> these debates have begun to look more like a prelude to the post-truth era in which society as a whole is presently condemned to live. The past decade has seen a precipitous rise not just in anti-scientific thinking
Enough of this nonsense. Scepticism is a cornerstone of science itself. Perhaps if the "scientific consensus" had not led to the disasters of 2008 in USA and the EU crisis, people would be less skeptical. It would be nice if the NYtimes writers stopped rubbing their intellectual superiority all over us and instead think a little deeper about the rise of skepticism. Oh, and let's remember that, despite their claims, their walled garden doesn't hold a monopoly to the truth.
> Latour believes that if scientists were transparent about how science really functions — as a process in which people, politics, institutions, peer review and so forth all play their parts — they would be in a stronger position to convince people of their claims.
I 'm not sure if this would lead to stronger trust, considering the amount of politics inherent in the processes of funding and publishing.
The 'greed and bad governance' claim is bogus: one the one hand, it was was academically-approved 'greed', and 'bad goverment' had little to with the collapse of private institutions that the US government had to save.
You're making claims that are entirely unsupported by anything you've provided or said.
The paper linked makes the claim towards the failure of academic economics failing to predict the Financial crisis of 2008, not science.
(This also completely ignores that it seems to be a book passage rather than a review and well cited article in a Journal).
You've imposed your own narrative on the article written about Latour here and bought up wild claims about 2008 with no relevance to the discussion at hand.
I actually don't know what your point is other than to rally against the NYT and it sniffs of personal bias the whole way down.
I doubt you've read the article.
And I'll just leave this selected quote here from the article you did link.
"* This opinion paper is the outcome of one week of intense discussions within the working group on ‘Modeling of
Financial Markets’ at the 98
th
Dahlem Workshop, 2008. "
Peripherally some Wall Street companies involved had an insatiable hunger for physicists and mathematicians. There was bemoaning that the brightest minds were going to Wall Steeet instead of research. The company thinking that they could apply all of the scientific modeling to markets. It worked until the 2008 crisis hit and then it didn't and they lost their shirts and were living out of their Lexuses.
Personally I suspect the underlying issue is a fundamental lack of concern for truth and its origins just wanting to make money so they throw resources at it without concerns about the why and how to get what they want to hear short term.
That trend is repeating itself in other sectors with misuse of neural networks - and I mean that in a functional sense as opposed to an ethical one. Regardless of the ethics of facial recognition in law enforcement it simply doesn't scale to huge data sets and is being treated as "has to be right" instead of viewing it as the coarse filter it is will lead to problems unless one is sociopathic enough to consider that a feature.
Yes, definitely, however, so is accepting empirical evidence. And as much as claims have to be supported by evidence, so has skepticism of those claims.
We seriously have people running around claiming the world is flat. That is not skepticism, that is retardation.
There is increased skepticism throughout the hierarchy. the flat-earthers and creationists are caricatures, but focusing on them misses or disguises the bigger picture. Many people believe that science, and especially the part of it that often informs public policy, is not scrutinizing itself enough , and is often led by groupthink and popularity rather than rigor.
There's enough people running around claiming the world is a sphere, which is not really true either. At least the flat earthers understand that most people know less than they think they need to.
Do you know how people become successful scientists? By "scrutinizing" science and coming up with better and more predictive theories. This idea that science isn't "scrutinizing itself" fundamentally misunderstands how science works. This misunderstanding not only affects the "caricatures" like creationists but supposedly "more sophisticated" critics of science such as "alternative" medicine devotees.
> how people become successful scientists? By "scrutinizing"
Some scientists do, but the majority become successful by looking for things that are highly publishable. Hence why you have a reproducibility crisis in some sciences but no shortage of results/claims.
Define successful and define scientist - Lysenko was quite "successful" in the Soviet Union for obtaining funding and influence because he flattered the ideology of the management. His work however was complete bunk and didn't even hit upon real epigenetic interactions.
They may get rewarded for it in dysfunctional systems but it isn't furthering science.
That is the question, yes, and I think that was what jhbadger meant by “successful” - that one is so in science (from this perspective) similarly to any other field; when people buy into your work, give you funding, your reputation increases, etc.
To the level that this is true (the "reproducibility crisis" has been blown out of hand because the general public confuses reproducibility with generalizability), this is because of the exact opposite of what you claimed earlier -- it isn't "groupthink" but the exact opposite -- the individuality of scientists not thinking as a group and wanting to demonstrate their own unique takes rather than just redoing what others have done.
the cynical in me says that many scientists choose to forgo research that would disprove some semi-established research in the fears that their work might get heavily scrutinized as well. I think you 're talking about "great scientists" which are extreme outliers. Scientists often enjoy that mythical appreciation, but the truth is a lot more pedestrian - there are 7.8 million researchers , 0.1% of the world's population.
