Against the Church of Science

There's a lot to love and loathe in this New York Times online debate, but I found one part particularly curious. Robert Skidelsky, professor of economics at the University of Warwick, on improving economic education: 

"The most important steps to improve the training of young economists would be to make economic history and the history of economic thought compulsory in all undergraduate teaching of economics. Both survive, if at all, as curricular options that the brightest are discouraged from taking. The rich history of economic thought has been replaced by a narrow range of currently fashionable mathematical "models" taught and often learned by rote... 

Behind the dismissal of economic history and the history of ideas lies the mistaken view of economics as a natural science, whose knowledge base automatically cumulates. For example, anything worthwhile in the old has been incorporated in the new, and can therefore be neglected. This ignores the fact that, unlike in the natural world, the reality that economics aims to study and understand is constantly shifting..."

I actually agree with his prescription for economic education, but Skidelsky has an adorably naive view of natural science.

The history of natural science is far from cumulative. Theories are constantly supplanting one another, with each paradigm invalidating the last. The most cogent example of this is the Copernican revolution. Geocentrism was a legitimate scientific paradigm for millennia. The entire science of astronomy revolved, with the sun, around the earth. Complex mathematical models were used to explain and predict celestial observations. In fact, during the time of Copernicus, the geocentric models were actually better at predicting celestial motions than their heliocentric counterpart. (Notice that neither theory is objectively  "truer" than the other. They each merely try to compress observations into rules, with varying degrees of success.) Some of the most damning, intransigent resistance to heliocentrism came not from the church but rather the incumbent scientific community, whose ideas and contributions threatened to evaporate in the face of the new theory. When the science of astronomy shifted from geocentrism to heliocentrism, two thousand years worth of science was effectively destroyed. Reality itself had metastasized.

Scientific history is littered with such creative destruction. Yesterday's science is today's alchemy. Phlogiston chemistry, Aristotalian mechanics, Newtonian dynamics: all were once models of scientific reality now deemed obsolete, replaced merely by new theories.

This leads us to conclude, then, that even modern scientific theories aren't "true" in any sense, and that they will all likely be replaced at some point in the future. We should be thusly encouraging students to think critically about scientific theories, their limitations, and how the "facts" of a given field are produced. Unfortunately modern scientific education amounts to peremptory readings from holy textbooks, with the best marks going to those students who most successfully regurgitate dogmas.

Academics have every incentive to prevent students and scholastic civilians alike from questioning their findings, and the scientific axioms that underlie them. But the last Einstein had to reject theories taught in academia in order to improve upon them, and so will the next one.

Fox News as the Ministry of Truth

I think that the smarter republicans out there need to take a good hard look at their party affiliation, political identity, and whether or not they just believe whatever Fox News tells them. The most persuasive case I can make to this effect involves a hypothetical Mitt Romney presidency. Namely, had Mitt Romney won the 2008 presidential election, what would he have done differently from Barack Obama?

Most republicans immediately say that spending levels and the deficit would have been far lower. This strikes me as insane.

The national debt tripled during Ronald Reagan's presidency. It nearly doubled during that of George W. Bush. Spending during Reagan's two terms averaged 22.4% of GDP. That's almost two full points above the 1971-2009 average of 20.6%. The last four republican presidents oversaw an increase in the national debt; the last five democratic presidents, a decrease. Even 80% of the debt accrued under president Obama can be blamed on Bush 43's policies, as it would have accumulated anyway had our president simply sat there twiddling his thumbs.

And you mean to tell me that Romney would have, for no apparent reason, broke decades of republican precedent and enacted harsh austerity measures? He would have ignored his economic advisers and eschewed stimulus? (Check out what his chief economic adviser was saying in 2008 and 2009.) He would have magically canceled all of the Bush-era programs with which republicans had no qualms at the time?

Of course not, and the major takeaway here is that republicans were never opposed to deficits until a democrat  ran them. Dick Cheney famously quipped in 2002 that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." And they didn't. But now they do. And now they always have. Now Ronald Reagan was a budget-balancer. Now he was a hero of fiscal restraint. Because now Fox News says he was. Because we were always at war with Eastasia deficits. 

Texting on the Toilet, and Other Links

Bonus Picture 

Let's be honest, we all do it. Here's a high five:

1. Chipotle is the Apple of fast food, and as a loyal customer this past summer, let us pray that Chop't Salad Co. goes nationwide.

2. The rise of the gay sports bar

3. The free-market price of high school

4.  "Which famous singer would have dominated American Idol the most had he/she started his/her career as a contestant on the show?" My answer would be Christina Aguilera, or maybe this guy.

5. Dentist Evils

Doctor Evils

I am currently suffering through a sinus infection. This has occurred three times in the past four years. The drug I need is azithromycin (a Z-Pak, more colloquially). I was prescribed this for each of my previous sinus infections, and each time it worked wonders. I should be able to walk down to the local medication supplier, give him some money and an insurance card, receive azithromycin, return to health, and get on with my life.

Unfortunately, this is not how it works.

Doctors like money (Who doesn’t?). In order to get more money, they will lobby the government to enact laws that make more of your money float into doctors’ pockets. This is the purpose of big doctor unions like the American Medical Association. They fight against cuts to medicare, against the burgeoning of low-cost supermarket clinics, for caps on malpractice claims, and for exorbitant restrictions on who can practice medicine (the US is well below the OECD average for physicians per capita, despite US physicians’ higher compensation).

Of course, they also lobby the government to ensure that I must see a doctor in order to obtain certain medicines. Even if I know exactly what drug I need. Even if I feel no need to and do not want to see a doctor. The government forces me to go to a doctor’s office, sit in a lobby reading a four-month-old copy of Sports Illustrated, and then pay a doctor for a piece of paper that says I can go buy a drug.

