Changing the Paradigm

[ZSorenson]

Good Article on Stubborn Paradigms

This article was something that I found to be very refreshing to read. I wasn’t pleased with all of it, but in general I liked the point it was trying to make.

I’ve recently posted on climate science and its relevance to the ‘State Science Institute’. I continue with the SSI theme. My commentary on this article begins with asking, how can we change the paradigm?

Why is it that intellectuals - very smart people - fall into these anti-intellectual traps? There are sociological explanations. Some claim that science is a true and rigorous as it can be (I don’t buy that). And then maybe there is a magic bullet explanation.

Maybe the political economics of grant-funded science, and academia, explains the problem. Unfortunately, the problem is broader as it extends into the media and popular culture. How does it get there?

I have two relevant anecdotes. First, with this climate change email scandal, a common response on the left has been ‘why would scientists have such a conspiracy’. They totally accept the idea that oil companies big bucks cause skeptics to fudge science - which is ironically a paradigm, or narrative - but can’t understand why it would go the other way. Lust for grant dollars aside, I suspect the most likely explanation for why an entire cadre of scientists would falsify science is ideological.

This leads to my second anecdote. Many of my friends from high school were pretty intellectual guys, as well as being pretty laid back, at the time. Now, we’ve all gone through college. I’ve noticed how monolithically left-wing they have become. They buy in 100% into the altruist/age of responsibility/finding a career that is meaningful to others nonsense. They even get enthusiastic about ‘hope and change’ slogans when they are by far smart enough to know better than accept an empty slogan at face value. Finally, I’ve noticed a weird social dynamic that is ubersensitive to racial and gender discussions (even in private). That does not describe their behavior in high school. I suppose a good leftist would say that they have simply ‘matured’. I don’t feel that way when I begin to describe basic concepts of rational selfishness and am met with an embarassed tolerance that borders on a superficially polite mockery. That’s not intellectual, yet many of them are Ivy Leaguers and I know them to be very intellectually rigorous in their fields of study.

I never experienced whatever mystical force of conversion they did in college (I only learned about my frustration with shallow academia, and shallow college kids).

This is the power of paradigm that I want to explain and understand.

So, to start off a legitimate discussion, I offer a specific theory and a solution. Please do also.

[ZSorenson]

Okay, here’s the theory:

The use of reason is really hard. It takes time and effort and the knowledge of the importance of using reason in life in order to effectively use it.

Intellectuals are very smart, and use reason and science in their work. Importantly, they master very specific topics, within specific fields. They do so because the community the exist within requires as much because of competition for prestige and ultimately dollars. As a result, they don’t have time to critically challenge ideas other than their own. Often, they don’t even have time to question the basic assumptions of their own field.

The other element, beyond time and effort itself, is sociological. Intellectual division of labor requires that your intellectual product be marketable in your community. Physicists support altruism for the same reason businessmen are required be philanthropic if they want to network in their community. It is unlikely that an intellectual would produce knowledge that flies in the face of assumptions - it wouldn’t be accepted. This adherence to convention is amplified across disciplines, so an economist must accept the conventional wisdom of climatologists. And that’s in an environment where a climatologist would have trouble challenging conventional wisdom - even if they have ample evidence justifying their attempts.

So, I blame a lot of the problem on the diversity of modern knowledge and the difficulty in being accurate and true in details and statistics.

However, the main culprit, I think, is an overreliance on convention. The practical conditions I just described cause intellectuals to become ‘lazy’ if you will, because trusting paradigms is just an easy way of getting things done.

So here is my solution, a single paradigm shift: never trust convention. You could apply this paradigm to many scientific papers by adjusting the language ever so slightly. Words like, ‘physics common to journals in the 1960’s’, or ‘the so-and-so school of ethics’, would suffice to qualify knowledge. Reworking language to describe science as knowledge in progress is the idea. A more robust solution would be to scale back the grant system. Get smarties away from the tenure-tracks and coeds, and get them in board rooms, proposing wild projects to improve human life. Heck, get them into fishing stores to improve the quality and effectiveness of fishing gear. Most of them would make the same amount of money.

My most ideal solution would be the creation of an academy that systematically reveals the errors in knowledge of existing schools, and outpaces them. Unfortunately, those that see the need for this sort of thing don’t always have the experience and capacity to compete with academia. This is a major problem - those on the left usually complain about the sophmoric quality of right-wing academia - and they are often right. There’s just not enough time to challenge the paradigm and be as intellectually rigorous as those who don’t.

I think breaking the philosophical paradigm would be the best beginning, but I’m not sure it can be done. So, begin by breaking down confidence in the paradigm. Force people to challenge their assumptions, and check their premises. Then maybe we can move forward towards a society we’d be happier living in…

I still am frustrated and confused about what has become of my friends. Perhaps there is some innate instinctual appeal of anti-philosophy that swallows up those in the protected youth-dominated environment of academia.

[dream_weaver]

In Ominous Parallels, Leonard Peikoff points out that the ivory towers in Germany helped set the stage for the events which unfolded upon it. The vast majority of individuals do not wax philosophic if you will, nor do they see the need for it, and consequently are the ones which are most helplessly caught in its power.

Ayn Rand has shattered the old philosophical paradigms and provided in its place an approach to epistemology which is unprecidented in history. The seeds of what made America possible (also unprecidented in history) have been traced back to ancient Greece. Both the wheat and the tares; Aristotle and Plato. Building on Plato, Immanuel Kant preceded the Nazi’s by ~150 years, and Hegel by ~125 years.

In the United States, the education system (which is too important to permit a government to meddle with) since the 1950’s has been laying the groundwork for the ‘intellectual culture’ we observe today. When you listen, you can hear the lamenting about what is going on in the world today. The apologists dismiss it for one thing or another. Academia shrug their shoulders while claiming there are no causes. The religionists claim it is the consequence of those who do not embrace their doctrines (‘primitive form of philosophy’). The distrust, or breaking down of confidence, is out there. The use of reason is a tool whose utilization has not been widely taught, hence like glass blowing, or the use of an abacus, finding individuals who can teach and/or utilize it effectively makes it that much more elusive.

There are differences between America and the Weimar Republic. Our future, as far as one can judge, is still indeterminate. But the current trend will not be checked unless we <ompar_22> grasp, in terms of essentials, the ominous parallels between the two countries—and, above all, the basic cause behind those parallels. If we are to avoid a fate like that of Germany, we must find out what made such a fate possible. We must find out what, at root, is required to turn a country, Germany or any other, into a Nazi dictatorship; and then we must uproot that root.

If the rationale for America can be traced back to Aristotle, then the identifications identified by Ayn Rand can only lead to . . .