Indeed, I don’t think that’s actually surprising to many people in the life sciences.

Pinker: People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics.

See, I would give someone more credit for acknowledging, in whatever form, their ignorance of a scientific discipline, as opposed to, say, holding forth authoritatively about evolutionary biology when one is actually an ignorant cretin about it. And of course, both sorts get tenure at Harvard, but at least the former doesn’t get tenure in a scientific discipline. Well, not usually.

Their sizes are probably too small to merit much more discussion, though.

A friend of mine tells stories about the man who owns the building next door to him: a rich sleazeball criminal defense lawyer. I’ve probably mentioned him before. He works mostly federal cases, drugs and guns. He wears $3000 suits and drives this year’s biggest Mercedes. He’s fond of loudly intoning statements like “I’m at the forefront of the defense of your civil liberties.” And Josh laughs, because he knows he’s right. The latest news is that the guy apparently has just taken his first pro bono case, and won’t shut up about it. “This black kid. The cops fucked him! He wasn’t even there! I got witnesses!” And then he talks about never caring about whether his clients are innocent or guilty. “I don’t do this shit! I don’t care, there’s no money!… But this kid didn’t do it!! I’m gonna get him off. Fuck the cops!”
And he’ll win too.
Josh has always liked this schmuck, because he’s always been likable as a schmuck. Now he likes him a little more. It’s nice when it happens but you can’t count on it.
And the guy’s still a sleazeball.

And here’s where Loren and I get civil.
“I also suspect that there is a deep congruity between scientific reasoning and public argument.”
I’d have to say that there isn’t. The notion of divided government is based on the maintenance of prerogatives and not on reason as such. The Executive the Legislative and the Judicial exist in tension. The same logic defines the relations we prefer to see between unions to management, those we demand between prosecutors and defense attorney what I at least would prefer between the press to the government. None of these are predicated on our capacity for reason but on the assumption that reason may lose its way: that power corrupts. The relations are necessarily formal and adversarial so that an approximation of reason may be preserved.

The professionalization of intellectual life seen in this light is not a mark of resilience but of brittleness. Personally, I could do without Plato, but given his existence a world without Aristophanes would scare the shit out of all of us.

The logic, the ideology, of individual reason and rationality that people defend is based on a misunderstanding of the forms of government that they themselves would defend if asked; and they do so under the assumption the the only choice is between freedom or vulgar determinism (that this false dichotomy is so common is itself the result of events and history.)

The choice in fact is between an unfounded and therefore dangerous optimism and a pessimism based in empirical observation: and on the arts and history.
The great thing about art is that we can enjoy it even as we know the artist’s ideas are shit. I don’t read Eliot or Larkin to become like them but to remind myself not be become what they were. But still, they were only human, and they described what they saw and how they saw it well.

The tendency of history is towards determinism. Having a graduate degree in political science or philosophy is no guarantee against it. Just ask Prof. Immanuel Rath.
Me, I like the prefer the arts because artists are confidence men. And you can’t con a con.

Maggie Thatcher scientist? sg you just made my point.

The scientists and mathematicians in my life have generally been kind, thoughtful, and extraordinarily well-read, although I’ve certainly met my share of the ‘mere technicians’ variety of lab scientist, and plenty too of those who uncritically accept a certain halfbaked metaphysical worldview and dismiss anyone of a more philosophical bent, and with contrary inclinations, as dumb and simply confused or ignorant about ‘the science’.

I’ve yet to meet a competent scientist who was seriously dismissive of the rule of law, although I have seen the tendency to be naive and overly optimistic about technical expertise somehow solving historically and conceptually complicated moral and political problems.

But I offer a tentative conjecture (I’ll give it no more weight than that), which is at odds with some of the views on offer here: historical and interpretive practices are, for whatever reason, far more intuitive to most of us than formal and quantitative reasoning.

I think this conjecture is roughly consistent with the position, expressed much earlier in the thread, that sophisticated and deeply informed critical interpretation takes a lot of care, and certainly a great deal of practice. But I wonder if—however rich and nuanced our interpretations—the practice of interpretation simply comes easier to most of us than the ways of thinking and debating that have come to dominate most of the sciences?

Even if most of us don’t have the time, inclination, or depth and breadth of literary experience and historical knowledge to really grapple carefully with, say, Harold Bloom or Jacques Derrida, most of us get the exercise in a way most of us probably do not with, say, problems in combinatorics or topology applied to computer network security or astrophysics.

My conjecture depends, of course, on us being, in some very deep way, interpreting animals, doomed or blessed (depending on your perspective) to find and forge meanings, and more typically inclined to do this than, say, make elaborate and difficult calculations about quantities and relations.

If that’s even remotely accurate, perhaps this is in part hardwired, as evolutionary psychologists could no doubt gleefully “explain” with elaborate just-so stories (“social intuition and language skills were more important when hunting in small bands …”), and intriguing but then heroically interpreted experiments?

Or perhaps it simply reflects a longstanding bias against formal and quantitative reasoning in education and popular culture? (although with shows like Numbers getting more than one season, and even Tom Cruise getting his math down in the latest Mission: Impossible installment, maybe this will change).

I think a few more scientists in power might have a positive influence on the world right now.