Scientific Numerology

     One of the reasons I go by the handle "Techpriest" is because I often find myself called to be a priest or evangelist for a scientific 'religion' rather than what is commonly thought of as the objective, fact-finding work of scientists. One such time is when I am called to defend what I call Scientific Numerology.

source: publicdomainpictures.net

    Scientific Numerology is the idea that, since there are some cases in which natural events can be reduced to equations with a few variables, that this must be true of every event. Like any other idea, this idea  that complex systems, like ecosystems, societies, and people can all be reduced to simple equations, has consequences. Namely, believers would argue that the solution to any problem is to data mine the world until the problem can be plotted into a graph, and the graph then serves as a "map" to show what we should do.

    To sum up the history of this idea in as short a manner as possible,  Scientific Numerology is a part of a larger "cult of expertise" which teaches that the rule of enlightened experts will lead to a perfect world. This idea has been around a long time, but in more recent years improvements in computing power led to a resurgence of the idea that enough scientists cranking out data would, one day, find a perfect set of laws, regulations, and whatever else that would give us a perfect society. And there is at least some evidence for this: we can build better buildings, better vehicles, and better machines now compared to any other time in human history, so why not give the eggheads double the funding so we can get our flying cars? However, there is a flaw in the idea of this reduction to numbers and equations which presents itself very quickly, and the consequences of this flaw is concerning.

This is the issue: We assume that the facts generated by a scientist are absolute and self-interpreting.

    When a scientist does research, he often has an end in mind. This can cause bias to be introduced in two ways. First, he can choose his methods so that only the data he is interested in is collected. History research is particularly vulnerable to this: if the researcher doesn't include some information and he isn't called on it, then his misinterpretation, intentional or accidental, may be considered "truth." Second, the job of any scientist is to interpret his data to extract a narrative out of it. In my engineering research field, we often call this step "Finding the story to be told," or "Making sense out of the data," since data on its own means nothing without interpretation.

To prevent these biases there is peer review, but what if everyone on the review board is biased in the same way?

    For example, what if all economists with some authority assume that the best thing a government can do is maximize a GDP function, when this assumption is false? They may spend decades trying to fine-tune the GDP function, but in the end, the method they use might cause more harm than good.

    Another example is in health: if a health indicator such as, say cholesterol, is too high, is the issue one of just trying to make the number go down, or is there a larger disease behind the symptom?

    Further still, I remember a food science professor brag in a presentation about how he came up with a way to get record food stamp participation in his state. What about poverty? Where was his solution to help the growing numbers of poor people become independent of food stamps by coming up with creative ways to make healthy food cheaper?

    These are the kinds of questions that need to be asked of researchers, but the reason they aren't asked within research communities is because there is a known fixation on magic numbers within certain fields and making them go up, or, making the numbers fit a narrative. I will discuss more about the creation of narratives next time.

Ideas Have Consequences

    As a kid I had always liked history, particularly the stories of great adversities people have overcome, and the defeat of great evils. It is this latter part about history, the defeat of great evils, that inspired years of thinking and, finally, this blog. As a child I was often told in history class about the evils of slavery, and about the Nazis, and the Communists. And questions I had, which were never answered during that time, were:

1) Why the the public ever allow the Nazis or Communists or whoever else to come into power?

2) Why would anyone want to follow such destructive ideas anyway?

And most importantly,

3) Could people like that ever return?

    The usual answer back to the first two questions usually referred either to the idea that some people are just evil but most people are good, or that evil men like Stalin, Mao and Hitler and their followers were actually insane and got into power by chance. So the solution was to make sure that only "good" people held on to power.

    Since that time, however, I learned about a different reason. It began when I had gotten married, and met my grandmother-in-law for the first time. She is from Inner Mongolia, a province in China, and had the misfortune of growing up during Mao's cultural revolution. She had the double misfortune of being from a well-to-do family, and at a young age seeing her mother dragged away in chains and all of her property seized.

    This time, I was not in history class, and for once talking to a real person.

    I asked her what people at the time thought of all these events, and why the Red Guard did what they did. The answer absolutely shocked me: "Everyone was cheering. They paraded my mother and all the other rich people down the street while their former employees threw rotten vegetables at them." In other words, the Cultural Revolution, at least in Hohhot, wasn't this chance evil that good people kept a distance from, it was a popular celebration! Concerning the reason why, in the backdrop of the ravages of a war with the Japanese and a civil war, Chairman Mao didn't point to these obvious sources of impoverishment, but instead decided to consolidate power by blaming his opponents and rich people. "It's the rich vs. the rest of us," just like today's popular 99% vs. 1% chants.

    The result of this policy, for those unaware, was that the public lived off the seized riches for a year or so, then the wealth ran out and led to widespread famine. A generation later my father-in-law would march in Tiananmen Square and my mother-in-law, staying home since she was with child, had to wait anxiously for his return since the tanks had set up a position in a park across the street, and proceeded to shell the protesters.

    This experience led me to a few years of study and introspection, trying to reconcile what I learned in school vs. what I learned in reality. And recently, I began to see the answer to that question:

Ideas Have Consequences

    This blog will focus on ideas that we see today, where they have been adopted before, what the consequences are, and alternative directions we could go. For now though, with the understanding that ideas have consequences, I will answer the three questions at the beginning in light of this.

1) Why the the public ever allow the Nazis or Communists or whoever else to come into power?

Evil ideas often appear as smart solutions to a problem, but in reality open the door to unintended consequences, which do not manifest themselves until it is too late. The most toxic of all ideas, which I call "I'm right!" can lead people to internally  hold evil thoughts until there is an opportunity to act them out.

2) Why would anyone want to follow such destructive ideas anyway?

People do the most evil when they think they are doing the most good. Coming from my Cultural Revolution example, the Red Guard and even many common Chinese thought that the evil they were committing was in fact a triumph of justice. However, the full reality of that evil took years to set in.

3) Could people like that ever return?

Bad ideas still exist, and most likely will exist for as long as their are people to accept them. Any form of good, including the freedoms we here in the West enjoy, requires constant vigilance.

It's going to be a wild ride in the landscape of ideas, but if that's your thing, join me on this adventure! While this particular post is focused on the grave consequences of bad ideas, there will also be plenty of time given to good ones, and how to defend them.

Opening Post

This is a blog about ideas, and about consequences that flow from those ideas. I was inspired to start writing when I first visited my in-laws in China, and listening to their stories about the rise and fall of Maoist communism.

However, this blog isn't about Chairman Mao per se. Instead, it is more about a revelation I had over that period of time. Long before meeting my wife, I was a child in school, learning about the greatest sins in the world's past -- like communism and nazism -- and I asked myself "If we can see it so well now how terrible people in the past were, how come they couldn't see it too?" In my own case I grew up in what we called "The South," or that collection of states that fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. I read all about slavery and the Jim Crow period, and beyond that I heard more about a post-Civil War dark age from the older people in my neighborhood, so terrifying that they never taught about it in school.

Again, I had the same question, "Why?" Why would people do those kinds of things? How could they not know better? ... And just as importantly, if they didn't know better then, what sins could we be committing right now, but not know it until it's in the history books generations from now?

This blog is the answer I've found to all of these questions, and more. For now, I will leave you with the title: Ideas Have Consequences. The ideas we choose to accept, will very often dictate our actions in ways we cannot predict, both for bad and good.