"Useless" natural science

[MarxSchmarx]

Some science has eminently practical applications - medicine, petroleum geology, civil engineering, agriculture - and other sciences are, well, frankly, useless. Or, I should say, what has been useful about them has already been extracted

Take, for example, historical linguistics. It's pretty cool that the indigenous languages of the Rocky mountains are more closely related to some Siberian language than either are to any neighboring languages. And it was probably helpful in terms of instigating modern linguistics as a discipline. Or the debate about why the tyrannosaurus has such small limbs. Now of course these are no less inconsequential, really, than whether a particular person's car starts in the morning, so for that particular person, pursuing the answer to the question that motivates them (an esoteric problem of number theory or "why won't my truck start?") is just fine, but should society care? Why should we care whether Pluto is or is not a planet?

And I think a greater question is what should be the fate of such natural sciences after capitalism ends? Should they be the work of committed amateurs? Or will there still be a world where a professor number theory is paid just as much if not more than a professor of computer science?

[Fawkes]

Provided there is an interest in and desire for more knowledge on a given topic, I don't see why researchers, historians, etc., of seemingly "useless" sciences would not be regarded as possessing just as legitimate a profession as a mechanical engineer designing car engines. Just because something may not be immediately applicable to how our infrastructure is maintained and expanded doesn't mean it should be regarded as insignificant.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Some science has eminently practical applications - medicine, petroleum geology, civil engineering, agriculture - and other sciences are, well, frankly, useless. Or, I should say, what has been useful about them has already been extracted

Take, for example ... the debate about why the tyrannosaurus has such small limbs.

I'd say questions about evolution are fairly important, wouldn't you? The linguistics question doesn't personally interest me, but that doesn't mean it does not have some wider application that I am ignorant of.

Now of course these are no less inconsequential, really, than whether a particular person's car starts in the morning,

On what basis do you make this judgement?

so for that particular person, pursuing the answer to the question that motivates them (an esoteric problem of number theory or "why won't my truck start?") is just fine, but should society care? Why should we care whether Pluto is or is not a planet?

Pluto is still and has always been a planet. What has been under examination is the kind of planetary body that it represents. The IAU has determined that Pluto represents a class of objects known as dwarf planets. It's only the media that likes to pretend that planethood is still some kind of binary condition.

And I think a greater question is what should be the fate of such natural sciences after capitalism ends? Should they be the work of committed amateurs? Or will there still be a world where a professor number theory is paid just as much if not more than a professor of computer science?

I think the natural sciences are tremendously more powerful and useful than the social "sciences", which more often than not simply operate as vehicles for a particular individual's ideology and/or worldview.

[Ele'ill]

Certain fields will likely go into a maintenance or holding status in regards to practice but I don't see any reason that research in those fields should stop- in fact- I think it would grow after capitalism ends.

In regards to sciences deemed not applicable- If we're going to make technological jumps after capitalism falls we're going to need to know a lot more about the world our technology operates in. A conclusion to the Tyrannosaurus Rex limb debate might be the key to harvesting or farming algae from another planet's lakes. (Yeah I know, it's late and you get the general idea)

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

And I think a greater question is what should be the fate of such natural sciences after capitalism ends? Should they be the work of committed amateurs? Or will there still be a world where a professor number theory is paid just as much if not more than a professor of computer science?

The kind of society we need to build going forward requires a break down between the contradiction between mental and manual labor, doers and thinkers, average joes and esteemed specialists, etc.

There's no reason people can't pursue whatever fields of knowledge they are interested in, applying it where possible to human reality, and still contribute socially necessary labor in other fields. In fact, that's exactly the sort of thing that will be needed.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

The kind of society we need to build going forward requires a break down between the contradiction between mental and manual labor, doers and thinkers, average joes and esteemed specialists, etc.

I don't think the fact that there exists different kinds of work indicates any kind of "contradiction" is going on. I certainly don't see the contradiction in not wanting to earn a living breaking rocks with my scrawny frame.

