And from experience (itself anecdotal evidence), one has learned just how trying the untested anecdotal evidence of others may be.

The opposing pole, however, is received information. Many of us have been trained in "disciplines" or "professions" (etymology of both terms very interesting), but it seems to me always worth remembering that the bulk of that training consists of swallowing others' conclusions rather than working through the original proofs that drove those historical others to their conclusions.

Does it ever occur to anyone else that many of our disciplines and professions are in need of correction from naive empiricists - ie, those people who offer up their "anecdotes," their personal observations, which received opinion may be discounting simply because they do not fit into predetermined categories?

Added later: I would like to see more third-party independent research on lots of things. The guys who wrote Freakonomics (Levitt and ?), for instance, really didn't care what the results of their studies were, they were just interpreting data.

[ 11 December 2005: Message edited by: Chubbles ]

Thank you.

And now on to the substantive response.

I think there are a couple of issues behind the anecdote is not a data point argument. They both have to do with the theory involved. One is that an anecdote about a probabalistic theory is inadequate. The other is that many anecdotes come with unexpressed theories attached.

One question about probabilistic theories that needs to be asked, is is it really probabilistic or is it just ignoring a lot of other influences? In science, that is an important thing to do in order to construct a clear view of a given aspect of the problem. In engineering, it may well be fatal (in this context medicine is engineering). If what you care about is a single individual (and I suspect a profound caring is what is going on here) you need to fight through the complexities and direct experience (the positive description of anecdote) is required to do that.

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Science is systematized knowledge derived from observation, study, and experimentation. Thus, it deals only with phenomena that can be examined empirically. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not a grab-bag of immutable facts, but rather a way of asking questions and evaluating various possible answers. The objective is to describe the makeup of the physical universe and the underlying principles that govern activities therein. In the process, scientists attempt to agree upon a limited number of constituents that combine to produce the complexity the natural domain and to derive a set of laws that describe the interactions among those components.

Scientific observations are carried out under controlled conditions in order to minimize the impact of researchers' biases and expectations as well as random influences from the environment. Public accessibil­ity of methods and findings, and skeptical evaluation of results, are paramount requirements in the scientific community. Single experiments practically never settle an important scientific debate - it is the preponderance of evidence among researchers in the field (who must be able to replicate each others' findings) that determines the currently accepted explanation for any given phenomenon.

In carrying out this disciplined examination of the natural world, scientists attempt to generalize from particular observations to formulate general laws. Having established those lawful relationships and a body of reliable data, they organize them into testable theories to explain the facts at hand and, if possible, predict new phenomena that would not otherwise have been apparent. By broadening the generality of their theories, scientists hope to extend their explanatory power to cover other phenomena in the subject domain.

The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould defined a scientific or “natural” law as: “a generalization so overwhelmingly confirmed by empirical observation that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” Note Gould's insertion of the word “provisional.” By this he meant to emphasize that while currently accepted laws are the best-supported conjectures we have at the moment, they are subject to revision if improved tools or methods should generate novel findings. The same honing and revision is also applicable to scientific theories. It is this self-correcting aspect that perhaps most distinguishes sciences from religious doctrines and pseudo­sciences. The latter are prone to enshrine their explanations in stagnant dogmas that are immune to revision by new discoveries. Active sciences are constantly in flux.

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Does it ever occur to anyone else that many of our disciplines and professions are in need of correction from naive empiricists - ie, those people who offer up their "anecdotes," their personal observations, which received opinion may be discounting simply because they do not fit into predetermined categories?

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I thought this was the whole point of postmodernism. If there is nothing outside "the text", there is nothing other than "anecdotes", written or spoken.

While this approach frees everyone to compete in creating ever-more imaginative universes, it requires a truth-criterion in order to allow people to choose wisely among the alternative discourses.

The problem is that a polarizing debate arises between personal experience and information collected by "authorities". The former group disparages the "authority", and holds that their experience is valid enough to make generalized statements or theses, while the latter group has no time for anything that hasn't been written down and academically verified.

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In carrying out this disciplined examination of the natural world, scientists attempt to generalize from particular observations to formulate general laws. Having established those lawful relationships and a body of reliable data, they organize them into testable theories to explain the facts at hand and, if possible, predict new phenomena that would not otherwise have been apparent.

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This is a little sloppy. Theory actually comes first. Without a theory you cannot organize observations. I suspect that this is hard to see simply because people are so good at creating theories that the process is invisible.

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Originally posted by jrootham:
Theory actually comes first. Without a theory you cannot organize observations.

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A scientific "theory" is something that has been tested and peer-reviewed and accepted as provisionally correct, on the basis of controlled, empirical evidence. Thus we speak of the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity, and the theory of evolution, all of which are solidly accepted science.

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Originally posted by skdadl:
Does it ever occur to anyone else that many of our disciplines and professions are in need of correction from naive empiricists - ie, those people who offer up their "anecdotes," their personal observations, which received opinion may be discounting simply because they do not fit into predetermined categories?

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The problem is that it's usually pretty easy to explain an apparent paradox - if you really understand the relevant theory. Many apparent challenges turn out to be manifestations of well-known and long-exploded fallacies.