This is one area where I think Ron Paul has it absolutely right. Let’s bust the doctor unions. They lobby the government to legislate my money into doctors’ pockets. Doctors then use a fraction of that money to help elect the politicians who support them. It takes both big government and big business to perpetuate the circlejerk. This is true of most industries, but right now I’m only pissed off at this one.

*Note that there are very good reasons for regulating the use of antibiotics specifically, but that’s largely beside the point.

The Wrongs of Rights

The above imagine is making the rounds on facebook, apparently in light of the Prop 8 ruling. I don't dislike Rachel Maddow, but I find this quote so intellectually despicable that I feel it demands a response.

As luck would have it, I penned in the wee hours of last Wednesday a midterm essay on this very topic. The essay specifically confronts human rights, but I would apply its arguments to the concept of rights more generally (including that of gay rights).

Here it is, and I promise to be more active on this space in the coming weeks.
...

I gargle generosity further than the monster explosion. That is a perfectly grammatical sentence comprised of commonly used words. It is also completely nonsensical. Just because something can be said does not mean that it expresses a concrete or even coherent concept. Words are artificial, epiphenomenal constructs the primary utility of which resides in expressing and communicating ideas. Just because I can say a word and call it a noun does not mean that it “exists” by any standard definition of the term. Let’s call a “kwyjibo” an invisible, empirically undetectable rhinoceros with Gene Simmons face paint currently standing directly atop your head. There we have a word and even a fairly cogent concept to back it up. Yet in no sense would you say that the kwyjibo actually exists. Indeed, if unobservable things exist then anything could be said to exist. I could legitimately believe in the kwyjibo, and if you ascribed existence to intangible entities then you would have no way to refute my claim. To take it to a level philosophically uncomfortable for most, numbers do not exist. There is no magical “3” floating out there in space (but who knows, I suppose). Numbers are socially constructed tools that lend utility to innumerable applications. If there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, there is no guarantee whatsoever that they use anything resembling the concept of numbers. With that in mind, I find it bizarre and untenable that anyone could ascribe existence to what we call human rights. Further, I do not think that the term is backed by anything resembling a coherent or consistent concept.

Robert Churchill likens “rights” to terms like “justice” and “equality” in the sense that it is “too complex or controversial to be defined in simple and nonambiguous terms.” Controversial, certainly, but to explain our absence of an agreeable and communicable definition in terms of complexity gives the liberal philosophical tradition far too much credit. Quantum physics and wave-particle duality are extremely complex, extremely recondite concepts. Yet they are sufficiently coherent and inspire sufficient consensus to amass an entire worldwide discipline dedicated to their study, with textbook upon mutually compatible textbook espousing the same ideas. It is a well-established, internally-consistent, bona fide epistemological paradigm, prodigious complexity notwithstanding. And yet philosophers cannot even agree on a consistent framework for analyzing “rights” or “justice”. Sure, the politicians provide a consistent rhetorical approach, but intellectual honesty is not a prerequisite for their positions. Philosophers and scholars have nothing near a workable paradigm for analyzing many of the flagship terms of the western liberal tradition. Plato, that scourge of intellectual history, spends an entire treatise attempting to elucidate “justice.” He fails so spectacularly that scholars today still argue over what even he meant.

Consider the right to free speech. Most Americans might claim to have it. But what about when a court issues a gag order, or any of the other myriad exceptions to our proudly boasted oratory freedom? What about when you’re pulled over and you decide to speak rudely to the cop, who then uses his executive discretion to give you a ticket that a more affable orator mightn’t have gotten? If you have the “right to free speech” except in cases X1, X2,…Xn then what do you really have? Nothing worth compressing into a simple term, certainly. So why do it at all?

The problem compounds when you consider what the absence of a right to free speech (as popularly denoted) looks like. Can citizens in Iraq or Myanmar or North Korea say anything they want without much harm coming to them? In 99.9 percent of cases the answer is yes. The government can only observe and execute actions upon a very, very minute subset of all the things that its citizens will say. And if you can say whatever you want except in cases X1, X2,…Xn, it becomes hard to distinguish in practice from a purported “freedom of speech.” Particularly when you take into account the limits of violence monopolization and the internationally heterogeneous cultural attitudes that government policies reflect, it becomes hard to view the right to free speech as a coherent legal concept, let alone a philosophical one

I do concede, however, that some people may find some utility in using a term like “human rights”. Because so many people recognize the term and mentally associate it with benevolence and happiness, it can be an immensely effective rhetorical device. I agree with Amartya Sen that “It is not hard to understand [human rights activists’] unwillingness to spend time trying to provide conceptual justification, given the great urgency to respond to terrible deprivations around the world.” But let us recognize that conceptual justification is indeed an afterthought, and that the primary goal is indeed to respond to terrible deprivations around the world. The moral sentiment in my view has nothing to do with a mere word like “rights.” Rather it is a response to actual human suffering. I personally applaud the goal of preventing human suffering, but I feel no need to build an elaborate mythology around it.

Liveblog - Fox News Republican Presidential Debate

Sexy Memorization, and Other Finals Weekend Links

Maureen Dowd's March op-ed on  raunchy memorization techniques

Here are a few quirky items from my saved links folder, and one very good piece from today. First the quirk:

1. Deeper voices are more persuasive.

2. South Korean citizens "roam cities secretly videotaping fellow citizens breaking the law, deliver the evidence to government officials and collect the rewards."

3. Spiders can be assholes to each other.

4. Our hands and the future of interactive design

And from today, Matt Yglesias has a great post here on the Egyptian economy in the wake of the Arab Spring. I'll add this chart, which I think goes a long way toward explaining the seeds of Egyptian political revolution.