There's no reason people can't pursue whatever fields of knowledge they are interested in, applying it where possible to human reality, and still contribute socially necessary labor in other fields. In fact, that's exactly the sort of thing that will be needed.

Sure, but it doesn't follow that necessarily entails the end of specialisation. There are certain jobs that shouldn't be done by amateurs. Like surgery.

[MarxSchmarx]

Provided there is an interest in and desire for more knowledge on a given topic, I don't see why researchers, historians, etc., of seemingly "useless" sciences would not be regarded as possessing just as legitimate a profession as a mechanical engineer designing car engines. Just because something may not be immediately applicable to how our infrastructure is maintained and expanded doesn't mean it should be regarded as insignificant.

Right, but how do we justify investing limited resources in them, especially in a planned economy? So I think there will be for example, great interest in designing car engines, and much social support for investing more in this. I think one can make a great case for investing heavily in educating cutting edge mechanical engineers, but investing as heavily in educating cutting edge paleontologists just doesn't seem to be in society's interest.

Take, for example ... the debate about why the tyrannosaurus has such small limbs.

I'd say questions about evolution are fairly important, wouldn't you?

As a generality of course, but then why not study adaptations like this with fruit flies, bacteria, even humans, for example?

The linguistics question doesn't personally interest me, but that doesn't mean it does not have some wider application that I am ignorant of.

Most grant applications in these kinds of areas currently require a statement on how the work could potentially be socially useful. I've read quite a few of these, and they are almost always boiler plates about training the next generation of scientists,some rather unpersuasive application that could be studied more directly (like the evolution of programming languages, for example). This is in contrast to grant applications in eminently applied scientific fields. There doesn't seem to be much thought put into justifying their social utility (after all the projects are evaluated by other people in the field), so I was curious if people here had a better take.

As an aside, I think the failure of some really bright people to make a compelling case for their field is part of why such fields are really considered a luxury for example in research institutes in developing countries and increasingly under the ax in developed countries.

Now of course these are no less inconsequential, really, than whether a particular person's car starts in the morning,

On what basis do you make this judgement?

What I meant was that a handful of people might find them personally deeply important, but that seems to be as far as their application goes.

The kind of society we need to build going forward requires a break down between the contradiction between mental and manual labor, doers and thinkers, average joes and esteemed specialists, etc.

There's no reason people can't pursue whatever fields of knowledge they are interested in, applying it where possible to human reality, and still contribute socially necessary labor in other fields. In fact, that's exactly the sort of thing that will be needed.

Actually, in general I agree - however, I think the issue is that let's say X hours of the day are spent pursuing a field of knowledge. If lots of people spent their days chasing fossils, debating beetle taxonomy or working on number theory proofs, instead of developing better car engines or working to cure diseases, then I don't think we'd be much better off, materially at least, as if those people spent their time counting gravel in their drive way or watching movies. So how do we demarcate between research "done for society" and research "done for one's pleasure"? Capitalism I think has done a horrible job at this - stamp collecting for example is considered something that nobody should get paid anything for, but there are professional numismatists employed at several museums and universities.

[bcbm]

not sure how a greater understanding of the world we live in is ever "useless"

Sure, but it doesn't follow that necessarily entails the end of specialisation. There are certain jobs that shouldn't be done by amateurs. Like surgery.

i think it will entail the end of specialization as we know it

[black magick hustla]

knowledge about our relationship to the world and its universe are of course not useless. people buy books about it and people love watching documentaries, etcetera. its like saying entertainment is "useless". what is use anyway? indeed, a world were we just dedicated ourselves to building dams and growing food would be hella boring.


anyway universties as we know it are a failure of the imagination and will of a society that is chained to its own stratification and division of labor. "research" as we know it, as well as specialized schools as we know them will be abolished.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

As a generality of course, but then why not study adaptations like this with fruit flies, bacteria, even humans, for example?

Because only one of those examples is even a vertebrate, and not exactly a closely related one at that. Besides, if we studied anything else we wouldn't be studying the Tyrannosaurus.

