Plus ca Change

Pinker’s review says that the book sucks and he hopes everyone will read it.

Though I, as a humanist, think it is important to try to be scientifically literate, I don’t believe I agree with Snow’s analogies. I have learned what the second law of thermodynamics is several times over the years, and forgotten subsequently forgotten it every time, because I never have any occasion to use it. On the other hand, I have thought about “Romeo and Juliet” many times since the first time I read it, because it deals with issues that are raised by my own experience as a human being. Shakespeare is about human life, and I am living a human life, while thermodynamics is about something else. One is about things you have to think about just because you are human. The other is not. Thus being ignorant of Shakespeare is worse than being ignorant of the second law of thermodynamics.

What is vulgar is the missing cedilla. Just kidding.

Kieran, do you agree with Pinker?

Love the way that Pinker can’t resist getting a little bit of his own propaganda in:

(For those afraid to ask: pencil “lead” is carbon; hydrogen fuel takes more energy to produce than it releases; all living things contain genes; a clone is just a twin.) (emphasis added)

“one of these things is not like the others”

Well, Pinker himself was sneered at because he used a gross misinterpretation of Woolf in The Blank Slate (or so I am told anyway, I haven’t read Woolf; you may sneer). By the way, if Pinker tried to score some cheap points with this oblique reference to Woolf, it doesn’t cast him in a very good light (I say if because I read this story about him misinterpreting Woolf recently, so it might be my brain trying to make sense of a coincidence).

To answer your challenge Hidari, I have met many people who will openly boast about their inculture and disdain for some forms of scientific knowledge, in my case towards mathematics. Interestingly, in my necessarily anecdotal experience, it rarely comes from “literature oriented” persons, as Pinker suggests, but more often from engineers or scientists who have an aggressive stance against mathematical abstraction. I always interpreted it as a perhaps understandable reaction to the probably exagerated amount of abstract mathematical knowledge that was inflicted upon them during their training. Which brings me to a larger point: I would assume that a lot of this “culture war” “I bet you can’t even write down the equation of an hyperbola; I bet you haven’t even read Shaw” actually stems from distinction strategies originating in the specialization process within higher education (but probably already moderately present as early as high-school).

That is where I read it at least, and damn that was an entertaining read. I regret the young Pinker sometimes, the one from wich I learned so much about inflectional morphology and the syntax of grammar errors among kids.

I’ve read Virginia Woolf and can identify the second law of thermodynamics. I am your rightful king.

I think the consensus that is emerging is that one should sneer at people for not having read some books, and sneer at them for having read all the other books. So constant universal sneering is the way to go. Punctuated by an occasional “talk to the hand” gesture.

Dsquared, could you explain why “clones are twins” is not on par with “living things contains genes” as a simple fact?

per 20, quite easily. If clones were simply twins, there would be no particular scientific problem of creating clones; in fact there is, because clones are highly susceptible to a lot of problems related to the genetic damage intrinsic to the cloning process. Also, it is trivially true that it is not possible to make a twin of an animal that is already alive, but it is possible to make a clone of an animal that is already alive. All this issues are currently live among scientists and bioethicists, and it is, IMO, absolutely typical of Pinker’s general character and ethics that he would try to pretend that his own particular opinion on the subject is as uncontroversial as the view that graphite is carbon.

Well Dsquared I also wonder about “hydrogen fuel takes more energy to produce than it releases” — of course this is true also of ancient green plants into petroleum, and hydro into electric. And in fact, uh, any physical process… (Dear Pinker: It is the FORM of the poison to us that matters more, and the biosphere’s capacity to “sink” the energy-consumption waste.)

What I find very telling is that almost all arts-and-humanities people, who may admit they don’t know much about science, still BELIEVE the universe is essentially mathematical. The successes of physics and chemistry suggest this, but it does not constitute a proof. Yet, from before C.P Snow, the one culture has thoroughly subverted the other.

