Literary modernism explained · 7:16pm Apr 28th, 2014
I'm trying to catch up on 150 years of literature and literary theory. Now I'm listening to the Teaching Company audio course, Literary Modernism by Jeffrey Perl. It uses a division by Frank Kermode of modernists into paleomodernists (TS Eliot, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, DH Lawrence, the late Yeats) and neomodernists (Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf).
Paleomodernists wrote enormous poems and books sprinkled with Greek & Latin quotes, with footnotes or explanatory texts without which they could not be read. They valued art, and believed that some works were good and some were bad. They were likely to be Christian (Eliot) or fascist (Pound, Lawrence, Yeats), possibly because the fascists hated neo-modernism. (The neo-modernist Gertrude Stein was also a fascist in the 1930s.)
Neomodernists wrote short poems in English. (They thought Greek and Latin quotes were bad by definition because they were elitist.) They believed that all viewpoints and all works were in some sense equally good (though not in any sense that would tolerate paleo-modernist work), and that it was "better to call all birds nightingales than to silence some." Perl thinks that was their main battle with paleomodernists: Paleomodernists sought quality and perfection; neomodernists said that was elitist and undemocratic, and that it was morally necessary to value all values equally. They naturally preferred anarchism to government or religion.
Both camps believed there were serious problems with the meanings of words. Paleo-modernists believed that meaning resided not in referents like frogs and rocks, but in the context the words invoked, their etymology (hence the obsession with Latin and Greek--or more likely the causation was the other way around), and their associations. Neo-modernists believed all those associations made words too tied-up to use, and so they wanted to use words in a strictly "realistic" sense, like Williams' red wheelbarrow or Moore's "imaginary gardens with real toads in them", and present them in sentence fragments without context, as in ee cumming's later work, with the idea that they could shatter language into fragments and strip off those unwieldy associations. The painter Marcel Duchamp, whom I'll call neo-modernist, said that a stained glass church window would be more beautiful if you smashed it from its frame to lie in fragments on the floor, which is basically what the neo-modernists did in their poetry. For example, here are the first verses of Gertrude Stein's neo-modernist poem "Yet Dish":
I
Put a sun in Sunday, Sunday.
Eleven please ten hoop. Hoop.
Cousin coarse in coarse in soap.
Cousin coarse in soap sew up. soap.
Cousin coarse in sew up soap.II
A lea ender stow sole lightly.
Not a bet beggar.
Nearer a true set jump hum,
A lamp lander so seen poor lip.III
Never so round.
A is a guess and a piece.
A is a sweet cent sender.
A is a kiss slow cheese.
A is for age jet.IV
New deck stairs.
Little in den little in dear den.
A paleo-modernist would reply that the neo-modernists were thus descending into non-sense, because stripping words of their associations leaves nothing behind but a set of letters. (We can perhaps equate paleo-modernism with structuralism, and neo-modernism with deconstructionism. The overthrow of structuralism by deconstructionism in linguistics paralleled the overthrow of paleo-modernism by neo-modernism in literature.)
Both camps mingled art and politics. I can't assign any political view consistently to one or the other, other than to say that their political positions were sometimes based on their own private fantasies about the upper class, the middle class, the lower class, fascism, and communism.
Both camps of modernists spent much of their time writing metafiction that was not actually novels or poems, but novels or poems that were allegories for their philosophy about how novels and poems ought to be written. This includes Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's "The Waste Land", William's "The Red Wheelbarrow", Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica", and Moore's "On Poetry".
They are both part of the broader sweep of modernism and post-modernism, which Perl explains as taking romanticism and realism, which are complete opposites, and saying that they're both right and both wrong, and in fact everything is always both right and wrong.
Much of modernism and post-modernism can be described as semantic sleights of hand to prove that you can't prove anything. The problem is that this implies that science doesn't work. This is explicit in the work of modernist historians of science such as Thomas Kuhn, who say that science does not progress, but is a purely social game in which theories replace other theories not because they explain facts better, but as the result of academic power struggles. (Kuhn later denied saying this, but he was lying.)
The problem for all these modernists is history. All ways of knowing and all ways of answering questions are equally valid, they say. But who was it that figured out figured out that cholera was spread through water? Astrologers? Alchemists? No; it was scientists. Who developed the steam engine? Engineers and scientists. Who explained electricity and magnetism so that we could harness their powers? Poets? Literary critics? No; scientists. Who predicted the existence of Uranus? Scientists. Who predicted the gravitational bending of light rays? Scientists. Who built a rocket to the moon? Who sequenced the human genome?
It sounds silly when you imagine it the standard way, that a bunch of literary theorists all decided at once that literature should be about epistemology, and they just never noticed that they were flatly denying the existence of science, even while driving their motorcars and installing electric refrigerators. Why did they never once say, "Hey, these scientists seem to know something about truth--why don't we look into how they do things?" Not once in the history of modernism, AFAIK, did anyone ask that question except when, as with Eliot and Kuhn, their purpose from the start was to discredit science.
It makes more sense, I think--though I just made this opinion up today--to see modernism as a reaction to science.
It's long been my opinion that most philosophers are (with exceptions such as Aristotle, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Russell) people who want to do science, but don't have the knowledge or critical thinking skills to do it. The modernist literary theorists wanted to do philosophy, but didn't have the knowledge or critical thinking skills to do that. So they tried to gum up the works and deny that either philosophy or science should tackle important questions.
I think that paleo-modernism, neo-modernism, post-modernism, and deconstructionism are all unconsciously aligned. Their battles with each other are, taken as a whole, a distraction to keep people from noticing that science is gobbling up their territory. All those schools are, at root, claims that literary question such as what words mean, what a poem or novel means, the validity of subjective vs. objective knowledge, the beauty of artifice versus nature, and so on, do not have answers and thus are not in the domain of science or of philosophy, but of poets and novelists. (That was, in fact, the conclusion of TS Eliot's doctoral dissertation.) All these schools are confused and obscure because they all use the method of exaggerating the ambiguity of language in order to claim that no questions have answers, and because all of them dissolve if you stop the entertaining circus-barker's vitriol and the semantic shell game long enough to apply their own claims about language to their own ideas.
