The Gelman Blog mentioned a paper by Lorraine Daston called The Moral Economy
of Science, [Osiris, Vol. 10, Constructing Knowledge in the History of Science
(1995), pp. 2-24] which attracted my attention because long ago I read E.P.
Thompson's The Moral Economy of the English Crowd [Past & Present
No. 50 (Feb., 1971), pp. 76-136] that made an extremely persuasive case for
delicate balance between the legitimacy of the rural market for agricultural
goods and riots when this legitimacy falls apart. Thompson prefaces his paper
with the passage from Proverbs: "He that withholdeth Corn, the People shall
curse him: but Blessing shall be upon the Head of him that selleth it."
Daston is at pains to distinguish her thesis from Thompson's -- she is not
about the legitimacy of science in the broader culture/environment, but the
argument, which is more about the moral economy within the scientific
community, is nonetheless quite appealing. As such departures from one's
usual reading sometimes do, this led me done a rabbit hole of related
reading concluding with a video lecture by Daston from 2010 called "Rule
of Rules: Or how Reason became Rationality", which constitutes a cogent
historical survey of the rise of algorithms as a substitute for judgement
and reason. Since post WWII economics has bought into the algorithmic,
mechanistic decision making zeitgeist with a vengeance, Daston's lecture
is a refreshing antidote to the familiar brainwashing of the discipline.
As I joked when I forwarded the link of the lecture to an old friend, "I'm
not sure whether the lecture is better than "Marriage Italian Style", the
last movie I've watched, but I'm working on an algorithm to decide this."
Daston has a book with Peter Galison (he of How Experiments End) on
"Objectivity", which I've not yet read, but surely must contain the following
quotation that also appears in Daston's Moral Economy paper:
Goethe gave voice to the worries that impel mechanical objectivity when he
preached caution in interpreting experimental results: "For here at this pass,
this transition from empirical evidence to judgment, cognition to application,
all the inner enemies of man lie in wait: imagination, which sweeps him away
on its wings before he knows his feet have left the ground; impatience; haste;
self-satisfaction; rigidity; formalistic thought; prejudice; ease; frivolity;
fickleness -- this whole throng and its retinue. Here they lie in ambush and
surprise not only the active observer but also the contemplative one who
appears safe from all passion." Johann Wolfgang Goethe, "The Experiment as
Mediator between Object and Subject" (1792, publ. 1823)
Coincidentally, the latest Economist letters column contains related passage
from the "melancholy finale of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel, The Leopard
Nowhere has truth such a short life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five
minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished,
disfigured, squashed, annihilated by imagination and self interest; shame, fear,
generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil,
fling themselves onto the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished
altogether
Sicily is now faced with some stiff competition in this domain.
