From shaming to intellectual challenge

[timelets]

I see a beginning of a pragmatic shift within a more farsighted academia: away from shaming alt-right ideologues to challenging them intellectually. Shaming works only as long as the society is unified in its cultural norms. Once the norms fracture, one has to find a deeper cultural background for discussing ideas. For example, the tag "alt-right" itself is a misnomer akin to "horseless carriage." That is, it denotes what the thing is not, rather than what it actually stands for. This is a sign of an early-stage innovation where the future is highly uncertain and open to interpretation. No wonder it attracts amoral opportunists like Trump and Co.

Comments

[lxe]

Isn't that a reasonable expectation of how the academia (as opposed to e.g. a church, a spiritual movement or an assembly of talkative elderly individuals) should have reacted to a widespread fallacy in the first place?

In other words, did Louis Pasteur teach that boiling water before drinking is a moral virtue? And would he have been widely accepted if he did?

[timelets]

As Max Planck noted a while ago, Science advances one funeral at a time. A reasonable expectation would be to see a significant reaction in academia after the current generation of leaders dies out.

Wrt Pasteur, boiling water is a moral virtue indeed. It assumes that human life is worth saving, which is nonsense from, e.g. a bacteria point of view.

[lxe]

boiling water is a moral virtue indeed.

That's a good point but, on that scale, no single real-world decision is free from moral considerations. The authority of academic science owes - significantly - to its neutrality towards normative statements ("one should"). Science tells about means given ends, not ends themselves. I am not sure whether Pasteur ever had to challenge anyone's decision not to boil water on sadistic cruelty or, more realistically, cost efficiency grounds; but, by defending the value of human life, he would nevertheless have had to engage in activity different from scientific.

Science advances one funeral at a time. A reasonable expectation would be to see a significant reaction in academia after the current generation of leaders dies out.

Hasn't that generation of leaders died in the days of Galileo and Kepler? (Separation of cause-and-effect from virtue-and-sin is roughly that old.)

[timelets]

I think it's a rather limited view on science but I'm not skilled enough to explain my POV on the subject succinctly. There's no such thing as "science tells us." Some research focuses on what is - we tend to call it natural sciences. Some research focuses on what ought to be - we tend to call it engineering and social sciences. Etc.

[lxe]

Engineering is still "what ought to be in order to". That's what businessmen often have to remind engineers when the latter tend to stand the ground of pure beauty.

I can't see how social sciences make any difference. As Bertrand Russell puts it, "Suppose some one maintains, for example, that democracy is good, but persons holding certain opinions should not be allowed to vote, we may convict him of inconsistency, and prove to him that at least one of his two assertions must be more or less erroneous." That's pretty much what they are capable of and what they aren't.

[timelets]

It means we see the world differently and, unfortunately, I have no idea how to bridge the gap.

[lxe]

At least we know it exists; it's been good to clarify anyway. Thank you!

[timelets]

No problem. When you have a chance take a look at "The Sciences of the Artificial", by Herbert A. Simon.

[lxe]

Continuing his exploration of the organization of complexity and the science of design, this new edition of Herbert Simon's classic work on artificial intelligence adds a chapter that sorts out the current themes and tools -- chaos, adaptive systems, genetic algorithms -- for analyzing complexity and complex systems. There are updates throughout the book as well. These take into account important advances in cognitive psychology and the science of design while confirming and extending the book's basic thesis: that a physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for intelligent action. The chapter "Economic Reality" has also been revised to reflect a change in emphasis in Simon's thinking about the respective roles of organizations and markets in economic systems.

I still don't quite get how this addresses inference of normative claims from positive ones. A definition of a standard or an expectation of role conformity may be a normative statement, however a study of those statements made by real-world or thought-experimented actors would necessarily be positive, just as a comparative religion study wouldn't a religious teaching on its own.

[timelets]

Reading Simon's book would help. As a side note, we deal with the issue every day. For example, the wiki article you are referring to states "This article needs additional citations for verification." It's a normative claim inferred from a bunch of positive ones. And you don't have any problem referring to it.

[lxe]

The comment says "this article needs additional citations in order to be verified". It's a positive claim. We can speculate that a Wikipedia administrator would want us or another reader to provide the missing information but we don't necessarily share that desire even if we agree with the comment, and we don't have to share it to agree.

We make or agree with a lot of normative claims on our own every day, including trivial ones like "I should survive for another day" or "I should not suffer from hunger provided nothing more important than my health is at stake". We use them to consume positive claims that we acquire by reasoning or observation and transform them into actionable normative claims just as we use ferments and bacteria to digest food. Ferments and bacteria are invisible required preconditions to nutrition. Similarly, air is an invisible required precondition for internal combustion engines to work, but it is mentioned as such far less often than is fuel, and was barely mentioned when not considered scarce at all. When we aren't short on normative claims, we don't mention them, but lack of them is a frequent cause of behavior disruption, such as job burnout, "utilizationary behavior" or psychopathic aggression, when cognitive abilities are fully functional.

