Philosophers v. Practical Persons

I’ve got a buddy who rather likes rolling his eyes at economists; these were the deliverers of lectures that he’d rather not have had to sit through, who failed to make his college experience sufficiently practical or fun. To this friend, I feel the need to make an argument for “why science”?

On its face, the worthwhileness of science is almost tautological, if you see “science” as basically the accumulation of knowledge about how the world works, which can give you powers. Don’t you need to know that to make an AC unit (if you’re reading in summer) or a furnace (for winter), or to get water into the “running” camp (year round, I hope)? Those who see science as worth doing for these purposes I’ll call practical people.

For others, though, you don’t need science to be justified by what it allows you to do; it’s enough to allow you to understand. This genre of person I would call a philosopher, this definition more literally matching the root of the word than our running definition of “person who asks only questions that cannot be answered” (as this implies to me that this person kind of has philo less for soph than for questions, which strikes me as anything but soph). Learning about how the world works is intrinsically important for philosophers but for anyone who doesn’t care about the answer to a question (e.g., “how many blades of grass are there in the backyard?”), it needs to be instrumentally justified to be worth asking, let alone answering.

This is, I think, part of the issue that people of the Nicholas Nassim Taleb genre take with scientific endeavor. The issue taken here might extend to scientist’s taking their sweet time and druthers solving a question, regardless of its importance, since they don’t have “skin in the game”. Chomsky and his genre insist that scientific inquiry isn’t about external rewards, and what makes it work is the intrinsic motivation of the scientists which suffices as fuel for 80+ hour workweeks for relatively low wages, as seen in his MIT halls.

Another way that science runs out of usefulness is when it runs out of low-hanging fruit, an analogy for diminishing marginal returns and increasing marginal difficulty which I’ve heard Ross Douthat call one of Tyler Cowen’s favorite analogies. This might be the reason for what Peter Thiel laments as in “We were promised hovercars, and instead we got 140 characters.

So if one side wants to convince the other that pure discovery is worth the resources expended on it and the other one asks for hovercars, it seems that the only productive conversation can be had at the intersection of these two interests, where the scientists who love discovery obviously face a lower threshold of usefulness to find a discovery worth pursuing, and the practical people have a higher one, we can safely say that the latter is a subset of the former.

So the philosophers’ only hope is to convince the practical people that curiosity- or discovery-fueled science will yield better practical outcomes. How in the world would you do that?

I hope the answer is in this article by the innovation economist Nick Bloom.