[cross-posted from my blog https://pchvykov.com/blog]
I see a problem with current science. It’s not the reproducibility crisis, nor the toxic work culture, nor the misaligned incentive. But in another sense, it is all of these – or perhaps the root cause behind them. It’s hard to name it exactly, but in a way, it’s the dissociation between the romanticism of a selfless “quest for truth,” and the career-success incentives that run academia. In another way, it’s Goodhart’s law (optimizing for citation counts rather than for meaningful progress). In yet another way, it may be an issue with the scientific method itself (or at least how it’s taught). But I think the overarching issue is with trying to remove our humanity from the scientific process.
Let’s begin with something concrete – Goodhart’s law (“when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric”). This is a major (perhaps the major) problem of the western social order, which relies heavily on metrics. We optimize for GDP, and forget about actual well-being and psychological happiness of the population. We optimize for profits, and forget about the social value we are creating. We optimize for grades, and forget about learning. We optimize for longevity, and forget about meaning. And so in academia, we optimize for citations, and forget about progress, about building a better world. Goodhart’s law comes up because the things we actually value cannot be accurately encoded into metrics – they will always be slightly misaligned. People’s ingenuity will then always find a way a way to leverage this misalignment to game the metric. But metrics and reproducible measurements are at the core of the scientific method, thereby seeding the problem (it's easier to write a paper showing some high metric score than one that actually matters).
At the same time, upon reflection we somehow have an intuitive understanding of whether something is or isn’t a “good” metric, or whether it achieved some “desired” outcomes. So what metric inside us tells us what’s good? For this I like the dialectic of “measuring” vs “sensing” – the former being about finding the value of a pre-defined metric, and the latter about pattern-recognition. Perhaps one can say that in these terms, science is more about measuring, while art is about sensing? Either way, measuring has a linear quality to it – it’s the “forward path” of the scientific method. In contrast, sensing is inherently a feedback loop – where question informs the answer, which in turn changes the question, and so on. Such dynamics may mitigate Goodhart’s law as the metric (i.e., question) here is never static, but continuously updated and refined in response to the outcomes. The problem I’m referring to is insufficient amount of this feedback in science and its application.
But I think we must take it deeper than this. We must include not just the question, but the observer themselves in this feedback loop. To see this, we need to ask ourselves honestly why do we study the questions that we do? The real reason is often circumstantial – “my PhD adviser worked on this,” or “there was a job available for this research,” or “this topic sells well.” But if we go beyond all this and honestly ask ourselves which questions are really important? Which questions are worth our time, our effort, and money? Which questions really make meaningful progress towards a better world? Such sincere inquiry quickly makes us realize that the answers are far from obvious, are very subjective, and are highly sensitive to personal and cultural values, traumas, fears and hopes. And these are the foundation of our science. Thus, we cannot pretend to be the “objective observers,” standing outside the scientific method – we are part of it. And as such, we must have the humility to ourselves become subjects to it. On the one hand, thus goes back to the willingness to update our beliefs about the world, our behavior, our personality, our sense of self even, in response to new evidence – which is already hard enough. But on the other, it also means asking the questions that actually matter to us, that actually have the potential to change our lives (cf. active learning in ML). I think this is the only way to really do “honest science.”
And once we come to this, we basically come to spirituality (in some idealized sense). If science is the study of the external, then spirituality is the study of the internal (-Carl Jung, Carl Sagan, Fritjof Capra, etc.). But if we allow our science to be guided by the quest for personal transformation, for greater joy, and for a better world, then the distinction begins to blur. I believe that this integration of science with spirituality, with our humanity, with our inner goals and aspirations, and paradoxically, with our subjectivity, is the only way to overcome Goodhart’s law and get fulfilling outcomes. The notion of a separate objective observer in the scientific method is an impossible idealization – and therefore misleading, leaving much of academia to study incremental technical minutiae that has little relevance to our lives. Even the relevant technological achievements often end up divorced from generating greater well-being. It is no accident that many of the early scientists were motivated by their faith – they studied the external to better understand the internal. I find that the schism between the scientific and the spiritual that emerged since has been unproductive for both domains, just as any hard disciplinary boundaries lead to siloed inefficient work.