But not always.

In my world, identifying a truly inexplicable phenomenon/anecdote is akin to finding an intellectual gold mine. A fruitful research agenda and (if all goes well) a trip to Stockholm are the usual rewards. So we take these 'puzzles' pretty seriously - if can be in fact established that it is a puzzle.

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Originally posted by jrootham:
One of the advantages of Stephen Gordon is that he is explicit about his theories so we (well some of us try) can engage him on that level.

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In my world, identifying a truly inexplicable phenomenon/anecdote is akin to finding an intellectual gold mine.

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But you are an economist! Wouldn't it be fair to say that most economic work doesn't involve
controlled experiments at all?

As I look at economics from the outside, I see theories which claim to explain social phenomena, and may actually do so to some extent. But no one can really run an experiment to show that the explanation is false, or even true.

It's a social science, like history or sociology.

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Originally posted by jeff house:
Wouldn't it be fair to say that most economic work doesn't involve controlled experiments at all?

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It's a social science, like history or sociology.

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So, here's an "inexplicable phenomenon" to solve for us: given the radically-unjust distribution of wealth in the world, why are economists so conformist?

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Sure. Neither does most work in astronomy. We work with what we have. But as long as our models have predictive content, they can be tested and/or compared to competitors.

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"Working with what you have" is fine, but it does not constitute science, except in the attenuated sense of "social science".

The object of study for astronomy exists as an entirely natural phenomenon. Thus, its study through experiment does not involve human will, either individually or cumulatively.

Light which passes near the sun will be bent by its gravity. This will happen every single time, and experiment will confirm it every single time.

An economics model in essence predicts human economic behaviour. "If interest rates are lowered, consumers will do X".

Of course, in sophisticated economic modelling, the variables are more numerous; still, it is human behaviour which is being predicted. Because of that, no one can really predict such things as the next depression, or the next recession.

That's why I disagree with your original idea that there are few unexplained phenomena in economics. Since no one knows whether the proposed explanations are true or not, economics can only be interpretative, never scientific.

I think of economists as highly specialized sociologists, nothing to be deprecated.

Or are we just arriving at conclusions that don't conform with your uninformed guesses?

Maybe - just maybe - your uninformed guesses are (gasp) wrong? Naah. Couldn't be. You're a lawyer, and lawyers know everything about everything. Just ask one.

Apologies, skdadl. I didn't start this drift, but I'm not going to back down, either.

[ 11 December 2005: Message edited by: Stephen Gordon ]

You are a scientist because you say so.

1) Observation and hypothesis generally go hand in hand. Usually its a case of making an observation, modifying a theory slightly, making new observations based on that, further modifications of the theory ... kind of a positive (hopefully) feedback loop. Often both the observations and modifications take place in very small steps (in fact both being modified on the fly everyday while the theory is being worked out). Differentiating between them is an interesting philosopical exercise, but doesn't have much to do with the way science is actually carried out (yes there are exceptions).

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Originally posted by jeff house:
Oh I see, I am a lawyer and cannot grasp your wisdom.

You are a scientist because you say so.

Good argument.

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There should be a word called "scientism"- the inappropriate investigation by scientific method of that which is by definition beyond scientific explanation. I'm not saying that cancer falls in this category, but many important things do.

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Originally posted by looney:
There should be a word called "scientism"- the inappropriate investigation by scientific method of that which is by definition beyond scientific explanation. I'm not saying that cancer falls in this category, but many important things do.

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However. I must note that this whole Forum is called "Humanities AND Science".

Question: It has been said, by Isaiah Berlin, that Vico was the first person to claim that ONLY the humanities can offer certain knowledge, because they contain "the human". We can know ourselves, but not nature.

We are not necessarily stupid to think about most things in a practical, observable way; it is not necessarily wrong to rely on our senses in most observations. Everybody from 10,000 BC to 1600 AD could have told you that things fall down, before Newton made meticulous notes on how things do it. A pre-mathematical goatherd could tell whether any of his flock was missing, even if he couldn't do subtraction.

Scientists do ignore evidence that contradicts their theories and they can do so until the next generation of scientists come around. Scientists, after all, are as irrational as the rest of us and sometimes have a hard time letting go of a life’s work. Still, the real ‘beauty’ of science is that the ideal is that data match theory and that everything should be questioned, even if it comes from a scientist of great renown and reputation. Sometimes it takes longer than it should, but it usually happens.

I actually think that it is harder to ‘know ourselves’. We have so many preconceptions that we don’t want to give up or examine closely. I think that this makes the social sciences the hardest of all.

Reading Stephen Jay Gould taught me just how much history and contingency is part of science. Sure, we can’t replicate and study it in the laboratory, but there are rigorous ways to look at the past and see patterns. It would be fascinating to start life over again on this planet and see what happens. Just how unlikely are creatures like us? There are and have been lots of intelligent species, but few have had both the equipment (hands, for instance) and drive to modify the world as we have.

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Scientists do ignore evidence that contradicts their theories and they can do so until the next generation of scientists come around. Scientists, after all, are as irrational as the rest of us and sometimes have a hard time letting go of a life’s work.

