Yes, it’s a very good cartoon. One thing that reading people like Tyson, Coyne, Dawkins, Pinker et al has made me very much aware of is that away from their own disciplines scientists are often no better than anyone else and sometimes worse, though unfortunately they suppose that, being scientists (or scientific popularisers, as Dawkins is in E.O. Wilson’s view), they are and must be better. The contempt for the liberal arts seems to be a chiefly Anglo-American tradition, though it may have spread elsewhere by now – European scientists of the past, such as Bohr, Einstein & Heisenberg certainly had a respect for the arts and for philosophy, as did, I recall now, the author of one of my favourite books, A Mathematician’s Apology, G.H. Hardy, who had great respect for A.E. Housman, his colleague at Trinity.
I think it can work both ways, or even between arts/humanities disciplines. A lot of experts in a lot of disciplines seem to forget that their discipline is not supreme and experts in other fields probably know a lot of things that they don’t. Depending on your background you’ll fail to grasp other disciplines in different ways. E.g. theologians tend to think they’ve got philosophy covered and wonder what the hell the philosophy department is for. Philosophers sometimes have a similar attitude to experimental psychology, and vice versa.
As an experimental physicist trained as a philosopher, I’ve never found pride in other physicists arrogantly dismissing subjects they know very little about.
In my experience they are always theorists. But not all theorists are bad.
A lot of experts in a lot of disciplines seem to forget that their discipline is not supreme and experts in other fields probably know a lot of things that they don’t
Thank you for noting this; saved me the trouble. As someone with each foot in a vastly different discipline, I encounter this all the time. My playwright friends often discount the idea that scientists can tell them anything about science, and will ignore any criticisms from scientists when they get the science horribly wrong. They know nearly nothing about science, but insist on writing plays about science that spend a lot of time showing what they don’t know, and promoting terribly wrongheaded views. I even had a director insist that I got one of my science plays (about colony collapse disorder) wrong, because it contradicted something one of his high school speech students put in a speech that went to Nationals and won third place. Winning third place in a national speech competition (for high school students) means you have the right to speak as an expert; having a Ph.D. in the relevant field means you must never contradict common knowledge. My response was to ask the director who judged the student, speech teachers or scientists? He did not answer. It was not important; I am well aware that these contests are judged by speech teachers, not experts in the fields the students mangle in their speeches.
Many of my art world friends feel we should dispense with science altogether, because scientists promote things like vaccines and non-homeopathic (read: not natural) medicines and things like that, rather than recognizing the value of ancient Chinese medicine and Vedic healing.
Most of my scientist friends, on the other hand, have a healthy respect for the arts, and a recognition of what they don’t know. I don’t know why we continue to promote the most arrogant, sure of themselves, unable to recognize their own limits scientists as popularizers. Or maybe they become that after getting a lot of acclaim?
Yes, of course you are right. Ben Gorrigan and iknklast. And I certainly agree with you that you find among many supposedly ‘artistic’ people (usually not artistically good people, though) the attitude that what is scientifically correct is simply irrelevant to the arts. You also get people like the art critic I came across – was it in the Guardian? – enthusing about Daman Hirst’s installation, within a sealed glass box, of a rotting cow’s head, a bowl of maggots hatching into flies that promptly flew towards the head for the first square meal of their adult lives only to get electrocuted by a (naturally) invisible electric current in mid-flight. The critic found this somehow splendid – it was scientifically challenging and showed an artist who was scientifically up with things! It was truly ‘contemporary’! The fact that at the very most it was a banal and cruel allegory with an obvious shock value, for those who think that shock value is important, did not cross his mind. But I nevertheless get quite as fed up with the attitudes towards the arts apparent in, for example, Stephen Pinker’s remarks on Virginia Woolf and on music – whereas there was the wonderful book on the science of music by an American (I think) scientist with an Indian name (it’s on my shelves somewhere but I can’t lay my hands on it), written by a man who both understood music deeply and was a very good scientist: that kind of work I have the deepest respect for.
I read Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” years ago, and thought it was brilliant at the time. I think now I’d find many of the arguments to be of the straw man variety. Part of the book that I found awful even then was the discussion of music. Absolute nonsense.
A book on the science of music that I have read and do NOT recommend is “This Is Your Brain on Music”, by Daniel Levitin, who studies the topic professionally. I found his attempts at explanation completely unconvincing, and he demonstrated absolutely dreadful knowledge of classical music.
So I would be interested in learning the title and author of this mystery book by the American with an Indian name. :-)
I have dug the book out. It is ‘Music, Language, and the Brain’, Aniruddh D. Patel; Oxford University Press, 2008. I thought it a wonderful, very learned, well argued, and genuinely illuminating book, full of interesting examples and insights and written with a proper scientific responsibility and humility (unlike the books of most of the popularisers). He takes strong issue with Pinker.