The attitude Pinker’s on about is probably a function of the idea that an inordinate interest in science leads ineluctably to scientism. (And everyone knows scientism is bad.)

it is trivially true that it is not possible to make a twin of an animal that is already alive

.

Not so, twinning generally via splitting of the zygote. A zygote is already alive.

A clone is not just a twin, but for quite different reasons than the ones given. For one thing, clones do not share mitochondrial DNA; identical twins do.

Lotsa liberal arts folks are interested in the sciences. The problem is, they always pick the same three or four topics to get interested in—relativity, chaos, the uncertainty principle, and Schrodinger’s cat. The stuff that explains most of what goes on in our world—chemical thermodynamics, the periodic table, Maxwell’s equations, population genetics—just isn’t sexy enough.

By the way, to Lester Hunt / #4 – a certain amount of mathematics, not calculus, but probability and geometric series, is stuff where many people will have occasion to use it in normal life.

I think it’s a fair objection that “describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics” is not something useful for most people. However, “describe why playing the lottery is a bad bet” is something many people could use very directly. Even better is “describe why carrying a balance on credit cards is an extremely poor idea (pun intended)”.

I’m inclined to think this is more common amongst professional artsy types with something of a name for themselves, than among the general populace.

Kind of like the attitude toward literature blogs shown by Richard Shickel or Richard Ford, scorn and willful ignorance.

I’ve no doubt these are the kinds of people a Pinker or Snow finds himself hobnobbing with at high-level academic soirees, but I’m not sure they’re particularly relevant.

I won’t bite so much as nibble on this one.
A lot of this thread has been taken up with a discussion of whether or not or how Steven Pinker twists logic to make rhetorical points and to defend positions that others think are absurd. That is the discussion turned from one of science as such and its relation to the humanities to a discussion of attitudes biases and egos within the scientic field: the stuff of literature.
Science is technical expertise. No more or less. I’d like more scientists to read Shakespeare. He has a lot to teach. I spent the day listening to a researcher bitch about egos, fads, power politics and grant proposals. She’s disgusted, of course.

“Yet, from before C.P Snow, the one culture has thoroughly subverted the other.”
Dream on.
Then again

#27 – wood turtle: One of my history professors said that the engineering students in his classes tended to either get a strong A or a C- in his classes. The C- engineers were the ones who consciously did the minimum work required to pass the class, and the A engineers were the ones who took the class seriously.

I think it’s a fair objection that “describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics” is not something useful for most people.

Ever notice how much tiring doing housework is? That’s a consequence of the Second Law.

“I’d like more scientists to read Shakespeare. ”

I bet more science & technology people act in community theater productions of Shakespeare than English lit majors.

Anyone who thinks “the ability to do math” correlates in any significant way with the ability to make good financial decisions (involving math or otherwise) has never been a Financial Advisor.

I imagine the same is true for decisions in other domains. Certainly logicians act nor more “logically” in their decisionmaking.

It’s telling that biological knowledge is never used as the cultural discriminant. It’s got a short shelf life; the answers some questions would elicit might track the age of the respondent better than their academic specialty. Small feathery T. Rex cousins, anyone? Kinky spider sex?

[Disclosure: I’ve never read Virginia Woolf, nor am I afraid of her. I read War and Peace twice; I still think Pierre was a klutz.]

Adventures in torque: trying to take the lug nuts off the left rear wheel of a 1965 Chrysler station wagon. Then, only a year or two later, using a six-foot (2m) length of pipe as a cheater to try to budge the left front axle nut of a VW Bug. Two of us managed to lift the other end of the car off the ground.

Left-hand threads. How could I have forgotten?

In re Clones v. Twins: besides the MtDNA, the prenatal environment. The mom, like. Dad even.

I’m not sure my blonde, blue-eyed twin cousins didn’t share a soul (since the soul is present at the instant of fusion of spematozoon and ovum) until after their first husbands.

