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But I want to offer something provoke some debate, so: (a) it strikes me that environmental politics is increasingly part of science news, in ways which invite us to reflect upon the politics of science; (b) the scientific community shouldn’t be scared to work with environmental NGOs. I don’t think they should get to decide science news, but we should see them as a player. I don’t think science should treat these groups uncritically, but equally science shouldn’t be scared to be criticised either.
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It’s worth remembering that environmental NGOs are in many ways quite scientific creatures. Or at least we might see them as a product of science, often taking inspiration from science and technology’s ability to alert us to human impact on the planet (see, for example, the early history of the WWF). As a colleague put it recently, the green movement is unique amongst contemporary political ideologies in that it is so rooted in science. As a scientific creature, it’s maybe understandable then that it manages to be both overly strident and riddled with doubt. (That’s the scientific way, no?). Moreover, just because the green movement has critiqued aspects of science, doesn’t make it hostile or ignorant of the whole enterprise. Green campaigns are often less “anti-science” and more a hopeful attempt at harnessing the power of science and technology for maximum social good. We can have a fight over what we think counts as “social good” – just as we might fight over what counts as “science” or “progress” – but that’s politics, isn’t it? Indeed, I’d argue that’s the politics of science, and environmental NGOs are a key player in inviting us to discuss what science could and should be.
"Starting off in political science and then moving through several disciplinary domains such as management theory, psychology, sociology, economics, organization and institutional theory, March’s academic career has been focused on understanding and analyzing human decision making and behavior. The basic thesis that he has pursued is that human action is neither optimal (or unboundedly rational) nor random, but nevertheless reasonably comprehensible (March, 1978, 1994, 1999). The ideas that were developed to understand human behavior in organizations in March’s early work in the analysis of how people deal with an uncertain and ambiguous world included, among other things, the concepts of bounded rationality and satisficing "
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As March mentions in the following interview, a key theme in his later work (and a theme underlying his recent movie on leadership) is examining the problems of achieving a balance between exploration and exploitation (see, in particular, March, 1991, 1996a). Exploiting existing capabilities is full of rewards in the short run, but doesn’t prepare people for changes in technologies, capabilities, desires, tastes, and identities. For such preparation, exploration is necessary. Exploration involves searching for things that might come to be known, experimenting with doing things that are not warranted by experience or expectations. In all areas (in research as well as in life) we need both sides; illustrating, perhaps, a variation of Milan Kundera’s discussion of the ambiguous issue of the lightness-weight opposition, the combination of which is the source of numerous contradictions and difficulties; yet also the essence of being (Kundera, 1984).
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So what does this have to do with leadership? In March’s most recent academic venture–a movie produced with filmmaker Steven Schecter on this theme, titled Passion and Discipline: Don Quixote’s Lessons for Leadership–March provides an intellectually stimulating interpretation of the contemporary meaning of Don Quixote, using interviews with modern leaders, wine drinking in Spain, and numerous episodes drawn from the novel to demonstrate the significance of joy, commitment, and imagination.(n2)
In keeping with this message, March, sees teaching "as a calling of faith, not a consequential act." As elaborated in the interview below, Don Quixote’s basic message remains important to teachers, leaders, and the rest of us. As March says, "Quixote reminds us that if we trust only when trust is warranted, love only when love is returned, learn only when learning is valuable, we abandon an essential feature of our humanness."
"Thinking about these communities reminded me of Lovecraft’s earlier interactions. In some ways, amateur journalism and epistolary circles of Lovecraft’s day were not unlike the blogs and webpages that Less Wrong and the chemtrailers use. (Yes, I know the dangers of cross-temporal and cross-technological comparisons.) Still, I think there is much to explore about how such groups produce and distribute their knowledge against the background of an epistemic status quo. If scientists have their journals—as Alex Csiszar has been exploring—the laity have their amateur journalism and their blogs. And such spaces give historians of science and technology and STS scholars a chance to examine and probe the practices of epistemic subcultures."
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Historians know that early scientists were—and, indeed, prided themselves on being—amateurs. I am more interested in lay circles, like Lovecraft’s, that persist(ed) well after the professionalization of science and technology. Some scholars have already touched on this theme. The historian of technology, Susan Douglas, has noted the importance of amateurs in shaping the initial stages of technical change in objects such as radios. We can also think of Sophia Roosth’s work on garage science. Yet, much remains to be said about the perseverance of amateurism.