I don't really believe that this was deliberate. It's the natural result of people trying to do epistemology without a scientific background. TS Eliot was aware of the profound difficulty of saying what a word means. The problem was that he operated with a child's notion of what scientists think. He thought that scientists created words and theories (true) and believed that they were absolutely true and precise (false). But no one knows better than a scientist, after dozens of failed experiments and confusing results, that their categories and their theories have exceptions and may be wrong, and are just generalities used in certain situations to solve certain problems. (Teachers may impart scientific knowledge without understanding this.) Eliot said that "there is no such thing as precision", when a scientist would say, more correctly, that all statements and categories have a precision. Eliot built his entire elaborate thesis about the illusory nature of knowledge on the foundation of his own misunderstanding of this point.
So I've just explained most of literary theory from 1900-1970 as being a deceptive, self-serving, desperate attempt to discredit science before it steals more territory from literary theorists.
Next question?
I could also tell a story claiming modernism was a response to Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche, World War I, relativity, and quantum mechanics. This is a common explanation; Marx, Freud, Darwin, & Nietzsche are sometimes called the first modernists. All those things shattered the 19th century's faith that they understood the world nearly perfectly. Maybe the sudden demonstration of the power of science made people lose faith in science and progress, just as when biologists today discover new things about nutrition it makes people lose faith in biologists, for changing their story. But still we come back to science. Was it a loss of faith in science, or fear of its efficacy?
I favor the "fear of science" theory. The old "loss of faith" story doesn't make sense, because novelists before the 20th century weren't interested in epistemology. Novelists had dealt with their own questions in their own ways for thousands of years. Science was over there, minding its own business. There was no good reason for novelists to care if it suddenly seemed (to them) less reliable at whatever it was doing.
I'm not being fair to modernist writers, who wrote some very interesting books and some very good books. Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Kafka, and Woolf are considered modernist writers. They developed the unreliable narrator and stream of consciousness. I'm bitter towards them, and all of modernism, because it created the current environment in which art is supposed to always be obscure, inaccessible, ambiguous, and avoid making conclusions, and artists are supposed to be judged on their philosophy and politics more than on their art.
I'm especially not being fair to all the writers who've been called modernist writers just because they wrote in the period 1920-1950. These include George Bernard Shaw, and, for goodness sake, H.G. Wells, who was about as anti-modernist in his beliefs as a writer could be.
Ah yes, the eternal, unending battle between reality and people who don't want to admit they're wrong.
So, what do you think is next? Do you think increased knowledge of the sciences in the population as a whole, and in particular amongst smart people who decide that it is a good idea to write stories, will result in a movement of its own? Or do you think that their lack of any real alignment with each other would prohibit such?
It is ever a problem with realists that "accepting reality" is not really a unifying platform, it is just the logical thing to do. Just because two people both do so does not mean that they're going to agree on what should be done about various things, because the reasons they had for doing so are not external but internal.
I believe the courant phrase for deriding the notion of progress is "a Whiggish view of history."
The number of scientists I've met who didn't give me this impression when talking to them for any length of time, I can count on one hand. And I include many fine people who will probably read this.
Maybe it's more common for scientists to understand this than it is for them to let on to the masses that they understand this. But I suspect that until scientists learn to better communicate their understanding of a lack of precision in the universe and language, the opinion among artists will probably remain that scientists are fools who are only grabbing a piece of the elephant and condescendingly tell people they've got the whole thing.
2057328 Were they research scientists, or were they engineers, programmers, mathematicians, lab technicians, or doctors?
2057347
The scientists who seem good at communicating that they get it tend to be physicists (students) and statisticians (students and professionals). Biologists and engineers tend to be the most condescending, even when talking about statistics or physics.
First off, a semantic (or is it stylistic?) quibble: you hedge your bets twice with this sentence. You say "most philosophers," then name a list of philosophers you believe to be exceptions. This seems odd to me, but whatever.
Second, surely there's a difference in the sort of discussions scientists and philosophers are capable of participating in (within the purview of their profession: scientists can hold philosophical views and vice versa). If a philosophical question can be answered by science, it's not really philosophical.
It seems to me that you're imputing science with capabilities it doesn't really have. That's probably an improvement over the neomodernist idea that it's actually useless, though.
Before I reply at length, two things:
(1) I am presently sick and, thus, intellectually compromised.
(2) My understanding of Kuhn, which I'll admit stems from yet another Teaching Company audio course (Jeffrey L. Kasser's Philosophy of Science), wasn't so much that Kuhn was trying to disprove science as to provide a more accurate picture of the accumulation of knowledge, and I think there's a lot to be said for (at least what I understand to be) his argument, which I take to mean something very different from how you're portraying it.
The way I understood Kuhn's work wasn't that theories came and went according to academic power struggles, but rather that the individuals involved with early debates were generally unreliable because of those academic power struggles, and it was instead the following scientific generation that would really judge the merits of competing theories and decide on a position based on what worked better.
This is very much my experience of Bayesianism versus frequentism in statistics. Most of the strong partisans are either dead or nearing retirement, and the current crop of statisticians barely even know the debate happened. They just use whichever methods are more tractable for the problems they're dealing with. This is fundamentally unsatisfactory for both ideological Bayesians and frequentists, since it completely ignores the philosophical points that were made 30-40 years ago about how science ought to be done, but it's how statisticians operate now, almost uniformly.
2057328
Also, for a long time, this pretty much matched up with my experience. These days, spending more time in very academic circles, I don't seem to encounter it much anymore. I'm not sure whether that means (a) researchers are better about being honest within their own sphere, (b) I just don't have to deal with people like that, or (c) the people I thought of in that light aren't really the people I'd think of as scientists anymore.
