Principles of Applied Epistemology (APPLIED EPISTEMOLOGY)

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

The Truth Police (Radio 4)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001k0ky

A half-hour programme tucked away in the radio schedules about people who investigate fraud in scientific papers. Nobody pays a lot of attention to this, the work is done by individuals' enthusiasm and a bit of crowd funding. They report that one, two, ten per cent -- they don't really attempt to quantify it -- of papers are fraudulent. Not bad, not pointless, not unread. Fraudulent. And that's scientific papers.

I have to admit to wry smiles when they kept reiterating how nobody was interested in their work. I got the impression this was the bit that shocked them most. Individual fallibility they could understand, however widespread it might be, but that organised academia is in the frame -- not for crookedness but for not caring about crookedness -- was something they hadn't expected. One of them even said, "It's not a question of rotten apples, I think it's worse than that." Or as I put in Revisionist Historiography

[Grant]

Read "Replication Crisis" on wiki.

A massive pecentage of scientific papers are not replicable. One would expect this with pop psychology or sociology, but it applies to medicine as well. Even physics is suffering, although not quite as badly.

[Mick Harper]

This was referred to in the programme.

The really (really) depressing part was when the BBC presenter, after a good deal of puppyish eagerness -- it was, after all, a scoop -- wrapped it up by conveying the impression that the problem was being attended to at the highest levels and wheeled on Professor Rachael Gooberman-Hill, Co-Chair of the UK Research Integrity Committee, to say, "Nothing to see here. There was a problem but it's been dealt with. We thank the whistle-blowers for bringing this to our attention but if they don't pipe down they will be shot out of hand like the whining curs they are." Or words to that effect.

As the Roman poet Juvenal put it, "Who shall research the integrity of the integrity researchers?" That would be us, folks.

[Mick Harper]

I used to steer clear of scientific matters on the basis that (a) the scientific method was proof against most things and (b) I got ten per cent in a General Science exam and when offered the choice between Chemistry and German, I chose the latter (and got Grade H in my German O-level). It was only with experience that I came to realise that

(a) what are called sciences, eg the earth sciences, the social sciences, may not be sciences
(b) in science the scientific method is sparingly employed
(c) science is relatively unimportant, it is technology that is important
(d) I'm even worse with technology than I am with science or languages.

[Mick Harper]

The smartest person in the room

Walk into a room full of people. You don’t know much about them but they all seem to be a bit like you. They seem friendly enough, as are you, you fit right in, so start circulating. You’ll need to because your task is to identify the smartest person in the room. You haven’t been told what 'smart' means in this context but if that bothers you, walk right out again. You will be given a small but not derisory pourboire at the desk, and our thanks for attending.

If you do know what smart means – and you should, you’re using your own definition – then the next question is, “Is this a competitive matter, is it meaningful to say Ms X is smarter than Mr Y?” (I was smart to put it that way round). If you think it isn’t, if you think the whole thing is damn silly, again walk right out again. Ask for envelope B.

You’re still here? Even if under sufferance, out of curiosity, whatever, we don’t mind. OK, next question. “Is it you?” If your answer is, “How the hell would I know, I haven’t talked to everyone yet?” The answer is, “No, you’re not.” How can I be sure, never having met you? That’s easy. You’ve never concluded you were the smartest person in the room after having talked to a roomful of your peers so, at a minimum, if you turned out to be the smartest person in this particular room, that would be a twenty-to-one random shot. But that’s not the minimum. The smartest person in the room assumes he is the smartest person in the room. He may be wrong, but he'll be right up there. It’s been happening to him all his life. You have never assumed that you will be the smartest person in any room you walked into, except maybe once or twice in special circumstances.

[By the way I’m going to assume everyone is male from now on, partly for tiresome linguistic reasons, partly because I myself happen to be male and partly for a reason we’ll come to later. If that bothers you, ask for envelope C.]

But here’s something that may not have occurred to you. You have never in your whole life gone into a room of your peers, started circulating, and thought to yourself, “Blimey, that bloke was definitely smarter than me.” Well, maybe once or twice in special circumstances, but basically it just never happens. So how are you going to manage to identify the smartest person in the room after you have finished talking to everyone in this particular room? You may be able to say, “Well, he was definitely smarter than him” but not “Well, he was definitely smarter than me.”

How do you think that makes the smartest person in the room feel?

[Mick Harper]

The smartest person in the room (Part Two)

Smartness is a competitive exercise. It's what allowed human beings to out-compete with other animals, it's what human beings like to inculcate in young human beings via competitive exercises of various kinds. And yet we have no way of measuring it. We are even, it seems, reluctant to compare it, mano a mano.

We have always tried. But whenever we do, we find we have measured something that is related to smartness but isn't smartness. Hence, someone with a high IQ is intelligent but not smart. Someone with a string of qualifications knows a lot but isn't smart. Someone with a posh accent has a smart background but is not smart. 'Necessarily' to be added in all cases.

So, back to the room. You have now finished your evaluation of your peers, what have you to report? They were all 'fairly smart', weren't they? We always judge our peers to be be smart(ish) because if they weren't that would mean we ourselves would not be. This is tremendously important in the Smart Game. We are not foolish enough to assume we are smart just because the people we hang with are. We look around and see very unsmart people hanging together. We are too smart to make such a rookie error.

