Hopefully Anonymous used the term and I asked him to elaborate on it. His comment is reproduced below:
That’s a good prompt. Maybe it will help if I list some things that tend to be anti-knowledge playspaces.
-Racial differences in behavior
-Global Warming
-What makes a good leader
And areas of science that seem to me to be more productive epistemological spaces even though they could have turned into anti-knowledge playspaces:
-population genetics
-(I would name more but out of time/energy/inclination)
In general I think anti-knowledge playspaces tend to be topics where two factions emerge whose constituencies add up to be a hegemonic force in the discussion, both of whom have their positions made up more by politically correct policing than by solid empiricism, and both sides probably suborn subpopulation identities who feel they can win in status games if their side either wins out by luck of being right or by show of force in dominating their opponents in the discussion space. I think it’s a bit of a 2 side competition that’s also a coordination against third parties that aren’t explicitly identified (the pageant element is a soft nontransparency, that the pageant element is to take social attention away from third parties is a hard nontransparency).
Entitled to an Opinion 
June 26, 2010 at 11:30 am
I’ve been reading a lot of Bruno Latour lately (see here) and he would say that all science involves political struggles between different sides vying to establish facts. The only distinguishing marks of the ones you list is that they enlist the general public in the debate.
I have to say that HA has an ear for language that is the opposite of catchy.
June 26, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Latour as paraphrased by you seems to needlessly universalize his observation. Part of my point in the comment above is there seems to me be a distribution of better and worse epistemological behavior (from the perspective of the production of knowledge). Also I think the eye should be as much on the “sides” as on the “facts” for the pageantry/political struggle element of social epistemological activity.
June 26, 2010 at 9:29 pm
My short paraphrase of Latour probably doesn’t do him justice. If you are interested in the social production of science, you should read him (Science in Action is probably the place to start).
Here’s another attempt:
– scientists like anyone else are political animals engaging in competion, status-seeking, coalition-building, etc.
– but scientists have the somewhat-unique ability to enlist nature in their coalition.
– The scientist who can successfully get (eg) DNA speaking the language of their not-yet-accepted theory is likely to get theirs accepted, and win.
More here: http://www.stswiki.org/index.php?title=Actant
June 26, 2010 at 11:37 am
Also see the recently popularized term agnotology.
June 26, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Interesting survey article. Lacks a Kurzweil type greed for all-strengths/no-weaknesses ability, but nicely discusses an under-discusses area.
“Ignorance is socially produced and socially productive” was the best line in the piece and deserve a lot more exploration, IMO.
June 26, 2010 at 12:23 pm
“When you stop to consider whether some sort of ‘group think’ really drives these patterns and could it really exist in science in general, the idea is really pretty laughable […] All of the incentives in science are exactly the opposite.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100625185428.htm
Expert Credibility in Climate Change
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/22/1003187107.abstract
June 26, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Read the science daily article. Media attention seems to be going to the subset of agw-is-real climate scientists that are willing to part of a professional wrestling storyline with agw-is-not-real skeptics. When the two hegemonic sides are fighting each other rather than becoming explanation monsters studying everything including each other, I think the anti-knowledge playspace element is winning out.
June 26, 2010 at 9:46 pm
Scientists are people and act like people, but that does not lead to the fallacy of gray.
Ignorance is the default and does not need to be produced.
I recall Mencius Moldbug repeatedly promoting Climate Audit in his attacks on AGW and telling me that since I was currently a believer in AGW, that would quickly set me right. I’ve now read a reasonable amount from there and while I find it fairly high quality, Steve McIntyre never actually denies AGW. The deduction AGW-skeptics seem to make is that some scientists promoting it have behaved badly, therefore it is wrong.
June 27, 2010 at 12:07 am
“Ignorance is the default and does not need to be produced.”
I’m skeptical on (perhaps appropriately ironic) intuitive grounds.
Also, sounds like you’re reaching a bit for a blank slate model there.
But overall, I think your stance is too universal.
June 27, 2010 at 11:16 am
Scientists are people and act like people, but that does not lead to the fallacy of gray.
I think you underestimate the radicalism of Latour’s viewpoint. It’s not that there are black scientists who let politics influence their science and white scientists that don’t, or scientists somewhere on the grayscale in between. It’s that the production of science (like everything else) is fundamentally social and thus has politics inescapably baked into it at the most fundamental level.
June 27, 2010 at 2:23 pm
In 2010 it’s not that fucking radical. What I think is more useful is, (1) from the Faustian angle, solid empirical exploration into how science occurs in the world, and (2) from the Bostromian angle, optimization of scientific activity as part of an existential risk minimization strategy.
