Prosocial Science vs Infant Mortality
Why do we censor? We're soft.
I am in awe of Anna Krylov. When it comes to the defense of intellectual merit, she speaks for me, I just point.
I’m still floating in the wake of meeting some of the nation’s top academics dedicated to preserving the integrity of scientific research and defending it from political slander and manipulation. For example, I have met the wonderful Ivan Oransky who keeps track of all of the retracted scientific papers, and the reasons for which they are retracted. I have the database (giggle, giggle) It’s here.
Many years ago, I thought that if I kept up with the top fifty public intellectuals, then I could have a good handle on remaining immune from the populist froth that burdens the American public. It turned out that I both had the capacity and the need for more than just fifty. I figured, I’ll just read all the Stephen Pinker and all the Michael Shermer and all the Nassim Taleb. Not enough. I kept discovering more. So while I still have the tag of T50 there’s more to it, and now I have to figure out a way to share all that. Necessity being the mother of invention, I’m looking at the ways in which academics are publishing and sharing data. It’s a very different world from that of enterprise computing, which I know. So my first step is to integrate S3 object storage with my expanding T50 list such that I can put documents and data of interest into that space. But I digress.
At the conference I attended: Censorship in the Sciences I was impressed with a number of the presentations which pointed me in different directions than I had considered before. Others were somewhat tiresome explicit denotations of the sorts of excesses I am quite familiar with, but would be required reading especially for the people who believe that everyone who criticize Woke is some sort of Trumpist midwit or worse. As a STEM person (more or less) I have been interrogating people I know about the pervasiveness of the oppositional identity-think evangelized by Critical Theory in the Sciences. Some see nothing. Some have been cancelled. We tend to attract the latter at FBT. But we are not the only samizdat in America, and we are not the only ones pushing back.
So here’s the tricky part. What is going on in the Humanities and in society in general that has captured so many of our elite universities and their first-rate wannabes?
Prosocial Moderation
The short answer is a prosocial agenda. ‘Prosocial’ is not the kind of word one usually comes across, but it is something that crosses the fine line of discovery for the sake of knowledge and other aims. Let me quote John McWhorter’s characterization of Woke:
Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic, or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.
So this is one way a prosocial component of aiming the process of discovery warps the steel of academic institutions. It doesn’t melt it.
A less fiery way of bending the steel of academic institutions is to work towards something we might call a Hippocratic barrier to publication. In other words there can be a very diplomatic way of moderating academic publication in service of the prosocial aim of ‘reducing harm’. Now what is harm? Harm might be defined as that which could be interpreted as prejudicial against a group. This might seem to be a clear kind of protocol if you use some Nazi bog standard, but it gets quite muddy very quickly. I got into this controversy years ago over the use of the term ‘gay’ as contrasted to ‘homosexual’. To be brief, homosexual in my consistent use of the term was simply the matter of sexual attraction of individuals, as compared to the politicization of the sexual attraction of individuals. In particular, I paid attention to those who politicized the issues brought to light by the Stonewall Riot. There is a segment of the homosexual population who would never advocate to be married, whose own interpretation of their sexuality was fundamentally rebellious against the very essence of bourgeois conformity exemplified by marriage, ie queer. So would scientific research that reveals antipathy to ‘gay marriage’ be considered harmful? Certainly not categorically. It is in academic publication that such attention to detail is most important, but that doesn’t matter if one is always attempting to editorialize away that which can be considered harmful. Slippery slope, meet gravity.
The Cutting Edge of Marginal Science
Several years ago, before I was documenting my T50 with discipline, I made reference to an economist whose new book held the premise that in America there is no more low hanging economic fruit. Ah I found it. In 2011 I said:
Of course liberalism is shrinking, because the promises it thinks it can make to Americans who cling to Bibles and guns are too expensive and its benefits are so marginal that it finally realizes(?) it will never change all of those minds. There is no more low hanging fruit. There are no more economic rabbits (except in IT industrialization and bioengineering) to pull out of hats. There are already so many chickens in so many pots that the Left has to attack the chicken industry for operating so cheaply.
Yeah that’s a bit polluted, and bioengineering has done nowhere nearly as well as IT industrialization. Yet the fact remains is that there is no more low hanging economic fruit so much as there is an economy of green pork amid the other porcine economies. Elon Musk has destroyed GM and Ford with the greenest cars on the planet, and now haters hate because he made billions. Inconsistent, I know. But still nobody except the new realists are means-testing immigration policy. Who gets to come in, for what kind of jobs at whose expense? Obviously a racial pass for asylum is insufficiently moral or economic for even a midwit immigration policy.
Yet what are we doing on the high side? Our best minds are hamstrung in particle physics. The discovery of the Hadron is basically it, and we didn’t even build an American CERN. I can’t feed my family with hadrons even though we’ve proven they exist, I can’t even promise them theoretical multidimensional string cheese or dark matter corn flakes. But we sure can get umpteen thousand to sign a declaration that climate is getting warmer. Besides iPhones, Ozempic and fentanyl what’s new? Azure, GCP and AWS. That economy isn’t providing better jobs for middle class or working class Americans who still buy [cheap] stuff made in East Asia. BTW, checkout Amazon for the prices of N95 vs KN95 masks. Why are there more KN95? Why don’t they meet the American standard?
