Episode 36
Transcript:
Stuart Firestein:
There is an ancient proverb that says it's very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat. I find this a particularly apt description of science and how science works, bumbling around in a dark room, bumping into things, trying to figure out what shape this might be, what that might be. There are reports of a cat somewhere around, they may not be reliable, they may be, and so forth and so on. Now, I know this is different than the way most people think about science. Science, we generally are told is a very well-ordered mechanism for understanding the world, for gaining facts, for gaining data, that it's rule-based, that scientists use this thing called the scientific method, and we've been doing this for 14 generations or so now. And the scientific method is a set of rules for getting hard, cold facts out of the data. I'd like to tell you that's not the case. So what is the difference, then, between the way, I believe, science is pursued and the way it seems to be perceived?
When I go to a meeting, after the meeting day is over and we collect in the bar over a couple of beers with my colleagues, we never talk about what we know. We talk about what we don't know. We talk about what still has to get done, what's so critical to get done in the lab. Indeed, this was, I think, best said by Marie Curie, who said that "One never notices what has been done, but only what remains to be done." This is what I think we were leaving out of our courses and leaving out of the interaction that we have with public of scientists, the what remains to be done. This is the stuff that's exhilarating and interesting. It is, if you will, the ignorance. That's what was missing. So I thought, "Well, maybe I should teach a course on ignorance."
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph. Welcome to Revolution Now, February 23rd, 2022. I apologize for the gap between this episode and the prior one. Like most of us have to deal with at various points in this life, the past few weeks have been marred by an ever arduous household move with many delays and problems. Oh, the joy of schlepping our piles of property around. In fact, as an opening tangent, before I talk about the opening excerpt regarding science and the role of ignorance, it's worth reflecting on the notion of access versus property in economic organization. A lifestyle based on a shared system, as opposed to a propertied one, once again, while the neuroses today pushes the idea that having more and more is a sign of success and stability, along with enduring the physical and spatial burden imposed within a propertied society, rarely do people think about the kind of lightness and flexibility of an access society in contrast, not to mention the dramatic improvement of overall integrity. Access, meaning that with the exception of personal items for everyday use, private in nature, such as a computer, musical instrument, medical equipment, and so forth. Many other aspects of consumption that are not as frequent would benefit from a shared circular system through strategic design.
In my own personal case, I have tons of film-related equipment that I don't use that frequently, but I need to own in the current strategy today because to rent over and over again is not cost efficient. It's unfortunate because I'd prefer not to have to store all of this stuff. And while, obviously, there's wear and tear in the use of any particular good, this stuff sitting in storage is restricting other people's possible use of it. Anyway, this has all been talked about before, but it's been on my mind. And it's worth pointing out that one of the things that people assume in this indoctrination, under our private property-obsessed capitalist nightmare, is that ownership is superior to access when, in reality, the opposite is true, not only true on a technical level, with higher levels of sustainability, along with the ability for more people to have access to needs and wants that would not be possible in a restricted propertied system, reducing inequity, and inequality-
I think on the cultural and personal level, the stress reduction, a reduction of inhibition, and ultimately, an improvement of mental health would also arise. People not feeling so weighted down, not to mention the improved sense of security. It would improve the quality of social relations is my point, establishing a deeper sense of trust, and a deeper gravitation and incentive toward ethical and sustainable behavior. For instance, one would realize that the quality of what they have access to is contingent upon the integrity and stewardship of others, and hence, an inter-relational nature. This would lead to a more conscious sense of responsibility, as opposed to the fragmented, isolated "This is my stuff, this is all I care about, and I'm not concerned with the property of others." People would generally argue that they care about other people and their stuff, but there isn't really a built-in incentive.
In an access society, the incentive would be structurally built in which, as an aside, speaks to the core problem with today's social architecture, because we are forcing ethical and moral guidelines upon people that are in contradiction to the way the society is organized, and that simply doesn't work. So you know the old idea of the disregarded rental car? You don't have to care about, really, so you can hit potholes and so forth. That kind of disrespectful characteristic, driven by the exclusive nature of property, would subside because people would realize that everyone needs to behave more responsibly for the system to work. There's a mindset built into a propertied culture. And while one may care about what they own, they will fundamentally disregard what they do not; not a very healthy mindset for a finite planetary ecosystem that needs a holistic view and consideration or a unified global civilization that needs to be approached in the same way.
And, of course, the pro-market people will continue to argue that property incentivizes people to take care of things. This has been a longstanding half-truth. Obviously, true in the most basic sense, you're going to take care of the car are that you own because you're fiscally responsible for it and so forth. But when it comes to the context of private means of production property, such as owning, say, forest land, there's no integrity to that idea. The concept of stewardship of a musical instrument you like to play is very different than the concept of stewardship for something you are exploiting for income, such as a forest for wood. There is no incentive in the market system structure to preserve a forest, have it re-grow in homeostatic balance after things are cut down for commercial purposes. Point being, in the end, society needs a value system that makes people feel like everything around them is their responsibility to take care of. Seems natural, seems obvious, but the system we have today actually moves against such consideration.
