Tag: Richard Dawkins

Defending philosophy of science

From Carl Bergstrom’s Twitter thread about a new book called How Irrationality Created Modern Science, by Michael Strevens:

https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1372811516391526400

The Iron Rule from the book is, in Bergstrom’s retelling, “no use of philosophical reasoning in the mode of Aristotle; no leveraging theological or scriptural understanding in the mode of Descartes. Formal scientific arguments must be sterilised, to use Strevens’s word, of subjectivity and non-empirical content.” I was particularly taken by the use of the term ‘individual’ in the tweet I’ve quoted above. The point about philosophical argumentation being an “individual” technique is important, often understated.

There are some personal techniques we use to discern some truths but which we don’t publicise. But the more we read and converse with others doing the same things, the more we may find that everyone has many of the same stand-ins – tools or methods that we haven’t empirically verified to be true and/or legitimate but which we have discerned, based on our experiences, to be suitably good guiding lights.

I discovered this issue first when I read Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method many years ago, and then in practice when I found during reporting some stories that scientists in different situations often developed similar proxies for processes that couldn’t be performed in their fullest due to resource constraints. But they seldom spoke to each other (especially across institutes), thus allowing an ideal view of how to do something to crenellate even as almost every one did that something in a similarly different way.

A very common example of this is scientists evaluating papers based on the ‘prestigiousness’ and/or impact factors of the journals the papers are published in, instead of based on their contents – often simply for lack of time and proper incentives. As a result, ideas like “science is self-correcting” and “science is objective” persist as ideals because they’re products of applying the Iron Rule to the process of disseminating the products of one’s research.

But “by turning a lens on the practice of science itself,” to borrow Bergstrom’s words, philosophies of science allow us to spot deviations from the prescribed normal – originating from “Iron Rule Ecclesiastics” like Richard Dawkins – and, to me particularly, revealing how we really, actually do it and how we can become better at it. Or as Bergstrom put it: “By understanding how norms and institutions create incentives to which scientists respond …, we can find ways to nudge the current system toward greater efficiency.”

(It is also gratifying a bit to see the book as well as Bergstrom pick on Lawrence Krauss. The book goes straight into my reading list.)

Epstein’s friends from the ‘Reality Club’

New York magazine has published an alphabetised list of the names of people that find mention in Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘black book’, a log book of sorts in which he kept track of the people he entertained, including at his residence and onboard his private jet, both venues of Epstein’s horrible exploitation of young women. The first name on the list is “Allen, Woody” and the last, “Zuckerman, Mort”; somewhere in between, there’s this about the ‘Reality Club’:

What seems new, in flipping through the reams of society photos of perhaps the world’s most prolific sexual predator that have been circulating over the past few weeks, is not the powerful and the beautiful who surrounded Epstein, but the intellectuals — the Richard Dawkinses, the Daniel Dennetts, the Steven Pinkers. All men, of course. But the group selfies probably shouldn’t have been a surprise — documents of an age in which every millionaire doesn’t just fancy himself a philosopher-king but expects to be treated as such, and every public intellectual wants to be seen as a kind of celebrity.

On point. The rituals of scholarship haven’t spared any man from the temptations of misplaced self-importance, if not outright power; in fact, on many occasions they have been the means to accrue it. Just ask Jorge Domínguez, Jeff Galindo, William V. Harris, Jason Lieb, Lawrence Krauss, Michael Katze, Geoff Marcy, Christian Ott, Thomas Pogge, John R. Searle or, perhaps most recently, Inder Verma – all of whom were passively protected by a network of academic institutions that financially benefited from the presence of these men on their campuses even as they continued to sexually harass, allegedly or decidedly, their coworkers and/or students. (Pinker and Dawkins have only helped this conclusion along with their displays of “poor scholarship” and “unthinking certitude”.)