The Innumeracy of Intellectuals (2008)
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A short time ago, I was involved in debate over instituting a new affirmative action program at my university. "We're failing this group terribly! We must do something about this!" came the rallying cry.
I responded with university admissions statistics, high school graduation statistics, and census statistics, showing that the largest reason behind our apparent lack of members of that group was that we were an urban institution which drew students mostly from the local area, and members of that group lived mostly in rural areas where the population as a whole tended to attend more rural institutions. (Canada has far more of a trend towards attending "nearby" post-secondary institutions than the US does.)
I was accused of trying to confuse the issue "by introducing numbers and percentages", and the admissions policy was adopted.
For the record, I have a degree in CS and Philosophy, so its awfully tough to "stick to the liberal arts".
(And the philosophers aren't the problem... although that might be partly because our philosophy department is quite strong on logic.)
"Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject."
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/verbal-vs-mat...
It is a job one gets by deciding to do it, sticking to it, paying one's dues over a long period, cultivating connections, building a personal brand. Like so many other jobs...
Professors should be respected in direct proportion to their actually demonstrated knowledge, and only in the fields where that knowledge has been demonstrated... other than this we should not respect them more than teachers of high school or elementary school, who usually have greater expertise and dedication in teaching.
So in at least some cases, people get odd combinations of degrees more by accident than design.
It turns out that philosophy and programming are distressfully similar. You build a structure out of logic and feel proud of yourself until somebody finds a bug, and then you scramble around trying to reassemble your logic structure so it doesn't have the bug. The main difference is that you can test a program, so the turnaround time is measured in minutes rather than, in some cases, centuries.
Totally a case of selection bias, given I'm one of those and notice them, but I've long been convinced that a love of systems creation and debugging is the common attribute between philosophers and sysadmins.
Freshman year I came in as Computer Science and took a class called Minds and Machines that was a sort of intro to philosophy and cognitive science (two years later, the school got their Cognitive Science degree approved/accredited and the Minds and Machines program because the Cognitive Science program)
I love Computer Science but I really love writing and ethics[1]. I love communication and the art (and science) of effectively conveying ideas. I'd probably love advertising, to be honest.
I love all majors and subjects though so maybe that's not accurate enough. Anyway I went into college wanting to do science, and I picked Computer Science because it had the lowest do-your-own-thing cost. If a Biologist or Engineer wants to do his own thing he may need a lab or machining equipment. Prices for that stuff has really come down in the last 50 years but its nowhere near CS. All you need is a computer. I loved the idea that my only restriction to making things was time. It was the people's major! (cue communist imagery)
I had no idea about this whole world of humanities until I took that first class. The teacher was also my advisor-to-be if I dual majored and the logic part of the Phil curriculum had its own appeal. So many more opportunities to write papers than my CS classes!
If I had to do college all over again I'd probably try to do English/Philosophy/CS, with perhaps CS as the minor. I have enormous respect for liberal arts majors, but more-so than other majors, and I think this is very important, the value of humanities degrees are very much what you put into them. It didn't seem hard in my school at least to get a Phil/Communications/English degree compared to a STEM degree, but that in itself only meant that what you got out of a humanities degree it was what you put in. I definitely found myself finding humanities majors far, far more socially capable than the engineer majors, almost to an embarassing degree.[2]
Anyway I do think the two majors compliment each other. It seems only natural, especially with the intersection of Logic. But I also think it compliments CS because I think the largest deficiency in every other CS and engineering grad I've met is that they have a hard time communicating their ideas and debating others effectively. Philosophy helps with that. A lot, in my opinion.
[1] in the Aristotelian/Kant/Mill/Humanity's greater good/etc sense of the word, not the vague-ideas-gotten-by-parents-and-peers sense which is usually picked up on (see for instance almost the entire abortion debate)
[2] I'm quite the introvert and it took me a long time to overcome the social interaction thing that seemed to plague so many of my peers in college. I was supremely shy as a kid and generally liked to hide behind my mom whenever we went somewhere. My 8th grade class was just 21 people (two groups of 10 and 11), and my high school was just 500-600 people. I was unused to, well, interaction.
