What I am referring to is the scientific world view. This is not the scientific drive, i.e. the motivation to find the truth and to learn about the world, but the overly scientific anti-identification of that which is studied. It is as prevalent in the social sciences as it is in politics and buesiness management. There are no people around anymore, there’s only statistics and faceless aggregates.
In economics this is very obvious – the study of human action is almost completely reduced to discussions on how to mitigate biases and avoid multicollinearity in econometric functions. Now, in what sense would you gain understanding of why people act in certain ways through tweaking regression models? The obvious answer – and it is so obvious most economists simply don’t see it – is that you don’t. You don’t gain any knowledge whatsoever of why people acted a certain way through running tests of heteroskedasticity and deciding whether or not to use “White’s estimator.”
Economics is the most obvious victim of what I would like to call scientism, the belief that anything that uses aggregates and that is seemingly universal – through (at any price) avoiding to acknowledge the identity or personality of the individuals studied – is more valuable as a science. Actually, the common view is that as long as you can hide the fact that there are individuals in “the data” any conclusions you might draw are generally applicable.
In a recent discussion with a fellow student, I claimed that the empirical study of people is totally worthless unless your aim is to understand why exactly those individuals acted in that exact way in that exact situation. My point was that if the “experiment” would be repeated with the same people (as “data”) the outcome would be completely different because people learn. And if it would be repeated, and the situation could be set up exactly the same way, but the “data” (the people) would be different individuals the outcome would still be different – simply because they are different people and therefore react differently in a number of ways.
And on top of it all, these examples are still ridiculous – it simply isn’t possible to create the exact same situation again and expose people to it. Even if the setting (or framework) would be the same, the people would have different subjective experiences (no matter if they are “the same” or “others”), which would affect the results.
One could argue that this is why we have confidence intervals and standard deviations. But that implies that people act in such a way that the outcome of everybody’s actions are nicely distributed in a bell-shaped curve. How often would you say that happens? That would depend on what kind of people you happen to have in your sample, wouldn’t it? The point is that one cannot study people the way one studies dead matter, simply because people are people, i.e. thinking creatures that learn from experience and that aren’t reducible to a “nature” the same way a rock would be.
This “scientism” is not only prevalent in the [social] sciences – it is a cornerstone of modern politics as well as business management. In politics there is no such thing as an individual; it simply doesn’t happen that politicians discuss a certain individual. And if they happen to use the word “individual” they use it as a stereotypical “nature” of the items in the population they rule. In my ten years in party politics, I haven’t heard one politician discuss how decisions or policies affect individuals – the best I’ve heard is the use of stereotypical examples of “the average family” or “the single mom.” But never did anyone care to add flesh and blood to their dead skeletons.
There is a reason for this, even though politicians are usually too stupid to understand it. It simply isn’t possible to propose or support policies that affect people’s lives unless you make sure to forget that they are real people. Even cold-hearted, ignorant, and self-centered politicians wouldn’t have the guts nor morality to put hundreds or thousands of people in misery through pushing a button. Most people simply don’t have it in them to coldly calculate plusses and minuses while radically and forcefully change the lives of a great number of people with the stroke of a pen.
The lesson to learn is this: would there really be wars if those waging wars would see each and every person they would have to send to their deaths? It is unlikely, even though there are some really, really disturbed people out there.
The same is the case in large corporations, where the CEO or president usually has no clue about the people working for him (or her). Of course, the nature of a corporation is distinctly different from that of a state – the corporation gives, and any punishment from a corporation is to “not give”; a state takes, and any punishment is to “take more” or “kill” whereas every “reward” consists of “taking less” away from that person. Corporations can no doubt be horrible, but they are not a state.
The problem we have here is the “scientific” way of approaching one’s work: scientists who have no idea that the statistics they’re using are really people, won’t mind drawing horrible conclusions; politicians not understanding there are individuals and individual suffering as a result of every decision they make, don’t have a problem with “redistributing” from some to some or killing off some for the benefit of others; and business managers can take irresponsible risks when they can “simply”, if something goes wrong, cut the corporation’s employment with “10%” rather than, which is equally true, throw hundreds of families into unemployment and misery.
Scientism is the problem, and it arises as an effect of centralization. Centralization calls for stereotypes and grouping, for one-policy-fits-all kind of decisions, and cold-hearted leadership for some unidentified aim. What this world so desperately needs is radical decentralization. The problem with our society is not only that there is a huge parasitic cancer tumor feeding off our lives and liberties (i.e., the State), but that it is too large-scale and too centralized. Not only must the State go, but we need to get back to seeing people as people.
