I don’t visit bookstores often enough. Most of my book shopping is done via Amazon. No matter how good online shopping has gotten, it cannot match the serendipity and rush of intellectual curiosity that happens in brick-and-mortar bookstores. I was recently reminded of how pleasant bookstore browsing is a few weeks ago when I wandered into the local Barnes and Noble.
I browsed through the history section for a while before wandering over to philosophy, which is usually one of the smallest sections. I find it quite funny that the philosophy books are typically located right next to the books on religion. It seems that despite modern philosophy’s best efforts, they haven’t yet broken free from their roots in theology.
I felt at home in that area of the bookstore, where Nietzsche and St. Augustine live so close together. It felt like a place of contemplation, consideration, and curiosity. It felt inviting, like the authors wanted to share something with me. Truth was not absent from this place of quiet thought, but it was hidden and distributed. Even the presence of charlatans like Deepak Chopra did not detract from the overall feeling that this was a safe place to explore ideas.
If a philosopher or theologian makes a claim, it is relatively easy to consider whether it is true, especially when one reads widely. A reader can easily begin with questions like, “does this claim correspond with or contradict my experience? Is this argument compelling enough for me to accept on the basis of reason? What counterexamples are there and how might the author respond to the counterexamples?” And then the reader can take the claim under consideration, pose additional questions, rehearse counterarguments in his or her head, and just generally think. Take the most basic assertion of most of theology: God exists. Well, there is no way to prove that conclusively. No one can claim to have a run a study, published peer-reviewed research, and demonstrated the existence of God (or the opposite). But a theist can still provide compelling arguments based on reason and experience and allow the reader to think through the arguments.
The same thing is true of most philosophical claims. Aristotle argues that the good life is achieved by exercising reason and virtue to obtain a feeling of lasting and sustained happiness and satisfaction. Just like the question of the existence of God, this is a claim in which a reader can evaluate Aristotle’s arguments and consider them a priori and a posteriori. You can try it for yourself. Go read Plato’s Protagoras1 (or any of his dialogues), and follow his logic and just enjoy considering his arguments. You know enough to argue with Plato, I promise.
Additionally, a reader is also under no obligation to accept or reject philosophical types of arguments. In fact, most of the fun of philosophy (for me at least) is learning many different types of arguments and ideas and then trying to work them into conversations.
After bidding farewell to the pleasantness of the philosophy and religion section, I turned a corner and found myself in the Science section, and its neighbor: Psychology.
In philosophy and religion, I felt an invitation to explore…
…But when I arrived in Science, the books screamed: BELIEVE THE THINGS THAT I WANT YOU TO BELIEVE!!! STUDIES SHOOWWWWWWWWW!!! THE EVIDENCE DEMONSTRATES!!! ULTIMATE TRUTH IS FOUND IN MY PAGES AND YOU MUST BEEEELIEVE!!! BELIEVE OR PERISH!!!
The feeling was unsettling. I was afraid to pick up most of the books because I didn’t have enough background knowledge in the field to evaluate the claims. If an anthropologist’s book makes claims about how the remnants of ritual burial sites of an ancient civilization demonstrate conclusively that the society was highly egalitarian, how can I know if that is correct or not? If a neuroscientist writes a book about how free will is an illusion and presents a bunch of evidence collected in a lab and published in peer-reviewed journals, how much more reading do I have to do on the subject before being able to think about the subject comprehensively? And the closer the topic of the book got to political questions, the more apprehensive I got.
In the Science section, it felt like the authors didn’t want me to explore, but to read and believe. I didn’t feel an invitation to be curious, to consider, or to contemplate. I felt commanded to believe based on “The Evidence.” This wasn’t true of all the books in the science section, but it was the general feeling that I got anyway.
But perhaps I am being unfair to the science books. In previous essays I have discussed the importance of “critical feeling,” and it feels fair that I apply some critical feeling in this instance. Why was I having such a negative reaction to the science section?
The first reason is basic insecurity. I just don’t know that much about science, so entering into fields in which I have no fundamental basis for understanding means that I won’t know how to evaluate truth claims. I can’t make effective counterarguments.
The second reason is that the revolutionary nature of “science” means that much of what is published today will be discovered to be wrong in the future. In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Philosopher of Science Thomas Kuhn argues persuasively that science does not progress in a linear way, where discoveries are compounded over time to make progress. Rather, he posits that science undergoes periodic “paradigm shifts,” where existing bodies of knowledge are completely overturned and replaced by new theories and ideas that are better able to account for the exceptions that were not accounted for under the old paradigm. The book goes through a myriad of examples of this process. So, why learn a bunch of stuff that was discovered in one paradigm that is likely to end up being overturned anyway? I suspect that in the next decade or two we will see at serious challenges to some of the bedrock theories which have characterized modern science.
