Martin Geddes
— James P. Hogan, Code of the Lifemaker
I
semi-jokingly describe my job as being a "humanistic
technophilosopher". It sounds a bit grandiose, but it's really an
attempt to capture a simple idea: in our technological society, the
most interesting stuff happens at the boundary of the humanities and the
sciences.
Whilst it is common for scientists to lament the innumeracy of their artistic counterparts, it is my observation that scientists can be equally naive about the social. In fact, they can be even more profoundly ignorant, since the artists know they are mathematical weaklings, but the numerate are conceited that their reductionist rationalism is the right tool for political problems.
Understanding why this widespread arrogance exists may prove illuminating, and this is best shown via an example. Several people have pointed me at a published scientific paper by an Oxford University researcher about the scaling properties of "conspiracies". (Defining one is problematic, as we shall see, hence the scare quotes.) Can we take its conclusion — conspiracies don't scale well — at face value?
The paper's fatal flaw is easy to spot in its abstract and abstraction (my emphasis): "In this work, we establish a simple mathematical model for conspiracies involving multiple actors with time, which yields failure probability for any given conspiracy." Anyone who thinks complex historical narratives collapse to binary probabilities is already in deep trouble! Indeed, the idea that there is a single truth in the social is extremely contentious.
What this paper attempts is to produce a universal model of all phenomena whereby an intentional deception is jointly maintained over time by a closed group. It assumes there is a single and well-defined class of narrative called a "conspiracy", and furthermore presumes that the author has the superior wisdom and raw data to personally discriminate between truth and lies. The scientist, you see, is not so easily duped! These are also perfectly "true or false" phenomena in their totality, both in their construction (is it a conspiracy or not?) and their extinction (they either fail totally, or don't at all).
Having been a childhood victim of a Masonic conspiracy — the Jehovah's Witnesses cult — that operates persistently in the open, I feel in a somewhat privileged position to comment on Dr Grimes's epistemological endeavour. In short, it is demonstrably foolish, and illustrates why physics journals, for the sake of their credibility and integrity, should stay well away from commenting on sociological matters.
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"Scientists
are the easiest to fool. ... They think in straight, predictable,
directable, and therefore misdirectable, lines. The only world they know
is the one where everything has a logical explanation and things are
what they appear to be. Children and conjurors—they terrify me.
Scientists are no problem; against them I feel quite confident."
— James P. Hogan, Code of the Lifemaker
Whilst it is common for scientists to lament the innumeracy of their artistic counterparts, it is my observation that scientists can be equally naive about the social. In fact, they can be even more profoundly ignorant, since the artists know they are mathematical weaklings, but the numerate are conceited that their reductionist rationalism is the right tool for political problems.
Understanding why this widespread arrogance exists may prove illuminating, and this is best shown via an example. Several people have pointed me at a published scientific paper by an Oxford University researcher about the scaling properties of "conspiracies". (Defining one is problematic, as we shall see, hence the scare quotes.) Can we take its conclusion — conspiracies don't scale well — at face value?
The paper's fatal flaw is easy to spot in its abstract and abstraction (my emphasis): "In this work, we establish a simple mathematical model for conspiracies involving multiple actors with time, which yields failure probability for any given conspiracy." Anyone who thinks complex historical narratives collapse to binary probabilities is already in deep trouble! Indeed, the idea that there is a single truth in the social is extremely contentious.
What this paper attempts is to produce a universal model of all phenomena whereby an intentional deception is jointly maintained over time by a closed group. It assumes there is a single and well-defined class of narrative called a "conspiracy", and furthermore presumes that the author has the superior wisdom and raw data to personally discriminate between truth and lies. The scientist, you see, is not so easily duped! These are also perfectly "true or false" phenomena in their totality, both in their construction (is it a conspiracy or not?) and their extinction (they either fail totally, or don't at all).
Having been a childhood victim of a Masonic conspiracy — the Jehovah's Witnesses cult — that operates persistently in the open, I feel in a somewhat privileged position to comment on Dr Grimes's epistemological endeavour. In short, it is demonstrably foolish, and illustrates why physics journals, for the sake of their credibility and integrity, should stay well away from commenting on sociological matters.
Read more
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