Science vs Common Sense vs SCIENCE!

Regarding the recent conversations of L.P.K. and J.C.

¹

There has been an interesting back and forth this past week between Luc Koch and John Carter² about the nature of science (the one we do), common sense and Science (the one we are supposed to obey.) I don’t want to go in point by point, because there are a lot and I don’t really disagree with lots of it, but there are a few themes I want to mention and maybe pull back on a little, because I don’t know that I really agree with lots of it, either. I mean, good lord, it drifts into epistemology and the nature of the brain’s division of thought and how that affects how we think, etc.; how could there not be something to both agree and disagree with there!

science is applied common sense, if you have remarkably good common sense

JC makes a number of good points around this, centrally that science (or Science) isn’t a magical communion with Truth that only the anointed few can engage upon, bringing the Word back to the rest of us for our betterment. Science (small s) is essentially just common sense applied to “how do I figure out if this is true or not?” and the sort of thing anyone who has the mental discipline and relevant facts can do. Empirically, plenty of laymen have looked over the output of both science and Science and found errors or built upon it to find new discoveries. Those letters after our names do not imply anything more than that we have had more training on the facts and the mental discipline of the field than some others.

What I want to poke at a bit, however, is how difficult that mental discipline part is, along with how important questioning those facts are. Second one first.

The biggest problem I have seen with students of science, and laymen outside of the academy, is that they confuse knowing “facts³” and trivia with scientific knowledge. This is partially correct, in that you need to know a lot of stuff to figure other stuff out, but their knowledge is fragmented, untested, and well, just a bunch of trivia. Rarely, if ever, are they in a position to use that information to affect reality, but never the less they proclaim “I love science!” as they talk about how cool butterfly wing scales are or how horrific duck genitalia are.

And that’s fine, so far as it goes. I like learning about animals, too. More pernicious are facts like “Ancient Rome had less income inequality than modern America.”⁴ This is a little bit of a different fact than descriptions of duck penises. One has to understand what they mean by “inequality” and how it is measured, how well those measurements work when looking at 2000 year old scraps of data from a civilization that wasn’t collecting the information with that intent in mind, how you even compare “wealth” of slaves who don’t even own themselves entirely with modern poor, how one measures non-monetary income (in kind transactions are immensely important in pre-modern economies), among other things. Without interrogating all those aspects and more, one can’t really tell if that fact is true or not. Most people erroneously just assume “Well, a Science man said it, and they don’t say things that aren’t true, so it must be true!”

Even if it true, however, there’s another important point: should we even care? Is income inequality inherently bad? Would we be willing to trade income for, say, some rights like “not being a slave”? Would we be willing to trade inequality for technology that allows some people to be terrifically productive compared to others, and so make disproportionately more income while providing a better standard of life for everyone?

These are some of the mental discipline issues at play. We need the mental discipline to tell our emotional bits to shut up and let us examine things without jumping to the conclusions we want. We need to think through received facts and ask “Is this true? If so, what else would have to be true? What does this fact change that I think is true? How would I know? How can I test that?” and a long litany of similar questions. We also have to consider “Is this actually implying something is inherently good or bad, or am I just reacting to emotionally charged words?”

That last one is super important, because most people’s common sense cleaves more to “Does it sound nice and feel right?” than to “Interrogate that! Believe nothing on someone else’s say so!” In economics, at least, most people’s common sense is complete crap. As Caplan discusses in “Myth of the Rational Voter” the average person has terrible intuitions and common sense when it comes to markets, trade, where prices come from, etc. Which is really strange, because we are immersed in arms length markets and trade for most of our lives, yet we only generally develop an intuition for how things work in our particular field of work, and apparently believe that every other industry is different than ours own. Our common sense fails us in a way that F.A. Hayek described as trying to apply the logic of how the family works to how impersonal relationships in markets work. In other words, most people’s common sense leads them to desire socialism.

Yet, normal people can learn this mental discipline. It is just a bit awkward, so awkward that many trained as economists don’t learn it, either. It is awkward because it is counter to our intuitions, and even a pile of facts won’t help form better intuitions and common sense without a lot of work.

Disciplined thinking across different intellectual areas is remarkably difficult for humans. We are pretty good at disciplining our thinking when we get feed back from the environment, that is, when we have to be disciplined to get the outcomes we want in some controllable situation we have information about. People are often pretty sharp at figuring out how to get what they want out of their job processes⁵, for example. It is very difficult to keep that discipline to our common sense when addressing other fields where we are not really active and most of the rewards come down to “agreeing with everyone else to show I am smart and know the things people in this group are supposed to know.”

Finding the truth, then, is often a matter of rediscovering what we have known all along.

This is… true perhaps, but in a very misleading way.

Humans do have a hard time building new intuitions based on scads of data. There is a huge difference between “knowing” how to do something based on having read a book about how to do it, and “knowing” how to do it based on having done it a lot successfully.

This is partially due to the distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge.

• Explicit knowledge is the sort of thing you can write down and convey to another person. I can write down my phone number, hand you the paper, and now you know my phone number for all practical purposes. I can give you directions to my house from the grocery store and you can get there roughly as well as I can⁶. I can both explicate the knowledge, and you can internalize it, without notable loss of information.

