So far, Sagan is about the only old-white-dude-scientist that hasn’t been revealed to be a personal nightmare. (I remember being unutterably dispirited when I found out how childish and abusive Feynman was toward his partner.) Not sure if there’s a correlation between being personally decent and being publicly decent (as shown by the thoughtful clip in the post), but I’d be willing to bet there is.
For what it’s worth, I’ve always thought the “Pale Blue Dot” passage from the book Pale Blue Dot is one of the finest and most moving pieces of writing I have ever read:
Agreed. Sagan was very much a man of his time, and the greatest science communicator of my experience because of it.
It reminds me of a story I once read: a kid was taken along by his mother to a concert given by a budding young concert pianist. “Wasn’t she great…!?” said the mother as they made their way home afterwards.
Came the reply: “Aw… I’d be as good as her if I only knew what keys to bang down..!”
Omar, that anecdote reminds me of the exchange between Andre Previn and Eric Morecambe. Previn tells Morcambe “You are playing all the wrong notes”. Morecambe replies “I am playing all the right notes. I’m just not necessarily playing them in the right order!”
Think it was David Brin also pointed out about Star Wars: the droids are pretty clearly sentient, intelligent beings… Yet they can be bought, sold, effectively enslaved with ‘restraining bolts’. And it’s not just villains who do so.
… I find it not at all surprising Sagan would raise the issues I did. It flows quite naturally, it seems to me, from other views on the possible diversity of life in the universe, how our own perspective is, as yet, probably quite limited, against all of what might be out there.
… adding (it’s probably been covered, don’t know; haven’t been around; apologies)…
There seems to be this very poorly thought through attitude amongs the anti-social justice (or possibly just antisocial and antijustice) contingent that, somehow, there’s this bright line between some mythical, antiseptic domain of the ‘hard scientists’ and some terribly squishy, soft social domain thing. And this attiitude, again, I suspect, is rearing its head here.
And Sagan is, in fact, amusingly enough, a fairly clear exhibit that this is not at all a clean separation. Not that it should surprise anyone, really, that there isn’t, when the very categories, here, are reified pretty willy nilly…
There’s a legitimate case, maybe, that you can’t get from is to ought in any absolutely prescribed way. As in: nothing about the arrangement of the physical matter of the universe quite says we shouldn’t enslave people or just treat them like desert. On the slavery question, economists, I’m sure, could comment pretty brutally on when it _does_, kinda, work out, if all you’re looking at is a specific balance sheet. (I’d add, parenthetically: chattel slavery, though it absolutely _can_ be a helluva deal for the palntation owner, isn’t necessarily guaranteed to be that great a deal for them; it may be one of the reasons it’s not around much anymore, or not anywhere where there’s any kind of modern economy going)…
But look at what the so-called ‘hard’ sciences are, and what ‘technology’ is. Nothing, at all, walls them off from the social world. And the social world, the rules we live by, are every bit as real as a booster rocket. And technology is really only important to us when it meets up with the human, and, generally, quickly after that, it will meet up with the social. A rocket booster isn’t interesting to us just because, out in space, away from perturbing bodies, it’s an unusually clean example of the third law in action…
It’s interesting because of where we can go with it, what we can send up with it, which may be, yes, a communications satellite (a thing with social interaction as its very reason for being, that), or a robot that will send back information on what we are curious about…
What’s behind this poorly considered idea of some mythical separation of these domains is, I think, mostly wishful thinking. People like to keep things simple, and some of them, especially, just don’t want some things to change. They’d like to say can’t we just talk about the canyons on Mars; those are cool; can’t we just talk about rockets; I like those…
But real life isn’t like that. Everything you learn has implications. And everything you invent has implications. And nothing you do, you truly do in a vacuum (even if you do it halfway to the asteroid belt). And while you’re looking through your microscope, probably someone’s making your lunch. And how they’re being paid cannot be entirely separated from you, either, or how you had _time_ to look through that microscope…
Real life isn’t like that. _Reality_ isn’t like that. And the sciences, after all, do try to concern themselves with studying reality…
… and actually _good_ scientists, like Sagan, are of necessity curious and wide-ranging thinkers. Inevitably, they’re going to notice those things. They will notice the connections, even if _you’d_ rather not think about them.
