Category: Sharp Stick

Paradigm Shifts

I bought a paperback copy of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in the University of Manitoba Bookstore in the basement of the Student Union building, during the 1971-72 or 1972-73 term. It was not a required text. The book was embraced by sociologists, economists and political scientist seeking validation of claims by teachers of those areas of study as “science”:

The changes that occur in politics, society and business are often expressed in Kuhnian terms, however poor their parallel with the practice of science may seem to scientists and historians of science. The terms “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” have become such notorious clichés and buzzwords that they are sometimes viewed as effectively devoid of content.

Wikipedia entry: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

An article in the magazine The New Republic discussed the the meaning and use of the terms paradigm and paradigm shift in since the early ’70s:

For the culture at large, Structure’s greatest contribution has been linguistic—the notion of “paradigm change” as a synonym for “thinking outside the box.” But read in 2024, in light of the current history wars, the real revolution at the heart of Structure was a paradigm shift in scientific narrative. Who gets to tell the story of a field? And how truthful should they be in their telling?

Audra Wolfe. “What was the Paradigm Shift“, The New Republic, May 22, 2024

The article examined Kuhn’s influences and context including the idea of science in the early ’60s:

… when a young Kuhn was teaching the history of science at Harvard. Kuhn’s tenure at Harvard coincided with the waning years of the presidency of James B. Conant, a chemist who had long left the lab in favor of scientific and political administration. …

… Conant sought a pedagogical strategy that could cultivate a new generation of curious scientists and instill respect for science among nonscientists but that would also carefully calibrate citizens’ questioning of authority.

Conant’s solution was historical method. Shortly after the war ended, Conant began teaching a new course on the history and philosophy of science for Harvard undergraduates. In a turn that was unusual for courses in the history of science at the time, Conant covered scientific wrong turns and dead ends, including alchemy and theories of spontaneous generation. Kuhn’s experience of teaching a version of this course transformed his understanding of the history and philosophy of science.

This crucial context explains the book’s otherwise peculiar obsession with scientific textbooks. The problem with textbooks, as Kuhn repeatedly explains, echoing Conant, is that they obscure scientific debate and prior explanations in the name of inducting students into the reigning understanding of how the world works—that is, a scientific paradigm. These textbooks, he claims, have to be “rewritten” when normal science changes, because they “refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts’ paradigm problems.”

….

Kuhn claimed, both in 1962 and for the rest of his career, that he had not intended any of this as an attack on the scientific enterprise itself. For Kuhn, the entire point of Structure was to elucidate what he and many scientists of his generation saw as science’s distinctive ability to build cumulative knowledge.

….

… Kuhn himself acknowledged one critical way in which his account of scientific progress diverged from common understanding: It had nothing to do with truth. Instead of thinking of science as a process that inevitably draws closer to natural reality, Kuhn suggested that we treat scientific change as an evolutionary process … in which various paradigms compete for community advantage.

Ibid

The article also examined whether Kuhn had contributed to the popularity of European philosophical trends, such as structuralism, critical theory and Foucalt’s theories of power, authority and knowledge among academics and the general public:

By the mid-1980s, a new generation of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of science brought a more critical lens to scientific power. They incorporated ideas about race, sex, gender, national and historical context, and, most importantly, power into their analyses of what drove scientific communities to embrace some theories and reject others. Defenders of science took to calling this approach “Kuhnian,” to Kuhn’s everlasting chagrin. The charge was ridiculous then and ridiculous now: Structure’s approach to its topic is in …intellectually conservative, given that it excludes the natural and social sciences and any discussion of technology or … “external social, economic, and intellectual conditions in the development of the sciences.”

Ibid

Another article “The Realist and the Pragmatist” in the online edition of the magazine Aeon (not paywalled at the time), discussing paradigms in epistemology. She discussed Kuhn in the context of theories articulated in logical empiricist school of philosophy by Rudolph Carnap. She contrasts framed enquiries and framing enquiries. She suggests the latter lead to what Kuhn called ‘paradigm shifts’ and notes that:

… in framed enquiry, the framework constrains the space of possible answers, while in framing enquiry, the issue is more open-ended. We do not aim at a predetermined target in the same way that a murder investigation aims at finding out who the murderer is. When we discuss our conceptions of democracy, gender, efficiency, the goal is to build conceptual structures that help us make sense of the world, given our purposes. There is no right answer to be found ‘out there’

….

