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Sentences to ponder
The scientific method & capitalism are similarly inhuman systems. They also happen to be the primary sources of our progress.
That is Kebko, from the MR comments section.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 13, 2008 at 10:50 AM in History | Permalink
Comments
Very poetic, but rather silly really. They are, after all, exclusively human phenomena.
Posted by: Adam at Nov 13, 2008 11:06:31 AM
And both require government oversight to function. No one (except for a few cranks/libertarians) advocates the right of people to produce unlimited quantities of dioxin, nuclear fuel or other fruits of science in their back yard. Far too dangerous. Similarly, no one should advocate the right of Morgan Stanley to produce toxic financial products without some sort of oversight.
Posted by: es at Nov 13, 2008 11:09:01 AM
It is no accident that both procedures rely on trial-and-error. To this list, I would add the ability to run "trials" in our mind, which allows us to rule out many of the trials that would lead to our destruction at a relatively low cost.
The free market and the scientific method's successes hinge on their procedural support for trial-and-error on a massive scale.
Posted by: Publius at Nov 13, 2008 11:09:41 AM
That is indeed an intriguing insight!
I think it's true, too.
Obviously so, actually.
Evolution requires change. As we evolve, we necessarily become less like we used to be. And therefore inhuman in quite a real sense.
Posted by: igor at Nov 13, 2008 11:09:45 AM
Hmmm. Very deep. It's true that capitalism makes market more efficient, but I'm not sure about capitalism being one of the primary sources of our progress. I guess it depends on how you define progress... But good pondering. May be a tad too deep for Thursday morning :)
Posted by: Pang at Nov 13, 2008 11:11:22 AM
"I guess it depends on how you define progress"
I thought there was only one way to define progress. Atleast that is what the religion of Progressivism has taught.
Posted by: Jay at Nov 13, 2008 11:34:01 AM
Meanwhile, the religion of religion (in this country anyway) defines progress as believing in creationism, the complete opposite of the scientific method.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Posted by: meter at Nov 13, 2008 11:50:10 AM
Compare societies run by systems deemed "scientific" and those deemed "capitalistic". Scientific socialism is clearly inhuman, with a death toll to match, while the capitalists abolished the slave trade.
Science is a tool for understanding material and mechanical systems, capitalism is concerned with organizing and coordinating humans.
Posted by: 8 at Nov 13, 2008 12:00:53 PM
F A Hayek makes the same point in one of his books. Either him or Michael Polanyi, or both.
es: "And both require government oversight to function. No one (except for a few cranks/libertarians) advocates the right of people to produce unlimited quantities of dioxin, nuclear fuel or other fruits of science in their back yard. Far too dangerous. Similarly, no one should advocate the right of Morgan Stanley to produce toxic financial products without some sort of oversight."
What a load of socialist rubbish. Whether a person makes a large amount of, say, dioxin is not the point. It's what they do with it, whether it poses a threat to others that those others cannot control. Whether there is externality.
The same is true of financial products. With a financial product all that need concern government is whether or not the product is sold honestly, whether it fulfills the promises of the person selling it. There is no problem of externality here. Radiation cannot leak out of futures contracts.
(There are of course externalities in the Federal Reserve system. But those are deliberately created by that system not a feature of a free market).
Posted by: Current at Nov 13, 2008 12:01:13 PM
What about evolution and past progress? Another highly inhuman process -- but one that created humans.
Posted by: John at Nov 13, 2008 12:13:39 PM
As capitalism and scientific method both rely to some extent on inductive reasoning to feed deductive models, I'm havin' a tough time with that one.
Posted by: Alex at Nov 13, 2008 12:15:43 PM
well . . . put they couldn't be more human systems. after all there are no lizards, birds, or mammals besides us with such systems.
i would say they are very very human and, yes, a primary source of our progress
Posted by: dis at Nov 13, 2008 12:16:58 PM
Both the scientific method and capitalism have rationality/ logic/ reason in their backbones. The past five hundred years of human history has seen reason gradually substituting religion to expand our knowledge frontier and perpetuate progress. But the question is whether this substitution can go on in perpetuity. Theoretically, it cannot -- Gödel's incompleteness theorems suggest mathematics (i.e., rationality, logic, reason) itself is incomplete. Practically, it may – the universe is so expansive that we may be able to keep on expanding our frontiers while exercising reason within. Who knows… it’s certainly fun to think about it.
Posted by: Yan Li at Nov 13, 2008 12:21:17 PM
No one (except for a few cranks/libertarians) advocates the right of people to produce unlimited quantities of dioxin, nuclear fuel or other fruits of science in their back yard.
Let me give the obligatory crankish response: It was the US government that took billions (under threat of imprisonment) from its citizens and created atomic weapons and then used them, and it is still governments that are the top producers of nasty weapons. It is also governments who promise to contain their spread and fail miserably at this task, as they do with all other justifications they give to the pubic for their activities. (E.g. invade Iraq to get rid of WMD, and subsidize North Korea after it admits it has nukes.)
And the true "extreme libertarian" position isn't the extension of anti-gun control rhetoric, namely, "Hey until you actually fry an innocent person, you have a God-given right to stockpile hydrogen bombs in your basement." On the contrary, the true property rights position would hold that the owner of an apartment complex or housing subdivision could have clauses that say, for example, "The tenant/buyer agrees not to play loud music after 11 pm, and not to manufacture anthrax."