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So much of it is beyond anything I could have written, but then that's what I was looking for, help in thinking more clearly. So much I want to respond to (beginning with a correction of my own question), but I can't do that till later today. First I have to go talk to an ideologue (an MD). Wish me luck.

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Stephen, just out of curiosity, would you consider political scientists* to be scientists in the same manner as economists?

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Physics/calculus/mathematics
Chemistry/organic chemistry
Biochemistry
Biology
Medical sciences
Psychiatry/Psychology
Sociology/History
Literature/Spirituality

I like to think of philosophy as an all-encompassing science, one that seeks to make sense of the different areas of study using human thought.

I tend to disagree with the statement 'science is methodology' because there are different methods that can be used depending on the field of study and the desired result. Science shouldn't be reduced to methodology, but I agree that method is generally a good thing.

Random thoughts are indeed useful but they are indeed hypotheses. Don't get scared by the fancy words.

Democracy also requires constant questioning and challenging of assumptions. Science is a product of our culture, but both are too little understood by many.

Examples include seeing all manner of objects fall to the ground, or the fact that objects DO stay as near the ground as possible, pointing to the existence of a force that keeps us drawn to the Earth (gravity), or the tendency of electric shocks to be felt when one scuffs one's feet on the carpet (electricity), and so on.

There are branches of chemistry and physics which are largely mathematical and abstract in nature, such as quantum mechanics, semiconductor physics and physical chemistry. That having been said they must explain physical phenomena or all that math is of no use.

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Originally posted by DrConway:
The point at which "anecdotal" does pluralize to "data" is, I think, somewhat fuzzy.

...

... and certainly mathematically analyzing things that don't suddenly act with a mind of their own is a relief.

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This highlights an experience I had as a research assistant in clinical (vet) medicine. The only way to take into account the variables in the raw data was to run several different statistical analyses; the researchers would consider different combinations of variables and try to imagine how they might interact, then they would ask the computer guy to run the analyses through the software program.

Anecdotal evidence provides insight, particularly where the narrow restrictions of empiricism cannot accomplish anything meaningful (at least not without prodigious amounts of funding).

Personal experiences are crucial to real understanding of an issue, especially in the policy realm.

On the other hand, it's difficult to analyze or develop policy for the personal experience. As a result, most policies are developed to a generalized mean - the default experience. Deviation from that experience is then marginalized (gender, race, culture, disability). So empirically based policies meant to be generally applicable often end up having unintended consequences for those who do not fit the generalized norm.

However, making or researching policy impacts for individuals is massively time consuming and likely futile.

insecurity:
The uninspired scientist must disregard anything that falls outside hir narrow speciality. To such a person, methodology is all: since s/he generates no insights, s/he is likely to discount other people's. To a Richard Feinman, insight comes first; method follows. Since Feinmans account for a tiny fraction of the scientific population, institutions are invariably headed, and largely staffed, by mediocre scientists. They get to make the rules and enforce them rigidly.

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Anecdotal evidence is not fallacious per se; its characterization as unreliable must be understood to mean unreliable with respect to the scientific method. Many (perhaps most) true phenomena are first observed in the form of anecdotal evidence. For example eating limes to prevent scurvy was supported by anecdotal evidence for close to three centuries, beginning with the observations of James Lind. The causative elements involved were only identified after the structure of Vitamin C was discovered, and the link between Vitamin C and scurvy was only Scientifically proven in 1932 by Szent-Gyorgyi.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
The point being that the link between Vitamin C and scurvy was not proven by anecdotal evidence, but by controlled scientific experimentation. The anecdotal evidence was sufficiently strong to give rise to a hypothesis, and the hypothesis was subsequently proven using other ("scientific") data.

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jrootham
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 838

posted 11 December 2005 03:22 PM
quote:
In carrying out this disciplined examination of the natural world, scientists attempt to generalize from particular observations to formulate general laws. Having established those lawful relationships and a body of reliable data, they organize them into testable theories to explain the facts at hand and, if possible, predict new phenomena that would not otherwise have been apparent.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:

And what important things are by definition beyond scientific explanation?

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Explanation?
Epistemology, I suppose.

Beyond scientific purview?
Ethics, aesthetics, in some ways the philosophy of science itself. Lots of philosophy, actually.

You can come up with scientific information about potential outcomes that will help you make ethical decisions, you can even come up with scientific studies about the nature of simian brains or cultural tendencies that may tell you what sorts of things humans often decide, but science cannot in itself tell you what you *ought* to do. That's a philosophical issue.
You can come up with scientific-ish stories about humans preferring ancestral savannah-like landscapes. It doesn't really tell you much about the nature of beauty, or whether beauty is a worthwhile aesthetic aim.
Seems to me that the philosophy of science cannot, itself, be science.

Politics. Even if you had a perfect science of economics that was able to precisely predict the outcomes of different policies, that doesn't tell you what kind of society you should want as an outcome.

Science is about "is". Many important things are about "ought". There's some kind of saying about that . . .