This is not to say that, when we engage in framing enquiry, we should give up on any ideal of objectivity. The open-endedness of framing enquiry does not amount to a free-for-all pass to choose or create the framework that fits one’s prior beliefs and desires. In fact, doing so would be the opposite of open-endedness, since it would subordinate the entire enquiry to predetermined ends. Instead, facts matter in framing enquiry because there is a constant iterative adjustment between frameworks and facts. … . Reasons, arguments and evidence still have a central role to play in framing enquiry.

This is why it is important to know when we are engaged in a framed or a framing enquiry. Unfortunately, it is not always straightforward to tell, especially from the inside. First, the distinction between framed and framing enquiry is a spectrum rather than a dichotomy, and that complicates matters. Many of our daily investigations are very clearly on the framed end of the spectrum: why is the kitchen sink leaking? How many eggs do we have in the fridge? But in more complex enquiries, whether in science or politics, the boundaries between framed and framing enquiry are blurred, as we most often alternate between the two.

Celine Hénne, “The Realist and the Pragmatist”. Aeone

Is NPR Woke?

In William Deresiewicz’s article in the online service UnHerd March 8, 2022 “Escaping American tribalism” he says that he started to listen to contrarian podcasts including Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable in 2021, when he thought that American National Public Radio (“NPR”) has become partisan, on the “woke” side of the cultural divide:

“Moral clarity” became the new journalistic standard, as if the phrase meant anything other than tailoring the evidence to fit one’s preexisting beliefs. I was lamenting the loss, not of “journalistic objectivity,” a foolish term and impossible goal, but of simple journalistic good faith: a willingness to gather and present the facts that bear upon an issue, honestly and clearly, regardless of their implications.

For months, I felt trapped, alone with my incredulity. Was I the only person seeing this? Every time I turned on NPR, my exasperation grew — basically, I was hate-listening after a certain point — but what was the alternative? I literally couldn’t think of any. Then, by sheer dumb luck, I was invited on a podcast to discuss a book I had recently published. It was The Unspeakable, with Meghan Daum, and while I had never thought of myself as a podcast person, I so enjoyed myself, was so impressed with her intelligence and humour, that I became a listener.

UnHerd, March 8, 2022, Escaping American Tribalism

The implies that the audience, particularly in America, has become polarized, by identity politics, into “tribes”. Writers criticized, in the Atlantic:

Some academic writers – e.g. Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bevel in The Power of Us and in an extract in the Atlantic defend the social benefits of tribalism.

William Deresiewicz had been an adjunct professor teaching at Yale but after he was not granted tenure, he ceased to teach in 2008. He wrote articles and books as a public intellectual. He wrote Excellent Sheep in 2014, criticizing (1) the admission policies and curricula and (2) the high cost of attending of American elite universities. His book had a mixed reception. Some of the reviews – for instance by Douglas Greenberg and by Kevin Dettmer in the Los Angeles Review of Books – were harsh. The reviews insinuated – a common enough capitalist/competitive polemic strategy – he had not been good enough to get tenure, or had failings.

Meghan Daum’s book of essays, Unspeakable and William Dersiewicz’s books are good, but were not best sellers. Neither writer is a white supremacist, a Q-Anon supporter or an anti-vaxxer. They are worth reading and listening too.

In 2020, Deresiewicz published The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech on how artists sustain themselves in the Information Age. He appears to have turned to writing for contrarian platforms. In his UnHerd article, he suggests the publishing world became as censorious as the academic world. The publishing world rewards less of the few writers who attract and sustain large audiences. It extracts “content” from less popular writers and maintains – perhaps pretends – that writers are fairly compensated for content. The internet platforms prefer to publish unpaid content. Publishers say that writers are compensated by learning the business and creating a reputation that may, with luck. eventually earn advances and royalties.

