Has there ever been an instance when religion and science came into conflict and religion legitimately won? Imagine the reverse of the flat-world idea, e.g. science posits that the world is flat and religion argues it is round.
I think this is an unfairly loaded question.
Science,
on my reading of history, exists as thoughts that people hold in a
certain way. To put it crudely, the thoughts of a scientist that
constitute Science are thoughts that can be transmitted clearly from one
person to another and that can be proven false upon critical
observation. I am annoying to some real scientists (and almost all
science journalists) because I don't believe in scientific truth: for me the process of science is an accumulation of
skillful lies about reality, skillful lies which exist as we become
aware of our fundamental ignorance about how things work in a particular
environment and learn to make that ignorance minimally poisonous. The
theory of gravity, to my mind, is a skillful lie about how bodies relate
to one another in space. It is skillful because its precision allows
us to notice clearly where it ceases to work (e.g. in very small
spaces). Much that passes for Science in the popular mind, and even in
scientific journals, does not rise to this level of rigor (and
skillfulness). This is particularly true of modern scientific
publications dedicated to medicine and soft (not to say hopelessly squishy) sciences like psychology or
economics (which latter I regard as the modern version of ancient astrology).
Religion
is different from Science in comprising more (and more incongruous)
things. Historically, scientists practice religion (along with other
mortals), which is just a kind of organized human behavior that is more
often than not explicitly irrational. (Why are we met on this field to
sing at the top of our lungs, dance naked, and drink beverages that
might make us live longer or kill us quicker, depending on which
scientist we want to believe? That is a question that only an idiot
would think he could answer definitively, it seems to me. And yet you
will find some scientists--the ones I scoff at--trying to give
definitive answers, explaining how the history of the universe makes
rock concerts or Catholic masses inevitable.)
More
often than not, what we call Science arises out of people reflecting on
Religion (asking what we are, how we exist, what happens when we get
drunk together, etc.). A more honest assessment of the relationship
between Science and Religion, to my mind, would be that people generally
have ideas (more or less clever) about what the heck Life is, and that
some of them then go on to make these ideas falsifiable while others
follow an opposite trajectory. Neither group of people (the generally
skeptical or the generally dogmatic) argues pure Science or pure
Religion (historically never simply theology, which is to
Religion proper what Science is to medicine). Both tell clever lies,
and both live a Life that refutes their lies constantly, whether they
choose to notice or not.
Now,
in light of all this, I come to the question: has Science ever gotten
wrong what Religion got right? If we limit Religion to theology,
historically a kind of Science (as I just noticed), then the answer is
probably not. But let this be no comfort to thee, Science, for (as just
noted) Religion contains much more than just the rambling thoughts of a
Plato or a Thomas Aquinas (let alone hacks like Ken
Ham). It also includes years of practical experience, which is often
incredibly wise where Science is naive and stupid.
Some
of the most telling examples of Religion winning against Science occur
in the area of diet and exercise. Religion gives people seasonality
(rest at least once a week, observe holy days), where Science gives them
lab schedules (work 7 days a week, night-shifts, etc., and when you get
sick we'll hook you up to a fancy CPAP to see what the heck is wrong).
Religion gives people fasting (the real secret behind many "miracle
diets" that look great when native cultures practice them and terrible
in clinical trials), where Science gives them whatever idiotic nonsense
the US Department of Agriculture and the American Medical Association are currently shilling. I don't level the charge
of nonsense lightly. If you care to dig into real Science, i.e. medical
research, you will find a growing field in the study of iatrogenics,
which reveals that much "cutting-edge" medical science (particularly in
the realm of diet and exercise, and the cure for things like obesity,
metabolic syndrome, and CVD) is dangerous bullshit.
If
we move outside medicine to say, economics, we have Science offering
people complicated mathematical formulae "proving" that debt is safe,
whereas Religion tells them it is evil. In light of recent events, I am
personally inclined to give this one to Religion (though others,
notably economists, politicians, and bankers, will put in a bid for
Science--and demand taxpayer money for further trials of their beautiful
theories).
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Monday, May 12, 2014
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Humor and Integrity
I recently listened to the first half of this interview again, and I was impressed (moved). Brian Dalton has some good things to say, things that have crossed my mind several times as well (more and more over the past few years).
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Jared Diamond. "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race." Discover Magazine, May 1997, 64-66.
