways medical science all that's all the technological and scientific progress were used to just you know discovery after discovery after discovery at the same time because of things like the end result of the Catholic of the Reformation of the development of science itself of all kinds of state warfare the old modes of authority or not even just be questioned but they've fallen on hard times the church starts to look a little less good than it did after a couple hundred years of religious warfare in the West nation state governments the Divine Right of Kings thing has sort of fallen away replaced by a lot of democracies and Democratic Parliament's which are messy and ugly we know this right there if nothing else you don't think whatever our Congress votes must be the world absolute truth right everybody is aware that sometimes they occasionally vote for things that might not actually be completely true and so if your government is losing authority if your sense of God the churches may be losing authority what grows up to fill that vacuum one thing was in fact science because it year after year decade after decade it was delivering you know antibiotics sanitation Telegraph's like I said steam engines steam ships airplanes dream of man time and memorial good lord were flying it's like a miracle but it was generating a miracle every five years not one but just one after another after another after another it was blew people's minds and so what happens is science gained this reputation for a infallibility and be as not a source of knowledge which it certainly is but the source of knowledge which it certainly is not that's scientism it's when everybody decided they had to look like science if they were to have any relevance or meaning if you don't look like you're doing the scientific method if you don't look like you're adhering to the scientific rules of reasoning than a you're not thinking and B your results are totally suspect and unusable unfortunately this is of course a myth it's not only not true it's hugely misleading and actually quite damaging I'll give you an example many examples Wow but I do want to start off with science wonderful and amazing this is not a criticism of science so criticism is a misunderstanding and a misapplication of what science does and can do and then what a canton and has no business trying to do so if you think about you want to build a bridge they would say we want to replace the Hood Canal Brigette's we did recently now we have over 200 years of metallurgical science engineering science material science construction logistics but I mean wow we have computer CAD systems we can build a bridge we can build I mean just fabulous wonderful credible bridges no problem great problem for science you want a bridge we'll build you one it'll be good you guarantee it where should you build a bridge this is not a scientific problem because I certainly don't want the bridge in my backyard I want the bridge built in your back as it turns out you build the bridge through the backyards of four people right this is where you build your bridges but there's there's no right answer to where to build a bridge the narrowest place well what if the Narrows place happens to be particularly like a nature preserve well let's move it to a little bit wider place well what if the wider place happens to be the homes of many very wealthy people what about a really wide leg well now that's too expensive Oh expensive who should pay for the bridge should it be the people who drive on it this is your classic toll bridge if you use it you paid a court if you don't you don't have to well that's wonderful and seems sensible but of course almost nothing would ever get built in this model certainly in a country as expansive as ours the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was built under this model which is great but what if we want to put a bridge in Seattle she blowing people in Seattle pay for maybe the state has an interest in there being a bridge in which case all the citizens would pay for maybe the federal government has an interest in there being a bridges in which case all the taxpayers in America should help pay for this bridge that's in the middle of Seattle there's no right answer you can't say well this and not that you know there's it's not subject to scientific analysis there's too many variables it's it's a moral ethical political question really it's a political question which we'll talk about which really aren't subject to scientific analysis and so how about do we want a bike lane bike lanes are nice bike lanes are expensive bike lanes take up room you can have four cars how about a pedestrian and a bike lane how about a light rail Lane how about we don't let cars on at all we don't said you don't like cars maybe we should have a high occupancy vehicle Lane can you think of a C these are all choices that we have to make none of which science helps us with whatsoever and it turns out that in our lives almost all the questions we face are quest like what kind of bridge should we build where and how much should we spend on it versus hey we can design a perfect sort of very good bridge also the question of what a bridge should look like comes up anything we could make it look like a big dragon which I think would be cool but we don't but just cuz we don't want to you could but again not a sense aesthetic question there is no right way to build a bridge there's no right word way to put a bridge there's no right way to fund a bridge there's only various social compromises that are brought up by the various interests of the society we can only afford a bridge this big we don't want people to ride their bikes on we don't like bicyclists right whatever it is you decide it's not correct in any scientific sense it's not a measurable correctness it's not repeatable we'll photocopy the hood canal and we'll build 11 different bridges