Hi! The best jokes deserve someone to explain them!
My (Kuhn’s) answer to OP is, it depends what the state of knowledge in your field is. If you are doing the normal science work of researching the implications of a theoretical discovery, you don’t need to worry too much about challenging the status quo.
But, if your field has come to the limit of its current paradigm, then deference to the status quo starts to hinder you.
The problem is that being at the limit of your current paradigm is also the place where endless baroque tweaks and variations of a theory start happening to try and accommodate the situations where the paradigm fails.
And grad-school is nothing better than a factory for the creation of complex, Byzantine, and ultimately profoundly boring scientific insights.
On some level you have to learn to play and win the game though, if you’re ever going to be powerful enough enough to change it.
> The simplified narrative is "Truth comes from elders and societal consensus."
I get the impression that you haven't frequented scientific academic circles. Although old (and incorrect) theories tend to die alongside the academic who proposed them, the community side of the scientific process tends to combine collaborative and competitive management of ideas. Discovering things that are at sufficiently at odds with current knowledge and understanding, tends to be the way to make a name for yourself in science.
> the community side of the scientific process tends to combine collaborative and competitive management of ideas.
I always hear people say this, but I just haven't seen it. As I read more and more about science, over time I've developed more and more opinions about science that goes against consensus. I would love to name some examples here, but I won't because I know it'll derail the discussion. In my experience, anytime you express an opinion contrary to scientific consensus, it NEVER EVER EVER results in a respectful debate. It always results in name calling and insulting (at least on reddit).
>anytime you express an opinion contrary to scientific consensus, it NEVER EVER EVER results in a respectful debate. It always results in name calling and insulting (at least on reddit).
And that's the pivital point: scientific discussion among laymen are not science as it's done in the scientific community. But among laymen, the scientific consensus is exactly what's most relevant. Ideas that severely diviate from that tend to be wrong, which is unsurprising since change in scientific thinking is necessarily based on the incorporation of new data, not on armchair philosophy, to put it bluntly.
No meant as an insult, but as a trigger for self reflection (which everyone regularly needs, myself included):
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
> And that's the pivital point: scientific discussion among laymen are not science as it's done in the scientific community. But among laymen, the scientific consensus is exactly what's most relevant. Ideas that severely diviate from that tend to be wrong, which is unsurprising since change in scientific thinking is necessarily based on the incorporation of new data, not on armchair philosophy, to put it bluntly.
What you're basically saying here is that since I'm a layperson, then all of my ideas are wrong if they disagree with scientific consensus. That's exactly the conundrum that's laid out in the OP. You're saying that the world is split into two categories. One side is the the big brained geniuses that are right about everything, and the other side are the tiny brained morons that are wrong about everything. If you happen to be one of the tiny brains, then you need to just shut the hell up and orient yourself to the big brains because they know what they're talking about.
The question then becomes: What demarcates those who get to be in the "big brained" category? If I spend hours and hours reading research papers do I get to join the big brain camp, or am I destined to be a tiny brained layperson for the rest of my life no matter what? If I enroll in a university and earn myself a PhD, but still disagree with consensus, does my big brain status get revoked?
>One side is the the big brained geniuses that are right about everything, and the other side are the tiny brained morons that are wrong about everything. If you happen to be one of the tiny brains
No, one side is people who have dedicated their lives to the job of doing science, while the other are people who may be enthusiastic about science but have zero practical experience with actually doing science.
Honestly, all that 'big brain' nonsense? Science is lots and lots of gruelling, tediously boring work with short intermittent bursts of writing a paper and hopefully getting it published. And if you persist, and maybe even excell, at that for enough years, then you get to have some scientific standing. Screaming at ~~reddit~~ the clouds will give you exactly zero scientific standing.
>If I enroll in a university and earn myself a PhD, but still disagree with consensus, does my big brain status get revoked?
That depends ... can you do the work and find evidence for your claims, or will you just keep on screaming at the clouds?
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
> What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
It's funny that you say this, because I TOTALLY AGREE, which is why I sometimes disagree with consensus.
There are two types of disagreements when it comes to disagreeing with scientific consensus. One way is when consensus rejects evidence, but you think it should not be rejected. This is called "additive disagreement", because with your disagreement, you're trying to add new evidence that would otherwise not be added. The other kind of disagreement goes the other way around. Consensus accepts some evidence, but the person disagreeing believe that evidence is not valid and should be rejected. This is called "subtractive disagreement".
All of my disagreements with scientific consensus are of the subtractive variety. It's not about "finding evidence for my claims", because I'm not making a claim. The other side is making the claim, and I'm trying to disprove those claims. But the response is always "You're just too dumb to understand why this evidence is valid because you're just a tiny brained redditor. The people you're disagreeing with have tons of years of experience, so show some respect"
Every scientist's work has supposedly gone through the scientific method. If you're skeptical, then baseless assertions aren't going to change anything. All they do is muddy the water. You would either need to show how the scientists you disagree with deviated from the scientific method or go through the method with your own experiment disproving them.
If you don't do that, then how is anyone supposed to know if you're right?
The method is solid, its been around for hundreds of years. Its what got us to the moon and to split the atom, its described the universe and germs. Its held up as the best way to distill true information from evidence in every situation.
You're free to read the articles of professors and scientists online and shoot them emails. Most of them have public emails and LinkedIn profiles.
This is not actually true. I mean I agree with the ethos, and the scientific ideal of the method does really seem to have alot to do with getting things rights, but as to the actual method, it doesn't seem to have existed all that long. The scientific method as we know it in today's academia, is maybe 50 years old. Maybe 60 if we push it. But already 70 years ago academic work was so utterly different from today, that it would cause an uproar today.
Also the success of the method is debatable. Sociology of science and agnotology have been hard at work poking holes in this idea that science is good at correcting itself. It would be closer to the truth to say that science, as opposed to other traditions, sometimes eventually manages to correct itself.
Just a factual sidenote. The actual point of your comment I agree with. It's the content of the argument that matters, and if someone disagrees with an expert, one should address the work and the findings, not the authority of the expert.
I'd say that it's less about big brains and little brains, and more about recognition of expertise and enculturation into a field.
You can read all the papers you want, but there are certain things that you will only learn by being embedded in a community of experts. This is less about gatekeeping and more about coming to understand the norms of a particular scientific community.
I suspect the reason why layfolk (e.g. on Facebook) get derided so much for their opinions against consensus is because many are seen to be contrarian. That is, they take an opposing view because of a distrust of expertise, a particular ideological perspective, or because they think they're Galileo.
If you, as a layperson, propose some view against the consensus, you can do by asking why your view is wrong. Why is it that this particular view doesn't hold water? Has it been considered before? What are you missing that you may have missed? Then, when exhausting and correcting for all of the holes, if your view works better than the current consensus, it will be adopted (albeit slowly). This is the way is "generally" works within an expert community.
> If you, as a layperson, propose some view against the consensus, you can do by asking why your view is wrong.
All of my disagreements with consensus are always of the same form. I mention this in another post on this thread. That form is usually me saying evidence brought forth by another person is not coherent, and therefore not valid.
Take this example. Say a scientist publishes a research paper claiming that black holes have some weird quality to them. Then, when you read into the nitty gritty details of the paper and you find out that the evidence behind this claim boils down to "my uncle fred said that black holes have this quality, and he's really smart, he beat me at tick-tac-toe three times in a row once"
When I see that, my stance will be "I don't accept this result because the evidence is incoherent to me". The result will likely be "well, obviously it doesn't make sense to you. You're a small brained idiot. All of us big brain smart people have no problem grasping why beating you three time in a row at tic-tac-toe makes you smart enough to know a black hole has this particular quality in question."