And of course, despite the Social Injustice Warriors’ (SIWs) best efforts to portray their own views as the “unpolitical”, “non-ideological” position, pure reason and objective facts are no more capable of supporting their own values – such as the inalienable right of sleazy men to seek personal gratification at women’s expense – than they’re capable of supporting the pro social justice views that they hate so much.
Ironically, one of the leaders of the “keep your grubby politics out of my skepticism, unless you’re bashing Muslims” movement, Sam Harris, wrote an entire book about getting oughts from is, while brushing aside any suggestion that this was in any way a problem.
And yes, the contempt for “soft” sciences (or social sciences or whatever) is part of the problem here. The anti-SJWs are really science deniers when it comes to issues like discrimination. Of course, evolutionary psychology somehow gets exempted from their scorn.
pure reason and objective facts are no more capable of supporting their own values – such as the inalienable right of sleazy men to seek personal gratification at women’s expense – than they’re capable of supporting the pro social justice views that they hate so much.
They think they are, because they are reading “ought” from “is” – the fact that men want to do that thing is read as meaning that men are inherently wired to do just that, and therefore it is the natural way of the universe. There are many problems with that, but a couple are very glaring.
First, their “is”. While there are many men, apparently, who want to do that, it does not follow that this is inherent in the nature of the male of the species. There are men who appear quite able to interact with women without groping, grabbing, or leering, and these men are not all attracted to men. Our intrepid “rationalist” SIWs can spout all they want to about this being unnatural, and the men being emasculated or feminized, but they have no evidence to support that claim, either. Any study done using adult men (or even adolescent almost-men) is by its very nature suspect, because it is very difficult to separate nature from nurture. Not impossible, but unless the researcher is totally honest in his/her attempt, some bias is likely to sneak into the analysis.
Second, their “ought”. Even if it turns out that they are totally right and that grabbing, groping, and leering are part of the package that men are born with, that does not translate into “it’s all right to grab, grope, leer, because it’s just boys being boys”. It fails to recognize the shared humanity of the two sexes, and the fact that, if you accept that men have that inherent drive, you must accept (from the same basic level of evidence, which is that women seem to want to make these choices more often than they want to not make their own choices) that women have an inherent desire to select the individual(s) with whom they have sexual encounters. You therefore have two inherent natures in opposition to each other, which fits well with the “nature red in tooth and claw” constant competition mode of evolution favored by many SJWs. It does not, however, fit too well with the cooperation mode that science has discovered is also a substantial driver of evolution in general, and a driver of human evolution.
So it comes down to relating the “is” to the “ought”, and there is no purely objective means of deciding which is the more compelling. We can point to human well being, human freedom, human autonomy, etc, but those arguments can only be employed in this situation if you can find some objective evidence to determine which of these “ought” (scientifically), since they may lead you to conflicting answers.
This is where philosophy comes in. Philosophy may not be giving you an objective answer to ‘”is” vs “ought”, but at least it gives us a means to try to evaluate the competing claims. Any answer will be imperfect, and will have to tell one side to buzz off (much more nicely, of course, and in much more formalized, scholarly language). Right now, the lessons of history have led a lot of us to tell those in the “boys will be boys” school to buzz off, but they are simply refusing to acknowledge that they might be wrong. So perhaps our only hope it to fund science to research the possibility that this trait in so many men is not inherent, and fight them with their own tools. Or we can employ reason and logic to demonstrate that their position is the steaming pile that it is, only they cannot see our logic.
Which brings me back to where it all started – we just keep going around in circles.
I do think, mind, that the natural sciences are enormously _helpful_ in working out how you get–and don’t get–to certain oughts. It’s one of the reasons, I might add, it regularly comes under attack–highly dishonestly–from those who aren’t interested in themselves or others understanding the same.
Because good science tells you about relationships. And quantifies them. Getting you to things like: what happens when you oxidize a whole lot of carbon, release it into the atmosphere, at rates natural processes can’t catch up to, sufficiently to fix it again fast enough to keep atmospheric levels from rising significantly.
So it doesn’t give you ‘ought’. Technically, it doesn’t quite say ‘you must stop emitting that oxide’. It does say: if rates continue to rise, other things being equal, here are the consequences. It gives you cause and effect and consequences.
