Scientific Chewing

I am not going to tell you to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Once you know that Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard is people, you grasp the idea. But at the end of the book, after surviving innumerable horrors and humiliations (the only mercy Sinclair allows him is a stint as a migrant worker), the main character falls in with a group of talkative Socialists. Sinclair is artist enough not to make them saints. He makes them almost silly. He wants us not to agree with their solutions, but to respond to the fact of their caring, to respond to their trying to do anything at all. He wants us not to admire them, but to imagine ourselves as one of them. I forget the rest of the projects, but one, mentioned in passing, stuck in my mind. One man proposes “to double the nutritive value of food through the practice of scientific chewing.”

My mind has an alarm for absurdity in reforms and projects; scientific chewing is the noise it makes. Sometimes I read about a project, and despite its well-designed site, its clever name and cleverer slogan, and the intent, conscientious faces of its young founders – all I hear is scientific chewing.

All useful ideas have three life stages: an infancy when they seem ridiculous; an adolescence when they seem all-important; and a maturity when they are present and useful, but limited, and possibly invisible. Scientific chewing belongs to the adolescence of the idea of the scientific. Those who have only recently learned the benefits of scientific handwashing are susceptible to the idea that chewing might also advance.

The projects that make me think of scientific chewing belong to the same stage, the analogous adolescence, of other ideas. Recent examples are many. Online has finally achieved its maturity. There are no more projects tantamount to online chewing, though their weight once sank the economy. Social is in the throes of adolescence; most days some variant of social chewing shows up in the news, flush with seed funding. Crowdsourced is just settling down; mobile is just hitting puberty.

These examples are worth enumerating because we are very fortunate in them. The worst their excesses have done is make fools of us. We have been spared the upheavals and atrocities that accompanied the adolescence of ideas like the people or the nation, like society or central planning. The motion of ideas is circular, but not static; a cycloid, not an orbit; but though it moves forward, it moves with wheels that are heavy and iron, and able to run you down.

My interest is not critical but analytic. I want to know where I stand; I want to know when to get out of the way. If ideas really move in a circle, born boosters and born skeptics will both be right sometimes, like stopped clocks. Scientific chewing is my cue to stand with the skeptics. I have no equally vivid cue to switch the other way; though I have found that my initial sense that something is pointless and weird reliably predicts its popularity – witness the Internet.

I know this essay is a little miscellaneous; so are the rest of the essays where I try to think about ideas as such. I feel something enormous and terrainous loom in the darkness; when something lights that bulk I observe it as an explorer, and not knowing which features are most important, I cannot omit any.

Amateurs

In the twentieth century, better a professional and wrong than an amateur and right. A lie in the high tower commanded the respect and attention of the world. It shaped the textbooks and the encyclopedias, it directed the cameras and the microphones. A truth in the street had to recruit and organize, had to keep the heat on and blow the lid off.

In the twenty-first century, better an amateur and wrong than a professional and right. A lie in the street finds friends everywhere. It supplies interests and activities, it bonds a community: the less self-supporting, the more room for supporters. A truth in the high tower must patiently plait its proofs until they hang long and thick enough to support the perilous climb down.

The distinction between the amateur and the professional is not necessary or ancient. It is a conclusion of the philosophy of pragmatism, one of pragmatism’s dynamic alternatives to the statics of classical philosophy. Everything used to be much more like cooking, where the difference between professionals and amateurs – the difference between livelihood and pastime – is one of better ingredients, better equipment, and wider experience – a difference not of kind but of degree.

The distinction does not divide one scale of practice into the amateur and the professional; it removes professional practice from amateur judgment. Success in all practice had been judged against something prior to practice. There were judges then because there were standards. But the professional, having some arduous qualification, defines the profession as what professionals do. Professionalism is not a standard; professionalism is an alternative to standards. Now there are standards because there are judges. Who are you to tell someone instructed and trained, tested and proven – to tell a doctor, a lawyer, an artist, a scientist – who are you tell them what to be? They are not told; they show. If you must have a system, describe them; but do not expect them to notice. Apes do not care about primatology; scientists do not care about philosophy of science.

