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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27004 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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Big Peter Thiel interview with John Gray H/T MarginalRevolution

This hits quite a few topics, but one cluster I'd pull out is science/achievement/religion/wokeness:

[JG:] Part of the resistance to your analysis of science is a kind of quasi-religious conception of the salvific possibilities of science. Science can do what religion hasn’t done, which is to actually change worldly life in a way which rids it of its deepest contradictions. And for some people, if they gave up that faith in science, they would be left with nihilism, or left with despair, or left with unbearable anxiety.

PT: Yeah, although there’s a very complicated history of science. In some ways it was a by-product of Christianity, in some ways it was in opposition to Christianity. And certainly in its healthy, ambitious, early modern forms, whether it was a substitute or a complement to Christianity, it was supposed to be a vehicle for comparable transformation. The indefinite prolongation of human life was an early modern science project in which people still believed in the 17th and 18th centuries. There was a sub-movement within the revolutionary Soviet politics in the 1920s called Cosmism, where a part of the project of the revolution had to be to physically resurrect all dead human beings, because if science didn’t do that it would be inferior to Christianity.

[...] So there is this anti-Christian or derivative from Christianity, very ambitious version of science. And of course, there is also a more defeatist version of science, where science actually tells us about limits and things you cannot do. To use a literary example, when Hamlet’s evil mother, Gertrude, says that all that lives must die, the question one must ask is, is that a law of nature? Or is this just a rationalization for the rottenness that is Denmark? And certainly the early modern conception was that you wanted to transcend this, both in a Christian or a scientific form. By late modernity, as science decayed, that sort of ambition is only on the fringes of science, not the mainstream.

...

One particular example of science’s slide from early modern ambition into late modern torpor is the climate change debate. If one took climate change seriously, there are all kinds of progressive science things one could do. You could be pushing for the construction of hundreds of new nuclear reactors. You could be pushing for nuclear fusion. But in practice, we don’t lean into that. We’re instead told that we should ride bicycles. So much of science today has this Luddite feeling.

The theme is that science used to be ambitious, especially ambitious in thinking that it would easily replace religion in all aspects, even in hope. I don't think he's claiming here that science has directly stalled out technologically, but the way the culture views it and uses it is uninspired and uninspiring. He seems to extend this decline to the science of social technology:

You know, McKinsey was a real thing in 1985 in the United States. If you hired a consultant they actually helped you improve your company, because the companies were badly run. At this point McKinsey is a total racket, it’s just all fake. The Reagan and Thatcher administrations empowered McKinsey because they allowed more companies to be acquired, more M&A activity to happen. It was a somewhat brutal but very powerful reorganization of society that was possible and in fact the right thing to do in the 1980s. At this point, McKinsey is not ever going to be anything other than a super corrupt, fake racket in 2023.

I think that toward the end, he possibly comes to some sort of root of it:

one of my colleagues says that institutions have embedded growth obligations, EGOs, in short. A healthy institution has exponential growth. A healthy, exponentially growing company, for example, creates more jobs and everybody can get promoted. Other institutions have their equivalents. And then at some point, the growth stops, and you have a choice. You can become more honest and say, well, you know, the university isn’t growing anymore. There’ll be very few faculty slots available. If you’re in a PhD program, we’re gonna make sure that 80% of the students drop out of the program within six months so they don’t waste their time. Or, the thing that I think unfortunately happens a great deal, is you just lie and the and the institutions become sociopathic. They pretend that the growth is still going on and then it’s only years and years later that people figure out that there are no jobs.

To tie it back to wokeness, wokeness is designed to distract from and cope with this structural reality. Say you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry program and there’s a job for only one of them at the end. You’re engaged in a Malthusian struggle, fistfights over beakers and Bunsen burners. Then somebody says something slightly racist or slightly inappropriate. What a relief – you can throw that one person off the overcrowded bus! That kind of phenomenon is perfectly natural, and could be avoided with more growth.

That is, I think he is saying that the problem with society and science stems (STEMs?) not from the screwed up incentive to publish ever more just to make number go up, but from the fact that people just didn't take seriously the idea that number don't go up (of faculty), which could be the fundamental driver for why there is the screwed up incentive to publish ever more just to make number go up. That this core problem drove the messed up incentive system, made the whole thing go sociopathic, generating apathy/lack of ambition (you can't have that wide-eyed of an optimistic ambition within the muck of a clearly sociopathic endeavor), and ultimately giving birth to extremely degenerate behavior like wokeness.

I think some here would say that the only reason why number don't go up (of faculty) is a problem is because society has this strange idea that everyone is completely equal in terms of potential/capability, so they think there's no reason why we couldn't have vastly higher quantities of faculty-capable people. But I'm not sure whether that's the case or if we're genuinely dealing with a weird numbers problem. Literally this morning, I saw a new video from a top chess grandmaster, talking about how the rating system is messed up post-COVID. How a ton of young kids across the world poured obscene amounts of their lives into online chess during that time, due to quarantine/addition/general rise in popularity, and they genuinely got really good at chess. But their skill isn't reflected by the traditional "over the board" rating, because they may just not have played enough games in those settings to have it adjust properly.

I do lament that the vast majority of what gets published is totally worthless, but I'm wishy-washy on whether the fundamental driver is that less capable people are getting into these positions or if it's almost purely a result of incentive structure. In the end, I think it's probably both, but let me sketch it out. This is basically an attempt to steelman the possibility that, say, the 85th percentile of folks who could have even plausibly thought about pursuing a career in academia actually has gotten to be a lot better than they were in the past. Then, since total faculty numbers are stagnant, it wasn't as easy to just look at traditional measures and pick out the highest quality folks (akin to how you can't necessarily just look at OTB chess rating nowadays), but since you couldn't just wait and let the rating system self-correct over time, because, uh, you don't have a self-correcting rating system like ELO for academics, they had to go hard in on shit like just making some number or other go up. Then, even though the quantity of reasonable-tier candidates (and their general quality) may be higher, Goodhart's law still takes over, and you end up selecting the ones that are just better at gaming your metric or stabbing each other in the back (and they focus their efforts on gaming metrics/backstabbing, so that even if they're actually more capable, their output becomes generally worse, which would explain how many crap papers are out there). Apathy, lack of ambition, and dysfunction follow.

(I still don't know whether I actually think the 85th percentile of potential faculty actually has gone up, or just people really want to believe in the absence of an actually good measure.)

This is something I never understand when this discussion comes up. Why think Thiel is right about science not living up to its potential? Peter Thiel knows better than the best chemists/economists/statisticians/physicists/etc what kind of world-changing discoveries they could be making but aren't? Why think this?

Peter Thiel is pretty smart, he topped a maths competition in California, made a couple of multi billion-dollar companies in the STEM sector. Who better to talk about the innovation/science process than a man who did it personally?

'If you're so smart then why aren't you rich' carries a certain weight to it. If those chemists/statisticians/physicists and especially economists were so smart, why don't they have nine-digit net worth? Likewise with Musk, he clearly knows things others don't. Regardless of whether he's right about other matters, he clearly knows how to innovate and make things.

Most very smart people aren’t rich, and most very rich people aren’t very smart, even though they’re certainly smarter than average. Great wealth is a product in many cases of charisma and luck as well as (usually) intelligence.

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