and we'll study those bridges for 12 years and then we'll decide which one we should have written originally that would be a scientific experiment unfortunately you cannot photocopy the world and try all sorts of different things and see which one turns out the best instead you make compromises and sneak bills through in the end of the night and raise taxes without people knowing it and charge exorbitant tolls and all the stuff that we always do because there's nothing else there's no other way to do it and this is our life this is the world we live in another way to think about us think about something like a banana people tend to like bananas I like bananas now if you ask a biochemist what a banana is you will get an entirely different answer than if you ask say a molecular physicist or if you asked say a structural engineer they will give you totally different versions like oh I don't know wait could you support with a banana maybe three bananas stacked in particular with how might you know where does that structure when will it fail fascinating question structural engineer can tell you they can do all kinds of research on it but basically we don't care about anything that we really don't care we don't even care about nutrition it turns out look what we're eating right as a as a nation we have no interest in nutrition right we like bananas cuz we like them we want to know is it right how do I tell that's what we care about but then notice the ripeness that people like very dramatic some people like disgustingly overripe bananas that's wrong by science we know that's you know and we're much more about where to put a bridge and what kind of banana do I want to eat but the banana example also I think don't forget science is not a theme it's a method that's applied all over in different fields but biochemists do not know what the hell physicists are doing physicists do not know what electrical engineers have been electoral engineers have no idea what geneticists are doing in fact people in the subfields of their own fields have no idea what each other are doing listen it's like it's not like there's this board of science where they all sit around and chat about all of science in fact the president this is true has a science council that advises him on science which I love this idea because it suggests that like a bomb has all this time to run experiments at the White House right he's in there going oh let's see if we can find the Higgs boson first or something no and if you look at what they say they say they're helping the president understand science which is okay maybe I don't know why but sure but if you look at what they actually talk about it's all political of course do you think the prezi United States makes a lot of decisions based on firm science now it's like who's gonna vote for it can I get it funded can I get through the house miss in it no you know it is all of these other calculations nothing do with science science be damned politics science no relationship whatsoever you may have noticed this but it turns out that are again our world is a lot more like where do bridges go bananas and politics than it is like Oh what is the atomic weight of this object right means it's just that's not where we live does it make sense bad it makes it generally totally unhelpful keep this in mind so we're in this weird world where we believe absolutely in science and we'll give you some examples of this we do believe and we want it to be applied everywhere even though it's applicable almost nowhere I mean science is great within the realms of science that are useful for it but everybody else tries to use it all which confuses this endlessly a couple of examples here one I just looked this up before so if you go so to do science you need to quantify things you got to give them numbers because that makes it easy to communicate and easy to analyze so what this in scientism is done is made us want to put a number on everything even things that it makes no sense whatsoever to put numbers on so I looked at before I came to class or to this lecture The Brothers Karamazov on amazon.com is rated a four point for Dan Brown's Angels & Demons is rated a for this means that The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky is 10% better than Angels & Demons by Dan Brown and I know because those are the numbers that they have right clearly it's 10% better what the hell does it mean the Dutch dance is novel to be a 4.4 I don't know out of 5 well I but there it is and we rate every meaning we can't help ourselves right by the way if you go back this is new if you go back at night I would essentially argue anything written before 1900 never does this but just don't this is not this is a really new way of thinking about the world that this notion that everything is scaled numerically now my experience The Brothers Karamazov is rated either 100 or 0 you either love that book and it transformed your life or you think cheers Lord stop writing this is the response that I've never seen to this bucket for me I love but every criticism that people have about that novel it's too long the plot makes no sense that the trial scene is interminable everybody rambles on pointlessly forever it's all true he was getting paid by the workers and he was writing at an incredible pace and so he's just cranking out crap but it's just this beautiful wonderful flawed horrible mess of a novel and either a horrible mess overwhelms you and you just pitch it and go zero I don't like it or you read it you go oh that's the greatest thing ever written and you think a hundred I love it I want to sleep with it every night right but it turns out it's actually a 4.4 and like anywhere 10% better than Angels & Demons and you can fight you you know that's right we've seen this you can find this for every rock album in history this is the eighth best the hard rock album ever made this is