We do not recognize this division as pragmatism because it has left pragmatism behind and become, instead of a conclusion, a postulate – no, more than a postulate, it has become its own form of logic. The necessities of professionalism define reality. Professions do not serve purposes; purposes serve professions. Not that professionalism is priestcraft. The professional is not the priest of the god; the professional is the very god, and unanswerable. It is difficult to read Job today except as God the Professional shutting down His critics.

Professionalism won; but professionalism is not self-sustaining. Like nature around technology, amateurism grows up in all the cracks of professionalism, and encloses all of its structures. One of the wonders of the early web was to see, in all its private seriousness, the wider ecosystem of amateurism inside which professionalism lives. Until then professionals, like migrating birds, came from somewhere, somehow, and went somewhere, for something. Now we saw the grave mimicry of the professional manner by which postulants committed themselves; we saw the ingenious criticisms by which they kept themselves involved; we saw how the necropolis of obsolete methods, dead-end theories, and abandoned movements was refurbished and inhabited.

But nature around technology is not just what remains of nature before technology; it is something different. Prey becomes pest; wild becomes weed. Amateurism around professionalism is something different than amateurism before professionalism. Separation from money made it resourceful; separation from recognition made it incorrigible; separation from responsibility made it reckless. These changes cannot be reversed. To let go of professionalism would no more restore Renaissance men, gentleman scientists, scholar-adventurers, or philosopher-legislators to mankind, than to remove mankind would restore to nature the mammoth, the aurochs, or the thylacine. There are lines of descent in human varieties as much as in natural species. With these too, extinction is forever. Sometimes backbreeds and hybridization revive the traits; but without a niche to inhabit the result is only a curiosity. In an ecology, if a niche is extant, something will fill it, and if the niche is gone, some other ecology has displaced it. Effectual amateurism has been re-opened; but what we get from it may as little resemble what we had before, as the kangaroo resembles the deer.

Professionalism is an evident pathology. Its privileges are too tempting for us. All professionalism decays toward the asymptote of the DSM. But for now, there is no alternative. Professionalism and amateurism have coexisted too long; they require one another for correction. One cannot be right unless the other is wrong; for now, to be right at all, we need them both.

Historiography

Historians are the natural predators of history. History, like entropy, always increases in a closed system. Without historians to control it, history would suffocate us. Whole peoples live today enthralled by history, peoples for whom the dishonors of a thousand years ago require the murders of today – and all because they never had historians to set them free.

History always increases. There are always more artifacts and more events, always more memories binding those artifacts and those events. The natural condition of history is not the absence of history, but absolute history – when commemoration and observance fill every every hour and block every path, until any choice is violation or sacrilege, and any novelty is hubris or corruption.

Of course there are other, uglier ways to fight history than the historian’s. But besides its low success rate, fighting history with atrocity is perverse. It is only a way of destroying someone else’s history; the winner is still doomed to have their own history written.

The historian is gentler and more effective. In consolidating and concentrating history, in resolving it with narrative, the historian does to history what the distiller does to grain: reduces so many tons of space-consuming, care-intensive material into something stable, compact, and portable. The historian who puts a name and meaning to a period gives us categories of thought that allow us to sort and assess masses of artifacts and memories that would otherwise lay total claim to our attention and devotion.

History is not over. History is still happening. History is still flowing from the invisible meanwhile to the obvious retrospect. But just because we are in history, because we must learn from it – so we must not submit to it, we must not inherit our place in it; we must be free enough of it that we can range over it, that we can examine all of it and it can examine us. Let us look at the past and let it look at us; let us invite the dead to judge the living as their most impartial judges. But first we must be free to take the judgment of the best wherever they are found, not only among our fathers and forebears.

Polyps make coral; trees make wood; human beings make history. Freedom from history is not freedom without history, but freedom for history: the freedom that makes us equal in history with those who have come before us and those who will come after us: not the wreck of the past, not the redeemers of the past, not the seed of the future, not the betrayers of the future, but what we are: the inescapable present.

Common sense

I respect common sense only because it is inconsistent. Of course consistency is good; certainly inconsistency is bad; but there is a kind of knowledge which is useful, not because it is known to be right, but useful only until it is known to be right.

