Crucial distinctions
Gary Rosen, the chief external affairs officer of the Templeton Foundation, reviews Timothy Ferris’s The Science of Liberty in The New York Times.
Nor is it clear, as Ferris would have it, that science furnishes the ideal template for liberal democracy. Science, he notes, is antiauthoritarian, self-correcting, meritocratic and collaborative…But crucial distinctions are lost in these comparisons. The scientific community may be open to everyone, in principle, but it has steep and familiar barriers to entry…[M]odern science is, in the most admirable sense, an aristocracy — a selection and sorting of the best minds as they interact within institutions designed to achieve certain rarefied ends. Experiment, equality and freedom of expression are essential to this work, but it is the work of an elite community from which most people are necessarily excluded.
But crucial distinctions are lost in Rosen’s claim, too. Very crucial. ‘Most people’ are not excluded in the most pernicious sense of the word – formally, permanently, without appeal, because of who they are rather than what they know or what they can do. Nobody is excluded in that sense, and that distinction is as crucial as it gets. People are ‘excluded’ by for instance not wanting to do the hard work it takes to be a scientist, but that’s a very provisional kind of exclusion. Steep barriers to entry are very different from absolute barriers to entry. There are more or less steep barriers to entry to all forms of work, but it remains possible to try, or to dream about trying. That’s a different thing from knowing that you will never be allowed to do a particular kind of work no matter how much education you get and no matter how good you are. This matters enormously, and there’s something faintly sinister about exaggerating the amount and kind of ‘exclusion’ that science entails.
Yeah, and I’ve been excluded from weight-lifting at the Olympics, piloting airplanes and singing in the Australian Opera. Those elitist aristocratic bastards.
Quite.
I tell you what though – we could easily be governor of Alaska!
You would probably do a passable job. California might be more in need of your talents though.
I think this is one of those cases where we’re talking at such a level of generality that everybody has to be wrong.
For instance, Rosen can just reply, “Look Ophelia, the glass ceiling is a form of exclusion, and granted it’s not an absolute barrier for entry since some women have made it on top, but that doesn’t change the imbalanced male:female CEO ratio.” As far as science goes, the economic obstacles are probably the most potent in this area, given the ridiculous amount of cash it takes to get into American ivy league schools. But there are also the failing educational infrastructures — for me, high school was a prison, a Sartre play full of ghoulish creatures, kind of like Fox News but the people were shorter and had more bacne.
Given my first sentence, even I must be wrong. For instance, he did use the word “necessarily”, which is pretty clearly an exaggeration, unless you qualify it in some weird ad hoc way (which people necessarily do when they use the word). And moreover, he must be sort of wrongish, because your point is a valid one, and it has hardly been defeated by the counter-argument I offered.
The trouble is that I see enough that is right about his claim that I’m willing to shrug and play along. The most I can say is that I know that I can’t be sure that Rosen and I have the same sorts of things in mind.
Ben, Rosen didn’t make the connection between money and exclusion. He pointed the finger emphatically at science. I agree that in America merit is often underwritten by money, but even in America money alone won’t get you to the top of the heap in science.
The perils of a classical education: I don’t think ‘aristocracy” even in the “best sense” has meant ‘meritocracy’ any time in the last two millennia. Rosen, I suspect, is projecting his own elitist, in the worst sense, attitudes onto science.
There is a lot of top-rate science going on outside the Ivy League. And for a bright PhD student in science, it doesn’t cost anything to get in anywhere.
What about all those thousands of amateur astronomers, or other ‘citizen scientists’? Plenty of science – archaeological digs, for instance – gets done by people who are underpaid or unpaid. Plenty of scientific data is gathered by unqualified amateurs, as in the Big Garden Birdwatch. There is no hard and fast line between ‘scientists’ and the rest of us. Unless, I suppose, you’ve got a sub-Hollywood imagination and sees a scientist as some Promethean loon in a white coat.
And what about the unfair exclusiveness of religion? You can’t be a member of the clergy in most religions if you’re a woman and/or LGBT, heck if you’re a woman you can’t even vote on church/mosque/etc matters in most religions, and then there’s the burqa in Islam and the “women’s section” in the back of synagogues and mosques, and the Catholic church opposition to not just abortion but birth control and divorce, and on and on. Do you know Orthodox Jewish women don’t even count in a minyan (prayer quorum)? A thousand women could show up, and they couldn’t have prayers. Only ten men may perform the supposedly essential morning and evening prayers (and read from the torah, and have Bat Mitzvah, and on and on.)I’m pretty fucking offended by that.