Most grant applications in these kinds of areas currently require a statement on how the work could potentially be socially useful. I've read quite a few of these, and they are almost always boiler plates about training the next generation of scientists,some rather unpersuasive application that could be studied more directly (like the evolution of programming languages, for example). This is in contrast to grant applications in eminently applied scientific fields. There doesn't seem to be much thought put into justifying their social utility (after all the projects are evaluated by other people in the field), so I was curious if people here had a better take.

As an aside, I think the failure of some really bright people to make a compelling case for their field is part of why such fields are really considered a luxury for example in research institutes in developing countries and increasingly under the ax in developed countries.

I think that has more to do limited funding in the first instance and the economic crisis in the other. I also think you're confusing the actual social usefulness of a field with the ease with which a particular field's usefulness can be put across in a grant application - my impression is that it's easier to spout cliches than it is to actually justify work, which tells me the problem is not so much with the fields but with how science is funded.

What I meant was that a handful of people might find them personally deeply important, but that seems to be as far as their application goes.

I'm not so sure. After all, from where do "applied" fields draw their knowledge from? Research, of course. Research that at the time may not appear immediately useful.

i think it will entail the end of specialization as we know it

The qualification "as we know it" contains an unknown number of unknowns - in practical terms, what you're saying is that specialisation will ultimately still exist in some form. Indeed, if we're going to remain a technological species, it must exist.

research" as we know it, as well as specialized schools as we know them will be abolished.

To be replaced with what? What's the beef with specialisation anyway?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

I don't think the fact that there exists different kinds of work indicates any kind of "contradiction" is going on. I certainly don't see the contradiction in not wanting to earn a living breaking rocks with my scrawny frame.

So folks who are physically larger than you will have to do physical labor but those who are your size or smaller won't? Guys who are tall and more muscular by genetic accident are doomed to a life of "banging away on rocks" while scrawny guys get to spend their lives in libraries? I don't think that's a realistic basis for any kind of system.

The kind of society we want to build requires a fair division of socially necessary labor, and a divvying up of tasks that are least liked especially.

Not to mention that there will be automation to the highest extent possible, especially in undesirable and unsafe tasks.

Sure, but it doesn't follow that necessarily entails the end of specialisation. There are certain jobs that shouldn't be done by amateurs. Like surgery.

So, people who do surgery shouldn't have to do anything else, ever? Again, I don't think that's a rational basis for the kind of society we're aiming to construct.

One can learn the skills needed to do surgery while still contribution toward the total amount of socially necessary labor elsewhere. When training finishes and they begin doing surgery on a regular basis, they can still do other things when not in the operating room or pursuing other interests. Surgery on Monday, fishing on Tuesday, teaching on Wednesday, delivering mail on Thursday. Why not?

"Whilst the division of labour raises the productive power of labour and increases the wealth and refinement of society, it impoverishes the worker and reduces him to a machine... With this division of labour on the one hand and the accumulation of capital on the other, the worker becomes ever more exclusively dependent on labour, and on a particular, very one-sided, machine-like labour at that..." - Marx

What's the beef with specialisation anyway?

Specialization is for insects.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

So folks who are physically larger than you will have to do physical labor but those who are your size or smaller won't? Guys who are tall and more muscular by genetic accident are doomed to a life of "banging away on rocks" while scrawny guys get to spend their lives in libraries? I don't think that's a realistic basis for any kind of system.

You are making unwarranted assumptions. Just because I think I'm particularly unsuited to hard physical labour does not mean I think fitter people should bear the burdens of society alone, so to speak.

The kind of society we want to build requires a fair division of socially necessary labor, and a divvying up of tasks that are least liked especially.

Sure, but don't expect people with certain body types to do much heavy lifting. They can make other contributions, doing jobs that are dangerous but not necessarily physically exhausting. I myself would be happy to work as a technician or something in a uranium mine if that's what it takes to keep the power on. I like having electricity. Or perhaps, since I'm a big fan of science and modern medicine, I could volunteer to be a test subject.

Not to mention that there will be automation to the highest extent possible, especially in undesirable and unsafe tasks.