the 11th best progressive rock guitar Lincoln is what she's the number four most beautiful model in the world what notice that did this this desire to quantify to quantify you must put a number on it because if it doesn't have a number it's meaningless another example that I actually put here because I think it's so beautifully hilarious is from the Wine Spectator October 13th 2014 this is a I am NOT gonna try to say all that Italian Roca deep mata Massey it's an 88 points and it's $25 let's cut to the chase it's two numbers ladies and gentlemen it's an 88 and it's a 25 25 bucks we know what that means 88 that's close to 100 must be good now but really think how preposterous this is if you don't like this wine once again it's not an 88 it's roughly wine you don't like then what you do is you do a lot of other wine and then you come back and drink it because that's why you can't tell anyway right we know this I don't like that I'll bring this out there okay now I'll drink the wine that's left that's what you make bad wine good you drink the other that's what wine drinking is about we love to mock the wine connoisseur but the wine connoisseur is mockable because of the scientism but the wine connoisseur if you think about it really you drink a lot of wines and you find the style of wine you prefer and you try to communicate it to people and what you can do is share some wine and hand it to the person and say this is the kind of wine I like we've talked about the kind of wine I like I think it correlates for the kind of wine you might like only if you try it only if you have the experience can you confirm and validate yeah if I validate that a lot with somebody then when they say it's an 88 which is still absurd I can go oh really what they're saying is this is a wine they enjoyed I've tried other wine day with joy and it turns out that our palates line up therefore I think there's a probability not a certainty of course but a probability that I'll enjoy this wine but I can only know by drinking it and it's not repeatable the same wine from that Ventnor next year might be no good might be better than a couple of years might go off on the shelf in a couple years my tastes might shift as I age which is generally what happens you can only know whether an auto wine is good by drinking it and we hate that we absolutely hate that idea we want to know that it's an 88 I spent 25 dollars on it and it's an 18 therefore it must be a good wine even if I don't like it it because the scientific e people have told me in today with numbers and everything right have you ever had a cheap wine that you sort of like oh that's kind of cheap I like it little little squeamish about that right because not dollars is also a price and that's a real number and so numbers are real and so this is that this this is it's just bizarre again you go back and look at wine writing art writing literary writing music writing criticism reviews prior to 1900 1910 even 1920 they almost never rank things this Debussy Sonata is a 7.3 I mean they'll talk about all kinds of aspects of it they'll talk about whether or not they like it I regard Charles a brilliant music critic go back and look what he said I can never remember him putting a number to anything but we want everything to have the number even when we can laugh and say that silly we still want the number right this is because we need that reassurance that sense of scientism that there's really something there behind it another aspect of scientism is the belief that a revolution is just about upon us we're always about to be revolutionized by some new technological breakthrough everybody's familiar with this um the two fields that I thought about immediately the thing about this was one is cancer research because if you look read medical news at all about once a month there is a miraculous revolution in cancer treatment it makes me think that somewhere in the world is a factory producing new cancers because that generated so many revolutionary treatments and they still have cancer makes no sense so I put a chart here of the mortality rate of breast cancer patients from 1975 to about 2010 and started in about 1990 the mortality rate begins to decline um and it's fallen by about 15% in the intervening 15 years now that's a percent of year that is spectacular this is thousands if not millions of lives saved and extended but as a percent of here is not a revolution it's science the slow accretion we ran some experiments we found out this 4% more effective if we reduce the first dose and raise the second dose disembarks experimentation has said you know what it's better to break that into three small doses and give that over time as we get a 5% the result it's a hundred small incremental continuous evaluations of lots of complex factors to arrive at slightly better outcomes that cumulatively generate cures and life extensions for thousands if not millions of people that's wonderful and powerful not revolutionary it's just slow this is what science does it's generally very slow very careful very incremental and what we think of the scientific revolutions if you go back and look at the historical they're sort of generally decades or centuries long processes that have finally come to fruition because people have been working on them hard for decades or cent and generally many hundreds if not thousands of people rarely the work of isolated geniuses happens occasionally very fascinating but often just a lot of people slogging away on complex and difficult problems a second example of that you turn over the the Flyers is cost per kilowatt hour of solar panels now this chart is slightly misleading because this is from the Department of Energy and they squeeze the top of the graph a little bit so it's not quite as smooth as it appears it actually took a sharper dip there for the first couple of years and then leveled out so this has been slightly