June 27, 2010 at 9:44 pm
Maybe not, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the conservative attacks on science studies. Anyway, he’s done plenty of anthropological studies of how scientists work (ie this earlier book), which informs the philosophy.
I have no idea what the Faustian angle means. From the Bostromian angle, presumably the safest thing to do would be to shoot all the scientists.
June 28, 2010 at 4:10 am
Mtravern, I look at the fictional character Faust as an archetype for lust for knowledge (best models of reality, not “explanations for everything, right or wrong”) over lust for status or persistence.
June 27, 2010 at 2:29 pm
that fallacy of grsy post reminded me of why I often find Yudkowsky’s posts noxious. I think it’s a bad sign for the attempt to get good social science thoughtwork done when people start invoking people like Gandhi, King, and Mother Teresa as role models.
June 27, 2010 at 9:19 pm
It’s intuitive that snakes & heights are scary. The things mentioned in mtraven’s article are not. In fact, it’s the opposite for evolution. A while back I was arguing with a fundamentalist who thought highly of the strategy of Creationists and attributed the lack of belief in evolution among the general public to their work over the past 30 years. I had to point out that even children of atheist families by default believe animals are created in a platonic form.
Even if you don’t care for the hagiography of Gandhi, he makes a recognizable example of someone who was different from Stalin. And regarding the sciences, I’ll say that some really are less politicized than others. Because of differences between fields we can even say there is a hierarchy of the sciences.
June 27, 2010 at 10:40 pm
Re “Gandhi …makes a recognizable example of someone who was different from Stalin” – presumably any sensible person should recognize the difference between a pious fraud and an unapologetic murderer.
June 27, 2010 at 10:36 pm
The argument the AGW-skeptics make (with reference to Mann, Jones, etc.) is to ask why, if their proposition were true, they found it necessary to cook the data and to try to suppress dissenting points of view.
That’s a good question, irrespective of the truth or falsehood of AGW. However, it attacks the proposition only obliquely. It is more akin to the lawyer’s tactic of impeaching a hostile witness than it is a direct refutation of the testimony he has presented.
June 28, 2010 at 10:14 am
I grant that “some scientists promoting it have behaved badly, therefore it is wrong” is recognizably close to a heuristic which people do use, and which probably explains a lot of the effective impact of McIntyre’s work in nontechnical people’s judgments. Perhaps you will grant that “some scientists promoting it” is, in this context, an inappropriately vague way to describe the heuristic that people actually use when they develop a heuristic judgment of the importance of McIntyre’s criticism?
Consider that counting peer-reviewed publications is a different heuristic than counting noses of every human willing to express an opinion. It may have pretty much the same fundamental weakness, but it differs so much in details that it tends to have a rather different political applicability and impact. Thus in trying to understand the effect of citation-based appeals to authority, retreating to unnecessary vagueness by thinking of it as “nose counting” probably wouldn’t be useful.
McIntyre’s most famous work is criticism of the Mann “hockey stick” historical temperature reconstruction which was chosen as a report cover illustration by IPCC, and then as an iconic result by many of the other major players. The perceived special importance of the hockey stick as a proxy for IPCC validity started with that media exposure (and less famously, with the way that Mann’s work served to justify a very unKuhnianly uncontroversial and quick paradigm shift in the IPCC consensus on un-CO2-forced natural climate variability). Its special importance continues because IPCC folk continue to circle the wagons around it: I don’t know any enthusiastic defender of the current IPCC who is willing to concede that the original hockey stick is technically bad work which shouldn’t’ve been trusted at all, much relied on as a prominent part of argument for discarding LIA and MWP. As long as refusal to make a concession like that remains a litmus test for IPCC supporters, McIntyre and others hammering on the hockey stick continue to do heuristic damage to the credibility of the IPCC and its supporters all out of proportion to what someone would expect from reading your remark about “some scientists promoting it have behaved badly.” It is more nearly “most of the most prominent scientists, institutions, and advocates supporting the current IPCC position are behaving badly in this most visible and iconic of claims.”
Of course, it still doesn’t follow “therefore it is wrong,” but that’s almost purely irrelevant, because the conclusion that I see in the people who are actually influenced is more like “therefore that coalition doesn’t have a very good claim to be pursuing or reliably presenting the truth.” That isn’t a fundamentally perfectly reliable heuristic for weighing evidence, but it is an important heuristic that people commonly do use for weighing evidence in technical debates, so it’s unsurprising that it ends up being used by all factions in the AGW controversy.
