Unpredictable Patterns #33: Poe and science as a vulture
Fear, uncertainty and doubt in the age of exclusionary science
Dear reader,
This is the last of the summer notes and next week we go back to a more free-ranging format - discussing tech policy, mental models and futurology in different formats. This week’s note focuses on the role of science in society and how we think about science over all.
Poe and science as reductive
Edgar Allan Poe is well known as one of the finest horror writers we have, and he is also sometimes credited with writing the first detective story. But his poetry remains perhaps his most highly praised contribution to literature. From ”The Raven” over ”Dream within a Dream” to ”UIalume” he became known as a bleak chronicler of man’s transience and the dark nature of our world. He is often identified as a romantic, but he himself held a curiously rational view of poetry - described in the unusual essay he wrote about ”The Raven” thus:
”It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition — that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.”
His view of poetry as mathematical problem is in tension with his view overall of science, however, and in order to examine science more closely we will use his poem with the same name as a starting point:
Sonnet - To Science
SCIENCE! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
Science, here, is painted as the opposite to a romantic view of the world as filled with spirits, dreams and hidden meanings. The naiads and dryads - river and tree spirits - are removed forcibly from the world and what remains is ”dull realities”.
Poe’s view of science impact on the world echoes sociologist Max Weber’s. Weber spoke in his works about a process that he called ”entzauberung” - or disenchantment. Weber noted that:
”The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.”
Now, Weber has an ambivalent relationship to this fact - he obviously is not arguing for enchantment, but his is noting that something goes missing as religion disappears in our lives, and in this sense he is in agreement with Poe. But Weber also notes that this is followed by the other advantages that we get from the enlightenment - one of them being the growth and success of science and our ability to explain.
In a speech he gave later - Science as a Vocation - Weber notes that the pursuit of science has enormous value, but that it still cannot answer questions of value - such questions need to be anchored in something else than explanations, such as religion.
Weber here suggests a division of labor between faith and reason, between the humanities and science, that still resonates in our debate today. Stephen Jay Gould would continue to develop this into the theory of ”non-overlapping magisteria” - suggesting that fact and value are separate domains of inquiry - never to overlap.
Yet, this is not Poe’s position. Poe seems to insist that science expands the realm of fact at the cost of value, and the Weber who wrote about disenchantment seems to agree with him. Something is lost, a layer or context, that we cannot reproduce through science, and which cannot co-exist with science either.
Fact, doubt and fear
If we wanted to distill the political debates of our time down to a single dichotomy we could do significantly worse than suggest that it should be about fact and value. We disagree on the facts and we do not share values, we seem to lack a common baseline of facts, but what is worse is that we seem to miss a process for adjudicating facts overall.
There is no universally accepted set of processes such that if we apply them we agree that what comes out at the other end should be respected as our best-effort at the facts as we know them.
Science used to be that process, but science has scaled in a weird way: rather than provide us with more facts, science has provided us with more ambiguity - and this is not through the hijacking of science as such by corporate or political interests, it is because of an interesting quality of science itself - a single study casting doubt on an established fact can unsettle a whole field.
This - the fact that doubt comes cheap in science - is a real strength: it is what allows us to proceed from one paradigm to another over time, as noted by Thomas Kuhn: when the doubts become numerous enough we understand that our normal science is failing and we are forced through shifts of that paradigm into other, new theories.
That requires, however, that we set the threshold for doubt right - and currently we seem to suggest that the very existence of a single doubt is enough to throw an entire body of fact built painstakingly over board.
Cheap doubt is good, free doubt is dangerous.
Again - this is not so much about lacking a common baseline of facts - is about lacking the agreement of when we should update that baseline, or even when it is intellectually ok to ignore that baseline as a whole. Today, a the suggestion of a single piece of counter-evidence is enough not just to force updating, but legitimize the abandonment of whole domains of knowledge - clearly that is problematic!
One way to think about this is to say that Poe’s science is not satisfied with ripping dryads out of trees and naiads out of rivers - it continues to rip any established view away in favor of not so much ”dull reality” as ”value reality”. Science eliminates not just faith, but also undermines reason, when reasonable doubt is not qualified and calibrated, because of the way that doubt works.
”Doubt” is a word that we have traced back in time to mean things like ”uncertainty with regard to the truth of something” , but it is also related to the French ”dote” - with a connotation of fear .
The relationship between fear and doubt is worth exploring more closely: when we doubt someone we fear that we cannot trust them, but this is a symmetric function - when we fear someone we doubt them. It is not unreasonable then to assume that the threshold we set for doubt in a society is related to the amount of fear in that society, and this seems to suggest that a fearful society will be less able to sustain both a common baseline of facts as well as a process for adjudicating what counts as fact.
And what do we do when we are afraid? We seek not so much explanations as values to guide us, so not only do we lose facts in a fearful society, we should also expect to see a reactionary adoption of value.
Now, this is not news: it amounts to the theory that a people who are afraid seek group coherence rather than novelty, but it does seem important because we can trace a relationship between the doubt thresholds undermining the creation of shared facts and fear in society.
The stuff that dreams are made of
This is where the last line of Poe’s poem is intriguing. That science will dismantle myth and religion, and leave us disenchanted is easy to understand - but why would it tear our dreams from us?
One way to read Poe here is to say that our individual dreams are dependent on an enchanted world. Dreams can only exist in a world where science has not revealed the underlying patterns of probability and risk - because dreams require a distance from ”dull reality”.
Poe writes about the poet - but we can read him as writing about the poetic nature of man, seeking treasure in the skies, dreaming and forced to fend of the vulture of science again and again as he sets out to dream more.
