#scientisms

[1000rh]

…psychiatry assumes that society does not cause distress in biologically normal people, who are considered biologically normal at least in part because they are economically productive. This assumption permits the conclusion that if a person is distressed to the point of unproductivity, it is because that person—not society—is abnormal. Thus, psychiatry’s commitment to biological essentialism not only masks the role of the constructed sociopolitical environment in creating distress but depoliticizes it by characterizing that allegedly irrational distress as induced by biological abnormality.

– Kiera Lyons, “The Neurodiversity Paradigm and Abolition of Psychiatric Incarceration” (2023)

[awakenedsalamander]

So I’ve been wanting to write about this for a long time (my friends can probably attest to the fact I will talk about it unprompted) but I can’t find it way to do so concisely. Here’s my best try.

Is Mage: The Ascension (in its presentation of the Technocracy in specific) anti-science?

I don’t think so, not anymore. But I want to explain why. By the way, I have to imagine that this won’t be all that accessible if you don’t have much knowledge of Mage, but you’re free to stick around if you want to.

So, here’s the thing— the Technocratic Union is pretty much a stand-in for the advancement of the scientific method, “the Enlightenment,” all that. The whole point in the first edition of Ascension is that the Union is science, the science that dispelled notions of magic, and that this is a Bad Thing. They are oppressive, heartless, and cold. The villains, plain and simple.

In later editions, this gets softened, partly due to the notion of “Science is a conspiracy the elite uses to rule the world and keep you down” becoming less fun and more toxic as it gained more sincere believers, and partly because fans really liked the Technocracy.

I think the common read is that Ascension then took the direction of the Technocracy being anti-villains— the Union has noble goals, and many of its members are sincerely brave and compassionate, but ultimately it is too extreme, too callous. It has to be stopped.

This is, to be fair, an improvement over “science is evil,” but “science is too dangerous,” is still not great. And for a long time, this was my view on Mage: The Ascension. Fun ideas, maybe, but the core conflict of the game was just too reckless a portrayal of what seemed to me like a mirror of real-world conspiracist ideology.

And to some extent, I still think that. Especially in the early editions, this is a very fair critique. That said, the game still spoke to me as I looked into it, and for the longest time I wasn’t quite sure why. A piece of it was my own opening up to the notion of our subjective viewpoints affecting our reality— something that deserves its own rambling essay— but a related part of it was me realizing that there was something about the Technocracy that rung true to me, despite my misgivings. And I think I figured it out.

See, the Technocracy isn’t a stand-in for the scientific method, but for scientism.

If you’ve not heard the term, “scientism” is a controversial (we’ll get into why a bit later) pejorative term for the belief/perspective that science, as a body, composes essentially all useful and/or reliable knowledge about the world.

Notably, those who critique scientism rarely hold the view that scientific knowledge is bad or even inaccurate, just that it is an incomplete model of reality. This is not an anti-science position, but a skepticism towards the trust people place in its ability to solve every mystery. Vaccines, for example, are great! No one can reasonably dispute the benefits and efficacy of vaccination. When it comes to medicine, the scientific method has done incalculable good— the lives saved by vaccination alone are countless.

To be against scientism, then, is not to argue that medical science is a failure, or overrated— but to point out that there is more to life than being healthy. Everyone should be glad we have learned so much about treating illness and alleviating suffering. But what of having a sense of purpose? What about love and compassion and justice? What about satisfaction, having gone through a life worth living?

Again, none of that is to say that science or the scientific community is the problem. But if you take the Technocracy as an example of scientism gone to an extreme, one in which things like kindness and equity must be left behind in favor of only the virtue of material knowledge, I think Mage: The Ascension starts to really work.

(I originally intended to write a MUCH longer piece including references to the military-industrial complex, the rise of automation and AI, as well as the increasingly algorithmic nature of culture but this is so long already. And yet I worry I said essentially nothing. C’est la vie.)