So if you’ve an ought in _mind_, it tells you: here’s how you will and won’t get it.
… and this is what makes obscurantism–whether religious or otherwise ideological–dishonest. It’s not exactly that _science_ on its own, makes a religion or an ideology immoral. It’s the extent to which the followers thereof attempt to deny themselves and others the fruits of the science–that is, that extremely important understanding the science yields.
John @11, I accept that that’s your imagining of the scenario, but given Sagan’s deeply insightful and humanistic comments (albeit in the frame of reference of society at that time), what actual evidence can you point at that Sagan would reject what most would consider the ‘SJW Movement’* core objectives?
*Not that there really is a Movement. It’s more of a movement, comprised of a loosely aggregated bunch of individuals a groups with levels of organisation ranging from nil to cohesive, with the aggregate having zero co-ordination and no agreed manifesto.
John, you stand as a good example of the mindset I described at #3: you dislike the SJWs, describing them as irrational and anti-science. By inference then, you believe that you have arrived at your own positions on the matter through rational, scientific thought… and because Sagan is famous for his clarity of thought and speech, you declare that he would agree with you.
Did I say ‘good’ example? Dear god, your comment is an exact match.
I hope that #11 comes back to clarify the argument, but it reads dissonant enough that one would wonder if adding an “anti-” before “SJW” wouldn’t make more sense, and actually wasn’t initially intended.
John almost never does come back to reply to replies. He’s a drive-by commenter, mostly quite a rude one, which is why all his comments are held for approval before they appear. It’s an annoying habit. There’s no law against it but it’s annoying.
So far, Sagan is about the only old-white-dude-scientist that hasn’t been revealed to be a personal nightmare. (I remember being unutterably dispirited when I found out how childish and abusive Feynman was toward his partner.) Not sure if there’s a correlation between being personally decent and being publicly decent (as shown by the thoughtful clip in the post), but I’d be willing to bet there is.
He wasn’t great at sharing the work in his first marriage, but did better as he grew up more. That’s the worst I know of him.
Classic regressive arsehole ‘scientific’ racist / anti-feminist reasoning:
1. My anti-immigrant / woman beliefs are scientific, and I am super rational, unlike those emotional women and SJWs;
2. Sagan was a highly notable scientist;
3. Therefore he would have shared my views.
For what it’s worth, I’ve always thought the “Pale Blue Dot” passage from the book Pale Blue Dot is one of the finest and most moving pieces of writing I have ever read:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/230027-look-again-at-that-dot-that-s-here-that-s-home-that-s
YNB:
Agreed. Sagan was very much a man of his time, and the greatest science communicator of my experience because of it.
It reminds me of a story I once read: a kid was taken along by his mother to a concert given by a budding young concert pianist. “Wasn’t she great…!?” said the mother as they made their way home afterwards.
Came the reply: “Aw… I’d be as good as her if I only knew what keys to bang down..!”
Sagan definitely knew his keys.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/centre.html
Can’t say I cared much for the man. Ahem. :-)
Omar, that anecdote reminds me of the exchange between Andre Previn and Eric Morecambe. Previn tells Morcambe “You are playing all the wrong notes”. Morecambe replies “I am playing all the right notes. I’m just not necessarily playing them in the right order!”
Think it was David Brin also pointed out about Star Wars: the droids are pretty clearly sentient, intelligent beings… Yet they can be bought, sold, effectively enslaved with ‘restraining bolts’. And it’s not just villains who do so.
… I find it not at all surprising Sagan would raise the issues I did. It flows quite naturally, it seems to me, from other views on the possible diversity of life in the universe, how our own perspective is, as yet, probably quite limited, against all of what might be out there.
… adding (it’s probably been covered, don’t know; haven’t been around; apologies)…
There seems to be this very poorly thought through attitude amongs the anti-social justice (or possibly just antisocial and antijustice) contingent that, somehow, there’s this bright line between some mythical, antiseptic domain of the ‘hard scientists’ and some terribly squishy, soft social domain thing. And this attiitude, again, I suspect, is rearing its head here.