Yes, I recall being very disappointed with ‘This is Your Brain on Music’, which is still the book that comes up first, complete with yards of favourable reviews, if you Google ‘science and music’ or some such, or look the subject up on Amazon. As I recall, there was in it a lot of nonsense about ‘improvisation’, which seemed to be supposed to be quintessentially American, and was opposed to stuffy European music, the performance of which apparently consisted in merely reproducing what was written in the score. My wife’s old piano teacher, the late Georg Vasarhelyi, whom Wilhelm Kempff once called the the finest Schubert player in Europe (which he was – he was a good friend of ours and I heard him on a number of occasions), once said to my wife when he was teaching her at Tokyo University that performance consists in understanding a piece as fully as possible and then improvising.
To return to Tyson, he is merely unthinkingly, and in happy ignorance of the work of such as Antonio Damasio, depending on the old Platonic & Cartesian chestnut that pure rationality exists in some realm of freedom beyond nature and is therefore the only aspect of ours that is to be trusted. One notices that he carefully avoids drawing any conclusion in his little list of numeralised (sorry about that word) incommensurables. Had he tried to do that, he might have seen how foolish he was being and realised that the ‘objective truth’ he was so proud of laying before us was sadly incomplete and utterly banal – it was merely an irrelevant listing. I wonder if anyone has challenged him on what conclusions he might draw from his listing? The only possible one that I can see is that we shouldn’t worry about mass shootings, because they don’t kill so many people as this, that, or the other – which is disgracefully complacent. But one finds this sort of thing in the writing of other scientists. Francis Crick’s assertion that ‘You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’ Were he to be consistent, which few scientists seem to be in this respect, he would have to say that the whole of science, too, is nothing but the behaviour of of a vast assembly of nerve cells, etc. But that step never seems to be taken. As somebody remarked, Crick’s proudly disabused assertion is like saying that Shakespeare’s plays are nothing but an assembly of twenty six letters of the alphabet in different configurations (ah, I’ve remembered, it was Jeremy Lent who said this, though he was probably not the first). And, having lived in East Asia for nearly fifty years, I must say that this dualism seems peculiarly Western. I do not know any Japanese or Chinese people who would begin to think in this way. Of course, one’s joys and sorrows, etc involve the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells, etc, but that does not make them any less joys and sorrows, any more than the fact that science also involves the same vast assembly makes it any less science. Similarly, politics and political institutions depend on that same vast assemblage, but that does not mean that they have no significance in themselves.
Yes, it’s a very good cartoon. One thing that reading people like Tyson, Coyne, Dawkins, Pinker et al has made me very much aware of is that away from their own disciplines scientists are often no better than anyone else and sometimes worse, though unfortunately they suppose that, being scientists (or scientific popularisers, as Dawkins is in E.O. Wilson’s view), they are and must be better. The contempt for the liberal arts seems to be a chiefly Anglo-American tradition, though it may have spread elsewhere by now – European scientists of the past, such as Bohr, Einstein & Heisenberg certainly had a respect for the arts and for philosophy, as did, I recall now, the author of one of my favourite books, A Mathematician’s Apology, G.H. Hardy, who had great respect for A.E. Housman, his colleague at Trinity.
I think it can work both ways, or even between arts/humanities disciplines. A lot of experts in a lot of disciplines seem to forget that their discipline is not supreme and experts in other fields probably know a lot of things that they don’t. Depending on your background you’ll fail to grasp other disciplines in different ways. E.g. theologians tend to think they’ve got philosophy covered and wonder what the hell the philosophy department is for. Philosophers sometimes have a similar attitude to experimental psychology, and vice versa.
As an experimental physicist trained as a philosopher, I’ve never found pride in other physicists arrogantly dismissing subjects they know very little about.
In my experience they are always theorists. But not all theorists are bad.
Thank you for noting this; saved me the trouble. As someone with each foot in a vastly different discipline, I encounter this all the time. My playwright friends often discount the idea that scientists can tell them anything about science, and will ignore any criticisms from scientists when they get the science horribly wrong. They know nearly nothing about science, but insist on writing plays about science that spend a lot of time showing what they don’t know, and promoting terribly wrongheaded views. I even had a director insist that I got one of my science plays (about colony collapse disorder) wrong, because it contradicted something one of his high school speech students put in a speech that went to Nationals and won third place. Winning third place in a national speech competition (for high school students) means you have the right to speak as an expert; having a Ph.D. in the relevant field means you must never contradict common knowledge. My response was to ask the director who judged the student, speech teachers or scientists? He did not answer. It was not important; I am well aware that these contests are judged by speech teachers, not experts in the fields the students mangle in their speeches.
Many of my art world friends feel we should dispense with science altogether, because scientists promote things like vaccines and non-homeopathic (read: not natural) medicines and things like that, rather than recognizing the value of ancient Chinese medicine and Vedic healing.