> and is often led by groupthink and popularity rather than rigor.
To a large extent that's true. Funding goes more to groups who publish more positive results. It's well established by now that the incentive structure needs to change to make science more robust, but there's considerable resistance.
I hate to be that guy, but that is really not even vaguely appropriate—retardation literally means you are slow at development. This is unrelated to deluded adults, and I’d hazard a guess that most retarded individuals are not deluded about the earth being flat.
Instead of using a metaphor why not quote an example of the 'retardation' you have in mind. I guess you don't think readers here should be overly concerned with folk who claim the world (the Earth) is flat as against being approximately spherical.
> This, in essence, is the premise of Latour’s latest book, “Down to Earth,” an illuminating and counterintuitive analysis of the present post-truth moment, which will be published in the United States next month.
Ah, that's why this article exists - he's got a book to promote.
Despite that, it's a good read and an important discussion to have, and one that's at great risk of misinterpretation. What Latour and others are discussing is not the idea that there isn't an external reality, but that what we know about reality is inevitably filtered by our perception, which includes our social, economic and institutional contexts. Latour's questioning of scientism pre-dates the modern problems of nonreproducibility, p-hacking etc.
I would also recommend Latour's work Aramis. The French government attempted an extremely Elon Musk personal transit system in the 80s, and Latour examines why it failed. Perhaps to be read alongside Feynman writing about Challenger in the same timeframe.
> Ah, that’s why this article exists - he’s got a book to promote.
“it has become clear that whether or not a statement is believed depends far less on its veracity than on the conditions of its “construction” — that is, who is making it, to whom it’s being addressed and from which institutions it emerges and is made visible.”
Not a critique, just an observation. This stuff is subtle.
[Disclosure/disclaimer: I am a strong believer in empirical reality, scientific consensus, and rational skepticism.]
Yes, the publication of Latour's new book in the US is undoubtedly the occasion of this extraordinarily well-written biopic and summary of Latour's work as the father of Actor-Actant Network Theory.
I've long been a fan of Latour, especially his short treatise _We Have Never Been Modern_ whose provocative title belies the clarity with which Latour explains that science is, above all, an overarching domain which brings together humans, social systems, manufacturing regimes, nonhuman actors, extraterrestrial matter, etc.
Most importantly (and as a summary for those of us who may be less familiar with Latour's very French and very poststructuralist way of looking at the world and human activity), Latour explains that what scientific traditionalists consider to be matters of strict empirical reality--the hole in the Ozone layer, global climate change, Boyle's Law, and even reproducibility itself--depends in very intimate ways on the messy social and political systems that allow such things as scientific facts to emerge into our consensus view of reality.
This is not simply saying "politics matter" though certainly also that.
Many who subscribe to Latour's precepts feel that science should acknowledge the way in which many ontological and phenomenological domains are imbricated in the production of scientific knowledge. By doing so, science stands a better chance not only of understanding how humans affect the world in which they live but, more crucially, may also more effectively fight the anti-scientific attacks that bury the truths which science reveals.
According to this line of thinking and in the context of (probably) runaway global climate change and the decreasing habitability of our planet for macroorganisms, scientific realists need to understand that facts do not speak for themselves and that the public will not change its opinion just because something is true. I know scientifically-minded people often do not like to be told this but non-scientific people don't require facts; they require convincing.
Of course, facts can help convince non-scientific people but those facts must come in the service of a larger coordinated effort to convince people to accept facts as the basis for changing what people decide to do. It's sort of like how engineering teams need marketers to convince customers to buy, though of course establishing consensus reality is much more complicated and higher risk than that. In a very real way, the fate of many of Earth's species depends on how effectively scientists can communicate with non-scientists.
I'm looking forward to reading _Down to Earth_. As a final plug for those of us who may not have time to read the linked article, here are some quotes which I think summarize what the author, Ava Kofman, distills from Latour's work.
> Science was “social,” then, not merely because it was performed by people (this, he thought, was a reductive misunderstanding of the word “social”); rather, science was social because it brought together a multitude of human and nonhuman entities and harnessed their collective power to act on and transform the world.
> Even though the evidence in support of global warming has long been overwhelming, some scientists continue to believe that the problem of denialism can be solved through ever more data and greater public education. Political scientists, meanwhile, have shown that so-called “irrational” individuals, especially those who are highly educated, in some cases actually hold onto their opinions more strongly when faced with facts that contradict them. Instead of accusing Trump supporters and climate denialists of irrationality, Latour argues that it is untenable to talk about scientific facts as though their rightness alone will be persuasive.
EDIT: treaties -> treatise; Add rhetorical context and qualify several claims. Clarity. ...
>What Latour and others are discussing is not the idea that there isn't an external reality, but that what we know about reality is inevitably filtered by our perception, which includes our social, economic and institutional contexts.
