3 Things I Learned in Grad School ~ March 5 2017

This week I wrote a bunch of papers and took a mid-term (a non-statistics test in grad school? yes) so my access to completely new thoughts was limited. However, I did learn some things in new ways as I was forced to prove that I know some stuff. Below are my reflections on the 3 Purposes of a Social Scientist, People Can't be Trusted, and the Commons. Also, above is a picture of a Kermit the Frog glass frog discovered in Costa Rica: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/150421-glass-frog-kermit-discovery-animals-science-costa-rica/
 
3 Purposes of a Social Scientist
I know the purpose of science (the systematic pursuit of knowledge), theory (the systematic explanation for the observations that relate to a particular aspect of life), and a hypothesis (a testable expectation about empirical reality that follows from a theory). These usually don’t follow the definitions that a non-scientist use. For example, when a non-scientist says they have a theory, they mean they have an idea. Along those lines, when someone says that Evolution is just a theory that tells me all I need to know about their knowledge of science. They think it is just an idea instead of a rigorous set of explanations that has never been proven wrong according to what it purports to speak to – adaptation by natural selection or genetic drift. A side-note: The Theory of Gravity and the Theory of the Standard Model (of subatomic particle physics) have also never been proven wrong either, only refined, but people have far less of an issue with these and, to me, they are way more insane and counter-intuitive (The sun has a pull on the Earth from millions of miles away with nothing connecting it? The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says that you can measure something perfectly in a place but not at a time or at a time but not place?) Side Side-note: while some of the history has been verified, no aspect of the ontology, epistemology, or phenomenology of any religion has been proven true when held up to a systematic explanation of observations.
 
I digress. These things I’ve known but I am new to what a social scientist is. I had to explain my knowledge of what a social scientist is on my midterm and came across the 3 Purposes of a Social Scientist. These are to 1) Explore (understand through feasibility analyses or developing methods), 2) Describe (through a demographic survey or the U.S. Census), or 3) Explain or Predict ( analyzing the factors of an event or behavior). This is fascinating to me. I’ve always concerned myself with the Explore aspect but have never consciously thought about the Explain or Predict aspect. The Explore part makes sense to me and I think I’ve assumed the Explain part or taken it for granted maybe. For example, Physics is a prediction science but Ecology is not (yet). I can tell you that if I drop a heavy object, it will fall to the ground. However, if I remove a species of tree from a forest or a previously non-invasive non-native species to a habitat, I cannot tell you what will happen – there are a lot variables and stochastic events. Ecology is attempting to become a prediction science and I think it gets there by the Explore part. I’m trying to understand the relationship of the three parts and I’m thinking that a certain level of Explore is needed to get you to an Explain. With Social Science, I cannot tell you how people are going to behave (for some of the same reasons that apply to Ecology) but I can analyze what happens after an event. Maybe enough Exploring gets us to Explaining. Maybe it’s like weather prediction: within certain and small timeframe I can tell you with a percentage of certainty what will happen. I don’t know.
 
Consumers (People) Can’t Be Trusted
In my Behavior class we’re reading Consumer.ology by Philip Graves. The book is great. The entire book, in my mind, can be summed up by the Henry Ford quote: If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse. People don’t know what they want, they don’t know they don’t know what they want, they think they know what they want, they get angry when they don’t get what they think they want, when they get what they think they want they get sad, and people can be manipulated to be happy with something they didn’t think they wanted. They want a faster horse but the automobile is ubiquitous and I only see horses in wealthy people’s hands. There are a lot of sociobiological (or evolutionary psychology) reasons for this and they include our cognitive dissonances and theories of mind. We need to believe that we are consciously driving the vehicle that is our body and mind otherwise we go a little insane. We need to believe that our reasons for doing things are our own (and not, say, our friend’s reasons or society’s). We need to believe that when confronted with a series of options we will pick the one that is best according to the information that we have and we will not be swayed by simple things like a smaller left-handed number ($19.99 vs $20.00 – mental number line bias) or choosing the middle of three options (extremeness aversion) or an option only because we’ve heard of it before (the idea of priming) or an option because the last seconds of our time with it were better than the rest (people rated colonoscopies as not unpleasant simply because someone was nice to them at the end of it rather than the beginning – this is peak-end theory). Humans don’t know why they want the things they want but they are very adamant that they do know. Don’t trust humans.
 
The Commons
The idea of the commons is basically what my entire life is focused around studying and has been since I was 20. Hardin re-utilized the term Commons in his paper in the 60s and popularized the term “Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin explains the Tragedy thusly: “Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.”
 
I’ve known this Tragedy and Hardin’s paper for a while but have never been forced to look at it closely or develop my own ideas. I submitted a paper this week that created a typology of the commons. I stuck with the physical environment for the purposes of explaining how we manage some commons (fresh water) and how we exploit others (biodiversity). I didn’t wade into the murky waters of cultural commons such as Information (the internet) or shared space (AirBnB, Couchsurfing) but I did write that our global society is shifting what we envision as the commons. I had to do a fair amount of research into opposing ideas (the Law Professor Rose’s Comedy of the Commons), ways to use the new commons (Paul Hawken’s Ecology of Commerce), and new ways to think about commons (Rifkin’s Zero Marginal Cost Society).
 
I’ve got this idea that our society is almost at a sustainable and wealth-generating point. As a meliorist, an optimist, and a humanist I do believe that our society is the best that has ever occurred on the planet according to every metric (compared to previous societies). I also believe that the problems we have are big, getting bigger, and will become world-killer problems. But I also believe that we will either solve them and live in an unprecedented age where disease and want are dissolved for all or we will fail and continue to live not very different from our bronze-age ancestors (the lived experience for almost 2 billion of us right now anyway). These ideas come from David Deutsch’s Beginning of Infinity, Wright’s NonZero, Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature, Kaku’s Physics of the Future, Kardashev’s 3 Types of Civilizations, and other writers (EO Wilson, Harari, and Carroll, mostly). To get to this place requires a shift in thinking about what are our commons, how we engage with the planet’s 9 Boundaries (Stockholm Resilience Center), and how we understand our axiology.