smooth by the do-e people but the general gist there is the same in you know 1980s at cost of per kilowatt panel was about fifteen dollars kilowatt hour of solar panels was about fifteen dollars and it's dropped down now it's where it's about two so again a steady decline improvements in manufacturing technology material retired refinements installation techniques wiring batteries transfer everything right this hundreds of things have been improved a little bit every year for 30 years it's not a revolution this is a slow incremental improvement which is basically how science is done everything because that's the process you run an experiment now it has to be verified this takes a long time somebody else has to run the experiment almost invariably they come up with a different result so then everybody scratched their head and said well let's run it a couple more times and you run the experiment a bunch of times you finally go okay it looks like we're all getting the same thing great now we can keep moving ahead so the notion of the scientific revolution which we love is also part of scientism mythological and here's a quote from Peter Thiel's who's a guy who's a billionaire that means you're smart by the way and and and he's a founder of PayPal so he made a lot of money with PayPal which means he's a tech guy which means of course he's also smart so he's double smart smart squared and this is from an article computer world he was talking about the fact that we live in an anti-science age which is hilarious he should have met the Inquisition Galileo has something to say to him about anti-science age but while advances today may be enough to dramatically improve business efficiencies and create great new companies is not clear it's always enough to take our civilization to the next level notices it civilizations come in levels right now we're at about a 64 73 you see this is the scientific mindset his argument parallels one raised by the Economist Robert Gordon who argued that there's an absence of the type of innovation that advances civilization in fundamental ways right well true innovation is something like air conditioner the combustion engine or the telephone um so I was trying to think of the fundamental advances in civilization there's agriculture big step forward about 10,000 years ago something of a lull for about I don't know a couple of thousand years probably writing and reading and literacy is your next big one then you get a lull for a couple of thousand years and then maybe the Scientific Revolution this is still arguable certainly the Industrial Revolution which is not exactly the same Industrial Revolution those are probably the three big shifts in history of civilization agriculture followed by writing followed by the Industrial Revolution so shockingly in the last 60 or 70 years of science we haven't fundamentally changed civilization again I don't know why that is what a bizarre measuring stick right that signs should fundamentally alter civilization every couple of decades notice what this would mean it would mean we would have to fundamentally alter the way we live every say 20 years one reason science isn't doing that is because people don't want to do that we're still not fully reconverted to the Industrial Revolution all of this harkening we have back to agrarian utopia is and back to the earth movement small this is the harkening back to the agricultural world and which most of humanity lived for the preceding nine thousand ten thousand years no most of us left that over a hundred hundred and fifty years ago in the developed world and we still hearken back to it we still have this sort of longing culturally if not individually everybody's moving to the city everybody that wants to be out on a farm it's a weird dichotomy but it's easy to explain because a fundamental shift in your civilization is difficult that's challenging it upsets all the patterns that you've lived by all your sense of the world where where where you're gonna earn your money who's gonna be your neighbors what your future is going to look like has to change when civilization fundamentally alters I think if scientists were fundamentally altering our civilization and a clip like this we would kill them all we're killing you because don't do that we just got used to this I mean it takes hundreds of years to make the kind of transition apparently he wants us to make every 20 or 30 years for science to be meeting if you've read the epic of gilgamesh the first written novel we had it is a pay on to the lost pre agrarian civilization this is what Gilgamesh is longing for his his friend and Kendu is longing to return to the civilization to the pre agrarian civilization it's and that's you know that comes much after Agriculture's very well established big civilization you've got writing you have Canaan form tablets and what are they sitting around thinking of it on Oh wasn't it great back when we just lived with the deer and the enemies weren't afraid of us and things were cool you know it's the same thing today it's 200 300 years since we left the Agricultural Revolution world that we lived in for so long and entered the new industrial world which we haven't lived in that long until we we have the same longing that the authors of Gilgamesh had for the pre agrarian world for the agrarian world so I mean a science can't possibly deliver this B we would hate them if they did it's a meaningless idea but we have this notion science should generate an endless series of revolutionary moments that changes everything except that would drive us absolutely crazy and the dead we would not want it we would not like it and of course it's ridiculous and the three example he gives none of these are important by the way to innovation like air conditioning now air conditioning allows people to live in Florida yeah where they shouldn't I think is right yeah they should in