On the other hand, assume that Neil DeGrasse Tyson hears of this research paper. He then goes on his podcast and says to his audience "this paper here is claiming that winning tic-tac-toe three times in a row makes a person qualified to just know something black holes have this particular quality. I don't follow this reasoning." In this case, people will accept his claim and will consider this paper's claim invalid. If one of the big brains says he doesn't understand something, that means something. If a tiny brain says he doesn't understand something, thats just a day that ends with a "y".
The only people who can objectively claim that evidence is invalid, are the ones with status. If you have no status, then no one will even for a fraction of a second consider the possibly of ever agreeing with you on that issue.
There are a few different topics you're touching on here. It might be useful to have a read on how others have cached this out.
Alfred Moore gives us a way of understanding how we make judgments of expert claims (look at chapter 3).
Stephen Turner deals with the idea of epistemic authority and how it changes depending on the roles involved (read the section on Cognitive Authority and its Legitimacy).
Finally, we have Thomas Gieryn who talks about the work scientists do around the boundaries and edges of their fields. Whilst this is typically around demarcating science from non-science (if such a thing can even be done), you can apply it similarly to demarcating the various groups interacting with scientific knowledge.
References
Moore, Alfred. 2017. Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Problem of Expertise. Cambridge University Press.
Gieryn, Thomas F. 1983. ‘Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists’. American Sociological Review 48 (6): 781. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095325.
Everyone has areas of expertise that are different. When I'm discussing something that isn't my area of expertise, I definitely give more credence to someone who is an expert. In return they would do the same for me if the topics lined up that way. As for experts that don't agree with other experts in their field, that's how scientific understanding evolves. I think it's worthwhile considering their viewpoint.
That's insulting. No AI was involved in this, not even to formulate my thoughts. jesh. For one thing It's about 5% as long as what an llm would produce. For another I lost my job at 57 last year due to cuts so my former company could through a few more billions at AI datacenters, so fuck off.
"since I'm a layperson, then all of my ideas are wrong if they disagree with scientific consensus"
No, not necessarily all of them. But the bulk of those ideas are going to be wrong. It's a game of statistics.
Two scenarios, in a field where the scientific consensus is long established, overwhelmingly accepted, and well supported by experimental evidence. But there are some "dark clouds on the horizon", or some experimental data that doesn't quite fit the models, or an inconsistency in the models.
Situation A: a layperson without education (=knowledge) and experience (=common sense) proposes that the consensus is wrong. They are 99.999% likely to be talking nonsense.
Situation B: A young assistant professor, who has been doing experimental work in exactly the area where trouble is already brewing, suggests that a medium-size modification of the underlying model is necessary. They are 90% likely to be wrong, but 10% likely to be right.
Now in Situation B, in a culture in which criticizing your elders is career (and relationship) suicide, in a group that is trying to get stuff done fast and efficiently and the criticism the young assistant professor offers will slow things down, where the old guy who runs the research group or department is trying to get the Nobel price and criticism from within his own lab would reduce his chances, the problem the OP refers to absolutely exists.
And yes, having worked in experimental research in a hard science, I have seen these situations first hand.
>What you're basically saying here is that since I'm a layperson, then all of my ideas are wrong if they disagree with scientific consensus.
In regards to the hard sciences, sure, why not? It's fine to be wrong.
>You're saying that the world is split into two categories. One side is the the big brained geniuses that are right about everything, and the other side are the tiny brained morons that are wrong about everything.
No no, that's not what I took from it. Given any field, some people advance that field and bring knowledge, others use that knowledge but don't research, and others are just "tourists" with basic knowledge or laymen.
Be it sports, maths, physics, gaming, IT, chemistry, biology, and so on, you can pretty much find this everywhere. I don't know how to say it without sounding mean, but reading a study or a paper and understanding the nuances - not just the gist or the lies-to-children - among the laypeople is extremelly rare. As such, the community as a whole from a given field shouldn't be required to engage with every single layman who thinks he has an ideea against the establishment.
The large amounts of crank proofs on Collatz Conjecture or any other millenium problem is proof of that.
> but reading a study or a paper and understanding the nuances - not just the gist or the lies-to-children - among the laypeople is extremelly rare.
I fundamentally disagree. There is nothing special about the concept of a research paper that makes it completely not accessible to someone like me. Its just words on a page. If you can read and understand the words I'm writing here, then you can read and understand a research paper. I've read dozens and dozens of papers in fields I have no formal training in myself from top to bottom many times. I agree that most people won't do this, but that doesn't mean it'll never happen. The problem is whats the point? Usually when I read stuff in certain fields, the take away is always "wow this is garbage. This evidence is terrible". The problem is that I can't express this to anyone because no one will read this stuff themselves, and no one will ever even consider the possibility that a research paper accepted by consensus is anything but divine perfection.
>There is nothing special about the concept of a research paper that makes it completely not accessible to someone like me
I mean no offense, but who are you? Also, about what kind of research papers are we talking about?
I myself have training in formal mathematics, physics and computer science and I have no illusion that I can understand the topics above me my training level enough to contest someone in mathematics or physics. There comes a level at which I just don't get it anymore.
Computer science is a little different, as I am actively involved in the field as a programmer.
>Usually when I read stuff in certain fields, the take away is always "wow this is garbage. This evidence is terrible
Are those "certain fields" psychology or sociology related? These are pretty well known to be soft sciences full of cranks, fakers and money-wasters.
There was a video some time ago from Jordan Peterson(I know, I know, but please bear with me), where he said that he and another friend of his cracked the code to submit bullshit papers in their field.
I think you're thinking of Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, who submitted several fake papers before they were caught, including "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct".
I don't remember ever hearing JP mention doing that. He might have mentioned a high level way you could do it, maybe referring to Peter and James while he did it.
You don’t get respect by expressing an opinion. You get respect by making novel predictions, showing that they conform to reality, and passing peer review. Science happens in the lab, not on Reddit.
> You get respect by making novel predictions, showing that they conform to reality,
Not all science is like this. Take for example, radiocarbon dating. I'ts just some guy saying "I did some science and I hereby declare that this item is 20,000 years old". Its not something that can be proven to be wrong by not coming true.
> Science happens in the lab, not on Reddit.
What if some flat earthers find their way into a lab and publish some absolute rubbish?
Science can only be science if the wider world accepts it. All science has to succeed in the marketplace of ideas.
>Not all science is like this. Take for example, radiocarbon dating. I'ts just some guy saying "I did some science and I hereby declare that this item is 20,000 years old". Its not something that can be proven to be wrong by not coming true.
But that isn't how radiocarbon dating was worked out. It wasn't just "some guy saying" something.
>Science can only be science if the wider world accepts it. All science has to succeed in the marketplace of ideas.
Which marketplace though? These days, much of science is so intricately specialised that only people highly embedded in that field of knowledge will be able to judge the idea. The general public's trust of that expertise is a different issue entirely - they're unlikely to have the skills to judge the claim itself.
>Are collectivist and hierarchical cultures a hindrance to scientific thinking?
A) I want to problematize the question quite a bit. First, I think you are approaching this from the perspective of social science and categories of analysis, not from the perspective of philosophy and ontology, in a question about science and the practice of science. I don't think these categories are helpful for the question you are wanting answered. In social psychology, collectivistic and individualistic are attributional styles, not ontological categories.
B) If we did want to address this question philosophically, I would go to the work of Thomas Kasulis, especially his Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference. In using a framework of ways of knowing rooted in different cultural philosophies of relationship (especially philosophies of internal vs external relationships), one can get past the idea of monolithic, hermetically sealed "types" like "collectivist culture". Kasulis also points out that the same culture often has both orientations, both philosophies of relationship, but often they are socialized to different groups in society. Again, cuts against the grain of this assumption of "collectivist cultures" as a distinct thing.
>The simplified narrative is "Truth comes from elders and societal consensus."