Yes, the libertarian solution woudn't be perfect, and presumably some nuclear weapons might still be produced (especially since governments have spent so many billions over the years doing all of the research). But it's not as if the government approach has kept the world free from nasty weapons either.
Posted by: Bob Murphy at Nov 13, 2008 12:21:51 PM
I believe the sentence refers to how humans innately organize themselves. Having evolved in what were essentially small communes (tribes), we seem irrationally predisposed towards socialism. Among friends and associates, monetary trade is taboo.
Something similar could be said of science. Most arguments about fact or truth seem to be motivated by a desire for status in the tribal hierarchy, not for real truth-seeking.
Science is an institution which aligns the incentives of scientists with a social good. Capitalism does the same. I'm not sure "inhuman" is the right term, but both institutions channel certain human traits into things far more constructive than they'd otherwise be.
Posted by: Grant at Nov 13, 2008 12:25:36 PM
8,
When I hear the term "scientific socialism" I think of Marx's materialistic dialectic argument for the inevitable collapse of capitalism as opposed to the utopian socialists who advocated socialism as reform. In contrast to the utopians, maybe Marx can be seen as scientific, but in contrast to modern science, not so much, even if he has a material dialectic as oppose to what you will find in Hegel.
Posted by: James at Nov 13, 2008 12:49:17 PM
Even though capitalism and the scientific are uniquely human activities... they are far from what makes us humans.
Posted by: at Nov 13, 2008 12:52:17 PM
"What a load of socialist rubbish. Whether a person makes a large amount of, say, dioxin is not the point. It's what they do with it, whether it poses a threat to others that those others cannot control. Whether there is externality."
and there's the crux of it . . . everyone has their own little definition of an "externalities"
The range is from yourself, your family, your demographic (age/class/race etc), relgion, community, state, national to global in scale overlayed on a range from human, domestic animals, wild animals, rest of nature, environment, atmospehere overlayed on a range of the present, the next year, 100 years, 1000 years etc etc
Who is looking out for the whole damn system over all of time????
Posted by: at Nov 13, 2008 1:15:02 PM
Wow, what an honor! Thanks for the nod, Dr. Cowen!
I think Grant does the best at getting at my point. Community is a fundamentally important part of being human. And, I think Dr. Hanson would agree that an important part of living in a community that has depth is engaging in a social compact that says we will believe in & do things that are irrational & difficult. By supporting each other in these thoughts & deeds, we will feel a deep connection & a familial warmth.
Science & capitalism create a context where we only support each other when we're part of a solution - toward truth or wealth or freedom. But, loyalty is what our biology craves.
If I confront a person who defends creationism, government support for dying industries, buying local, etc., it is likely that I am asking them to consider much more than a logical consideration. I am asking them to be traitor to the ideals that their community defends. I say that these systems are inhuman, because I feel inhuman when I do this.
Posted by: kebko at Nov 13, 2008 1:44:25 PM
The sentence is something in between of what Marx and then Soros wrote about capitalism. I contend that here is something highly problematic in the fact that capitalist society is predisposed to harmonize with scientific method. These days tend to be more in line with some capitalism decay and inherent self-destructing forces. If someone wants to call them progress...Perhaps we are in progress, towards?
Posted by: Massimo GIANNINI at Nov 13, 2008 2:47:27 PM
Two systems are for completely different ends. The people advocating using science, or "putting the smart people in charge", i.e. scientists, are the folks who brought us Nazism, Communism, and propose similar governments today. If only it wasn't for religion, or tribalism, or some other human factor, the world would be a better place. But science is amoral. It is a system for understanding the world. In the hands of moral people, science is used to advance knowledge, in the hands of immoral people, science is used to destroy. It doesn't align scientists with the social good, anymore than a hammer aligns itself with the social good. It depends on who's swinging the hammer.
Capitalism, on the other hand, accepts human nature and free will. Capitalism is the most human of all economic systems.
Posted by: 8 at Nov 13, 2008 2:50:29 PM
As Adam mentioned, I'm not so sure what I'm supposed to see as "inhuman" in those two institutions. They both rely on trial and error, and the assumption that you don't start out with the problem already solved. The scientific method is explicit and the capitalism (whatever your definition) is simply a description of how people in groups behave under certain (most) circumstances, but they are both attempts BY HUMANS to deal with the scarcity and uncertainty which compose the human condition.
As a side note, socialism was an attempt to make society more efficient (and of course just), based on theories produced by social science. The experiment turned out to be a failure (or rather, several), but it was still science. It was just wrong, that's all. How very human.
Posted by: d.cous. at Nov 13, 2008 3:09:43 PM
We need the government to oversight these weapons of mass media destruction on the worldwide interwebs
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/arts/television/13hoax.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
We need to refocus our human intelligence at the mouth of each of the tubes
Posted by: Andrew at Nov 13, 2008 4:32:21 PM
When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness" [...]
Posted by: at Nov 13, 2008 4:37:11 PM
this is not just silly, but stupid.
yeah, "community" is a "fundamentally important" part of being human. So are our wills to power, truth, goodness, etc. jesus christ, educating other people is not inhuman. If I meet a rabid KKK racist, I'll tell him you-know-what, and i would feel damn good about it. the fact that kebko feels guilty about fighting racism is a sign of some deep psychological problem on his part (oh no! what about the racist's feelings?), which ought not to generalized to the population at large.
as for "progress," i'll agree with that, and also add in democracy.
Posted by: raft at Nov 13, 2008 4:52:06 PM