I think this is a very real problem where science and society intersect, though, because so many people have gotten so indoctrinated into the absolute truth of science (perhaps by Bad Horse's aforementioned teachers-who-don't-know-what-they're-doing) that it's very common to run into individuals who will take things as gospel truth just because a scientist somewhere said something about it. And there are a number of areas where I think this attitude has infected scientists in general, where many of them have very little idea of what the data pertaining to certain questions may look like, but they're happy to voice strident opinions because "a consensus exists".
I personally consider that poisonous.
2057358 Statisticians are the mathematicians who should get it, because their field is the study of certainty. They are all secretly epistemologists.
When modernism began, there was no obvious evidence that science could tackle the specifc questions modernists were interested in. It's since demonstrated that it can tackle some of them. But I think it's been obvious all along that scientists have a good approach to answering questions.
2057393 PLEASE PLEASE post on the bayesian/frequentist debate?
I've never understood what the big deal is.
2057487
Will do so after lunch.
Oh, are you asking for a comment or a blog post, though?
2057511 A big long blog post.
The expression used here has always bothered me. While it is true in some cases, the fact is the best teachers are those that can and have done, and now teach. Minor quibble, but it the expression is a major generalization, and this whole blog seems to be partly about how literary theorists need to not do that.
This entry explain so much, while also being vaguely depressing.
Also, I think part of the underlying problem that is the underlying principles of Science aren't taught as well as science, through popular culture and its effects, is shown to people.
As in, kids are taught what has been learned through countless experiments without knowing how experiments work; and when there are experiments (lab experiences. Cough, cough) done in the classroom, what they amount to is rote ceremony, where if a student gets an unexpected result he fells like he's failed, and could be punished.
WHICH IS THE EXACT FU*K!NG OPPOSITE OF WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN!!
In an ideal world, in primary school kids would do experiments on things that are unknown, and then interpret the data.
Such an approach IS impossible to standardize and probably more trouble than it is worth, but one can dream...
Good grief I couldn't agree more. Nothing will hammer the fallibility of scientists and the uncertainty of science itself into you more than getting a degree in it, though I suppose I can really only speak for physicists.
There is a cultural view of what science is, and then there's what it actually is, and how it really functions. At least in western culture, those on the outside tend to view science as capable of spouting pure truth, based on completely reliable, undeniable data. They also tend to think that just about anything can be proven with science (one of my favorite questions: "can you prove it scientifically?"), that science can answer nearly any question humans might have. Well, it can't, and I'm sorry if that disappoints anyone.
When it comes to literary theory, something I'm terribly ignorant about, I do believe there are solid answers out there to the questions raised. However, I also believe that 1) they will never be reached, or 2) that if they are (and may possibly already have been), then they will never be accepted wholesale, such as Einstein's theories of Special and General Relativity were (for the most part, anyway), because the people seeking these answers are humans, and humans need to feel like they have a purpose, something to live for. There are those who have built their life or philosophies around the pursuit of answering these questions, and, should all of humanity come at once upon the answers...what is there left for them to do?
Science is ultimately pursuing the goal of discovering the reason for how everything in the universe functions (among other goals, one may argue)...but do you think that any real scientist would be happy if we discovered all the answers and science, for the most part, ended? Now arguably, science may never end, given the prospect of technological progress (and thus, the need for research), and we can certainly discuss whether there is a finite or infinite number of applications for matter, energy, and the rules by which they are governed.
But, hypothetically assuming science could complete its mission, I seriously doubt those in it would be really happy about it--perhaps at first, but not for long. And, I believe, the same applies for those in the field of literature, or philosophy. Obviously, we would call it a good thing for philosophy to know all the answers, but then we couldn't live the same way we do now, and anyone else fond of thinking about the deeper questions on meaning, purpose, life and the soul, right and wrong, would have to find something else to do with their time.
Besides, an individual may be able to swallow his or her pride and admit they've been wrong about something (literary theory) for most of their life, but whole schools of thought? Never, I would say.
But perhaps I'm pessimistic in this regard.
2057622 I almost didn't put it in, but... oh, I'll take it out. It's divisive and unnecessary.
I think that in some cases, we have more-or-less found answers, but nobody likes them, so we pretend that we haven't and keep looking. It's beginning to look like most of the "big questions" along the lines of "What is right and what is wrong" or "What's my purpose in life?" have answers that aren't going to make anybody happy.
2057235 Ah yes, the British intellectual flavoring that all of human history has worked towards the creation of the British Parliament. Well we're still here, so that obviously wasn't the end-game after all.
2057872 It's beginning to look like that to myself as well.
I came here for literary theory and ended up getting a spiel on science. I'm a little bit surprised but I can see how things got here.
Personally, when I approach it in the following manner. "I'm creating something, not discovering something or explaining something, I'm creating something. I'm making a world in which I can vary any number of things. I'm making a world in which things are different, and this follows through to the penultimate conclusion of what somebody in that world does to reckon with the consequences of that world.
This is when I begin making characters, I set them up like a set of tin soldiers, but always keep in mind that they don't know I made them, they don't know the constants of the universe or what went into making it. They have that which they can perceive, and I can only hope they make something interesting happen for myself to record.
Is it a slightly creepy approach to making a story? Maybe, but I don't get wrapped up in issues of whether science can answer the questions of this world.
We seem to be lamenting that Jubal and Tubal Cain cannot get along.
And that is an old, old song:
Jubal sang of the Wrath of God
And the curse of thistle and thorn--
But Tubal got him a pointed rod,
And scrabbled the earth for corn.
Old--old as that early mould,
Young as the sprouting grain--
Yearly green is the strife between
Jubal and Tubal Cain.
Jubal sang of the new-found sea,
And the love that its waves divide--
But Tubal hollowed a fallen tree
And passed to the further side.
Black-black as the hurricane-wrack,
Salt as the under-main
Bitter and cold is the hate they hold--
Jubal and Tubal Cain.
Jubal sang of the Golden Years
When wars and wounds shall cease--
But Tubal fashioned the hand-flung spears
And showed his neighbours peace.
