Reason vs Rationality

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.