The quest for scientific certainty is futile. I don’t floss. This makes me, as my dentists always seem to imply, a naughty boy, a disgusting human willing to walk around with bits of food stuck between my teeth. Of all the dreaded parts of any dentist visit, the worst is receiving a condescending lecture on the merits of flossing. Then I found a secret weapon: a 2019 research review by Cochrane, an independent network of scientists widely considered to produce the most golden of gold-standard research. They pulled together studies that investigated the impact of flossing or using other devices that clean between teeth on dental health: 35 randomized-controlled trials, 3,929 participants total. The results were dismal. Flossing “may” reduce gingivitis, the meta-analysis found, but the effects were uncertain and barely significant statistically. None of the studies investigated whether flossing prevents cavities. … (New York Times)
The Discipline of Desire. “Of all existing things some are up to us, and others are not up to us. Up to us are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word, everything which is our own doing. Things not up to us include the body, property, reputation, office, and, in a word, everything which is not our own doing” (Epictetus, Enchiridion, 1). Thus begins one of the most famous pieces of practical advice from ancient philosophy, which I will try to put into practice in this very column. First, a quick refresher. Last issue we looked at the three disciplines articulated by the first century Stoic philosopher Epictetus. Each discipline is meant to help us to improve in one of three areas that, together, make for a virtuous and smooth flow of life. The three disciplines are: desire, which deals with retraining ourselves to prefer what’s good for us and shun what is bad; action, which concerns how we interact with others; and assent, which is devoted to our judgements, and therefore how we practice the first two disciplines. Here I want to focus on desire. The basic assumption of Epictetus’s discipline of desire is that we are often mistaken about what is or is not good for us. I may think, for instance, that eating gelato is a good thing – until I realize that my doctor may object the next time she sees my cholesterol chart. … (Philosophy Now)
The (linguistic) fall of rationality. If you ever suspected that the beginning of the end of the world happened around 1980, there is now some scientific evidence to back up your intuition. An intriguing paper authored by a group of researchers in the Netherlands comprising Marten Scheffer, Ingrid van de Leemput, Els Weinans, and Johan Bollen and published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) USA (Scheffer et al. 2021) gives us skeptics quite a bit to chew on and ponder. Let me first sketch out the methodology and main findings, and then we’ll tackle the more prickly issue of what it all may (or may not) mean. Scheffer and collaborators looked at the frequency of words indicating either rationality or emotion in several large databases across the period of time from 1850 to 2019. They took words such as experiment, circuit, chemistry, gravity, weigh, depth, greater, per, and several others to indicate the use of rational discourse. By contrast, they regarded words such as imagine,compassion, forgiveness, heal, etc., as related to emotional discourse. … (Skeptical Inquirer)
Scrolls that survived Vesuvius divulge their first word. From deep within a papyrus scroll that has not been read in almost 2,000 years and would crumble to pieces if unrolled, researchers have retrieved a handful of letters and a single word: “porphyras,” ancient Greek for “purple.” Experts who announced the findings on Thursday hope that the techniques used will enable them to electronically reconstruct the full contents of the many Herculaneum scrolls that have been preserved but are too fragile to open. The scrolls were carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 that buried Pompeii and deluged Herculaneum with hot gases and volcanic mud. The scrolls, which look like wrinkled lumps of coal, come from a grand villa thought to have been owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. … (New York Times)
Are fears of A.I. and nuclear apocalypse keeping you up? Blame Prometheus. Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods of Olympus and gave it to human beings, setting us on a path of glory and disaster and incurring the jealous wrath of Zeus. In the modern world, especially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, he has served as a symbol of progress and peril, an avatar of both the liberating power of knowledge and the dangers of technological overreach. Mary Shelley subtitled “Frankenstein,” her Gothic tale of a prototypical mad scientist and his monster, “The Modern Prometheus,” underlining the hubris of the monster’s inventor as well as his idealism — while also emphasizing the fragile humanity of his creation. Shelley’s husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, was less ambivalent. In the preface to his verse drama “Prometheus Unbound,” he described his hero as “the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.” Prometheus was an emancipator, a rebel on behalf of humanity against Zeus’ tyranny. … (New York Times)
In The (Linguistic) Fall of Rationality, you quote from Scheffer et al section on Potential Drivers
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2107848118
Two possible drivers are mentioned: the start of the internet and "perhaps more importantly, there could be a connection to tensions arising from neoliberal policies which were defended on rational arguments, while the eco-nomic fruits were reaped by an increasingly small fraction of societies"
As someone who started the 1970's as an undergraduate and who dropped out of graduate school by 1980, I have three observations:
1. The rise of the internet probably was an insignifcant contributor. I started using the Arpanet in January 1973, and being in gradute school in Artificial Intelligence, was a heavy user. But it did not affect society at large.