Deresiewicz risks being labelled a right wing conspiracy theorist by woke academics and woke adjacent publishers – igf he is not woke, he must be against justice, or a deplorable. Attacking the writers, editors and publishers of competing media would be a way the established media would deal with dissenting and competing voices.

The effects of sectarianism along the dividing lines of ideology, religion and policy, affect writers and publishers:

UnHerd, after time and experimention, has found subject matter and material beyond Brexit, and British politics. As of March 2022 writes at UnHerd have been taking shots at Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbin, the anti-Semitism of the new Left, the new Labour leadership, woke activists, Green activists, Trans activists, the corporate leadership of the Church of England, racist immigation policies in the EU, Vladimir Putin and Britain’s embrace of Russian oligarchs.

The late George Carlin said: “It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for you.”

Parapsychology

Rupert Sheldrake still believes in and writes about parapsychology. Mr. Sheldrake had an experience in the late 1970s and became convinced that he had recognized something important about the relationship between ideas and reality. At points, Sheldrake takes the posture of a pragmatist like William James. But where James was soft on conversion experiences and mysticism, Sheldrake maintains that he is right because no one has proved (and no one can ever can logically prove) him to be wrong. In promoting his 2012 book The Science Delusion he complained that other scientists were making him a pariah and a heretic. See: Tim Adams “Rupert Sheldrake: the ‘heretic’ at odds with scientific dogma” in the Guardian February 5, 2012.

The evidence for parapsychology is anecdotes by people who postulate and believe in unknown natural or supernatural forces and and events. These people have theories about why supernatural events happen. In 2009 Adam Rutherford dismissed Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life:

In it, Sheldrake describes “morphic resonance“, which is the notion that there is a supernatural memory that is created, reinforced and inherited by repeated action. This, he claims, explains many phenomena including how newly synthesised chemicals become easier to make elsewhere in the world, how puzzles become easier once they have been done once, and paranormal powers, such as psychokinesis and telepathy. Alas, there is no evidence for morphic resonance. And as the phenomena listed are not real, no matter how real they may seem to people, there is no requirement for it.

Sheldrake is a sort of “God of the gaps” scientist. He sees gaps in knowledge, and inserts supernature as an explanation. There are three basic flaws with use of this tool. First is that it’s just not scientific. To invoke an unfalsifiable concept to fill a knowledge gap is not parsimonious. It’s much better and more scientific to simply say “We don’t know” and move on.

Second, history has shown us that it would be even better to say “we don’t know yet”, as invariably those gaps are filled in time with genuine testable explanations.

Finally, more often than not, the gaps invoked actually have perfectly good, scientific explanations, which are ignored because the protagonist is not disinterested. Thus, proponents of intelligent design, that pseudoscientific form of creationism, invoke a designer where evolution will happily suffice, because they wish to promote God. It’s impossible to establish exactly what Rupert Sheldrake is promoting, but one guess is that it’s Rupert Sheldrake.

Jung gave us a pleasant maxim which sceptics should always bear in mind: “I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud”. Indeed, speculation is a key part of formulating an hypothesis, which then can be tested to destruction. Much of Sheldrake’s work can be explained with just a bit more rigour than he employs.

Adam Rutherford, “A Book for Ignoring”, The Guardian, Feb. 6, 2009

In late 2021 Mr. Sheldrake claimed in an article “Rationalists are wrong about telepathy” published by the online site unHerd on November 22, 2021, that scientists, including Stephen Pinker, label Sheldrake’s beliefs as pseudoscience on the basis of scientism which he considers to be an illogical or irrational belief. Most of unHerd’s contributors refer to science with more concern over verifiable evidence, but unHerd has an institutional commitment to freedom of speech, particularly in matters of “faith and meaning”?

Liberal principles accepted in “Western” countries have disestablished official religions and removed government support for particular religions, and allow freedom of worship and religious practice by allowing citizens to engage in worship and religious practices without government coercion or interference. Freedom of religion allows persons to refrain from following any religious practice and to be agnostic or atheist. Freedom of religion is the formal legal framework for religious tolerance or the institutional principle of religious pluralism.