And, as an aside, often I'm asked what kind of hybrid policy measures could balance the flaws of the capitalist structure which, to be clear, once again, goes against the basic principle I advocate on this podcast as a so-called "structuralist." The fundamental thesis being, once again, we cannot rely on ethics and morality and, by extension, politics and legal policy to successfully move against the structurally-incentivized behavior; the dominant patterns of behavior rooted in the market game in order to avoid problems. That doesn't work, and it hasn't worked. But if there was some singular thing that could magically be imposed upon the system as an incremental step, an access arrangement would be helpful, just for the sake of argument here, because what it would do is take the existing market factor of cost efficiency and re-incentivize producers to design goods and processes in a more sustainable way. Why? Because they are responsible for the product over its lifespan. It's a little abstract, but let's imagine all producing companies on the planet today were actually responsible for the integrity of what they created from cradle to grave or, more ideally, cradle to cradle in a circular economy.
They didn't sell the goods outright. They rented them. The legal relationship is no longer a person owning something, but a person having use rights to that item based on use need. In this, industrial design, production, and distribution patterns would change dramatically if a company was responsible for maintaining everything it made, along with repairing everything, along with end of product life responsibility. No landfills, all items produced go straight back to its point of origin. And that doesn't necessarily mean just a singular company. If a proper network was established in this way, the component parts would also be redistributed back to their points of origin as well in the network of commercial production. And, in the end, it would change the approach of entire industry sectors, redesigning for the sake of cost efficiency in the new context, not based on cyclical consumption, hence an entire new tier of market-gaming logic would exist, whereby the company would try to ensure it doesn't have to do anything after it puts this product out there. Cheap materials, gone. The inability to repair, gone. Planned obsolescence, gone. Proprietary exclusivity and a lack of industrial standardization of components, gone.
In fact, if I could argue market capitalism could do any singular thing to improve itself, maybe even preserve itself, dare I say, it would be to reorganize the system where there is no resale. I don't buy a car, fix it as I go along, and sell it to some other consumer who eventually sells it again, all the way down until it ends up in a scrapyard. The car is returned to the manufacturer, broken apart with the components returned back again in reverse, refurbished, recycled, and hence, the burden is entirely on the producing companies, not the consumer. And as such, an access society would invariably grow to be circular, highly reducing waste, which is the opposite of the incentives you see today because of cyclical consumption.
This concept also challenges the entire notion of economic growth which, of course, is a stark contradiction to other incentive problems in the system, but remember, this is just an abstraction. In a real economy, the idea of throwing something into a landfill would be anathema. The design of a given good will include end-of-life potential at the earliest stages of assessment. Built in. And the more we avoid that kind of arrangement, the more scarcity we're going to see, as we see right now, as we see shortages of so many materials now because of the fundamentally wasteful practices inherent.
All right, enough of that, let's get back to podcast proper. The opening audio was an excerpt from a talk by Stuart Firestein on the role of informed ignorance in society. Informed ignorance. Ignorance not as a negative notion but as a relevant ongoing observation and reality. Seems like an odd distinction, not particularly profound but still missing and important, when it comes to ontological and philosophical perspective. Like observing the space between objects rather than the objects themselves. And an extended causal system context is also relevant in terms of the epistemological structure of things as we know it. The old adage the more we know, the more we don't know, but we still tend not to take that to heart, hence the prevalence of dogma. And while the practice of science and the agents therein tend to do a better job than many other related disciplines, such as, I don't know, mainstream religion, it still suffers by way of the urge to reject falsifiability. And there are many reasons for that. The most obvious would be a fundamental egoism. However, naturally, from a group mind systems perspective, in terms of the evolution of information in civilization, to be proven wrong should be celebrated. But the fact is we have generated a deeply insecure, egoist culture that's obsessed with the appearance of knowing at all times. A neurosis driven by fear of judgment, trying to maintain one's self-confidence within a group dynamic.
Most people out there are driven by public perception. The very notion of success in society is often defined by how popular you are, which also coincides with material wealth, but still public perception and general "fame," as it were... When kids are asked what they want to be when they grow up in Western society, they often say rich and famous. And, of course, going back to Thorstein Veblen and his book, Theory of the Leisure Class, after a certain point, wealth becomes conspicuous. It's all of about being perceived a certain way and showing off. Otherwise, why would you have all of that shit? How much of you is you, once again? We are no doubt, as we are born and raised, culturally codified by the people we meet in our lives, through the formative years, and so forth. We are products of culture. Hence, we are products of groups.