I discovered Diamond's essay for the first time several years ago, while I was reading up on human health (in an ongoing quest to improve my own). I was intrigued, and eventually convinced, although I know that there are important points to be made against Diamond's pessimistic take on agricultural civilization (e.g. the arguments raised by Steven Pinker). That said, this post is going to be my version of Diamond (dumber, shorter, and with less references). I wrote the original version of the post in response to a friend, who forwarded an article lamenting recent decline in the birth rate among nations of the First World. I have seen several such articles, all of them implying that social upheaval (broken economies, crime, etc.) is owing to a lack of babies, a lack that these writers (if I understand them correctly) seem to ascribe to widespread laziness. My fellow First Worlders are not "putting out" as industriously as they should, and will be rewarded with the implosion of their padded social safety nets (as fewer kids exist to care for more and more parents, aged and helpless). I doubt this. Following the train of thought developed by Daniel Quinn, I further doubt that a reduction in human population worldwide would be a bad thing (necessarily: I am not saying that it would be great, either; it might, however, be natural -- as good or bad as rocks, waterfalls, and bacon). Here is what I wrote, with a little minimal editing.
I think population reduction is a healthy response to imbalance in resources. We simply don't have the goods to fuel endless growth (in people or the things they require to exist, things like food, water, shelter, clothes, entertainment -- unless we are willing to drastically reduce our expectations in these areas). We are adjusting to several environmental factors, e.g. globalization (and concomitant competition for increasingly scarce resources), climate change (which may or may not have anything significant to do with us), and technological revolution (which has addicted increasing numbers of us to luxuries like running water, food that someone else prepared, housing that someone else built, gadgets that someone else invented and mass-produced, and lifetimes spent working narrow careers with companies that don't go belly up).
Historically, the agricultural model for human survival has been to reproduce like insects: we made lots of people -- lots of sick, blind, stunted, relatively weak people -- and took over from the hunter-gatherers (who were healthier, sharper-sighted, taller, stronger, and even more mentally capable than we) by sheer force of numbers. One familiar episode in this ongoing saga is the displacement of the American Indians by boatloads of European riff-raff (whose guns, germs, and steel paved the way for them to become a dominant force worldwide). Indians were healthier (as individuals), more sustainable (as communities), and less numerous than the immigrants who replaced them. We were the mites and moths and hornets who overran their beehive. Now, it's our turn to be overrun. Maybe the result will be just another opportunistic parasitism, but I don't know. I get the feeling that other societies are collapsing too: people are living shorter and sicker lives all over the world; standard methods of producing the energy modern civilization requires to exist are failing; economies are imploding (not just in Europe and North America: India, China, and their neighbors are also looking less than robust these days). I think we may just have to learn to live with less; and that may mean that there will be less of us. Our old methods for solving these dilemmas are (1) plague and (2) wars: the last century saw us pushing (1) away while embracing (2) with all our might. I think we might be due for a switch, with (1) returning (in the form of rampant diseases of civilization: diabetes, syndrome X, autoimmune disorders, obesity, failure to thrive, infertility, heart disease, stroke, cancer, etc.) and (2) fading (as we stagger away from a century of vicious fighting). I could be wrong, of course.
I discovered Diamond's essay for the first time several years ago, while I was reading up on human health (in an ongoing quest to improve my own). I was intrigued, and eventually convinced, although I know that there are important points to be made against Diamond's pessimistic take on agricultural civilization (e.g. the arguments raised by Steven Pinker). That said, this post is going to be my version of Diamond (dumber, shorter, and with less references). I wrote the original version of the post in response to a friend, who forwarded an article lamenting recent decline in the birth rate among nations of the First World. I have seen several such articles, all of them implying that social upheaval (broken economies, crime, etc.) is owing to a lack of babies, a lack that these writers (if I understand them correctly) seem to ascribe to widespread laziness. My fellow First Worlders are not "putting out" as industriously as they should, and will be rewarded with the implosion of their padded social safety nets (as fewer kids exist to care for more and more parents, aged and helpless). I doubt this. Following the train of thought developed by Daniel Quinn, I further doubt that a reduction in human population worldwide would be a bad thing (necessarily: I am not saying that it would be great, either; it might, however, be natural -- as good or bad as rocks, waterfalls, and bacon). Here is what I wrote, with a little minimal editing.
I think population reduction is a healthy response to imbalance in resources. We simply don't have the goods to fuel endless growth (in people or the things they require to exist, things like food, water, shelter, clothes, entertainment -- unless we are willing to drastically reduce our expectations in these areas). We are adjusting to several environmental factors, e.g. globalization (and concomitant competition for increasingly scarce resources), climate change (which may or may not have anything significant to do with us), and technological revolution (which has addicted increasing numbers of us to luxuries like running water, food that someone else prepared, housing that someone else built, gadgets that someone else invented and mass-produced, and lifetimes spent working narrow careers with companies that don't go belly up).