This isn't a simplified narrative, it's a simplistic one, rooted in the assumption of the categories you are arguing. To take what you are intuiting and give it some direction, again since you are talking in terms of social science instead of philosophy, I'd recommend reading some sociology of knowledge, like Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality and/or Berger's sociology of religion The Sacred Canopy. You have the sense that there is a relationship between the structures of society and the kind of knowledge produced in societies, but you are getting hung up on broad and misleading categories like "collectivism". In reading Berger and Luckmann, you will see that there are similar processes of the creation of consensus and a common worldview in all cultures, and all societies have institutions that discipline knowledge (i.e. create consensus) and all institutions have hierarchy, even non-collectivist societies.
Being able to tease out this relationship between social institutions and the creation of knowledge, and the effect these dynamics have in the practice of science, you'll get to the heart of your question here, but shorn of misleadingly monolithic concepts like "collectivist cultures".
Collectivist and hierarchical cultures? Every culture has some type or types of social hierarchical structures. Every time I hear the word collectivist it always comes from libertarian circles that think any type is social organization is bad because it suppresses the individual, is that what you are trying to say here?
I do happen to be a libertarian, but contrary to popular understanding, libertarians are not against social organization or voluntary hierarchies. Libertarians are against force. And in the case of companies, they are hierarchies of skills and resources, not hierarchies of social rights
You don’t want to jump to removing hierarchy from culture entirely.
Then opinions from subject matter experts are flattened to the same importance as people without credentials, or worse, pathological contrarians.
That isn’t to say everyone shouldn’t get their shot to say their piece, and we do need channels for laypeople or subordinates to give personal insight in a constructive manner. All kinds of engineering disasters have occurred because people in executive positions have ignored high level technical experts.
In that regard the failure isn’t hierarchy, it’s an improperly organized (or outright false) hierarchy of authority. These false hierarchies are built such that people with competence (measured by technical performance) become functionally subordinate to other group members who have nominal power, but not enough expertise to actually make goals manifest in reality.
Hierarchy exists all throughout biological life, but the need for survival keeps it “honest” so to speak. In hyper-cortical social ape world… money and status tend to be key corollaries with apex position in a hierarchy of authority.
What you’re describing is honestly more rooted in individual temperament and general cultural norms regarding deference to authority. These concepts can be thought about with psychometric models of human personality like the Big 5.
People who are higher in trait Openness, will find value in exploring concepts and aesthetics outside the cultural mileu. People low in Openness tend to want predefined roles, to maximize certainty and maximize deference to the established order.
You need both kinds of people being selected for across time to cover the diverse range of needs and preferences we see in modern times. Cultures that strike the right balance between open boundaries and rigid authority tend to do best across their history.
Once the layman can’t legally speak their own point of view, the culture is already deep in authoritarianism.
You chose an extremely narrow subset of a nuanced but oversimplified approach to modeling the problem space. Hierarchy exists from emergent causes across biological species.
Usually they’re based on competence. Except for when the hierarchy based on the local emergent values goes into a state disrepair and degenerates show up (you know who) and reverse real progress.
You also didn’t offer up an alternative model that has been observed to work historically, or with some kind of evolutionary development.
Brother... you're making quite a fine job of conflating expertise with authority so persistently.. look, subject-matter-experts having valuable knowledge on that in-the-moment relevant subject means nothing in regards to them needing command authority over others. They simply don't need it. A structural engineer knowing more about load-bearing, for example, requires no actually hierarchical organization, whatsoever.
It just means that their expertise informs decisions without them having power to compel obedience.
Your "properly organized hierarchy" or whatever is a staple of sociologically-illiterate slop - that the failures of hierarchy are about wrong people in powerful positions, rather than hierarchical organization itself generating very predictable and inevitable socio-psychological pathologies, particularly, though not limited to - information distortion up chains of command, then authority divorced from competence and actual, lived relations and finally, positional power which regularly overrides expertise and generates perverse incentives.
> hierarchy exists in nature
No it doesn't and it's a naturalistic fallacy. Lots of things exist in biological life that don't justify human organizational structures and citing biology of all fields resolves no political questions whatsoever about how humans should organize.
Ahh yes your contempt for the existence of status hierarchies caused you to attack my character or tone of my writing, instead of refuting the content. You may want to look deep within to see if your dissatisfaction with hierarchy is due to reason or resentment.
Graham’s HIERARCHY of disagreement exists for this very reason… to STRATIFY the level of value that can be extracted from various kinds of disagreements. You calling my linguistic choices “slop”, is an attack on character, and that denigrates your point (no matter how lucid) to the class of “ad hominem.”
You can yell till you’re blue in the face, but fundamentally hierarchy exists because bodily harm exists, and it’s expensive to carry out long term. When people disagree, we need SOMEONE with authority to adjudicate the process (fairly) before it devolves into violence… or worse, cycles of tit for tat retribution.
These are real social problems that were solved by hierarchy and socially-encoded behavioral patterns in nature millennia ago. It’s why lions, wolves, and primates don’t waste energy and relative peace by enacting brutal violence against “insubordinate” group members.
The latent virtues in their social hierarchy are encoded in their behavior… as long as the dissenting member submits to the dominant member in the proper ritual fashion, violence is avoided and social roles are sorted all at once. I’m sure you know from human history how violence tends to spiral in cycles of revenge.
It’s not ONLY that the wrong people get in the wrong position of status. If the wrong person can even GET a position of power, the hierarchy isn’t organized to reflect common virtues that emerge across cultures. If a tyrant can get to the top and stay there… maybe the power hierarchy actually reflects the EMBODIED virtues of the culture… like avoidance, inattentiveness, civic disengagement.
Since stratification is a mode of social organization, every individual exists as a constituent element of a given hierarchy authority. That gives individuals power to improve it, even if that change is very gradual. The key takeaway is that every individual must adopt responsibility to make their local realm better, so the emergent order updates in a way that properly expresses the virtues of that society/organization.
Yes I know “better” is very ambiguous here because what constitutes “better” is a deeply subjective philosophical set of conditions. The precise answer of what constitutes better can only be articulated by a continual dialogue between members inside the local sociocultural mileu.
AKA the vast majority of people in a locale have to entrain virtues like attentiveness, diligence, open mindedness, civic duty, transcendence, redemption, etc. into common cultural grammar… or else it’s very likely that someone without those traits can co-opt the existing authority structure and stagnate it, or weaponize it.
Yes, my model places a lot on the shoulders of the individual. I see it as an existential responsibility for each person to put in effort to improve the world we were born into. They don’t have to cure cancer, they just need to bring harmony to the places where they intersect with society.
This means continual optimizing and renewal of themselves, their families, their friendships, relationships, workplaces, etc. That only happens through honest self-examination, civic virtue, dialogical communication, and dialectical incrementalism. And not in the way Marx put forth.
Again, I know it’s a tall order, but can you imagine the world if millions of people were striving for self-actualization and improving the things they CAN improve? Hundreds of millions bringing order and personal truth to light? It’s hard to say what kind of society could emerge from that starting point.
I think we can agree it would be much better than a society of atomized people detached from the structures that give them a culture.
This is circular, "hierarchies reflect cultural virtues, but individuals can improve hierarchies through personal responsibility, but if tyrants rise it proves the culture's actual values, but also everyone should work on self-actualization to improve structures". Like, wtf, you're trying to have it both ways - hierarchy as "inevitable natural fact" and as malleable system individuals can reform through virtue.
>Violence requires authority to adjudicate
Conflict resolution through negotiation, mediation, restorative practices and community accountability can exist without permanent authority structures. False dichotomy between hierarchical adjudication or endless revenge cycles, that's all this is.
