Money talks and the social construction of reality, walks

Restropective court judgements are very common in tax – retrospective legislation is very rare, in my experience.

I am trying hard to find a subject in this post, but it appears to be largely a footnoted drive-by spraying of criticisms at familiar adversaries.

Regarding crisis status for the current credit market turmoil, Bernanke managed to avoid a domino collapse of Wall Street only by taking extreme, if not desperate, measures to lend vast amounts of Federal cash against toxic waste assets.

We are all ignorant of the magnitude of the unrecognized losses in the over-leveraged and under-capitalized financial sector, but these losses cannot be hidden forever. Thus, it is too soon to say that there is no crisis.

The relevant branch of social science for addressing current and future kerfluffles of this kind is trust engineering. The mechanisms of trust synthesis and assurance are badly underdeveloped, largely because interested parties favor “flexibility” in this domain.

The F.W. Taylor of scientific management of trust has not yet arrived. Until he does, we will blame our losses on everything but the fundamental cause: the periodic breach of trust by individuals and institutions in the financial marketplace.

Bob Park’s _Voodoo Science_ is a good book about how bad science is done and especially publicized, written by a working physicist. Epistemology stops at reproducibility in that book, I think.

also the curious subculture of index fund fandom, but that’s perhaps a subject for another day

Can you post about it on your blog so I won’t accidentally miss it? I thought all people who aren’t Warren Buffett are supposed to be index fund fans.

The problem is that a lot of the people doing “critical analysis of the way facts are made” are not disinterested sociologists of science but are, instead, global-warming denialists, supply-side economists, nuclear lobbyists, coal lobbyists, tobacco lobbyists, creationists and other fruitbats, and so scientists tend to get instinctively defensive about the purity of fact in a way that isn’t perhaps completely justified.

Indeed. I recently sat next to a man on a flight recently. He was an employee of the Discovery Institute and in between writing long diatribes defending Expelled he was intently reading Voodoo Science and marking it with a highlighter.

“But where’s the big book about tobacco lobbyist and global warning deniers?”

I think these cases differ from the case of religion in a number of ways. Here’s one. No one worth talking to believe that tobacco doesn’t cause cancer or that anthropogenic climate change is a real. More importantly, no one worth talking to believe that such beliefs are worthy of “respect.” But in the case of religion, many people worth talking to persist in believing false religious beliefs, and even more believe that such beliefs are inherently worthy of “respect.”

Of course we should be hostile to any opportunistic and overbroad appeal to the “socially constructed” nature of facts. But only one of the three above-mentioned phenomena routinely get a free-pass from those who know better. Hence the extra doses of attention and hostility it gets from these writers.

Foucault directed his “science studies” toward what he called the weaker sciences (or something like that) — e.g., criminology or sexology. Discourses that mimic science and claim the authority of science, but whose scientific claims are really pretty weak.

There’s certainly an abundance of critiques of economics for economists to ignore, dismiss, and misrepresent. Fortunately for them, they aren’t required to give the critiques individual attention, but can just dismiss them en bloc.

And yes, I think that economics is more like sexology than like physics. But maybe I’m wrong.

NOTE: Gee. Dennett is willing to say that religion is socially constructed. I never would have guessed such a thing.

dsquared, tardy but effusive thanks for your original pointer to Mackenzie. The article you reference, “An Equation and its Worlds: Bricolage, Exemplars, Disunity and Performativity in Financial Economics” no longer resides among his online pub list or WPs, but is available here [pdf].

“Science bores me.”

How about Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science?” Is that boring?

Providing an opportunity to link

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“Science bores me”

Yeah, me too. Also boring: books, Australia, and goats. Man, goats are tedious.

Daniel: I’ve always thought it’s a real shame that Bruno Latour and the rest of the science studies crowd decided concentrate on natural sciences rather than having a really good look at the worlds of business, finance and economics.

You’re probably already aware of it, but in case not, you might be interested in the work of Philip Mirowski, who seems to be very much into `pomo critiques’ of economics. See

More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics.
and
Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science .

I haven’t actually read these books, so I might be way off base here. My knowledge of them is based on another interesting recent book on the philosophy of economics (which I have read) called
Economic Theory and Cognitive Science by Donald Ross. Ross sets up Mirowski as one of the `foils’ to his own argument; parts of his book are explicitly intended as replies to Mirowski’s arguments (and in other parts, Ross anticipates Mirowski’s own replies to Ross’s arguments).

One of the reasons why I’ve never had very much time for the Dawkinses, Dennetts and Martin Gardners[2] of this world and their hostility to any critical analysis of the way in which “facts” are made….

