This is a bit of a curious post. I'm not sure the antidote to people being proud of ignorance in science/math (which is a problem) is to be proud of ignorance in the humanities (which is also a problem). I mean, if you'd rather go boozing than read Bertrand Russell, that's a choice you're free to make, but I wouldn't be proud of it. I guess I don't know much about the history of classical music myself, but mostly because one can't study everything, and it isn't currently near the top of my reading list (though the fact that both Douglas Hofstadter and David Cope constantly mention J.S. Bach makes it somewhat relevant to my AI interests).
I also don't generally think as scientists we can afford to be ignorant of the humanities in general, though many people can afford to ignore parts. There is a lot of physics that suffers from "bad metaphysics" precisely because of its practitioners reinventing metaphysics, in the guise of "interpretations" of physics, when they are unaware of obvious problems that arise, which even a small amount of reading would've made them aware of. And there's a lot of work in artificial intelligence that makes more sense with a humanities background.
Oddly this seems to be a recent phenomenon. Early 20th century physicists were very well-read in philosophy, and their interpretations are accordingly sophisticated and rarely run into novice problems. Same with mathematicians; it's hard to even separate whether someone like Frege was a mathematician or philosopher. Some is unavoidable due to increasing specialization, but if anything that would seem to call for more humility, not extra arrogance that we know how to solve the philosophical problems that we don't time to study in as much depth as Einstein/Planck/Bohr/etc. did...
I'd trace some of it (on both sides) to a general academic tendency to want to rationalize why the fields you didn't specialize in and don't know about aren't that important to know about. There's an only half-joke that academics always want to reduce every field to their own: to an economist everything is analyzable with economic tools, to a sociologist everything is culture, to a physicist everything is physics and its minor epiphenomena, to a philosopher everything is philosophy plus implementation details, to a dynamical systems theorist everything is just instantiations of dynamical systems, etc.
> This is a bit of a curious post. I'm not sure the antidote to people being proud of ignorance in science/math (which is a problem) is to be proud of ignorance in the humanities (which is also a problem).
I don't think you really mean ignorance in the humanities, you mean ignorance in philosophy. Being able to distinguish all the various cantatas of Bach is the most trivial of trivialities. More broadly, I suspect talking about "the humanities" as a category is worse than useless, because you get passionate defenses of literacy in reply to weeping and moaning over the sad state of modern dance.
Talk about literacy, philosophy, history. Talk about theater and dance. Talk about visual art and music. Talk about rhetoric and economics.
I can believe that as regards science practice, and think a lot of epistemology of science and such isn't that relevant or useful to the practice of science (everyone seems to have kind of a half-worked-out theory of verificationism or falsificationism or something similar that they claim to subscribe to, but things mostly work pragmatically in practice).
I'm more thinking of physicists who, especially in their later career, decide to write what are essentially philosophy works, only they: 1) don't acknowledge them as such; and 2) they are therefore often not as good as they could be, and sometimes bad. For example, Roger Penrose's stuff about physics and consciousness is a bit strange, and it probably wouldn't hurt if he cared more about existing work in philosophy of mind. And Hawking's most recent book has good science, and an interesting philosophical proposal of "model-dependent realism", but strangely refuses to consider it to be a philosophy proposal or discuss relevant existing positions.
Physicists veering off towards "big-picture" philosophy-ish stuff later in their careers isn't new, but this sort of seat-of-your-pants approach seems newer. Looking at the philosophy-oriented works Max Planck wrote later in his career, for example, he's impressively well-read in both physics and philosophy.
I do not think that's true. Are you familiar with the idea that scientific theories have to be falsifiable? That was formulated by Karl Popper in the mid-20th century.
If anything, the rise of analytic philosophy and the introduction of greater logical rigor to philosophy in the early 20th century made it relevant again after a largely fruitless 19th century. Go ahead and ask a scientist whether Popper or Hegel is more useful.
It's not like before Popper scientists didn't know they had to design experiments to test their theories. Popper himself, from what I read of him, considered his work more useful as a way to tell apart real science from fake science (he gives Marxism as an example of the latter), than as anything that could help real scientists do their jobs.
In chapter 7 of "Dreams of a Final Theory", Steven Weinberg argues that philosophy has been mostly useless or even harmful for physicists, and whatever positive effects some philosophical theories might have had, had to do with undoing the harm done by other philosophical theories.
Weinberg is not hostile towards philosophy, he has warm words for it and says he enjoys reading certain philosophers, he just acknowledges that philosophy is not at all helpful in doing science. Exact quote: "I know of noone who has participated actively in the advance of physics in the postwar period whose research has been significantly helped by the work of philosophers." (Weinberg considers this surprising, and contrasts it with mathematics, which is extremely useful even though there is no reason why it should be.)
There is a lot of physics that suffers from "bad metaphysics" precisely because of its practitioners reinventing metaphysics, in the guise of "interpretations" of physics, when they are unaware of obvious problems that arise, which even a small amount of reading would've made them aware of.
Could you give examples? I'm not sure what you're referring to.
Maybe the commenter was referring to the "quantum energy" BS spouted by the likes of Deepak Chopra? (but in nicer words that I personally would've put it...)
That was my thought of it as well. Such pseudo-science demeans both science and the people who use it. If new age spirituality is so awesome, why the need to use pretend-science to justify it? Why can't it be awesome on it's own terms?
Oddly this seems to be a recent phenomenon. Early 20th century physicists were very well-read in philosophy, and their interpretations are accordingly sophisticated and rarely run into novice problems. Same with mathematicians; it's hard to even separate whether someone like Frege was a mathematician or philosopher.
Bertrand Russell and Frege are part of philosophy of science, a relatively recent period in philosophy.