Animal behavior, as used as proof hierarchy is necessary, for the second time, commits the naturalistic fallacy. Mutual aid and egalitarian organization exist throughout nature, and selecting examples that support your conclusion while ignoring contrary evidence is anything but convincing, just as reducing structural political questions to individual moral responsibility ("bring harmony where you intersect") dissolves systemic analysis into self-help liberal hyper-individualism.
Whether hierarchical or non-hierarchical organization functions better for human coordination is an empirical question about structures, not about whether enough people achieve self-actualization.
I've no desire to continue this any further, the Peterson-style pseudo-psychologizing ("look deep within to see if your dissatisfaction is resentment") and evolutionary psychology determinism aren't productive ground for any discussion.
I agree with your premise but not relating it to age groups. Why is everything about age nowadays? Can't talk about anything without having to dismantle these preconceptions of which age group did or does what. There are plenty of bossy, ideologically rigid younger people around. Ours is a youth culture and younger people set the tone. If you're going to point to old politicians, consider who keeps voting them in.
I don't believe in giving preferable treatment to anyone young or old. No elder-based culture, no youth-based culture. Have a logic and reason based culture.
There is no true equality in reality—people have different levels of influence and social weight. And that is a good thing, because only in this way can society maintain focus and use authority to grow and develop. If complete equality existed, the process of sharing and processing information would become so inefficient that human society would likely collapse very quickly.
Modern science originated in the collectivist and hierarchical cultures of 16th century Europe. Some of the biggest scientific and technological advances of the 20th century came from collectivist and hierarchical cultures, namely the American, British, Russian, and German militaries.
>The best kind of culture for education and science is one where everyone is viewed as equal individuals.
I think it's a bit more complicated than you suggest. Firstly, let me say where we agree.
We should all be encouraged to ask questions or challenge dominant ideas IF we believe we have good reason to do so.
Institutions can inhibit proposition 1 above and instead encourage groupthink/uncritical conformity etc.
However, on the other hand, LEGITIMATE authority has its place. If we fail to give reasonable weight to authority then we will be reinventing the wheel again. For example, academic journals are founded on a degree of trust. You will reference other experts without doing their experiments yourself.
I think a good corrective is what I was taught in college. First learn what the experts/textbooks are saying. THEN question it. There is a balance between being dogmatic and being so sceptical you become unmoored from the millions of hours of research already completed on a topic.
Now I hasten to emphaise, as said earlier, not all authority is legitimate (and this unfortunately can include university departments and "experts"). Such departments can be captured by uncritical ideology or have ulter motives like any other institution. So a judgement will need to be made.
Liberalism, Enlightenment, and Science all emerged along side each other. At the foundation they reset social structures to nothing and build from there.
They all can build collective and hierarchical institutions, but they build in (or attempt to theoretically) mechanisms to abandon/modify dysfunctional one’s.
Your critique: under the above mentioned systems individuals are morally equal. That is not the case in monarchy, theocracy, fascism, or communism. In all of those the leaders bestow privileges upon the people. It may even be benevolent, but those people at the top are certainly not equals.
Math/science: I’m guessing you’re referencing China. China has collectivist culture AND government. Your argument is that why they perform well in math/science. Sure but so does Japan/Korea. They have more collectivist culture than the west but their governments are not. So, variable that would seem to matter is cultural rather than government institutions. We see this with crime+poverty+inequality where some very poor and unequal cultures have unexpectedly (to the west) have very low crime. Bhutan/Cambodia for example. Again is the cultural norms not governance that seems to be the key variable. (SM/screens isn’t helping us in the west…).
It’ll take us too far afield, but for social function it doesn’t seem that collectivism is always key as you can have high social trust (which leads to high civic/charity engagement) in an individualist culture. High performing liberal societies (individualistic) seem to have that. Do they perform better on math/science than peers? That’s a good question. Preliminarily it seems better education scores generally but might not be math/science specific vs just generally higher.
In a philosophical society where enlightenment is pursued openly, scientifically, and commonly, then those with the most wisdom will be those who have spent the most time pursuing it. The wise elder will not shout down the young upstart or insist on his conclusions by asserting their popularity or precedence. The young seeker of wisdom will not enter into dispute with the old seeker of wisdom with any notions that their own conclusions start on an equal footing.
Of course, all disputes should be resolved purely through reason, but the proper dynamic between the young and the old should be as two travelers disagreeing about the route to take to enlightenment. Provided both parties are equally equipped with reason, then the party who has not yet actually traveled the paths, made mistakes, backtracked, and tried again, should defer to the party who has done so. That is, the younger seeker should assume that the older one starts with the advantage of experience, and must therefore enter the discussion with the ready willingness to have his conclusions shown to be wrong.
> commonly, then those with the most wisdom will be those who have spent the most time pursuing it.
Throughout my life I've come across way too many old people with credentials who are just absolute morons to agree with this statement. In my opinion, the most wise ones are the ones who can express their beliefs in such a way that makes other people understand why their beliefs are rational. The kind of people who will express their beliefs by saying things like "I know what I'm talking about. I've been doing this since you were in diapers. Shut your mouth and listen to your elders" are the ones who are full of shit and should not be listened to, no matter how many years they have been doing something.
Imperial Germany was very strong in the sciences and authoritarian in both general ethos and political structure. France too, in the 18th century. An authoritarian system can repress creativity, but it can also protect dissenters from popular prejudice.
Imperial Germany kept establishing independent research Institutes because the government didnt like old professors monopolizing power and funding at Universities.
Science has always been a collective effort based on very arbitrary social rules and codes in the community of “science.”
What you are describing is some sort of myth of science as a disinterested inquiry into absolute truth. That myth was deciphered long ago
"Man you must be quite young or inexperienced." That's not exactly a nice thing to say. You can disagree without making assumptions about someone's character
Just read the paper I sent . Don’t shoot the messenger . It’s not personal.
Also intellectual subjects can be quite confrontational and harsh , you will get used to it in time, youngin.
I communicate fine with people I love but we are strangers debating an intellectual topic online . This isn’t about us . Just read and learn . You’ll value this interaction one day looking back upon it.
Cybtroll | a day ago
...hello Thomas Kuhn! We meet again.
I thought you were dead.
Flimsy-Tomato7801 | a day ago
Hi! The best jokes deserve someone to explain them!
My (Kuhn’s) answer to OP is, it depends what the state of knowledge in your field is. If you are doing the normal science work of researching the implications of a theoretical discovery, you don’t need to worry too much about challenging the status quo.
But, if your field has come to the limit of its current paradigm, then deference to the status quo starts to hinder you.
The problem is that being at the limit of your current paradigm is also the place where endless baroque tweaks and variations of a theory start happening to try and accommodate the situations where the paradigm fails.
And grad-school is nothing better than a factory for the creation of complex, Byzantine, and ultimately profoundly boring scientific insights.
On some level you have to learn to play and win the game though, if you’re ever going to be powerful enough enough to change it.
erinaceus_ | a day ago
> The simplified narrative is "Truth comes from elders and societal consensus."
I get the impression that you haven't frequented scientific academic circles. Although old (and incorrect) theories tend to die alongside the academic who proposed them, the community side of the scientific process tends to combine collaborative and competitive management of ideas. Discovering things that are at sufficiently at odds with current knowledge and understanding, tends to be the way to make a name for yourself in science.
freework | a day ago
> the community side of the scientific process tends to combine collaborative and competitive management of ideas.
I always hear people say this, but I just haven't seen it. As I read more and more about science, over time I've developed more and more opinions about science that goes against consensus. I would love to name some examples here, but I won't because I know it'll derail the discussion. In my experience, anytime you express an opinion contrary to scientific consensus, it NEVER EVER EVER results in a respectful debate. It always results in name calling and insulting (at least on reddit).
erinaceus_ | a day ago
>anytime you express an opinion contrary to scientific consensus, it NEVER EVER EVER results in a respectful debate. It always results in name calling and insulting (at least on reddit).