Similar points are made in economic literature: entrepreneurs are people who ignore the odds, and seek not risk but uncertainty. That uncertainty is key to anyone trying what ought not to be possible. Frank Knight suggests as much in his Risk, Uncertainty and Profit - hailing the optimism of entrepreneurs as a key characteristic and Nicholas Nassim Taleb suggests that entrepreneurs and risk takers to some extent recognize that not all risk can be reduced to uncertainty - and then allow themselves to dream.
But wait! Does this mean that entrepreneurship should be opposed to science? No, not at all. The point is rather this: entrepreneurship is dependent on the space of doubt opened up by uncertainty where there used to be only probabilistic risk.
We can dream generatively only where science has left us doubt to dream from. Dreaming about a world where the second law of thermodynamics does not apply is not just bad science, it is horrible entrepreneurship.
Mapping doubt is an important task and as we do so we are engaged in what we could call ”re-enchantment”. The science in Poe’s poem advances on our old beliefs and invalidates them - but what Poe misses is that as it does so it also opens up vast new domains of doubt so new fuel for dreaming.
Abandoning dryads, elfins and naiads is a step in mining new doubt to dream from.
Re-enchanting the world collaboratively
Is our world less enchanted than that of Poe and Weber? Hardly - we have expanded our horizons of ignorance and so if anything we have more doubt now than ever before, but it is different.
The doubt that fed mythical creatures and beasts now fuels questions about dark matter, the ultimate nature of time, complex systems and the question about intelligence and consciousness.
But there is a challenge here and that is that even if there is more doubt now than ever before, it is much more highly concentrated and so dreams are are too.
Let’s think of religion as dreams fuelled by doubt about our world. What can we then say about that form of dreaming? We can say that it was evenly distributed and shared amongst us as a people. Sure, there were tyrannical institutions and horrible crimes, so let us not romanticize that, but at the heart of the religious dream was the fact that it was inclusive and shared - we had a shared value space.
And maybe that shared value space was then key to a process where we could also agree on a common shared baseline of facts and a method for generating such facts? Now, that method was flawed and dangerous - the witch trials show as much - but it allowed for the construction of a coherent world view among a large group of us.
If we compare science to that we find that it has become less and less inclusive, less and less a source of shared dreaming and while it has created a strong and robust value space, there are few paths into that space for those that are not a part of the scientific project. So they - we - use science a bit like a cargo cult and make up beliefs about science, refer to it as a a body of unshakeable knowledge rather than a robust process.
The consequence of the exclusionary nature of science - driven by specialization and institutional drift - is that we have ended up in a world with two views of science: one from the inside, where science is seen as a robust process and a successful human venture and one from the outside, where it is viewed as a set of different unassailable facts to be used in dogmatic debates.
This latter view has elements of a cargo cult of science where links to any paper must be accepted as the imprimatur of truth, where possible doubt is immediately exchanged for reasonable doubt, where a sole dissenting voice can unmoor the entire ship of a discipline.
And it is far too easy to blame the people in the cargo cult, or dismiss them as stupid or engage in snobbery. If we want to have a shared baseline of facts we first need to invite everyone into the process we use to create it, and that is what then allows us in parallel to build a value space that we can use as a basis for the scientific project.
Learning together
Looking at science policy, the main debates now are about the way that we fund science, the way we use it and how we can turn it into national competitive advantages - or in the case of the US and China: geopolitical advantages. But is that the right focus? It seems infinitely more important to broaden the scientific endeavor to include more and more people. And there is so much to do here:
Encourage the return of the citizen scientist - from including more and more people in crowd science to figuring out ways to encourage private investigations. Remember that for the most part of our history science has been much less confined to an institutional structure than it is today.
Open the academic networks. At some point the famous republic of letters - which cared little for institutions and tenure -. coalesced in to today’s academic silos. This has led to a society in which science feels distant and abstract, and where the barriers to entry are foreboding.
Find a way back to the shared narrative of science. I think one thing that Mariana Mazzucato is right about in her book on mission economies is that these missions have a strong narrative inclusive function - they tell the story of science as a shared venture and a key to our long time survival.
And these are just a few things that we should focus on. The return of science to the fore of our societal narrative would also allow us to shift focus from facts to discovery processes: what we need is not a hymn sheet to sing from together, but a way to agree on how to make that music together.
Currently we are caught in a vicious circle: as science has become less inclusive, and our societies have become more dependent on science for our long term survival - in, for example, the case of climate change - we have reverted to a form of science communication where science issues reports commented on by political pundits who analyze how this report will impact the game theoretical considerations of politics.
Science is communicated as results, not as hypotheses - and so given as facts, not presented as process.
The science on one side - the politics on the other and us citizens stuck in between, to do what we will with ever grimmer facts.
And this is where we return to Poe: in the very beginning of the poem he notes that science alters everything with its gaze - and that is perhaps the most important insight here: science does not observe the world at a distance, it changes it - and creates two distinct value spaces in which we live our lives. On the inside scientists feel the freedom of the hypothesis and celebrate the scientific project, and on the outside more and more people are locked into the scientific facts, chafing against the chains of conclusions being imposed on them and challenging the very idea of scientific progress.
Science peering eyes change what they look at, create new worlds and dreams in the doubt their gaze reveals. This is not a reductive process, but a creative one - but it is not shared equally and so the result becomes reductive in sum anyway and people turn to re-enchantment either in a return to religion or through erecting new idols that are caricatures of science.
Maybe the lesson from Poe’s poem is that science has confused the notion of a value-free process with the possibility of a value free practice. The process of science is, and should be, to the extent that is at all possible, value-free or value-declared. The practice of science is a human practice that creates a community of values that can either be inclusive or exclusionary.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
N