It is widely accepted that philosophy of science was initiated by Immanuel Kant (late 18th century) in the Western world, and since then, philosophers have been trying to give solutions to some of the problems he first posed.
What's more, most of the Western world at the end of the 18th century underwent a period called Enlightenment. This meant, all of a sudden, there was a huge emphasis on science and empiricism throughout all parts of society (Academia included, of course).
Before that, 'philosophy of science' was known as (observations on) natural history, and then the term 'natural philosophy' was created.
Thus, since mathematics is the language of science, this is why you can't/couldn't tell whether a philosopher of science was a mathematician or a philosopher.
Even nowadays, most programmes (my own research covers Canada and major American universities) only offer philosophy of science courses, but many do not explicitly state 'philosophy of science'. I know this because I almost majored in philosophy, but I specifically wanted to go away from this branch and instead wanted to specialize in pre-Socratic philosophy, but there were no programmes dedicated to this.
As for my personal opinion on students/teachers of science vs. arts, I feel many science students lack an appreciation of philosophy and how much it did for the sciences in its early years. Most science majors shove philosophy with the rest of the arts, but, as an arts major, philosophy is the hardest arts subject and can be equally demanding as a physics course, because it is the only subject which requires an extremely rigorous knowledge of science and arts. And there are simply very few people who hold such knowledge. Philosophy is the ultimate interdisciplinary subject where in a given class, you can talk about the laws of speed and light, 18th century subtexts vis-à-vis slavery, and biology (the growth process of plants and trees).
In Physics, the general feeling is that "philosophical interpretation" is simply out of the scope of our work. I think this derives mainly from the intensity and ultimate futility of the disagreements over the interpretation of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century. It's seen as a waste of time and a seed of acrimony that we're better off not indulging in as a field.
Yeah, I have in mind more stuff like recent works by Penrose, Hawking, Krauss, etc. I don't have a problem with people abstaining from comment on implications/interpretations entirely, and many experimentalists would fall in that category. But many physicists seem to really want to write about interpretations and philosophy! Only, somehow, they don't want to call what they're doing "philosophy", because they look down on that.
I think this misses the point a little bit though. I believe he acknowledges that that is probably not a good thing but he is trying to point out the phenomenon of it being "acceptable" to well-trained in humanities but be prideful of not knowing mathematics but the reverse is considered strange.
Isn't the difference that you can do practical stuff with maths, but not really with literature and art (except, granted, create more literature and art, which might be the only jobs left in the future)?
Perhaps knowing maths is a bit like having dirty fingernails from doing manual labor. A certain class of people is proud of not having to do manual labor, and hence they take pride in their clean and long fingernails. Others will despise them and value "real work" higher.
Ah, but pure mathematicians see themselves as having the clean fingernails, studying the mysteries of the cosmos unsullied by practical application. :)
> Perhaps knowing maths is a bit like having dirty fingernails from doing manual labor.
Never tell this to someone who pursues pure mathematics. It's so absolutely opposite their whole mindset that math should focus on anything other than the beauty of mathematics that comparing it to manual labor may well make their heads explode.
Interesting sidenote: in Germany, the camps are subtly different: Geisteswissenschaften - "mind sciences" vs. Naturwissenschaften - "nature sciences". And mathematics belongs to the former (although most people are probably not aware of that and the same attitude criticised by TFA is quite common).
Chad Orzel isn't glamourizing his lack of systematic knowledge, merely acknowledging it in a forthright and fairly humble manner. I'd argue that he's trying to avoid coming off as and arrogant physics/math nerd.
In fact, here is direct textual evidence contradicting your caricaturization:
"This is the exact same chippiness I hear from Physics majors who are annoyed at having to take liberal arts classes in order to graduate. The only difference is that Terrance can expect to get a sympathetic hearing from much of the academy, where the grousing of Physics majors is written off as whining by nerds who badly need to expand their narrow minds."
I give you an F in Reading, and a B in Rhetoric. I concur entirely that the lack of intellectual breadth amongst both technical and non-technical academics is quite obnoxious, and I'd argue that the rather pointlessly competitive nature of academic subfield is a holdover from when academics were basically young courtiers trying to secure themselves a nice sinecure. Sometimes this energy can produce great things, I'd venture that at this point we are just making the remarkable research discoveries that are largely just waiting around for some humble systematic work, further away.
I also don't generally think as scientists we can afford to be ignorant of the humanities in general, though many people can afford to ignore parts. There is a lot of physics that suffers from "bad metaphysics" precisely because of its practitioners reinventing metaphysics, in the guise of "interpretations" of physics, when they are unaware of obvious problems that arise, which even a small amount of reading would've made them aware of. And there's a lot of work in artificial intelligence that makes more sense with a humanities background.
Oddly this seems to be a recent phenomenon. Early 20th century physicists were very well-read in philosophy, and their interpretations are accordingly sophisticated and rarely run into novice problems. Same with mathematicians; it's hard to even separate whether someone like Frege was a mathematician or philosopher. Some is unavoidable due to increasing specialization, but if anything that would seem to call for more humility, not extra arrogance that we know how to solve the philosophical problems that we don't time to study in as much depth as Einstein/Planck/Bohr/etc. did...
I'd trace some of it (on both sides) to a general academic tendency to want to rationalize why the fields you didn't specialize in and don't know about aren't that important to know about. There's an only half-joke that academics always want to reduce every field to their own: to an economist everything is analyzable with economic tools, to a sociologist everything is culture, to a physicist everything is physics and its minor epiphenomena, to a philosopher everything is philosophy plus implementation details, to a dynamical systems theorist everything is just instantiations of dynamical systems, etc.