And that's the pivital point: scientific discussion among laymen are not science as it's done in the scientific community. But among laymen, the scientific consensus is exactly what's most relevant. Ideas that severely diviate from that tend to be wrong, which is unsurprising since change in scientific thinking is necessarily based on the incorporation of new data, not on armchair philosophy, to put it bluntly.
No meant as an insult, but as a trigger for self reflection (which everyone regularly needs, myself included):
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
--Carl Sagan
freework | a day ago
> And that's the pivital point: scientific discussion among laymen are not science as it's done in the scientific community. But among laymen, the scientific consensus is exactly what's most relevant. Ideas that severely diviate from that tend to be wrong, which is unsurprising since change in scientific thinking is necessarily based on the incorporation of new data, not on armchair philosophy, to put it bluntly.
What you're basically saying here is that since I'm a layperson, then all of my ideas are wrong if they disagree with scientific consensus. That's exactly the conundrum that's laid out in the OP. You're saying that the world is split into two categories. One side is the the big brained geniuses that are right about everything, and the other side are the tiny brained morons that are wrong about everything. If you happen to be one of the tiny brains, then you need to just shut the hell up and orient yourself to the big brains because they know what they're talking about.
The question then becomes: What demarcates those who get to be in the "big brained" category? If I spend hours and hours reading research papers do I get to join the big brain camp, or am I destined to be a tiny brained layperson for the rest of my life no matter what? If I enroll in a university and earn myself a PhD, but still disagree with consensus, does my big brain status get revoked?
erinaceus_ | a day ago
>One side is the the big brained geniuses that are right about everything, and the other side are the tiny brained morons that are wrong about everything. If you happen to be one of the tiny brains
No, one side is people who have dedicated their lives to the job of doing science, while the other are people who may be enthusiastic about science but have zero practical experience with actually doing science.
Honestly, all that 'big brain' nonsense? Science is lots and lots of gruelling, tediously boring work with short intermittent bursts of writing a paper and hopefully getting it published. And if you persist, and maybe even excell, at that for enough years, then you get to have some scientific standing. Screaming at ~~reddit~~ the clouds will give you exactly zero scientific standing.
>If I enroll in a university and earn myself a PhD, but still disagree with consensus, does my big brain status get revoked?
That depends ... can you do the work and find evidence for your claims, or will you just keep on screaming at the clouds?
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
freework | a day ago
> What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
It's funny that you say this, because I TOTALLY AGREE, which is why I sometimes disagree with consensus.
There are two types of disagreements when it comes to disagreeing with scientific consensus. One way is when consensus rejects evidence, but you think it should not be rejected. This is called "additive disagreement", because with your disagreement, you're trying to add new evidence that would otherwise not be added. The other kind of disagreement goes the other way around. Consensus accepts some evidence, but the person disagreeing believe that evidence is not valid and should be rejected. This is called "subtractive disagreement".
All of my disagreements with scientific consensus are of the subtractive variety. It's not about "finding evidence for my claims", because I'm not making a claim. The other side is making the claim, and I'm trying to disprove those claims. But the response is always "You're just too dumb to understand why this evidence is valid because you're just a tiny brained redditor. The people you're disagreeing with have tons of years of experience, so show some respect"
ipreuss | 22 hours ago
What happens when you go to the experts you actually disagree with?
freework | 20 hours ago
what do you mean by "got to"?
ipreuss | 14 hours ago
Contact them. Instead of non-experts on Reddit.
Unlikely_Repair9572 | 18 hours ago
Every scientist's work has supposedly gone through the scientific method. If you're skeptical, then baseless assertions aren't going to change anything. All they do is muddy the water. You would either need to show how the scientists you disagree with deviated from the scientific method or go through the method with your own experiment disproving them.
If you don't do that, then how is anyone supposed to know if you're right?
The method is solid, its been around for hundreds of years. Its what got us to the moon and to split the atom, its described the universe and germs. Its held up as the best way to distill true information from evidence in every situation.
You're free to read the articles of professors and scientists online and shoot them emails. Most of them have public emails and LinkedIn profiles.
Helpful_Loss_3739 | 13 hours ago
Hi!
A historian of science here!
This is not actually true. I mean I agree with the ethos, and the scientific ideal of the method does really seem to have alot to do with getting things rights, but as to the actual method, it doesn't seem to have existed all that long. The scientific method as we know it in today's academia, is maybe 50 years old. Maybe 60 if we push it. But already 70 years ago academic work was so utterly different from today, that it would cause an uproar today.
Also the success of the method is debatable. Sociology of science and agnotology have been hard at work poking holes in this idea that science is good at correcting itself. It would be closer to the truth to say that science, as opposed to other traditions, sometimes eventually manages to correct itself.
Just a factual sidenote. The actual point of your comment I agree with. It's the content of the argument that matters, and if someone disagrees with an expert, one should address the work and the findings, not the authority of the expert.
extraneousness | 22 hours ago
I'd say that it's less about big brains and little brains, and more about recognition of expertise and enculturation into a field.
You can read all the papers you want, but there are certain things that you will only learn by being embedded in a community of experts. This is less about gatekeeping and more about coming to understand the norms of a particular scientific community.
I suspect the reason why layfolk (e.g. on Facebook) get derided so much for their opinions against consensus is because many are seen to be contrarian. That is, they take an opposing view because of a distrust of expertise, a particular ideological perspective, or because they think they're Galileo.
If you, as a layperson, propose some view against the consensus, you can do by asking why your view is wrong. Why is it that this particular view doesn't hold water? Has it been considered before? What are you missing that you may have missed? Then, when exhausting and correcting for all of the holes, if your view works better than the current consensus, it will be adopted (albeit slowly). This is the way is "generally" works within an expert community.
freework | 22 hours ago
> If you, as a layperson, propose some view against the consensus, you can do by asking why your view is wrong.
All of my disagreements with consensus are always of the same form. I mention this in another post on this thread. That form is usually me saying evidence brought forth by another person is not coherent, and therefore not valid.
Take this example. Say a scientist publishes a research paper claiming that black holes have some weird quality to them. Then, when you read into the nitty gritty details of the paper and you find out that the evidence behind this claim boils down to "my uncle fred said that black holes have this quality, and he's really smart, he beat me at tick-tac-toe three times in a row once"
When I see that, my stance will be "I don't accept this result because the evidence is incoherent to me". The result will likely be "well, obviously it doesn't make sense to you. You're a small brained idiot. All of us big brain smart people have no problem grasping why beating you three time in a row at tic-tac-toe makes you smart enough to know a black hole has this particular quality in question."
On the other hand, assume that Neil DeGrasse Tyson hears of this research paper. He then goes on his podcast and says to his audience "this paper here is claiming that winning tic-tac-toe three times in a row makes a person qualified to just know something black holes have this particular quality. I don't follow this reasoning." In this case, people will accept his claim and will consider this paper's claim invalid. If one of the big brains says he doesn't understand something, that means something. If a tiny brain says he doesn't understand something, thats just a day that ends with a "y".
The only people who can objectively claim that evidence is invalid, are the ones with status. If you have no status, then no one will even for a fraction of a second consider the possibly of ever agreeing with you on that issue.
extraneousness | 19 hours ago
There are a few different topics you're touching on here. It might be useful to have a read on how others have cached this out.
Alfred Moore gives us a way of understanding how we make judgments of expert claims (look at chapter 3).
Stephen Turner deals with the idea of epistemic authority and how it changes depending on the roles involved (read the section on Cognitive Authority and its Legitimacy).
Finally, we have Thomas Gieryn who talks about the work scientists do around the boundaries and edges of their fields. Whilst this is typically around demarcating science from non-science (if such a thing can even be done), you can apply it similarly to demarcating the various groups interacting with scientific knowledge.