Interestingly, Dennet plays a starring role in Ross’s own philosophy of mind.
According to Ross’s reading of Dennet, what we call `self-awareness’ is very much a `social construct’. In the Ross/Dennet model, human brains aren’t really `selves’ in the `folk-psychology’ sense (and even less are they the homo economicus of neo-classical economics); instead, human brains are fiendishly complex `societies’ of interacting agents, with no central control. Humans first invented a `theory of mind’ so that they could construct tractable predictive models of other people; hence our `theory of mind’ is inextricably a product of social interaction (and hence, a `social construct’). What we call `self-awareness’ is what happens when a human brain then reflexively applies this `theory of mind’ to itself (hence, self-awareness is also in some sense a `social construct’). It follows: if people in different societies (with different modes of social interaction) developed somewhat different `theories of mind’, they might then develop somewhat different forms of `self-awareness’.

Or at least, this is my bastardized rendition of my vague understanding of what appears to be a formidably complex and subtle philosophical argument presented in Ross’s book. I must admit I do not feel I understood all the arguments in the book (I am not a philosopher). But I still found it quite fascinating and I recommend it to anyone interested in `philosophy of economics’, particularly in excavating the epistemological foundations of the subject.

Seth: Little acts of discovery occur and then get shrouded in pomp and circumstance, and things go awry. A set of allegories and analogies is built around one set of facts and they seem to function for a while and then they’re shown as what they are…..

Science bores me. I appreciate its practical power but as philosophy it’s thin stuff. It’s either the philosophy of planes trains and automobiles, or it’s pure Platonism. I’ll take the medicine (maybe) but not the values.

Most career scientists are painfully aware of the extent to which science is a product of politics and social gamesmanship. There is a prevailing belief that `the truth wins in the end’, but I don’t think that any serious scientist would deny that, in the short term, much of the `conventional wisdom’ of science is in some sense a `social construct’.

Why, then are so many scientists so hostile towards `pomo’ critiques of science? I think the reason is this: there is a strong suspicion that these critiques are mounted by people who intrinsically hate and fear science because, basically, they aren’t good at it. In this story, the kids who barely passed mathematics in highschool and avoided all science courses in university (but who were good at writing essays and doing what Rutherford once disparagingly called `scholarship’) grew up to become humanities professors, and became alarmed and dismayed at the apparent looming irrelevance of their own chosen specialization in an increasingly technological and scientific (`scientistic’?) world. So, they mount a counterattack, where they try to undermine Science’s claim to epistemological supremacy by dismissing it as a `social construct’, no better to any other religion or mythology.

Now, this dismissal of the `pomo crowd’ and their `pomo critiques’ of science might be unfair and ad hominem. But when someone makes a series of sweeping and inaccurate generalizations about the formation of scientific knowledge, and then ends by saying `Science bores me’, he goes a long way towards reinforcing the stereotype that the `pomo crowd’ are a bunch of ignorant luddites.

If we view scientific method as an intellectual toolkit well-suited to subjects that exhibit the properties of fields, functions, populations, and quantifiable behaviors, then it makes a nice fit for study of emergent social and political behavior on the Internet.

“Knowledge physics” will be a new domain that marries the rigor of the physical sciences with the goals of social scientists. Treating the interactions of wired people as analytically tractable phenomena will lead to fruitful discoveries, possibly including new methods for the synthesis of trust and new systems of societal self-regulation.

The belief that there is nothing new under the intellectual sun will be challenged as new theoretical illumination falls upon our emerging digital society.

“also boring: books”…
Books are interesting. The Alps are beautiful but dumb.

“Science bores me” is bit much; hyperbole directed at those who put the word “scholarship” in scare quotes. In more mundane language I simply don’t see science, in the sense of a consideration of the world as a mapping of externalities, helping to resolve any of our central philosophical or political questions. I gave three example: trade, affirmative action and (for lack of a better word) education. In all three I’d argue generalizations are not universally applicable, either as a matter of logic or more obviously politics, but the search for generalizations is what predominates discussion.

I posted a comment on the thread about yet another abomination from Fox pointing out the thanks we owe Murdoch for reminding people that the press should be not neutral but engaged. I don’t read TPM out of some pretense that it’s neutral (and much of what I read offends me) I read it because the writers are articulately personally and intellectually involved in the debate over the issues and because by and large unlike Fox they’re not stupid. Unopinionated writing is not writing without bias, it’s writing where the biases are hidden. One of the most annoying things about unsophisticated liberals (and that’s many of them) is the sense that they’re immune to the foibles of their opponents. It the trait in so many Americans that drives people from other countries nuts.