New--new as Nine-point-Two
Older than Lamech's slain--
Roaring and loud is the feud avowed
Twixt Jubal and Tubal Cain.
Jubal sang of the cliffs that bar
And the peaks that none may crown--
But Tubal clambered by jut and scar
And there he builded a town.
High--high as the snowsheds lie,
Low as the culverts drain;
Wherever they be they can never agree--
Jubal and Tubal Cain.
--Rudyard Kipling
2057970 oh my... wish there was a video of someone singing that, it would be an interesting listen.
I will give the modernists this:
Scientists have figured out that cholera was spread through water, developed the steam engine, explained electricity and magnetism, predicted the existence of Uranus, predicted the gravitational bending of light rays, built a rocket to the moon, and sequenced the human genome …
… but despite hundreds of years of glorious, almost unimaginable, progress, they have not improved the novel.
(I don't think this means it's impossible. But it's really, really hard.)
2057358
Interesting. I have an engineering degree myself, and what was repeatedly taught me was that engineers not only don't go for exact answers, they shouldn't even bother with pursuing exact answers, because such answers often don't exist and, even when they exist, tend to be economically unfeasible to pursue. Instead, we go after imperfect answers while measuring how imprecise those answers are, so we can be sure (or as sure as feasible) that the answers we provide are good even though they are not exact.
Of course, when talking to clients, or to people without a scientific background in general, engineers are often forced to hide the imperfections in their answers. People out there tend to think that engineers provide exact answers and that any engineer that doesn't express perfect confidence in his answer is a phony.
The same can be seen in other professions, of course. For example, good lawyers, and people with some knowledge of law, are quite aware that the end result of a lawsuit is more often than not unpredictable, but a lawyer that doesn't express fake confidence in the end result will often lose clients. The kind of conversation one gets when approaching such a professional as a layman, or as a fellow practitioner, is completely different.
2058406 On the other hand, they haven't screwed up the novel either.
2057872
Oh totally, I believe we do have answers--most of them, in fact. But people want to live how they want to live (myself included) and, because of whichever vice, we want worldviews that either require no change or very little change from us--or even better, lots of change that can be fulfilled by lip service, which is to say we pretend to change but don't really (many christians are super guilty of this, myself included).
I agree that no one likes or will like the answers, because they're the kind that will make you happy only after you apply them, and not before. But we want answers that will make us happy now, a.k.a. ones that justify our lifestyles and require no change.
At least, that's what I think, anyway.
2058412
This is absolutely true, but it still easily turns into a form of condescension, even if it's only out of habit or the expectations of a professional. The assumption that all laypeople want confident answers is at best a cycle, and at worst an incorrect assumption that they aren't capable of understanding the complexities of the matter.
After making my post, it occurred to me that I've read and loved a number of books by scientist-essayist in various fields (Oliver Sacks, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, etc.) and one of the things that made them accessible (and, likely, so popular among laypeople) was the sense of humility they all expressed in the face of the vastness of their fields. Oliver Sacks, for example, never seems to become jaded when talking about the strange and amazing different ways the brain can work, and never backs away from communicating his fascination at finding some new and unusual disorder or compensation.
And yet I'll talk to an engineer who, in theory, knows orders of magnitude less than a world-renowned neurologist about the workings of the brain, and get the impression from them that science has the brain worked out and anyone who doubts that is a luddite. Whether that's a matter of hubris or poor communication on the part of the engineer, or feigned humility on the part of Oliver Sacks, the engineer leaves me frustrated while Oliver Sacks makes me believe that science might have something worthwhile to stay something about the mysteries of the universe, after all.
To that end, I wonder if some scientists just aren't good at communicating things. Maybe as much as poets need to understand science, science needs to learn from the poets.
Sadly, that's also what happens in real science... if you don't get the results you said you'd get in your grant application, you're in trouble. I once had a research grant application rejected because the reviewer said I "could not be certain of success".
A general outline for grant applications:
"This experiment has a roughly 100% chance of yielding significant results. Its results will be used to cure every sort of cancer known to man. Also, it can be weaponized. Please give me money."
2059279 The perfect grant application: The cancer transfer device. It takes cancer away and gives it to targets of your choice.
Indeed. It even seems to me to be an extension of Romanticism as a reaction to the Enlightenment.
2058406
Off-topic, but I'm sick and I make excuses for myself.
I keep seeing you posting comments with your avatar and being all like, "WAIT! That's not what Horizon looks like!"
I think this does not lend credibility to your claim to not be a changeling.
2059040
Quoted for truth.
The best and brightest in their fields often have good communication ability. I think part of this ties into one of the conceptions of intelligence in psychology as efficient mental representations of knowledge (i.e. she who builds the models in her brain, using Occam's razor, wins at everything). People with more efficient representations have an easier time communicating what they know to others, because they don't need as much folderol to get the ideas across.
But my (admittedly somewhat limited) experience in academia has always been that poor writing is passively encouraged in most places because it's harder to assail mediocre ideas if nobody can understand what you said. That won't get you into top journals, obviously, but I think it'll frequently get you into lower tier journals and let you keep your job as an academic.
I am vaguely amused to see you do to Kuhn the thing that you accuse Eliot of doing to scientists. Kuhn's model does contain concepts like social clustering and influence, just as the scientific method does contain the concept of precision. But Kuhn doesn't claim that science "is a purely social game" any more than a scientist would claim that p<0.05 makes a theory "absolutely true and precise." Other parts of his model include things like theories explaining the facts better.
2057393
More or less. In Kuhn's model, it's not that they're unreliable because of the power struggles, but rather that they get into power struggles because they're operating with incompatible frameworks and assumptions.
This is a possibly-true idea that wouldn't have developed without Kuhn's work, but in his account the "deciding what's right based on what works better" step happens at the same time as the debates. Eventually one side wins, and the next generation adopts that paradigm so deeply that they don't understand why there would even be a debate. (e.g., Isn't it sad how many people died because scientists didn't adopt germ theory as soon as Semmelweis suggested that doctors should wash their hands? What fools they must have been, to not see something so obvious.)