Historically, the agricultural model for human survival has been to reproduce like insects: we made lots of people -- lots of sick, blind, stunted, relatively weak people -- and took over from the hunter-gatherers (who were healthier, sharper-sighted, taller, stronger, and even more mentally capable than we) by sheer force of numbers. One familiar episode in this ongoing saga is the displacement of the American Indians by boatloads of European riff-raff (whose guns, germs, and steel paved the way for them to become a dominant force worldwide). Indians were healthier (as individuals), more sustainable (as communities), and less numerous than the immigrants who replaced them. We were the mites and moths and hornets who overran their beehive. Now, it's our turn to be overrun. Maybe the result will be just another opportunistic parasitism, but I don't know. I get the feeling that other societies are collapsing too: people are living shorter and sicker lives all over the world; standard methods of producing the energy modern civilization requires to exist are failing; economies are imploding (not just in Europe and North America: India, China, and their neighbors are also looking less than robust these days). I think we may just have to learn to live with less; and that may mean that there will be less of us. Our old methods for solving these dilemmas are (1) plague and (2) wars: the last century saw us pushing (1) away while embracing (2) with all our might. I think we might be due for a switch, with (1) returning (in the form of rampant diseases of civilization: diabetes, syndrome X, autoimmune disorders, obesity, failure to thrive, infertility, heart disease, stroke, cancer, etc.) and (2) fading (as we stagger away from a century of vicious fighting). I could be wrong, of course.
Since this is a topic of recurring interest to me, there will be more about it on the blog. I am not done with it yet by any means.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
A World of Signs
Yuri M. Lotman. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Translated by Ann Shukman. Introduced by Umberto Eco. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. ISBN 025321405X.
Jakob von Uexkull. "The Theory of Meaning." Semiotica 42 (1982): 25-87. ISSN 0037-1998.
During my last year of coursework in graduate school, I decided to take an accelerated course in Russian language. In addition to providing an introduction to Russian language and culture, the course incorporated some general references to semiotic theory (named from the Greek word sema, meaning "sign"), which intrigued me greatly. In answer to my inquiries, the instructor provided a wealth of material, including Lotman's book and a reprint of von Uexkull's work. Both were a revelation to me, helping me to systematize and streamline my understanding of the world to a greater extent than I had imagined possible.
I grew up studying first one thing, then another. When I was nine years old, I was determined to be a paleontologist, and eagerly devoured books by authors like Gregory S. Paul and Robert Bakker. Then, a year or two later, I became enamored of history; eventually this led me all the way through Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, I read the Standard Works of the LDS church, starting with the Book of Mormon and getting through the Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, and all of the King James Bible (several times). As a university student, I wandered from religious studies into classics (Greek and Latin antiquity), where I eventually took an undergraduate degree and (in a fit of naivete) went to graduate school. Until I encountered semiotics, I had no way of consciously (or convincingly) relating the individual fields of inquiry whose fruit I had tasted: each was something of an island unto itself, connected to the rest by artificial intellectual bridges that needed only a little introspection to dismantle. The insularity of my "knowledge" of each field made me largely an abject pupil to "experts" whose "knowledge" was similarly insular, superior to mine only in that it was much more detailed. Negotiating this early period in my intellectual development required a lot of faith in teachers, then, and a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance, since my teachers did not always agree where their relatively narrow fields converged. Semiotics gave me the tools I needed to understand what unites all the various fields of human inquiry.
From Lotman, I learned that all human culture is composed of signs (or signals). These take the form of images, gestures, words, numbers, texts, equations, and artifacts. In some contexts, the information content of these signals is relatively fixed: written law and common usage converge to make the meaning of red "stop" signs on American roads pretty clear, and pretty similar to all cultured people. In other contexts, however, the information content of signals is fundamentally unfixed. When used by the Spanish band Estopa (to give one example), the red "stop" sign means much more than just "stop." You could write volumes trying to explain its significance as a musical or political symbol without exhausting its capacity to generate new meaning every time you or someone else looks at it. Systems of signs work like individual signs: the farther removed they get from very specific contexts, and the more information they attempt to convey, the more capacity to generate unexpected (and unpredictable) meaning they acquire. So attempts to definitively fix the meaning of a complex literary text (like the US Constitution) inevitably fail. This is because terms like "interstate commerce" are too unspecific to be read the same way by all readers. So all human culture entails a necessary burden of ambiguity: the signs we use to communicate with one another inevitably say more or less than we mean, because we cannot control meaning. It escapes us, no matter how much institutional power we may bring to bear upon it. So it becomes impossible to conceive of an absolute truth accessible to the community in definite form. If it can be thought, it cannot be spoken or shared in any medium. Instead, we spend our time sharing signs whose information content varies infinitely over time as contexts come and go, evolving and and devolving with an ebb and flow that escapes our power to predict or control definitively.