In my freshman year of college it hit me. My college (RPI) was known for being an introverted place and I met so many great people who almost literally never left their rooms. Great minds and personalities who were self-sequestered from the world.
It felt tragic sometimes. I met and found a lot of people wanted to meet people but had a great fear of simply being in public spaces more and exchanging pleasantries. Others still, and this was not an uncommon opinion, would disparage the idea of small talk as useless. It's funny but, of all places, once I came to college and met enough varied and amazing people I became vastly, vastly less shy. It just wasn't worth it to be shy when there were so many great people to meet.
I've been in rooms of really smart technical people who have a child-like understanding of social and cultural issues that effect them (discussion about gender on HN can be a great example of this). At the same time I've been in rooms of extremely well read humanists who cringe at any attempt to understand the world through mathematical models. Both of these groups exhibit a clear intellectual poverty that limits their overall understanding of the world.
The worst part isn't merely that each group has such ignorance of the other's domain, but that each will proudly defend this ignorance. The "enjoy working at starbucks" and "buzzes like a fridge" comments are equally anti-intellectual. The first thing that needs to change is this attitude.
If the answers to these questions are negative, then in what way can Foucault be put on the same level as the theory of probability, so that it is a shameful thing not to know anything about what Foucault says?
More to the point, why should one be proud of a reductionistic and truncated worldview?
For example, I liked Thus Spoke Zarathrusta's concept of the Ubermensch as a goal for aspiration, but realized I would never want to deify myself as much as Nietzsche espoused.
The universe has never asked my input into anything before. Why should it care whether any aspect of itself resonates with my belief system?
I've seen what happens when people evaluate new ideas based largely on whether they resonate with their belief systems. The world doesn't need any more votes on whether the sea level is rising or whether the human genome is similar to the chimp genome because Jesus.
If you question whether this has any relevance to morality, for example, ask yourself why morality shouldn't be evaluated empirically. Might yield better results than channeling a mythologized goatherd.
This is deliberately misstating the position, something a philosopher should be acutely aware of and avoid entirely.
The problem with philosophy is, where is the falsification? How can a philosophical position be refuted and discredited in the way phlogiston has been?
Philosophy postulates interesting questions, and the mass of previous philosophers provides some direction in the exploration of said questions - the expectation that these questions even have an answer, much less a falsifiable one, is unreasonable.
So if philosophy is art, why do some philosophers think it needs to be respected on the same level as physics when it comes to understanding the world?
Is there any evidence or argument that could possibly change your mind about this?
"Because religion deserves to be respected as much as physics when it comes to understanding the world."
Is that statement still true?
Even I don't understand it. (It's very deep.)
However, why should you question it just because it hasn't bothered to explain itself to you on your terms? Why should it explain itself to you at all? Who do you think you are all of a sudden?
Certainly there are fields that are intentionally obfuscated and impenetrable. That doesn't mean the manner in which they are tangled is not outside comprehensibility, as your simple constructed example demonstrates.
The spirit of what I was saying is, if lots of people are talking about Smilism, then if you want to have a conversation with those people you will have to examine Smilism on its own turf.
No one's saying you have to play with other people, but if you do, you better play nice.
On the other hand, people that wish to spread or communicate their ideas are well motivated to translate them into other peoples' terms. So it's not that I'm some VIP, it's that--for instance--Democrats want to explain Obama's health bill in clear but simple terms.
Now, with Foucault, there is less motivation to do so. Partly because Philosophy is one of those fields in which thinkers can benefit from obfuscation, and partly because Philosophy is one of those fields that relies on the self-motivation of its students.
This isn't true in physics. Why is it true in philosophy? Do philosophers see this as a problem?
> Philosophy is one of those fields that relies on the self-motivation of its students.
So do all fields.
You've just repeated more or less exactly what you initially said in this thread. This probably indicates that you're not making enough effort to understand why people are saying what they're saying.