June 28, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Mr. Newman – Might you be the William Newman who wrote “Gehennical Fire,” “Promethean Ambitions,” and (with Lawrence Principe) “Alchemy Tried in the Fire”?
June 27, 2010 at 11:01 pm
Is it not the case that the OB/LW crowd also falls into the category of anti-knowledge?
I have always found Yudkowsky’s arguments highly suspicious and politically slanted, my most charitable interpretation is that he is an space alien trying to prevent humans to make any real progress in AI. :-D
But anyway, who cares about knowledge?
For us monkeys it’s all about status, even in spozedly “academic” realms.
June 28, 2010 at 4:11 am
TGGP, I really like the readers/commenters you’re attracting. for example Michael and Kevembuangga -great additions to regulars such as Mtravern, Chip Smith, and others.
July 2, 2010 at 2:25 am
Thanks for the praise, but what I was specifically alluding to about status is this.
June 28, 2010 at 8:59 pm
Useless pedantry: Faust sold his soul not only for knowledge but worldly pleasure, famously including Gretchen. I recall from Goethe’s version that he was tight with (or perhaps a member of) royalty near the end. Dr. Frankenstein might be a better example of Promethean recklessness for the sake of science, although I guess that would come to close to your persistence angle.
Michael, nice summation on Stalin/Gandhi (distinct from Stalin-Gandhi!).
From what I recall, Cyril Burt & Robert Millikan are also accused of fudging results they just assumed to be correct and are relatively (apologies for the weasel word) close to consensus figures now.
William Newman, you’ll have to explain what’s appropriately specific. I think most people don’t know enough about the field to be specific.
Peer review is a fairly weak filter, most published findings are wrong. It indicates that some scholars near the field didn’t detect obvious crap. Counting publications would be a rather weak heuristic, a meta-analysis examing the relation between statistical significance and sample size is much better (the hierarchy of the sciences paper I linked to above is another interesting application of meta-analysis). Walter Block has a funny paper on counting academic papers to settle arguments. You could do worse though. As for laymen, I think like Philip Converse that much of their response should be deemed “non-opinions”. That could be true to a lesser extent for academics for things sufficiently outside their specialty. You might possibly be interested in an old post of mine on what kinds of evidence are convincing, though I didn’t get into social epistemology there.
Both McIntyre and Michael Mann agree that the Hockey Stick isn’t that important when it comes to the science. I’m not very familiar with the pre-Mann history of these things. I agree that the IPCC is seriously flawed, letting in bogus stuff which was never really peer-reviewed despite their own standards.
Kevembuangga:
I don’t think most of the crowd even rises to the level of Gelman & Shalizi’s criticism. They don’t have models to fit. Hanson is an actual practicioner making use of Bayesianism, but I don’t know enough about his work to tell how Gelman/Shalizi applies. I don’t know enough about A.I to evaluate what effect Eliezer has, but melendwyr doesn’t seem far off in saying that Eliezer has done little more than say he’d like to achieve something but its hard so he’ll have to think a lot before going any further.
Hopefully Anonymous:
I think both of them used to comment here more frequently in the past, so perhaps I am doing less well than previously. Off-topic, but since you’re interested in the Renaissance Hedge fund, Felix Salmon had an interesting post on them. The bit about adhering to predictions which make no sense reminds me of Supercrunchers.
June 28, 2010 at 10:52 pm
“…Faust sold his soul not only for knowledge but worldly pleasure…”
The difference isn’t obvious to me.
June 28, 2010 at 11:08 pm
Menstrual synchronicity might make for an interesting agnotological case study, where folk knowledge (among women across time and cultures) was glibly dismissed by field scientists without the benefit of evidence. Once the data were in (and only recently), the matter was efficiently resolved, but I wonder if vested skeptics put up a fight?
June 29, 2010 at 12:00 am
I referenced some of that data here. I don’t know about scientists, but some “folk” women complained a lot about investigating the topic.
June 29, 2010 at 7:37 am
TGGP,
The Mind Hacks link is somewhat related, but I’m referring to the more straightforward finding that when women live in close proximity their hormonal cycles sync up. This wasn’t accepted until the 1970s.
June 29, 2010 at 10:32 pm
Growing up well after then, I thought everyone had always known that from time immemorial.
June 30, 2010 at 3:19 am
I don’t think when you were born has anything to do with it. It sounds like folk wisdom that may not be true (even though apparently it’s empirically verified). I recall an Asimov piece debunking the idea that period cycles have lunar timing that may have in passing been skeptical about mestrual synchronicity.