Von Uexkull takes a semiotic approach to biology, interpreting all life as the interchange of signals (in the form of chemical and physical reactions embodying the transmission of information). A very simple example of his approach is the tick. Imagine a field full of bright flowers and tall grass on a warm summer's day: the sun shines, the wind blows, birds and bees flit to and fro. But the tick perceives none of this. Instead, it feels the presence of mammals approaching and receding in whiffs of butyric acid carried by the wind. Eventually, one whiff approaches near enough to stimulate a move, and the tick's perception shifts to notice thick, mammalian hair under and around it. Moving through the hair, the tick looks for a specific temperature unique to the skin-surface temperature of warm-blooded mammals. When it finds this temperature, it inserts its snout and begins feeding. Like the tick, all living organisms are bundles of sense-organs oriented towards stimuli in their unique environments; each conceives (and constructs) the world as its organs permit. This new (and beautiful) way of looking at the universe left me with a great dilemma. What becomes of absolute truth, even as an idea, when the tick has one view of life and I have another so radically different? Why should my view be any more true (in any way) than the tick's? Why is my viewpoint worth more than the tick's? I can find no answer to these questions that does not come from myself, no answer that comes from some source of information independent of me and the tick. Lotman made all men equal in my eyes as imperfect (the semiotic term is "asymmetrical") interpreters of signs; von Uexkull used a similar methodology to make all life equal.
One result of my encounter with Lotman and von Uexkull is that I have lost the ability to take seriously the idea that an anthropomorphic god might be the absolute ruler of earth. In practice, the word "god" is a sign whose information content is completely unfixed: we use it to mark the unknown source of life that none of us is really, definitively sure about. If we are going to mark that uncertainty with a constructed persona, should not our persona be large enough to encompass all life (not just the human)? At issue here is our human orientation towards the world. Do we want to see the world as a definite thing that we control (through the great man-in-the-sky who has set us up as lords of creation), or as an indefinite community in which we have a significant interest (not necessarily a controlling one, since we do not see all the factors incorporated into its existence)? I tried for several years to live with the first perspective, but in my personal experience it has never mapped onto reality: god the man never appeared to me. So I am thrust back on the latter, which is truer to my own experience and the science of semiotics: the word "god" marks a fundamentally indefinite mystery. Attempts to curb or control its opacity are just as futile as your high-school English teacher's efforts to eradicate the split infinitive.
Jakob von Uexkull. "The Theory of Meaning." Semiotica 42 (1982): 25-87. ISSN 0037-1998.
During my last year of coursework in graduate school, I decided to take an accelerated course in Russian language. In addition to providing an introduction to Russian language and culture, the course incorporated some general references to semiotic theory (named from the Greek word sema, meaning "sign"), which intrigued me greatly. In answer to my inquiries, the instructor provided a wealth of material, including Lotman's book and a reprint of von Uexkull's work. Both were a revelation to me, helping me to systematize and streamline my understanding of the world to a greater extent than I had imagined possible.
I grew up studying first one thing, then another. When I was nine years old, I was determined to be a paleontologist, and eagerly devoured books by authors like Gregory S. Paul and Robert Bakker. Then, a year or two later, I became enamored of history; eventually this led me all the way through Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, I read the Standard Works of the LDS church, starting with the Book of Mormon and getting through the Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, and all of the King James Bible (several times). As a university student, I wandered from religious studies into classics (Greek and Latin antiquity), where I eventually took an undergraduate degree and (in a fit of naivete) went to graduate school. Until I encountered semiotics, I had no way of consciously (or convincingly) relating the individual fields of inquiry whose fruit I had tasted: each was something of an island unto itself, connected to the rest by artificial intellectual bridges that needed only a little introspection to dismantle. The insularity of my "knowledge" of each field made me largely an abject pupil to "experts" whose "knowledge" was similarly insular, superior to mine only in that it was much more detailed. Negotiating this early period in my intellectual development required a lot of faith in teachers, then, and a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance, since my teachers did not always agree where their relatively narrow fields converged. Semiotics gave me the tools I needed to understand what unites all the various fields of human inquiry.