2059817 I base my understanding of Kuhn entirely on his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", but I've read it carefully with an eye to just that question, because his later forward to his book explicitly denied ever having said any such thing. My conclusion was that he left no room for scientific progress based on actually explaining the facts better, and his denial was just a necessary lie. Before he was famous, it was more advantageous to say outrageous things; once he was famous, it was more advantageous to deny having said them.
My recollection is that his whole endeavor was flawed because he based it largely on his example of phlogiston vs. oxygen theory, and some other theory, I forget which, possibly heliocentrism, and in both cases he had perversely picked scientific "revolutions" which did not in fact explain the facts very much better. The phlogiston content of a substance, semantically analyzed, turns out to be zero minus its oxygen content. In most situations, phlogiston & oxygen theory are equivalent.
2057328
Most people can't even tell the difference between a scientist and someone who says they are a scientist because science is the ultimate source of all truth, and therefore you must believe them because science says so.
And indeed, even when scientists DO speak up, people don't understand them. This is partially because people don't understand statistics, and also because people don't want to hear them when they say things they don't like.
Say a scientist says something is such and such a way. What they're ACTUALLY saying is pretty much "to nth degree of certainty, we know Y". But no one talks like that outside of formal research papers and similar settings because normal people don't understand statistics on even the most basic of levels, and among scientists it is just assumed, so on both fronts it is mostly pointless to talk like that unless you are actually having a technical conversation with someone who can appreciate it.
Take, for instance, this:
When you show a layperson this, they will think that blacks are all violent criminals, or that the person who came up with these statistics is a racist, depending on their political predilection.
In reality, the majority of black people never commit crimes, and there are more whites in prison than blacks, because blacks only make up 13.6% of the population, so even though they are three times more likely to commit a violent crime, they still aren't sufficiently large in numbers to make up a majority of prisoners.
But you can't show statistics like this to laypeople and expect them to understand them.
Pretty much every single dietary study ever is the same way. People just don't understand statistics and science, and even when scientists spend time explaining it to them, almost none of them get it.
So they basically give up, and amongst each other discuss things in a mutually comprehensible way, and address the public in a dumbed down way; you can, of course, read their papers and look stuff up, but the only people who actually bother to do this are other scientists, and maybe the odd journalist, who doesn't understand what they're looking at half the time.
Want to see this stupidity in its purest form? Take the gun control debate. Do a correlation of homicides rate vs gun ownership rate. The result?
A flat line with no confidence at all, because the data is just completely random. There is no correlation.
And from this, you will have the anti-gun control advocates point out that guns clearly don't increase crime, and you will have the pro-gun control advocates claim that clearly guns don't prevent crime.
Both are right. But both refuse to acknowledge the other's point of view at all, and embrace the truth (gun ownership is unrelated to crime rates). And indeed you'll have people claim that banning guns increases the crime rate and point to Washington DC, and you'll have people claiming that having lots of guns makes for a ton of crime and point to louisana.
It doesn't matter how much science you have on your side. Most people don't care. They will only hear what they want to believe.
And people who consider themselves authorities - artists, religious figures, politicians - react EXTREMELY negatively when someone points out that you can TEST whether or not they are right, and thus determine absolutely whether or not something is right or wrong in many cases.
As was once said by a wise man, never hold strong beliefs in things you don't understand. But most people don't understand most things, and yet hold strong beliefs in almost everything.
This is further complicated by the theory/observation dichotomy. Take, for instance, relativity. We know for an absolute fact that time is not constant because we can actually directly measure the inconsistency of time on satellites; in fact, every time you use a GPS, you are relying on this very fact, as otherwise your GPS would be off. There are many things which absolutely have to be so because we have built things which are dependent on the fact that they are so; if we were just outright wrong about them, those things couldn't possibly work.
The exact laws of physics may not be known (in fact, we know both quantum mechanics and relativity are incomplete, because they are both true and yet apparently incompatible) but we are very, very, very close on many of them, to the point where we cannot be off by very much on the scale of, say, the solar system. Things like dark matter and dark energy we could be completely wrong about, but we can't be wrong about genes because we can directly manipulate them and put our knowledge into practice. Genes exist and function and have consequences and if they didn't, we wouldn't have Roundup Ready soybeans.
And this deeply confuses people as well. Science is science, right? But scientists are vastly more confident about some things than they are about others, and people don't really have any understanding that "new study says that omega-3 fatty acids prevent heart attacks" isn't actually saying that at all, and isn't something that scientists are confident in at all. What the study ACTUALLY said was that people who ate more fish were healthier. But the problem is, it waasn't a RANDOMIZED study - it was an observational study. When we specifically tested that hypothesis scientifically, and actually applied what might be called "real science" to the problem, feeding a randomized group of people placebos or omega-3 fatty acid supplements, we saw no benefits at all. And indeed the real cause is that the people who eat more fish are not the same as the people who eat less fish - they're more affluent, more health conscious, exercise more, ect. Eating fish had nothing to do with it.
The same is true of all vegetarian diets - when they examine vegetarians and non-vegetarians of equal health consciousness, SES, ect. the benefits of the vegetarian diet vanish entirely because the diet isn't actually good for you, it is merely that more health conscious folks are more likely to become vegetarians (ironically, partially out of the belief that fat was really bad for you, which, as it turns out, was also proven false).
But most people don't know this. Most people can't distinguish between someone saying that smoking gives you cancer and that eating hot dogs gives you cancer. They were both said by someone who said they were a scientist, so clearly both are equally valid, right?
The entire organic food industry is built out of this. So is veganism. So is the anti-vaccination movement. So are the anti-global-warming folks.
But don't think that merely nutters are involved here. Someone on 538 did an analysis of disaster damage vs GDP and found that there was no evidence of global warming causing a measurable increase in disaster damage - that the reason modern day disasters cost more money is not because we are having more or worse natural disasters, but because we have a whole lot more stuff to wreck. As they even noted, the true costs of global warming likely wouldn't even show UP in said data, because it is hard to trace back a crop failure to global warming without a heck of a lot of legwork, and global warming merely causes a statistical change in the likelihood of events - you cannot really attribute any specific weather event to global warming, and anyone who does otherwise is pretty much engaging in pseudoscience.