References
Moore, Alfred. 2017. Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Problem of Expertise. Cambridge University Press.
Turner, Stephen P. 2001. ‘What Is the Problem with Experts?’ Social Studies of Science, no. 31: 123–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631201031001007.
Gieryn, Thomas F. 1983. ‘Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists’. American Sociological Review 48 (6): 781. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095325.
DJSauvage | 22 hours ago
Everyone has areas of expertise that are different. When I'm discussing something that isn't my area of expertise, I definitely give more credence to someone who is an expert. In return they would do the same for me if the topics lined up that way. As for experts that don't agree with other experts in their field, that's how scientific understanding evolves. I think it's worthwhile considering their viewpoint.
freework | 21 hours ago
nice llm assisted post, bro
DJSauvage | 19 hours ago
That's insulting. No AI was involved in this, not even to formulate my thoughts. jesh. For one thing It's about 5% as long as what an llm would produce. For another I lost my job at 57 last year due to cuts so my former company could through a few more billions at AI datacenters, so fuck off.
treefaeller | 18 hours ago
"since I'm a layperson, then all of my ideas are wrong if they disagree with scientific consensus"
No, not necessarily all of them. But the bulk of those ideas are going to be wrong. It's a game of statistics.
Two scenarios, in a field where the scientific consensus is long established, overwhelmingly accepted, and well supported by experimental evidence. But there are some "dark clouds on the horizon", or some experimental data that doesn't quite fit the models, or an inconsistency in the models.
Situation A: a layperson without education (=knowledge) and experience (=common sense) proposes that the consensus is wrong. They are 99.999% likely to be talking nonsense.
Situation B: A young assistant professor, who has been doing experimental work in exactly the area where trouble is already brewing, suggests that a medium-size modification of the underlying model is necessary. They are 90% likely to be wrong, but 10% likely to be right.
Now in Situation B, in a culture in which criticizing your elders is career (and relationship) suicide, in a group that is trying to get stuff done fast and efficiently and the criticism the young assistant professor offers will slow things down, where the old guy who runs the research group or department is trying to get the Nobel price and criticism from within his own lab would reduce his chances, the problem the OP refers to absolutely exists.
And yes, having worked in experimental research in a hard science, I have seen these situations first hand.
SaltEngineer455 | 12 hours ago
>What you're basically saying here is that since I'm a layperson, then all of my ideas are wrong if they disagree with scientific consensus.
In regards to the hard sciences, sure, why not? It's fine to be wrong.
>You're saying that the world is split into two categories. One side is the the big brained geniuses that are right about everything, and the other side are the tiny brained morons that are wrong about everything.
No no, that's not what I took from it. Given any field, some people advance that field and bring knowledge, others use that knowledge but don't research, and others are just "tourists" with basic knowledge or laymen.
Be it sports, maths, physics, gaming, IT, chemistry, biology, and so on, you can pretty much find this everywhere. I don't know how to say it without sounding mean, but reading a study or a paper and understanding the nuances - not just the gist or the lies-to-children - among the laypeople is extremelly rare. As such, the community as a whole from a given field shouldn't be required to engage with every single layman who thinks he has an ideea against the establishment.
The large amounts of crank proofs on Collatz Conjecture or any other millenium problem is proof of that.
freework | 6 hours ago
> but reading a study or a paper and understanding the nuances - not just the gist or the lies-to-children - among the laypeople is extremelly rare.
I fundamentally disagree. There is nothing special about the concept of a research paper that makes it completely not accessible to someone like me. Its just words on a page. If you can read and understand the words I'm writing here, then you can read and understand a research paper. I've read dozens and dozens of papers in fields I have no formal training in myself from top to bottom many times. I agree that most people won't do this, but that doesn't mean it'll never happen. The problem is whats the point? Usually when I read stuff in certain fields, the take away is always "wow this is garbage. This evidence is terrible". The problem is that I can't express this to anyone because no one will read this stuff themselves, and no one will ever even consider the possibility that a research paper accepted by consensus is anything but divine perfection.
SaltEngineer455 | 6 hours ago
>There is nothing special about the concept of a research paper that makes it completely not accessible to someone like me
I mean no offense, but who are you? Also, about what kind of research papers are we talking about?
I myself have training in formal mathematics, physics and computer science and I have no illusion that I can understand the topics above me my training level enough to contest someone in mathematics or physics. There comes a level at which I just don't get it anymore.
Computer science is a little different, as I am actively involved in the field as a programmer.
>Usually when I read stuff in certain fields, the take away is always "wow this is garbage. This evidence is terrible
Are those "certain fields" psychology or sociology related? These are pretty well known to be soft sciences full of cranks, fakers and money-wasters.
There was a video some time ago from Jordan Peterson(I know, I know, but please bear with me), where he said that he and another friend of his cracked the code to submit bullshit papers in their field.
MikeUsesNotion | 5 hours ago
I think you're thinking of Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, who submitted several fake papers before they were caught, including "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct".
I don't remember ever hearing JP mention doing that. He might have mentioned a high level way you could do it, maybe referring to Peter and James while he did it.
ipreuss | 22 hours ago
You don’t get respect by expressing an opinion. You get respect by making novel predictions, showing that they conform to reality, and passing peer review. Science happens in the lab, not on Reddit.
freework | 21 hours ago
> You get respect by making novel predictions, showing that they conform to reality,
Not all science is like this. Take for example, radiocarbon dating. I'ts just some guy saying "I did some science and I hereby declare that this item is 20,000 years old". Its not something that can be proven to be wrong by not coming true.
> Science happens in the lab, not on Reddit.
What if some flat earthers find their way into a lab and publish some absolute rubbish?
Science can only be science if the wider world accepts it. All science has to succeed in the marketplace of ideas.
extraneousness | 19 hours ago
>Not all science is like this. Take for example, radiocarbon dating. I'ts just some guy saying "I did some science and I hereby declare that this item is 20,000 years old". Its not something that can be proven to be wrong by not coming true.
But that isn't how radiocarbon dating was worked out. It wasn't just "some guy saying" something.
>Science can only be science if the wider world accepts it. All science has to succeed in the marketplace of ideas.
Which marketplace though? These days, much of science is so intricately specialised that only people highly embedded in that field of knowledge will be able to judge the idea. The general public's trust of that expertise is a different issue entirely - they're unlikely to have the skills to judge the claim itself.
ipreuss | 14 hours ago
You certainly don’t get my respect by misrepresenting science, or by quoting out of context.
concreteutopian | a day ago
>Are collectivist and hierarchical cultures a hindrance to scientific thinking?
A) I want to problematize the question quite a bit. First, I think you are approaching this from the perspective of social science and categories of analysis, not from the perspective of philosophy and ontology, in a question about science and the practice of science. I don't think these categories are helpful for the question you are wanting answered. In social psychology, collectivistic and individualistic are attributional styles, not ontological categories.
B) If we did want to address this question philosophically, I would go to the work of Thomas Kasulis, especially his Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference. In using a framework of ways of knowing rooted in different cultural philosophies of relationship (especially philosophies of internal vs external relationships), one can get past the idea of monolithic, hermetically sealed "types" like "collectivist culture". Kasulis also points out that the same culture often has both orientations, both philosophies of relationship, but often they are socialized to different groups in society. Again, cuts against the grain of this assumption of "collectivist cultures" as a distinct thing.
>The simplified narrative is "Truth comes from elders and societal consensus."