[adamzki]

[noosphe-re]

Is Natural Science finally committed to materialism? There is no doubt that the theories of science constitute trustworthy knowledge, because they are verifiable and enable us to predict and control the events of Nature. But we must not forget that what is called science is not a single systematic view of Reality. It is a mass of sectional views of Reality - fragments of a total experience which do not seem to fit together. Natural Science deals with matter, with life, and with mind; but the moment you ask the question how matter, life, and mind are mutually related, you begin to see the sectional character of the various sciences that deal with them and the inability of these sciences, taken singly, to furnish a complete answer to your question. In fact, the various natural sciences are like so many vultures falling on the dead body of Nature, and each running away with a piece of its flesh. Nature as the subject of science is a highly artificial affair, and this artificiality is the result of that selective process to which science must subject her in the interests of precision. The moment you put the subject of science in the total of human experience it begins to disclose a different character.

Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

[airbrickwall]

[pratchettquotes]

As far as Polly could tell, Igors believed that the body was nothing more than a complicated kind of clothing. Oddly enough, that's what Nugganites thought, too.

Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment

[apenitentialprayer]

When Materialist Soviets Just Didn't Get It

Scientific atheists believed that their technological and scientific successes would obviously disprove the validity of religion because the two are fundamentally in opposition. Official Soviet ideology stated that "religion exists where knowledge is lacking, religion is opposed to science." […] Scientific atheists viewed any technology as evidence of atheism because it demonstrated that humans could work "miracles" that were not performed by God. At the very first attempts to industrialize the newly created Soviet Union, scientific atheists seized on the introduction of new technologies as a source for their anti-religious propaganda. For example, farming technology became a means to convince rural residences of their outdated reliance on religious concepts. An anti-religious pamphlet printed in the first Five Year Plan period was entitled "Prayers or Tractor" and a widespread poster crudely elaborated on the alleged contradiction between "cross and tractor." The alternative, "religion or tractor" with which the communists operated, never existed in the minds of the people for who this propaganda was intended. The illusions about "atheist tractor" were therefore soon shattered, especially when peasants affixed crosses to them and when priests celebrated thanksgiving services at their arrival in villages. As this instance demonstrates, scientific atheists simply did not understand the nature of religious belief. The fact that a tractor exists does not translate into a disproof of God and, ironically, Kolarz points out that farmers often interpreted these agricultural advancements as gifts from God. Similarly, scientific atheists thought that atheism was empirically proven because God remained unseen or because certain religious stories were scientifically inconceivable. Following World War II, Soviet officials started a campaign to produce natural-scientific arguments against belief in God. For instance, Soviet scientists placed holy water under a microscope to prove that it has no special properties and [… i]n one of the most famous examples, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin proclaimed upon his return from the very first space flight in history he did not see God in space. Aeronautical technology was often presented as proof of atheism and Soviet leaders viewed every flight as an "assault on heaven." In the Russian language, as in many others, there is only one expression for both "heaven" and "sky" and "assault on heaven" therefore meant both the technical conquest of the air and the conquest of space where God was supposed to live . . . However, before the atheist propaganda was able to exploit the "conquest of the stratosphere" it suffered a tremendous setback when the stratosphere plane "SSSR" crashed after having reached the height of 22 kilometers. As the communists considered these flights to be a challenge to religion . . . the more simple minded believers considered the accident and death of all three pilots as an act of divine punishment. [...] As there examples illustrate, scientific atheists did not recognize the nonempirical character of religious concepts and stories. In most cases, atheist proselytizers had little or no knowledge of actual religious doctrine. In fact, a visitor to the Soviet Union in the 1960s reported that "no atheist ringleader has ever dared to allow those under him to study the Bible, even for the purpose of spying out the enemy's territory in order to more easily conquer it." Under these conditions, atheist recruiters were largely ignorant of the nonempirical tenets of religious belief, which led them to only attack the supernatural using empirical arguments.