Adding side note about Freud--he was a very bright man, and he told a lot of very compelling just so stories which caught a lot of people's imagination. But I'm not clear that any of it has really stood the test of time beyond the notion that it can be good to talk out your problems--something which the Catholic church had known for centuries. Heck, I've heard that he didn't even necessarily subscribe to that much of it; I believe he said on at least one occasion something along the lines of, that the point wasn't to be right, it was basically to have a good, convincing explanation that would allow the patient to believe they were OK and create the reality from the belief. Also, quite a lot of the weirder stuff came out of him backing away from believing the reality of female patients' accounts of child sexual abuse. I'm not happy with him about that.

[ 13 December 2005: Message edited by: Rufus Polson ]

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Originally posted by Rufus Polson:
Explanation?
Epistemology, I suppose.

Beyond scientific purview?
Ethics, aesthetics, in some ways the philosophy of science itself. Lots of philosophy, actually.

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Ethics? How about the Darwinian explanations of the evolution of altruistic behaviour in humans? This kind of science doesn't tell us how we ought to behave, but goes a long way to explain the origins of our moral codes.

Ditto aesthetics. Modern experiments in neuroscience are revealing more and more about why we find some people and things more pleasing than others.

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Originally posted by looney:
Well then, what is not susceptible to direct scientific investigation? The answer simply is individual subjective experience.

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All scientific data comes from empirical observations by humans, sometimes with the help of human-designed machines. The marvellous thing about science is that it can turn these subjective experiences into "data" that allow us to describe and understand the material reality external to our individual selves.

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Adding side note about Freud--he was a very bright man, and he told a lot of very compelling just so stories which caught a lot of people's imagination. But I'm not clear that any of it has really stood the test of time ...

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Originally posted by looney:
A good mri machine can exactly identify which brain circuits light up when you see the colour red, but can never, even in principle, replicate your individual experience of seeing that colour.

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My question above was mixing up questions about at least two separate sets of distinctions: I see that from reading jrootham's posts.

looney's example here is very close to one of the distinctions I was thinking about. I am reading a bit of cognitive neuroscience right now (popularized, but then a lot of it turns out to be more like philosophy than "hard science" anyway, and quite readable).

The fMRI machines have produced a lot of data about stimuli and the brain. That seems to be true. (I wasn't there, but I accept the reports. )

This locale or these synapses in the brain will respond to that stimulus; and even: this section will govern that function (although I think some of the larger governances were known before fMRIs, from actual physical stimulation).

But everything beyond that basic statement of location - and cognitive neuroscientists say a great deal beyond that - seems to me interpretation. In other words, we accumulate a lot of data, but "what it means" remains sometimes puzzling, sometimes contested.

I'm not even sure I know what "what it means" means - except that suddenly I do when I read a researcher leap to a conclusion, especially one that I believe to be wrong (a belief based only on my careful observations). And they definitely do leap to conclusions.

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Originally posted by jeff house:
Skdadl may be able to tell us the answer to this.

Question: It has been said, by Isaiah Berlin, that Vico was the first person to claim that ONLY the humanities can offer certain knowledge, because they contain "the human". We can know ourselves, but not nature.

So, the question: Is that really in Vico, or is that just one of those things Berlin made up, as you mention elsewhere?

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First, jeff house, it has been so long since I have read either gentleman closely that I can't answer very precisely. My position on Berlin is that I read Vico in order to find out what Vico wrote and Berlin read him in order to find support for his own well-developed theories.

Now, jrootham will tell us that either I am being naive about my own reading there or I'm joking, which would, ok, be true. But the extent to which one's readings are "interested" varies, and I would say that Berlin's were highly predetermined, whereas mine were much closer to innocence.

However: I digress. I don't remember whether Vico quite puts things that way, but if he does, he would certainly not have been the first, not in my view. What Vico did was to grasp, eg, that he could deduct many things about human history (and maybe even human intelligence) from the written record, especially myths, without being an archaeologist; and in fact he began to be proved pretty much right about his specific guesses, eg, about "Homer" within the next half-century by archaeologists, and then after that by textual scholars.

He was, in other words, an extremely talented reader, and probably psychologist. Yay, Vico.

However, that claim from Berlin: "we can know ourselves, but not nature" - hmmmn. I would say that increasingly through the C17 and C18 in certain W European cultures, there was a context being created for the first part of that claim, and that context was more and more distinct from the taxonomic materialism of the mid-C18 (Linnaeus, eg).

But the second part of that claim: we cannot know nature. Hmmmn. That sounds to me like a C20 ideologue going "roots-hunting" (accusatorily) in a C18 culture that may have tip-toed up towards that trippy thought but was definitely not the C20. It was Alexander Pope, after all, who wrote, "The proper study of mankind is Man," and he wrote that some time before Vico, and in a quite different context.

(Seriously: I consider the analysis of one-liners to be absurd.)

The trippiest C18 thinker of that kind is, of course, David Hume. But I doubt that even Hume would have signed on to such a flat, reductive summary of his scepticism, thorough - and yet creative - though it was.

On a separate point: A number of people have written here about "method" or "methodology" - och, such a curse of my grad-student years, everyone's attempt to claim that their process of testing, testing, testing is somehow terribly sophisticated when in fact it usually comes down to testing, testing, testing.