So what do we do? Well, I’m not really sure. The rationalism movement may be on the right track here. Personally I think it would be fun to build a research institute that really focuses on enabling this feedback between research results and our personal inner values. I’ve been quite interested in Eastern Philosophy and mindfulness practices for a while – and these might give a good approach to really help learn from and internalize our scientific insights. On the other hand, complexity science (my research field) may be a good framework to research all these questions more systematically, perhaps in the context of “science of science.” The key, I think, is to integrate the theory and the practice here – to “walk our talk.” I would love to see science become a joyful and deep practice that leads its adepts to ever-greater personal fulfillment and wisdom, not mere knowledge. Scientists serve the role of shamans in modernity, and so their wisdom and personal attainment (or lack thereof) spreads to the rest of the human tribe.
My reply turned out to be a bit long. Perhaps you can jsut skim it for the aspects you care about?
I think wrapping science in spirituality can work, but for people in this community, it's probably tempting to think in objective, well-defined tokens rather than thinking in the concepts and subjective tokens which align with how the brain works and with ones own values.
But the rules of the mind and the rules of mathematics are entirely different, and ones "objective" quality of life matters much less for well-being than their subjective worldview does, which is partly why we're not really getting any happier.
If you try walking, and thinking consciously about every movement you make, you will probably find that walking becomes much harder. Your mind also has its own symbolic language which is much more efficient than mathematics for many things, and science is sufficently inhuman that it's destructive not just to human errors, but to human nature in general.
You could partly do that by correctly stating that everything is relative, and thus that an absolutist worldview might not be ideal. But moving further than that is difficult as people have an almost religious view of science. They think that the subjective doesn't matter much, that things are only worth something if you can prove them, that science can discriminate between good and evil or morality and immorality.
People also seem to either reject reality, or desperately attempt to construct a morally correct hypothesis which explains the pattern they see in reality, and then make up excuses as the hypothesis repeatedly fails to predict the future. The idea that people seek the truth is a lie, they can only be objective about things that they don't care about too much, which is why controversies repeatedly form around things connected to politics and morality. People who don't realize this don't even have a basic understanding of themselves (or other people, or humanity in general) which is the actual cause of our problems.
It can when you put the latter first, so that science becomes second. That feeling of wonder literally requires a lack of complete understanding. The people who enjoy science the most are those who know it the least, and they will become disillusioned until they once again meet something that they don't understand, which causes an explosion in possibilities bigger than what you can wrap your mind around. "The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you", the latter part is only true because we don't understand quantum science. It's our good luck that we didn't manage to "solve" science.
And again, we have to watch out for Goodhart's law. If you "improve" peoples lives in a way which makes them miserable, then it's not an improvement, even if the metrics state otherwise. Another reason I dislike scientific views is that I think it results in Moloch. the only winning move is not to play, and the only way to avoid playing is if the optimal solution remains unknown. Psychologically speaking, having full information about something seems really undesirable. Possibly because you do the mental equivalence of when the state reduces human lives to numbers on a spreadsheet.
I'm autistic so thinking objectively has always been easy for me, I appear "better" at scientific thought than most, which is why I'm so conscious of all the pitfalls one can run into. Anyway, I think the many psychological issues appearing in society are directly connected to the domination of scientific thought and the death of religion, and thus that you're trying to solve the problem with the tools which caused it, and that you only consider this a good idea because you feel something wonderful in science... Which actually exists in yourself (or in your relation to science). The whole "beauty in mathematics" is, I think, the brains reaction to symmetry and harmonious patterns, making it beautiful in the same way that music is beautiful. Of course, a lot of things can be made possible through science, so it's not incorrect to perceive a lot of hidden value waiting to be discovered. It just has to be for the sake of humanity instead of at the cost of humanity.
But everywhere in society I see a hatred of humanity and attempts of destroying it. Usually in order to make humanity "better" or "more moral", which translates into destroying aspects of human nature or replacing them with less human ones. An easy example which is not too controversial is destroying "laziness" and making people into efficient workers. Which also hints at the fact that the optimization of "productivity" and the optimization of "humanity" go in two different directions, meaning that we'll start our own darwinistic process of destroying human aspects (as the genetic "fitness" values inhuman/objective things). Which is ironic as the purpose of technology is improving human life, rather than to, say, replace it.