- Paul Froese ("Forced Secularization in Soviet Russia: Why an Atheistic Monopoly Failed")

[areadersquoteslibrary]

"If we fail to anticipate the unforeseen, or expect the unexpected in a universe of infinite possibilities, we may find ourselves at the mercy of anyone or anything that cannot be programmed, categorized, and easily referenced."

- Fox Mulder, 'The X-Files: Fight The Future'

[shrinkrants]

In 2017, a young Black woman of Togolese descent, TG, visited the emergency department due to distress and panic attacks related to previous sexual assaults. She was admitted to an inpatient psychiatric unit and diagnosed with psychosis. Upon discharge, she was prescribed perphenazine, a first-generation antipsychotic with greater side effect risks. Despite her symptoms being primarily related to mood and trauma, her dosage was increased by subsequent providers. In 2021, a team at Yale Department of Psychiatry determined that she had been misdiagnosed with schizophrenia due to racial bias. After a thorough review of her medical records and social history, TG received a re-diagnosis of major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Adjusting her medication led to a significant improvement in her depression, anxiety, and panic attacks.

In an article published in Harvard Review of Psychiatry, physicians at the Yale Department of Psychiatry present the case of TG to explore the mechanisms behind what they call “psychiatry’s longest-standing inequities born of real-time clinician racial bias” and its iatrogenic harm to patients who come to seek their help for other mood or trauma-related disorders. They write:

“For TG, she had consistently been telling providers about her sexual trauma for years only to have ED and outpatient providers doubt her report of abuse as a possible ‘delusion.’ During her second ED encounter in August 2018, documentation depicts her testimony using appallingly insensitive language, including ‘increasingly bizarre statements about supposed rape.’” Here, we can see how “biased perceptions of dishonesty intersect with bias against believing sexual assault survivors.”

[philosophybits]

Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book

[stimpunks]

Instead of metrics, fixate on joy to motivate learning.

Instead of metric fixation, joy fixation. Learning goes where intrinsic motivation leads. Measurement kills curiosity, joy, and intrinsic motivation. Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. Step 1 of motivating learning: Restore curiosity and joy. Stop measuring everything. What if all the reductionist scientism of “the science of” frameworks were…

[1000rh]

This is how misogyny works: take a hierarchy, any hierarchy, and use it to derogate a girl or woman. We value intelligence: so call her stupid, inane, clueless. We value rationality: so call her crazy and hysterical. We value maturity: so call her childish and irresponsible. We value morality: so call her a bad person. We value thinness: so call her fat and, implicitly or explicitly, ugly. We value sexual attractiveness: so make her out to be the kind of person whom no one could ever want. This despite the fact that not only can fat people be found sexually attractive, it is a common sexual preference, at least if porn consumption is any indication. And this jibes with the point that, as we saw earlier, it’s not that we downrank fat bodies because we inherently dislike them. Rather, we dislike them because they are often downranked nowadays, following the advent of the fatphobic beauty hierarchies steeped in anti-Black racism.

– Kate Manne, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (2024)

[barschter000]

t4t benbaro but transmasc Albert and transfem Barok

[ghostsandgod]

Beware lest any man cheat you by philosophy and vain deceit, according to the tradition of men, and not according to Christ.

-Coloss. ii. 8

[airbrickwall]

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[raisongardee]

“Le caractère analytique de la science moderne se traduit par la multiplication sans cesse croissante des "spécialités", dont Auguste Comte lui-même n’a pu s’empêcher de dénoncer les dangers ; cette "spécialisation", si vantée de certains sociologues sous le nom de "division du travail", est à coup sûr le meilleur moyen d’acquérir cette "myopie intellectuelle" qui semble faire partie des qualifications requises du parfait "scientiste", et sans laquelle, d’ailleurs, le "scientisme" même n’aurait guère de prise. Aussi les "spécialistes", dès qu’on les sort de leur domaine, font-ils généralement preuve d’une incroyable naïveté ; rien n’est plus facile que de leur en imposer […]”

René Guénon, Orient et Occident, 1924.