large numbers when they would not before you don't want to live in Florida until there's air conditioning right you don't wanna live in Arizona until there's air conditioning people did live there it just makes it very much Pleasant but it's not a world changing and plus by the way most of the world still doesn't have air conditioning the combustion engine this is the steam engine thing the steam engine weather revolution the combustion engine is just more steam engine this is it doesn't it doesn't change anything dramatically it means that you can drive all over the place it changes the patterns what I mean commercially engineer influential but we were already moving fast it's just maybe you can move fast to more places sort of also but you had to get horses off the road right and then the telephone the telephone is cool and amazing is that all transfer but when you have the Telegraph you can send messages more or less instantaneously more or less anywhere in the world the telephone makes it more efficient and easier does it change it's not a fundamental change so he calls for a fundamental revolution and lists three things that are not fundamental revolutions which lets you know that even people who fury know about technology and science which he obviously does not are subject to this scientism this this sense that the world must must be changed by science continuous this revolutionary import so we love numbers even when they're inappropriate which is almost all the time we love this notion of revolution everything is about to change and we live in an age of remarkably rapid change which tends to drive this crazier than it makes us enjoying it and yet we have this belief that Oh science is about to deliver even more which it doesn't I mean it finally is the belief that science displaces all kinds of other for instance now you may be familiar we have this little problem with Ebola there's a great interview from the person of the Gates Foundation they're giving a lot of money to this they do a lot of public health care all over the world so they've been focusing on bola and they were she was being interviewed the interviewer said you know are you guys working on a vaccine they're like well we have trials underway are you working on a treatment well we have treatments are fine and she said she stopped you see look look look you're you're not asking the right questions we know how to stop Ebola we've done it before successfully we will do it again successful public health workers will educate the community and isolate people who have lobola that is the only way to stop an outbreak and the interviewer was like so how long till we have a vaccine say even when science tells them look here's how you do it we don't like it because it doesn't fill our idea of scientism scientism says there's going to be a pill a magic switch or a gun that is going to take care of all this even when science says no there is no magic switch there is no Raygun there is no pill our desire for it overwhelms the sign so that the scientist and you see this all time all kinds of ways in all kinds of fields end up saying sort of look no no no you're you're expecting too much from science your your your you've exaggerated it and almost all certainly vast coins of science reporting are in fact scientism they exaggerate they inflate they misrepresent and then if you go back to the original papers or the arguments of the scientists themselves they're almost always very small and carefully worded because that's what science is about two more examples of how science works and how we'd love it I mentioned that this science works in both ways one way is we have all the knowledge that we have and then leads people to go oh I think something might be true let's test it and so in famously sixty-four to roughly 1970 several physicists most famously mr. Higgs suggested that we're missing this particle from our model and that particle is the Higgs boson was named after him now wasn't named after him then it was a type of boson and so they named after him and so he predicted this it was a boson like particle was observed and I should say 2013 sorry I got that wrong it should be 2013 so this was the particle accelerator in CERN and they're pretty sure they found the Higgs boson so what does that say 50 years to find one particle that's the way science works and they're very excited by this yes just like that we got it right and some Nobel Prizes will probably be handed out and that'll be very fun but it's certainly not revolutionary the other thing that science does permanently is in the late 1990s separate teams we're trying to measure the rate how fast the universe is expanding and there all these theories lost and we had a really good cosmological understanding of the universe rock solid I mean nobody wanted to see it change and what they found out was it was wrong because these teams returned the information that said the universe is not just expanding which we expected very good but it's accelerating it's expanding faster and faster which is bad because the model does not allow for that and so the cosmologists now now you have new data first they said we think you're wrong and they did support it turns out it looks like it's pretty reliable damn so now we've got to think again and this is the other thing to understand about Sciences is it's an ongoing process we want it to be done finish up your science now give us the answer give us the pill give us the switch give us the the solution and then we're ready to go another great example see it works both ways it both creates speculation that you have that could take decades to answer and often turns out to be wrong and then sometimes it produces new things that messes up decades of work just erase all that and we'll have to come up with some new new idea so by the way the response to that was if you've heard of dark matter and dark energy they