Hanging on to the Edges

Daniel Nettle

Description

What does it mean to be a scientist working today; specifically, a scientist whose subject matter is human life? Scientists often overstate their claim to certainty, sorting the world into categorical distinctions that obstruct rather than clarify its complexities. In this book Daniel Nettle urges the reader to unpick such distinctions—biological versus social sciences, mind versus body, and nature versus nurture—and look instead for the for puzzles and anomalies, the points of connection and overlap. These essays, converted from often humorous, sometimes autobiographical blog posts, form an extended meditation on the possibilities and frustrations of the life scientific.





Pragmatically arguing from the intersection between social and biological sciences, Nettle reappraises the virtues of policy initiatives such as Universal Basic Income and income redistribution, highlighting the traps researchers and politicians are liable to encounter. This provocative, intelligent and self-critical volume is a testament to the possibilities of interdisciplinary study—whose virtues Nettle stridently defends—drawing from and having implications for a wide cross-section of academic inquiry. This will appeal to anybody curious about the implications of social and biological sciences for increasingly topical political concerns. It comes particularly recommended to Sciences and Social Sciences students and to scholars seeking to extend the scope of their field in collaboration with other disciplines.

 

Sujets

• Sciences et techniques
• Poverty
• Social sciences
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Open Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 18 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783745838
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

HANGING ON TO THE EDGES


Hanging on to the Edges
Essays on Science, Society, and the Academic Life
Daniel Nettle



https://www.openbookpublishers.com
© 2018 Daniel Nettle
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
Daniel Nettle, Hanging on to the Edges. Essays on Science, Society, and the Academic Life . Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0155
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ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-580-7
ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-581-4
ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-582-1
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-583-8
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-584-5
ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-78374-608-8
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0155
Cover image: Photo by Alessio Lin on Unsplash , https://unsplash.com/photos/E0LJBY360HI . Cover design: Anna Gatti
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Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK)


Contents
Introduction
1
PART ONE
7
1. How my theory explains everything: and can make you happier, healthier, and wealthier
8
2. What we talk about when we talk about biology
25
3. The cultural and the agentic
43
4. What is cultural evolution like?
59
5. Is it explanation yet?
77
PART TWO
95
6. The mill that grinds young people old
96
7. Why inequality is bad
111
8. Let them eat cake!
129
9. The worst thing about poverty is not having enough money
145
10. Getting your head around the Universal Basic Income
163
PART THREE
181
11. The need for discipline
182
12. Waking up and going out to work in the uncanny valley
199
13. Staying in the game
215
14. Morale is high (since I gave up hope)
231
Acknowledgements
247
Index
249


Introduction


© 2018 Daniel Nettle, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0155.15
Those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
–Bertrand Russell, New Hopes for a Changing World 1
This is, in many respects, an anti-book. Books have a clear, unitary central message. The message is set out clearly in the opening chapter; seen growing up, fighting off rivals and doing all kinds of good deeds in a series of episodes in the middle; and then triumphantly restated at the end. Books come from certainty and self-confidence: the world is simpler than you thought! Anti-books, on the other hand, grow from critical self-reflection, compromise, and doubt. They cross and re-cross a complex landscape, trying to see its features from as many angles as possible, pointing out commonalities and false friends, abandoning one path and trying another. Their central message, if there is one at all, cannot be summarised in a sentence, but perhaps emerges, unsuspected, from an entanglement of detailed local engagements. It is a set of value commitments as much as a claim.
In 2016 I realised, with some alarm, that I had been working for over twenty years (twenty years!) at the interface between the biological and the social sciences, trying to cross the gulf that still tends to separate those two great human endeavours. What conclusions did I have from all this effort? None clear enough, right now, for a book; but plenty for an anti-book. I had been downcast for years that where other people had grand, bold theories or sweeping claims to make their names with, I did not. I had a lot of reading and thinking behind me; a lot of experimentation with different methods and ideas, without entirely nailing my colours to any of them; a lot of ‘both sides have useful things to contribute’ sentiments; a lot of reasonably good-humoured scepticism; and a great deal of respect for the craft. Running through all this was a diffuse sense of slight disappointment: in private moments, I could see that none of the theories espoused out there in the literature, especially those espoused by me, quite lived up to their promise. The big breakthrough had not quite come. When was I going to discover my gift?
It was only latterly that I realised: disappointment, good-humoured scepticism and the ability to see something valuable on both sides are gifts, of a sort. At any rate, if they’re what you’ve got, they’re what you’ve got. I resolved to reflect on human nature in a way that did not suggest closure, overstatement or facile answers, yet still offered something useful beyond the status quo. More than that, I wanted to find a way of writing more honestly about the academic life. The published record of books and papers airbrushes out a lot of the true nature of this life. Generally, the more influential and prestigious the publication, the more severe the airbrushing is. Readers can see only the tiny subset of thoughts and experiences that makes it through the filtering and signalling processes usually involved in publication. The quotidian mass of unpublished rumination is less cocksure, more imaginative, and in some important sense, truer. The excision of all the doubt and exploration from the final product both biases the scientific record, and gives novice scholars a completely unrealistic sense of what the academic life is really like. I have here tried to find a way of writing that is more open, more like an authentic conversation, than academic papers generally allow for. Over the course of the writing of this book, the search for the authentic voice became part of the substance as well as the style. As such, I hope the reader will forgive me an informality of tone, a periodic recourse to flippancy, and a certain self-involvement, in what follows.
Hanging on to the Edges consists of fourteen essays, written in 2016, 2017 and 2018, and originally published separately on my website. 2 My intention was that each essay could be read in a single sitting (ignoring the footnotes unless you are keen to follow up sources), and each would stand alone. There are, however, plenty of connections between them if you want to make them. They are organized into three groups. Part I is a set of critical journeys through the current terrain of the human sciences. Respectively, these examine the recurrent tendency for researchers to over-claim for their theories ( How my theory explains everything ); the pernicious and persistent maintenance of a false distinction between the ‘social’ and the ‘biological’ ( What we talk about when we talk about biology ); the continuum from social theories that see humans as too self-determining and independent-minded, to those that don’t see them as self-determining and independent-minded enough ( The cultural and the agentic ); the perils of conceiving of culture as something like DNA and its change as something like natural selection ( What is cultural evolution like? ); and finally, the whole question of what a theory is, and what a good one would look like in the case of human behaviour ( Is it explanation yet? ).
Part II turns to the topic of poverty, particularly the consequences of poverty within affluent societies. This is one of my main specialist interests, and a topic to which the human sciences must turn with renewed vigour. Poor people know what it means to be hanging on to the edges, in many different ways. Just as the experience of poverty is insufficiently discussed, researchers struggle to conceptualise the causes and consequences of poverty in sensible ways. Thus, these essays deal as much with how to theorise about poverty as the empirical reality of what poverty is like. The mill that grinds young people old examines the link between poverty and ageing, and begins to raise my general claim that the behaviours of poor people typically make pretty good sense given the conditions under which they have to live. Why inequality is bad argues that economic inequality is bad for well-being, though not necessarily for the reason people usually say. Let them eat cake! considers the role of hunger in the consequences of poverty, arguing that before we turn to more abstruse and symbolic arguments, we consider the visceral: poor people in affluent societies simply can’t afford to eat well, and this could explain a lot. The worst thing about poverty is not having enough mo