Of course.

So, people who do surgery shouldn't have to do anything else, ever? Again, I don't think that's a rational basis for the kind of society we're aiming to construct.

It's not a matter of "should", as if I think people's career choices are to be dictated from up high - rather it's a matter of being a "jack of all trades, master of none", or taking the time to acquire a deep understanding, extensive knowledge and years of experience working in a particular field.

One can learn the skills needed to do surgery while still contribution toward the total amount of socially necessary labor elsewhere. When training finishes and they begin doing surgery on a regular basis, they can still do other things when not in the operating room or pursuing other interests. Surgery on Monday, fishing on Tuesday, teaching on Wednesday, delivering mail on Thursday. Why not?

Depends whether that schedule you suggest is something chosen by the individual concerned or is something mandated by some authority. Delivering mail is something any able-bodied literate person can do, but what about teaching? It's not something you can really make someone do if they have no interest in it - they'll just go through the motions and be a mediocre-to-crap teacher.

"Whilst the division of labour raises the productive power of labour and increases the wealth and refinement of society, it impoverishes the worker and reduces him to a machine... With this division of labour on the one hand and the accumulation of capital on the other, the worker becomes ever more exclusively dependent on labour, and on a particular, very one-sided, machine-like labour at that..." - Marx

Marx was writing at a time when automation was nowhere near as sophisticated as it is today, and factories required large numbers of people who were required to do relatively simple tasks, for hours on end, under terrible conditions, for very little pay.

My understanding is that as low-skill manufacturing jobs faded away with increasing automation, those jobs were replaced with more technical and maintenance jobs for the lucky (or not, depending on your view) few, and service sector and white collar jobs for the rest, and even then the white collar jobs were eroded away by evolving technology and later, paroxysms of downsizing.

I certainly don't think the growth of the service sector represents anything worthwhile - it seems mainly to be the kind of work that servants used to do, but with even less respect and lower pay. In the developed world at least, the drudge of the factory job has been replaced with the daily humiliation of the McJob.

In any case, the problem isn't that labour is specialised, the problem is that it is alienated, with the vast majority of low-ranking workers having little control or personal investment in their work. They're treated like cogs in a machine or walking, talking, artificially happy advertisements for their paymasters. Workers aren't humans, they "human resources".

Specialization is for insects.

Insects are the most successful multicellular organisms on the planet. We would do well to get off our pedestal and, to some extent at least, learn from their example.

[bcbm]

Depends whether that schedule you suggest is something chosen by the individual concerned or is something mandated by some authority.

um pretty sure the entire point was that we'd be freed from things like "job" and "career" and be able to freely choose our activities... not sure how you could interpret anything nhia was saying as requiring mandate from an authority

Insects are the most successful multicellular organisms on the planet. We would do well to get off our pedestal and, to some extent at least, learn from their example.

i think success would mean something wildly different for us than it does for insects

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Alienation is directly tied in with specialization and the division of labor. It's a fundamental part of the thing.

"Increasing the specialization may also lead to workers with poorer overall skills and a lack of enthusiasm for their work. This viewpoint was extended and refined by Karl Marx. He described the process as alienation; workers become more and more specialized and work repetitious which eventually leads to complete alienation. Marx wrote that 'with this division of labour', the worker is 'depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine'. He believed that the fullness of production is essential to human liberation and accepted the idea of a strict division of labour only as a temporary necessary evil.

"Marx's most important theoretical contribution is his sharp distinction between the social division and the technical or economic division of labour. That is, some forms of labour co-operation are due purely to technical necessity, but others are purely a result of a social control function related to a class and status hierarchy. If these two divisions are conflated, it might appear as though the existing division of labour is technically inevitable and immutable, rather than (in good part) socially constructed and influenced by power relationships.

"It may be, for example, that it is technically necessary that both pleasant and unpleasant jobs must be done by a group of people. But from that fact alone, it does not follow that any particular person must do any particular (pleasant or unpleasant) job. If particular people get to do the unpleasant jobs and others the pleasant jobs, this cannot be explained by technical necessity; it is a socially made decision, which could be made using a variety of different criteria. The tasks could be rotated, or a person could be assigned to a task permanently, and so on.

