The Parable of the Mote and the Beam, Domenico Fetti, c. 1619 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Every paradigm is informed by its contemporary society, even if they seem unrelated. The go-to example of this is Freud’s theories, from which we derive “pent up” and “release” and “drives” and “pressures” – all of which are the language of the turn-of-the century steam industrial world. Whether Freud was right or not isn’t the point– he just sounds wrong because we don’t use steam engines and the brain doesn’t look like an engine anymore.
The point here is that we acknowledge the ideas of prior cultures relied on their context, but we willfully ignore our own immersion in our context. I [The Last Psychiatrist] read this in The Economist:
However, unlike Freud’s unconscious (a hot, claustrophobic place full of repressed memories and inappropriate sexual fantasies about one’s parents) the modern unconscious is a place of super-fast data processing, useful survival mechanisms and rules of thumb about the world that have been honed by millions of years of evolution. It is the unconscious, for instance, that stitches together data on colour, shape, movement…
Note that this isn’t merely a metaphor or analogy to modern computers – it is an earnest but uncritical assumption of an actual similarity.
What I think is particularly interesting here is how different frames of reference (e.g., the steam engine, the computer) not only lead to different ways of describing the same thing, but perhaps to different actions in response to the same problem.
Does one settle upon different policy prescriptions depending on whether one sees the government as a steam engine or as a computer?
I have discussed time and again on this blog (and in public lectures) the difficulty of truly knowing anything in the social sciences, and the usefulness of controlled experiments in chipping away at our ignorance.
But the question I ask above is, I’m afraid, unanswerable. There appears to be such a thing as context-dependent memory (the “improved recall of specific episodes or information when the context present at encoding and retrieval are the same,” or the reason why if you study drunk, you should also take the test drunk), but context-dependent policy making goes beyond that.
Put another way: Would we care so much about social capital, network effects, and spillovers if the Internet had never been invented?
On steam engines and computers, I was reminded of William Gibson and Bruce Stirling’s The Difference Engine, about which Amazon say:
1855: The Industrial Revolution is in full and inexorable swing, powered by steam-driven cybernetic Engines. Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine and the computer age arrives a century ahead of its time. And three extraordinary characters race toward a rendezvous with history—and the future.
The book is thought to have popularized the whole Steampunk aesthetic. I read it in college and didn’t enjoy it half as much as I did Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, but your mileage may vary.
That being said, I want to address one thing that has been bothering me for a long time. When I did my MA, my advisor rightly pointed out that he never understood how Marxist professors could declaim capitalism while making $100,000 per year. I don’t mind well-paid academics suggesting that ideas from Marx have validity, but I do have an enormous problem with the champagne socialists such as Terry Eagleton and Noam Chomsky who make millions of dollars manufacturing very repetitive lambasts against the American hegemony and ills of free market capitalism, which they then sell to intellectuals in first and third-world countries for a tidy profit. The global demand, in a hysterically frustrating irony, for these authors’ works in Asia and continental Europe is fueled by the Pax Americana, which keeps English as the lingua franca of economics and academia.
From a comment by someone named secretcognition on this article in The American Scholar by William Deresiewicz.
Probably the best thing I have read on the issue of gay marriage:
[The gay] population is on the whole law-abiding and productively employed, and having a below-normal fertility rate does not impose the same costs on the education and welfare systems as the heterosexual population does. It is thus not surprising that in response to the President’s announcement of his support for homosexual marriage, Republican leaders cautioned their followers not to be distracted by this issue from the problems of the US economy. This was tacit acknowledgment that homosexual marriage, and homosexual rights in general, have no economic significance.
It seems that the only remaining basis for opposition to homosexual marriage, or to legal equality between homosexuals and heterosexuals in general, is religious. Many devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims are strongly opposed to homosexual marriage, and to homosexuality more generally. Why they are is unclear. If as appears homosexuality is innate, and therefore natural (and indeed there is homosexuality among animals), and if homosexuals are not an antisocial segment of the population, why should they be thought to be offending against God’s will? Stated differently, why has sex come to play such a large role in the Abrahamic religions? I do not know the answer. But whatever the answer, the United States is not a theocracy and should hesitate to enact laws that serve religious rather than pragmatic secular aims, such as material welfare and national security.
The emphasis is mine, but here is more from Richard Posner, and here is his co-blogger Gary Becker’s response.
Interestingly, in his post, Posner brings up the 1975 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia. In that case, the Court held that prohibiting interracial marriage was unconstitutional.
The Mote and the Beam: Context-Dependent Policy Making?
Every paradigm is informed by its contemporary society, even if they seem unrelated. The go-to example of this is Freud’s theories, from which we derive “pent up” and “release” and “drives” and “pressures” – all of which are the language of the turn-of-the century steam industrial world. Whether Freud was right or not isn’t the point– he just sounds wrong because we don’t use steam engines and the brain doesn’t look like an engine anymore.
The point here is that we acknowledge the ideas of prior cultures relied on their context, but we willfully ignore our own immersion in our context. I [The Last Psychiatrist] read this in The Economist:
Note that this isn’t merely a metaphor or analogy to modern computers – it is an earnest but uncritical assumption of an actual similarity.
More here from The Last Psychiatrist.
What I think is particularly interesting here is how different frames of reference (e.g., the steam engine, the computer) not only lead to different ways of describing the same thing, but perhaps to different actions in response to the same problem.
Does one settle upon different policy prescriptions depending on whether one sees the government as a steam engine or as a computer?
I have discussed time and again on this blog (and in public lectures) the difficulty of truly knowing anything in the social sciences, and the usefulness of controlled experiments in chipping away at our ignorance.
But the question I ask above is, I’m afraid, unanswerable. There appears to be such a thing as context-dependent memory (the “improved recall of specific episodes or information when the context present at encoding and retrieval are the same,” or the reason why if you study drunk, you should also take the test drunk), but context-dependent policy making goes beyond that.
Put another way: Would we care so much about social capital, network effects, and spillovers if the Internet had never been invented?
On steam engines and computers, I was reminded of William Gibson and Bruce Stirling’s The Difference Engine, about which Amazon say:
1855: The Industrial Revolution is in full and inexorable swing, powered by steam-driven cybernetic Engines. Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine and the computer age arrives a century ahead of its time. And three extraordinary characters race toward a rendezvous with history—and the future.
The book is thought to have popularized the whole Steampunk aesthetic. I read it in college and didn’t enjoy it half as much as I did Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, but your mileage may vary.