Not only that, valdemar, but Ferris has quite a bit about Galton and the wisdom of crowds (chaos theory). He points out, for example, that investors in orange juice futures are better at predicting long term weather trends than the US Weather Service, and that many technological problems have been “crowd-sourced”, because the experts were stumped, and in many cases, crowd-sourced problems have been solved. As Ferris says: “As Galton’s discovery suggested, the public not only has the right to make decisions but very often is right.”
So, I don’t understand Rosen’s critcisms. He points out that, at a certain point, Ferris gives “up on any real effort to argue for the decisive influence of science as such.” But this is silly, because Ferris shows how the method of science is actually reinforced, in social decision making, by means of democratic process. Rather than depend upon experts to rule from positions of privilege, democracy and wealth production often works best without the intervention of imposed solutions. And, while Ferris sees liberalism and democracy as basically unrelated – liberalism as the ideal, and democracy, as he says, ‘the rattletrap truck that delivers it’ – the point seems to be that, together, they provide ways of dealing creatively with change and unpredictability.
But the question of the professionalisation of science doesn’t enter into the equation at all. Of course, there are scientific professionals. Much scientific research is a complex, expensive business, and requires a long and often harsh apprenticeship. But all this is tangential to the argument of Ferris’s book as I understand it so far. Can it be that Rosen, the Chief External Affairs Officer (Wow!) of the Templeton Foundation, is more comfortable with the idea of (religious) elites, and does not want to think that science does not also function in the same way? So, just as religion accuses science of being dependent on an act of faith (just like religion), science must also be hierarchical (just like religion)?
Crossed with Anna. (Must have had the comments window open for awhile while surfing!) But surely that is just the point. Religion is hierarchical and exclusive, so science must be too.
Emily, sure, but what else could we reasonably mean by “exclusion”? Money is obviously part of it, as is access to vital services like education. Surely his focus was on some nebulous sense of exclusion, which Ophelia rightly criticises. But if he were to just get a bit more specific, his point would be perfectly defensible. I mean, it would be one thing if I were bending over backwards to read him charitably, but in this case I’m hardly stretching very far in assessing the claim he makes.
Hamilton, the claim that “for a bright PhD student in science, it doesn’t cost anything to get in anywhere” seems contentious to me. First, I just don’t believe it, unless by “bright” one means “outstanding accomplished supergenius with lots of friends” and by “anywhere” one means “anywhere except those places you can’t”. You’d have to justify your claim for me to understand where you’re coming from. Second, even if it were true, it already costs quite a lot of time and commitment just to get to the doctoral level, which seems to moot the point.
Valdemar, I think (to play devil’s advocate, obviously) that my response would be, “And ever since Luther, God communes with his People individually, so unlike with Catholicism, there’s no hard and fast distinction between priests and peoples.” This argument would, of course, be a tad disingenuous, since the idea of Protestantism has mutated into this radioactive Mothra intent on destroying whole cities. But it remains for you to show that it is wrongheaded in such a way that cannot also be applied to your argument about amateur “small” scientists and professional “big” scientists.
What science excludes isn’t people, it’s ‘personal evidence.’ Intuition, feelings, private experiences, mystical knowledge, and subjective confirmation are excluded because they can’t be examined or critiqued by others, and can’t be used to build a body of public knowledge. An official at Templeton is bound to be miffed at science’s exclusion of the “subjective realm.”
It’s been said that objectivity comes down to having respect for the critical opinions of other people. You have to pay attention to their argument, and try to persuade by reason and evidence. “Other ways of knowing” tend to persuade by bribery and threat, pitting those who want to believe, against those who don’t, presumably as a test of character. This is going to be a lot more divisive — and a lot more elitist — than asking people to either do the work, or understand that a system of checks and balances is more reliable than one that encourages faith, and the will to believe.
Ferris’ new book sounds interesting, I’ll have to put it on my list. We need an antidote for all the “science came from Christianity” and “the concept of equality comes from the Bible” tripe that’s been touted recently.
Eric:
Ferris is overstating the Wisdom of the Crowds point. For one thing it only works if popular opinion is unbiased in large samples. If there’s some persistent skew in how people view a subject, the Wisdom of the Crowds will produce persistent, predictable errors. In fact an economist named Bryan Caplan wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Myth of the Rational Voter, which looked at how popular opinions on economic subjects leads to persistent errors in policy making. I’m betting if you repeated Caplan’s methodology with various sciences, you would see similar patterns.