Seeing people as people is what so many individuals in our world have forgotten. Be they scientists, politicians or corporate managers – they all share the same fallacy in thinking that scale is a good thing, that personal ties are “in the way” and a problem for efficiency or whatever.
I am a person and I intend to continue being one. You better start seeing me as one.
The Scary World of Self-Proclaimed Scholars
Friday, May 29th, 2009Some people are truly narrow-minded jerks, and quite a few of them seem to have taken refuge to academic departments at publicly financed universities. Most of them, it seems, are simply not interested in creating knowledge, finding the truth, and all the other things most of us would probably expect from researchers and professors.
Whereas I could write this blog post on all the little things that I have discovered and that have annoyed me, I will only discuss something that I find particularly annoying and unworthy anyone working with science: conscious and purposeful smearing for the sake of … smearing.
The art of undermining somebody’s authority and reputation through spreading rumors and attacking them behind their backs is practiced in most trades, and so too in academia. One should not assume that scientists, supposedly fact-oriented and logically stringent seekers of The Truth, do not play dirty tricks on each other and spend enormous amounts of time and energy waging and fighting petty faction wars in departments or even within offices. Politics seems to be a “natural” part of most organized bodies of people in which they do not naturally and solely share a specific aim.
In any case, academia is just like any other such body but perhaps more puerile. The hierarchy is very fixed while often informal and it is a highly held custom to kick on anyone who’s on a lower level. Also, if there is something you do not like – do not hesitate to attack their person rather than their research, and do whatever you can to make straw-man arguments with as sarcastic tone as possible.
There are plenty of examples of such behavior, but perhaps Brad DeLong‘s treatment of Austrian Economics is the best recent example. Not only do comments correcting Dr. DeLong’s assertions mysteriously disappear from his blog or are as mysteriously shortened, but he does not give people disagreeing with him a chance. He is simply not interested in other views. Scholarly? Not very.
Steve Horwitz comments on DeLong (all the necessary links to comments back and forth are provided by Horwitz; Mellon was President Hoover’s Treasury Secretary):
This is not a very unusual or extreme behavior and Brad DeLong is hardly an extremist (extremely ignorant and puerile, maybe – but not an extremist). Rather, this is quite common behavior in the land of academia, where everybody’s constantly guarding their turf and aren’t interested in any arguments or facts unless they strengthen their own view.
The fact is that most academics are hardly sholars; they are mostly people who are too smart for politics but too lazy to do the work necessary to be successful in any other trade. And many professors have never even tried any other line of work. In fact, some even look down upon people with experience outside of academia as if that would be something despicable.
Academia and science simply doesn’t work the way it theoretically should, i.e. the way John Stuart Mill defended free speech: only through allowing everybody to speak their opinion can we have sufficient ground to weed out the obviously bad and false. If academia would work this way, it would be eagerly receptive to new ideas and not only accept but even long for new perspectives and challenging ways of explaining real phenomena. Embracing the ideas of the one who challenges you and what you believe in is the way towards scientific progress.
The fact is that academia works in a way that is quite the opposite. New ideas are not embraced; rather, they are fought, silenced, and ridiculed – and editors of scientific journals even refuse to publish papers that are too “controversial.” To be published, new scientific results need to be “scientifically correct” rather than true to the facts.
I guess the question that pops up in your mind now, dear reader, is why the heck I so badly want to be part of this? My answer is that there are a number of exceptions to this rule and that working with but one true scholar and a hundred nitwits is a privilege – it is very rewarding to be around and work with a true genious. Also, I love doing what professors do: I love research and I love teaching – I could even spend ours on committees without necessarily being bored to death.
What scares me, however, is that there are so many “great” self-proclaimed scholars out there that do not know what the word means. And that they fall to such low levels in ways of fighting their petty turf wars. I am scared about this fact, but I am not afraid of them nor what they do. My background in politics have prepared me for the worst, and the fact is that I too can play this game – and I have formal training through 15 years in politics, which most academics do not. They will not know what hit them.
So I say: let me do what I do best and do your worst in honest critiquing of my work. And if you cannot, but prefer to fight dirty, bring it on. It is not a threat, it is a promise.
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