It is extremely annoying when people present this is some kind of new groundbreaking idea, when it fact this is the exact observation that lead to creation of the scientific method.
The basis of the scientific method is the notion that human perception has quirks, therefore to learn about reality as it really is we need to design system that correct for those quirks. Alan Kay and Neil DeGrasse Tyson have good talks on this subject.
Big problems with modern science are not philosophical ones. They stem from institutional structures, incentives and the economy of modern science. Guess what? An institution distorting it own conclusions because of group biases bad economic incentives is not conceptually different from human brain distorting conclusions because of individual biases and instincts. It is something that should and can be handled through better process design.
Most scientists do not deny that these problems exist. There are plenty of them who analyze these issues, criticize the current state of affairs and propose actionable solution. Maybe we should listen to them before listening to post-modernists, eh? I am aware of exactly zero positive changes in science that ever resulted from post-modernist critique. Feel free to provide counter-examples.
> The first text he was assigned was Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy”; unlike “all the confusion of mathematics,” it immediately struck him as clear and perfectly rational.
> [Latour's] early work, it was true, had done more than that of any other living thinker to unsettle the traditional understanding of how we acquire knowledge of what’s real.
I'm sorry, but no. Anglosphere philosophers (= the mainstream, like it or not) do not, in general, take social constructionism at all seriously. I'd predict that there is not one tenured philosopher of science at a top-50 department who'd regard Latour as an influential contributor to epistemology or philosophy of science.
For some reason, journalists who write about philosophy are universally ignorant of the fact that academic philosophy took a hard analytic turn a century ago, and that the continent has contributed very little since - France least of all.
26 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 65.3 ms ] threadEnough of this nonsense. Scepticism is a cornerstone of science itself. Perhaps if the "scientific consensus" had not led to the disasters of 2008 in USA and the EU crisis, people would be less skeptical. It would be nice if the NYtimes writers stopped rubbing their intellectual superiority all over us and instead think a little deeper about the rise of skepticism. Oh, and let's remember that, despite their claims, their walled garden doesn't hold a monopoly to the truth.
> Latour believes that if scientists were transparent about how science really functions — as a process in which people, politics, institutions, peer review and so forth all play their parts — they would be in a stronger position to convince people of their claims.
I 'm not sure if this would lead to stronger trust, considering the amount of politics inherent in the processes of funding and publishing.
The 'greed and bad governance' claim is bogus: one the one hand, it was was academically-approved 'greed', and 'bad goverment' had little to with the collapse of private institutions that the US government had to save.
(This also completely ignores that it seems to be a book passage rather than a review and well cited article in a Journal).
You've imposed your own narrative on the article written about Latour here and bought up wild claims about 2008 with no relevance to the discussion at hand.
I actually don't know what your point is other than to rally against the NYT and it sniffs of personal bias the whole way down.
I doubt you've read the article.
And I'll just leave this selected quote here from the article you did link.
"* This opinion paper is the outcome of one week of intense discussions within the working group on ‘Modeling of Financial Markets’ at the 98 th Dahlem Workshop, 2008. "
A famous example is from 2010 and affected the response to the crisis: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel...
Personally I suspect the underlying issue is a fundamental lack of concern for truth and its origins just wanting to make money so they throw resources at it without concerns about the why and how to get what they want to hear short term.
That trend is repeating itself in other sectors with misuse of neural networks - and I mean that in a functional sense as opposed to an ethical one. Regardless of the ethics of facial recognition in law enforcement it simply doesn't scale to huge data sets and is being treated as "has to be right" instead of viewing it as the coarse filter it is will lead to problems unless one is sociopathic enough to consider that a feature.
Yes, definitely, however, so is accepting empirical evidence. And as much as claims have to be supported by evidence, so has skepticism of those claims.
We seriously have people running around claiming the world is flat. That is not skepticism, that is retardation.
Some scientists do, but the majority become successful by looking for things that are highly publishable. Hence why you have a reproducibility crisis in some sciences but no shortage of results/claims.
They may get rewarded for it in dysfunctional systems but it isn't furthering science.
To a large extent that's true. Funding goes more to groups who publish more positive results. It's well established by now that the incentive structure needs to change to make science more robust, but there's considerable resistance.
I hate to be that guy, but that is really not even vaguely appropriate—retardation literally means you are slow at development. This is unrelated to deluded adults, and I’d hazard a guess that most retarded individuals are not deluded about the earth being flat.
Ah, that's why this article exists - he's got a book to promote.
Despite that, it's a good read and an important discussion to have, and one that's at great risk of misinterpretation. What Latour and others are discussing is not the idea that there isn't an external reality, but that what we know about reality is inevitably filtered by our perception, which includes our social, economic and institutional contexts. Latour's questioning of scientism pre-dates the modern problems of nonreproducibility, p-hacking etc.