From Lotman, I learned that all human culture is composed of signs (or signals). These take the form of images, gestures, words, numbers, texts, equations, and artifacts. In some contexts, the information content of these signals is relatively fixed: written law and common usage converge to make the meaning of red "stop" signs on American roads pretty clear, and pretty similar to all cultured people. In other contexts, however, the information content of signals is fundamentally unfixed. When used by the Spanish band Estopa (to give one example), the red "stop" sign means much more than just "stop." You could write volumes trying to explain its significance as a musical or political symbol without exhausting its capacity to generate new meaning every time you or someone else looks at it. Systems of signs work like individual signs: the farther removed they get from very specific contexts, and the more information they attempt to convey, the more capacity to generate unexpected (and unpredictable) meaning they acquire. So attempts to definitively fix the meaning of a complex literary text (like the US Constitution) inevitably fail. This is because terms like "interstate commerce" are too unspecific to be read the same way by all readers. So all human culture entails a necessary burden of ambiguity: the signs we use to communicate with one another inevitably say more or less than we mean, because we cannot control meaning. It escapes us, no matter how much institutional power we may bring to bear upon it. So it becomes impossible to conceive of an absolute truth accessible to the community in definite form. If it can be thought, it cannot be spoken or shared in any medium. Instead, we spend our time sharing signs whose information content varies infinitely over time as contexts come and go, evolving and and devolving with an ebb and flow that escapes our power to predict or control definitively.
Von Uexkull takes a semiotic approach to biology, interpreting all life as the interchange of signals (in the form of chemical and physical reactions embodying the transmission of information). A very simple example of his approach is the tick. Imagine a field full of bright flowers and tall grass on a warm summer's day: the sun shines, the wind blows, birds and bees flit to and fro. But the tick perceives none of this. Instead, it feels the presence of mammals approaching and receding in whiffs of butyric acid carried by the wind. Eventually, one whiff approaches near enough to stimulate a move, and the tick's perception shifts to notice thick, mammalian hair under and around it. Moving through the hair, the tick looks for a specific temperature unique to the skin-surface temperature of warm-blooded mammals. When it finds this temperature, it inserts its snout and begins feeding. Like the tick, all living organisms are bundles of sense-organs oriented towards stimuli in their unique environments; each conceives (and constructs) the world as its organs permit. This new (and beautiful) way of looking at the universe left me with a great dilemma. What becomes of absolute truth, even as an idea, when the tick has one view of life and I have another so radically different? Why should my view be any more true (in any way) than the tick's? Why is my viewpoint worth more than the tick's? I can find no answer to these questions that does not come from myself, no answer that comes from some source of information independent of me and the tick. Lotman made all men equal in my eyes as imperfect (the semiotic term is "asymmetrical") interpreters of signs; von Uexkull used a similar methodology to make all life equal.
One result of my encounter with Lotman and von Uexkull is that I have lost the ability to take seriously the idea that an anthropomorphic god might be the absolute ruler of earth. In practice, the word "god" is a sign whose information content is completely unfixed: we use it to mark the unknown source of life that none of us is really, definitively sure about. If we are going to mark that uncertainty with a constructed persona, should not our persona be large enough to encompass all life (not just the human)? At issue here is our human orientation towards the world. Do we want to see the world as a definite thing that we control (through the great man-in-the-sky who has set us up as lords of creation), or as an indefinite community in which we have a significant interest (not necessarily a controlling one, since we do not see all the factors incorporated into its existence)? I tried for several years to live with the first perspective, but in my personal experience it has never mapped onto reality: god the man never appeared to me. So I am thrust back on the latter, which is truer to my own experience and the science of semiotics: the word "god" marks a fundamentally indefinite mystery. Attempts to curb or control its opacity are just as futile as your high-school English teacher's efforts to eradicate the split infinitive.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Confession of a Dumb Bird-Watcher
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. New York: Random House, 2004. ISBN 0812975219.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007. ISBN 1400063515.