Some people may know that Denis Diderot spent a lot of his career really working hard to promote the work of his many materialist scientist friends; and further, to import their scientific method into his own writing, which ranged from biology to history to art criticism to a primitive form of cognitive neuroscience ( Le Reve de d'Alembert ).

But some of the most charming and convincing passages in his writing develop from his later admissions that, for him, method had really come down to following his nose. He invented a verb to describe his method: subodorer, "to sniff out." In his earlier writing about art, you can see him struggling to make his understanding of how his own sharp critical perceptions work sound as though they follow a "scientific" method - so it is very moving to read him in later life laughing at himself a bit, raising the scepticism to a higher plane.

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Scientists do ignore evidence that contradicts their theories and they can do so until the next generation of scientists come around. Scientists, after all, are as irrational as the rest of us and sometimes have a hard time letting go of a life’s work. Still, the real ‘beauty’ of science is that the ideal is that data match theory and that everything should be questioned, even if it comes from a scientist of great renown and reputation. Sometimes it takes longer than it should, but it usually happens.

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I'm trying to think of a single example of this ignoring in my fields (physics and engineering), but I can't (at least not among well known scientists). Lots of examples of people spending a lifetime futily trying to tie contradicting data into favorite theories (Einstein did this with quantum mechanics), but never ignoring published data. Empirical data is the groundwork; any scientist who ignores it gets laughed out of conferences and finds peer reviewed journals rejecting their submissions. However, trying to tie the data into theories is a procedure full of human frailties, and might lead to fruitless years or new breakthroughs.

Couple of other points: science moves forward as often as not by sudden insight - but the insight only becomes science when it leads to new testable predictions (ie new theories or at least modifications of existing theories which make successful predictions). For instance, at the moment super string theory is considered mathematical-physics (ie math) rather than physics (ie science) because despite having huge explanative powers, it has yet to yield a testable hypotheses.

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No, but what do they mean, beyond "I saw activity in that sector"?

Most scientists go on to make claims way beyond that.

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Here's a typical statement of his views:

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2. Descartes assumed "clear and distinct ideas" as the criterion of truth, but in Vico’s view "the criterion of truth is what we have made" (in Latin, verum "the true" and factum "what is made" are the same).4 Thus, "cogito ergo sum" is not truth, but only certitude of the consciousness of one’s own existence. Since "made" and "truth" are the same, only the one who makes something knows it. Thus, only God knows the natural world, because he made it.

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http://www.crvp.org/book/Series03/III-15/chapter_ii.htm

I find that interesting, because I think the common view these days is that we can know "nature" far better than we can know human activity.

That's why the human sciences, such as history, economics, political "science", and so on, have a much less compelling claim on certain knowledge. Once knowledge involves human endeavour rather than the behaviour of light or the atomic makeup of potassium, knowledge and predictability decline substantially.

[ 13 December 2005: Message edited by: jeff house ]

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the argument Vico seems to be presenting

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Huh? Where is Vico presenting an argument here? What am I missing?

People quote a few phrases, and you think you're reading Vico? You got the New Science in front of you, Rufus? You read it? About the search for the "true Homer"?

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The humanities were on the defensive, for the first time feeling the possibility of not being supreme and unchallenged in the learning arena. They didn't like it. Who would? So they dissed the sciences.

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And Rufus, as history, this is garbage.

The "men of letters" of the high Englightenment all did everything. They weren't divided up into C19 professional disciplines, which is the distorted lens through which you are looking at them and overgeneralizing about them.

The encyclopaedists, for instance, covered the waterfront. Diderot took two years out of his other work to study biology and human anatomy, and many of his best friends were the most boring, silly materialists known to history.

One important point that hasn't been made on this thread is an important distinction between Cartesian rationalism and empiricism.

DesCartes was interested in creating CERTAIN knowledge. So, his examples were mathematics, and the cogito.

The empiricists thought that we could only create PROBABLE knowledge. So, they stressed observation, not mathematics.

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I once had a very unpleasant, but ultimately useful, conversation with the editor of one of America's leading intellectual magazines. He was in the process of refusing to print a piece I had written at his request, and his dissatisfaction with what I had written was the main subject at hand. But along the way I somehow mentioned the need to represent economic ideas with carefully thought-out models, and he responded with a mixture of bafflement and asperity. Clearly the idea that economic ideas could benefit from being modeled was new to him, even though his journal frequently publishes articles on economic affairs; and he suggested to me that in future I would do well to explain why models are sometimes useful and why they usually are not.

At the time I was fairly flabbergasted: to question the usefulness of economic models at this late date seemed rather strange. But the economist's idea that economic theory for the most part consists of models has by no means been accepted by intellectuals outside our field. In fact, if one looks at the favorite economic writers of the non-economist intellectual -- Robert Reich, Lester Thurow, John Kenneth Galbraith -- one realizes that they have in common an aversion to or ignorance of modeling. There are model-oriented economists, like Alan Blinder, who also write for a broader audience, and they don't put their equations in their books and articles; but the skeleton of the models that structure their thought is visible under the surface to those who know how to look. By contrast, in the writings of Reich or Galbraith what you read is what you get -- there is no hidden mathematical structure to the argument, no diagram one might draw on a blackboard or simulation one might run on a computer to clarify the point.