Yes, it also indicates, perhaps, that people aren't really understanding _you_. But if you find yourself repeating the same button, you're still not doing any additional work in the conversation.
Going back to your initial post:
>How does one determine whether Foucault's statements are true or not?
Thinking about them. Talking about them with others. All of the obvious answers.
>At any rate, why should I accept them?
You should accept them _conditionally_--i.e., not necessarily incorporate them into your actual beliefs--because if you want to have conversations with the loads of people that take Foucault seriously, _you will have to play nice_.
All the dude said was that he really felt Foucault was important. You pretty much just disagree with him, which is, you know, fine; but instead of saying "I find Foucault to be less useful for such-and-such a reason"--a statement I suspect you cannot construct because you actually don't know anything about Foucault--you are pointedly and obviously resisting the idea that Foucault could have any value.
In your very question you assume the existence of an ethical system which distributes values to systems of knowledge and yet that ethical system cannot be verified or tested the way that you demand all meaningful such systems should be.
The answer to why Foucault is important is the same as the answer to why you hold a belief system which itself denies it's own value.
If I can't reliably determine that what he says is actually true or applicable to anything then there is no more reason for me to buy into his opinions than those of the Catholic church or the guy next door. Possibly less. I don't have to live with Foucault and I can't hurt his feelings, at any rate.
alternately, perhaps this box is a subset of knowing. it's conceivable. and necessarily, the whole wouldn't follow the same rules as the part. it could be a challenge to leave our box, like learning a foreign language without cognates. i mean, it does all sound like noise, doesn't it? gives me such a headache.
This grossly misunderstands science. If you think science is just everything we can fit in a box you've missed the past few centuries and still think everything is ultimately down to which religious leader has the most followers who haven't died of religion yet.
If you demand pithy quotes, here's one: Science is the process by which we gradually learn to stop fooling ourselves about things.
Remember, asking why the sun rises in the East was once a moral and philosophical question.
no, I don't. you misunderstand. willfully? or just hubris?
box == frame of reference == paradigm == system of thought == set of axioms, habits, etc, that fit together into a semi-cohesive whole.
you may, or course, not be able to perceive the box as a box, and invert the negative space into something substantial. that is, you may not be smart enough to understand, to avoid the wrong questions.
Science is the process of changing boxes based on new evidence, without being constrained by preconceptions.
I also don't generally think as scientists we can afford to be ignorant of the humanities in general, though many people can afford to ignore parts. There is a lot of physics that suffers from "bad metaphysics" precisely because of its practitioners reinventing metaphysics, in the guise of "interpretations" of physics, when they are unaware of obvious problems that arise, which even a small amount of reading would've made them aware of. And there's a lot of work in artificial intelligence that makes more sense with a humanities background.
Oddly this seems to be a recent phenomenon. Early 20th century physicists were very well-read in philosophy, and their interpretations are accordingly sophisticated and rarely run into novice problems. Same with mathematicians; it's hard to even separate whether someone like Frege was a mathematician or philosopher. Some is unavoidable due to increasing specialization, but if anything that would seem to call for more humility, not extra arrogance that we know how to solve the philosophical problems that we don't time to study in as much depth as Einstein/Planck/Bohr/etc. did...
I'd trace some of it (on both sides) to a general academic tendency to want to rationalize why the fields you didn't specialize in and don't know about aren't that important to know about. There's an only half-joke that academics always want to reduce every field to their own: to an economist everything is analyzable with economic tools, to a sociologist everything is culture, to a physicist everything is physics and its minor epiphenomena, to a philosopher everything is philosophy plus implementation details, to a dynamical systems theorist everything is just instantiations of dynamical systems, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russells_paradox
Philosophy's usefulness to Science died off in the early 20th century for a reason.
Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson commented upon this very issue in their Poetry of Science talk. Very insightful:
I'm more thinking of physicists who, especially in their later career, decide to write what are essentially philosophy works, only they: 1) don't acknowledge them as such; and 2) they are therefore often not as good as they could be, and sometimes bad. For example, Roger Penrose's stuff about physics and consciousness is a bit strange, and it probably wouldn't hurt if he cared more about existing work in philosophy of mind. And Hawking's most recent book has good science, and an interesting philosophical proposal of "model-dependent realism", but strangely refuses to consider it to be a philosophy proposal or discuss relevant existing positions.
Physicists veering off towards "big-picture" philosophy-ish stuff later in their careers isn't new, but this sort of seat-of-your-pants approach seems newer. Looking at the philosophy-oriented works Max Planck wrote later in his career, for example, he's impressively well-read in both physics and philosophy.
If anything, the rise of analytic philosophy and the introduction of greater logical rigor to philosophy in the early 20th century made it relevant again after a largely fruitless 19th century. Go ahead and ask a scientist whether Popper or Hegel is more useful.
In chapter 7 of "Dreams of a Final Theory", Steven Weinberg argues that philosophy has been mostly useless or even harmful for physicists, and whatever positive effects some philosophical theories might have had, had to do with undoing the harm done by other philosophical theories.
Weinberg is not hostile towards philosophy, he has warm words for it and says he enjoys reading certain philosophers, he just acknowledges that philosophy is not at all helpful in doing science. Exact quote: "I know of no one who has participated actively in the advance of physics in the postwar period whose research has been significantly helped by the work of philosophers." (Weinberg considers this surprising, and contrasts it with mathematics, which is extremely useful even though there is no reason why it should be.)
Bertrand Russell and Frege are part of philosophy of science, a relatively recent period in philosophy.
It is widely accepted that philosophy of science was initiated by Immanuel Kant (late 18th century) in the Western world, and since then, philosophers have been trying to give solutions to some of the problems he first posed.
What's more, most of the Western world at the end of the 18th century underwent a period called Enlightenment. This meant, all of a sudden, there was a huge emphasis on science and empiricism throughout all parts of society (Academia included, of course).
Before that, 'philosophy of science' was known as (observations on) natural history, and then the term 'natural philosophy' was created.
Thus, since mathematics is the language of science, this is why you can't/couldn't tell whether a philosopher of science was a mathematician or a philosopher.
Even nowadays, most programmes (my own research covers Canada and major American universities) only offer philosophy of science courses, but many do not explicitly state 'philosophy of science'. I know this because I almost majored in philosophy, but I specifically wanted to go away from this branch and instead wanted to specialize in pre-Socratic philosophy, but there were no programmes dedicated to this.
As for my personal opinion on students/teachers of science vs. arts, I feel many science students lack an appreciation of philosophy and how much it did for the sciences in its early years. Most science majors shove philosophy with the rest of the arts, but, as an arts major, philosophy is the hardest arts subject and can be equally demanding as a physics course, because it is the only subject which requires an extremely rigorous knowledge of science and arts. And there are simply very few people who hold such knowledge. Philosophy is the ultimate interdisciplinary subject where in a given class, you can talk about the laws of speed and light, 18th century subtexts vis-à-vis slavery, and biology (the growth process of plants and trees).
Could you give examples? I'm not sure what you're referring to.
Perhaps knowing maths is a bit like having dirty fingernails from doing manual labor. A certain class of people is proud of not having to do manual labor, and hence they take pride in their clean and long fingernails. Others will despise them and value "real work" higher.
Never tell this to someone who pursues pure mathematics. It's so absolutely opposite their whole mindset that math should focus on anything other than the beauty of mathematics that comparing it to manual labor may well make their heads explode.
I don't think you really mean ignorance in the humanities, you mean ignorance in philosophy. Being able to distinguish all the various cantatas of Bach is the most trivial of trivialities. More broadly, I suspect talking about "the humanities" as a category is worse than useless, because you get passionate defenses of literacy in reply to weeping and moaning over the sad state of modern dance.
Talk about literacy, philosophy, history. Talk about theater and dance. Talk about visual art and music. Talk about rhetoric and economics.