said well it turns out that we're missing 90% of the universe which is I think about it's a big miss it's there but we can't see it so we'll call it dark ah that's great I love when science does that right this invisible magic universe stuff and so now they're busy looking for that of course because otherwise we really don't know what's going on but another example of this is something like diabetes the type 1 diabetes is a killer horrible killer some people are porn born with an ability to process sugars and glucose and all of this and so what would happen if you reach a certain age and you would just starve to death this is a family thing about this you have a perfectly healthy child and then when it onset you would just watch them start relatively quickly just kill them they just say this horrible terrible tragic disease and they finally found a surface that that we could add insulin they've been improving the way insulin is delivered and so now people don't get diabetes it's great no we have diabetes and epic proportions how can that be true how can we have a treatment for diabetes and yet people get an epic proportions one is a treatment and not a cure and to lots of people who would not get diabetes millions and millions sort of volunteer for it yes yes it's now it's not all of the mechanisms of diabetes are not perfectly understood but what is clearly understood is for most people if you do not have it genetically which almost nobody does it is relatively rare but still horrible disease but treatable with insulin wait but then lifestyle millions and millions of people acquired a lifestyle that includes a diet and lack of exercise that combined to make you your chance of getting diabetes go up astronomically which is to say you sort of volunteer for it so notice that see science can't solve that because we can come up with a pill of in theory that then cures diabetes are actually of course working on the staff they've made some progress on this but it doesn't prevent us from getting some other disease that then science has to cure we can cure pretty much probably 60 to 70 percent of the diabetes in the world by changing the way we eat and exercises that's what nutritional science and health science tells us so why don't we do that we don't want to people are perverse and wonderful and irrational in every way and so we want the scientism the magic pill which probably isn't coming anytime soon not do what science says which is dramatically lower your chance of getting diabetes by having a certain kind of exercise routine and by eating a certain way science tells us that we want nothing to do with that kind of science rid of that scientism says here's a pill that's what we like it's a revolution that solves our problem without us doing anything very unscientific perfectly scientism and this influences our thinking again across the board so much so again here's another example for you so much do we actually deny science while embracing scientism this is the weird mix of the scientism actually racist signs of it it hides it is I got this the creationist super conference of 2014 is coming up you may want to know about this so these are the people who believe that the world was created about 6,000 years ago byah byah byah de T that's a that's a great idea it just runs counter to super truly all biology geology astra astronomy cosmology we have lots of reasons to think the world is not 6,000 years old but this conference will be live internet broadcast now I just love this notion the tool of satellite communication fiber optics which is an amazing fiber-optic digital communication computer systems cameras LCD I mean in the entire panoply of modern scientific technological achievement will be marshaled by these people to tell everybody that science doesn't work that doesn't work don't believe it breelan this is this is scientism you don't actually have to believe the signs to use it you can brought it it's just it's just mind-boggling it's like look if you put your popcorn in the microwave and turn it on and it pops creationism is wrong I mean it's really that simple you can run the test but you don't but see this is that this is the power of scientists and if you look at the people who are speaking at this conference which I did many of them claimed scientific credentials because if you're going to deny science its breakthroughs its methods and its insights people will only believe you if you're a credentialed scientist I'm not making that up that's how much we believe in scientism if the scientists say it it must be true even when they say things that of course abrogate the entire work of you know the scientific establishment for several hundred years that's okay because it's a scientist and so we're in this bizarre world where we love to rate measures school don't get me started on that education is terrifying and assume all of the methods of scientific analysis in a world that we can't reproduce a last note you hear from from I think economics is probably when the great ones to look at one of the big the neoclassical school economics you may have heard of Chicago School is one of the famous ones what are their fundamentalists is the rational actor this is that human beings make rational financial decisions ladies and gentlemen I suspect that occasionally every once in a while human beings do not make rational financial decisions in fact I think the history of the world demonstrates with utter and complete clarity that if there's anything we're irrational about its money by the way the next lecture will be on money in which I will explore this topic in great detail but we are not never have been nor will be nor should we be I would I think it would be a very sad world indeed we're all people to be rational with their money no fun um it just it but they have to assume that by the way they have to assume this because if you assume that an