Global warming is absolutely real, though - the ice cap, sea level, CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and global temperature averages all show it. But that doesn't mean global warming is going to show up in every data set.
But the people who know that global warming is a problem will get VERY ANGRY with you if you point out that there isn't really evidence for this added damage.
EVERYONE in the world is this way. Even scientists and other technical people aren't immune to it, even though they know better. But they do BETTER than the population as a whole, and they STILL can be taken in by mumbo jumbo sometimes. If people specifically trained to be rational and question everything and to look at the data fail at times, what hope is there for the population as a whole?
The problem isn't unique to artists. Artists are merely one group, like many religious factions, which see science as a threat to their own domain of power and influence and which resent the idea that they might be empirically wrong about some things, and they have more influence than Joe Schmoe off the street. Joe Schmoe has no way of projecting his lack of understanding or resentment of being told he is wrong, but artists, religious figures, and politicians can and do.
2057366
A lot of people think that there are multiple domains of knowledge, but this is simply outright false. ANYTHING which has any influence on the universe whatsoever can be tested by science - that is to say, you can forumulate a hypothesis, then test it. If you can do something, you can test it. If you're asking whether or not you should do something, that is a testable hypothesis. Note that this does not mean that they HAVE been answered, mind you; merely that there is an answer.
For instance, take something which most people would say is a very moralistic question - is the death penalty acceptable?
But you totally can answer that question scientifically! You can break down the costs and benefits. The death penalty results in the death of someone who would otherwise be alive; the expected value of said people is on average quite negative (they produce nothing, and consume resources while they are alive in prison and are actively dangerous and must be held in isolation to prevent them from killing anyone else, which has a large negative expected value; there may be exceptions to this rule, so a serial killer who writes really neat novels might be worth sparing on that basis). However, to make sure we minimize the number of executions of innocent people, we make sure that we throughly try said people, which means we spend EXTRA money up front trying them. This is a large cost, both because we spend a bunch of money and because we spend a whole lot of money NOW rather than a little money over a long period of time - having money in the now allows you to build capital which gives you more money later.
However, there is another hidden benefit to the death penalty, and that is plea bargains for life without parole. If you could get the death penalty, and can plea for life without parole, the state doesn't have to spend money trying you, merely imprisoning you, which makes back a bunch of the money you lose by actually sentencing people to death - and a lot more people plea bargain than actually force a trial (indeed, the overall ratio is about 9:1). Of course, the bad news is that some people might plea guilty out of fear of the death penalty even though they are actually innocent, though this sometimes happens regardless.
This is a hugely moral issue, but in the end, you can break it down into an economic issue, and you can measure how much money you are spending and figure out how to minimize your costs and maximize your benefits, which is how you make a good decision. You might say that it is unethical to put a price on life in this way, but we already do so every day and indeed we must do so, as otherwise we would be paralyzed by indecision - the decision to drive to work means that you are willing to risk dying in an automobile accident for whatever income you make that day, which allows us to put a value on your life that you yourself established. And indeed, we do not have an infinite amount of money to spend saving people, and thus you can ultimately break down a great deal of decision making to "how much of a human life is this worth?"
We can make all sorts of decisions in this way which philosphers would claim that we cannot make via science. It is true that making some decisions is very hard in this way - for instance, if we ask the question, "Will lowering taxes help the economy", scientists can't give you the answer because we don't KNOW the answer (a lot of people will claim they do, but they are liars - there are no controlled studies on the subject matter), all we can do is walk you through a logical process about why it might or might not work. And these are indeed questions we don't know the answers to.
But it isn't because science CANNOT answer them, merely that it is very hard to answer said questions. But philosphers and religious folk and artists are no better - in fact, they're really worse, because they'll claim they have absolute answers to these questions, and yet lack any real evidence as to why.
There are questions which science cannot answer, but these mostly fall into three categories. The first is the category of things which have no influence over the universe, and therefore their presence or absence makes no difference. For instance, "is there a multiverse?" If the other universes cannot influence our reality, then we can answer that with "it doesn't matter", but there is no way for science to tell us whether or not it is true. The second thing is something which is inherently unobservable. We aren't sure if this category of things exists, but it might, and if it does, then it would be impossible to answer questions about it (for instance, we may never figure out what happened "before" the Big Bang, though some will note that "before the Big Bang" doesn't actually make sense according to relativity, I think it is still a valid question for some definitions of "before").
The third category is "assignment of moral values". That is to say, science cannot tell you that making more money is better than making less money, or that being alive is better than being dead. I mean, those may seem like OBVIOUS things, which science WOULD tell you... but all it can really tell you is what the benefits and penalties of them are. It can't tell you that a penalty is good or a benefit is bad. There is no reason for the Universe to care if it is full of living things or a completely dead thing of nothing more than cold gas. However, science can tell you the consequences of your decisions, and thus inform the creation of any moral system.
So science can't really answer every question. But it can generally speaking answer most meaningful ones. If you make different assumptions (being alive sucks, so it would be better if everyone was dead) science can't tell you you're wrong. But if you make a decision (I want to spend a million dollars on this) science can tell you what it will really cost you in terms of opportunity cost.
2057641
There's an elephant in the room here that I'm not sure any of us can actually answer.
"What is it like to be stupid?"
I saw a study once on average IQ by profession, and engineers clocked in at 120-126 depending on specialty (interestingly, Catholic clergy in the study clocked in close to this level, suggesting that the Catholic Church might actually have quite the brain trust). Scientists clocked in around that region as well.
How many dumb engineers are there? I don't mean dumb in the "dumb relative to engineers" sense. I mean "dumb relative to the population" sense. Below average. How about scientists?
There may not be a single person who is a scientist or an engineer who is below average relative to the population.
