Transcription
All right everybody. So, as I am sure most of you are probably aware, a certain Mr. Dave decided recently to publish a video doing a takedown of me, and specifically a response to my video that was titled "How Science Became Unscientific."
Now, as entertaining as that was, I wasn't originally going to respond to that video at all. Mainly because I feel like Dave just spectacularly missed my point repeatedly for a solid hour, and I felt like responding to that at all would be, if anything, just kind of validating his misrepresentation of me more than anything. But also because I felt like I really did not want to get bogged down, sucked into the kind of debate bro egotistical mudslinging which often happens on YouTube. I like to think that I am personally above that, and I like to think that the philosophy and science and scholarship communities here on YouTube are above that. But, uh, you know, maybe that's a little bit too much to ask for some people, as I found out.
So obviously, I've I've changed my mind a bit. I've decided that I am going to talk about that, mostly because I've I've spent some time thinking about it, and I've decided that it's actually kind of interesting in itself that Dave so egregiously failed to understand the the points that I was making, and also that he got so angry, so upset personally by the things that I said. So today, we're going to talk about that.
Now, throughout that video, I was pretty clear, rather repeatedly, about a distinction which I was making between science itself, the idea of science as a way of engaging with nature and attempting to disclose nature, to understand nature through that engagement, on the one hand. And then, on the other hand, the idea of the science, what, uh, Dark Age theorist fellow YouTuber has referred to as "Science TM," uh, what the Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek referred to as scientism. He was the first to really popularize this idea of science as a kind of ideological structure rather than as a mode of engagement with the world, a kind of epistemological project. And that distinction was, of course, very significant, very, very central to the point that I was making.
My point was not that science itself is bad. My point was that the way of understanding science which has become particularly popular over the course of the past 50 to 70 years or so is antithetical to science. And it's antithetical to science because it's an idea of science as a kind of ecclesiarchy, as a kind of institutional structure of authorized beliefs which mediates between us mere mortals and the divine truths which are revealed by the science.
So, initially, my thought was that Dave and his fans just didn't really watch the video, or at the very least, didn't pay attention to the things that I actually said in the video. But the more I thought about this, the more I realized that I think there's more going on than that. The problem was not that I was not clear about that distinction, and I don't think the problem was that Dave and his fans simply lacked the reading comprehension or cognitive horsepower to understand that distinction. Rather, I think what's going on here has more to do with the psychological function that the idea of the science actually performs for people like Dave and his fans.
The world is kind of a scary place, and we look for things that can ground us, things that can give us a sense of certainty and stability. And for some people, that thing that gives us that sense of stability is religion. For other people, it's the science. The idea that there could be a disentanglement of science from the science from scientism is itself kind of threatening to that ideological disposition. There's something very comforting about the idea that there is a trustworthy institution which can just tell us what we can safely believe or disbelieve. There's something very reassuring about the idea that science is something that we can passively consume and thereby safely distinguish between truth and nonsense.
Part of the reason why Dave got so upset, I think, is because that itself is the product which he is selling: science as a kind of passive entertainment which we absorb and thereby achieve a kind of epistemological certainty. The other reason is because I believe Dave himself is exactly the kind of person who needs science to be the science in order for it to be what it is to him on a deep emotional and psychological level.
What I argued in my video is that science can never be that. It can never be a kind of ecclesiarchy which mediates between truth and the masses. It can never be a kind of quasi-religious institution. And part of the reason for that is simply because uncertainty itself is woven into the very endeavor of science. But the problem is not with science itself. The problem lies in the concerted effort which has been made over the past several decades to make science into just such an ecclesiarchy. Many of the claims which are handed down to us, which are presented as facts, are falsehoods. They are not true, or at the very least, there is far more uncertainty than would be indicated by the way that these things are presented to us.
Now, one criticism which was made of me is that I am overgeneralizing, that these are problems with the soft sciences, with sociology, um, but that these are not really issues with the hard sciences, the sciences which are truly trustworthy. And this is simply not the case. The replication crisis is as much a problem for biomed research as it is for psychology and sociology. And in fact, researchers of the replication crisis have looked at physics as well. And what they found was not that physics is exempt from these endemic problems. Rather, what they found, first of all, is that physicists tended to be far more confident about the replicability of their findings and far less likely to have actually attempted to perform such replications. Link in the description. And moreover, some of the most egregious cases of failure to replicate, some of the most egregious cases of outright fraud, come from physics.
