Month: July 2016

Managerialism, Leftism, Scientism, You Name It.

Two or three threads came together this morning.

Ongoing debates about European responses to “immigrants”, “anti-semitism” and “islamism” – politically correct to the point of perversion of sense. Insanity. And of course later (lower down) #Chilcot. Where to start?

Here a piece by Chris Corrigan posted on Facebook by Johnnie Moore, on managerialism and the conflict between “efficiency” and common humanity, at the inevitable expense of care and attention to the latter.

“Management practices these days manage for efficiency which on the surface is widely accepted as a good thing. But there are things in human experience for which efficiency is devastating. Love, care, community, and attention are all made much worse by being efficient.”

I responded:

“Absolutely! It’s a shared mental illness to objectify anything we need to manage (to justify, govern, make efficient, etc) and remove any aspect of compassionate caring humanity from our equations. (A contagious fashion, a meme. Scientism I’ve been calling it for 15 years.)”

Here two tweets by Anne Marie Waters on what should be sympathetic compassion for those punished for crimes against individuals who end up feeling guilty and behaving irrationally as the victims.

[Post Note :

End Post Note.]

Anne Marie calls it “Leftism” – her perspective rejecting dysfunctional socialist politics, seen as ignoring these issues for reasons of political correctness, freeing herself to address the issues head-on.

What Chris calls “Managerialism”, I’ve been calling “Scientism” throughout this blogging project. But what’s in a name? Underlying the whole is the meme that expects “objectification” of anything we’re dealing with, so we can manage it, justify it, quantify it, put them in our logical and arithmetic equations.

This ignores common humanity, compassion, care and love. By design they’re excluded from any objective analysis. It’s a collective mental illness to think this way. It’s not complicated, but it must be resisted.

Also related this exchange from Nassim Nicholas Taleb denying the value of Game Theory in his statistical equations. He’s right, they won’t fit his rigorous logic (I have a separate draft post on this) but they therefore exclude the psychology between subjects, empathetic or competitive. A kind of mental illness, autism to exclude personal subjective impression, to reduce psychology to objective guesswork (ie sophisticated statistical analyses).

Need to join-up those three threads, they may even seem counter-intuitively related to my point, but they’re part of the same underlying meme.

Continuing, today is of course publication of #Chilcot, and exactly the same problem, in BBC summary he concludes:

“[F]uture military action on such a scale [should] only be possible with more careful analysis and political judgement.”

Wong again. Analysis may be more rigorous, but never careful. It’s care-less by design. We murder to dissect. What is really meant is:

“more careful analysis and political judgement.”

Judgment by analysis is mere “fudgement” – a scientistic managerial way of justifying action, but very unwise judgement. Specific issues in the #Iraq / #Chilcot case are about “planning” the follow-through of taking action, not about the tough decision to take action. It’s the decision and (military) action that needs care, not the analysis. What we need is practical wisdom. Analysis is a mere tool. The fudge of the WMD Dossier was always a fudge because it could only ever be a fudge for what was already (properly) a judgement.

Furthermore:

Exactly – liberal intervention was a good & wise call then, and it still is. It’s wisdom however, was destroyed by having to satisfy (ie fudge) objective justification, thereby taking eyes of the real ball of planning for the complex and long-term consequences of “regime change” – because this complex judgement of reality and planning options had to remain hidden so that a simplistic facade could be presented. Lots of good people (politicians and journos) had their careers destroyed knowing there was a lot wrong, but having no means to get the underlying issue addressed credibly for a world craving ethical simplicity.

No shit Sherlock ….

So it goes ….

There Is No Scientific Method?

Jerry Coyne ranting in response to this NYT piece by James Blachovicz.

A recurring topic, but I had to react to this:

Blachovicz: Scientific method is not itself an object of study for scientists, but it is an object of study for philosophers of science. It is not scientists who are trained specifically to provide analyses of scientific method.

Coyne: All I can say here is “WTF”? Does this man have any inkling of the difference between science on the one hand and philosophy or poetry on the other?

All I can say is WTF? Does Jerry Coyne have any inkling of the difference between philosophy and science?

The issue is that science uses many methods, many of the creative ones it uses are shared with many other arts and crafts, but the real point must surely be which particular methodological aspects distinguish it as science as opposed any other rational pursuit. Obviously rationality is part of it, but it’s part of any rational pursuit, and simply leaves us with narrow or broad definitions of rationality to worry about instead of definitive features of science. No progress there. (Good news is that Coyne respects Dennett on being helpful to science as a philosopher. Maybe he’s also noticed Dennett is not a fan of premature definitions or greedy reductionism.)

Blachovicz is right, and Coyne wrong, on his meta-point that scientists may self-identify as such, but cannot thmselves define what makes them so. That’s on another level, one for the philosophers.

My own thrust is that the definitive feature of science is the repeatable empirical falsifiability, where scientific empiricism demands tight & closed, objective & logical, framing of the hypothesis and of any repeatable test(s), in order that a conclusion (false or not) can follow from any test result.

This limits science to those fields usefully amenable to such closed objective definitions. For so many fields of human endeavour it may not be the most useful approach to understanding and problem solving. Experienced human empiricism may not be scientific but is nevertheless “real”. Much human endeavour, even life in general, can never really be a repeatable experiment, and indeed the exclusively objective rationality of science is (by design) ignorant and even destructive of subjects, human or otherwise.

Reinforces my impression to date, that Coyne may be a staunch defender of the place of (Darwinian) evolution in science, but is not sophisticated epistemologically, nor particularly scientific or rational in his approach.

[Hat tip to @ChrisOldfield for sharing the original link.]

[Post Note – Tangentially related, but distinguishing wrong thoughts and beliefs from wrong ways of thinking and rationalising them is the key here. The one is meta to the other. Here Alan Rayner’s Best Thinking reinforces the point again:

And in fact the same “scientism” thread pretty much continues in the next post …..]