This essay takes me a little distance down memory lane, since I encountered Nassim Taleb before my crisis of faith had become truly critical. Still not really concerned by the cognitive dissonance that would eventually become unbearable, I was happily engaged in my graduate school work, taking classes and preparing for examinations. As an outlet for stress, I maintained an active lifestyle and sought the best information I could find on human health and performance. I had knocked around enough to know that the people from whom I had the most to learn were older athletes who maintained high activity levels: they had something I wanted. So I found myself visiting the web site of Clarence Bass, who introduced me (figuratively speaking) to economist Arthur De Vany and his brain-child "Evolutionary Fitness". De Vany's ideas about complex systems (of which the human body provides one instance) are very interesting and changed my thinking in many ways (before his blog became available by subscription only; as a poor student, I have little cash to spare). It was on De Vany's blog that I first learned of Taleb, whom (as I recall) De Vany approved as presenting a useful model for understanding how the real world works. I was intrigued enough that I tracked down some cheap copies of Taleb's books and began reading.
In both of his books, Taleb outlines a world very different from the over-determined one in which I grew up. Who can say when my dalliance with determinism began? I remember my mother putting me to bed one night, back when I was about four years old. I looked up at her and asked, with real emotion, "Mama, why does everybody do what they do?" Maybe that was the beginning. In any case, I spent the next several years learning from a deterministic point of view. When I studied palaeontology as a nine-year-old, I tended to assume that dinosaurs (and other extinct life-forms) evolved a certain way out of necessity, adapting in some definite way to meet a definite need. When I read the Book of Mormon as an eleven-year-old and experienced a very powerful emotional conversion, dinosaurs and evolution receded into the background (for several years I rejected evolution entirely!), but deterministic thinking remained: God had a plan which he played out in human life; free will in this plan existed from our point of view (since we were not coerced into making decisions), but not really from his (since he knew in advance what decisions we would make). So life was controlled by prophecies. There was the uncomfortable fact that many of these prophecies seemed to come "true" in so many different times, and in so many different ways. Could God really have deliberately intended so much? Taleb makes it really hard to think he did, particularly if you think of God as a glorified man, which as a good Mormon (and Christian, though some will doubtless protest) I once did.
Instead of writing about "the great chain of being" in some form, with all life ultimately determined by some Aristotelian unmoved mover (whether God or "nature" or anything else you please), Taleb writes about man, i.e. homo sapiens, though when you are knee-deep in Taleb's work he looks a lot more like homo stultus. For Taleb's man is not the pinnacle of evolutionary history or the capstone of God's creation. He is a garrulous fool with a penchant for telling stories to explain why things happen. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Taleb's man does not reason our way out step by logical step: like any good cowboy, he takes a gut check and gets the hell out of Dodge! Then, seated at a cozy table with friends, he tells the story of his escape as though he had calculated every step precisely, as though his salvation were determined by consummate skill (or calculated divine intervention) instead of dumb luck. The rational element is here completely subservient to the emotional, which provides the real, unexamined, unexplained source for human action. I was fascinated by this (for me) new vision of humanity, to the point that I decided to follow a hint from Taleb and take a special examination in ancient astrology, comparing it to modern economics as practiced by the big-shots that have been going broke recently (and using the government's muscle to take food from my children's mouths to get back on their feet). It is uncanny to me how similar ancient astrologers (still extant in old manuscripts that few people read) are to modern economists: both use the language of science (geometry, mathematics) to speak a kind of hyper-articulate gibberish that always makes perfect sense of the (determined) past but cannot say anything really telling about the (undetermined) future. The bogus nature of their predictions is revealed when something really unexpected happens (the unfolding economic crisis, for example): Taleb refers to these unlooked-for events as "black swans", drawing on the old European notion that all swans are white, a notion which persisted until the late 17th century, when black swans were discovered in western Australia.