Most of my scientist friends, on the other hand, have a healthy respect for the arts, and a recognition of what they don’t know. I don’t know why we continue to promote the most arrogant, sure of themselves, unable to recognize their own limits scientists as popularizers. Or maybe they become that after getting a lot of acclaim?
Yes, of course you are right. Ben Gorrigan and iknklast. And I certainly agree with you that you find among many supposedly ‘artistic’ people (usually not artistically good people, though) the attitude that what is scientifically correct is simply irrelevant to the arts. You also get people like the art critic I came across – was it in the Guardian? – enthusing about Daman Hirst’s installation, within a sealed glass box, of a rotting cow’s head, a bowl of maggots hatching into flies that promptly flew towards the head for the first square meal of their adult lives only to get electrocuted by a (naturally) invisible electric current in mid-flight. The critic found this somehow splendid – it was scientifically challenging and showed an artist who was scientifically up with things! It was truly ‘contemporary’! The fact that at the very most it was a banal and cruel allegory with an obvious shock value, for those who think that shock value is important, did not cross his mind. But I nevertheless get quite as fed up with the attitudes towards the arts apparent in, for example, Stephen Pinker’s remarks on Virginia Woolf and on music – whereas there was the wonderful book on the science of music by an American (I think) scientist with an Indian name (it’s on my shelves somewhere but I can’t lay my hands on it), written by a man who both understood music deeply and was a very good scientist: that kind of work I have the deepest respect for.
I read Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” years ago, and thought it was brilliant at the time. I think now I’d find many of the arguments to be of the straw man variety. Part of the book that I found awful even then was the discussion of music. Absolute nonsense.
A book on the science of music that I have read and do NOT recommend is “This Is Your Brain on Music”, by Daniel Levitin, who studies the topic professionally. I found his attempts at explanation completely unconvincing, and he demonstrated absolutely dreadful knowledge of classical music.
So I would be interested in learning the title and author of this mystery book by the American with an Indian name. :-)
I have dug the book out. It is ‘Music, Language, and the Brain’, Aniruddh D. Patel; Oxford University Press, 2008. I thought it a wonderful, very learned, well argued, and genuinely illuminating book, full of interesting examples and insights and written with a proper scientific responsibility and humility (unlike the books of most of the popularisers). He takes strong issue with Pinker.
Yes, I recall being very disappointed with ‘This is Your Brain on Music’, which is still the book that comes up first, complete with yards of favourable reviews, if you Google ‘science and music’ or some such, or look the subject up on Amazon. As I recall, there was in it a lot of nonsense about ‘improvisation’, which seemed to be supposed to be quintessentially American, and was opposed to stuffy European music, the performance of which apparently consisted in merely reproducing what was written in the score. My wife’s old piano teacher, the late Georg Vasarhelyi, whom Wilhelm Kempff once called the the finest Schubert player in Europe (which he was – he was a good friend of ours and I heard him on a number of occasions), once said to my wife when he was teaching her at Tokyo University that performance consists in understanding a piece as fully as possible and then improvising.
To return to Tyson, he is merely unthinkingly, and in happy ignorance of the work of such as Antonio Damasio, depending on the old Platonic & Cartesian chestnut that pure rationality exists in some realm of freedom beyond nature and is therefore the only aspect of ours that is to be trusted. One notices that he carefully avoids drawing any conclusion in his little list of numeralised (sorry about that word) incommensurables. Had he tried to do that, he might have seen how foolish he was being and realised that the ‘objective truth’ he was so proud of laying before us was sadly incomplete and utterly banal – it was merely an irrelevant listing. I wonder if anyone has challenged him on what conclusions he might draw from his listing? The only possible one that I can see is that we shouldn’t worry about mass shootings, because they don’t kill so many people as this, that, or the other – which is disgracefully complacent. But one finds this sort of thing in the writing of other scientists. Francis Crick’s assertion that ‘You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’ Were he to be consistent, which few scientists seem to be in this respect, he would have to say that the whole of science, too, is nothing but the behaviour of of a vast assembly of nerve cells, etc. But that step never seems to be taken. As somebody remarked, Crick’s proudly disabused assertion is like saying that Shakespeare’s plays are nothing but an assembly of twenty six letters of the alphabet in different configurations (ah, I’ve remembered, it was Jeremy Lent who said this, though he was probably not the first). And, having lived in East Asia for nearly fifty years, I must say that this dualism seems peculiarly Western. I do not know any Japanese or Chinese people who would begin to think in this way. Of course, one’s joys and sorrows, etc involve the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells, etc, but that does not make them any less joys and sorrows, any more than the fact that science also involves the same vast assembly makes it any less science. Similarly, politics and political institutions depend on that same vast assemblage, but that does not mean that they have no significance in themselves.