Another particularly egregious example of fraud and malpractice comes from the world of biomed science, the so-called Hwang affair. Again, link in the description to a lovely little video essay about that, in which a celebrity South Korean stem cell researcher was found to have fabricated most of his data, abused his research students, and also engaged in an enormous amount of financial malpractice.
Now, finance is something we should probably talk about as well. One thing that Dave mentioned in his video is that I was so out of line for saying that there's something a little fishy about the fact that we have to pay for access to scientific journals. He compared paying for scientific research to paying for Netflix, which is itself kind of interesting, isn't it? It kind of highlights the fact that Dave really sees science primarily as a form of entertainment, or at least that's the product he's selling.
Now, the thing about Netflix, though, is that Netflix does not pretend to be providing the public with truth or certainty or data. Netflix is entertainment. And moreover, my tax dollars don't pay for Netflix. My tax dollars do pay for scientific research. Most scientific research is publicly funded. My tax dollars and yours pay for that research to exist. And so, the fact that scientific research would be inaccessible by the general public which pays for that research is a bit different than paying for Netflix, isn't it?
The relationship between financial incentives, profit motivations, and truth doesn't exactly have a great track record. And I don't think it's accidental at all that the idea of science as an ecclesiarchy really rose to prominence following World War II, specifically following the development of atomic weapons. Because it was during that time period that national governments began to look at science as a powerful weapon of political control, social control, and military dominance. I don't think it is accidental whatsoever that around the exact same time that national governments began to see science as a weapon, that science came to serve the ideological function as a kind of holy text of neoliberal globalization.
A lot of people like to think that physics is exempt from these ideological problems, that physics is a truly hard science that exists in a completely different realm than our ideological and religious beliefs, our metaphysical presuppositions, and whatnot. But this is simply not true. Astrophysics in particular is perhaps the most speculative form of science. All astrophysical conjectures, all astrophysical research, builds upon previous research in a very tenuous kind of way. Very specific assumptions are made, and lots of such assumptions are made every step of the way. And if any of those assumptions, any of those calculations, turn out to be wrong, then the whole house of cards comes to fall down.
And again, uncertainty itself is not the problem here. It's good that we are uncertain. It is good that we have humility rather than overconfidence when we make conjectures about the world, about the universe. And yet, because of financial incentives, scientists and universities have a very vested interest in presenting themselves as far more confident than they actually are much of the time. Because a lot of universities and research initiatives are publicly funded, researchers and scientists and academic institutions need to convince politicians and lawmakers that their endeavors are worthy investments. And so there is an active, direct incentive there for scientists to pretend to be a lot more certain than they actually are. And this is probably the case more so in physics than in any other branch of science. There is an enormous amount of money that goes into making things like particle colliders. And if you want to see just how gory the details of such endeavors can be, then again, check the description for a lovely little video essay about the particle collider which was attempted to be created in Houston, Texas.
Now, with things such as particle colliders in mind, next we should talk about technology. Now, in Dave's video about electric universe theory, the one that I brought up in my video, Dave says that electric universe theory cannot be correct because we know how gravity works, we know how light works, we know how electromagnetism works. And his evidence which he pointed to for this knowledge was technology. We know that these things are true because we have things like satellites and smartphones and television and whatnot. And there is even the insinuation that I am a hypocrite for, uh, not believing in science while also using technology to talk about how I don't believe in science, which again, that's not actually what my video was about. But in any case, the thing here is that Dave's actually making a pretty big leap in pointing to technology in this way.
I can, for example, create an equation that predicts with stunning accuracy when the school bus will show up outside of my apartment complex every day, and it will work. It, it will be a beautiful triumph of mathematical precision, until summer comes around and school's not in session anymore and the bus stops showing up. Now, that of course wouldn't be terribly surprising. We know why buses come and go. But that equation would fail because it doesn't take into consideration the reality which underlies the regularities which the math models. General relativity is extremely successful within certain kinds of observations, within certain kinds of phenomena. And yet, when we then try to generalize that to the universe at large and start looking at things like galaxy formation, the predictions fail. Things don't turn out the way we would expect them to. And that seems to be an indication that we've gotten something wrong along the way. The equations work until they don't. And that still does allow us to do things. It allows us to do all kinds of technological things which are quite marvelous. But that in no way implies, or at least in no way necessitates, that the presumptions about nature which underly those equations are completely correct.
