8 ms·

The Shrinking World of Ideas

57 points by diodorus 12y ago

zdw 12y ago
This is fundamentally a "biological sciences are eating everything" piece - that we can explain all of the human experience through a bunch of biochemical reactions in our grey matter, and thus working on philosophy in other ways (making models and assertions experientially) is no longer a valid way to get to truth. I'd argue that doing a biochemical reverse engineering of even one person's brains is impractical, and more likely to tell you about their food or companionship preferences than anything profound. Just like newtonian mechanics is still useful in the age of quantum mechanics, classical philosophy and religion is still valuable, well tested, and empirically useful, even if it isn't verifiably true, as making a verifiable answer is far beyond (and likely will remain far beyond) our current capabilities.
- venomsnake 12y ago
  What do you mean by - religion is well tested?
  - wavefunction 12y ago
    I think we have pretty good test-coverage, even if all the tests are still failing instead of ever passing once.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Trouble is, sometimes coincidences occur. Humans are born to fasten onto faulty cause-and-effect relationships; its what kept us from being eaten by tigers a million years ago - "Og saw a stripey cat; today we found him dead. Stripey cats are bad news". And today its responsible for witchcraft, voodoo, the lottery, you name it.
      - wavefunction 12y ago
        Indeed, I have no religious faith but I find its emergence in the human psyche endlessly interesting.
  - prbuckley 12y ago
    Perhaps he means that religions have played an important role over many centuries across many cultures and billions of people. You can argue that religion has been used in good and bad ways but one thing I think is hard to deny is that peoples spiritual beleifs have shaped societies and what social norms prevail. The pro religion group could argue religion has had a civilizing effect on a species (homo-sapiens) that has compelled us collectivly to higher levels then our instinctual animal predecessors. The collective beleif in a set of shared moral values holds communities and societies together. The anti religion group could argue that great atrocities have been justified in the name of religion. This group often argues that we should be basing our collective beleifs on science rather then religions. (Edit: I don't beleive there are any examples yet of a large society being held together by a common beleif in science. The efforts to come up with a set of policies around global warming might be the closest thing I can think of and we all know how well that is going, not very well unfortunatly.) By my estimation the human condition and the struggles we all face leave lots of room for different view points.
niels_olson 12y ago
Meh. There have never been more ideas than there are today. The inability of the tweed-jacketed offspring of the wealthy, living their noblesse oblige in the self-imposed poverty of humanities, are struggling with the reflections in the mirror: -their theories aren't changing the world as fast as they want -they didn't study the hard sciences that would allow them to understand the theories that are changing the world. The older I get, the more I see this: outside of the young men whom the society annoints "whiz kids", the entire culture seems paralyzed by fear of math and science. That's surely a generalization. I know at least one old classmate who's a quantitative historian and quite gainfully employed. But how many people are going into history for the quantitative angle? Don't get me wrong, I think the humanities are important. But those who choose this route have got to level up if they want to play.
- AnimalMuppet 12y ago
  The 19th and 20th Century were, in many ways, the era of philosophical ideas being taken more seriously than they deserved. Marx and Engels took Hegel more seriously than he deserved. Lenin took Marx and Engels more seriously than they deserved. Hitler took Neitzche more seriously than he deserved.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > The 19th and 20th Century were, in many ways, the era of philosophical ideas being taken more seriously than they deserved. Insofar as that's arguably true of the 19th and 20th Centuries, its equally true of most of the centuries before those as well, and also so far of the one we've seen after that. > Lenin took Marx and Engels more seriously than they deserved. How seriously could Lenin have taken Marx and Engels to take the rhetoric of Marxism while throwing out its entire theoretical underpinning?
    - netcan 12y ago
      While it doesn't all get described as modernism, I think the idea that the scientific method was being applied to everything, art, history, politics, economics, etc. was a major part of most of that periods ideas. Ayn Rand is a good caricature, since she actually dealt with modernism as a subject matter. They saw themselves or strived to be "the Newton of __". Marx' theories of history an politics were treated as a theory in the same sense as darwin's was. They named the departments political science. We are still dismantling many of these ideas, especially in areas like economics or psychology where they use math or experimentation and seem more scientific.
ilaksh 12y ago
