Social Science and the Supernatural

They have the concerned looks to match the learned degrees. Questions from others come with a certain reverence. They are with us always, but never more than in a crisis, and we seek them out, in search of the truth. They are more than willing to offer a view with little doubt or pause – this is science and they are — experts. We aren’t talking about natural science here, where facts are facts. The experts are social scientists, experts in the science of human interaction. What they want you to believe, what they need you to believe, is that natural science and social science are the same thing, that human interaction and social interaction can be studied the same way, in the same terms.

What is required to make this leap is the presumption that the human person, the individual, is an ordinary part in the natural machinery. Modern philosophy has led us this way. All knowledge is developed from sense experience, physical interaction with the natural world. Anything else is meaningless. Human interaction, therefore, becomes just another science governed by physical facts.

Aristotle said – “So we must examine the conclusion we have reached so far by applying them to the actual facts of life: if they are in harmony with the facts we must accept them, and if they clash we must assume they are mere words.” The Covid 19 pandemic provide an excellent test. At the onset of the virus, experts were called in to model how the virus would impact the population. Policy judgments were made based on the models. Perhaps the most influential model was produced by Imperial College in London, one Neil Ferguson being lead researcher. He said with little doubt that many millions of people would die from the virus, even if we made radical adjustments to our social interactions. If we didn’t it would be worse. Policy makers viewed this as fact, as science, as truth, and reacted. Economies were shut down, people stayed at home, social interaction came to a standstill.

Not in Sweden. In Sweden, it seems to me, the policy makers took a kind of Bayesian approach. Before the pandemic began, people in Sweden had some intuitive prior distribution concerning the risks of everyday life. As information began to surface about the virus, these prior were revised with the new data. Perhaps I should limit my close social interactions to those I know well. As the virus developed, new priors are adjusted again. The government did little more than provide information about the risks, like sharp curve signs on the highway, and relied on the individuals in society to adjust as they saw fit. The result was that outcomes in Sweden were not materially different than other developed countries. The rational human was not just a predicate of a natural chain, but an active participant in the process. Trust me, dogs did not change behavior because of the virus.

“Social Science” requires the rejection of the uniqueness of the human condition. “Man’s physical nature is taken to be the whole of his existence and knowledge is attained through sense perception. Once these Ontological and Epistemological assumptions are adopted, it is of little surprise that the methods of natural sciences are adopted.” (Maladies of Modernity: Scientism and the Deformation of the Political Order, David N. Whitney, Page 130). There can be no super-natural.

Frank Ramsey

I was a mediocre undergraduate Math student, but I was perceptive enough to notice one thing. In every class of 30 or so, there was always one student who floated above all the others. Professors would be running through some theory in a language that was a mystery to me, but “the one” would be listening with the bliss of complete understanding on their face. Imagine being that person in every field you touched. Imagine discussing with Keynes the nature of probablity at 19, being chosen as the translator of Wittgenstein’s Tractus , at 22. Imagine laying the groundwork for decision theory in mathematics while tackling vexing problems in philosophy and economics. This was Frank Ramsey – “the one” to end all – and he died at 26. Read the book.

Stupid Courage

The General by C.S. Forester is a 1936 novel set in WWI. The central character, General Herbert Curzon makes an improbable rise of in the class driven world of the British military through remarkable courage, sense of duty and luck. As a young officer in the Boer War, by attrition he is left in command of his Calvary regiment as it about to be overrun. He leads the troops in what he imagines to be a retreat, gets lost, yet finds himself in the rear of his attackers. He leads a charge that sacks the Boers, bringing victory to the British and accolades to himself.

Military life between the Boer War and the Great War is rather dull, with little chance for the glory that he craves. This thirst if finally relieved with the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, and he goes off with his regiment on horseback, with sabre at this side, to confront the reality of machine guns and poison gas. The quick war that was anticipated declines into a miserable trench battle. Curzon rises in rank, largely through his willingness to send untold numbers of his men to their deaths in pursuit of a promised breakthrough of the German lines. The General cannot conceive of the possibility that his officers and their men may not have the same sense of duty that drives him, a duty energized by the possibility of shame.

The General highlights a perversion of virtue. Virtues intersect. Courage without prudence leads to slaughter. Curzon rejected anything new, any other approach to war than the way he was trained. Courage without right judgment is foolishness. Yes, he could inspire his men by his courage under fire. Superiors trusted him to “do his duty”. But he, and the system he represented, let the virtue of courage overwhelm all others. Small wonder God died after WWI.

Transcendence

I am far from the toughest guy in the world. My life has been pretty cushy. I was never on some sea tossed landing craft, waiting for the ramp to drop and expose me to machine gun fire.

Yet reactions to the virus create massive chaos in my head. Why are people reacting the way they are? Has courage in the face of adversity been completely abandoned? Has the rejection of transcendence, things larger than ourselves and our senses, forced humankind into a very narrow, narcissistic hallway. The only way the guys pictured above got into that boat is that they saw the world and life as something bigger than themselves.

My cursory understanding of the output of modern philosophy is the elimination of absolutes, of Truth with a capital T, of God, of anything that is beyond the senses. Either it does not exist or our reason is insufficient to understand it so why bother.

I have decided try and sure up my understanding of these developments in philosophy by reading The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics by A. W. Moore. This takes some courage as it will suck up a lot of reading time, but is a required exercise in advance of any sorting out.

The Recent Past

A fantastic new paper that investigates the efficacy of machine learning in stock selection. Cliff Notes as follows – look at the machine learning and artificial intelligence models that you would find in a graduate level quantitative finance textbook. Run them on tons of data and see if they are helpful in stock selection. They conclude that the models are marginally beneficial (not a surprise since some of the authors do quant finance for a living). Really astonishing were the variable results. They threw a ton of stock information into the hopper, fundamental, price, industry, you name it. One variable dominated all the others in every model – Price Momentum. If a stock had gone up recently, the models wanted to bet that it would continue.

Momentum is the least thoughtful, least rational of indicators. It looks at the recent past and simply extrapolates. There is no notion of value, no grounding in fundamentals – just the recent past. What these models are picking up is the dominance of short term thinking on our lives and discourse generally, not just in finance.