The discussions of the Second Law in this thread illustrate the problem: it’s not relevant to “real life,” it’s something they may run into incidentally, basically something that these important people can’t be bothered with, most likely because they’ve never seriously looked at it.

Thermodynamics (which I, a chemist, hated on first acquaintance) is about judging boundaries: can this reaction work? Under what conditions? It is about limits. It gives the minimum conditions for what can happen. Making it happen is up to us. I think Shakespeare worked within this range of things.

Likewise, probability and risk theory are a part of everyday discourse since 9/11. How can we judge President Bush’s latest implicit accusations that the reporters questioning him are endangering their children without knowing how to estimate what the risks are?

Scientists are caricatured as putting “literature” in a box, and some of them do. But too much of the discussion above puts science in a box: reduce it to the Second Law and then declare that irrelevant.

I’m with hidari on this. I don’t know all that many people who are big on Virginia Woolf these days (which is sad). And a lot of people will attempt to get through Shakespeare by watching one of the film adaptations and reading the Cliff Notes. Actually thinking their way through Shakespeare requires a lot more work than many people, humanities OR science majors, are willing to give.

That said, my colleagues and students always look at me in disbelief when I tell them that I took the accelerated Calculus sequence as an undergraduate and was a geophysics major for three years before tossing all that science stuff away and becoming a historian precisely because I found that my heart was in reading Virginia Woolf or the early texts of the reformers instead of charting anticlines and synclines in a rock formation.

>>> I have learned what the second law of thermodynamics is several times over the years, and forgotten subsequently forgotten it every time, because I never have any occasion to use it.

You have many occasions to use the law. (Not “use” in the sense of “calculate a result”, but “use” in the sense of “help to understand something about the world”: the same sense in which you use the understanding of character and motivation that you have gained from Shakespeare.)

The second law says, very roughly speaking, that heat flows spontaneously from hot objects to adjacent cold ones, and not the other way. Any physical situation involving temperature differences has some feature that is understandable in terms of the second law: heating your house, refrigeration and air conditioning, sweating on a hot day, cooking, power generation, and so on. (And the second law will help you understand why creationists are frauds.)

“creationists are frauds.”
Is Pinker a fraud? Where do you draw the line?

I’d like to think dualists and believers in AI are both frauds.
Is Rumsfeld a fraud? He can’t possibly believe what he says.

“Most of these plays revolve around resolving your problems through death. Either killing or killing yourself. Neither I thought was very modern”
Both are of course the very definition of the modern.
And if you want to see a perpetual motion machine, I know a russian girl out in bay ridge.
amazing

I have known people boast about their incompetence at math and calculation; one of them was pointedly above being able to calculate the volume of a cake-tin, another told me that science only dealt with problems we already know the answers to. They haven’t been the majority, but they do exist.

The majority feeling has been some combination of fear and exhaustion. Are there countries with more elementary teachers who don’t dislike math? Do those countries frighten their math students as badly?

I strongly suspect Pinker was consciously ehoing Snow. And, on the scientific snob side of the two cultures though I may be, I actually don’t know of anyone on the literary side who does this. They tend to at least pay lip service to the need to know basic physics.

In my experience, it’s very common — in fact, pretty much the norm — to run across people who consider themselves educated, have degrees, and freely admit that if they ever took algebra, they’ve forgotten it. I think most of our political discourse exhibits a blithe’ disdain for elementary science knowledge.

I have read Pinker. I have read Snow. I have read Woolf. And I have even read the Angier book that is being mentioned. Would be nice if some of you folks could comment on both the book and the Pinker review of the book instead of two cultures or Pinker

All this talk of CP Snow and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and nobody’s yet mentioned Flanders and Swann?

“Heat is work and work’s a curse
And all the heat in the universe
Is gonna cool down,
‘Cos it can’t increase
Then there’ll be no more work
And there’ll be perfect peace”
“Really?”

“Yeah, that’s entropy, man.”

“Thankfully, she does not try to render something called ‘the scientific method’ (a phrase that never passes the lips of a real scientist)”

Ah, would that it were true.