Philosophy is the precursor to science. It is relatively primitive, unfocused, untestable. Maybe still interesting though in terms of its ability to tie together ideas different scientific fields without so much "rigour". That is really more a weakness of science though. You need to separate literature from philosophy. There certainly are today and have been recently some excellent novels with interesting ideas in them. But for someone to pay large amounts of money to study novels or poetry or even history -- even the most privileged groups are expected to have practical skills and knowledge in a consulting position or running a company. The relative lack of interest in politics, morality, better social organization, etc. I believe you can attribute to a few things. First, there is less hardship than in previous eras, which means fewer critics of social structure. There is also a relatively strong control over public (and private, to a degree) education that is reinforced by a powerful propaganda machine. But the critics and ideas are out there. They are harder to find.
dirktheman 12y ago
I don't agree. There's no constraint, no limit in 'ideas to come up with'. Not like, say music. There are only 10 octaves in the audible spectrum, but that doesn't stop people from coming up with new songs and melodies for the last couple of centuries. Because executing an idea has never been cheaper and more accessible, it might seem that we're running out of fresh ideas. But as technology evolves, so are the ideas that go with it. I'm betting on an intergalactic ridesharing app for space monkeys somewhere in the next decade...
qthrul 12y ago
Technology is the response to a perceived need. Science is that which explains and predicts. See also Kuhn's paradigm shift, etc...
allendoerfer 12y ago
I want to add, that many great ideas are identified as such years after they have been formulated. Sometimes only the historical context makes an idea great. Kafka died in 1924, years before the NS regime took over, which bureaucracy he illustrated so brilliantly. All his writings were published after his death. So the ideas clearly were present before, they just stayed unnoticed and only in hindsight became famous for the fact, that there were indeed people who knew better before and the catastrophe could have been avoided. The past is always glorified or at least seen as more significant, because only these parts stick. Its harder to spot a significant piece in real time, because the signal to noise is much worse.
- xamuel 12y ago
  Minor correction: you meant to say all his novels were published after his death. Kafka published quite a few short stories while still alive (including short stories which would later become parts of his three novels).
jckt 12y ago
The source on "7.6 percent of bachelor’s degrees were granted in the humanities in 2010" seems flimsy. The Chronicle links to the NYT, and the NYT links to a blog (and not even a specific post). The numbers here[1] I think are trustworthy. For those who can't be bothered, it says 16.8% of all Bachelors' conferred in 2010 -- more than double 7.6% (and according to the same source, around the same as that in the 70s). So I don't know if the liberal arts "are not where the action is these days". There's certainly still a lot of people going into them. [1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.as...
westoncb 12y ago
The author proposes that the humanities are no longer the fertile source of important ideas they once were, and attributes this, somewhat vaguely (the vagueness appropriately matches available information sources on the subject, though), to the humanities fumbling somewhat in the past 40 years or so with certain trends they pushed; to the progress of their analysis perhaps inevitably leading to a direct study of the human mind, which is more expertly carried out by cognitive scientists; and to the general, unaccounted for, contemporary success of science. It seems more likely to me that differences in society's communication structure and regular inability to determine who intellectual leaders are except retrospectively, are the main causes for the changes described by the author. Aside from that, there's probably more of a shift in what the author now considers an important idea than anything: the humanities and sciences address different subject matters. Scientific discoveries often serve to restrict the realm of viable philosophies (e.g. cognitive science's impact on the any theory of innate knowledge a la Plato), but if it ever says something positive on a philosophical subject, that subject is no longer philosophy proper—and there's plenty of room for philosophy still. The rest of the humanities, from my understanding, is about communicating ideas about human life—often times about the experience of living it—using a different set of techniques than the sciences, and the utility of those techniques has not diminished.
CuriouslyC 12y ago
I find it ironic that an article that has obviously been painstakingly crafted by someone who by accounts is a highly capable writer should be so poor at communicating ideas. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising, my experience has generally been that philosophers and literary theorists tend to more interested in demonstrating their adroitness through linguistic gymnastics and obscure references than creating end-products with intrinsic value.
- nemo 12y ago
  It's strange, I found it very clear and readable. Maybe it has to do with one's level of familiarity with the topic, though.

