A Proposal for the Sciences, Rediscover Bacon's Idols of the Mind

Why is science so stubbornly politicized?  Perhaps we have just been teaching it wrong.

Francis Bacon benefited from his Queen's loyalty to the split with the Catholic church. Being entirely separate had its advantages, and Bacon's firm adherence to Aristotle while despising the state of received Aristotelian philosophy materialized in his bold new vision for the scientific approach.

I am happy to discuss in comments the details of this matter, which I am still working through, but let's make a long story short. Science before Bacon had been captured by the idea of the deductive method. This means that first principles were hypothesized which, when logically applied, would sort out almost any contradiction between competing claims. What if these didn't work because of some new discovery? Simply, revise the first principles. This process would give us insight into the true nature of the world.

Bacon offered an alternative. His method looked towards the inductive method. This takes a radical approach to science that we are all taught in our first laboratory class, the scientific method. Simply put, the scientific method asks us which phenomenon we are interested in and then accumulates related observations. We sort these observations by their perceived priority in association with the main phenomenon of interest.

In this approach, Bacon discovered what he called the Idols of the Mind. He gave them names:

• idola tribus: The idol of the "tribe" deals with coherence of ideas into neat packages. I take this to be related to much of the moral foundations literature Jonathan Haidt is working with. 
• idola spectus: The idol of the "cave" deals with cognitive bias. For example, our minds interpret our enemies best argument as evidence that they have bad intentions. Liberals who watch Fox News confirm their prior that conservatives are crazy. 
• idola fori: The idol of the "marketplace"  deals with language. Often language assumes a meaning quite different the way specialist use it, this helps distort careful logic when applied to the public debate.
• idola theatri: The idol of the "theatre" is the closes to sophistry. The tendency to over-sell academic expertise. 
• idola schola: The idol of the "school" is the pedantic reasoning of textbooks. It is a oversimplification useful only for the teaching of material to neophytes. 

The idols were categories of errors. Science according to Bacon was understanding error, not finding truth.  The most important lesson that Bacon teaches us is that all answers are errors and that these are more or less affected by these idols. To begin the process of cleansing the mind from these idols, there are many approaches. None are going to work. We can only progress by taking the task seriously. 

I find it discouraging sometimes that so many students think that they can posses "the answer" and have simply not been taught the idols of the mind, specifically idola schola. I can't read a periodical without thinking of the idola fori. I have so much contempt for my peers who dismiss the idola theatri and attempt to establish their reputation by sophism. 

The only hope science has is to proceed with a more ready understanding of Bacon's idols. It strikes me that much of what we see as progress in the last 300 years depends on the implicit expectation of this task. If anything explains why modern science is so politicized, it is the fact that we have lost our understanding of Bacon's method. I aim to do better.    

Academia: A Handshake Culture?

Gone are the days where the choice of the correct tweed jacket was all you needed to signal membership in the fraternity of academic teaching, speaking, and publishing. However, it seems that for every student who overestimates the depth of insight and limitless pool of expertise that their professors have, there is at least one student whose contempt is palatable.

Perhaps this is best described by misunderstanding the portion of the job that is spent outside of the classroom. It is hardly surprising that when academics present the same paper at conferences year after year without making any progress the average student sees a very low bar. However, this should not really be the case in the modern university since people willing to take the job are numerous and the typical person able to qualify for tenure craves the attention that a new publication affords them. So where does this idea of intellectual laziness come from?

Perhaps the non-tenure track lecturers are responsible? The contempt for the system might be very real among these instructors who value teaching without research (if such a thing actually exists). Perhaps students simply haven't understood the complex reward mechanism associated with tenure. Perhaps the student's immaturity makes them look at the world as who you know and not what you know.

I certainly can relate to the idea that professors are parroting warmed over insights from a instructor's manual. The incentives are such that the less time you spend on prep the more time you have for research. So even very competent researchers would have an incentive to use the teaching materials available from the publisher. An interaction between this lack of prep and lack of pedagogical instruction for the research faculty can breed the type of contempt I see among students.

But this still leaves the idea that all research grants, publications, research appointments, and other gigs on campus come from some club which is anything but transparent. As a economist and big fan of the market mechanism for revealing information, this is perhaps a fault of a system that is protected from competitive forces. However, the longer I spend in academia, the more convinced I am that there is a meaningful division of labor. Some people do very detailed work and are bad at promoting (much less explaining) the significance to the wider public. Some are very good at expressing themselves, but find the underlying research element challenging. Some are highly mathematical, good at expressing themselves, but can't publish. Still more are very adept at understanding the politics of the university and add value as administrators. Others are very effective managers over research projects and create synergies from otherwise frustrated researchers.

All of these categories are needed, but each comes with a weakness. As a student it might be easy to look at this collection of weaknesses (taking attention away from the classroom) rather than at the collection of strengths. I wish the advantages of these different personalities were more clearly defended, perhaps in something like a price mechanism. Good teachers should be compensated according to the the value they create among the tuition paying students. This might be the biggest source of the critique for students. Good researchers should be rewarded in proportion to their ability to publish. People who are able to act as good managers and increase the productivity of their research team should also be compensated. There is no one model, nor should we ever pretend that there is.

For everyone who relies on a firm handshake to get things done in academia, there need to be several others that are nose-down researchers who can rely on these people to do their job consistently and without penalty. To be an academic with no sense of politics, we need some people to manage effectively. There also need to be good teachers who can communicate effectively. Rather than denying the division of labor, let us embrace it.

Leontieff function as it applies to Professorship

The above function suggests that you are only evaluated by the measure in which you do the least well. For economists this is simple, it is a perfect compliment arrangement. It is an extreme case. But when you are preparing to appear in a formal setting, you don't want to know how many shoes you have to chose from to wear with your tux, you want to know if you have one right shoe and a left shoe that matches. Having 5 right shoes does not solve the problem.

