Saturday, March 15, 2014

Ignoring Those "Ifs" Could Just End Up Killing Us

From what I've been able to read about this "prisoner's dilemma produces the golden rule" line of tripe, the game set up for the computers to run through over and over again, is little like real life.  It is an incredibly narrow and artificial set-up that I'd guess seldom if ever is accurately matched in real life.

To start with, the teaching of the Jewish tradition, beginning in the Torah, through Hillel and Jesus and his earliest followers, wasn't meant to be confined to an artificial set up of mathematicians and ideologically motivated, so-called scientists.   The Jewish prophets and scholars were talking about real life.    It's my understanding that the extremely rigorous and detailed debates of Jewish scholars about the application of The Law to real life situations is so contentious BECAUSE it addresses real life instead of something that would fit into equations and computer language.  So, to start with, the conclusions of those who would fit that teaching into the dogma of natural selection are based on an inadequate reductionist presentation of what "the golden rule" was articulated to address, don't do what they claim they do.   That alone makes the contention that the game theoreticians have produced the same thing, absurd.

I don't think it's possible for any, single mathematical reduction to address the vastly complex range of human experiences and human actions that the prophets were addressing.   I'd like to hear someone defend idea that any mathematics that is humanly achievable could do that.   The assumption that what was given to the computers to run through is the same as that enormous variety of lived experience is nonsense.  We are talking about the enormously variable behavior of human beings in real life, not subatomic particles under controlled conditions.

That kind of absurdly reductionist modeling as reliably representative of real life is a basic superstition on which much of the "science" of behavior and societies is based.  It is often betrayed by the use of conditional statements found early in the process that are then just ignored in the rest of the process.  There is so often a tiny "if" put in one of the early sentences that is supposed to act as an escape clause if someone points out that the thing is based on some rather massive and unfounded assumptions.   Sometimes that "if" is implied but not stated, and by the time the popular "understanding" of the results are given it has disappeared into a statement as definite as those which any true believe have ever declaimed.

In one of the most annoying of recent commercials - well other than those of the oil industry shill, Brooke Alexander -  an upper class, Brit male voice says,  "We believe that if love is a chemical reaction [therefore the petrochemical industry = LUV. ]."  For an Irish guy it might be tempting to say,  figures that it would be a Brit who would think of love in terms of petro-chemicals.  But what this is is an absurd reductionism of one of the most profound and incomprehensible and, yet, the most meaningful of all human experiences  which ends up with promoting an industry that regularly sells death and environmental destruction for profit.   The motives of reducing profound human experiences into absurd symbolic substitutes is something that deserves serious study because the history of that effort is of one of the venues of organized human behavior that has produced enormous damage to human beings and the biological systems we require to live.

It is a habit of thought that is particularly popular with atheists, as I have shown in a long series of posts about the desire to make bio-chemistry, destiny.  Its generalization into the culture is on the basis of an uncritical and unthinking veneration of anything that can get called "science" on the basis of ideology or, originally, wearing down the resistance of real scientists who certainly would find it deficient and a complete violation of the standards that real science, physical science, requires, if they would only be honest about that.

In one of those earlier posts, I noted the horrified reaction of the eminent biologist, Vernon Kellog to essentially the same kind of thinking among the educated German elite in the early 20th century.   And he was talking about those ideas becoming current only among the elite.   Today they are promoted throughout the media on a daily basis, as the NPR story I heard this morning, the reason I'm writing this, demonstrates.   It is becoming the popular understanding of life, even among those who should be entirely skeptical about it.

The social, so-called, "sciences" have a history of having the securely stated, widely distributed foundations of its various branches and schools being widely accepted and then totally discredited.  I have come to conclude that that is a guaranteed result of the kind of reductionism that they base their "science" on. Real life will out, eventually, it will overtake and press the issues skated over by those opening and perfunctory "if" clauses.   It is remarkable that, given the serial collapses of behavioral science that it has retained its position in popular credulity.   I think that is because those social scientists are selling stuff that is saleable, especially to the mid-brow salesmen of the media.  I have found, over and over again that most of the people pushing that stuff in the media have scant scientific background and education.  Even in some of the popular science magazines, such as Scientific American.   I think we need to demand that real scientists apply their scientific rigor in a critique of this kind of stuff.  If they don't want to see scientific methods discredited, they will have to defend them from this kind of stuff.

Update:   The series of posts I did about Joseph Weizenbaum's great book, Computer Power and Human Reason is also very relevant to this topic.   I think I'll do an index of those posts.  Who knows, I might decide to expand it.

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