In this the situation in economics is virtually identical to that in evolutionary theory. Ask a working biologist who is the greatest living evolutionary thinker, and he or she will probably answer John Maynard Smith (with nods to George Williams and William Hamilton). Maynard Smith not only has a name that should have made him an economist; he writes and thinks like an economist, representing evolutionary issues with stylized mathematical models that are sometimes confronted with data, sometimes simulated on the computer, but always serve as the true structure informing the verbal argument. A textbook like his Evolutionary Genetics (1989) feels remarkably comfortable for an academic economist: the style is familiar, and even a good bit of the content looks like things economists do too. But ask intellectuals in general for a great evolutionary thinker and they will surely name Stephen Jay Gould -- who receives one brief, dismissive reference in Maynard Smith (1989). (One of my ill-advised moves in the conversation with the editor was to point out that the index to Tyson (1993) contains no references either to Reich or to Thurow).

What does Gould have that Maynard Smith does not? He is a more accessible writer -- but evolutionary theory is, to a far greater extent than economics, blessed with excellent popularizers: writers like Dawkins (1989) or Ridley (1993), who provide beautifully written expositions of what researchers have learned. (Writers like Gould or Reich are not, in the proper sense, popularizers: a popularizer reports on the work of a community of scholars, whereas these writers argue for their own, heterodox points of view). No, what makes Gould so popular with intellectuals is not merely the quality of his writing but the fact that, unlike Dawkins or Ridley, he is not trying to explain the essentially mathematical logic of modern evolutionary theory. It's not just that there are no equations or simulations in his books; he doesn't even think in terms of the mathematical models that inform the work of writers like Dawkins. That is what makes his work so appealing. The problem, of course, is that evolutionary theory -- the real thing -- is based on mathematical models; indeed, increasingly it is based on computer simulation. And so the very aversion to mathematics that makes Gould so appealing to his audience means that his books, while they may seem to his readers to contain deep ideas, seem to people who actually know the field to be mere literary confections with little serious intellectual content, and much of that simply wrong. In particular, readers whose ideas of evolution are formed by reading Gould's work get no sense of the power and reach of the theory of natural selection -- if anything, they come away with a sense that modern thought has shown that theory to be inadequate.

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And I freely admit that, with two years college mathematics, there are levels which I cannot penetrate.

That was so when I was a graduate student in political science, and some honourable students were into computer modelling of voting behaviour.

And I imagine computer modelling of consumer behaviour would also exclude me.

But I think Krugman is on pretty thin ice when he writes:

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But ask intellectuals in general for a great evolutionary thinker and they will surely name Stephen Jay Gould --

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Maybe Krugman has done a (scientific?) survey, but Gould is known just because his works are published and republished everywhere. It's the first name on people's lips, maybe. Myself, I've read Maynard Smith, and Th. Dobzhansky, and a few others I'd put way above Gould.

When I was a political scientist, I had respect for those who were modelling political behaviour. But I always thought that this tended to mask the deeper questions, starting with the question of whether the voting system was in any way democratic.

And that's my problem with economics as I understand it in my non-mathematical way. I want to know the answer to the question: "What distribution of property brings most happiness to most people? How can we insure that this distribution is present through historical time?

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Originally posted by skdadl:

My question above was mixing up questions about at least two separate sets of distinctions: I see that from reading jrootham's posts.

looney's example here is very close to one of the distinctions I was thinking about. I am reading a bit of cognitive neuroscience right now (popularized, but then a lot of it turns out to be more like philosophy than "hard science" anyway, and quite readable).

The fMRI machines have produced a lot of data about stimuli and the brain. That seems to be true. (I wasn't there, but I accept the reports. )

This locale or these synapses in the brain will respond to that stimulus; and even: this section will govern that function (although I think some of the larger governances were known before fMRIs, from actual physical stimulation).

But everything beyond that basic statement of location - and cognitive neuroscientists say a great deal beyond that - seems to me interpretation. In other words, we accumulate a lot of data, but "what it means" remains sometimes puzzling, sometimes contested.

I'm not even sure I know what "what it means" means - except that suddenly I do when I read a researcher leap to a conclusion, especially one that I believe to be wrong (a belief based only on my careful observations). And they definitely do leap to conclusions.

So that was one puzzle I was thinking about. There was another, and now I have even more. I shall return.

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I definitely hear you on this one, and I am thinking that a lot of the problem is that human brain activity and behavior is a lot more complex than our scientific/technological process can currently handle. In assessing another human being, we can be more sensitive than machines. Also more biased, more off-base, and more wrong -- but sometimes, more sensitive. In other words, sometimes empirical studies are too specific to be useful with individuals, and sometimes anecdotal studies have great practical use despite shaky theoretical underpinnings.

This is all kind of half-formed so bear with me!It just seems that brain activity/behavior is an area where the empiricists claim to have it all sewn up, but what they have actually proven is often so limited as to be useless in individual cases. In individual cases it seems to me that personal relationships and sensitivity are still useful tools, anecdotal experience in other words, and I've been stuggling with how to defend that.