The opposite case is a perfect substitute. In professorship many people assume you can either teach well and then not do research or research well and not really excel at teaching. This is not the case. I should point out that teaching well is hard to measure, so we proxy with teaching evaluations.

To some extent the idea of perfect compliments can only occur if the supply of people with moderate ratings on both margins is high. As labor is scarce, quality is sacrificed. However, there seem to be many people that would like the job. It is easy to see that someone needs to be a good researcher in order to be effective in the classroom. Who wants to hear a lecture from someone that is still teaching something they were forced to learn in grad school, good teachers update (good researchers update).

Why might it be the case that you need to be a good teacher to be a good researcher? What about the division of labor? Communicating clearly is very helpful in research. Too often people get rewarded for tweaking a tiny aspect of a model or having the only access to a data set. Just like judging students based on one GRE test, judging an article based on access to data or a particular methodological tool fails a robustness check. I can't exactly explain why a good researcher has to be a good teacher, but it seems to make sense to me. Maybe enjoying the classroom means that a good researcher will stay productive over a long period? I am open to thoughts on this.

Learning through Adversity

Economics, as a science, can only advance if it takes on the hard questions.

Learning is a theme on this blog as I started the conversation here talking about how to best improve as a writer. Knowing very precisely how bad one is as a writer helps to outline what needs to be done in order to progress. The more potential for progress the more inadequate one feels. This even translates to mind-numbing feelings of inadequacy, at times. It was for this reason that I chose the title, "off-the-cuff" and the German word unvorbereitet for unprepared or extemporaneous. Acknowledgement of short-comings removes one of the biggest obstacles to learning.

Economics has developed a fetish as a hand-maiden to political power. There is always an economist that can back your basic story and conveniently we, as a profession, have access to statistics that can remove criticism beyond the ability of a casual observer. Being certain pays in the marketplace of ideas and quantity supply increases. At GMU we questioned methodological barriers to entry because, like all barriers, it prevents true competition. It has remained my instinct to avoid the assertion of expertise or those that think they are done learning. Rather, I am careful to see knowledge from a particular angle with almost debilitating numbers of caveats.

The longer that I spend in the academy, the more I understand that time is scarce. Energy is scarce. Who can both succeed as a professional and be clear about the limitations of science? It makes me appreciate the value of folks like Matt Ridley and Richard Dawkins who are privately funded as advocates of popularizing science. I am now familiar a few books by both authors and am impressed with the energy they bring to their sciences and the crusader's will to discover what it takes to teach their subjects. After all, what impact does science have on society if its central tenets are misunderstood and the consumers have no avenue to decode them?

I can't help but be frustrated, however, with what I see as a willingness on the part of the standard professor to assert expertise over a whole variety of topics, but to not admit to their students the real deficiencies in their own depth in these subjects. Professors that pull it off well, that is distinguishing where they are experts and where they lack expertise, are loved by their students. The student humanizes the pursuit of knowledge only when you tell them that, like you, they are beginning a search or a journey of the mind.

The academy rewards self-confidence, but the search for truth only rewards humility. How can we teach this lesson to our students? More importantly, what are we doing to remember this lesson?

What is teaching?

In our time teaching is best described as preparing individuals for the next step in life. We expect people to take a few years to learn to speak, walk, get along with others and then we put them in school so that they can learn skills that are not as well learned in the home.

Kindergarten is to prepare for grade school, which prepares you for junior high. At this point you are prepared for high school which is about getting into a good college. When our students arrive, they can think a variety of things that are untrue about college --

1) they are going to be given the secret of their chosen profession and become an asset when equipped with that knowledge;

2) they can think that they are being punished and have contempt for the whole process which results in a membership card required to get a job they should have been given anyhow;

3) they could be in college because that is where the single people of their age are - for obvious reasons.

I have written, before, about how I think that writing should be a craft as opposed to an art. But when I walk down the halls of the university I am convinced that school is becoming less of a craft. I observed today an older student who was back in school to get a masters. He was fired from his job and does not have other options without the masters. He is enjoying it, mostly, and talks frequently in classes, a bit too much actually. It is a bit of a consumption experience for him, but when he talks to other students about what it will take to succeed, they give him quite a bit of deference. He knows something about what it means to turn these abstract habits into a paying job, something that is not taught in school.

This made me think that we should not fear the concept of trade schools. I think we have a bad idea about them. Some things can only be learned in the context of application. Engineering might be one. Business is certainly one. When I was a student at Alabama, the MBA students were consulting with different firms and, if they and their results were liked, were offered jobs there at the end of the projects. This seemed to make sense -- the elimination of Asymmetric information for both parties.

I may be naive, but my vision of what would work in school is to have classes that were more geared around what people needed to know in a functional way. If your major at least was structured this way, it might make the electives more fun and relaxing. We might see students do well in a humanities class because it is an opportunity to do something different. I don't see this in my school. I see people generally valuing completing a degree but not earning one. They have no idea what it used to mean to accumulate the skills and insights required for a degree back when it meant more relative to the general public. By making the Bachelors a virtually universal expectation, we robbed it of some of its motivational capital.

I think more classes should structure the learning goals around some aspect of the craft of becoming educated. For Humanities this means that students should learn to think creatively and learn how to write. For engineering, perhaps students should offset some of their expenses by doing instructor led consulting (where they could be fired if they don't perform consistently).

I want to get out of the habit of seeing our students as kids that are preparing for something else that is important. We owe it to them to see them as young professionals that are filling in gaps in their credentials. Adolescence is long enough without subsidizing the hook-up scene. Besides, having a purpose in your daily activity should make you more attractive to your potential partners anyhow...