Tidbits of Wisdom I've Heard: Questioning 20th Century Science
What if our age isn't as enlightened as we presume?
Early 2024 has proven to be extraordinarily taxing on my time. I’ll elaborate more at a later date, but thanks for your patience as I try to find my way back toward a regular posting schedule. Thanks especially to all of my paid subscribers, who help make spending time on this even more worthwhile.
In my intro post to 2024, I suggested a few new formats I’d like to experiment with. This is one - sharing tidbits of wisdom I’ve heard from other podcasts, or perhaps read from other writings. And I should add, I believe these are interesting and wise. Your mileage may vary.
For now, I’m going to just directly quote the conversations, and not share the name of the podcast. I find it entertaining to do so, and also it gets past a little of “I hate the messenger, but I like the message” problem. Today, I share one example from an episode that really made me stop and listen intently.
Guest, setting the stage:
There really aren’t too many independent minds. People are very focused on ideological conformity. It’s probably always been the case, and the internet has just revealed that.
A notable example of this is the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. If you’re not familiar with the term, here’s a scenario: Imagine some expert in say, foreign policy, reading the Washington Post. He reads an article about something happening in the Middle East, an area he happens to know a lot about. As he reads it, he realizes it’s garbage, that it’s totally backwards. He thinks, this is a terrible piece of journalism - isn’t that shocking? He then turns the page, reads something about Japan, and assumes it’s all true and of high quality.
The exact same thing has been happening in academia for a very long time. More and more people are realizing now there’s shoddy knowledge in virtually all disciplines.
Kevin: Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is one of the most important terms and concepts of our era. Thank you, Michael Crichton.
Guest, diving deeper:
Big picture, academia has failed. My narrative is this: The 20th century generally, was filled to the brim, with really bad ideas that were articulated poorly, that paradigms were established not due to their intellectual merit, but because of political & social reasons, and it just is the case that once a paradigm is established, it’s incredibly hard to clean it up over time.
And when you look at the modern paradigms that we live under across domains, most were established in the time period between 1880 and about 1950. This was a time period when we had a bunch of revolutions not just in the world, you have political revolutions, economic revolutions, you had electrification for example. There was also a bunch of revolutions in the world of ideas, stretching from math to physics, to economics and psychology, to medicine, a bunch of our modern paradigms were established in this time frame, and those paradigms aren’t very good. Most of them have very big flaws that were even pointed out back then. It just turns out for historical and political reasons, the skepticism, the good skeptical arguments that were made criticizing let’s say the Copenhagen interpretation in physics in the 1920s – those skeptical arguments didn’t win out. That’s not due to their intellectual quality but to social dynamics.
Imagine all of those paradigms that were established by great and prestigious minds over the past century that simply weren’t corrected because we didn’t have the tools to correct them?
Kevin: For my readers, think a lot about those statements and consider zoning, traffic engineering, modern land-use planning and even modern architecture. All of those were instituted beginning in the 1910s and 20s.
Host:
If you misunderstand what happened, you’re going to keep recommending dumb things and using history as your guide.
How is this possible, that we could’ve gone so wrong? The Enlightenment promised us that with the application of reason, and by getting rid of all the layers of superstition under which we labored, would get us closer and closer to the truth. And yet, the results to put it mildly, are disappointing.
Guest:
Intellectuals, going through to the Enlightenment, have profoundly underestimated the complexity of the world.
Part of what’s happened, the naïve Enlightenment notion, we use reason and we discover the truth – doesn’t work. It turns out to be way harder to arrive at the truth than we realized.
There’s something chronologically that happened in the Progressive era, which leant itself to this. This early 20th century idea that we were going to have the experts that were going to structure society for us, the wise people like Woodrow Wilson, who have all the credentials, the knowledge, they’re going to build society out for us, because they’re so smart. We’re going to have epistocracy. Part of the reason that doesn’t work is simply because of the complexity problem. It’s too hard to know complex truths. Maybe you can understand some very abstract truths, but when you start zooming in, the world is just too damn complex to plan out and structure. So that’s part of the problem – the complexity problem.
The other part is the power of ideas. Turns out that ideas are very powerful and influential, and especially as they intersect with politics, we want to give power & authority to people who seem knowledgeable about things. So you have that dynamic, and it’s a sinister incentive for powerful people to pretend that we now know that the old dogmas were wrong and the new dogmas are true and then they give power to themselves, they game the system, which makes them the establishment, they start persecuting dissidents and heretics, and I think with that game theoretical structure of the power of ideas, you’re going to end up over time with really bad ideas being entrenched from on high.
Kevin: Obviously, this speaks deeply to much of what I discuss on this site. The whole notion of messy cities, for example, is about the inherent complexity of human settlements that simply can’t be reduced to a few lines of zoning code nor well-managed by silo’d disciplines. And, our 20th century reductionist approaches have done far more harm than good.
Host:
I think there’s an unjustified extrapolation that most of the public makes that is blinding them to what’s really happening. They look around and they say, look at technology, the advance of technology, the internet, cell phones, commercial air travel, automobiles, things like that – amazing, amazing achievements our ancestors could never have dreamed of. They extrapolate from that to “science is in good health.” Because that’s their day to day experience with science.
Guest:
That’s a great point. That’s the naïve belief I would’ve held before digging more into this subject, because that seems like a very intuitive idea. Partly because we talk about science, engineering & mathematics as the STEM field – just one thing. Science is technology is engineering. But when you look into it, that’s not the case. There is a large gap , as engineers know in particular, between the scientists & the theoreticians, and the practicing engineers.
Engineers are more connected to real world feedback than theoreticians.
It’s not that their smarter, it’s that they get more real world feedback
Kevin: In our world, I’d add to engineers: architects and developers. I’ve often wondered, how much of the improvement in the comforts of life in the modern world (let’s say the last 100 years), has come from technological improvement, and how much has come from the modern administrative apparatus. .
What do you think? Leave me your thoughts in the comments.