Plato and the Rise of Scientistry and NAXALTism
Imagine a judge saying, "Half of deciding cases is about convincing the world that the cases you're deciding matter." The facts matter about 50%; the other half is finding people to support you. Many judges unwittingly believe this and disguise this deviance from the facts in the philosophy of legal positivism [*3]. We refer to this often as judicial activism. But, science activism? Is the student's statement reflective of what many in the scientific community believe?
"Convincing the world" is partly about survival of the scientist. Publish or perish if you're lucky enough to be at a university. And without grants, vastly from the government [*4], simply perish regardless of any publishing. Does this pressure result in diminished standards?
With an estimated 1.5 million "scientific" studies produced each year, researchers testing reproducibility only able to reproduce 39 out of 100 experiments published in three psychology journals, [*5] and "90% of some 1,576 researchers" believing "there is a reproducibility crisis in science" back in 2016 [*6], how deep is the problem? Regardless of how deep, we know one exists, because researchers admit it.
Vox Day coined a particularly useful dichotomy: scientistry versus scientody [*7]. Scientistry is the public's faith in the "science," a figurative deification (albeit atheistic) of the individuals behind it and faith in the "ought" they can bring to the world. We see this in the general public's obsession with Neil DeGrasse Tyson [*8]. Scientody is the process of science (or, as it used to be known, science). It seems strange to need to invent a new word to distinguish the two. But the closer we get to science being about "convincing the world that what you're working on matters," the closer we get to scientistry and the further we get from actual science.
Day also recently published a video tying a decline in honesty within the scientific community to a turn from Christianity [*9]. If the scientist gains from willful ignorance or outright deception in coaxing or fixing a result in line with the hypothesis he's selling, and it gets past peer review, no one will likely find out. Experiments are rarely audited. There is no God to judge him in the end for his deception. Therefore, the faithless scientist may be more likely to deceive the world he's convincing. But are these scientists intentionally being deceptive?
Some likely are. Dr. John Bates of America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admiration (NOAA) blew the whistle in 2017 on deception to eliminate a "pause" in global temperature increase since 1998 (negating the hypothesis, let alone theory, of anthropogenic global warming) in a report to the UN Climate Conference in 2015 (the same Trump withdrew from in 2017) [*10]. Prior to that, we had the infamous 'hockey stick" graph deceptively used to convince the world global warming science "mattered" in 1998 [*11]. Oh, and that minor matter of e-mails released in 2011 [*12], showing, as Forbes reported, "(1) prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions; (2) these scientists view global warming as a political 'cause' rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and (3) many of these scientists frankly admit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data." [*13]. Of course, you can find plenty of leftist websites minimizing any damage from the prior controversies and persuasively redefining what we think of as "deception" to suggest mistakes or poor judgment limited to a few (albeit prominent) individuals as opposed to general malice aforethought. And significant evidence of intentional deception seems limited to the global warming/climate change subset of the science community. How do we explain the crisis in confidence in the rest of it?
There must be some difference in the fundamentals governing how modern scientists operate. Some core differences in thought must be driving this deviation from empiricism and the scientific method, and conflation of empiricism with some higher calling, as the woman in the commercial mentioned earlier was doing. Where does it begin?
Perhaps all differences in human thought come down to the great debate between two ancient Greek philosophers and students of Socrates: Plato versus Aristotle [*14]. While Aristotle believed reality could only be ascertained from the human senses, Plato did not. To understand Plato's viewpoint, Plato would ask you to define an object. No matter how many precise words you use to define it, you cannot write a definition that exactly describes what you see in front of you. As a related example, you cannot draw a perfect circle. There will always be a series of straight lines, decoupling the circle, if you magnify your drawing enough. Yet, a perfect circle does exist as a mathematic construct. We innately know the circle without being able to reproduce it in physical reality. And we are able to identify categories of objects in the real world, like circles, regardless of our inability to articulate them precisely.
So, how are we able to do this? Plato believed there was an ideal state of that object we are viewing that existed in our minds before we were born, giving us an innate ability to recognize and differentiate objects because of that ideal form we are preprogrammed with an understanding of [*15].
So, where does this all lead? The rise of concepts in lieu of empirical reality. When we think "table," we think an ideal form that is closely matched by objects we come across in the real world when we make that association. This train of thought leads us to idealizing concepts and working from the top down to particular objects in reality, as opposed to using the senses to define objects and working our way up to creating concepts to represent manifestations of those objects. The former is a Platonic (in the philosophical sense) way of thinking. The latter is an Aristotelian approach.
