The Value of Science (1955) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Value of Science (1955) [pdf]

math.ucla.edu

28 pointsbriantmaurer3 comments

> From time to time people suggest to me that scientists ought to give more consideration to social problems – especially that they should be more responsible in considering the impact of science on society. [...]

> we do think about these problems from time to time, but we don’t put a full-time effort into them – the reasons being that we know we don’t have any magic formula for solving social problems, that social problems are very much harder than scientific ones, and that we usually don’t get anywhere when we do think about them.

> I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy – and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he sounds as naive as anyone untrained in the matter.

I'm a huge fan of Feynman, but I think this line of thinking is a cop-out. There's no principled reason that social problems are "unscientific problems." Surely there are patterns behind why humans are so susceptible to war, and understanding those patterns can help us overcome some of our destructive natural tendencies. There are better and worse ways to organize society to encourage human flourishing, and the study of these ways is not beyond application of the scientific method.

Towards the end of the essay he hits on a more productive line of thought: Science teaches us to be aware of our own ignorance, to be willing to adjust our view of the world based on evidence. That is, not to dig in, and let our reasoning be entirely motivated by the desire to believe what we believe in already, because it is how we would like the world to work.

In that way, a scientist (or anyone able to think more rationally) looking at "non-scientific" social problems does in fact have a leg up on the general population in reaching more reasonable solutions to social problems; at least to the extent that the scientist has internalized looking objectively at the evidence and does not allow her worldview to overstep its bounds.

So I do think that scientists have a responsibility to consider social problems seriously; or at least acknowledge that they are not outside the bounds of science, or of scientific thinking. Sam Harris discusses in particular how morality is not beyond the realm of science in "The Moral Landscape," which is a great book.

There are a few things to consider here. The first quote is distinct from the rest in that it refers specifically to the impact of science on society, which is rarely of concern to the pure scientist, who seeks only to discover more about the world. I'm also not sure that the social problems you describe as scientific were well known or necessarily even established as scientific fields during Feynman's life, I'd guess they weren't. E.g. psychology and sociology have made leaps and bounds in the past few years in being accepted as sciences. Beyond that, there is a distinction we have to draw between things that are science and things that feel like science. It's incredibly hard to reason about causality in such complex systems as you describe, though many have tried by attempting to apply what really feels like the scientific method to the problem, but there are often far far far too many variables to isolate.

Great writing. I'm sure though that today, social networking and advertising companies, election campaign planners, and many other "big data" enterprises, have a completely different answer to the question of whether social problems and social behaviors can be studied causally and scientifically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com