Our identities are invariably intertwined, and hence, most people fall victim to a sense of identity that is not driven internally, but driven by feedback from the external; feedback from whatever group, or even society at large. Hence, we decide who we are based on people's perception of us. And the point I'm trying to make here, as if that dilemma wasn't bad enough, is this vulnerability is deeply amplified, catastrophically amplified, in our competitive, scarcity-oriented, exploitative, hierarchical economy. Whereas an adult, specifically, your personal reputation invariably precedes your professional survival, and hence, your survival in general. People are terrified of being perceived as incorrect in order to maintain their income and, by extension, status and power and are willing to live their lives really without a basic curiosity or personal challenge in order to feel secure. It's a self-imposed pathology, rejecting any possibility of being wrong as opposed to acquiescing for the sake of personal progress and progress of society as a whole.
And, of course, much could be said about the educational system and the process of competitive grading, where you get an F and you're a failure, rather than the observation that education is actually a transitional step by step process that's graduated. Anyway, I won't go down that road today, as that's for another discussion, but to make matters worse, in the most contemporary point of time, we have the internet. The internet has a memory that doesn't go away, and the social media ecosystem is built into that as well. The newer generation now will have their entire lives chronicled from cradle to grave by their own hand, in fact. And what this does, on a very basic level, from the standpoint of public perception, is make people even less likely to alter their positions out of fear of being seen as fallible over time. Someone goes back and sees something they said on the internet, want to hold that up forever because they don't want to seem like they've changed their mind, and hence, show weakness or whatnot.
It may seem like a trivial point, but it's actually a very, very strong method of social control, a system-level social control, as opposed to a dictatorial social control. So natural changes in one's beliefs, where once ignorant ideas are overturned for the better, in the educational process, becomes less of a vigilant act and more of a vulnerable act. And then, of course, the most obvious in all of this, in terms of the paralyzing nature of not wanting to be wrong in commercial industry, obviously establishments want to remain established. Hence, the oil industry still prevails versus all the renewables that we need to be focusing on and other potentials. And, in the case of corporate power, it's not just a denial of being wrong. They actively work to reinforce their wrongness, such as lobbyists and black op's climate denial PR that's out there on the part of these corporations and so forth.
So my point here is not only do you have the psychological, the egoism, the fear of being judged, or losing your job, or not being respected, and the status that goes along with that for whatever reason - you also have the fundamental establishment preservation tendency, which has been talked about a great deal on this podcast before, where people will fight the change that's required, the new information that voids their industry, because they want to maintain market share. That's obviously a massive, massive problem, again, as discussed before. And hence, going back to the opening audio about this pursuit of ignorance, informed ignorance, this vulnerability to falsifiability and the expectation of it, and really a worldview based around that vulnerability, which is quite lacking today for many reasons but the most pertinent obstruction to this kind of progress, obviously, once again, you guessed it -- is the condition of market economics and the game we are all involved in.
Contrary to the competitive assumption that a world fighting with itself will constantly innovate, at the same time, we create paralysis. And that paralysis is far more destructive than the competitive, entrepreneurial spirit is problem solving and innovative. Now, that extended tangent out of the way, I was originally going to continue the subject of myths and propaganda today, capitalist myths and propaganda, which was started many episodes back. And I think we are on number six now, which was the idea that, "Hey, what we have today isn't capitalism, buddy." In fact, I was just reading an article today where the author literally said, "We need more capitalism, not less," which of course is precisely the opposite need when you take a system's perspective of what capitalism is actually doing and is as a system. A very difficult conversation, as people have been indoctrinated into a particular perception of what the market economy is, with any apparent deviation of that becoming anomalous, sacrilege, when the fact is these repeating "deviations," these "anomalies" are really just as much a part of the system as buying and selling itself when someone takes an objective perspective.
You know "Crony capitalism," or most every other label that puts some adjective in front of capitalism as if capitalism is this flexible thing defined ultimately by these adjective qualifiers, reveals a misunderstanding of the system's expression as a whole. But I'm actually a bit bored with that subject at the present moment. And since I have inadvertently set up a context for this podcast, dealing with the epistemology, as per the informed ignorance notion discussed earlier, I'd like to continue that discussion as related to how we think about sociology and social phenomena. So let's return to the myth of what we have today isn't capitalism next episode, if you don't mind. And please note, as an aside, for those that have been around for years, I've been talking about the same thing over and over again for a long time. And I'm always looking for new angles to try and find a new argument, a new perspective, kind of like looking at a building in a different way. And that's what I'd like to do for the rest of this podcast today. So please bear with me.