In fact, here is direct textual evidence contradicting your caricaturization:
"This is the exact same chippiness I hear from Physics majors who are annoyed at having to take liberal arts classes in order to graduate. The only difference is that Terrance can expect to get a sympathetic hearing from much of the academy, where the grousing of Physics majors is written off as whining by nerds who badly need to expand their narrow minds."
I give you an F in Reading, and a B in Rhetoric. I concur entirely that the lack of intellectual breadth amongst both technical and non-technical academics is quite obnoxious, and I'd argue that the rather pointlessly competitive nature of academic subfield is a holdover from when academics were basically young courtiers trying to secure themselves a nice sinecure. Sometimes this energy can produce great things, I'd venture that at this point we are just making the remarkable research discoveries that are largely just waiting around for some humble systematic work, further away.
At root it seems to be an epistemological problem, complicated in higher learning by over-specialization in all disciplines.
While I won't directly take on your social signaling claim, there are some humanities which have clear utility (while also functioning as social signals), for example knowing the precise meaning and usage of a large set of words. People in the academy are not disdained for having this practical facility.
An adjusted version of your claim: I think that in some countries (including the U.S.) math & hard science are tarnished through their association with poorly-protected and therefore indifferently remunerated professions, such as accounting, pharmacology, and engineering. Most educated people I encounter would, all things being equal, like to be good at math, but some let themselves off a little easy. Trying and being bad at history would make you dumber than a lawyer, which feels okay; trying and being bad at algebra makes you dumber than an accountant, which is humiliating--so better not to try.
Really? Just how do you think ships (and airplanes while over water) navigated before GPS? How do you think the radius (and from that and the density, the mass) of the earth was determined? Would you be able to drive your car to work if not for the effort of paleontologists (many of whom work for the oil industry)?
All the astronomy needed for navigation was completed in prehistoric times, as far as I know. Modern astronomy, I think, has nothing to contribute.
> How do you think the radius (and from that and the density, the mass) of the earth was determined?
Eratosthenes modeled Earth as a sphere and the sun as an infinitely distant light source; what is the astronomy there, other than the common sense idea that the sun is very far away?
I think you could also have mentioned how astronomy inspired Newton's work, which has utility. But the point here is really about modern astronomy as a field of study: dark matter, black holes, etc. -- these are not "immediately useful" topics. Studying them does not get "one's hands dirty" because it's preparation for day labor.
> Would you be able to drive your car to work if not for the effort of paleontologists (many of whom work for the oil industry)?
Yes, I think so; a few paleontological techniques are useful for exploration, but it is not a major (or essential) tool, though many geological techniques are; exploration began far before paleontologists were involved.
The standard I was applying was really that certain fields of science are as superficially impractical as humanities like history or literature. A few paleontologists employed in industry wouldn't undermine that; a few historians get picked up by industry too (arts, law, etc.).
I’m a designer at heart, but my work is firmly in the hard sciences. I’m excited about what I do, and it shows. That’s what gets people interested—ferocity, passion.
You have to be able to describe your work in accessible terms, so that other people can appreciate it without having to understand it in depth. Not all people want to understand everything—it’s hard work. Work that we hackers can take for granted because, by our nature, we enjoy it.
Not just that they don't know what a boson is, but they don't really know what particles are, or what energy is, or what mass is. And so when you need to explain what the Higgs Boson is you need to give the simple lies we tell people when we explain physics
I live in the UK. BBC Radio 4 has a "flagship" news and current affairs programme called 'Today'.[1] Science is routinely handled as if the audience are idiots, while arts are given free range to be reasonably esoteric.
[1] Today website (http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/default.stm)
Your second statement is the core issue; pretense has nothing to do with it. The sciences are harder to care about because reaping the rewards of science requires reaching a minimal level of competence.
In art or literature teachers are happy to pass students who never really grasp the basics of how literature is constructed and interpreted. They only demand one thing: that you put enough effort into studying basic critical techniques that you learn to imitate them somewhat. Even that is subordinate to their main hope, which is that you see something in a work of art or literature that inspires a new perspective about something in your life or in the world.