“because clones are highly susceptible to a lot of problems related to the genetic damage intrinsic to the cloning process.”

You’re bullshitting here. You may or may not be aware of it, but you’re full of shit in the typical dsquared fashion. No one really knows what are all the problems with clones, but chief among them is not that there is genetic damage “intrinsic to the cloning process”. What genetic damage is “intrinsic to the cloning process”? Why are clones “highly susceptible” to it? I can’t work out a way in which your statement is even contingently true unless I allow the possibility that you know only enough about the subject to make universal assertions that are actually particular and you can’t tell the difference between the two. Anyway, if there are problems in the genetic material, it’s most likely the result of many accumulated mutations in that original’s cell line. Most of the problems, though, are thought to be related to the intracellular environment and its epigenetics.

“Also, it is trivially true that it is not possible to make a twin of an animal that is already alive, but it is possible to make a clone of an animal that is already alive.”

This assertion apparently relies heavily upon your personal and convenient definitions of the terms twin and clone.

It’s quite an accomplishment that you are able to manage to demonstrate less competency at biology than Pinker while equaling him in bad-faith rhetoric.

All the talk of creationists and the second law of thermodynamics brings to mind this classic from ‘The Onion’:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28308

To illustrate that all things are connected (the Second New Age Law of Thermodynamics?), the Irish Election site featured in the next post offers the following reason to be cheerful for those depressed by Fianna Fail’s continued hold on power:

2 – Fianna Fail can’t survive the death of the sun. So within 4 billion years we can expect a change of government.

http://www.irishelection.com/page/8/.

That proves it for me: the Second Law is something we all live with in our daily lives.

If I asked why thing fall, the response would be gravity, and even Lester Hunt would say, gee, I remember that, the Law of Gravity is a USEFUL THING. On the other hand if I asked why sugar dissolved into tea, how many would say, because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The problem is not that Lester learned and forgot the Second Law, the problem is that he never really understood what it means.

And of course, knowing the Second Law gives you insight into a lot of public policy issues such as siting power plants (why do you think people want to build them near cold water?) and biology. The First Law is also a USEFUL THING.

If I asked why thing fall, the response would be gravity, and even Lester Hunt would say, gee, I remember that, the Law of Gravity is a USEFUL THING

the map is not the territory. Gravity worked for thousands of years before anyone came up with a law about it.

Thus being ignorant of Shakespeare is worse than being ignorant of the second law of thermodynamics.

Have you ever salted your icy sidewalks or started a car engine or boiled water to cook food? When you put a towel on a puddle of liquid, will it soak in? You’ve gained an intuitive grasp of the second law of thermodynamics simply by living it, because it’s in every transfer of energy that happens around you from birth. You may not know how the second law of thermodynamics applies to those situations, but that’s because you’re ignorant. Similarly, I don’t need to know about Romeo and Juliet to fall in love or to feel trapped by social moors. I can get by fine without knowing anything about Romeo and Juliet or Shakespeare. It’s just a duller, dimmer existence.

Never mind Romeo and Juliet, try Hamlet or Macbeth.
And Madre de Dios, I can’t believe I’m channeling Brad DeLong, try Thucydides.

But that’s where Jenny got the reference.

The moon and the sun both occupy a near identical .5 degree arc of the observable sky, and they follow generally the same path across it.
Anyone looking at them would say they’re likely to be about the same size and, incidentally, probably going round the earth.
Science has shown us the counter-intuitive truth about this. Which then became so obvious it’s now the intuitive version and the old default is now counter.
Shakespeare does much the same for the complexities of human life. Othello’s not about race relations, Romeo and Juliet is much more than a love story, Lear more than a family drama.
The larger question about clones and the whole flotilla of life-tinkering technologies is about who’s using them as much as what it is they’re doing. There seems to be an order of high-function autistics leading the charge toward the technologies of immortality which I for one am not voting for.
At the same time we’re getting all kinds of counter-intuitive info about where and what we are that could be resolving toward wonderful self-knowledge, if the assholes weren’t jamming the concourse.
Not all of us can know everything about everything not even all the bits about the parts of everything that’s current human knowledge. We can share this stuff in ways that are inclusive – which is how we got this far to begin with – or we can license it and filter towaard exclusive qualified access.
This drive toward social polarity is functioning across the board now, people want an us and a them to belong to and to make war against the other on.
Science against religion. Science against the humanities.
A pox on all your houses. But we’re working on a cure.