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Recently, I have been a great deal about two communities that have put forward idiosyncratic ideas about the world. Less Wrong claims to be “a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality.” Eliezer Yudkowsky, a proponent of the singularity, began the blog in 2009 and used it as a space to broadcast his views on, well, just about everything but primarily artificial intelligence, epistemology, and ethics. Yudkowsky and the Less Wrong community often base their speculations on ‘rationality’ on research in cognitive science, behavioral economics, and related disciplines. I’ve also been interested for some time in chemtrail conspiracy theorists, a community that is more decentralized. Chemtrailers believe that contrails, or lines of condensed water left in an aircraft’s wake, are in fact, um, chemtrails, chemicals sprayed into the atmosphere by the government or some other malignant group. Chemtrail theorists have carried out their own experiments to verify their intuitions. And they have become the scourge of those proposing research on geoengineering
I’m not saying that arguments based on rationality are necessarily wrong in particular cases. (I can’t very well say that, given that I wrote an article on why it can be rational to vote.) I’m just trying to understand how pop-economics can so rapidly swing back and forth between opposing positions. And I think it’s coming from the comforting presence of rationality and efficiency in both formulations. It’s ok to distinguish economists from ordinary people (economists are rational and think the unthinkable, ordinary people don’t) and it’s also ok to distinguish economists from other social scientists (economists think ordinary people are rational, other social scientists believe in “culture”). You just have to be careful not to make both arguments in the same paragraph.
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OK, now to return to the puzzle that got us started. How is it that economics-writers such as Levitt are so comfortable flipping back and forth between argument 1 (people are rational) and argument 2 (economists are rational, most people are not)?
The key, I believe, is that “rationality” is a good thing. We all like to associate with good things, right? Argument 1 has a populist feel (people are rational!) and argument 2 has an elitist feel (economists are special!). But both are ways of associating oneself with rationality. It’s almost like the important thing is to be in the same room with rationality; it hardly matters whether you yourself are the exemplar of rationality, or whether you’re celebrating the rationality of others.
Why aren't there more pop-culture books about the internet by professional sociologists?
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The number of pop science/business/cultural studies books that have come out on the subject of the Internet in the past few years has been staggering. Off the top of my head, we’ve got Nick Carr’s The Shallows, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus, Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, Evengy Morozov’s The Net Delusion, Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, Johnathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet; and How to Stop It, Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital, Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, and John Palfrey & Urs Gasser’s Born Digital.
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So where does this leave us? What can sociology contribute to the study of the Internet, and what can the Internet contribute to the sociological lexicon? We need new and better sociological concepts to deal with the contexts of virtuality. We need a new approach to text, one that treats it as something other than an inert data resource. We need a new approach to space and place, one that allows us to talk about these things without reference to geographic clustering. We need to rethink our privileging of face-to-face relationships in our research, and of methodologies that embed and perpetuate that privileging. But most importantly, we need to stop talking about what people do online as though it isn’t real.
"The divisions between neurology and psychiatry suggested in the image above stir up lots of interesting questions not only about what we consider to be “neurological” or “psychiatric”, but more generally about the social production of knowledge."
"Still, I wonder why there isn’t more of a conversation between anthropologists and economists. Especially considering our overlapping interests. So why is there such a chasm between the two disciplines? Is it because our ways of thinking about and analyzing human nature are soooooo different that there is no room for dialog, or what?"
"What interests me about all of the above blogs is that they situate architecture within a broader context. Disciplinarity is dying at a rapid clip. I suspect the lament is partly a reaction to the end of disciplinarity. We are losing our ability to talk about architecture on its own terms."
In an excellent paper in a similar vein, Espeland and Hirsch (1990) give numerous examples of the kinds of manipulations possible of accounting profits that, they argue, made possible the conglomerates of the 1960s. Especially popular tricks allowed firms to count the earnings of acquired firms retroactively, thus increasing the apparent profitability of the firm post-merger
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So, what, specifically, do I mean by "Star Trek socialism"?
Nothing.
I mean nothing specific.
I mean it as an invitation to imagine, not as a definition to impose.
Such is the nature of utopia--it is, above all, an exercise of the imagination, which is a core part of what makes us human. By using the term "Star Trek socialism" I want to indicate and help re-establish an alternative viewpoint that is not just valuable in itself, but also for the sorts of discussions it can generate. The viewpoint is that which we can see embodied in the United Federation of Planets, and how we can imagine ways to "Make it so," as Captain Picard would say.
So my central point so far is this- if philosophers really “love wisdom”, then we ought to recognize the unprecedented bounty of knowledge that science now provides us with. Rather than viewing moral and political philosophy as a dialogue that occurred among the greats of the past, we should strive to connect the new empirical insights to these debates. While we may not have intellectual giants like Aristotle, Mill or Marx living among us today, what we do have is a wealth of empirical knowledge that ought to be an integral part of moral and political philosophy.
The argument of the piece (discounting some broader sociological claims) goes something like this. We are seeing a hybridization of Genre (i.e. SF, or as Kunkel calls it, ‘sci fi’) and Literature around a small set of shared tropes, which is a Very Bad Thing, because it vitiates Literature’s fascination with the complexity of the individual, and turns Literary Fiction into a higher class of potboiler.
in list: Radical SF
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