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June 23, 2020
August 10, 2020
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jessica_riskin-2020jul02-just_use_your_thinking_pump-scientific_method_by_henry_me_cowles.txt
The New York Review of Books
had a piece by Jessica Riskin
"Just Use Your Thinking Pump!" Measure your mind's height
In the July 2, 2020 Issue by how far it spurts
This was nominally a review of a book by Henry M. Cowles:
"The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from
Darwin to Dewey", Harvard University Press
This Jessica Riskin piece begins well,
talking about the strange doctrine of the
the five step Scientific Method.
FIVE_STEP_SCIENCE
Unfortunately, it goes off the rails,
trying hard to be a light-and-breezy
display of liberal/left virtue signaling
that among other things takes aim at
C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" essay.
TWO_CULTS
"For the most part, however, people who cite Snow's lecture don't
bother with anything beyond its two-word title ... "
Myself, I have read the essay, but
some time ago. Riskin's description
of it does not at all sound right to Historians are so *cute*
me, but I can't lay my hands on my when they try to do
copy just now. philosophy of science.
Even ones who are
located at Stanford, as
"... taking it to represent a lament she tells us repeatedly.
over the division of the intellectual
world into two mutually uncomprehending Here I don't sit
cultures, literary scholars and in my office at
scientists. This was Snow's Stanford, where I
window-dressing but not his main have not sat in
merchandise. In fact, he was censuring some time, and
Britain for undervaluing applied yet, I am still
sciences in education and politics [...] willing to
More generally, he was making a case for criticize Jessica
industrialization as the path to social Riskin, as she
as well as economic prosperity." sits in her office
at Stanford.
The wikipedia entry for "The Two Cultures"
helpfully quotes a key part of the essay:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
"A good many times I have been present at gatherings
of people who, by the standards of the traditional
culture, are thought highly educated and who have
with considerable gusto been expressing their
incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or
twice I have been provoked and have asked the company
how many of them could describe the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also
negative. Yet I was asking something which is the
scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of
Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked
an even simpler question-- such as, What do you mean
by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific
equivalent of saying, Can you read?-- not more than
one in ten of the highly educated would have felt
that I was speaking the same language. So the great
edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority
of the cleverest people in the western world have
about as much insight into it as their neolithic
ancestors would have had."
This quote was attributed to:
"Across the Great Divide".
Nature Physics. 5 (5):
309. 2009. doi:10.1038/nphys1258.
Jessica Riskin is arguing against a cartoon view of
C.P. Snow's position, trying to portray him as someone
elevating the sciences to the exclusion of everything
else-- but Snow wrote dozens of novels and I have a
copy of a critical literary study by him ("The
Realists"). The idea that he's *dismissing*
understanding of Shakespeare is completely ridiculous.
Isn't it clear he's not rejecting the liberal arts,
he's rejecting the students of the humanities who know
nothing else?
Jessica Riskin is piously calling for a view of
humanity that integrates both liberal arts and
sciences-- a point with which Snow would actually
be in resounding agreement.
At one point in the Two Cultures essay-- according
to Riskin-- C.P. Snow insisted on the importance of
industrializing the third world, and Riskin is
actually *dismissive* of him on this point!
In a moment I'll quote the full spiel for anyone who
wants to go over it. To my eye it amounts to an
argument that billions of people should've been left
in poverty.
She uses a smattering of historical details to attack
industrialization (roughly, it was bad "because
imperialism" and "because pollution").
The idea that there was some alternative route
to "economic prosperity" *besides* an embrace
of science and technology strikes me as, shall It also occurs to me you
we say, not established. might try polling the
people themselves to ask
One of my worst fears for the future: them if they would've
been better off without
The right has come out of the closet as "industrialization" or if
complete scum, and is largely recognized they'd rather be Stanford
as intellectually bankrupt, desperately professors driving to an
hanging on to power by it's fingernails... air conditioned office
every day.
But because of this, now the left feels
like they're riding high, and the
leftiness of an idea may be taken as the
sole critereon of truth.
As promised, let's give the last word to Riskin's
display of erudition:
"Snow scolded literary scholars and the old elite they
represented for looking down their noses at their
colleagues in engineering fields. These industrious young
'handymen' might be unacquainted with Shakespeare, he
argued, but they would soon be saving geopolitics by
elevating the Third World to the living standards of the
First. Where the Third World might have heard that one
before, Snow did not pause to consider. India, he pointed
out, was very poor, with a life expectancy less than half
what it was in England. In pressing what was certainly
then a progressive argument that 'the only hope of the
poor' lay in industrialization, Snow nevertheless omitted
any mention of its ugly side, its history of exploitation
and inequality. His audience may well have included South
Asian witnesses to the Raj's dismantling of their
economies as part of England's industrialization. Their
perspective would surely have offered reasons to temper
Snow's faith in the benignity of industrial capitalism,
even if we didn't have the vantage point of 2020, with its
ever-polarized living standards and environmental and
geopolitical crises, and with its economy and culture
dominated by Shakespeare scholars. Wait, sorry, no, I mean
by engineer-capitalists elevated to the very heights Snow
demanded on their behalf."
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