Yves here. Hoo boy, if future civilizations deign to study our attempt to make one, that sort of thing, an exercise in radical subjectivism. would probably be considered degenerate or deranged. This school of thought honors cargo cults and la la land.
By Peter Dorman, professor of economics at Evergreen State College. Originally posted on Econospeak
Let’s quickly jump to the top or bottom part of this review: Escape from Model Land: How mathematical models can lead us astray and what we can do about it by Erica Thompson is a poorly written and essentially meaningless rumination on mathematical modeling, and you would do well to ignore it.
Now that that’s done, we can move on to the interesting aspect of this book, its adaptation of the radical subjectivism fashionable for the world of modeling and empirical analysis. The framework I’m referring to looks like this: each of us exists in our own bubble, a product of our experiences and perspectives. Our thoughts express this subjective world, and they are true in relation to it but false beyond its borders. This means that no one has the right to speak or criticize anyone. In some versions, bubbles can be shared between people with the same set of identities, but, as before, not between them. In some unspecified way, we will be happy and productive if we embrace the diversity of our immeasurable worlds and their corresponding truths. Oppression occurs when certain privileged people think their bubbles are universal, the doctrine of false objectivity. We need to be re-educated out of such delusion.
This is of course a cartoon version, but I think it expresses the heart of the cognitive bubble framework. Its adherents think it to be very radical and liberating, and obviously correct. I won’t dwell on the obvious contradiction between the goalless bubble hypothesis and the assertion that the world of cognitive bubbles is the one we all live in. The only other point I will make is that, true to their belief that each cognitive world is impervious to criticism from another, adherents never acknowledge, and I mean never, let alone tackle serious criticism of their view of the world. Instead, they argue on authority: Author X, who is much admired by people like us, says this, and so we can use this idea as a basis for further analysis. “Arguing” in this context tends to take the form of an exemplary analogy: it’s a good way to think about the subject at hand, because something like this works in a situation that is analogous to it in some way. Argumentation by analogy fits into a subjectivist framework, since its salience derives from aha-ness, not from the type of reasoning or empirical evidence that depends on objective criteria.
How then can this framework be extended to the world of information sciences and mathematical modelling? Thompson’s idea is that each model can be thought of as existing in its own cognitive bubble, made up of the assumptions that structure it and the purposes it is supposed to serve. Each model is true in its own bubble, but we need to step out of them, into the world of social and cognitive diversity, to see their limitations and escape their claims to any larger truth or objectivity. And that’s sort of all. Although (as you can see) Thompson hasn’t convinced me of all this, I think there is a chance that her book will be a success in itself: future writers of radical subjectivist persuasion might cite her as why we should all think of models this way.
My own view is probably clear from the way I describe hers, but for completeness, here’s her own comic book version: There really are better and worse models, based on criteria that apply across different social and intellectual divides. Our self-knowledge is imperfect and others often understand things we don’t see about ourselves. We benefit from their criticism. They can also represent us, sometimes better and sometimes worse than we would represent ourselves. Arguments that escape engagement with a counterargument are usually weak and unreliable. Arguments based on reasoning and evidence are better than those based on any version of grokking, and these are the criteria we will need to use if we really want positive social change. What we share with each other, cognitively and otherwise, is not a matter of ex cathedra generalizations; it is something we discover by interacting with others, or better, something we can create by building on what already connects us.