But there is immense danger in Plato's form of thinking. A forest does not exist. It is a concept. A specific tree, however, does exist. There is no harm in thinking in terms of the "forest," as it is a useful tool to save time and energy in the mind when trying to get things done in our day-to-day lives. But, as Stefan Molyneux has warned [*16], what happens when you conceptualize more dangerous things? "The People" is a concept. It doesn't exist. Only individuals exist. "The Will of the People" doesn't exist either. Yet, many want to speak for it. This is the nature of government, addressing problems of its citizens by applying solutions to concepts like "the [insert ethnic minority] community," as opposed to individuals. Yet actions on behalf of a concept do impact individuals, often negatively. The goal for the good is directed toward something that doesn't actually exist, that doesn't empirically manifest in the real world.
If the unemployment rate is going down, we recognize that as a good thing. But that number is meaningless to the still unemployed individual as well as those that have had satisfying jobs the entire time. We recognize the good in that there were people that did not have jobs before that have them now. And in that sense, we can conceptualize some good that can likely be applied to individuals who got the jobs. But is each individual happy in his new job? And compared to what? It's impossible to know without collapsing the concept to the specific individual, even if we can recognize the high likelihood of general good occurring due to the lower unemployment rate.
This debate on the nature of reality between Aristotle and Plato perfectly delineates the difference in thinking between the political Right and Left. Plato's form of thinking allows for a bias toward concepts, fostering a belief that, with the right rules, government can mold and enforce a more perfect society, because it begins with concepts, which government (also a concept) is suited for remedying. Aristotle's form of thinking is cautionary of concepts, leading us to ground government policy in empirical reality, naturally leading to skepticism, because concepts cannot be remedied, only individual human beings. A humbling concession.
This dichotomy in thought matches the actual political beliefs between the two. Plato believed in political organization into a large empire (albeit the word "empire" to describe escalating global governance has fallen out of favor in modern times). Aristotle believed government should stay limited to the local city-state level. We can see how the two got to these different conclusions. The more you believe in innate concepts, the higher the scale of the aggregate concept you'll believe can be remedied (i.e. addressing world hunger or global warming). The more you rely on empiricism, the more you'll favor policies less broad in geographic scope, since the larger we build a concept in scale, the more divorced it becomes from the individuals we can empirically verify are benefitting from the policies we're enacting.
While the vast majority of people have not studied Plato or Aristotle in depth to understand this dichotomy in thinking, we all must operate from one of the two orientations. The Right is grounded in Aristotelian observations of reality. The Left is grounded in Plato's idealized forms of reality. We can see the benefits as well as dangers in relying too much on concepts as opposed to empirical reality we can observe with our senses. So, how does this relate to science?
Science was not always chiefly funded by government like it is in the modern age [*17]. But with the university system being dominated by the Left, increasing from 3.5:1 Democrat to Republican in 1970 to 10:1 in 2016 [*18], and the vast majority of science flowing from that cultural bubble where one third of academics openly admit they'd hire a liberal over a conservative if they were equally qualified [*19] (and 21% of students reported discrimination based on their politics at U. Michigan [*20]), it's easy to see how the scientific community, largely an appendage of university culture, is being oriented toward leftist ideology, which is related to Plato's line of thinking.
When a scientist with a bias toward Plato's world view conducts an experiment, she first conceptualizes the reality, as all experimenters do, by forming a hypothesis. The hypothesis could, of course, be wrong, but if you believe a higher form of reality exists, akin to the perfect circle but with all identifiable clumps of matter in life, then the experiment conforming to the idealized form or concept in the mind of the scientist may take precedence over empirical observations, biasing the scientist toward finding a result to fit her predetermined conclusion. This may explain the reproducibility crisis in science.
While scientists idealizing their concepts may be biased in favoring the "ought" they want to "convince the world," stemming from their hypothesis, they can also get particularly nasty in attacking deviations from their idealized concepts [*21]. Enter the rise of NAXALTism, the belief that when empirical analysis of the concept doesn't match our idealized version of the concept, we retort: "Not All [Insert Group] Are Like That." For example, the Left has an idealized concept of the workforce where no discrimination takes place, which statistically should align with proportional racial, religious, gender, and sexual orientation aggregates within a specific geographic boundary. Of course, how those geographic boundaries should be drawn will impact the proportions, as will many other variables.
For a particularly taboo counterpoint, an explanation for black representation of surgeons being proportionally lower than whites and Northeast Asians having to do with the average IQ of American blacks being 85 and the average of whites being 100 and Northeast Asians at 105 [*22] elicits the thought: "NAXALT!, you racist." Of course, no individual black is being insulted. There are American blacks with IQs above 150 and below 60. If being a medical doctor requires an IQ above 85 and the average white is 100 IQ, a full standard deviation, and Northeast Asians are 105, and IQ is 50% [*23] to 80% genetic [*24], if you extrapolate those numbers out to the width of their respective bell curves (the Asian, white, and black curves are respectively wider, with male distribution wider than female), you'd naturally see a disproportionate number of whites and Northeast Asians relative to blacks in that occupation.
