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Clay Shirky is optimistic
Most of the really important parts of our lives -- who we love and how, how we live and why, why we lie and when -- have yet to yield their secrets to real evidence.
Here is more. Here is a full directory of optimistic prognostications. Arnold Kling comments on same.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 1, 2007 at 07:44 PM in Science | Permalink
Comments
Odd choice of excerpt -- the least optimistic sentence in Shirky's essay.
Posted by: Mike Linksvayer at Jan 1, 2007 8:12:56 PM
I don't understand why it's optimistic to understand (and therefore ultimately be able to control) things like love, lying, and anything else. Positivism has not yielded purely positive results, in fact a lot of its adherents have clung to ideals like Nazism, Communism, and a lot of other ideologies that proclaimed science, "evidence," and "areligiosity" as the great saviours of mankind.
I would like to know what makes it good to understand all of these things and how it would improve our lives, other than potentially making the legendary "love potion" or non-barbiturate "truth serum" a possibility among other things. Without saying "down with science" or anything as stupid as that, can I get at least one other voice questioning whether all scientific and "evidential" progress should lead to optimism? I'm not calling for some fundamentalist Dark Age of Blissful Luddism here, just questioning Shirky's reasoning and that of many many hard scientists everywhere.
It's much more common for discoveries such as "why do fools fall in love" to lead to programs ensuring that fools are not permitted to fall in love, than harmless inquiry and study academically on such a topic.
Posted by: Neal at Jan 2, 2007 2:18:29 AM
Evolutionary psychology is a step towards evidence-based social science?
I agree with Neal that the historical evidence for the results of efforts to emulate the hard sciences in human behaviors is atrocious. That road is littered not only with Marxists but with a lot of embarrassingly bad research by otherwise smart people. I'm not sure that someone who actually believes in acting only on evidence can pursue evidence-based research into love, life decisions, etc., without a contradiction. IMHO, Feynman's essay on "Cargo Cult Science" is a good description of nearly people who dream of making social science more like physics.
Posted by: DK at Jan 2, 2007 8:33:02 AM
The economics slam in re: behavioral economics provided a quick signal that, like Aristotle, Mr. Shirky is unfamiliar with the evidence regarding that upon which he speaks. Taking all existing theory papers and adding hyperbolic discounting to them does not an intellectual revolution make. There is some good there, to be sure, but we are still very early with this literature, despite all the hype.
Jeff
Posted by: Jeff Smith at Jan 2, 2007 9:21:21 AM
Hi
Best wishes。
Allow me to offer my heartiest wishes.
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