As for futures markets, these are actually special cases as they select for knowledgeable people since there’s a financial penalty for being wrong, and someone with good information can expect to gain money by correcting mistakes less-knowledgeable people bring into the market. That makes futures markets (and prediction markets, which rely on the same principles) much better than the Wisdom of Crowds, as they can cope with biased actors, and even direct manipulation attempts.
Isn’t he trading on an equivocation? It actually is necessary that the majority of people turn out not be scientists, in the sense that society needs people in a whole lot of other roles. But it’s not true of most individuals that that that individual necessarily not become a scientist. In fact, it’s not true of any individual that he or she necessarily not become a scientist.
Still, of course science is meritocratic. So is any highly-competitive field. There’s nothing sinister about that; in fact, what’s the alternative?
Quite. And meritocratic is not the same thing as ‘closed to certain categories of people’ – which is sinister.
As a matter of fact, surely the job of ‘chief external affairs officer of the Templeton Foundation’ is considerably more elitist than all of science.
I’d be picky with the word “meritocratic”. There are two senses that I find important to the term: a) that most of who succeed deserve it, and b) that most of who deserve it, succeed. As far as science goes, I think (b) is obviously wrong, though I don’t doubt (a).
I wouldn’t take it as meaning either of those. They’re both quite tendentious, especially (of course) the second. The word is used tendentiously, to be sure, but I don’t think it’s inherently tendentious. I think the key sense is that the criterion for performance (not ‘success,’ which is a separate issue) is merit not family or fame or influence or bribery or other irrelevancies. The point is to distinguish it from aristo, pluto, klepto, etc. It’s not so much about desert as about proper matching.
And I don’t think Rosen was talking about money – I think he was talking primarily about difficulty; intellectual difficulty. There are what he calls ‘steep barriers’ to science even for rich people, because there just is a lot of work involved. It’s true that that’s a steep barrier, but I still think that kind of barrier is very different from the absolute ‘You are not permitted even to try’ kind, and I think he was blurring that.
Benjamin:
My point was mainly that the economic obstacles aren’t as high as you were making them out to be. The number of science and engineering PhD students who pay their own way is approximately zero, because almost all are fully funded by either teaching assistantships, research assistantships, or (for the lucky or talented few) fellowships. The financial burden is instead placed upon the faculty supervisor, who is expected to bring in enough grant money to support his own research students.
For this reason, having “lots of friends” generally gets you nowhere. Faculty aren’t willing to take on the financial burden of a student unless they think he or she stands a strong chance of being productive in research. Sure, it helps a lot if a student comes in with a good recommendation from a well known scientist, but even that doesn’t carry much weight unless the scientist is known to be stingy with praise.
There is certainly a high financial barrier for entry to the Ivy League at the undergraduate level, but that is not a significant barrier in the career of a scientist. With good GRE scores and the right kind of recommendation letters, students with a bachelor’s degree from a little-known state university can get into graduate programs at many top-level research institutions (including both Ivy League and good state universities). And once you get a PhD, most people only care about the quality of the research you have done, not the name of the school that you went to.
So although there are certainly some financial barriers to a career in science (e.g., it is much more difficult to get good GRE scores if you come from a background of abject poverty), these barriers are not at all the most important factor for the large number of people who have reached, say, lower middle class or above. From the perspective of most Americans, science is indeed a meritocracy (depending on both talent and many years of hard work), not an aristocracy.
When we talk about the barriers to entry in Rosen’s surface sense, they’re inextricably entangled with these other barriers, educational and economic. Language barriers are largely barriers involving intellectual trust and frequency of exposure to the relevant community of experts. If the back pages of “Nature” seem like babble, it indicates that you have a sociological and psychological distance from the writers, which can’t help but be rooted in education and economics. On second reading, though, I admit that Rosen seems like he isn’t much interested in going to these depths — his last paragraph especially sounds as though he’s stuck in the Moonenbaum communication paradigm, which doesn’t really go the distance. Still, if he were willing to reflect a bit further, education and economics are the places he’d have to go to make the point.
On meritocracy. I’ll accept your revision regarding performance and not success. Even still, my worry is still there.
I think (a) tells us something about the standards of inclusion for a group, and (b) tells us about the standards for exclusion. I suppose the trouble that I have is that for my part I find it hard to distinguish it from the klepto, pluto, aristo, etc. types without something like (b), or its standards of exclusion. For example, whether an organization is more demo-like or more pluto-like depends in some part on the proportionality of negative sanctions and arbitrariness of the judgments involved, which are matters of exclusion. And of course, academics are notoriously pompous and unfair, turning mere disagreements into political disputes. To the extent it is fair to say that, it has to sound more like “pluto” and less like “demo”.