57 points by diodorus 12y ago

zdw 12y ago

This is fundamentally a "biological sciences are eating everything" piece - that we can explain all of the human experience through a bunch of biochemical reactions in our grey matter, and thus working on philosophy in other ways (making models and assertions experientially) is no longer a valid way to get to truth. I'd argue that doing a biochemical reverse engineering of even one person's brains is impractical, and more likely to tell you about their food or companionship preferences than anything profound. Just like newtonian mechanics is still useful in the age of quantum mechanics, classical philosophy and religion is still valuable, well tested, and empirically useful, even if it isn't verifiably true, as making a verifiable answer is far beyond (and likely will remain far beyond) our current capabilities.

venomsnake 12y ago
What do you mean by - religion is well tested?
- wavefunction 12y ago
  I think we have pretty good test-coverage, even if all the tests are still failing instead of ever passing once.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Trouble is, sometimes coincidences occur. Humans are born to fasten onto faulty cause-and-effect relationships; its what kept us from being eaten by tigers a million years ago - "Og saw a stripey cat; today we found him dead. Stripey cats are bad news". And today its responsible for witchcraft, voodoo, the lottery, you name it.
    - wavefunction 12y ago
      Indeed, I have no religious faith but I find its emergence in the human psyche endlessly interesting.
- prbuckley 12y ago
  Perhaps he means that religions have played an important role over many centuries across many cultures and billions of people. You can argue that religion has been used in good and bad ways but one thing I think is hard to deny is that peoples spiritual beleifs have shaped societies and what social norms prevail. The pro religion group could argue religion has had a civilizing effect on a species (homo-sapiens) that has compelled us collectivly to higher levels then our instinctual animal predecessors. The collective beleif in a set of shared moral values holds communities and societies together. The anti religion group could argue that great atrocities have been justified in the name of religion. This group often argues that we should be basing our collective beleifs on science rather then religions. (Edit: I don't beleive there are any examples yet of a large society being held together by a common beleif in science. The efforts to come up with a set of policies around global warming might be the closest thing I can think of and we all know how well that is going, not very well unfortunatly.) By my estimation the human condition and the struggles we all face leave lots of room for different view points.

niels_olson 12y ago

Meh. There have never been more ideas than there are today. The inability of the tweed-jacketed offspring of the wealthy, living their noblesse oblige in the self-imposed poverty of humanities, are struggling with the reflections in the mirror: -their theories aren't changing the world as fast as they want -they didn't study the hard sciences that would allow them to understand the theories that are changing the world. The older I get, the more I see this: outside of the young men whom the society annoints "whiz kids", the entire culture seems paralyzed by fear of math and science. That's surely a generalization. I know at least one old classmate who's a quantitative historian and quite gainfully employed. But how many people are going into history for the quantitative angle? Don't get me wrong, I think the humanities are important. But those who choose this route have got to level up if they want to play.

AnimalMuppet 12y ago
The 19th and 20th Century were, in many ways, the era of philosophical ideas being taken more seriously than they deserved. Marx and Engels took Hegel more seriously than he deserved. Lenin took Marx and Engels more seriously than they deserved. Hitler took Neitzche more seriously than he deserved.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > The 19th and 20th Century were, in many ways, the era of philosophical ideas being taken more seriously than they deserved. Insofar as that's arguably true of the 19th and 20th Centuries, its equally true of most of the centuries before those as well, and also so far of the one we've seen after that. > Lenin took Marx and Engels more seriously than they deserved. How seriously could Lenin have taken Marx and Engels to take the rhetoric of Marxism while throwing out its entire theoretical underpinning?
  - netcan 12y ago
    While it doesn't all get described as modernism, I think the idea that the scientific method was being applied to everything, art, history, politics, economics, etc. was a major part of most of that periods ideas. Ayn Rand is a good caricature, since she actually dealt with modernism as a subject matter. They saw themselves or strived to be "the Newton of __". Marx' theories of history an politics were treated as a theory in the same sense as darwin's was. They named the departments political science. We are still dismantling many of these ideas, especially in areas like economics or psychology where they use math or experimentation and seem more scientific.

