When is Science Helpful?

Last spring, fourteen Chinese students from elite universities — seven from Tsinghua — traveled to several elite American universities, including Stanford, Harvard, and Yale, under the auspices of a program called IMUSE to discuss sensitive Chinese social topics, such as Tibet or censorship. One of the main events was panel discussions. The American students struck the Chinese students as admirably pragmatic but also in some cases “ignorant and arrogant”. In response to American students’ criticism, one Chinese student said this: “I eat a lot of rice. My ancestors ate a lot of rice. If you tell me to eat a lot of bread, I don’t know what to eat. I don’t know how to get a healthy diet.”

When I heard that comment, I said it was exactly right. Nutrition is perhaps 75% science, 25% religion. (The discovery of vitamins = science. Thinking the obesity epidemic is due to lack of exercise = religion.) The science part is helpful, the religious part is useless or, if taken seriously, harmful. Nutrition science is too uncertain to choose over the tried and true. Physics is almost 100% science. The stuff in physics textbooks has been used to build lots of useful stuff: buildings, bridges, computers. Economics and political science are perhaps 25% science — too little to rely on their recommendations, which was the Chinese student’s point. Better to rely on tradition. No one tells the American students any of this, however, and they believe far too much of what their professors tell them. (So much for all that teaching how “ to think and to reason.”) The result is they give foolish advice.

At Edge, four American experts tried to answer the question “Can science help solve the economic crisis?” Here is a bit of what they said:

Two basic assumptions must guide any thinking as we undertake these tasks. First, economies, financial institutions and markets cannot function without a context of rules and laws, which regulate them. . . . Second, mathematics, physics and computers already play a major and necessary role in our economic affairs.

They believed such statements are helpful. Nassim Taleb responded:

I spent close to 21 years in finance facing “scientists” in some field who show up in finance and economics, realize that economists and practitioners are not as smart as they are (they are not as “rigorous” and did not score as high in math), then think they can figure it all out. Nice, commendable impulse, but I blame the banking crisis (and other blowups) on such “scientism”. . . . Meanwhile the most robust understanding is present among practitioners who do not have the instinct to reduce ambiguity and uncertainty that scientists have. . . . Please, please, enough of this “science”. We have enough problems without you.

The Chinese student and Taleb are both saying that Big Ideas from elite American universities do not automatically improve on what people elsewhere have done for a long time. Weston Price and Jane Jacobs said the same thing. Somehow elite universities fail to teach this important lesson — perhaps because their professors haven’t learned it.

Thanks to Dave Lull.