• Implicit knowledge is the sort of thing you can’t explain. I can describe my mom to you, but chances are really slim you would then recognize her at the old ladies club. I can tell you my knee hurts, but I can’t get you to understand exactly how much⁷. I can hit a baseball with a bat⁸, but literally everything I have been told about how to do it is wrong and does nothing.

For example, I am teaching my oldest daughter how to swim. I can explain to her how to do a breast stroke or tuck and roll into a surface dive, and she can explain it back and demonstrate what to do, but actually doing it is tough. It isn’t that she isn’t listening or following directions; that’s the reason I am not teaching the two youngest. It is that she just doesn’t know how to get her body to do what she wants yet. Going to the pool for two hours a week isn’t enough to get an ambivalently athletic 8 year old proficient in the pool, no matter the quality of instruction⁹. You can’t learn to swim by watching TV and then hop into the pool and do it perfectly; better to spend the TV time in the pool without instruction at all and just figure out how to get your body to move around in the water.

Why bring that up? Because when LPK quotes Iain McGilchrist writing:

An understanding can never be given to another; it has to be awoken within them, and so must be there, in latent form already.

what is being awoken is not an understanding of some new thing in itself, but rather understanding of another thing that can then be applied. In other words, you explain something and someone says “Oh, it is like [this]. That makes sense.” where [this] is something else they understand and can apply. Humans learn by analogy, metaphor and similes. That’s why we have at least three words for roughly the same idea.

Over a period of time working with something, say swimming in a pool, we get a feel, a sense of how it works. We can’t really put it into words because it is not all conscious, sequential thought, but over a period we just get it. Not instinct, because we had to learn and figure things out, but not all explicit memorization of facts and relationships, either. After a while, we just have an intuition of how to move around such that we get ourselves where we want to be in the water.

Then we try to swim in a river, and damned near drown. Why? Well, someone told us “Be careful, there is a lot of current towards the middle there.” We listened, and even understood what all the words meant. Then we got out that way and holy crap, we are suddenly very far from where we started and really tired just from trying to stay in place. What the hell just happened? An entire swimming pool of water just moved past you at 10 miles per hour, followed by another, and another, that’s what.

In a sense we knew that already, but we weren’t prepared because we had no frame of reference, no experiential analogy that prepared us for what that was going to be like. We knew there was “a lot of current”, and we knew that meant “fast moving water” but still we were not prepared.

Yet we could be. The reverse happened to me at a pool, oddly enough. I had spent some time swimming in rivers and experienced that shift from slow moving close to the shore to what the hell?! faster water. So when visiting a community center pool with a river whirl pool area¹⁰ that was essentially a side channel that sucked you in and flushed you through 25 yards narrow pool before dropping you into a large circle whirlpool area with one other exit, it was rather surprising to discover but not a problem¹¹. I immediately understood it was like a river and didn’t try and fight the current and just adjusted my swimming angle to drop me where I wanted to go. Watching the kids navigate that (with innertubes of course) was kind of hilarious by comparison, because their intuition was to fight the water the whole way. They had no latent knowledge of the right answer, nothing to “rediscover”.

Because we don’t rediscover latent knowledge when we learn new things. We get a basic understanding because we apply patterns and intuitions from other things we know to the new situation. We don’t really understand it until we form new intuitions proper to the new subject.

What is that an important distinction? Because often we apply wildly inappropriate analogies to novel situations. Yes, lions are big cats. No, nothing about how your house cat can be expected to behave should be applied to lions beyond “If its feet are all pointed at you, it is going to pounce with all its pointy bits out.” More generally, humans constantly ascribe human traits to non-human beings and objects¹². One of humanities biggest issues when it comes to “common sense” is that we try to apply the behavior of what we understand best, people, to things that are just not people. We are not discovering latent knowledge of reality when we say “Awww, look how big that chimpanzee is smiling at us! He must like us!” We are making a very large error.

Good educators understand this. The most effective teaching works with what your student already knows and is interested in, and frames the new ideas in that. Granted, this is somewhat easier with economics than, say, organic chemistry, but then that is probably why so many chemists hated organic chemistry. If you can find out what your student already has a good intuitive understanding of¹³, and know enough about that subject to frame your topic in terms of that, you can get them to a basic understanding pretty quickly. The task that remains is to tune the repurposed intuition to the new subject, which is what develops into expertise and real understanding.

Where’s that hobby horse?

So, what is the real problem here? Why do we care whether or not people consider scientists who do Science to be infallible? Surely they are just people following another silly cult, and we don’t get worked up about religions we don’t agree with. I mean, up until they start mutilating children and killing people, at least.

Well, because even if you don’t care about Science, Science cares about you. Small s science is a good way to figure out what is more or less true, in our blind, groping fashion. The problem is that people who do science and, at bottom, people, and that means they care a lot about status and power¹⁴.

Status for a scientist generally means publishing novel and innovative things that other scientists care about. That has a tendency to push towards writing articles about how Roman aristocrats were closer in income to their slaves than Elon Musk is to someone on fixed income disability or something. It is different from what many scientists think, for obvious reasons, yet it conforms enough to what many would like to be true that it gets published.