This isn't a simplified narrative, it's a simplistic one, rooted in the assumption of the categories you are arguing. To take what you are intuiting and give it some direction, again since you are talking in terms of social science instead of philosophy, I'd recommend reading some sociology of knowledge, like Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality and/or Berger's sociology of religion The Sacred Canopy. You have the sense that there is a relationship between the structures of society and the kind of knowledge produced in societies, but you are getting hung up on broad and misleading categories like "collectivism". In reading Berger and Luckmann, you will see that there are similar processes of the creation of consensus and a common worldview in all cultures, and all societies have institutions that discipline knowledge (i.e. create consensus) and all institutions have hierarchy, even non-collectivist societies.
Being able to tease out this relationship between social institutions and the creation of knowledge, and the effect these dynamics have in the practice of science, you'll get to the heart of your question here, but shorn of misleadingly monolithic concepts like "collectivist cultures".
raskolnicope | a day ago
Collectivist and hierarchical cultures? Every culture has some type or types of social hierarchical structures. Every time I hear the word collectivist it always comes from libertarian circles that think any type is social organization is bad because it suppresses the individual, is that what you are trying to say here?
[OP] counwovja0385skje | 23 hours ago
I do happen to be a libertarian, but contrary to popular understanding, libertarians are not against social organization or voluntary hierarchies. Libertarians are against force. And in the case of companies, they are hierarchies of skills and resources, not hierarchies of social rights
acousticentropy | a day ago
You don’t want to jump to removing hierarchy from culture entirely.
Then opinions from subject matter experts are flattened to the same importance as people without credentials, or worse, pathological contrarians.
That isn’t to say everyone shouldn’t get their shot to say their piece, and we do need channels for laypeople or subordinates to give personal insight in a constructive manner. All kinds of engineering disasters have occurred because people in executive positions have ignored high level technical experts.
In that regard the failure isn’t hierarchy, it’s an improperly organized (or outright false) hierarchy of authority. These false hierarchies are built such that people with competence (measured by technical performance) become functionally subordinate to other group members who have nominal power, but not enough expertise to actually make goals manifest in reality.
Hierarchy exists all throughout biological life, but the need for survival keeps it “honest” so to speak. In hyper-cortical social ape world… money and status tend to be key corollaries with apex position in a hierarchy of authority.
What you’re describing is honestly more rooted in individual temperament and general cultural norms regarding deference to authority. These concepts can be thought about with psychometric models of human personality like the Big 5.
People who are higher in trait Openness, will find value in exploring concepts and aesthetics outside the cultural mileu. People low in Openness tend to want predefined roles, to maximize certainty and maximize deference to the established order.
You need both kinds of people being selected for across time to cover the diverse range of needs and preferences we see in modern times. Cultures that strike the right balance between open boundaries and rigid authority tend to do best across their history.
Once the layman can’t legally speak their own point of view, the culture is already deep in authoritarianism.
Gordan_Ponjavic | a day ago
OK, my comment is obsolete :D
LazarM2021 | 23 hours ago
>You don’t want to jump to removing hierarchy from culture entirely.
>Then opinions from subject matter experts are flattened to the same importance as people without credentials, or worse, pathological contrarians.
That's not how it works.
acousticentropy | 19 hours ago
You chose an extremely narrow subset of a nuanced but oversimplified approach to modeling the problem space. Hierarchy exists from emergent causes across biological species.
Usually they’re based on competence. Except for when the hierarchy based on the local emergent values goes into a state disrepair and degenerates show up (you know who) and reverse real progress.
You also didn’t offer up an alternative model that has been observed to work historically, or with some kind of evolutionary development.
You offered a quip where we needed strategy.
LazarM2021 | 11 hours ago
Brother... you're making quite a fine job of conflating expertise with authority so persistently.. look, subject-matter-experts having valuable knowledge on that in-the-moment relevant subject means nothing in regards to them needing command authority over others. They simply don't need it. A structural engineer knowing more about load-bearing, for example, requires no actually hierarchical organization, whatsoever.
It just means that their expertise informs decisions without them having power to compel obedience.
Your "properly organized hierarchy" or whatever is a staple of sociologically-illiterate slop - that the failures of hierarchy are about wrong people in powerful positions, rather than hierarchical organization itself generating very predictable and inevitable socio-psychological pathologies, particularly, though not limited to - information distortion up chains of command, then authority divorced from competence and actual, lived relations and finally, positional power which regularly overrides expertise and generates perverse incentives.
> hierarchy exists in nature
No it doesn't and it's a naturalistic fallacy. Lots of things exist in biological life that don't justify human organizational structures and citing biology of all fields resolves no political questions whatsoever about how humans should organize.
acousticentropy | 7 hours ago
Ahh yes your contempt for the existence of status hierarchies caused you to attack my character or tone of my writing, instead of refuting the content. You may want to look deep within to see if your dissatisfaction with hierarchy is due to reason or resentment.
Graham’s HIERARCHY of disagreement exists for this very reason… to STRATIFY the level of value that can be extracted from various kinds of disagreements. You calling my linguistic choices “slop”, is an attack on character, and that denigrates your point (no matter how lucid) to the class of “ad hominem.”
You can yell till you’re blue in the face, but fundamentally hierarchy exists because bodily harm exists, and it’s expensive to carry out long term. When people disagree, we need SOMEONE with authority to adjudicate the process (fairly) before it devolves into violence… or worse, cycles of tit for tat retribution.
These are real social problems that were solved by hierarchy and socially-encoded behavioral patterns in nature millennia ago. It’s why lions, wolves, and primates don’t waste energy and relative peace by enacting brutal violence against “insubordinate” group members.
The latent virtues in their social hierarchy are encoded in their behavior… as long as the dissenting member submits to the dominant member in the proper ritual fashion, violence is avoided and social roles are sorted all at once. I’m sure you know from human history how violence tends to spiral in cycles of revenge.
It’s not ONLY that the wrong people get in the wrong position of status. If the wrong person can even GET a position of power, the hierarchy isn’t organized to reflect common virtues that emerge across cultures. If a tyrant can get to the top and stay there… maybe the power hierarchy actually reflects the EMBODIED virtues of the culture… like avoidance, inattentiveness, civic disengagement.
Since stratification is a mode of social organization, every individual exists as a constituent element of a given hierarchy authority. That gives individuals power to improve it, even if that change is very gradual. The key takeaway is that every individual must adopt responsibility to make their local realm better, so the emergent order updates in a way that properly expresses the virtues of that society/organization.
Yes I know “better” is very ambiguous here because what constitutes “better” is a deeply subjective philosophical set of conditions. The precise answer of what constitutes better can only be articulated by a continual dialogue between members inside the local sociocultural mileu.
AKA the vast majority of people in a locale have to entrain virtues like attentiveness, diligence, open mindedness, civic duty, transcendence, redemption, etc. into common cultural grammar… or else it’s very likely that someone without those traits can co-opt the existing authority structure and stagnate it, or weaponize it.
Yes, my model places a lot on the shoulders of the individual. I see it as an existential responsibility for each person to put in effort to improve the world we were born into. They don’t have to cure cancer, they just need to bring harmony to the places where they intersect with society.
This means continual optimizing and renewal of themselves, their families, their friendships, relationships, workplaces, etc. That only happens through honest self-examination, civic virtue, dialogical communication, and dialectical incrementalism. And not in the way Marx put forth.
Again, I know it’s a tall order, but can you imagine the world if millions of people were striving for self-actualization and improving the things they CAN improve? Hundreds of millions bringing order and personal truth to light? It’s hard to say what kind of society could emerge from that starting point.
I think we can agree it would be much better than a society of atomized people detached from the structures that give them a culture.
LazarM2021 | 7 hours ago
This is circular, "hierarchies reflect cultural virtues, but individuals can improve hierarchies through personal responsibility, but if tyrants rise it proves the culture's actual values, but also everyone should work on self-actualization to improve structures". Like, wtf, you're trying to have it both ways - hierarchy as "inevitable natural fact" and as malleable system individuals can reform through virtue.