Someone has come up with a nice parable that illustrates what reading Taleb did for me. Imagine the human mind as a house full of windows to the outside. As long as you are in the house, your understanding of the outside is dependent on your access to the windows. Assuming the outside is important to you, would you not want access to as many windows as possible, preferably clean ones? Reading Taleb showed me (1) that there were many windows in my house, not just the one or two I had been using, and (2) that all of them were very dirty, such that it was better to talk about the potential rather than the actual when speaking of things outside. Essentially, reading Taleb turned me into an epistemological agnostic: I became more aware of the powers and limitations of my mind, and consequently less certain of everything; some things dropped off my radar almost entirely. Why talk seriously about saving the universe or some eternal essence of me long-term when I do not even know how to save the bacon here and now? I began to shut up and listen even more than I used to; other points of view became valuable when they disagreed rationally with an emotional judgment of mine, and useless when they made emotional appeals against my rational judgment. Returning to the parable of the house helps make sense of what was going on. Before I knew about the multitude of windows, I had only one or two (that were really dirty, remember), so when someone said, "Look, there's a little pink unicorn in the garden!" I would peer through the glass, get a glimpse of something and think to myself, "Yeah, that could be a unicorn, and it does look rather pink." After Taleb took me on the grand tour of the house, the process of verification became more complicated. I had to visit all the windows before making a pronouncement. Comparing one view with another, I would say something like this: "Yeah, the smudge on this window creates a blotch that makes whatever-it-is look horned, and the tinge of the dirt makes it seem pink, but that other window upstairs has a different pattern of smudges in different colors, and everyone up there is convinced we have a brown rabbit in the garden, rather than a pink unicorn. Seen from the west wing it looks more like a blue panda." A quicker way to convey this shift in perspective is to emend the famous quote from Descartes, who should have said cogito, ergo idiota sum ("I think, therefore I am an idiot"). Thinking no longer confirms what I already know (in my gut); instead, it provides evidence that I don't really know anything (because gut-sense is really nonsense; unfortunately, it is also the inalienable factor in most human decisions).
So, there you have it. Before reading Taleb, I was living out my life as just another philosophical footnote to Plato, chasing a vision of "absolute truth" whose reality I was prepared to rationalize any way I could. After reading Taleb, "absolute truth" disappeared as a meaningful variable on my epistemological map of the world. Though I still went through perfunctory motions of "believing" in it, I ceased using it as a heuristic in dealing with new data input: it became the relic of an irrecoverable past. Little by little, I shed the persona of the know-it-all expert, crafted in the image of God with clear insight into eternal reality, and recognized that I was just a dumb bird-watcher with a knack for leaping to unjustified (and unjustifiable) conclusions. Like many prognosticators before, I looked around and saw omens: eagles, meteors, planetary conjunctions, stock quotes, sacred books, a burning in the bosom, etc. Sometimes I read the omens "correctly" (meaning I got the outcomes I wanted after seeing the holy birds and making the proper sacrifices), and sometimes I did not. Then one day I saw a black swan. I have never really looked at the world the same way since.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007. ISBN 1400063515.
This essay takes me a little distance down memory lane, since I encountered Nassim Taleb before my crisis of faith had become truly critical. Still not really concerned by the cognitive dissonance that would eventually become unbearable, I was happily engaged in my graduate school work, taking classes and preparing for examinations. As an outlet for stress, I maintained an active lifestyle and sought the best information I could find on human health and performance. I had knocked around enough to know that the people from whom I had the most to learn were older athletes who maintained high activity levels: they had something I wanted. So I found myself visiting the web site of Clarence Bass, who introduced me (figuratively speaking) to economist Arthur De Vany and his brain-child "Evolutionary Fitness". De Vany's ideas about complex systems (of which the human body provides one instance) are very interesting and changed my thinking in many ways (before his blog became available by subscription only; as a poor student, I have little cash to spare). It was on De Vany's blog that I first learned of Taleb, whom (as I recall) De Vany approved as presenting a useful model for understanding how the real world works. I was intrigued enough that I tracked down some cheap copies of Taleb's books and began reading.
In both of his books, Taleb outlines a world very different from the over-determined one in which I grew up. Who can say when my dalliance with determinism began? I remember my mother putting me to bed one night, back when I was about four years old. I looked up at her and asked, with real emotion, "Mama, why does everybody do what they do?" Maybe that was the beginning. In any case, I spent the next several years learning from a deterministic point of view. When I studied palaeontology as a nine-year-old, I tended to assume that dinosaurs (and other extinct life-forms) evolved a certain way out of necessity, adapting in some definite way to meet a definite need. When I read the Book of Mormon as an eleven-year-old and experienced a very powerful emotional conversion, dinosaurs and evolution receded into the background (for several years I rejected evolution entirely!), but deterministic thinking remained: God had a plan which he played out in human life; free will in this plan existed from our point of view (since we were not coerced into making decisions), but not really from his (since he knew in advance what decisions we would make). So life was controlled by prophecies. There was the uncomfortable fact that many of these prophecies seemed to come "true" in so many different times, and in so many different ways. Could God really have deliberately intended so much? Taleb makes it really hard to think he did, particularly if you think of God as a glorified man, which as a good Mormon (and Christian, though some will doubtless protest) I once did.