In 2014, Dr. James Watson had to sell his Nobel prize for his role in discovery of the double helix in DNA due to ostracism from within the scientific community over his casual agreement with the above paragraph [*25]. We don't know the exact degree scientists will intentionally or mistakenly steer empirical data to conform to the innate idealized concept of the "ought" stemming from their hypothesis. But we see the degree scientists will go to defend it.
So, why does the NAXALT leftist jump to the thought "racist!"? Because, they are conflating the individual black American with the aggregate of all black Americans, which is a concept and does not exist in empirical reality. Racism is using aggregate perceptions of a race to unfairly prejudice an individual of that race. Racism is an act of malice. And malice cannot be inflicted on concepts, since concepts don't exist. Malice can only be inflicted on individuals existing in empirical reality. The idea of aggregate racial differences (a concept, not an empirical thing) harshly conflicts with their idealized view of humanity and their ability to remedy/perfect it with large-scale government policies.
We find another example in the aforementioned global warming/climate change debate. A simple Google search will bring up countless attacks on anyone who challenges the narrative that (1) the Earth is warming (with an underlying assumption that this is a problem), (2) man is mostly responsible, and (3) government regulation is the appropriate "ought" for the fix. What better excuse to orient more toward Plato's ideal of the benevolent global empire (albeit a democratic one of course!) than a problem harming all of humanity and requiring cooperation of nations around the globe.
Compare the attacks on these two subjects to any others, and you notice that the more attractive the "ought" the scientist has in his leftist-oriented innate view of reality, the more the scientist is likely to delve into rhetoric, chest-thumping scientistry, and deviate from scientody in his response.
The rise of scientistry and NAXALTism are two particularly pernicious consequences of Plato's philosophy of innate concepts. Fighting against the crisis in reproducibility and inquisition-like attacks on those dissenting from science that relates to a particularly attractive "ought" for the Left is a particularly difficult challenge. Perhaps fighting back starts with an understanding of where the leftist is coming from. They are particularly sensitive to your attack on their idealized concepts.
Bring any argument with a leftist (the ones susceptible to dialectic, like Sam Harris, and not ones who only know rhetoric) down to the fundamentals. Get reacquainted with Aristotle and empiricism. And remind them that the "forest" does not exist, only trees we can identify. This is plain to see. Ask the leftist how this is different then from the dichotomy between "The People" (like the forest ) and the human being (the individual tree). The path to the right line of thinking begins there. And any discussion on political differences should also begin at that point.
[*1] https://www.ispot.tv/ad/wUG6/microsoft-windows-10-shree-takes-her-work-to-the-next-level
[*2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-positivism/
[*3] https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/science-fair/steps-of-the-scientific-method
[*4] http://www.bu.edu/research/articles/funding-for-scientific-research/
[*5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/08/27/trouble-in-science-massive-effort-to-reproduce-100-experimental-results-succeeds-only-36-times/
[*6] https://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2016/07/talking-about-bad-science-being-funded
[*7] https://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/04/scientistry-and-sciensophy.html
[*8] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/21/scientists-who-are-actually-really-stupid-1-neil-degrasse-tyson/
[*9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0cKuFfYnVw
[*10] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World-leaders-duped-manipulated-global-warming-data.html
[*11] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/15/is-the-hockey-stick-graph-dead/
[*12] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/06/250-plus-noteworthy-climategate-2-0-emails/
[*13] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/11/23/climategate-2-0-new-e-mails-rock-the-global-warming-debate/#1aa2b4fa27ba
[*14] https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-plato-and-vs-socrates/
[*15] https://infogalactic.com/info/Innatism
[*16] link to 34:18 https://youtu.be/NirpXeuXlbU?t=34m18s
[*17] http://www.bu.edu/research/articles/funding-for-scientific-research/
[*18] https://heterodoxacademy.org/langbert-quain-klein-faculty-voter-registration-in-economics-history-journalism-law-and-psychology/
[*19] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/1/liberal-majority-on-campus-yes-were-biased/
[*20] freebeacon.com/culture/study-political-orientation-most-common-cause-of-discrimination-at-u-of-michigan/
[*21] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/01/dna-james-watson-scientist-selling-nobel-prize-medal
[*22] https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf
[*23] https://www.wired.com/2013/07/genetics-of-iq/
[*24] https://pumpkinperson.com/2017/12/15/u-s-black-white-iq-gap-no-more-than-50-genetic/comment-page-1/
[*25] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2853855/Scientist-discovered-DNA-forced-sell-Nobel-prize-shunned-inflammatory-race-comments.html
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