What about the Hamlet soliloquy that starts off with flesh thawing, melting, and resolving itself into a dew? Isn’t that about thermodynamics?

coming late to some very interesting strands of conversation. I’m not sure I agree with Roy about what Shakespeare does for the complexities of human life. But rather than make a clear case against his view, I’ll offer my anecdotal experiences and offer a halfbaked conjecture.

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).

… having said all of that, I also suspect that there is a deep congruity between scientific reasoning and public argument (even about matters qualitative and interpretive, moral and historical). The act of persuading others about a particular moral claim, or interpretive stance vis-a-vis a sculpture or novel or historical event, seems to me to invite a sort of reasoning that is roughly scientific, at least in the following sense: we put a substantive claim and a line of reasoning up for public scrutiny and criticism. We then see what remains after that process, and whether a great many people remain convinced of our initial claim and how we got there. But I don’t think that’s an instance of the culture of science subsuming the characteristic practices and concerns of the humanitities, but rather of rather science requiring a fundamentally democratic principle of inclusive public argument, and of that principle becoming central to good scientific reasoning.

Of course Thatcher was both a scientist and a scumbag, who mixed lower middle class moralism and economic pseudosciece into a politics of contempt. She was a very confused woman:
“Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”
“There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.”
Good for a laugh before she got elected to anything.
—

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.

Seth, I’m certainly not endorsing a sort of global or final politics of reason: I’m open to the likelihood that there are disagreements that reason cannot (and perhaps should not even attempt to) resolve. I certainly don’t expect public argument to resolve every dispute, nor do I think it ought to. But I do think there is something deeply and appealingly democratic in the publicity that science, at its best, shares with an (admittedly demanding) ideal of civil, sincere, and informed public argument. At the end of the day we make our case to others who may argue plausibly, perhaps devastatingly against us, presenting alternative ideas and new evidence that force us to rethink our considered beliefs. That isn’t to deny the value of adversarial political and legal procedures as bulwarks against tyranny or chaos when reason cannot do useful work, or when we fail to live up to this rather demanding (sometimes absurdly so) ideal of public argument, instead resorting to rhetoric, deceit, or worse. But that way of putting things makes clear that I do hold out considerable hope for reason beyond the confines of scientific inquiry into material causes and effects in the world. I don’t think this commits me to belief that, with reason properly applied we can somehow step outside of history and grasp the true nature of all things. That is a scientistic conceit. But I think our critical reflections and causal stories — articulated within history, of course — can acheive a greater degree of distance from our circumstances than I think you believe possible.

We’ll have to agree to disagree on the importance of being earnest. And The Blue Angel is more about pedantry than reason. Everyone lusts after Lola, but only one man ends up a fool.
Ray Davies’ relation to Lola in the song is more like Joe E. Brown at the end of Some Like it Hot:
“But… I’m a man!!”
“No one’s perfect”

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.

It should hardly be a surprise that Pinker would use sloppy rhetoric and hyperbole. It’s the NYT book section, for Pete’s sake.. Still, strictly speaking he is probably right. Take the set of people who would sneer at the vulgarian who has not read Virginia Woolf, and the set of those who insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics. Both sets must each have a cardinality above zero, since there are 6 billion people out there. And their intersection is probably not much smaller than their union.

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

It should hardly be a surprise that Pinker would use sloppy rhetoric and hyperbole.

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.