Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

"the application of sceintific research to advanced technology." - don't see any "quasi" or "misguided" there.

"in various degrees" i think serves as the blanket

should read "the combination of pseudo-science and advanced technology" or similar, probably.

i don't think he needs "pseudo" there. nuclear bombs were made with real science!

I'm going to find out more about his version of Hobbes. I'm ready to be a little maddened, but I at least like that he's into someone dodged by most enlightenment cheerleaders.

it seems to me that pinker cant really distinguish between "science" and "the scientific method" on the one hand and "scientism" and "positivism" on the other, when the attacks he cites are mostly on the latter and not the former. but, what a surprise that a positivist identifies his project as the project of all science.

xxp I think Lears is getting at the combination of ideologies based on pseudo-scientific knowledge such as Social Darwinism and the technologies of mass slaughter made possible by advanced technology.

Anyway, getting a bit bogged down here. The rest of the article seems to be "hey Humanists science is pretty great!" which is fine so far as it goes.

This section contains a classic is/ought fallacy:

And in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions— that all of us value our own welfare and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct—the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely adhering to principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings

it's ok to use values to bridge the is/ought gap.

The new sciences of the mind are reexamining the connections between politics and human nature, which were avidly discussed in Madison’s time but submerged during a long interlude in which humans were assumed to be blank slates or rational actors. Humans, we are increasingly appreciating, are moralistic actors, guided by norms and taboos about authority, tribe, and purity, and driven by conflicting inclinations toward revenge and reconciliation.

thx for figuring that one out for us i'll tell The Humanities

The definitional vacuum (for the term 'scientism') allows me to replicate gay activists’ flaunting of “queer” and appropriate the pejorative for a position I am prepared to defend.

this is just weird

never 4get dawkins' "brights":

Gay is succinct, uplifting, positive: an "up" word, where homosexual is a down word, and queer, faggot and pooftah are insults. Those of us who subscribe to no religion; those of us whose view of the universe is natural rather than supernatural; those of us who rejoice in the real and scorn the false comfort of the unreal, we need a word of our own, a word like "gay". ... Like gay, it should be a noun hijacked from an adjective, with its original meaning changed but not too much. Like gay, it should be catchy: a potentially prolific meme. Like gay, it should be positive, warm, cheerful, bright.

A positive, warm, cheerful term to convey your scorn towards the false comfort of the unreal.

good lord

lol dlh

glad science is here to teach the humanities that people are "guided by norms and taboos about authority, tribe, and purity, and driven by conflicting inclinations toward revenge and reconciliation"

that's not all it has to teach us!

History nerds can adduce examples that support either answer, but that does not mean the questions are irresolvable ... With the advent of data science—the analysis of large, open-access data sets of numbers or text—signals can be extracted from the noise and debates in history and political science resolved more objectively.

those history nerds are gonna cream their shorts when we tell them about these data sets of numbers and text

Why, with that information . . .

http://www.technovelgy.com/graphics/content09/hari-seldon.jpg

can't way to objectively resolve some political science debates, btw, at first i was a little worried about the potential in the concept of scientifically objective politics for entire dogmatic centuries of strife but then i remembered we have peer review

it's ok to use values to bridge the is/ought gap.

― click here to start exploding (ledge), Wednesday, 7 August 2013 13:52 (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think that when Pinker says "the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely adhering to principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings" he commits an is/ought fallacy, in that he infers utilitarian principles of welfare maximisation from "scientific facts". Or do you think that the "unexceptionable convictions" alluded to previously let him off that hook?

can't wait to extract signal from all that historical noise

xp that is what i think, yes, although i suppose you could argue the path from "all of us value our own welfare and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct" to welfare maximisation might need a little more explanation than he offers.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/guardian/About/General/2012/11/15/1352994928354/Nate-Silver-New-York-Time-010.jpg

i'm in ur disaster of postmodernism resolving ur debates

xp okay thanks ledge. As it happens I also have problems with "unexceptionable convictions" when it comes to morality and ethics, but best leave that for another day!

The first is that the world is intelligible. The phenomena we experience may be explained by principles that are more general than the phenomena themselves. These principles may in turn be explained by more fundamental principles, and so on. In making sense of our world, there should be few occasions in which we are forced to concede “It just is” or “It’s magic” or “Because I said so.”

what's interesting about this claim is that the "more fundamental principles" which become "more general" would seem to suggest that as those more and more general principles come into view their relationship to specific phenomena become more and more complex. that seems to be the trend, towards greater (infinite, even) complexity rather than simply "intelligibility." one can't help but question whether science as a whole is getting closer to "more fundamental principles" or farther away.

"scientism" is when assholes like pinker like to pretend they are scientists. I think he did actual science, briefly, at one point in his career? But his ability to work in a lab and take some measurements when he was younger really has no connection to the "science" he claims to know so freaking well.