Beginning with what we cannot deny, consistency brings us to what we cannot support. Surprise is a conserved quantity. We can begin with common-sense principles and end with surprising conclusions; or, if we wish to derive common-sense conclusions, in working backward we will arrive at surprising principles. Consistency always incurs surprise – surprise relative to common sense.

This is why I avoid political systems. They begin with, they have as their attraction, common-sense conclusions I could no more disagree with than fail to think of myself. Of course I see, and seeing condemn, the horrors of exploitation, the grotesqueness of consumption; of course I see, and seeing condemn, the incompetence of government, the farce of bureaucracy. But commitment demands consistency, and what begins in the recognition of common sense ends unrecognizably.

Always use common sense; never trust it. Common sense is not wisdom, it is wisdom made fungible. All of its rings true, but none of it agrees with itself. You can no more think with common sense than you can eat money.

Art vs. Life

Sometimes art frightens me. Sometimes I wonder what art is taking to match what it gives. Surely talk was faster and more excursive before recording; surely clothing was more splendid and plumed before photography; surely gesture and pose were quicker and more lifelike before movies. Maybe worship was more devoted, before idols and icons; maybe love was stronger, memory keener, regret fiercer before the portrait; maybe voices were softer, birdsong sweeter, before music. Art universalizes particular experience, delivers it across space, time, and language. But what we receive as if transmitted, might only be lost; what we receive as if preserved, might only be embalmed; what we receive as if translated, might only be parodied. How are we, art-shrouded, art-addled, to know any better? When every sense bends to its particular art, do we more watch than see, more listen than hear, more savor than taste? At best art stands between us and life; at worst it supplants our lives. What could Arthur Henry Hallam have done with his life to match In Memoriam? – where the use of grief in art prevents us from sharing that grief, we who so value the expression. I fear art and I love it; I fear it as I love it, because love is power given, and power brings abuse of power. So many minds are lost to art, full of images and stories they do not even recognize as art, puppets to old, ingrown art (they call it common sense). I study art, value it, and judge it not to pass life but to save life: because to study, value, and judge art is the only defense against it.

Cognitive psychology 5/5

If all this were true it would have two consequences. First, it would require a strict distinction between what a person reports their perception to be and what that perception actually is. The act of perceiving a perception in order to describe or render it would be understood as a skill, subject to cultivation. What cognitive psychology identifies as a bias of human perception would be no more than an untrained clumsiness. And second, it would regard the ways that cognitive psychology identifies to influence human behavior as weaknesses to be compensated by education, not intrinsic handles to pull in a desirable direction.

All this essaying is futile, I know. Even if I were right, no one would ever call me right, except in retrospect; and I am very likely wrong. In doubting a large field of scientific work I am certain to sound like a crank. I can only note that I am not nailing up theses; and that if I am wrong I am only hurting myself.

Postscript 2014

Since I wrote this essay I have participated, as a subject, in several experiments in cognitive psychology. In consequence, I now regard cognitive psychology as a pseudoscience.

I still think cognitive psychology is interesting. It is philosophically interesting, not because it uses science to cast light on the problems of philosophy, but simply because it is interesting philosophy. Its scientific pretensions are false.

Here is the problem: in order to avoid the appearance of shirking, the subject has no choice but to express preferences in the absence of preference and beliefs in the absence of belief. Even without financial stakes, ordinary social conventions compel the subject, in order to be kind to the experimenter, to deceive them.

It goes like this. The experimenter asks, “Does this make me look fat?” The subject says, “No.” And the experiment concludes: “Human beings are incapable of accurate estimation of one another’s weight.” Soon books are written about “cognitive weight bias.” “For our ancestors,” the press release begins, “underestimating one another’s weight was an important survival strategy.” This is what cognitive psychology is, and it is all cognitive psychology is: the heedless elaboration of a social solecism.

To put it another way: professors should not experiment on students for the same reasons professors should not date students. (Effectively all cognitive psychology is done by professors experimenting on students; where the subjects are not students, they are still acting in the role of students.) Between professors and students there are power differentials that preclude sexual consent. But someone who cannot give an honest answer to a sexual proposition certainly cannot give an honest answer to a personality inventory. If it is a bad idea for professors to date students, it is a far worse idea for professors to experiment on them.

