[extropy-chat] Science and Fools

[Robin Hanson]

At 02:47 PM 3/20/2005, Hal Finney wrote:
> > >Essentially I am advocating the idea of following the scientific
> > >consensus faithfully; you might even say, blindly.
> >
> > your arguments there would have the same force if you just used the
> > phrase "intellectual consensus" and dropped adding "science" modifiers.
> > The specific mechanism you praise is criticism, but this is mostly
> > just what happens to intellectual experts in general.
>
>I don't necessarily think that good use of criticism is the only thing 
>that makes science work.  I don't actually know why science works ...  The 
>scientific picture today is far more accurate than that of 100 years ago, 
>which itself was far better than the one 100 years earlier. ... The bottom 
>line is that I would judge whether another (non "scientific") intellectual 
>community deserves respect based on whether it is making visible progress, 
>from my layman's perspective.  ... my rule has plenty of bite, even if it 
>is limited. ...  Later we can decide how much we can expand the rule to 
>other intellectual communities.
>
> > >the minute you start deciding for yourself which scientists
> > >should be counted in the consensus and which shouldn't,
> > >you're making your own judgements.
> > Now isn't preferring high-criticism experts just another way to decide 
> which
> > experts should be counted?   If the experts in some area think they do just
> > find with less criticism, why should you think they are wrong?
>
>It would probably be a mistake to try to judge which scientific fields are 
>most amenable to criticism, and to decide which ones to believe on that basis.

I studied the sociology, history, and philosophy of science for many years, 
and in the end I found the word "science" to be almost useless as a 
referent for anything more specific than "people who study stuff."   That 
is why I latched on to your earlier reference to criticism, which I can at 
least make sense of.

But I'll rephrase my argument to apply to your suggestion to only follow 
the consensus of experts in fields where progress has been rapid over the 
last few hundred years.  If you allow yourself to disagree with experts 
from fields that have not made rapid progress, you are in essence saying 
that you are some combination of more informed, better at analysis, and 
more rational than they are.

Consider topics like moral philosophy, epistemology, what Shakespeare 
really meant, how to write a compelling novel, how to seduce the opposite 
sex, how to get a team to work together, etc.  Maybe progress hasn't been 
rapid enough in these areas over the centuries.  But that doesn't mean 
there aren't people who know a lot about these subjects, people you could 
stand to learn from.  How can you justify disagreeing with people who have 
studied these topics in great detail, just because progress hasn't been 
rapid?

When I was an undergraduate physics student at UCI I recall hearing a 
physics professor remark to his colleague that they could easily be rich, 
if only they would bother to study business.  I recall similar comments by 
physicists about biology and the social sciences - they presumed that the 
rapid progress in physics was because physicists were just smarter than 
other people, so that other fields would progress just as fast if 
physicists would bother to study those fields.

But this is just bull, as physicists find out when they do venture into 
these other areas.  Some topics are just harder to make progress in.  But 
just because experts today don't know that much more than experts two 
hundred years ago, that doesn't mean that experts don't know a hell of a 
lot more than non-experts.






Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323