Where are all the native Arabic speakers in discussions of Iraq? There’s not one Palestinian voice at the “reality based” TPM, and it affects the reporting immensely. It skews it to the point where it’s as deserving of mockery as Fox. But that’s something reason cannot solve, nor will it ever. Reason cannot replace self-representation. As long as so called “serious” people are allowed to frame the debate as between reason and irrationalism the debate will be bogged down in these side issues.

A note on reading. I read everything as an argument from a virtue ethic. If I read an armchair revolutionary it usually becomes clear pretty quickly that that’s what he is. Manners describe an ethos. Everything in words can be read as an example of a form and every written opinion is self-reporting. The difference between what someone believes and what they say they believe is often pretty clear, but only if you refuse to take them at their word. What’s the virtue ethic of geek culture, of libertarianism or the New Atheism? Of Darwinian Fundamentalism?
If something isn’t worth reading as a primary text, worth reading in itself, for me it’s not worth reading at all. Interesting writing is writing where the space between the author’s intentions and his desires becomes the subject. That writing, whether by intention or without it, manifests a philosophical awareness, a respect for ambiguity and the specificity of personal experience much more important to the health of a democracy than the search for scientific truth.

“for me”
Phrased that way it’s what my old man used to call “pompous diction” and then the stress is less on the caveat than on the pronouncement that follows. I should have just said I’m not interested in secondary texts. And though I think your response is snark, yes Bubba it’s not a common view anymore. If I can’t read a piece of writing for subtext, and think that the text somehow or other is still cohesive at that level (whatever the author’s intention) I’m not interested. If I were a biologist I would be making a mistake. But if I were a biologist I would still think it important to know how to read texts that way: to read something as a humanist rather than a technocrat, computer geek or automobile mechanic.
I have a limited interest in “original intent” but it’s the basis of a lot of arguments these days, not just those of Nino Scalia.

PS to hh: I don’t know which Gods you worship, but as I live in New Orleans I am forced(?) to kneel at the alter of hedonism, so am probable a pretty poor recruit for anyone’s new model anything–unless its
a newly-found bottle of well-aged booze.

“will “cloud computing” a/become a
precursor of a new God as the increasing power of AI plays out? Or, will digitalization allow us to play out a Neitzchean drama of the rise and fall and rise again all within our own psyche and truly become our own uber-informed Gods??”

This is an excellent question, and I think it gets at why many of the superb minds on this blog bristle at the notion of technologically mediated radical social transformation.

It is nothing less than heroic intellectuallism that may be an endangered species in digital society. The notion of ego-less philosophy is anathema to the polymaths, prodigies, savants, and assorted hep-cats who dominate university facuties and academic conferences. Most existing schools of philosophy are organized around the works of “greats.” Any historical trend that disperses intellectual greatness into a cloud is viewed with suspicion by most existing or wannabe greats.

But the rise of networked society poses just such a threat. It blows away the geographically chartered university and replaces it with domain based global faculties. It levels the field for study and contribution in any specialty and tears down barriers to entry. These changes will not be welcomed by contented intellectual franchise holders in conventional institutions.

To be sure, there have always been stray high-energy particles in the intellectual world, like Buckminster Fuller or Stephen Wolfram, but these “cranks” have been relegated to the periphery. What is about to happen is the release of an enormous cognitive surplus of untapped energy as anyone with half a clue finds a means of expressing ideas on subjects of interest. Most of this will be dross, but some of it will rival the best work of the old order.

So my answer is I don’t know how free digital society will be in a conventional political sense, but I believe it will exhibit degrees of freedom and possibility that we have never known before, such as the ability of an individual to live many concurrent identities. As the minds of the world begin to link up in a Teilhardian superorganism, all sorts of phenomena will emerge. The intellectual world will likely divide into groups that welcome and resist this change. It has ever been thus.

“…it will exhibit degrees of freedom and possibility that we have never known before, such as the ability of an individual to live many concurrent identities.”

I believe that last one will seem strictly limited once people settle down.

The idea that you can troll many pallid online discussions posing as multiple other people will seem generally useless. Whatever for? If you could present multiple identities to people who were available for anonymous sex, that would be somewhat different….

And who will believe rumors started by people they don’t trust? The big gain will be in an increased ability to anonymously send people things they can check themselves. That’s a plus but not a great big one.

My prediction is that some time in the future Seth Edenbaum and HH will meet in physical space, and immediately cancel each other out in a burst of gamme radiation.

“Well up above the tropostrata
There is a region stark and stellar
Where, on a streak of anti-matter
Lived Dr. Edward Anti-Teller.

Remote from Fusion’s origin,
He lived unguessed and unawares
With all his antikith and kin,
And kept macassars on his chairs.