And the thing is, there's a good chance that, depending on the school you went to, you might not have been in with average people, let alone stupid people, since ELEMENTARY school. And maybe not even then.
I went to public schools my whole life. But I went to a French Immersion charter school in elementary school, and the one year I was not there, I was instead at a school which had an elementary TAG program so I spent time there learning how to use other bases in math and various other things. In middle school I was on the top track in everything, living in a town where there are more PHDs than people who go to church on a weekly basis. I graduated high school with a year and a half of college credit from AP courses. The only time I was in a class with "normal people" was when I took a jewelerymaking class and I recognized exactly one other person in my class. Everywhere else I was surrounded by the same group of 60-80 high achievers, smart kids who were on the top track. And IIRC the first two years of math I took were both honors math classes, so the kids who started out below me would never end up in my classes; after that point, it was trig, pre-calc, and calc, which a lot of kids don't take.
I then went to Vanderbilt University, where I majored in biomedical engineering.
I then briefly went to upper-level courses at Oregon State University after graduating.
Then I worked at Hewlett-Packard. Dealing with some lab technicians was probably my first experience dealing with people who were actually average in intelligence, let alone stupid (one of them, I think, was actually stupid, and is probably one of the only actually stupid (read: below average) people I have spent any real amount of time around in real life - and it ended poorly for her, as she couldn't hack it as a lab tech and was fired). And I suspect that even there, the other person who I felt was incompetent may well have been of average intelligence, and when she was moved to a position of lower responsibility she was successful at it.
Then I went to work for Energ2, a start-up company which makes nanocarbon.
How much time have I spent around people who were average, let alone below average, in my entire life, in a capacity where I actually interacted with them enough for them to click as a person in my Monkeysphere? The answer is probably something on the order of six months.
Compared to something like 25 years of time around smart people, being raised by smart people, being friends with smart people, hanging out with smart people... well, you can see how my ability to tell what a normal person is capable of has been severely compromised.
And frankly, I think this is probably true of an enormous percentage of smart people. And among people who go into the sciences and engineering? When do we meet normal people?
Look at studies on literacy. USAToday noted that according to one study, 1 in 7 US adults would not be able to read this article about not being able to read that article. The actual study rated a mere 13% of the population as proficient. Other studies have suggested only 4% of the population lies in the highest literacy level, which is basically being able to read something complicated with multiple sources of conflicting information and draw conclusions from it.
That seems like a basic skill to me which is necessary to operate in society and actually make good informed decisions, and suggests that 4% of people in the US are actually capable of doing this. How are the other 96% going to be expected to function
So when we decry people's scientific illiteracy, we may be looking in the wrong place. The teachers may well be doing a good job - I always found explainations of experiments fascinating.
But did the lower tier kids get those explainations, and tune them out, or just not get them at all?
I can't tell you.
The world has to seem pretty bewildering to a lot of people, though. Is it any surprise that they have trouble with science? Even most scientists only have a rudimentary understanding of how to build a computer. To the average layperson, a computer might as well be magic. Science is just magic that real people use.
2059040
Gould, honestly, doesn't come off as humble at all to a lot of scientists. He certainly never came off as such as me.
He also was very upset about some things which are almost certainly true because they went against what he wanted to be true, which means he was actually a bad scientist in some respects.
For instance, The Mismeasure of Man is pretty much a diatribe against genetic determinism, and yet every year we find MORE evidence for genetic (and epigenetic) determinism. Indeed, the entire area of intelligence studies is a hugely taboo subject matter because we had hung all our hopes of "all men are created equal" on the idea that, regardless of whether we're tall or short, black or white, male or female, rich or poor, we're all the same on the inside and how well we do in life is determined not by accident of birth but by how awesome we are as human beings. That there were physical differences between people was readily obvious to the untrained eye, but you can't exactly measure someone's intelligence by looking at them.
When you find out that height correlates with IQ at 0.4 points per inch, that there are large and persistent differences in IQ between different populations, when studies indicate that as you get older, your IQ becomes MORE genetically determined, that adoption studies indicate that your post-natal environment plays a relatively small role on your intelligence in a developed nation, when we find that pre-K education apparently makes no lasting difference in educational attainment (it only persists to third grade before vanishing entirely), when we find that the heritability of IQ is somewhere between .5 and .8 in a developed nation...
Well, the idea that we are all created equal in that respect is pretty much dead. Intelligence - the nobility of man - was the last refuge we had for the idea that all men were created equal. And frankly, it was obviously stupid from the get go - of course it is genetically determined. We aren't chimpanzees. Not everyone is of equal ability, and there are people who are retarded and people who show signs of genius from extremely early ages, before your environment was likely to have created someone stupid or someone who was very smart.
And of course, as it turns out, we are as different there as anywhere else. Some people are taller, some people are shorter. Some are prettier or uglier. Some people are born with deformities - missing limbs, mental retardation, severe health issues.
And some people are born to two genius, wealthy parents. And that person not only does better than everyone else - even if his parents adopt some kid, that kid is very likely going to be below their biological kid in ability, even if his parents love him just as much.
We had, in the end, intelligence as our last resort. And it failed us. But some people don't like that. In fact, most people don't. "All men are created equal" is just. Fair. It is a very pretty lie. But a lie it is.
And some people think that if it is true, then obviously the next step is genocide. I blame Hitler, personally, but there is plenty of blame to go around.
It is true that we can do things which make a difference to some extent, but if you're born to a poor black family in Detroit, the odds of you growing up to be in charge of NASA are vastly worse than the child of an upper-middle class asian engineering manager and a microbiologist. And the truth is, there's a good chance no matter WHAT we did as a society, you wouldn't have an equal chance, unless we actually picked at random from the population as a whole, which we would be insane to do.
We can teach you, and we can teach you a lot. No one is born a master at any skill. But if you're faster at learning, if you pick up on concepts faster, if you draw conclusions more quickly, if you can teach yourself some things... it makes a big difference. A really big one. And it isn't just because your parents instilled you in the value of learning, though that definitely helps. They also instilled their genes in you, genes that helped them become upper-middle class people working in high intelligence professions.