A literature class built around those standards is a valuable and enriching experience, and it can even be valuable and enriching for someone really competent who shares the same classroom with people who aren't.
How could that be accomplished in math or science? If you only require that the students engage with the experience of investigating math or science, and you don't require that they develop competence at applying scientific knowledge, then the students will develop appreciation for the field and perhaps some good will and appreciation for people who are competent, but they won't learn anything useful they can apply in their own lives. They won't learn to read popular science articles intelligently. They won't gain a better understanding of their own health. The only positive outcome is that they might believe that scientists are okay people after all and not scary soulless monsters. (A lot of people in academia would consider that a negative outcome anyway.)
To illustrate the contrast, suppose I believe my spouse is cheating on me, and I think of Richard III and recognize the same feelings of anger and paranoia in Richard III's feelings towards his wife, and I gain a richer perspective on the possibility that my spouse is cheating on me. By mandatory general education standards, academia is willing to grant that I have successfully engaged with literature. It doesn't matter whether I understood Shakespeare's devices correctly or how many layers of meaning I penetrated. It doesn't even matter that I got Richard III and Othello mixed up. What matters is that my range and depth of understandings was enriched by my reading of the play. Most importantly, it doesn't matter whether my beliefs about my spouse's behavior are accurate or not. If I decide to trust my spouse, and four years and two children later I find out that my suspicions were founded all along, and two kids grow up with divorced mistrustful parents, then that is not a failure of my literary education.
In contrast to the literary example, if I read the CDC web site about MRSA and then read a web site that says all so-called infections are actually manifestations of nutritional imbalances, and then I decide it's perfectly appropriate to visit my grandmother in the hospital with an uncovered wound on my arm while she's recovering from surgery, then that's a complete failure of my science education, even though I engaged with writing about infection and enriched my range and depth of understandings about infection. Right answers may not be important to the process of doing science, but they are vital to reaping its rewards.
The difference is that art and literature fill the same role that Bertrand Russell described for philosophy (quote from a recent HN thread):
Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation....
This is the pragmatic approach to literature that colleges would like all graduates to appreciate. That means introductory literature classes can be enriching without demanding that everyone achieve any basic competence at literary analysis. Introductory science courses are useless unless the students achieve some basic level of competence. That means that mandatory science education is a very different proposition from mandatory art and literature courses. The minimum useful standard is much, much higher (unless the purpose of science education is merely to teach people to trust mainstream authorities.)
And by the same argument: where are today's equivalent textbooks for the rich? Our wealth gap is as big as ever, yet I see no books even for the rich that are so advanced.
I seem to recall a 19th-C. MIT entrance exam as comparable to or maybe behind what my better high-school classmates learned.
[0]: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/497891/Renaissance...
Thus what is particularly sad is not the fact that some subject or another is avoided and ignored by (intellectually) lazy people but that such people, proud of their ignorance, nowadays pass for intellectuals.
'My subject is more important than yours, so I am not going to waste time learning from you' is just a post-justification for being a dullard and a bigot.
So, learn from these smart people. Fake it and bask in it!
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/is-algebra-...
I find it a bit sad how he thinks that people should be taught long division, which is what we have calculators for, but algebra is a step too far. The only reason I think people should be taught arithmetic is so that they understand algebra. After algebra, Calculus I for people who want to actually be knowledgeable about the world around them (No heavy series and no multivariate), and then I don't care what they do, because I trust that they understand how the world works.
Instead, Hacker suggests that we drill those future artists and writers on duplicating the functions of a calculator for 12 years, and then throw them into the voting booth. Bleah.
That is not so much caused by a lack of math as it is a surplus of delusional optimism. No amount of math will ever beat that. Not only is it a bad example, I can't think of any better examples, and apparently neither can the author.
It may be that my utter incompetence in math makes me less than objective, but I fail to see any convincing argument in the entire article.