Corrosive
When you study things like education and psychology, you are really delving into things that develop complexity far too quickly for many useful rules to be formed. Consider the flipping of a truly random coin. At the first flip, you have a 50-50 split as to whether it will come up heads or tails. At the second flip, you still have a 50-50 split. If you flip a coin twice, the four possibilities as to what you might see are HH, HT, TH, TT. There are only four possibilities. The envelope of probability is pretty straightforward, with the total number of possibilities doubling with each flip.
However, in things like psychology or education, you flip a human. Humans may not be totally unpredictable, but they certainly have more than two states. After flipping a human once, you already have many possibilities. These include some which you never thought of, some which are unique to that human, and some which that human never thought of. The possibilities branch dramatically after that, limited only by larger bulk probabilities like those mandated by physical laws.
In the social sciences, you take many humans, on the principle that if you have a lot of them, their differences cancel out statistically and you can predict their mass behaviour. The 'lot of them' part is where you get 'social'; the 'predict' part is where you get 'sciences'. These disciplines include sociology, economics and anthropology as well; some would include geography, history and political science. It is hard to decide where to place philosophy.
But I digress. The main thing about these disciplines is that they attempt to reduce the complexity of human behaviour to the level of particle physics or coin tossing. Statistics are employed to show that correlation is quite likely destiny. All this has a corrosive effect on what we think humans are all about. It is somewhat to do with Richard Dawkins's 'blind watchmaker' idea, that environmental randomness accounts for humanity. Even if we think this is true, the secret to being human is to act as if humans are not statistical elements.
There ought to be a 'treat people as people' movement in intellectual and practical life. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world of the social sciences and lose the soul of the humanities?
However, in things like psychology or education, you flip a human. Humans may not be totally unpredictable, but they certainly have more than two states. After flipping a human once, you already have many possibilities. These include some which you never thought of, some which are unique to that human, and some which that human never thought of. The possibilities branch dramatically after that, limited only by larger bulk probabilities like those mandated by physical laws.
In the social sciences, you take many humans, on the principle that if you have a lot of them, their differences cancel out statistically and you can predict their mass behaviour. The 'lot of them' part is where you get 'social'; the 'predict' part is where you get 'sciences'. These disciplines include sociology, economics and anthropology as well; some would include geography, history and political science. It is hard to decide where to place philosophy.
But I digress. The main thing about these disciplines is that they attempt to reduce the complexity of human behaviour to the level of particle physics or coin tossing. Statistics are employed to show that correlation is quite likely destiny. All this has a corrosive effect on what we think humans are all about. It is somewhat to do with Richard Dawkins's 'blind watchmaker' idea, that environmental randomness accounts for humanity. Even if we think this is true, the secret to being human is to act as if humans are not statistical elements.
There ought to be a 'treat people as people' movement in intellectual and practical life. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world of the social sciences and lose the soul of the humanities?
Labels: Education, Humanity, Social Sciences
etched with acid at 8:16:00 am
1 Comments:
I hope you count this as related, but I am quite fascinated by the idea of "social calculus" (apparently the formal term is "methodological individualism as I recently discovered), where a malevolent entity or "malicious invisible hand" develops unwittingly from the sum of the collective actions of otherwise well-meaning individuals.
Consider members of an oligarchy in which *no-one* is safe, where the highest party leaders and the fonders are constantly purged. By whom? For who is it benefitting? The "establishment" that the first purge seems to benefit ends up getting purged themselves and a new clique sets themselves up, who then "fall out of favour with the Party." In 1984, the Party founders "come under a cloud", but by whom? Who orders their pictures sent into the memory hole? Nevertheless, the group that made that order also eventually ends up being deposed as well. In history books they always mention leaders who get deposed because "they fell out of favour with the Party." The Party, that collective entity that seems to take on a personality larger than the sum of all its members.
But this is of course impossible, so the idea is to analyse the sum effects of individuals when taken as a whole. The idea of the Party as a collective entity that imposes fear on *all* its members, even the highest-ranked, seems to create a sort of "Beast" which even the "power behind the throne" must fear. But in actuality, the Beast -- the malicious invisible hand -- is like the political equivalent of a "fictitious force" -- like how centripetal force is the summation of all the different components of force in each the system's numerous individual positions. Each individual tries to further their own self-interest, but in the case of an oligarchy, this can create a monster of a "fictitious tyrannical force" -- fictitious only because in reality, each member is contributing to his or her own oppression.
A rather tangential comment, whoops -- but I couldn't help thinking the idea as I read your post.
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