It's a shame there are virtually no popular public intellectual exponents of science who are actually scientifically competent. (yes i know there are exceptions).

Science has also provided the world with images of sublime beauty: stroboscopically frozen motion, exotic organisms, distant galaxies and outer planets, fluorescing neural circuitry, and a luminous planet Earth rising above the moon’s horizon into the blackness of space. Like great works of art, these are not just pretty pictures but prods to contemplation, which deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and of our place in nature.

*stroboscopically frozen motion, feels prodded into deep thoughts about our place in nature*

er, should be

*stares at image of stroboscopically frozen motion, feels prodded into deep thoughts about our place in nature*

"Eugenics was the campaign, popular among leftists and progressives in the early decades of the twentieth century"

wtfffffff

The visual arts could avail themselves of the explosion of knowledge in vision science, including the perception of color, shape, texture, and lighting, and the evolutionary aesthetics of faces and landscapes. Music scholars have much to discuss with the scientists who study the perception of speech and the brain’s analysis of the auditory world.

people are doing this already, actually. they have been for years.

wow this article is spectacularly maddening. pinker presuming to speak for 'science' with a mix of obvious, idiotic, and half-baked, and completely ignorant of any actual work going on in the humanities, no idea who he's engaging with or why.

i'm utterly baffled how large scale data mining has anything to say about "does violence solve problems" in all societies and situations ever.

Eugenics was the campaign

i hear this in the citizen kane newsreel voice

the evolutionary aesthetics of faces!

painters wait till you hear what people do w those mouths

i mean seriously has this guy been to a modern art museum does he have any idea what people are doing?

museum? i think you mean gallery

perhaps parlor

the smithsonian: a museum

Agreed S Clover, particularly the stuff about the "digital humanities" wow thanks Steven for the radical new concept which has in no way been going on for at least 60 years.

i just nabbed a pdf of Better Angels… last night, read a bit on the train this morning. The brief history of violence that starts it is… quite something.

Homer, The Bible and Shakespeare are quite violent.

And The Bible isn't true.

"modern biblical scholars have established that the Bible is a wiki."

pinker is a condescending prick and there are many howlers alternating with real-talk in that piece. and a lot of wishful thinking disguised as common sense. for all his talk of consilience (that's the term that was once floated about to indicate humanities-science crossover) he doesn't really seem to have a good understanding of the humanities disciplines he writes of.

that said, there _are_ folks in the humanities who are weirdly science-phobic, and who also don't really have any idea of what "science" is. humanities scholars who are science-phobic are often the same people who seem to benefit from writing that is deliberately abstruse, allusive, and/or just plain bad--it's this idea that humanities is just about constantly circulating ideas, with no real sense of winnowing out bad ones unless of course they fall on the far side of whatever doctrine or psuedo-political argot you've chosen to adhere to. i encounter these folks, usually once at every conference i go to. but frankly they are nowhere near a majority in most humanities fields and despite some ABD zealots I've met I think the "pox on science" stuff is dying out.

so basically both those folks and pinker can suck it.

but yeah in my own humanities field I think the contributions of cognitive science have been immense, if still pretty inchoate. they don't have very fine-grained explanatory power but they have cleared out, or rendered obsolete, some long-running debates w/ in media/film studies. and there's always new stuff coming out. like everything else you have to watch out for poorly-designed research (it's everywhere) and especially people (call them the malcolm gladwells of the world) who give these modest findings pop-psych glosses and pretend they reveal more than they do (or worse, can over you life tips).

FWIW http://scsmi-online.org/

and speaking of the study of violence, newist issue: http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/proj/

as i understand it, Better Angels relies on some of the least-trusted anthropological research out there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Chagnon

some of the worst charges against him weren't proven, but there's a great deal of sentiment that his research is irreparably flawed.

that said, there _are_ folks in the humanities who are weirdly science-phobic

this is true. there's a weird kind of laziness i've noticed in some fellow humanities grad students--almost a very rigid lack of curiosity. there's little incentive to expose yourself to things in which you might have something to learn (or even something you have a lack of mastery over). this is perhaps simple inertia (you learn one field or paradigm and then just sit in it comfortably the rest of your life) but i think at the same time it's evidence of an anxiety regarding the encroaching dominance of science, just expressed in a horribly defensive way.

@RichardDawkins All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114172/leon-wieseltier-scientism-and-humanities

xpost: at the same time, there's a bizarre presumption by people outside of the humanities that just by virtue of being a literate person you should be able to walk into any humanities classroom or open any recent book and have a clear idea of what's going on right away, without having to work just as hard.

wtf at that Dawkins tweet. Also at least one of the Trinity Cambridge Nobel laureates are from Muslim countries- Amartya Sen is from what is now Bangladesh. FU Dawkins.

It's weird how smoothly dawkins fierce opposition to religion has evolved into more or less open racism.