"Marx also suggests that the capitalist division of labour will evolve over time such that the maximum amount of labour is productive labour, where productive labour is defined as labour which creates surplus value.

"In Marx's imagined communist society, the division of labour is transcended, meaning that balanced human development occurs where people fully express their nature in the variety of creative work that they do." - Wikipedia: Division of labour - Karl Marx

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Alienation is directly tied in with specialization and the division of labor. It's a fundamental part of the thing.

"Increasing the specialization may also lead to workers with poorer overall skills and a lack of enthusiasm for their work. This viewpoint was extended and refined by Karl Marx. He described the process as alienation; workers become more and more specialized and work repetitious which eventually leads to complete alienation. Marx wrote that 'with this division of labour', the worker is 'depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine'. He believed that the fullness of production is essential to human liberation and accepted the idea of a strict division of labour only as a temporary necessary evil.

As the bolded sections indicate, when Marx spoke of specialisation, he was speaking of it in terms of workers becoming dehumanised cogs in a larger profit-making machine, rather than as them being a valued team member with specific skills and experience to bring to a project.

"Marx's most important theoretical contribution is his sharp distinction between the social division and the technical or economic division of labour. That is, some forms of labour co-operation are due purely to technical necessity, but others are purely a result of a social control function related to a class and status hierarchy. If these two divisions are conflated, it might appear as though the existing division of labour is technically inevitable and immutable, rather than (in good part) socially constructed and influenced by power relationships.

As a general statement, I find nothing wrong with this. But that's the problem - it's vague and platitudinous.

"It may be, for example, that it is technically necessary that both pleasant and unpleasant jobs must be done by a group of people. But from that fact alone, it does not follow that any particular person must do any particular (pleasant or unpleasant) job. If particular people get to do the unpleasant jobs and others the pleasant jobs, this cannot be explained by technical necessity; it is a socially made decision, which could be made using a variety of different criteria. The tasks could be rotated, or a person could be assigned to a task permanently, and so on.

As a more specific example, I would imagine that "cleaner" would no longer exist as a "career"... the people who use the facilities being responsible for keeping it clean and tidy, or some other more equitable arrangement.

But it is not obvious to me how this leads to people no longer specialising in their chosen work - if I were to become an aircraft engineer, I would most likely be able to devote a day or two in the week to say, cleaning duty, but being an oncologist, pizza chef and freighter captain at the same time would be a bit much - there are only so many days in a week!

"In Marx's imagined communist society, the division of labour is transcended, meaning that balanced human development occurs where people fully express their nature in the variety of creative work that they do."

No doubt people would be free to try their hand at other things, and with far greater available leisure time they'd most likely make a good swing of it. But since one's overall time is limited, people would have to make a choice between being OK at a number of fields or being excellent at one or two. Personally I would rather be excellent, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

[Tavarisch_Mike]

I think that things like medicine, searching for sustainable energy sources will always be prioritated and as long as thats the case i dont see why we cant study other things. Besides when youre making a research about parts of our history where we dont have too much oh written sources lingvistics makes up a good complement to archeological evidences and genetics, meaning that sometimes we must see the whole picture. Now if you want to see some really useless natural sience, i heard a couple of years ago that they where making a studdy in the differences on how men an women play air guitar. Thats useless.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Priorities are also a big part of the discussion. The profit motive isn't conductive to the satisfaction of human wants and needs.

"There is more money put into baldness drugs than into malaria. Now, baldness is a terrible thing and rich men are afflicted. That is why that priority has been set." - Bill Gates

[Quail]

Some science has eminently practical applications - medicine, petroleum geology, civil engineering, agriculture - and other sciences are, well, frankly, useless. Or, I should say, what has been useful about them has already been extracted

Take, for example, historical linguistics. It's pretty cool that the indigenous languages of the Rocky mountains are more closely related to some Siberian language than either are to any neighboring languages. And it was probably helpful in terms of instigating modern linguistics as a discipline. Or the debate about why the tyrannosaurus has such small limbs. Now of course these are no less inconsequential, really, than whether a particular person's car starts in the morning, so for that particular person, pursuing the answer to the question that motivates them (an esoteric problem of number theory or "why won't my truck start?") is just fine, but should society care? Why should we care whether Pluto is or is not a planet?