ilaksh 12y ago

Philosophy is the precursor to science. It is relatively primitive, unfocused, untestable. Maybe still interesting though in terms of its ability to tie together ideas different scientific fields without so much "rigour". That is really more a weakness of science though. You need to separate literature from philosophy. There certainly are today and have been recently some excellent novels with interesting ideas in them. But for someone to pay large amounts of money to study novels or poetry or even history -- even the most privileged groups are expected to have practical skills and knowledge in a consulting position or running a company. The relative lack of interest in politics, morality, better social organization, etc. I believe you can attribute to a few things. First, there is less hardship than in previous eras, which means fewer critics of social structure. There is also a relatively strong control over public (and private, to a degree) education that is reinforced by a powerful propaganda machine. But the critics and ideas are out there. They are harder to find.

dirktheman 12y ago

I don't agree. There's no constraint, no limit in 'ideas to come up with'. Not like, say music. There are only 10 octaves in the audible spectrum, but that doesn't stop people from coming up with new songs and melodies for the last couple of centuries. Because executing an idea has never been cheaper and more accessible, it might seem that we're running out of fresh ideas. But as technology evolves, so are the ideas that go with it. I'm betting on an intergalactic ridesharing app for space monkeys somewhere in the next decade...

qthrul 12y ago

Technology is the response to a perceived need. Science is that which explains and predicts. See also Kuhn's paradigm shift, etc...

allendoerfer 12y ago

I want to add, that many great ideas are identified as such years after they have been formulated. Sometimes only the historical context makes an idea great. Kafka died in 1924, years before the NS regime took over, which bureaucracy he illustrated so brilliantly. All his writings were published after his death. So the ideas clearly were present before, they just stayed unnoticed and only in hindsight became famous for the fact, that there were indeed people who knew better before and the catastrophe could have been avoided. The past is always glorified or at least seen as more significant, because only these parts stick. Its harder to spot a significant piece in real time, because the signal to noise is much worse.

xamuel 12y ago
Minor correction: you meant to say all his novels were published after his death. Kafka published quite a few short stories while still alive (including short stories which would later become parts of his three novels).

jckt 12y ago

The source on "7.6 percent of bachelor’s degrees were granted in the humanities in 2010" seems flimsy. The Chronicle links to the NYT, and the NYT links to a blog (and not even a specific post). The numbers here[1] I think are trustworthy. For those who can't be bothered, it says 16.8% of all Bachelors' conferred in 2010 -- more than double 7.6% (and according to the same source, around the same as that in the 70s). So I don't know if the liberal arts "are not where the action is these days". There's certainly still a lot of people going into them. [1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.as...

westoncb 12y ago

The author proposes that the humanities are no longer the fertile source of important ideas they once were, and attributes this, somewhat vaguely (the vagueness appropriately matches available information sources on the subject, though), to the humanities fumbling somewhat in the past 40 years or so with certain trends they pushed; to the progress of their analysis perhaps inevitably leading to a direct study of the human mind, which is more expertly carried out by cognitive scientists; and to the general, unaccounted for, contemporary success of science. It seems more likely to me that differences in society's communication structure and regular inability to determine who intellectual leaders are except retrospectively, are the main causes for the changes described by the author. Aside from that, there's probably more of a shift in what the author now considers an important idea than anything: the humanities and sciences address different subject matters. Scientific discoveries often serve to restrict the realm of viable philosophies (e.g. cognitive science's impact on the any theory of innate knowledge a la Plato), but if it ever says something positive on a philosophical subject, that subject is no longer philosophy proper—and there's plenty of room for philosophy still. The rest of the humanities, from my understanding, is about communicating ideas about human life—often times about the experience of living it—using a different set of techniques than the sciences, and the utility of those techniques has not diminished.

CuriouslyC 12y ago

I find it ironic that an article that has obviously been painstakingly crafted by someone who by accounts is a highly capable writer should be so poor at communicating ideas. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising, my experience has generally been that philosophers and literary theorists tend to more interested in demonstrating their adroitness through linguistic gymnastics and obscure references than creating end-products with intrinsic value.

nemo 12y ago
It's strange, I found it very clear and readable. Maybe it has to do with one's level of familiarity with the topic, though.