A few episodes back, we talked about correlation versus causation, which involves high complexity in sociology, which is ultimately the field we are all dealing with. Hence, the nature of complex systems, hence the nature of the complex adaptive system we call our economy, which underscores everything in society. Again, the reason the focus is so heavy on economics is because if you change the way the economy works, you basically change everything. How we organize survival carries influence across all levels of the human condition, culturally, reproductively, intellectually, emotionally, the very nature of social relations between genders, between ethnicity, between class, of course, which is a contrivance. And of course, the material survival of people, and on and on and on. The economy is the root of the system.
So returning to Stewart Firestein's comments on the role of informed ignorance in science, I was reminded of the work of French mathematician, Henry Poincaré. I hope I'm saying that right in French, Henry Poincaré, P-O-I-N-C-A-R-E, for those that want to look him up, who has considered the last universalist living in the late 19th and early 20th century. Universalist, meaning he was a polymath, recognized as having a general understanding of most every subject that existed his time. Obviously, to whatever extent that's true is probably apocryphal, but that's the way he's remembered. And he had three simple observations when it came to understanding causality and how one can classify all problems within those three. Very, very simple propositions, and he called them Degrees of Ignorance, the Three Degrees of Ignorance, which apply to all physical phenomena and any kind of causal intellectual analysis in general. And because he was a mathematician and fascinated with game theory and games of chance, think about the game of roulette as I describe the following, which I'm going to come back to in a moment.
Number one, the first degree of ignorance states that if you know an object's initial state, such as its position and speed... Again, this is a Newtonian perspective, but bear with me, this applies to all things that are intellectual in terms of causality. If you know an object's initial state, along with the physical laws that it follows, you can predict what's going to happen. Very basic Newtonian perspective. That, of course, is how we understand where all the planets are at any given moment. And I'm not quite sure why he called this the first form of ignorance or the first degree of ignorance since it's not really ignorance at all, but we'll leave it at that.
The second degree of ignorance is when you know the governing laws, but you don't know the initial state. In the case of real-world probabilities, such as trying to predict weather patterns, at no point, obviously, do you know the initial state of anything because everything is constantly in motion. But once again, you see the point of the observation. And, of course, the third degree of ignorance is when you don't understand the governing laws or the initial state. So you have no idea how to even approach analysis and measure things, not to mention you don't really know how things began. Now, these three basic frameworks, as simplified as they are, are worth considering, especially when dealing with sociology, for when it comes to trying to predict human behavior, we're stuck in the middle of these three degrees of ignorance.
In terms of social structures, human behavior obviously is organized around systems that we have created. Hence, sociological behavior can be considered governed by institutional structures we have established, once again. And the concept of an initial state is deeply elusive because it's obviously an abstract concept that does not exist in the real world. But in sociology, there are what you could call inflection points, pivotal points that have deep influence from that point on. They're not a point of origin, because there's no such thing, but they are pivots that set something new in motion to a large degree, such as the neolithic revolution. Was the neolithic revolution a point of origin? Not explicitly. It was not an initial state in this kind of Newtonian perspective once again, but it caused a notable change. And the point I'm getting at here is the greatest objection to sociological analysis that we see out there is a lack of confidence in the chaos of it all. A lack of confidence in the ability to actually understand and forecast accurately.
And my ultimate point here, which is very simple, is that we need to stop the sense of intimidation when it comes to complex phenomenon, because even the most complex environments can be understood with the right tools and the right principles. So going back to Henry Poincaré, who was obsessed with number theory and gambling as a mathematician; probabilities, chaos theory, and so forth, in 2004, a couple went into a casino to play roulette and they began winning quite dramatically. So much so that it sparked the interest of the security and all the people scrutinized over the video footage to figure out how it was possible, how these people were winning over and over and over again at a game of seemingly random chance. In fact, of all the casino games out there, roulette as a physical phenomenon versus a digital or poker or blackjack or whatever, is considered to be the most random, but it's not. It's not random. And so this couple went in there and they had a computer set up and they could actually analyze, in real time, the behavior of the ball as it moved around the roulette wheel. And they could bet strategically, based on the feedback of this hidden computer strapped to their body, to gain an edge, which means they could understand it.
And if they can do that, which is my point here, it goes to show that what one culture or one generation may perceive as enormously complex, so much so that you create a game of chance around it, and yet the laws of those dynamics can be discovered, we need to push more strongly in terms of sociological analysis in the same way. In other words, the analysis of human behavior and the dilemma of trying to figure out where we are and where we're going and why, understanding the governing laws of institutions that we have created, which serve as physical laws on the sociological level in terms of incentives and so forth. This is an area of study which really has not been embraced. So that is some food for thought I will leave you all with, and I appreciate your tolerance for this stream of consciousness episode, but I'll be back with more uniform organization in the next episode. And this program is brought to you by my Patreon, and we will pick up on debunking myths and propaganda of capitalism very soon. Thanks, everybody. Take care out there.