To use Chubbles' example above of ADHD, there we have a disorder that can be identified through use of an MRI. And what happens in that diagnostic process is pretty much what you describe -- activity in certain areas of the brain is visible and noted. What does that activity mean? What does it do? That's not so clear, and lots of people have theories. But more or less, the presence of that type of activity = ADHD. From there, we can structure empirical studies. Again with Chubbles' example, we can look at sugar comsumption. We use the MRI to make sure we have subjects with and without ADHD, we control sugar consumption, and we're off to the races. We find that sugar has little to do with ADHD type behavior. That's the empiricism.

But then you have the mother, who swears up and down that sugar affects her kid with ADHD. The doctor says it's not true, but she sees it every day. She's presenting anecdotal evidence. Usually the doctor trumps that with the empirical evidence otherwise, and dismisses her. I think this might be similar to your situation, maybe, skdadl?

But should the mother's experience really be written off as anecdotal? So many possibilities present themselves. Was the child properly diagnosed with ADHD (not many get a brain scan for that)? Is the child's behavior a symptom of another disorder that is affected by sugar? Is something associated with the sugar, rather than the sugar itself, responsible for the behavior change -- maybe a teacher uses candy as a reward and the reward schedule is somehow stimulating to the student, or the child associates cookies with fun times with Grandma and gets jumped up.

The mother, as a sensitive observer, has noted a relationship. She has done her own experimenting and confirmed the relationship between sugar and behavior for her child. Who knows why it works. The point is that for this child, that relationship seems to exist and this child's life can be improved by manipulating his sugar intake.
There is empirical evidence that sugar consumption should not affect ADHD, but who is to say that relationship has a single damn thing to do with this particular child and this particular problem.

I get frustrated when doctors dismiss that kind of experience. The kind of experience that family members, for example, often bring to bear on their children's medical issues. In the end, the MRI just confirms brain activity. Anything more than that is speculation. It measures something very narrow and specific, and human brain activity and behavior is influenced by an uncountable number of factors. So the absence of an empirically demonstrated relationship between X substance and Y brain activity shouldn't be used to dismiss the possibility of a functional relationship between X and Y in an individual.

It could very well be misdiagnosis or unrelated factors that are responsible for the seeming relationship, sure. But a sensitive human observer might have stumbled into some kind of functional relationship that can be manipulated to improve the individual's life. And I guess in my opinion, that's the value of anecdote.

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Originally posted by skdadl:

And Rufus, as history, this is garbage.

The "men of letters" of the high Englightenment all did everything.)

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Speaking of overgeneralization--maybe in France, but Pope sure didn't, and neither did Swift, or Samuel Johnson. They just wrote stuff (Swift also did charity work, but he didn't do other kinds of scholarship or research AFAIK), and they weren't the only ones. Pope complained about Grub Street and its low, modern scribblers, but in many ways he was part of the same phenomenon of the professionalization of writing and publishing that seemed to be happening in England in the C18. And in both Pope and Swift there were a few cases of a distinctly sniffy attitude towards anyone who went around tinkering or inventing. There's a couple sections of Gulliver's Travels that make fairly vicious fun of proto-scientist types.

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Originally posted by NoFleas:

But what's interesting to me about this is that the hypothesis 300 years later didn't get us any further ahead as far as preventing scurvy goes. Do you know what I mean?

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I won't carry on with the Augustan drift too long; however:

You're certainly right about that older generation of fairly conservative (not speaking here in terms of party affiliation, which gets complicated) satirists, although even among them, we see some relatively liberal variants - Addison, eg. That is a generational thing, though, and true in France as well. Voltaire's politics and the very little he wrote on economics are conservative as well, in much the same ways.

(An aside: I don't quite agree with your characterization of Swift in book 3: I read most of that as a satire of pedantry, not of science. I do always enjoy the sackful of objects, however. You will of course know The Battle of the Books, where he satirizes all sides.)

The generation(s) that followed, though, in both countries and then quite spectacularly in Germany, were racing to live up to Kant's quotation from Horace, Sapere aude! , long before he summarized their attitudes that way. Of course it is silly of me to say they were all doing everything, but most of the writers we still read were interested in and sympathetic to just about everything, and that includes the novelists and poets and painters. Sterne and Diderot wrote novels by spinning off John Locke, eg.

Much of this is only to say that vaguely and generally liberal vs conservative social and cultural views tend to be cyclical, or at least they look like that to me. But one finds again and again, until very late in the century, thinkers of all stripes referring to themselves as "men of letters." Hume asked to be remembered that way in his deathbed autobiography. His friend Adam Smith echoed him. That was the culture up to and for some time into the revolution.

Yes, materialist science was gaining ground, and yes, the great philosophes most everywhere patronized it (in both senses of that term), but when you read it philosophized - Holbach, Helvetius, eg - it sounds pretty raw still.

I understand, btw, that Linnaeus is somewhat in need of revision.