[timelets]

Yeah. A really interesting question would be, Why do we live and breath normative claims? Another question would be, What role does scientific research play in this process? Etc.

[lxe]

Well, only the normative modality suitably expresses motivation (which is a required precondition for action).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_theory_(psychology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force-field_analysis

Scientific research emerged as a provenly successful way to accommodate knowledge verifiable by independent competing parties and reusable without strings attached. Some previous steps of removing the strings were introduction of spoken and written language (as in "reproducible representation of opinion"), universal religion (as in "revelation not possessed by a particular person or common-origin group") and then philosophy (as in "reasoning on revelation-free grounds"). Phenomena discovered and explained by science are, consequently, experienced independently from the personal convictions of the observer or the persuasive power of the theorist. A sufficient reason to value scientific research would be, therefore, to value control - in a similar way as we, others equal, value a DRM-free DVD more than a DRM-protected one.

[timelets]

I think we are drifting a bit. It's not for nothing, though. Some of the keywords trigger ideas about the nature of the current tech/biz revolution.

What else is on your mind?

[lxe]

What else is on your mind?

Nothing or little more than a trivial corollary: normative claims used to express motivation for scientific (or engineering, for that matter) activity are nonscientific in nature. Such claims (as well as motives they express) can be highly reusable; they can be borne and spread by the same people and organizations that carry out actual research; it does not make them science any more than presence of canteens in universities and research centers makes nutrition scientific activity.

Or course such norms can be researched too. A study on engineering ethics would contain positive claims about these normative claims.

I would like to maintain this fine line wherever we go. Crossing it introduces a lot of confusion.

the current tech/biz revolution.

Is there any? (The very phrase sounds like "contribution of space flight to the resolution of the primary problem of philosophy" to me.)

[timelets]

Reusable is a useful term here. Why is it important to produce reusable claims?

[lxe]

Broadest: division of labor.

[timelets]

Why do you think positive claims are better for the division of labor than normative claims?

[lxe]

I did not say "positive claims are better for the division of labor".
Both positive and normative claims can be used by a different person from the one who makes them, or the same person in different circumstances. This makes them suitable means of investment and exchange. Consequently, claims have their market valuation based on the desirability of accepting or rejecting them; the more reusable a claim is, the greater the market, the more accurate the valuation is.

I don't, however, see any room for the "better" comparison. They are perfect complements. There is no way to substitute acceptance of a positive claim with acceptance of a normative claim, or vice versa, for any particular purpose.
Complementary combinations of positive and normative claims can, however, be substituted if they produce actions that can.

Science and engineering deal with highly reusable positive claims.
Churches and political movements deal with highly reusable normative claims.
Tainting scientific research with normative claims undermines its reusability in the same way a universal religious teaching may be tainted with positive claims of its contemporary science. Think of inability to buy the idea of compassionate love independently from the idea of a global deluge.

[timelets]

From this perspective, would a blueprint of a car be considered a positive or a normative statement?

[lxe]

It's a positive description [of something that's suitable for a particular purpose according to the designer's knowledge and belief].
A contract obligation or an administrative ordinance to use it for a particular purpose would be a normative statement.

[tijd]

away from shaming alt-right ideologues to challenging them intellectually

It does not work (and not because they are intellectullly superior).

Positive alternative narratives have been ruthlessly mocked and assaulted by the extreme-right, and have the efect of reinforcing their narratives.
http://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Fringe-Insurgency-221017.pdf

[timelets]

The goal is not to convince the alt-righters. Rather, it's to figure out how and why it works.

[ecreet]

Challenging *them* intellectually is pointless: one can't have a discussion with somebody who deals in "alternative facts", just like one can't broker a deal with someone who places no value in their own promises. Well, one can, but it is useless.

Academics challenging *their ideology*, or rather interpretations of what they say and do that even make sense as fragments of an ideology, is a sad thing: it means revisiting certain questions that have already been discussed and agreed upon, and offering them up for discussion again: so, is a brown American's citizenship any different from a white American's citizenship? Who knows? Must have an academic discussion about that! It is a step back.

Studying what these people (people who call themselves alt-right, or people who agree with those who call themselves alt-right on many points) say and do is, of course, tremendously useful and should be done.

[timelets]

It does feel like a step back into darker times. But ignoring the phenomena intellectually would be a mistake because the perceived agreement on basic social norms doesn't seem to work well enough to produce expected results.