aggregate people do not make rational decisions then you can't study them scientifically it would be like assuming that atoms occasionally just turn into different atoms for no reason this would make chemistry extraordinarily difficult now some people say all at the quantum level there's all this weirdness there is weirdness at the quantum level and it's totally stable weirdness particles do weird things with perfect consistency that's fine this is a create a problem for us at all we're cool with that as long as your weirdness is consistent we're totally inconsistent with our weirdness we're lacking we're chaotic I mean think about I mean I mean we all live through the sort of housing crisis breakdown Time magazine amongst many others had you know you cannot lose money in real estate real estate the greatest investment of all time the entire history of real estate is nothing but a series of booms and busts I mean it is the speculative bubble phenomena so this is just another in the long line of them but we had totally forgotten this again which is what humans do completely irrational but this is exactly what humans do we forget immediately look greedy yeah I can have something for me then fear uh sell it all get rid of this worth nothing that's that you know this is what we do I mean we had that the booms and busts throughout history are very very well documented um you know it's irrational but I just I guess there was a comic convention in New York and somebody has like a first edition Superman that's worth millions what there's no rational explanation for the valuation of a comic book at millions of dollars or a Jasper Johns for that matter or or event or whatever right but there it is it's completely human right there's no problem I understand it on a human level rationally no and I don't believe anybody predicted this in fact I know no economist predicted this because if you had a theory that accurately predicted what people would suddenly find a mentally valuable you would be immensely wealthy you would have thirty years ago writing equations and said oh look at this comic books in 2002 are cut out boom I'm buying them all you'd be like the comic book billionaire today you like ha ha I am billionaire and you could be interviewed about the stupid revolutions that science isn't creating for our society but but this does not happen because it's extraordinarily difficult to do this to make these predictions why because economics is not a science indeed one of our famous famous economist John Maynard Keynes one of his first books I believe is his first book was on probability and he said you cannot use statistical analysis for economic behavior because you can't predict economics because you couldn't predict the 9/11 attacks he didn't use that example obviously but he used similar examples from his own day because you can't predict what things like that you just basically have no idea but we know with absolute certainty this is the thing it is not speculative at all to say strange unexpected bizarre things will happen what they are we don't know and hence economics not a science but useful and this is where I want to leave us now what's happened with scientism is it's eclipsed all other forms of knowing and this is where it damages us this is where the problem lies the knowledge of a wine connoisseur is valuable in the sense that they have tried many many wines and in theory have created a sense of what they look and if they can articulate that then you can gain from that this becomes useful information and then you can go out and experiment yourself and using their information and ideas and your experiences developed perhaps a greater sense of the kind of wines you like the qualities you might like to develop then some wines you might like to try to narrow the field from all the thousands if not millions of varieties that are available but this isn't scientific in any way but it's valuable useful and indeed for human beings getting through the world much more valuable and they need sort of a pseudo-scientific thing we could do and again is the same for books and novels and movies we might want to see people we might want to meet right we have all these electronic dating sites that in theory are supposed to match people fill out your for your thing and then we'll have all these algorithms that will match people and then no it turns out to be a bunch of nonsense people you know they've studied this I say like people just uses a pre-screening device and then they communicate with the people and they choose and it turns out that the matching algorithms are total crap which is not surprising right we we know this I mean that that sometimes people think I'm really gonna like this person you turn on yeah I don't like this person I don't know why exactly or some people you think I that person I just saw I really like them I find them attractive for god knows what reason but a probably wasn't predicted by an algorithm right and that but again choosing who we spend our lives with is an immensely important part of the human experience think of how expensive emotionally and financially divorces and look at how prevalent it is an unbelievably high if you want to call it a tax or or cost on our inability to make those kinds of judgments but we still have to try you don't know right you just you know you don't know and think about this if you're married you might oh I'm happily married but maybe I would be happier with somebody else right maybe but but notice there's no way of knowing the only way to know would be to get a divorce and then to go with the other person well that's two people well that only leaves if you're dating you know opposite sex or even same-sex I guess about three billion people there's no way to know there's no scientific way to know cuz you commute there's only one of you and even if you get married relatively rounded in we're not gonna