The third reason is a simple lack of trust, especially in psychology and social science. Some of the most widely publicized findings in the fields of social science have ended up being wrong, not just because of mistakes, but in some cases because of fraud. I have been burned too many times by pop-psychology to be anything but highly skeptical of everything that is produced in that field.
Thinking Fast and Slow — While I am indebted to this book for getting me really thinking about the mind and decision making, a huge portion of it is based on studies that do not replicate. And after discovering Gigerenzer’s work, I have a much firmer basis on which to understand and criticize Kahneman and his school of thought.
Growth Mindset — This matched my intuition and made me excited about the possibilities for helping others improve. Again, it came to light several years ago that the studies that underpin the main thesis do not replicate.
Anything by Dan Ariely — I am lucky that I did not discover his work before others discovered his fraud because I would have eaten it up. He fabricated data on multiple occasions. All of his work is suspect.
Grit — I never read the book, but I was a cheerleader for Angela Duckworth’s popular TED Talk. A lot of her data was misleading, and she essentially just relabeled things that were already well established in the field.
The Dunning-Krueger Effect — I wrote a whole essay on the problems with this..
But is it fair to extend skepticism of psychology to other “harder” sciences? Unfortunately, I think it is.2345678. This is not to say that all hard science is flawed or fraudulent, I just have no way of spotting mistakes or arguing from first principles. The incentives for sciences in “hard” fields are nearly identical to those in social sciences. Authors want to publish books and papers, and to do so they need strong findings. The temptation to exaggerate, overlook contrary evidence, and oversimplify complicated ideas tends to be very high. And when a study’s findings have political implications, the incentives to do these things adds ideology to greed. Who would have thought that virology would end up being at the center of a political controversy?
The operative word when reading books about science is skepticism. One need not be obtuse, intransigent, obstinate, or hypercritical in order to be skeptical. There is much good science to read, it just may be hard to find.
The skepticism required for science is not, however, required for philosophical inquiry, at least it’s not the same type of skepticism. In reading books that site a lot of studies, it requires additional research to learn more about a topic. In Philosophy, quiet contemplation, writing, and thinking are typically all that are required. For me, this is much more pleasant.
In summary, my initial negative reaction to the science section was probably too strong. A lot of great books reside in that section, and to write them all off would be foolish. In fact, I ended up purchasing two books that day:
Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
Escape From Model Land: how mathematical models lead us astray and what we can do about it by Erika Thompson
I chose the first book because it was originally published in 1987, meaning it has been around for over 30 years, and it seemed like an overview of a burgeoning field, rather than a piece of advocacy. I chose the second book because I know a little bit about the downfalls of modeling and thought it would help me refine some of my critiques around COFM analysis.9
So, I am overcoming my trepidation of the science section, but I remain significantly more skeptical of the science section than the philosophy section.
Download the Substack App!
If you are only getting The Distro in your email then you are really missing out. Substack is an amazing community of people who support each other and share amazing writing. Download it today!
This was the first of Plato’s dialogues that I read when I was a young boy (maybe 13 or 14), so it will always hold a special place in my heart. Although you find out pretty quickly that trying to emulate Socrates’ style in normal discussions makes you quite insufferable—which is probably why the Athenians killed him.
Schön scandal - Wikipedia
Victor Ninov - Wikipedia
Rusi Taleyarkhan - Wikipedia
Olivier Voinnet - Wikipedia
Vishwa Jit Gupta - Wikipedia, Himalayan fossil hoax - Wikipedia
Kenichiro Itami - Wikipedia
How Fake Fossils Pervert Paleontology [Excerpt] | Scientific American
This is an esoteric Army thing. COFM stands for Correlation of Forces and Means. It is a mathematical model designed to help military leaders determine how many and what types of forces we need to counter a given enemy array.
I tracked down Kuhn’s book because this is one of the points of origin for the semi-mythical “Revolution in Military Affairs” (usually written as RMA for obvious reasons). A very interesting point was that Kuhn rejected the possibility that his ideas had any relevance beyond hard science, but I have argued elsewhere that what Kuhn missed was that the process had more to do with how people think and process ideas than it did with the arcania of physics.
Society becomes disconnected with claims to objective truth when theology is deemed irrelevant. C.S. Lewis wrote heavily on the subject. Purely scientific worlds have no basis for universal moral claims.