I would also recommend Latour's work Aramis. The French government attempted an extremely Elon Musk personal transit system in the 80s, and Latour examines why it failed. Perhaps to be read alongside Feynman writing about Challenger in the same timeframe.
Edit: in re climate skepticism, have a look at the Introduction of https://ecomig2014.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/178919402-lat... - which is a serious inquiry into the question of why climate scientists are or aren't believed.
“it has become clear that whether or not a statement is believed depends far less on its veracity than on the conditions of its “construction” — that is, who is making it, to whom it’s being addressed and from which institutions it emerges and is made visible.”
Not a critique, just an observation. This stuff is subtle.
Yes, the publication of Latour's new book in the US is undoubtedly the occasion of this extraordinarily well-written biopic and summary of Latour's work as the father of Actor-Actant Network Theory.
I've long been a fan of Latour, especially his short treatise _We Have Never Been Modern_ whose provocative title belies the clarity with which Latour explains that science is, above all, an overarching domain which brings together humans, social systems, manufacturing regimes, nonhuman actors, extraterrestrial matter, etc.
Most importantly (and as a summary for those of us who may be less familiar with Latour's very French and very poststructuralist way of looking at the world and human activity), Latour explains that what scientific traditionalists consider to be matters of strict empirical reality--the hole in the Ozone layer, global climate change, Boyle's Law, and even reproducibility itself--depends in very intimate ways on the messy social and political systems that allow such things as scientific facts to emerge into our consensus view of reality.
This is not simply saying "politics matter" though certainly also that.
Many who subscribe to Latour's precepts feel that science should acknowledge the way in which many ontological and phenomenological domains are imbricated in the production of scientific knowledge. By doing so, science stands a better chance not only of understanding how humans affect the world in which they live but, more crucially, may also more effectively fight the anti-scientific attacks that bury the truths which science reveals.
According to this line of thinking and in the context of (probably) runaway global climate change and the decreasing habitability of our planet for macroorganisms, scientific realists need to understand that facts do not speak for themselves and that the public will not change its opinion just because something is true. I know scientifically-minded people often do not like to be told this but non-scientific people don't require facts; they require convincing.
Of course, facts can help convince non-scientific people but those facts must come in the service of a larger coordinated effort to convince people to accept facts as the basis for changing what people decide to do. It's sort of like how engineering teams need marketers to convince customers to buy, though of course establishing consensus reality is much more complicated and higher risk than that. In a very real way, the fate of many of Earth's species depends on how effectively scientists can communicate with non-scientists.
I'm looking forward to reading _Down to Earth_. As a final plug for those of us who may not have time to read the linked article, here are some quotes which I think summarize what the author, Ava Kofman, distills from Latour's work.
> Science was “social,” then, not merely because it was performed by people (this, he thought, was a reductive misunderstanding of the word “social”); rather, science was social because it brought together a multitude of human and nonhuman entities and harnessed their collective power to act on and transform the world.
> Even though the evidence in support of global warming has long been overwhelming, some scientists continue to believe that the problem of denialism can be solved through ever more data and greater public education. Political scientists, meanwhile, have shown that so-called “irrational” individuals, especially those who are highly educated, in some cases actually hold onto their opinions more strongly when faced with facts that contradict them. Instead of accusing Trump supporters and climate denialists of irrationality, Latour argues that it is untenable to talk about scientific facts as though their rightness alone will be persuasive.
EDIT: treaties -> treatise; Add rhetorical context and qualify several claims. Clarity. ...
It is extremely annoying when people present this is some kind of new groundbreaking idea, when it fact this is the exact observation that lead to creation of the scientific method.
The basis of the scientific method is the notion that human perception has quirks, therefore to learn about reality as it really is we need to design system that correct for those quirks. Alan Kay and Neil DeGrasse Tyson have good talks on this subject.
Big problems with modern science are not philosophical ones. They stem from institutional structures, incentives and the economy of modern science. Guess what? An institution distorting it own conclusions because of group biases bad economic incentives is not conceptually different from human brain distorting conclusions because of individual biases and instincts. It is something that should and can be handled through better process design.
Most scientists do not deny that these problems exist. There are plenty of them who analyze these issues, criticize the current state of affairs and propose actionable solution. Maybe we should listen to them before listening to post-modernists, eh? I am aware of exactly zero positive changes in science that ever resulted from post-modernist critique. Feel free to provide counter-examples.
Bad sign...
I'm sorry, but no. Anglosphere philosophers (= the mainstream, like it or not) do not, in general, take social constructionism at all seriously. I'd predict that there is not one tenured philosopher of science at a top-50 department who'd regard Latour as an influential contributor to epistemology or philosophy of science.
For some reason, journalists who write about philosophy are universally ignorant of the fact that academic philosophy took a hard analytic turn a century ago, and that the continent has contributed very little since - France least of all.