Now, as for electric universe theory itself, in my video, I specifically mentioned that I wasn't really worried about going to bat for electric universe theory itself. I think that electric universe theory is pretty interesting, but that was tangential to the point I was making about Dave, and the video was already two hours long, so I didn't really feel the need to go there. Electric universe theory is interesting, I think, because it presents a very different approach to trying to understand the world at a cosmic, astrophysical scale. Nonetheless, I do have issues with electric universe theory. I think that electric universe theorists tend to buy into some of the exact same incorrect assumptions which are made within standard academic physics.
If you guys are familiar with the material atomics people, the guys who do the "Demystify Sci-Fi" podcast, they have also a very different approach to trying to understand the subatomic world. And I think that some of the assumptions that they are making are completely incorrect. And that's fine. We can disagree on things. But that's not enough for Dave. It's not enough for Dave to just disagree with myself or the electric universe people or whoever. Dave has to brand these people as heretics. They have to be evil adversaries who, who he is obligated to defeat. He has to put them in their place in the name of the science.
So, it could be that, in the grand scheme of things, electric universe theory is wrong. It could be that, in the grand scheme of things, general relativity is wrong. In fact, I think we have good reason to believe both of those, that both general relativity and electric universe are incorrect in certain ways. Nonetheless, it could be that both general relativity and electric universe theory point us in the direction of certain truths, certain things that we haven't seen before, things that we haven't noticed, which disclose for us a more subtle, complex, more strange reality which underlies both of those conceptual schemes. But Dave's attitude completely precludes this. This attitude of inquisitional dogmatism completely precludes the possibility that strange new ideas could show us things that we weren't able to see before. Ultimately, anything that we don't already know is going to, by definition, not be an authorized belief handed down to us by the science.
Now, as you guys are probably aware, I have some pretty far-out beliefs, or at least they seem pretty far-out when contrasted with the world picture that is often presented to us through academic science. And inevitably, some of those beliefs are going to change. My understanding of the world is something that is constantly in flux, and it has been that way my entire life. In fact, in my late teens and early 20s, I really wasn't all that different than Dave. I spent an enormous amount of time devouring books written by people like Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Dan Dennett. And I genuinely believed that the science was this thing that existed which could provide me with an ability to discern between that which could be taken seriously and that which could not be taken seriously, between the science and pseudoscience.
But I wanted to delve further into this. If there's really an epistemological distinction between science and pseudoscience, then I wanted to understand really what that amounted to at the most basic level. What really is that distinction? How do we know when we are doing epistemology correctly? And how can we then avoid doing epistemology incorrectly? And this led me into philosophy. This led me specifically into analytic philosophy of mind and analytic epistemology. And this, of course, was a huge rabbit hole. I found myself, you know, going through, uh, Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, studying the logical positivists, studying Carl Popper's work. And ultimately, what I found was that really, there was no line that you could draw which divided all of the things that we wish to consider to be the science, the real science, from pseudoscience. No matter how you carve that out, you're inevitably going to end up defining pseudoscience in such a way that it encompasses lots of the things that we generally consider to be science, or you're going to define science in such a way that a lot of the things that are ridiculed and dismissed as pseudoscience become included within that definition.
And really, what I found ultimately is that pseudoscience isn't really a matter of an epistemological algorithm which we follow in order to understand the world. Science isn't either. Pseudoscience has a lot more to do with attitude, with intention, than anything else. There, there is real pseudoscience out there, people who are generally trying to sell you things by appropriating the aura of prestige that we associate with science. So, for example, someone might use very sciencey sounding language to try to sell you a certain idea, a certain political belief, or a certain product, in a way that's very disingenuous, such that there's no real science underneath that facade of language. And that's pseudoscience. But for someone like Dave, pseudoscience needs to be much more than that. It needs to be heresy. Pseudoscience needs to be something that we can apply to those who dare to disagree with the authorized beliefs.
And the real irony in all this is that the real pseudoscience, the kind of pseudoscience which appropriates the language of science in order to appropriate that aura of prestige, is only possible because of the science, because of the idea of scientism which Dave himself is such a proponent of. Without the idea of authorized belief, without the idea of prestige associated with science as a kind of pseudo clergy, then there would be nothing for pseudoscience to appropriate.
Now, one other thing that I wanted to address in this video is a criticism that I received from a few people, not just Dave, pertaining specifically to the way that I talked about the relationship between relativity and quantum theory. Now, I understand that there is a distinction between special relativity and general relativity, that there is a distinction between quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory, and that when we get into the gory details, those distinctions matter pertaining to to how the quantum world and the gravitational relativistic world relate to one another. But I made that gloss. I ignored those technicalities for a reason. And the reason was because I was getting at a rather different point. My point pertains to metaphysics.