And Sagan is, in fact, amusingly enough, a fairly clear exhibit that this is not at all a clean separation. Not that it should surprise anyone, really, that there isn’t, when the very categories, here, are reified pretty willy nilly…
There’s a legitimate case, maybe, that you can’t get from is to ought in any absolutely prescribed way. As in: nothing about the arrangement of the physical matter of the universe quite says we shouldn’t enslave people or just treat them like desert. On the slavery question, economists, I’m sure, could comment pretty brutally on when it _does_, kinda, work out, if all you’re looking at is a specific balance sheet. (I’d add, parenthetically: chattel slavery, though it absolutely _can_ be a helluva deal for the palntation owner, isn’t necessarily guaranteed to be that great a deal for them; it may be one of the reasons it’s not around much anymore, or not anywhere where there’s any kind of modern economy going)…
But look at what the so-called ‘hard’ sciences are, and what ‘technology’ is. Nothing, at all, walls them off from the social world. And the social world, the rules we live by, are every bit as real as a booster rocket. And technology is really only important to us when it meets up with the human, and, generally, quickly after that, it will meet up with the social. A rocket booster isn’t interesting to us just because, out in space, away from perturbing bodies, it’s an unusually clean example of the third law in action…
It’s interesting because of where we can go with it, what we can send up with it, which may be, yes, a communications satellite (a thing with social interaction as its very reason for being, that), or a robot that will send back information on what we are curious about…
What’s behind this poorly considered idea of some mythical separation of these domains is, I think, mostly wishful thinking. People like to keep things simple, and some of them, especially, just don’t want some things to change. They’d like to say can’t we just talk about the canyons on Mars; those are cool; can’t we just talk about rockets; I like those…
But real life isn’t like that. Everything you learn has implications. And everything you invent has implications. And nothing you do, you truly do in a vacuum (even if you do it halfway to the asteroid belt). And while you’re looking through your microscope, probably someone’s making your lunch. And how they’re being paid cannot be entirely separated from you, either, or how you had _time_ to look through that microscope…
Real life isn’t like that. _Reality_ isn’t like that. And the sciences, after all, do try to concern themselves with studying reality…
… and actually _good_ scientists, like Sagan, are of necessity curious and wide-ranging thinkers. Inevitably, they’re going to notice those things. They will notice the connections, even if _you’d_ rather not think about them.
(s/desert/dirt/ No idea how I did that. Early morning, long night, mostly. Hello all.)
AJ Milne #8
And of course, despite the Social Injustice Warriors’ (SIWs) best efforts to portray their own views as the “unpolitical”, “non-ideological” position, pure reason and objective facts are no more capable of supporting their own values – such as the inalienable right of sleazy men to seek personal gratification at women’s expense – than they’re capable of supporting the pro social justice views that they hate so much.
I can’t for a minute imagine Sagan being attracted to anything as irrational and as anti-science as the entire SJW movement.
He’d recoil in horror. He’d be denounced as an instance of White Privilege.
A.J. Milne @8,
Ironically, one of the leaders of the “keep your grubby politics out of my skepticism, unless you’re bashing Muslims” movement, Sam Harris, wrote an entire book about getting oughts from is, while brushing aside any suggestion that this was in any way a problem.
And yes, the contempt for “soft” sciences (or social sciences or whatever) is part of the problem here. The anti-SJWs are really science deniers when it comes to issues like discrimination. Of course, evolutionary psychology somehow gets exempted from their scorn.
They think they are, because they are reading “ought” from “is” – the fact that men want to do that thing is read as meaning that men are inherently wired to do just that, and therefore it is the natural way of the universe. There are many problems with that, but a couple are very glaring.
First, their “is”. While there are many men, apparently, who want to do that, it does not follow that this is inherent in the nature of the male of the species. There are men who appear quite able to interact with women without groping, grabbing, or leering, and these men are not all attracted to men. Our intrepid “rationalist” SIWs can spout all they want to about this being unnatural, and the men being emasculated or feminized, but they have no evidence to support that claim, either. Any study done using adult men (or even adolescent almost-men) is by its very nature suspect, because it is very difficult to separate nature from nurture. Not impossible, but unless the researcher is totally honest in his/her attempt, some bias is likely to sneak into the analysis.