The other source of status for scientists, however, are those who want to use their work to further ends not scientific or engineering, but political.

That’s where the big problems come in, and why the social sciences were the first to sink into a useless morass. Once people started looking to scientists¹⁵ for answers on how to fix society it created a market for normative sociology, that is, the study of what ought to be causing society’s problems.

Because once politicians get involved, the question isn’t how to solve a specific problem. No, no, that’s the province of little people operating with their own resources. What a politician asks is “What problems can I solve by doing exactly what I wanted to do in any case?” That is, a politician starts with some actions or outcomes as a goal, then searches for scientists to provide reasons for why that action solves a problem that should be solved.

Generally, those outcomes will be something along the lines of “Give me more money to distribute to my friends” or “Give me more power to determine who gets money.” Sometimes, however, it will simply be “Make those people stop doing what I don’t like, and make them start doing what I do like.”

If those sound overly venal to you, consider, well, modern politics. Where is all that “Build Back Better” money going? Why do we spend so much time fighting about what pronouns we use to talk about someone to a third party? Why the hell is it any of my business who or what you want to fuck, and why are you demanding that I celebrate it to have a goddamned job? Why couldn’t I have drowned in the river in high school so I didn’t have to deal with this shit?

*ahem*

The problem with science is that it became a tool of politics, funded by politics for political purposes, and politics is evil. If you ever worried about science being bent towards destructive purposes by way of making more effective bombs to destroy all life on Earth in the name of war, you should be more worried about science being bent towards bettering mankind by way of controlling people. At least the bombs will actually work and we know what they will do; can you really say that about the chains of terrible social policies that Science has advocated over the years?

The problem with science is that it has become a justification for control of people, by people. Show how undesired behavior X leads to undesirable outcome Y, and you are good to go. Demonstrate how one’s unwanted life outcomes are the result of shadowy forces of the opposition, you get funding for a research center. Power loves nothing more than to claim it is being exercised for the oppressed person’s own good.

No politician says “We are drastically increasing our control over your lives, spending trillions of dollars taken from your pockets, all because it serves our egos, and frankly we don’t give a damn about whether it helps or hurts you. In fact, we kind of hope it does hurt a little, because we get kind of a kick out of being able to force you to do things against your will.” That’s the quiet part you aren’t supposed to say out loud, although admittedly they sometimes seem to forget that.

Instead those who would take your money and your freedom say “We are doing this for the good of society. We must protect everyone from irresponsible behaviors that endanger the lives and freedoms of us all. Together, we can make a better country and a better world for our children.” Throw in whatever behaviors you want, and so long as you have a few studies courtesy of Science, you are ready for the podium and the adoration of Twitter.

1. I have no idea if that quote in the picture is accurate or true. Someone named that totally could have said that, why not?

2. Not the other J.C. Also, somehow failed to link to John Carter’s post in the original. Sorry.

3. True or not.

4. Credit to the writer, he did include a link to the original paper here.

5. That isn’t the same as “are good at their jobs” from the standpoint of their manager, but rather closer to “gaming the system to maximize personal rewards relative to costs.”

6. Assuming my landmark based method of directions makes sense to you…

7. I also cannot get you to understand how much I hate those “How much pain are you in?” questions at the doctor’s. Apparently I have either a much higher tolerance for pain than other people, or have experienced “The worst pain you have ever felt” to a much higher degree, because every time I try to fill one of those out honestly the doctor says something to the effect of “Oh, well this shouldn’t be so bad… HOLY SHIT WHY WERE YOU NOT HERE SOONER?!” Clearly what I consider a 6 out of 10 is a bit closer to what they expect a 9 or 10 to be, yet my leg is still almost entirely attached guys, what’s the big deal? What possible information are they getting from asking you to rate your pain on a scale of 1-10 other than how much of a wimp some people are about getting a splinter?

8. Childhood friends of mine might be surprised by this revelation.

9. Before you make the obvious quip about me being low quality, she has had 4 years of swim instruction by other instructors, but never was able to swim. It took me ~4 weeks to get her able to breast stroke across the pool and back. I am not saying I am a great instructor, but apparently having taken and then taught swimming lessons 25 years ago and then not swimming for the last two decades or so prepared me better than the teachers we have to pay for.

10. For lack of a better term.

11. Oddly, it wasn’t labeled. Apparently they just expected people to know pools could have little opening in the side that pulled you in. It wasn’t very strong, most of the propellant jets being inside the channel, but it wasn’t nothing if you wandered in thinking “what’s this all about then?”

12. We even have a word for it, anthropomorphizing, which, honestly, no one would ever make up or use if it wasn’t highly relevant.

13. Incidentally, this is one reason why one on one discussions after class are where the vast majority of learning actually happens. Even with a class of less than 30 people it is hard to throw enough examples out such that everyone can relate to at least one.

14. Aww, there he is! Whose a good little horsey? You are!"

15. You could say “scientists and philosophers” but honestly they are sort of the same thing, and arguably only relatively recently have governments garnered enough capacity to really attempt to remake society.