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people are self-interested not truth interested. most scientific fields are initiated by a small handful of geniuses, but over time become a type of cloistered bureaucracy. your standard university education teaches you there are two paths - you make significant contributions and are remembered long after you die, or you plug in as a fresh node into the existing structure and are rewarded with a comfortable life, just check your ethics at the door. this is largely due to the failure of idealism as a philosophical framework to set up any type of enduring political, economic or secular social structure. the blame lies on hegel or perhaps marx's interpretation of hegel getting stuck in praxis quagmires. which is why the turn towards asia and the new age movement which emerges from it in the early 1900s is essentially anti-science. the spiritual successor of communism is the idea of fusing the east and west traditions to form the new enlightened human, who sees no race, religion or gender but simply behaves as the universal light and creator. it has largely been a failure, as folding china into the world community has been against the pragmatic self-interest of various sensitive american industries - weapons, space, communication, high finance, which can exert sufficient power on the american leadership structures to avoid any type of idealism about world peace. there are no more enemies or allies just competitive co-morbidity, actors fraying the ropes they are tugging on until something breaks, like the ussr in the 80s. it's only a problem if you think humans are equal. if you shift the view that humans are unequal and life is deeply unfair, then it's normal to see the next 100 years as a struggle for dominance between superstition and science, between a world led by north america or eurasia, between the new dominoes of fascist nationalism and disinterested international capitalism. it's a hot peace, which will end up with one temporary victor, possibly colonizing mars - or just landing there and coming back, before a new power emerges to challenge the old empire. i would argue that this is a bi-product of the 'correct' interpretation of hegel, the one that isn't taught directly in schools, the master and slave dialectic. |
I have a historical bogeyman of my own: I think Newton--perhaps accidentally--encoded a lot more of his own non-mathematical perspective into his work on Calculus. These biases got baked into our current theory of "real numbers" (which are pretty spooky, once you get to know them, and don't strike me as befitting their name). This was done primarily because the pure mathematicians in the centuries following Newton couldn't justify his results, which was an embarrassment since his work was so useful that it obviously was true. As you say:
> people are self-interested not truth interested
So now we have this element of arbitrariness baked into our numbers, theories that underpin the sort of methods that the article refers to here:
>Faith in this methodology certainly unites a much larger number of research psychologists than does any kind of commitment to a particular theoretical framework
Somewhere between physics and psychology, an assumption that worked for Newton stopped working for us, but we didn't notice because we had only it to compare it to.
I similarly extrapolate this accusation to wider political spaces (i.e. the failure of standardized testing to make the kind of differences we wanted it to, or the propensity of our economic system to generate jobs that don't actually matter).
I see some parallels between our reactions to this piece, so I want to read Hegel and see if we're just similarly out there, or if we're out there in similar ways.