Saving the World

Science is often used to justify decisions. Specifically, it produces (probabilistic) laws that we apply to predict the consequences of potential decisions. It is appropriate to trust scientists, according to the cover-story, because they simply do busy-work for us (i.e. objectively collect observations and run calculations). I disagree--I think that scientists do far more than busy-work and that the appropriateness of trusting scientists relies on them being elites.

I've spent many years trying to improve the cover-story (and thereby empower scientific elites to save the world). Here are some writings from various stages of that endeavour. Together they show an overall arch that may inform anyone tempted to follow a similar path.



It was after working as a scientist, seeing what scientists do, that I tried to develop a more accurate cover-story. The most refined version is in How to Deduce that a Decision is Justifiable. If you want to be the next Einstein, this essay provides your foundation--for the rest of us, the interesting part is why the effort fails. I made it rigorous, and developed the appropriate credentials. I became a PhD student of Elliott Sober, arguably the world's leading philosopher of evolutionary biology. I also got an MBA, so I would understand the perspective of science-consumers. All of this served to confirm that my idea was right, but experts simply wouldn't entertain an idea so revolutionary.

Frustrated, I did what many philosophers of science had done before me, and attacked the alternative, offering new, more rigorous arguments against the existing cover-story in A Problem with Probability. The interesting aspect of this paper is its negativity: not just its combative tone, but its combative content (it basically lists ways to undermine confidence in most authoritative thought). It is interesting that someone trying the save the world would be driven to such destruction. And it didn't help--the problem I really wanted to solve was political, not something any mathematical proof could resolve. I didn't just want to confirm for myself that I had the right idea, but to change the way others made decisions. It was terribly frustrating to realize that scholarship is useless for fixing our root problems.

Perhaps as a sort of therapy, I then wrote Evaluating Objections to Faiths and Science which tried to explain why scholarship can't penetrate certain barriers to social progress, why the more promising strategy for saving the world is to build and grow competing faith communities. It makes a fool of all academic endeavours, including itself. Give a gadfly enough time, and his analysis will obliterate even himself.