Tolerance does not satify all believers and beliefs. Some suspect tolerance as condescenging or patronizing. They want equal economic opportunities and actual respect or recognition for their opinions. Modern thinking in political philosophy attempts to rationalize and reconcile tolerance and respect for diverse opinions and needs.

Cultish

I put a hold on Amanda Montell’s 2021 book Cultish when the local library acquired it, and read it when an ebook copy was available.

AuthorAmanda MontellWikipedia entryPersonal siteSounds Like a Cult Podcast
BookCultishHarperCollins
(Publisher) Book Page		Amazon listing

The focus in on modern cults as understood in the modern vernacular:

In modern English, a cult is a social group that is defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, or by its common interest in a particular personality, object, or goal. This sense of the term is controversial, having divergent definitions both in popular culture and academia, and has also been an ongoing source of contention among scholars across several fields of study. The word “cult” is usually considered pejorative.

An older sense of the word cult involves a set of religious devotional practices that are conventional within their culture, are related to a particular figure, and are often associated with a particular place.

….

Sociological classifications of religious movements may identify a cult as a social group with socially deviant or novel beliefs and practices, although this is often unclear. Other researchers present a less-organized picture of cults, saying that they arise spontaneously around novel beliefs and practices. Groups labelled as “cults” range in size from local groups with a few followers to international organizations with millions of adherents.

Wikipedia entry “Cults” October 2021

This short book covers a lot of material. It discusses several 20th century cults that involved odd beliefs, exploitation and harm to members: the Peoples Temple (Jonestown), Heaven’s Gate, David Koresh (the Waco compound of Branch Davidian cult), Scientology, and the Childen of God commune(s) (later named the Family International organization). There are sections on Synanon and the bullying and sexual abuse in the NXIVM movement. It mentions the problems of Shambalha International based on the author’s conversations with a person involved in the movement in Vermont. It does not mention the coverage of the story by the Canadian magazine The Walrus, Canadian CBC coverage, or internet reports by concerned Buddhists. There is discussion of glossolalia in Pentecostal, Chrisian fundamentalist, and Christian evangelical religions.

It is a book by a well educated person on the young and affluent side of the age gap in the digital divide written for persons similarly situated. It explains well publicized recent events to persons who may be unaware of them. It uses terms like stan (a rhyming and disrespectful contraction of stalker and fan) as if this word had been published in a dictionary.

The book notes correctly that new teachings and groups within religious movements are viewed mildly by scholars of new religious movements, while cults can be seen as sinister in the popular imagination and in stories, or a desireably rare sources of resources or personal approval. Itrefers to a number of sources on new religious movements:

  • Sociologist – Eileen Barker in the Guardian May 29, 2009;
  • Culture Journalist – Jane Borden in Vanity Fair September 3, 2020;
  • Writer – Elizabeth Woollett in the Guardian November 18, 2018; and
  • Religion writer – Tara Elizabeth Burton in Vox April 19, 2018 and What is a Cult in the Aeon magazine. The book attibutes a statement in quotation marks to the academic and writer Megan Goodwin in a passage at ebook page 24. The (end)note attributes the words to Burton.

It isn’t a deep discussion – the book is not a dissertation or treatise. There is a discussion, based on the ideas of the behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman of impulsive and deliberately rational decision making (Thinking Fast and Slow). In the podcast, the author and the co-host conclude discussion of individual cultish groups with an assessment of “Watch your Back” or “Get the F&%* Out” which is prone to the optimism bias. Tthe podcasters identify LuLaRoe as a harmful cult and the media personality and self help speaker Tony Robbins as a cult leader. However, the podcasts tend call out cults after there has been public criticism of the cult or person. They do not lead the story.

The book rejects the idea that cults appeal to only to persons with low cognitive ability or social skills. It points out that cults recruit persons with capabilities, appeal to normal aspirations and overcome the caution and skepticism or many persons with above average cognitive ability.