Cognitive psychology 4/5

In the laboratory this fine distinction can only split hairs. I should supply a larger example that will bear the division better.

Drawing is self-reporting of a kind. Proposition: if you accept the standards that cognitive psychology uses to judge the self-reporting of perceptions, then you must also accept that people who draw perceive the world as they draw it to be; which is absurd, because they could not survive. When you draw a stick figure, that does not justify the conclusion that stick figures are what you see.

Some objections present themselves.

1​. If drawing is a manual skill, then non-artists may simply lack enough control to make the pencil do what they want.

There is certainly room for manual skill in drawing; but it is not required. Anyone who can negotiate the angles and curves of the alphabet has all the control required for a sketch.

2​. Non-artists do not perceive the world as they draw it, but the way they draw distorts what they see, the same way memory in general distorts what they experience.

There is an obvious comparison between how memory and drawing both exaggerate emotionally significant aspects of perception; between how memory artfully fits experience to narrative, and how drawing unartfully fits vision to outline.

Consider outlines. Outlines exist nowhere but in non-artists’ drawings. Nature defies outline; vision nowhere finds it. Nonetheless when non-artists draw, invariably they first attempt an outline – even cave painters, who were artists when they drew, still loved to outline their hands on the rock. Outlines are not incompatible with art – the Egyptians made high art of shaded outlines – but they are prior to art. Abstract outlines do not depict anything: their value is that, being abstractions, they preserve the symmetries and topologies of what they anonymize – they are mathematical in character and, for simple shapes, the origin of mathematics in the promise of geometry.

The comparison with memory and narrative is obvious. We need not invoke the world-cone diagrams of physics to understand that in anything that happens, an imponderable diversity of causes conspire, and that for anything that happens, an innumerable diversity of effects result. Every event is part of the fabric of the whole world.

Narrative, like outline, is unreal but useful; patterns of events, like shapes, though potentially infinite in variety, tend to approximate simple forms with predictable properties.

But drawing cannot distort information in the same way as memory. However badly someone draws, they do not ever act as if they see the world that way. To walk or sit, to touch or pick up, proves that a non-artist does not bungle seeing the world in same way as rendering it. Even in dreams no one sees as badly as they draw. The brain does not retouch value into outline before storing it; the reduction to outline is a loss within the brain.

3​. If someone does not draw in a style that resembles Western art, that person is not therefore a non-artist. High cultures elevate as art what Westerners might regard as mistakes. Non-artists may not exist. Could it be that everyone distorts their perceptions artistically when they draw, most in more dramatic ways than the subtle ones traditionally valorized in the West?

Western art has its conventions, but to say that photography and the kind of art that obeys the same laws of optics and projection is essentially a cultural convention requires more gall than I have. Human eyes only work one way. The anecdote says that a pygmy brought out of the forest could not tell buffaloes on the horizon from insects. Assume the anecdote is true; what does it prove? It proves that there exists such a thing as a myopic pygmy. Or should we believe that pygmies never look up into the crowns of trees? That they cannot tell that the bird overhead is the same as the bird in the bush? To prize optic validity as artistic quality is cultural; but the validity itself is physiological.

So if for the first 3500 years or so of human history no culture or civilization held the goal of art to be to represent just what was seen, then of course we are readily distracted by other goals, and must be induced by long training to give them up for this one particular goal of realism.

But I am unwilling to credit that the artistic way is ever the easy way. The artists of the cave walls, of Egypt and Sumer, of India and Persia, were no lazier than the artists of Venice, Florence, and Amsterdam. They were not primitive; they were not innocent. Assimilating natural errors to artistic traditions they happen to resemble represents a more ridiculous pedestal for Western art than any academy ever proposed.

Too, perspective and foreshadowing are not utterly alien to the brain; I suspect that even those whose arts reject these values, do in fact dream with them.

Cognitive psychology 3/5

The textbook scientific method abstracts a discovery from the experiment that made it as early and thoroughly as possible – by suppressing the personalities of the experimenters; by using standardized equipment and methods of analysis; by ensuring reproducibility and undertaking it. All these mechanisms are relatively weak in cognitive psychology. Success results in advancement, experiments are themselves the instruments, and with the expense and inconvenience of recruitment, and the backlog of experiments yet to be done, reproducing experiments is a last resort. But psychology has never worked the formal way – try it, and you get Behaviorism – and this way seems, for the most part, to work.