>Violence requires authority to adjudicate
Conflict resolution through negotiation, mediation, restorative practices and community accountability can exist without permanent authority structures. False dichotomy between hierarchical adjudication or endless revenge cycles, that's all this is.
Animal behavior, as used as proof hierarchy is necessary, for the second time, commits the naturalistic fallacy. Mutual aid and egalitarian organization exist throughout nature, and selecting examples that support your conclusion while ignoring contrary evidence is anything but convincing, just as reducing structural political questions to individual moral responsibility ("bring harmony where you intersect") dissolves systemic analysis into self-help liberal hyper-individualism.
Whether hierarchical or non-hierarchical organization functions better for human coordination is an empirical question about structures, not about whether enough people achieve self-actualization.
I've no desire to continue this any further, the Peterson-style pseudo-psychologizing ("look deep within to see if your dissatisfaction is resentment") and evolutionary psychology determinism aren't productive ground for any discussion.
healthisourwealth | a day ago
I agree with your premise but not relating it to age groups. Why is everything about age nowadays? Can't talk about anything without having to dismantle these preconceptions of which age group did or does what. There are plenty of bossy, ideologically rigid younger people around. Ours is a youth culture and younger people set the tone. If you're going to point to old politicians, consider who keeps voting them in.
[OP] counwovja0385skje | 23 hours ago
I don't believe in giving preferable treatment to anyone young or old. No elder-based culture, no youth-based culture. Have a logic and reason based culture.
Gordan_Ponjavic | a day ago
There is no true equality in reality—people have different levels of influence and social weight. And that is a good thing, because only in this way can society maintain focus and use authority to grow and develop. If complete equality existed, the process of sharing and processing information would become so inefficient that human society would likely collapse very quickly.
Što je autoritet? - Gpgale's Blog
Glamulosity | 16 hours ago
Modern science originated in the collectivist and hierarchical cultures of 16th century Europe. Some of the biggest scientific and technological advances of the 20th century came from collectivist and hierarchical cultures, namely the American, British, Russian, and German militaries.
>The best kind of culture for education and science is one where everyone is viewed as equal individuals.
Citation needed.
LostSignal1914 | 10 hours ago
I think it's a bit more complicated than you suggest. Firstly, let me say where we agree.
However, on the other hand, LEGITIMATE authority has its place. If we fail to give reasonable weight to authority then we will be reinventing the wheel again. For example, academic journals are founded on a degree of trust. You will reference other experts without doing their experiments yourself.
I think a good corrective is what I was taught in college. First learn what the experts/textbooks are saying. THEN question it. There is a balance between being dogmatic and being so sceptical you become unmoored from the millions of hours of research already completed on a topic.
Now I hasten to emphaise, as said earlier, not all authority is legitimate (and this unfortunately can include university departments and "experts"). Such departments can be captured by uncritical ideology or have ulter motives like any other institution. So a judgement will need to be made.
Freuds-Mother | 7 hours ago
Liberalism, Enlightenment, and Science all emerged along side each other. At the foundation they reset social structures to nothing and build from there.
They all can build collective and hierarchical institutions, but they build in (or attempt to theoretically) mechanisms to abandon/modify dysfunctional one’s.
Your critique: under the above mentioned systems individuals are morally equal. That is not the case in monarchy, theocracy, fascism, or communism. In all of those the leaders bestow privileges upon the people. It may even be benevolent, but those people at the top are certainly not equals.
Math/science: I’m guessing you’re referencing China. China has collectivist culture AND government. Your argument is that why they perform well in math/science. Sure but so does Japan/Korea. They have more collectivist culture than the west but their governments are not. So, variable that would seem to matter is cultural rather than government institutions. We see this with crime+poverty+inequality where some very poor and unequal cultures have unexpectedly (to the west) have very low crime. Bhutan/Cambodia for example. Again is the cultural norms not governance that seems to be the key variable. (SM/screens isn’t helping us in the west…).
It’ll take us too far afield, but for social function it doesn’t seem that collectivism is always key as you can have high social trust (which leads to high civic/charity engagement) in an individualist culture. High performing liberal societies (individualistic) seem to have that. Do they perform better on math/science than peers? That’s a good question. Preliminarily it seems better education scores generally but might not be math/science specific vs just generally higher.
PCScipio202 | a day ago
In a philosophical society where enlightenment is pursued openly, scientifically, and commonly, then those with the most wisdom will be those who have spent the most time pursuing it. The wise elder will not shout down the young upstart or insist on his conclusions by asserting their popularity or precedence. The young seeker of wisdom will not enter into dispute with the old seeker of wisdom with any notions that their own conclusions start on an equal footing.
Of course, all disputes should be resolved purely through reason, but the proper dynamic between the young and the old should be as two travelers disagreeing about the route to take to enlightenment. Provided both parties are equally equipped with reason, then the party who has not yet actually traveled the paths, made mistakes, backtracked, and tried again, should defer to the party who has done so. That is, the younger seeker should assume that the older one starts with the advantage of experience, and must therefore enter the discussion with the ready willingness to have his conclusions shown to be wrong.
freework | a day ago
> commonly, then those with the most wisdom will be those who have spent the most time pursuing it.
Throughout my life I've come across way too many old people with credentials who are just absolute morons to agree with this statement. In my opinion, the most wise ones are the ones who can express their beliefs in such a way that makes other people understand why their beliefs are rational. The kind of people who will express their beliefs by saying things like "I know what I'm talking about. I've been doing this since you were in diapers. Shut your mouth and listen to your elders" are the ones who are full of shit and should not be listened to, no matter how many years they have been doing something.
MalaclypseII | a day ago
Imperial Germany was very strong in the sciences and authoritarian in both general ethos and political structure. France too, in the 18th century. An authoritarian system can repress creativity, but it can also protect dissenters from popular prejudice.
PDXhasaRedhead | 16 hours ago
Imperial Germany kept establishing independent research Institutes because the government didnt like old professors monopolizing power and funding at Universities.
Own-Campaign-2089 | 22 hours ago
Man you must be quite young or inexperienced.
Start reading some sociology of science you could read this for an accessible entry point
https://reclus.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/latour-science-stidues-political-philosophy.pdf
Science has always been a collective effort based on very arbitrary social rules and codes in the community of “science.” What you are describing is some sort of myth of science as a disinterested inquiry into absolute truth. That myth was deciphered long ago
[OP] counwovja0385skje | 22 hours ago
Thanks for being very rude
Own-Campaign-2089 | 22 hours ago
Are you kidding ? This is Reddit. I wasn’t even trying to be rude.
[OP] counwovja0385skje | 21 hours ago
"Man you must be quite young or inexperienced." That's not exactly a nice thing to say. You can disagree without making assumptions about someone's character
Own-Campaign-2089 | 21 hours ago
You must be both or one of those come on now!
Nothing to be ashamed of.
Just learn something from me and move on to the next thing.
[OP] counwovja0385skje | 21 hours ago
Wow you really are a jerk! I hope you learn proper communication going forward
Own-Campaign-2089 | 21 hours ago
Just read the paper I sent . Don’t shoot the messenger . It’s not personal.
Also intellectual subjects can be quite confrontational and harsh , you will get used to it in time, youngin.
I communicate fine with people I love but we are strangers debating an intellectual topic online . This isn’t about us . Just read and learn . You’ll value this interaction one day looking back upon it.
[OP] counwovja0385skje | 21 hours ago
The fact that you think you don't owe courtesy to strangers is insane but whatever. Have a nice day.
Own-Campaign-2089 | 21 hours ago
You too.
RHX_Thain | a day ago
There are 3 categories of authority under which all other types are but interpretations:
In all 3 categories there is opportunity for absolute and utter disaster.
If one is currently causing the disaster, don't count out the other two. They'll find opportunities to make it worse.
Which one is best?
The one that keeps wondering.