We have devised a fail-safe method that ensures we will always be with smart people...

[Mick Harper]

The smartest person in the room (Part Three)

The room this time is a taxi. The driver says something. You say something. He says something. You can't help noticing you are vehemently disagreeing. Do you:

(a) conclude this taxi driver is pretty smart, his arguments were internally consistent, you had better go away and re-think your position. It may be, after all, you were right and he was wrong, but it would certainly be a smart move on your part to check it out.
(b) conclude this taxi driver is pretty dumb. You could tell anyway, not so much by his accent, but by the general poverty of his discourse. Clearly a mishmash of redtop newspapers. Besides, if he was that smart he wouldn't be driving a taxi.

You have to travel a long way -- unless you are at home with your parents -- to find people who disagree with you. You have to seek them out. And why would you?

[Mick Harper]

The smartest person in the room (Part Four)

Human beings have a superlative ability for seeking out groups who think the same way they do. Of course in former times everybody was ordained by the state to think the same way so no seeking was required. But even so it is not always clear whether individuals are tailoring their thoughts to the group or whether the group is tailoring them. Such is the power of the general mechanism, people seem to arrive 'in the room' fully conversant.

We can leave that for the moment because the upshot is that there can be no pecking order based on intelligence because no intelligence is required. Indeed, intelligence is a disadvantage because intelligent people will surely be tempted to shake off the shackles in order to show off their intelligence. However there is quite definitely a pecking order based on familiarity and fluency with the material that forms the group-thought. The state itself takes advantage of this, even now, by placing specially knowledgeable and fluent performers to, as it were, lead and guide groups.

It does not require a specially trained person to conclude that this is not a recipe for innovatory thought. Thought of any kind. Only an ability to shape what others have thought. People good at this rise to the top and become intelligentsia. Intellectuals are surplus to requirements.

[Grant]

If high energy intelligence was useful, we would have a higher average IQ than 100.
It's a bit like height. Women like tall men so they are more likely to breed with them, but they don't want an eight footer

[Mick Harper]

High energy intelligence is a new one on me. Do you mean rapid decision-making? I normally use stand-up comedy as an exemplar. They can do a bit of rapid-fire and improv but usually they spend months honing their act, though the act itself is meant to sound made-up on the spot.

Interestingly, comics have an equivocal place 'in the room'. They are not at the bottom because they are slightly feared and are always useful but never anywhere near the top. Classically, the court jester position.

[Mick Harper]

The smartest person in the room (Part Five)

This entire phenomenon is driven by one factor. We judge smartness in others by how much they agree with us. Go back to the taxi. If that conversation had consisted of him saying something, you agreeing with him, him saying something else, you agreeing with him etc etc, you would have said later, "I met an unusually intelligent taxi driver today..." You would not have said, "I met an unusual taxi driver today. He clearly reads the same newspapers as I do."

There is some merit in all this. Did that taxi driver, having a wet-and-a-wedge in a taxi driver haunt, say, "I just had an unusually intelligent fare..."? Of course not. Not in either scenario. He is perfectly aware he lives in a world in which taxi drivers are typically less educated than their fares, and that the world tends to judge 'smartness' in these terms. To some extent, he even agrees with that judgement.

But he is no more likely to change his views on the basis of what his fares say than they are likely to change theirs on hearing his. He simply alters the parameters of 'smartness'. Street smart. University of Life. They live in a world of their own. Jack's as good as his master. A bit better if you want to know the honest truth of it, I haven't had their advantages.

You'd better believe it.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

You may not use avowedly fictional rooms. This is a list of people that a script editor deems to have smartness. Notice though that each of them -- apart maybe from all-wise God Jethro -- is delineated as being completely dopey outside their smart specialism. Script editors know their audience.

Contrast that with a real CSI lab. For a start everybody is required to be non-smart, they have to follow strict protocols without thinking, "I know, I'll give this a little tweak." The 'Gibbs' in a real lab is not required to be -- and in all probability will not be -- the smartest person in the room. He is in charge. That is sufficient to discharge his function. Nor is he in charge because of any smartness he may have. It will be strictly a matter of time served, keeping your nose clean, turning in the product on time every time -- all things inimical to smart people.

[Mick Harper]

I will however break off to describe a real situation. Every week my family have a Zoom hook-up, a floating attendance of between eight and fifteen people. All pretty much peers. Every other week we have a quiz.

This does require the temporary appointment of 'the smartest person in the room', the quizmaster. As it happens, he is among the least educated of the group and is frequently challenged by individuals as to the correct answer. He survives by a combination of "My decision is final' and 'That's what it says on the computer'. But generally he is accepted without rancour as the pro tem smartest person, over and above him being quite a tough hombre.

Under non-quiz conditions, it is a free-for-all discussions. This being Britain and us not being Jews or Irish (apart from Dublin Hatty) the proceedings are both haltingly sparse and stridently interruptive. None of us have any skills in how to conduct a discourse despite -- or because -- most of us are university-trained and then some.

But what's important in this context is that 'smartness' is very definitely not operable. Subject matter is strictly governed by what is deemed suitable for any connected but inchoate group -- holidays, hobbies and health. The only nod to 'higher things' is politics discussed in a topical, garden-gate sort of way. Pecking order is dictated solely by a priori family status.

So who is the smartest person in the Zoom room?