And I think a greater question is what should be the fate of such natural sciences after capitalism ends? Should they be the work of committed amateurs? Or will there still be a world where a professor number theory is paid just as much if not more than a professor of computer science?

Number theory is probably a bad example of something that is "useless" because the applications of number theory might not be immediately obvious, but it does have a lot of applications and I don't think you can definitively say that we won't find any more applications for it in future.

I don't think that any study of natural sciences is useless. As I said above about number theory, just because the possible applications of something don't immediately jump out at you, it doesn't mean that there aren't any. I can't think of any disadvantage to having more knowledge.

It's also worth thinking about the nature of "work" after capitalism ends. People will have the opportunity to work in whatever field interests them the most, and whatever gives them fulfillment. If researching number theory gives someone fulfillment, why shouldn't they be able to do it?

[MarxSchmarx]

Number theory is probably a bad example of something that is "useless" because the applications of number theory might not be immediately obvious, but it does have a lot of applications and I don't think you can definitively say that we won't find any more applications for it in future.

Number theory is canonically regarded as among the least applicable branches of maths (e.g., Cohn JHSIAM 4(3) sept. 1956 "Some applied number theory, http://www2.stetson.edu/~mhale/numthy/index.htm) - by both supporters and detractors of this idea alike. There have been some potentially interesting results as applied to cryptography, but increasingly these are studied by "full time" cryptographers.

Originally Posted by MarxSchmarx
As a generality of course, but then why not study adaptations like this with fruit flies, bacteria, even humans, for example?

Because only one of those examples is even a vertebrate, and not exactly a closely related one at that. Besides, if we studied anything else we wouldn't be studying the Tyrannosaurus.

We have learned far more about evolution, even of vertebrates, studying fruit flies and bacteria (especially pathogenic ones) than we have studying tyrannosaurus. The conceptual merit of studying tyrannosaurus for tyrannosaurus's case is rather weak - it simply doesn't explain why we should invest additional resources in t-rex research when those resources could be used to study agricultural or medical pathogens.

NHiA I think puts his finger on it - just what kind of science are we going to prioritize, and how do we plan on doing it? It's not a shortage of citizen-scientists and their time that's the issue, but of other social resources - a hedron collider or a space station for example don't come free, nor does storage and maintenance for tyrannosaurus bones. Are applied sciences with immediate application going to get the lion's share? 70-30? 90-10?

I get that people will have a lot more free time and more support than they currently have to invest in their resources. But scarcity will remain a fact of life for a very, very long time, and science needs social support to function. Of course things like studying tyrannosaurus shouldn't be banned. And they have the potential to lead to insights. But right now, a lot of the breakthroughs in these fields (like historical linguistics or evolutionary biology) are coming from breakthroughs in applied sciences (informatics and dna sequencing, respectively), rather than the other way around. And if insights are gained by directly studying the field (e.g., by supporting cryptographic rather than other number-theoretic research),it's a very convoluted argument that says we should prioritize these less applied (I guess "purer") sciences over research that gives immediate results.

[Fawkes]

Right, but how do we justify investing limited resources in them, especially in a planned economy? So I think there will be for example, great interest in designing car engines, and much social support for investing more in this. I think one can make a great case for investing heavily in educating cutting edge mechanical engineers, but investing as heavily in educating cutting edge paleontologists just doesn't seem to be in society's interest.

If the resources really are that finite, more will be invested in things like mechanical engineering if that is what the community wishes. These things will all be dictated by the needs and desires of a given population. If people have a desire for knowledge and research in a particular field more so than another, resources will be allocated accordingly.