One line of discussion is the cult-like or cultish features of the organization and operation of:

MLMs recruit individuals to make direct sales on commission, and to recruit and administer a sales force. This system has drawbacks:

  • Direct selling is not a reliable way for an individual to earn income;
  • The responsibilities, costs and risk of the downline (sales force) fall on the earlier or “higher level” recruits;
  • Depending on the MLM, a recruit may face pressure to purchase unnecessary inventory;
  • Depending on the MLM, a recruit may be dumped or displaced if the recruit and the downline failed to produce sales;
  • The income of a new recruit is unlikely to progress and is often low or nil.

The cultish features of MLMs and the fitness businesses are said to be the uses of language and social techniques to persuade people to make irrational decisions about money, time, reputation, relationships and health. Some MLMs exploit existing social networks including churches, clubs and political organizations. The book discusses, tangentially, the way in which many sellers of goods and services use cultish methods to maintain their brands and influence workers and customers. Amanda Montel develops and explains in the episodes on SoulCycle, MLMs, LuLaRue and others in the Sounds Like a Cult podcast (link above). The podcast episode on LuLaRoe may have been inspired by the documentary series LuLaRich on Amazon Prime.

The arguments about MLMs are collectively persuasive. This isn’t the first book to consider MLMs to be exploitative. Robert L. Fitzpatrick has published the PyramidSchemeAlert web page and several books including Ponzinomics.

Other interesting lines of discussion in Cultish:

  1. the penetration of business language into social media and other internet channels,
  2. the role of social media in allowing grifters to become influencers,
  3. monied interests generating profits through cultish influencer marketing. The book discusses the promotion of personal advice and wellness services in the final chapter called Follow for Follow which addresses influencers exercising influence, and
  4. social media users to being influenced to their detriment.

Alt-right Thinkers

Benjamin Teitelbaum is an ethnographer, teaching at the Univerity of Colorado. He studies Scandinavian far right groups. Teitelbaum observed the role of the entrepreneurial activist Daniel Friburg, the principal of the publishing firm Arktos Media, in European politics. Arktos publishes the writings of traditionalist figures including René Guénon and Julius Evola. Teitelbaum wrote an opinion piece for Wall Street Journal about Friburg’s visit to America and the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville Virginia in 2017, suggesting the American organizers had staged a riot. A few modern public intellectuals who describe themselves as traditionalists, appear to have influence with some political figures: the Russian Aleksandr Dugin and the Brazilian Olavo de Carvalho. Steve Bannon, the alt-right American figure appointed as White House Chief Strategist by US President Trump, shares some traditionalist ideas. Teitelbaum got some interviews with Bannon, This was the basis of his 2020 book War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right (The subtitle in America, was “Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers”). Teitelbaum relies on inferences and imagined episodes from the lives of Bannon and some of Teitelbaum’s contacts and sources. He is unable to portray the members of the circle as a a coherent entity There are people with heterodox, esoteric, right wing views with careers as teachers, speakers, consultants and entrepreneurs – an intelligentsia largely outside the universities and the academic world.

Teitelbaum’s effort to address the role of traditionalist ideology in the growth of the populist right is hampered by a lack of information and evidence beyond a few facts. The American academic Jason Jorjani co-founded the Alt-Right Corporation with Friburg and the American enterpreneurial activist Richard B. Spencer. That venture collapsed after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville when American conservatives and businesses, other than President Trump distanced themselves from the event. The same people and events also are mentioned in Anna Merlan’s Republic of Lies. The Alt-Right distanced itself. at the time, from the idea that it has been planning to undermine the American government.

Teitelbaum’s American sources mention the Swiss gnostic Frithjof Schoen, or Frithjof Schuon, another “traditionalist”, who presented himself as a Sufi and a practitioner of American First Nation (Lakota and Crow) spirituality, who lived in Bloomington, Indiana 1980-1998. The American sources also describe some of the practises and educational experiences of the American new Right, which include visits to India for spiritual teaching and other New Age practises. This part of the book would have been interesting – even more interesting after the riots in Washington DC on January 6, 2021. Schuon professed a non-religious spirituality bordering on neoshamanism. This version of Alt-Right spirituality resembles the New Age spirituality of many left leaning figures.