Admittedly, as a GenX engineering type, I still think like everything should work like CAPCOM. The regime of academic publishing should work such that all subsystems should roll-call such that they are GO or NO GO. Alas academic publishing is not rocket science, so we have academic advisors, publishers and critics taking many bites off the apples of creativity including those of prosocial self-censorship and various shades of hateration. I don’t get too upset about that because I say that the fundamental engine of our civilization is energy, and I get hopping mad that we don’t do nuclear - that we don’t have plentiful electricity. It’s something we’ve known how to do for decades. Atoms for Peace, remember?
I expect that tools like ConsensusAI will help more of us laymen understand the arcane corners of the cutting edges of academic research. AIs are tireless, so long as there’s enough electricity. I think we’ll find a surplus of good ideas but a deficit of funding to make those ideas reality. There are only so many venture capitalists. There are so many competent CEOs who can bring products to market and maintain profitability. So of course there will be competitive thrash and slack in the supply chain of new businesses that can give us more jobs and buttress our way of life.
But We’re The Good Guys
The angst of some of the presenters concerned me. I live in the peasant world - a world where the overwhelming majority of us, despite the intellectual fights and competition over say, the best LINUX operating system, are left cold, and sometimes left out in the cold. LINUX, as ubiquitous as it is in the server world and as revolutionary as it has created the Open Source world, is never going to win the desktop. In fact, the desktop doesn’t even matter in today’s world of iOS, Android, PS5 and XBox. And Steam if any of you care. We all just seem to want to make movies. (About food, fashion and other recreational pastimes.) So we peasants tend to distrust institutions of higher education.
So why oh why don’t we let the researchers research with our contentious politics and troll storms of misinformation, censorship and cancellation? Because we’re soft. Because the marginal benefit of the thing all academics are trying to prove has little or material effect on our quality of life, unless we’re dying of the exact right kind of disease.
Why do we not revere science in Western Civilization? Because we don’t die of polio.
Because our infant mortality is so low that abortion is an economic choice of preference, because we all live and we’re all comfortable. By we, of course I mean we Americans. In the end, we see billions of dollars spent on cutting edge whatevers, physicists who try to tell us the size of the universe in a country run by a gerontocracy. What’s the biggest asset of ‘the’ Ohio State University? Its football team. So when I see the approaching panic of well-educated thought leaders on the corruption of academic integrity, I equally see the apathy of the ordinary Joe.
I share with that ordinary Joe this aghast feeling that here in America we seem totally incapable of keeping the woke mind virus and politically activist administrators from signing on to craptastic rationales. When we think our our heroes and our salvation, we don’t think of college professors.
How does it happen that someone with the pedigree of Jonathan Rauch, the keynote speaker, has been reduced to saying “We’re the good guys!”. I think it has something to do with that selfsame prosocial attitude. There’s two parts.
Academics have faith that the ends of knowledge for its own sake will benefit the public.
The extent to which academics sacrifice the ease with which they can explain that benefit to the public has, more often than not, altruistic motivations.
So researchers want to benefit the public, and believe the production of knowledge will benefit the public. That it eventually will benefit the public makes the investment in research worthwhile. So it comes as no surprise that such researchers would complain when
The amount of research that benefits the public in their field of expertise declines.
The resources dedicated to that field of research does not contribute to the advance of knowledge.
I have no immediate conclusions from this, but I definitely sense that professors and researchers desperately want to be the good guys, and that motivation to be doing good for the people, when overdone, leads to conflicts of interest. There’s a fine line between instruction and evangelism. That line needs to be brighter.
Every time I see a young person walking the streets with their face in a cellphone, it’s very difficult for me to imagine them reading Pulitzer Prize winning journalism or any educational material that would pass muster for college credit. When I was a youth, there seemed ample reasons for me, besides pure boredom with pop culture, to reach towards the classics for cultural edification. Fifties Jazz is more interesting to listen to than Fifties Rock because I actually understand something about music. So where are all of the music teachers? They’ve gone to work for Spotify and then laid off?
The university across the street from my house was selling and giving away orchestra instruments. They couldn’t maintain interest in orchestral music. I should have gotten a rescue oboe, but I didn’t think quickly enough.
So our society’s calm doesn’t rest so desperately on academic excellence. New research has a marginal impact on our lives because we’re already a first world superpower. “A new study out of the University of…” is new-jabber background noise. Is wine good for the heart or bad for the heart? We’d rather hear a stock tip. We already know nuclear power could give is abundant cheaper electricity, but all the professors on the planet can’t get Wall Street and Washington to do the right thing. All we’re getting are marginally improved consumer electronics (and dishwashers that take 90 minutes).
Influencers are more effective than professors. Who is going to fix those metaphysics and economics? Put on your thinking caps.
We strove...and won?