I believe that quantum understandings of the world and relativistic understandings of the world are really rooted in two very different consciousness structures. Now, if you're not familiar with what I do here, that might sound kind of vague. But the general idea is to summarize a bit, is, is that the Einsteinian picture of the world is ultimately a kind of mathematical formalization of the Kantian picture of the world, and the quantum understanding of the world is fundamentally post-Kantian. Now, I'm not going to get into too much detail here about what, what I mean by that. This is something I've talked a bit about before, and it's definitely something that I'll talk about in more detail later on. But my point is that I don't think any kind of new fancy math is going to come to the rescue here and reconcile those two world pictures because they are at a level that is deeper than the math, irreconcilable. There's not going to be a theory of quantum gravity which allows us to have our quantum cake and eat it too.
And I bring this up because of the relevance of metaphysics, the importance of philosophy here. People like Dave, or like Richard Dawkins, for example, like to think that philosophy and metaphysics are just irrelevant. We have science now, we can just do science and learn how the world works. We don't need to engage in any kind of metaphysical or philosophical speculations. And I think this just is not true. And in fact, it is necessarily not true. Not because there's always going to be holes in science that we need to fill with metaphysics or philosophy, but because ultimately, science is itself an outgrowth of metaphysics and philosophy. Metaphysics and naturalism are two sides of the same coin. You can't do one without the other.
I think this is exactly what we see in Thomas Kuhn's work, what we see in Paul Feyerabend's work. That our observations of the world, even things that seem obvious to us, things that just seem like raw data, themselves have to be interpreted. They have to be interpreted through our theories. We could say that observations themselves are theory-laden, and theories themselves are rooted in our core understandings, the core metaphors, the core assumptions about what the world is and how it works. And what happens when we ignore that metaphysical domain is not that we get away from metaphysics. It's not that metaphysics becomes irrelevant and that we can just do science without metaphysics. Rather, what happens is we create a blind spot because we don't see the metaphysics which is implicit in our scientific theories. We ignore it, and we come to believe that it's not there. And we don't realize that there are these very fundamental assumptions that we're taking for granted because we think that they're simply obvious. But they're not. They never are. They all have histories that are tied up with all kinds of things, sociological transformations, transformations in human consciousness itself, the way we speak, the way we think, the way that we experience the world.
And so, if we follow with someone like Stephen Hawking, for example, who says that philosophy is just irrelevant, now, what that means is that what we're going to do is we're going to begin operating with a set of core metaphysical assumptions which you're going to get a free ride. We're not going to criticize them anymore. We're not going to look at them under the microscope. We're going to lose our capacity to turn the microscope around and look at ourselves and the way that our own dispositions are conditioning the way that we come to understand the world in a scientific or naturalistic manner.
So, to tie this in a bow, I want to circle back around to technology and the epistemological and ideological roles which have come to be performed by technology within scientism. We've created a world in which we are surrounded by technologies, inundated by technologies. I'm using machine technologies to record this video. You will be using machine technologies to listen to this video. And yet, when we look away from the technologies for a moment and look at the world itself, we don't see technologies. We don't see machines. We see the world.
What we have here within that use of technology as the gold standard of epistemological validation is the free ride, the free lunch of a certain metaphor which conditions the way that we understand the world. That machine metaphor is a grid which we have applied to the world so thoroughly that we've forgotten that it even exists. And one of the big projects which I've tried to engage in here on my channel is trying to show that there is a different way of understanding the world. There are different ways that we can think about things that don't centralize technology in that way. We can think of the world in an organismic sense rather than a strictly technological sense.
And these ideas are not ideas that I've cooked up on my own. These are ideas developed by thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead or Henri Bergson or Johann von Goethe or Arthur M. Young. And these guys were not dummies. They were not pseudo-scientists or charlatans. Many of them were mathematicians, many of them were themselves scientists as well as philosophers. And I think that this is important. It's important to be able to broaden our scope in that way and look at the world as a living system rather than a machine, a clockwork universe comprised of dead matter. Because when we take that machine metaphor and use it for technologies, we achieve all kinds of wonderful things. But when we take that metaphor and try to generalize it to life, to the solar system, to the cosmos, to reality itself, we make a very big mistake, I believe. And it is specifically that mistake, I believe, which has caused modern science to in many ways paint itself into a corner. Thanks for watching.