cover any significant you're not going to get a statistical significant significant salmon try as you might also the only way you can know whether being married for a long time is worth the investment is to be married for a long time and so while you might say well I'm pulling the plug on this experiment I'm gonna try this well now you just watch that one now that experiment was not ever finished this often happens stopped running it we don't know how it turns out see for that this is what life is very much more like and just because things can't be quantified just because they can't be replicated and duplicated and reproduced in many labs all of which are necessary for science by the way you have to feel replicated and duplicated it doesn't mean you can't think about it in meaningful ways in fact again if you go back to seeing 1900s almost no one unless you're in a chemistry lab use this kind of scientific overlay to try and figure out other things now if this slows you down if you're trying to do chemistry if you're using analogies from the classical Greek literature to work on chemistry ah you're in trouble if you're using analogies from classical Greek literature to think about relationships ooh probably doing pretty well or at least potentially well or at least as good as anything else you know but this this is where you end up and so again this is not it's not a attack on science it is an attack on the missed application of science because we expect it to solve problems or give solutions or provide answers that are totally outside of its purview people hate politics one reason they didn't politics is because it's a grubby power fast this is but this is what politics has always been this way what the hell are politicians supposed to do but go in there and slog it out for preferential treatment I mean this is there is no other way particularly in democracy there is another way by the way Socrates or Plato elaborates on this in the Republic in which case you just have a totalitarian dictatorship of the most vicious sort right like well that gets rid of all those grubby people with power yeah it does but I'm not sure that's a very positive response you know then people think wow I can't scientist you know why can't the science say of global warming be embraced by our political leaders they don't care about the science forget the science they just do not care on either party zero interest in science but they look at the politics of it and they know right let's put a big ol tax on gasoline that's not gonna win any goods right let's just this is not a vote winner ladies and gentlemen maybe someday it will be right now if you're in Georgia and you're running for political office and you say I'm going to put a dollar gallon tax on your gasoline you are not being elected congratulations right and and these kinds of considerations are not scientific indeed there is a question whether or not the global warming being a great example if global warming is worst nightmare scenarios come true our political system may not be able to respond to the demands of a changing natural environment in which case sort of our simulation explodes which be kind of cruel would be interesting right change there would be your change from but but that is not an indictment of science it's just an indictment of our political system but all political systems fail this is the history of the world shows that your system might last five years 50 years 500 years 500 years if you're really really lucky that's a good long run in history but something is going to cause it to fail but it's not gonna be a lack of response to science probably it's just an inability to deal with the problems because of the trade-offs that have to be made it's all the ugly hedging and lies and distortions that we don't like we want the truth we want a number but most of the world again this is back to where I started from most of our world is more like that bridge question if you can think about this and really keep it in your mind how to build the bridge science yes great wonderful we build better bridges than anybody ever has in history not more beautiful by the way just better for utility we build hideously ugly bridges inexplicably but we do aaah but we could build beautiful ones but we don't care so it's an indictment of us but we're to build a bridge who should pay for it all those other questions they're not subject to scientific solutions they're the grubby questions we have to ask every day who should I marry should I stay married to them what kind of job doing it are they paying me enough what should I waste my money on that I've earned should I buy the third best novel is think about it angels and demons is only 10% less good than Brothers Karamazov but it's half as expensive isn't that like the best deal ever yet 90% is good at the novel for half the cost right that's your 88 your wine bottle is $10 been brought in 88 right think of how much better a deal that is then the $30 bottle that got an 89 we see house just a stupid and preposterous it is by the way as angels and demons is free it's not worth it and their brothers karamazov cost $100 it's more than worth see but but those are the sort of experience that's where we live we do not live in the world of science as wonderful as an amazing and beautiful human achievement as the sciences are and the scientific method is truly a revolution and the humanity's capacity to understand the world but the missed application of that method which we do almost without help ourselves damages our ability to respond to and understand the world and really for me that's the problem with scientism thank you very much

Channel: Wes Cecil

Views: 25,069

Rating: 4.6627908 out of 5

Keywords: Humane Arts, Wes Ceci, Philosophy, Science, Scientism, Humanities

Id: Uuo21-9SJBI

Length: 72min 7sec (4327 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 21 2014