This illuminates the spectacle of Alt-Rightists who went to Washingtion dressed and painted like hippies to subvert the election of Trump’s rival. Pictures of Yellowstone Wolf, the QAnon Shaman were in the news after January 6, 2021.

His sources didn’t give Teitelbaum much and the publishers didn’t want a book on the radicalization of American youth.

Catching Up – Templeton and Positive Psychology

Having mentioned Templeton, the mutual fund manager turned patron of the spiritual arts, in passing in my entry Ruse on Evolution, and Seligman’s Positive Psychology movement in my entry Psychology in Recovery and Be Happy, I was interested in “John Templeton’s Universe” in the The Nation. Barbara Ehrenreich looks at the weirdness that happens when inspiration, large sums of money, corporate values, positive thinking, psychology and spirituality intersect.
Unfortunately, it appears that Seligman, who had said some interesting things in his books on positive psychology, has become another corporate inspirational performer, hyping his own line of coaching and positive thinking “products”.

Therapeutic Man

Around the time that I was reading Christopher Lasch’s books, in 2005, I saw a few interviews with Philip Rieff at AL Daily. There is a long, penetrating essay about Dr. Rieff’s work by George Scialabba, “The Curse of Modernity, Philip Rieff’s problem with freedom” in the Boston Review. Much of Rieff’s work involved the continuing reevaluation of the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber and Freud into religion as a social force. In Rieff’s 1959 book on Freud, he suggested, in Sciallaba’s words:

Until the twentieth century … three character types had successively prevailed in Western culture: political man, the ideal of classical times, dedicated to the glory of his city; religious man, the ideal of the Christian era, dedicated to the glory of God; and a transitional figure, economic man, a creature of Enlightenment liberalism. Economic man believed in doing good unto others by doing well for himself. This convenient compromise did not last long, and what survived of it was not the altruism but the egoism. Psychological man was frankly and shrewdly selfish, beyond ideals and illusions, at best a charming narcissist, at worst boorish or hypochondriacal, according to his temperament.

There is some force to some of these ideas.

Continue reading “Therapeutic Man”

Made to Stick

Made to Stick, Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is a pretty good book. It’s marketed as a business book by some major bookstores, but libraries may shelve it under social psychology. The Duke University Business school has promoted it on its web page. Co-author Dan Heath is a consultant in the Duke program. The web site for the book has links to other reviews.
It starts with a retelling of the urban legend of drugged travelers and kidney theft. The authors, the Heath brothers, ask why this story is likely to remembered and repeated. They suggest that the ideas that stick are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories. They work through those 6 concepts, using case studies from business and the general media.
Which corporate mission statements provide a useful framework for decision-making by employees and customers? Southwest Airlines in the low-cost airline. Their customers know it, and the whole organization knows it. The discussion of corporate mission statements is good, and it’s quite funny. The Heath brothers deflate several meaningless and pretentious mission statements, and that has started a sort of buzz on the internet. Their book blog has tracked stories about moronic corporate mission statements.
Remember “where’s the beef”? Remember the urban myth of poisoned halloween candy? Why is sportsmanship a dead idea, and how has the idea of respect for the game replaced it?
The Heath brothers explain why some ideas are believed by some people, and remembered, even if not believed, by most people. They also look at the business end of psychology – which stories get people to buy products, send money to charities, act better, or simplify decisions.
The book provides a good working explanation of the psychology of decision making, which explains why there is more to persuasion than logic. In spite of the bad name given to rhetoric by Aristotle and other classical philosophers, it works.

signandsight.com

signandsight.com has some good writing, a cross-section of writing by European journalists. Not surprisingly, Europeans have a lot to say about the whether the religious and cultural values of Muslim immigrants, including their intolerant approach to other religions, their defensiveness of their religion’s approach to symbols and feminism, can be allowed to supersede secular values. Dutch writer Margriet de Moor’s essay “Alarm Bells in Muslim Hearts”. There is a strong, thoughtful debate under the title of “The Multicultural Issue”. There is recent feature called “Blind Exorcism in Poland”, which reflects on the work of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the great writer, who made promises to the secret police in order to travel and write, but always managed to tell his stories, subverting the regime in the process.