Cognitive psychology had to fight to free itself from Behaviorism. Here we come to the problem. Behaviorism rejected introspection; cognitive psychology accepts it; but it exchanges uncritical rejection for uncritical acceptance. I think that there is something that cognitive psychology gets fundamentally wrong about introspection: it assumes that our perceptions resemble our perception of our perceptions.

(Nominally cognitive psychology rejects “introspection” but accepts “self-reporting” – I do not understand the difference.)

For example: a form of experiment is to present a list of words on a common theme for memorization. The list omits some particularly obvious entry that could be expected to occur with the rest. When memorizers repeat the list back, they often supply this absent word. The obvious conclusion, the conclusion that cognitive psychology draws, is that the memorizers have perceived the absent word; that a subconscious process – sub in the sense of subroutine – inserts the extra word into the memorizer’s perception of the list.

But this may not be so. Precisely because the list is simple it obscures the distinction between perception and perception-of-perception. There is another interpretation. What if the memorizers do not perceive the extra word? What if, instead, in reproducing the list, the memorizers perceive their own perception of the list in an incorrect, yet conscious way?

Cognitive psychology 2/5

Before I attempt a reasoned argument I want to sketch some broad points of discomfort with cognitive psychology.

1​. It is impossible to pay sustained attention to cognitive psychology without suspecting that the point of many experiments is not the paper, but the press release. When we hear “science writer,” we imagine journalists trawling scientific publications for stories with headline appeal. But this is not how it works. Institutions (with what degree of involvement from researchers I do not know) push press releases to sites like EurekAlert!; journalists may check up on them to add human interest; but the transition between experiment and news item happens inside the institution. As a regime of incentives, this strikes me as perverse.

2​. Cognitive psychology is based on the model of the brain as a computer; but this is a trivial statement, nearly a tautology. It implies that a computer is a kind of machine, another something like a clock or car; a sophisticated machine, certainly, but just a machine; just a machine, and the brain just another example.

Cognitive psychology began when the psychologists of the 1960s saw the first electronic computers and found in them an analogy for the mind. Unfortunately this is still true: cognitive psychology still understands the mind as a computer of the 1960s, complete with fMRI blinkenlights.

But this is not what a computer is. The history of computers is not a history of invention; it is a history of discovery. We did not invent computers; we discovered computation. Computation is an aspect of nature, something like heat or gravity, a property of all sufficiently complex systems. If something is not a computer, it is less than a computer. Of course the brain is a computer; and—?

3​. Cognitive psychology and ethics in psychological research are roughly coeval. The obvious suspicion is to wonder: did we discover cognitive psychology because it was the only psychology we could discover ethically? In ages when the human form was held sacred, even after death, anatomy without dissection went badly wrong. Medieval anatomy reflected not the body, but medieval ethics. Does psychology reflect the mind, or does it reflect the ethics that direct our examination of the mind?

Cognitive psychology 1/5

So pervasive have the claims of cognitive psychology become, so often do I encounter the rhetoric in which the introductory anecdote takes the form of a cognitive psychology experiment, that I find it necessary to decide just what I think of it, and where I stand. I do so best by doing so publicly.

I admire cognitive psychology. It is the most coherent and fruitful paradigm in psychology. The nosology of biases, by itself, might be the greatest act of thinking about thinking since the Greek achievement of logic.

Of course, like logic, the doctrine of biases is subject to misuse – the more so because it is new and we have little experience with its limitations. In logic, the spirit of catching out logical fallacies trivializes itself in the principle of the fallacy of fallacies – the error of assuming that because an argument is fallacious, its conclusion is wrong. Now, because biases are innate, but the recognition of biases is acquired, the use in argument of accusations of bias cannot be closed by a neat “bias of biases”; but something equivalent is required to avoid the error of rejecting conclusions not because they are wrong, but because they are biased – which, in itself, is no argument.

Biases are everywhere. But the very pervasiveness of cognitive psychology risks creating a new bias – a meta-bias, a confusion between biased and wrong.