2. It is curious that the authors use the term "neoliberal", which I don't remember being discussed at the time. Although the hyper-inflation and economic malaise (including the gas crisis) of the Carter Administration led to his ouster and the replacement of Ronald Reagan and a different mindset, coupled with a similar malaise in England leading to Margarest Thatcher, I did not exerience these economic policies as resulting in a decrease in the respect for rationalism. Instead, they manifested themselves in a libertarian outlook, which replaced the greater sense of community that had developed in the wake of World War II. Although the two might be related, I doubt there is a causal relationship. I argue for a deeper cause that led to the economic and politcal changes.
3. There were a number of deeper currents in intellectual thought at that time that presaged this decline in rationality. Moral Foundations theory mentions respect for authority as one of the fundamental moral foundations. This was severly eroded in the 1960s during the civil rights and anti-war movements. This probably is a better explanation. In the 1970s, you saw an increase in religion and mysticism, for example. This was an individualistic religion that mirrored the individualistic politcal turn. That also led to a do-your-own thing, if-it-feels-good-do-it way of living that discounted the effort and value and fought against the confines of having to be rational.
I love your observations: "And of course, it is going to be mighty difficult to test the suggested causal link. It’s one thing to demonstrate a robust data pattern, repeatable across a series of datasets. It’s an altogether different thing to tease apart the underlying causal factors." and "one would have expected a comparable, or even larger, effect of the even more dramatic Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1939. But no such effect is visible in the data." I second you on this.
As someone currently working in the field of Natural Language Processing, I would point out that there are some methods to tease these relationships out. One that comes to mind is to go beyond the counting of single words. I struggle with this daily in my work. Analysis of keywords is a simplisitic analysis - it yields easy results with little effort, but you have to work harder to get to the next level. For example, given a database of the individual texts, such as the New York Times articles (and similar newspapers from around the world) you can select phrases that are more indicative of who inspired whom. As an example in this very discussion, the phrase "neoliberal policies" which I questioned earlier is an example of such as phrase, along with my citing "if it feels good do it". Then you can start building a graph linking the documents in terms of their influences through their idiomatic use of these phrases. Broadening this search to multiple societies allows you to then get an independent evaluation of the lingusitc effect: as the language changes, the effect on the individual societies can be measured. This effect is implied by the authors when they talk about economic changes. But there are other changes as well, such as the growth of relgion and the way it mutated. Another marker that is an indipendent measure of rationality is the changes in medical treatment, which is often subject to pseudo-scientific and irrational forces, such as homeopathy, or bogus treatments like Laetrile, which, if I remeber correctly, took off in this very 1980 time period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdalin
So this is a proposal for a followup study.
The article on flossing and scientific certainty is excellent.
If you have not read Adam Mastroianni yet, you should. His Substack essays are excellent. They present orignal and insightful ideas and they are fun to read. He has some valuable critiques of the way that science is practiced, especially how it relates to his field: psychology.
https://substack.com/@experimentalhistory
Some of my favorites:
Science is a strong-link problem
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-link-problem
I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/im-so-sorry-for-psychologys-loss
You'll forget most of what you learn. What should you do about that?
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/youll-forget-most-of-what-you-learn
Ideas aren’t getting harder to find and anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward and I will fight them
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/ideas-arent-getting-harder-to-find