against scientism

June 6, 2011 2 Comments

Do we see signs of Austrianism in Egyptology and marketing?

I don’t think Barbara Mertz is a praxeologist, by which I mean that I don’t assume she would accept the claims of a priori laws concerning social phenomena, but she certainly shares Mises’s methodological dualism.

After a discussion of some standard causal theories about the rise and decline of civilization, Mertz concludes,

This has been a very superficial, limited probing of some of the types of problems we encounter when we talk about causes in history. We have not even settled the important question of whether there are causes. Yet we will probably go right on looking for them, and talking about them. The intellectual climate of our own era asks for explanations. We would like, if we could, to reduce all phenomena to systems of logical sequence. In part this is the effect of the prestige of the physical sciences, and this effect is not always for the good. History may be “scientific” in its approach, and the social studies may be “social sciences” in the sense that they apply dispassionate, critical, and rigorously logical analyses to the subjects of their discourse. But the disciplines that deal with man and his peculiar affairs cannot expect to use the methods, or anticipate the results, of the physical sciences. The human experiment will not reproduce itself under laboratory conditions; we can never control our specimens to such a degree that we can isolate a pertinent stimulus or determine a specific conclusion. My personal antipathy toward the use of the term “scientific” in the humanistic disciplines is that the very application of the word sometimes suggests to the user that such isolation and such determination are possible. Sometimes I wish they were.

We have a more personal need, in our time, to dissect the past in search of its pathology, for according to some historians our own culture is showing disturbing signs of disease. However you define the developmental stages of civilization, and upon what ever step you put us here, in this twenty-first century of the Christian Era, it seems unlikely that we are at the beginning of a process. This leaves us with the dismal possibility that we may be nearing the end. If so, it behooves us to discover, insofar as we are able, where we are, and why. If there are universal causes, and if we are able to see them plainly, we may learn how to avoid their more disastrous consequences.

That is one of the reasons why we look for reasons. Whether we have any grounds for supposing that we will find them is another question. At the moment, it appears that our only recourse, if we are about to fall, is to go down gracefully.

Barbara Mertz, Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt

While Barbara Mertz’s may or may not agree with Ludwig von Mises’s approach to theory and history, ad man Rory Sutherland is openly Austrian, at least enough to give a marketing presentation called “Praxeology: Time to Rediscover a Lost Science”:

Jeffrey Tucker says, “This is, very truly, one of the most interesting lectures I’ve ever heard.” I have to agree.

Filed under civilization, economics, history, literature, philosophy, science, video

religion and science

May 17, 2011 Leave a comment

Benjamin was going to do a makeup class for kung fu, and then we were going to go shopping, but a huge storm kept us indoors. I read to the boy and his mother a couple of chapters of Geraldine McCaughrean’s Not the End of the World, about the the Deluge, as told from the perspective of Noah’s daughter (mention of whom didn’t manage to make it into the Bible).

Then Benjamin said he wanted to do some science experiments. A family friend had given him a science kit for Christmas. We did the (apparently famous) red-cabbage acid/base experiment, which you can find described at TheHappyScientist.com or at DoScience.com if you prefer to see some pictures.

Lucky for us that Blue, Base, and Baking Soda all start with the letter B. Handy mnemonic, that.

Filed under religion, science

household germs

October 24, 2010 Leave a comment

toiletBill Bryson on Dr. Charles P. Gerba on germs and toilets:

The most celebrated germ expert in the world is almost certainly Dr. Charles P. Gerba of the University of Arizona, who is so devoted to the field that he gave one of his children the middle name Escherichia, after the bacterium Escherichia coli. Dr. Gerba established some years ago that household germs are not always most numerous where you would expect them to be. In one famous survey he measured bacterial content in different rooms in various houses and found that typically the cleanest surface of all in the average house was the toilet seat. That is because it is wiped down with disinfectant more often than any other surface. By contrast the average desktop has five times more bacteria living on it than the average toilet seat.

The dirtiest area of all was the kitchen sink, closely followed by the kitchen counter, and the filthiest object was the kitchen washcloth. Most kitchen cloths are drenched in bacteria, and using them to wipe counters (or plates or breadboards or greasy chins or any other surface) merely transfers microbes from one place to another, affording them new chances to breed and proliferate. The second most efficient way of spreading germs, Gerba found, is to flush a toilet with the lid up. That spews billions of microbes into the air. Many stay in the air, floating like tiny soap bubbles, waiting to be inhaled, for up to two hours; others settle on things like your toothbrush. That is, of course, yet another good reason for putting the lid down.

Almost certainly the most memorable finding of recent years with respect to microbes was when an enterprising middle school student in Florida compared the quality of water in the toilets at her local fast-food restaurants with the quality of the ice in the soft drinks, and found that in 70 percent of outlets she surveyed the toilet water was cleaner than the ice.

Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Filed under science, strategy

rats

October 23, 2010 Leave a comment

ratAs a friend said, this sounds like something out of Ratatouille:

Rats are smart and often work cooperatively. At the former Gansevoort poultry market in Greenwich Village, New York, pest control authorities could not understand how rats were stealing eggs without breaking them, so one night an exterminator sat in hiding to watch. What he saw was that one rat would embrace an egg with all four legs, then roll over on his back. A second rat would then drag the first rat by its tail to their burrow, where they could share their prize in peace. In a similar manner workers at a packing plant discovered how sides of meat, hanging from hooks, were knocked to the floor and devoured night after night. An exterminator named Irving Billig watched and found that a swarm of rats formed a pyramid underneath a side of meat, and one rat scrambled to the top of the heap and leaped onto the meat from there. It then climbed to the top of the side of meat and gnawed its way through it around the hook until the meat dropped to the floor, at which point hundreds of waiting rats fell upon it.

Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Filed under history, science

scientific regress

March 20, 2010 2 Comments

London Herald headline: Scott Killed at the South Pole

On his blog, IdleWords.com, Polish-born Maciej Ceglowski ("as American as gooseberry pie," but now living in northeastern Romania) tells the fascinating story of how the cure for scurvy was won and lost in a culture confident in scientific progress, and why Robert Falcon Scott’s 1911 expedition to the South Pole struggled with a disease that had supposedly been cured in the 18th century:

I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease.…

Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times.…

[I]n the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another.

(via MonsterFool)

This idea of backward steps in science should be familiar to anyone who has read Murray Rothbard’s introduction to Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (available in print, PDF, and ePub):

The continual progress, onward-and-upward approach was demolished for me, and should have been for everyone, by Thomas Kuhn’s famed Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn paid no attention to economics, but instead, in the standard manner of philosophers and historians of science, focused on such ineluctably “hard” sciences as physics, chemistry, and astronomy.

Bringing the word “paradigm” into intellectual discourse, Kuhn demolished what I like to call the “Whig theory of the history of science.” The Whig theory, subscribed to by almost all historians of science, including economics, is that scientific thought progresses patiently, one year after another developing, sifting, and testing theories, so that science marches onward and upward, each year, decade, or generation learning more and possessing ever more correct scientific theories.

On analogy with the Whig theory of history, coined in mid-nineteenth-century England, which maintained that things are always getting (and therefore must get) better and better, the Whig historian of science, seemingly on firmer ground than the regular Whig historian, implicitly or explicitly asserts that “later is always better” in any particular scientific discipline. The Whig historian (whether of science or of history proper) really maintains that, for any point of historical time, “whatever was, was right,” or at least better than “whatever was earlier.”

The inevitable result is a complacent and infuriating Panglossian optimism. In the historiography of economic thought, the consequence is the firm if implicit position that every individual economist, or at least every school of economists, contributed their important mite to the inexorable upward march. There can, then, be no such thing as gross systemic error that deeply flawed, or even invalidated, an entire school of economic thought, much less sent the world of economics permanently astray.

Kuhn, however, shocked the philosophic world by demonstrating that this is simply not the way that science has developed. Once a central paradigm is selected, there is no testing or sifting, and tests of basic assumptions only take place after a series of failures and anomalies in the ruling paradigm has plunged the science into a “crisis situation.” One need not adopt Kuhn’s nihilistic philosophic outlook, his implication that no one paradigm is or can be better than any other, to realize that his less than starry-eyed view of science rings true both as history and as sociology.

But if the standard romantic or Panglossian view does not work even in the hard sciences, a fortiori it must be totally off the mark in such a ‘soft science’ as economics, in a discipline where there can be no laboratory testing, and where numerous even softer disciplines such as politics, religion, and ethics necessarily impinge on one’s economic outlook.

(Crossposted to blog.Mises.org)

Filed under economics, history, LvMI, science, technology

the psychology of power

January 23, 2010 Leave a comment

From The Economist January 21, 2010 print edition:

The One Ring

Absolutely

Power corrupts, but it corrupts only those who think they deserve it

Reports of politicians who have extramarital affairs while complaining about the death of family values, or who use public funding for private gain despite condemning government waste, have become so common in recent years that they hardly seem surprising anymore. Anecdotally, at least, the connection between power and hypocrisy looks obvious.

Anecdote is not science, though. And, more subtly, even if anecdote is correct, it does not answer the question of whether power tends to corrupt, as Lord Acton’s dictum has it, or whether it merely attracts the corruptible. To investigate this question Joris Lammers at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, and Adam Galinsky at Northwestern University, in Illinois, have conducted a series of experiments which attempted to elicit states of powerfulness and powerlessness in the minds of volunteers. Having done so, as they report in Psychological Science, they tested those volunteers’ moral pliability. Lord Acton, they found, was right.

Read the rest.

(via AC Capehart)

Filed under science

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