That isn't fair at all, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it short of mass genetic engineering, which is not something which is within our present economic or scientific abilities. It definitely isn't beautiful. But it is reality.
Incidentally, engineers and scientists are actually far better at communicating than the population as a whole, and are better read than the population as a whole. Most people are really terrible at communication, and scientists and engineers, while not perfect at it, have actually taken college level courses (or at least, all the ones my age have) on technical writing and suchlike. Literacy studies indicate they're all above average, and the vast majority of them are in the top two categories of literacy.
I don't know if improvement in that category is realistically possible. It is easy to say "they need to do a better job". Very easy to do, in fact, and we constantly do it. In fact, people constantly harp on people in engineering and science, at least in school, to improve your writing skills because communication is so vital to our work - we work in teams and have to communicate our results with others in a manner which can be understood.
But when you're already looking at people who are about as good as it gets in this, how much higher can we really push them? I'm not sure if that is a reasonable expectation to have.
2059285
We'd like a hundred thousand of them please. And paint them brown - we don't want anyone to know we have them.
2057872
I think the most disturbing question that science has asked that we really don't like the answer of is the Fermi Paradox, personally, as the implications for our future range from depressing to dire.
I personally think subverting the Fermi Paradox is the most important goal mankind should have.
2057516
2500 words. I'll post it tomorrow morning, once everybody's woken up again.
2059986
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/frequentists_vs_bayesians.png
Though to be fair, that's a pretty biased view of frequentists.
2060058
The link to this image is actually the very last line of the blog post.
2060060
Is the start of it this one?
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/correlation.png
2059040 2059953 Re. Gould, see Have no heroes, and no villains.
Perhaps the answer to the Fermi paradox is that other intelligent life eliminated their stupid people. Without stupid people, they would rapidly develop more complex societies that stupid people couldn't have coped with. These more-complex societies were less stable and more likely to produce people with extreme viewpoints (higher complexity probably implies higher variance among individuals), and so exterminated themselves.
Stupid people put brakes on progress, so that we live in societies that are simple enough that our smartest people can sometimes solve their problems.
2059915
This...this is...
You're absolutely right, and it's a thing I'd overlooked even as it was in the back of my mind.
I've also found your other recent comments illuminating and true, and...there's really not much I can add to them, actually.
Oh, and kudos for the monkeysphere reference.
2057487 I don't think I've ever seen you so excited as to use the
icon. 
2059666 About five days after BABSCon, I finally realized that he reminds me of the biker guy in The Village People.
2059842 Son of a kimchi, that's a long comment. (I read it all.)
Sorry for the comment train, but once again, this Bad Horse Blog© has delivered me my morning dose of intellectual stimulation. Any chance we can get the Bad Horse Blog© in Vitamin Pill form?
2059842
If I wrote a story and had to explain to most of the public that a scene said X, but what it was ACTUALLY saying is Y, but I couldn't explain Y because most people are too dumb to understand Y, so I explained X instead and everyone is supposed to assume I meant Y... did I write a successful story?
You have to remember one of the core concepts of art, especially writing, which is to communicate ideas effectively, often to the largest audience possible. What I'm saying is that it's a major flaw in science that scientists think that they can just ignore that, if the public doesn't understand how they're writing.
How is this different from Bad Horse's previous post about classical music eating its own tail? I suppose in science the possibility of technological advancement makes some discussions worth having, because they can produce something the public doesn't have to understand. But discussions like the ones you cited about gun control and global warming are pointless to have among scientists unless scientists can communicate them to other people.
With few exceptions, scientists end up like a bad fanfic author with a really cool idea, saying "i lik it and peeple i no like it and they al sea what im saying," (and, like that author, most people could work out what the scientists are saying if they felt like it, but science has not convinced them they should care.) There might be a really cool idea there, but don't be surprised when no one cares, and the people with cliche ideas that are good at making people understand them become popular.
2059953
And this is a perfect example.
You're talking a lot about IQ. IQ, of course, measures intelligence. Do you know how psychologists decided what "intelligence" is?
That which can be measured by an IQ test.
Well that's a bit of a circle, isn't it? It makes sense for psychologists. They needed to set a line someplace because "intelligence" is actually one of those things like "love" with so many facets and ways of expressing itself that it was either draw a freakin' line, or the whole field had to throw up their hands and say they couldn't deal with it. And "the thing an IQ test measures" does look a lot like what we consider "being smart," so they mostly get away with it.
And then you come along with your discussion about who has higher IQs and it all being genetic and you don't sound at all like you realize that it doesn't make those people smarter. It doesn't really mean anything except that they are better at doing IQ tests, and (possibly) better at thinking in the ways needed to do IQ tests. Our concept of genius has only become tied to IQ in the past 50 years or so, and there are plenty of people past and present who are doing things we might consider genius with average or lower than average IQs.
So here, you use the term IQ as if it has something to do with how smart people are. Luckily I know enough about this to know it's shit. But now, why should I believe anything you spout off about genetics? I can tell when someone is talking in a way that's meant to make me think they know what they're talking about. Even if you think you know what you're talking about, I know at least half of it is something that you haven't communicated to me that you actually understand. What does that say about the other half that I can't verify off the top of my head?
As it happens, I tend to think that humans are a good mix of genetics and environment. Intelligence, as defined by an IQ test, may be genetic. Communication skills might be environmental. They sure don't seem to be linked to IQ, at least.
The later might be true, but the former is only true if you judge communication in a vacuum (total correct information present in a sentence), rather than on the success of actually relating the information to other people.
I think I get it now. It must be really hard for some scientists to write when they're distracted by the lovely rose fragrance that comes out of their butts.
(Edited to remove a possibly offensive statement.)
Certainly. I can mail little capsules of powder to you at the start of each month. Just authorize me to charge recurring monthly paypal payments to you at the low low price of $5/day. It also cures arthritis, gout, tennis elbow, and modernism.