Instead of writing about "the great chain of being" in some form, with all life ultimately determined by some Aristotelian unmoved mover (whether God or "nature" or anything else you please), Taleb writes about man, i.e. homo sapiens, though when you are knee-deep in Taleb's work he looks a lot more like homo stultus. For Taleb's man is not the pinnacle of evolutionary history or the capstone of God's creation. He is a garrulous fool with a penchant for telling stories to explain why things happen. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Taleb's man does not reason our way out step by logical step: like any good cowboy, he takes a gut check and gets the hell out of Dodge! Then, seated at a cozy table with friends, he tells the story of his escape as though he had calculated every step precisely, as though his salvation were determined by consummate skill (or calculated divine intervention) instead of dumb luck. The rational element is here completely subservient to the emotional, which provides the real, unexamined, unexplained source for human action. I was fascinated by this (for me) new vision of humanity, to the point that I decided to follow a hint from Taleb and take a special examination in ancient astrology, comparing it to modern economics as practiced by the big-shots that have been going broke recently (and using the government's muscle to take food from my children's mouths to get back on their feet). It is uncanny to me how similar ancient astrologers (still extant in old manuscripts that few people read) are to modern economists: both use the language of science (geometry, mathematics) to speak a kind of hyper-articulate gibberish that always makes perfect sense of the (determined) past but cannot say anything really telling about the (undetermined) future. The bogus nature of their predictions is revealed when something really unexpected happens (the unfolding economic crisis, for example): Taleb refers to these unlooked-for events as "black swans", drawing on the old European notion that all swans are white, a notion which persisted until the late 17th century, when black swans were discovered in western Australia.
Someone has come up with a nice parable that illustrates what reading Taleb did for me. Imagine the human mind as a house full of windows to the outside. As long as you are in the house, your understanding of the outside is dependent on your access to the windows. Assuming the outside is important to you, would you not want access to as many windows as possible, preferably clean ones? Reading Taleb showed me (1) that there were many windows in my house, not just the one or two I had been using, and (2) that all of them were very dirty, such that it was better to talk about the potential rather than the actual when speaking of things outside. Essentially, reading Taleb turned me into an epistemological agnostic: I became more aware of the powers and limitations of my mind, and consequently less certain of everything; some things dropped off my radar almost entirely. Why talk seriously about saving the universe or some eternal essence of me long-term when I do not even know how to save the bacon here and now? I began to shut up and listen even more than I used to; other points of view became valuable when they disagreed rationally with an emotional judgment of mine, and useless when they made emotional appeals against my rational judgment. Returning to the parable of the house helps make sense of what was going on. Before I knew about the multitude of windows, I had only one or two (that were really dirty, remember), so when someone said, "Look, there's a little pink unicorn in the garden!" I would peer through the glass, get a glimpse of something and think to myself, "Yeah, that could be a unicorn, and it does look rather pink." After Taleb took me on the grand tour of the house, the process of verification became more complicated. I had to visit all the windows before making a pronouncement. Comparing one view with another, I would say something like this: "Yeah, the smudge on this window creates a blotch that makes whatever-it-is look horned, and the tinge of the dirt makes it seem pink, but that other window upstairs has a different pattern of smudges in different colors, and everyone up there is convinced we have a brown rabbit in the garden, rather than a pink unicorn. Seen from the west wing it looks more like a blue panda." A quicker way to convey this shift in perspective is to emend the famous quote from Descartes, who should have said cogito, ergo idiota sum ("I think, therefore I am an idiot"). Thinking no longer confirms what I already know (in my gut); instead, it provides evidence that I don't really know anything (because gut-sense is really nonsense; unfortunately, it is also the inalienable factor in most human decisions).
So, there you have it. Before reading Taleb, I was living out my life as just another philosophical footnote to Plato, chasing a vision of "absolute truth" whose reality I was prepared to rationalize any way I could. After reading Taleb, "absolute truth" disappeared as a meaningful variable on my epistemological map of the world. Though I still went through perfunctory motions of "believing" in it, I ceased using it as a heuristic in dealing with new data input: it became the relic of an irrecoverable past. Little by little, I shed the persona of the know-it-all expert, crafted in the image of God with clear insight into eternal reality, and recognized that I was just a dumb bird-watcher with a knack for leaping to unjustified (and unjustifiable) conclusions. Like many prognosticators before, I looked around and saw omens: eagles, meteors, planetary conjunctions, stock quotes, sacred books, a burning in the bosom, etc. Sometimes I read the omens "correctly" (meaning I got the outcomes I wanted after seeing the holy birds and making the proper sacrifices), and sometimes I did not. Then one day I saw a black swan. I have never really looked at the world the same way since.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)