[ 14 December 2005: Message edited by: skdadl ]

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Originally posted by skdadl:
Of course it is silly of me to say they were all doing everything, but most of the writers we still read were interested in and sympathetic to just about everything, and that includes the novelists and poets and painters.

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I'm very sympathetic to those guys who were interested in and sympathetic to just about everything.

Today, though, yikes. Talk about the two solitudes (I'm talking about the way we've divided up the arts/humanities and the sciences in our universities - the winner who's emerged from that division is....administration and business I almost think it was a complot to divide and conquer.

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Originally posted by skdadl:
Rufus, I apologize. I lost my temper yesterday afternoon

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"If our brains were any simpler, we wouldn't be able to understand them."

My favourite line. Author a populariser of science, especially chaos theory, much-published but whose surname I just cannot remember. First name Ian...

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So the absence of an empirically demonstrated relationship between X substance and Y brain activity shouldn't be used to dismiss the possibility of a functional relationship between X and Y in an individual.

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I am going to attempt to memorize that line, vmichel. If I ever use it, I shall credit you. Promise.

The problem you describe so helpfully there is indeed very like some of the situations I am thinking about, although more clearly broken down into three major moments - what fMRIs can do and show; subseqent empirical investigation; and anecdotal evidence - than I have been able to discern in the research claims I know about. That second moment, the empirical study of an observed manifestation - I have trouble imagining how that would be done, which might be why some researchers speak as though it didn't need doing.

I have no trouble with scientists saying "We don't know." I have quite a bit of trouble with scientists saying "Nothing is happening" when observably, behaviourally, something is. And no, I'm not talking about brain death here, about anything as extreme as, eg, the Schiavo case. Perhaps I am only talking about degrees of nuanced understanding among different scientists and medical people.

But that leads me back to my other point above, the danger of received wisdom in our disciplines and professions. Before any of us can do any kind of advanced study, we have to stuff ourselves with information that we accept more or less uncritically - professionals begin their careers in that condition. It seems to me a significant intellectual danger. Mind you, I believe Stephen Gordon when he says above:

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The problem is that it's usually pretty easy to explain an apparent paradox - if you really understand the relevant theory. Many apparent challenges turn out to be manifestations of well-known and long-exploded fallacies.

But not always.

In my world, identifying a truly inexplicable phenomenon/anecdote is akin to finding an intellectual gold mine. A fruitful research agenda and (if all goes well) a trip to Stockholm are the usual rewards. So we take these 'puzzles' pretty seriously - if can be in fact established that it is a puzzle.

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I do agree that that is the hell of it, figuring out whether you have a question in the first place, and then figuring out how to put it. I am mostly still back at that stage, which is why my posts are so empty and confused but why I find it so helpful to watch other people refine their versions of the question.

I was amused by your description of the "complot," brebis noire, especially its upshot.

People will maybe know C.P. Snow's famous lecture on "The Two Cultures" (1959) - there seems to be some good recent commentary and bibliography on that controversy here.

In terms of my question, though, I regret a bit drifting off in the direction of those historical disputes because what I'm puzzling through is a lot more basic than that - I think it is still localized in our understanding of what data are and also what intellectual rigour and honesty, maybe modesty, are. I really don't think it has anything to do with critiques of humanism or postmodernism. It has simply to do with holding scientists to their own standards.

Boarsbreath, I'm not sure that I can think of anyone who has made the flat claim that "reality is a figment of our imagination," although I gather that some people want to claim that that is what others have claimed. But that would just be a debate between pedants, wouldn't it.

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I'm not sure that I can think of anyone who has made the flat claim that "reality is a figment of our imagination,"

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A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM

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Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

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jeff house, you seem to be taking those few lines from a love lyric, with what looks to me an allusion to Shakespeare, as equivalent to a philosophical statement that There Is No Reality?

Well, y'know: have fun with that.

Poe would be an odd person to make that claim of, though, at least as I've read him (and I think I've read all his prose). Poe was fascinated by the science of his day, as he was also fascinated by the interplay of formal logic with human prejudice (see "The Purloined Letter," or any of the mysteries, which are early experiments in so-called "lateral thinking").

I would have called Poe a convinced materialist, actually, although not a banal one. About human consciousness, or spirit, he reasoned this way: if it exists (and he believed it did), it must be material in some sense; and if matter is indestructible (which he was convinced matter was), then consciousness or spirit must persist after death. He wrote several short stories or dialogues on the topic, as experimental meditations on what the persistence of material spirit after the body's death might be like. They're quite trippy, although I must admit I enjoy the mysteries more.

I'm not defending Poe's view here, mind, just trying to do it justice. I certainly don't think it can be reduced to a claim that "reality is a figment of our imagination."

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He was part of my dream, of course -- but then I was part of his dream, too!

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In "Through the Looking Glass," Tweedledee shows Alice the sleeping Red King and tells her: "You're only a sort of thing in his dream!" Upset by the thought of not being "real," Alice afterwards tries to puzzle it out: "He was part of my dream, of course -- but then I was part of his dream, too!" Children dream adults, and adults dream children; like all relationships based on fantasy and projection, this one has the potential for both humor and horror. It's Alice's ability to express the humor and the horror that accounts for her long and successful career as a little girl.

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