One morning, idling by the sea,
He spied a tin of monstrous girth
That bore three letters: A. E. C.
Out stepped a visitor from Earth.

Then, shouting gladly o’er the sands,
Met two who in their alien ways
Were like as lentils. Their right hands
Clasped, and the rest was gamma rays.”

“This isn’t going to settle down. If anything, the tempo of digital life will increase, because petroleum depletion will cut down travel options significantly.”

I kind of hope you’re right.

However, most people mostly care about the people they know personally. A few of us are now inventing new communities with like-minded people around the world who happen to speak the same dialect of the same language and who want the same sort of interactions. How much will that matter?

I see it with my wife’s games. A small number of people all over the world are playing the same text-based fantasy games. They do a lot of roleplaying. They cyber. Occasionally a young woman will wind up taking flights through the USA, canada, australia, britain, and maybe korea visiting the various young men who are infatuated with her. Eight a dozen of them have gotten pregnant and six are married. Sometimes it’s the guys who travel. So anyway, my wife spends two or three hours a day at her keyboard pretending she’s a headcount in republican rome, or a student at Miskatonic university. It makes some sort of difference in her life. She interacts with perhaps a hundred people she otherwise would have no contact with.

At first thought it all looks trivial. But after extended talks with the canadians online my wife has decided she wants to immigrate to canada. And they tell her it’s easy. All we have to do is agree to take our skills to some part of canada that nobody wants to live and apply them there, and we can be canadians!

And yet as travel gets more expensive I expect people will spend more of their attention on people they can actually be with. Suppose that in 1800 butchers in london could get almost-immediate communication with butchers in calcutta, or for that matter anyone in calcutta that wanted to talk to them. Would it have made much difference? What would they have to say to each other?

People talked about the tremendous difference the iraqi bloggers would make. I don’t see that they made any difference at all, except to themselves. As it turned out, an iraqi blogger who said what americans wanted to hear could easily get $300/month for doing it — a better than average income for rather little work. A number of them parleyed that into a ticket out of the country.

For 5 years the main effect of iraqi bloggers has been that americans who care about that sort of thing have found iraqis who tell them whatever it is they want to hear, and those americans have mostly ignored the iraqis who say things they don’t want to hear. People who’re against the war and listen to iraqis, listen to iraqis who say things are terrible. People who’re for the war and listen to iraqis, listen to iraqis who say things aren’t that bad and getting better. The net result of 5 years of iraqi blogging is a few opportunities for iraqi bloggers who picked the profitable side.

j thomas,
the ability to read translations of the Arabic press has been a boon, but often that translation has been done by amateurs and/or natives of countries outside the US.
The fact that experts in the English speaking world speak mostly to experts in the english speaking world is the larger problem.
Henry Farrell is behind the curve regarding American political and intellectual culture, just as Marc Lynch is behind the curve in relation to the state of play in Iraq; and both of them would consider themselves to be left of center. But even seeing them as I do as in the middle, the middle has shifted. And that’s a good thing.

One of the factors mitigating the ghettoized state of American discourse has been the influx of immigrants, legal and illegal, over the past generation. That’s why I don’t get involved with that argument one way or the other. Both sides make short sighted and self-interested defenses of their positions, but social globalization will continue to help the US ride out recent (self-induced) storms. Henry Farrell is an immigrant, and even with his Americanized sensibility he’s still a European. As I said Farrell, along with Josh Marshall and Barack Obama is the new middle. The most annoying thing to me is the argument from self-invention: as if any of them came up with any of this themselves. It’s all pretty much predictable. I’m grateful GWB hasn’t blown us up but other than that there’ve been no surprises.

My general point is the same: being a schoolmaster without an imagination is not very useful. Having a degree in symbolic manipulation means nothing if the relations of symbol to object and event keep changing. The model of the intellectual as auto mechanic is seen now more than at any time in the last century, as absurd. The academy lags.

I’d also say that being able to play chess or exchange recipes over the internet with someone in Tashkent or Cartagena is better I think, than being able to join them in imagined virtual worlds, or even than the ability to discuss politics. The former is grounded in this world, without being freighted with it, and that argues for it being another factor mitigating against societal atomization. That’s a longer argument though.

“Snark. Please don’t tell me there’s no market for it in the coming techno-utopia…”

It won’t be a Utopia; it will be a bigger world with many more possibilities. Among those possibilities will be the reordering and refinement of practical and philosophical studies of human society.

You can snark all you like, Herr Engels. There were snarkmeisters ridiculing Gutenberg for trying to sell cheap paper books when everyone knew that a real book was handwritten on parchment. Special ridicule was reserved for those who predicted that important social changes would result from pressing ink on paper with movable type.