Second, their “ought”. Even if it turns out that they are totally right and that grabbing, groping, and leering are part of the package that men are born with, that does not translate into “it’s all right to grab, grope, leer, because it’s just boys being boys”. It fails to recognize the shared humanity of the two sexes, and the fact that, if you accept that men have that inherent drive, you must accept (from the same basic level of evidence, which is that women seem to want to make these choices more often than they want to not make their own choices) that women have an inherent desire to select the individual(s) with whom they have sexual encounters. You therefore have two inherent natures in opposition to each other, which fits well with the “nature red in tooth and claw” constant competition mode of evolution favored by many SJWs. It does not, however, fit too well with the cooperation mode that science has discovered is also a substantial driver of evolution in general, and a driver of human evolution.
So it comes down to relating the “is” to the “ought”, and there is no purely objective means of deciding which is the more compelling. We can point to human well being, human freedom, human autonomy, etc, but those arguments can only be employed in this situation if you can find some objective evidence to determine which of these “ought” (scientifically), since they may lead you to conflicting answers.
This is where philosophy comes in. Philosophy may not be giving you an objective answer to ‘”is” vs “ought”, but at least it gives us a means to try to evaluate the competing claims. Any answer will be imperfect, and will have to tell one side to buzz off (much more nicely, of course, and in much more formalized, scholarly language). Right now, the lessons of history have led a lot of us to tell those in the “boys will be boys” school to buzz off, but they are simply refusing to acknowledge that they might be wrong. So perhaps our only hope it to fund science to research the possibility that this trait in so many men is not inherent, and fight them with their own tools. Or we can employ reason and logic to demonstrate that their position is the steaming pile that it is, only they cannot see our logic.
Which brings me back to where it all started – we just keep going around in circles.
Of course the «ougth» that he claims to derive from an «is» is in his premises to begin with, making the whole book one long circular argument…
John #11
What, exactly, is “the entire SJW movement”?
… thanks all.
I do think, mind, that the natural sciences are enormously _helpful_ in working out how you get–and don’t get–to certain oughts. It’s one of the reasons, I might add, it regularly comes under attack–highly dishonestly–from those who aren’t interested in themselves or others understanding the same.
Because good science tells you about relationships. And quantifies them. Getting you to things like: what happens when you oxidize a whole lot of carbon, release it into the atmosphere, at rates natural processes can’t catch up to, sufficiently to fix it again fast enough to keep atmospheric levels from rising significantly.
So it doesn’t give you ‘ought’. Technically, it doesn’t quite say ‘you must stop emitting that oxide’. It does say: if rates continue to rise, other things being equal, here are the consequences. It gives you cause and effect and consequences.
So if you’ve an ought in _mind_, it tells you: here’s how you will and won’t get it.
… and this is what makes obscurantism–whether religious or otherwise ideological–dishonest. It’s not exactly that _science_ on its own, makes a religion or an ideology immoral. It’s the extent to which the followers thereof attempt to deny themselves and others the fruits of the science–that is, that extremely important understanding the science yields.
[…] a pair of comments by AJ Milne on Shade of […]
John @11, I accept that that’s your imagining of the scenario, but given Sagan’s deeply insightful and humanistic comments (albeit in the frame of reference of society at that time), what actual evidence can you point at that Sagan would reject what most would consider the ‘SJW Movement’* core objectives?
*Not that there really is a Movement. It’s more of a movement, comprised of a loosely aggregated bunch of individuals a groups with levels of organisation ranging from nil to cohesive, with the aggregate having zero co-ordination and no agreed manifesto.
The Demon-Haunted World remains one of my favorite books. I wish everyone in the world could read it.
#11
John, you stand as a good example of the mindset I described at #3: you dislike the SJWs, describing them as irrational and anti-science. By inference then, you believe that you have arrived at your own positions on the matter through rational, scientific thought… and because Sagan is famous for his clarity of thought and speech, you declare that he would agree with you.
Did I say ‘good’ example? Dear god, your comment is an exact match.
I hope that #11 comes back to clarify the argument, but it reads dissonant enough that one would wonder if adding an “anti-” before “SJW” wouldn’t make more sense, and actually wasn’t initially intended.
John almost never does come back to reply to replies. He’s a drive-by commenter, mostly quite a rude one, which is why all his comments are held for approval before they appear. It’s an annoying habit. There’s no law against it but it’s annoying.