The One Great Thing (Pt. II)

 

 

Man is born egotistical, a result of the conditioning of nature. Nature fills us with instincts; it is education that fills us with virtues.

~Fidel Castro

Empirical and non-empirical

 

A young scientist in training

It's far too easy to get bogged down in endless debate if you miss the following important distinction: empirical and non-empirical claims. So let's learn this important distinction today. Put simply, an empirical claim is one that makes a statement about the world; these kinds of claims are typically verified either through the senses (i.e., you just check for yourself) or through systematic observation/experimentation (i.e., through the process of science). Empirical claims usually take the form of a descriptive sentence, like "Misha is over six feet tall"—a statement that can either be true or false, depending on how tall Misha actually is. If you think about it, you'll realize that it's really easy to be wrong about a statement like "Misha is over six feet tall." Maybe you just didn't assess Misha's height very well when you met her. In this way, this empirical claim is unlike, say, a value judgment. If you were to say "I think it's good to be over six feet tall", then you are expressing a value claim—a claim about your preferences and values. If you think about it, it's really hard to be wrong about value judgments, at least at the time you express them (see my lesson titled The Trolley (Pt. II)). How can you be wrong about whether you think being tall is a good thing?

Sometimes, though, value claims are suspiciously close to empirical claims. For example, in the sentence we just considered ("It is good to be over six feet tall"), there is a possible interpretation which can be read as something like "It is good to be over six feet tall (since you get more social benefits)". It is definitely likely true that tall people get more social benefits, such as perhaps more attention, more respect, and even higher wages. Those, as I hope you can tell, are empirical matters. If it really is the case that we are making the claim that tall people get more social benefits, we'd have to check our claim by performing a systematic investigation into the lives of tall people. You can't (or shouldn't) just make empirical claims without doing due diligence and checking to see if they're actually true.

So, value judgments about your own personal preferences are one type of non-empirical claim. There plenty others. For example, if you are to make a claim about logical consistency, then this is not commonly conceived of as an empirical matter. This is a conceptual investigation: an investigation into whether a particular concept applies to something. For example, one might wonder whether the concept of logical consistency applies to the following set containing two sentences:

  • If Aristo is home, then Blippo respects himself.
  • Either Aristo is not home or Blippo respects himself.

It's probably the case that no one would ever ask you the question of whether these sentences are logically consistent or not (unless you have the misfortune of taking my logic class). However, if someone were to ask about the consistency of these sentences, you wouldn't have to check the world or read a science journal to find out if the set of sentences is consistent or not. You simply have to consider whether it is possible for both sentences to be true at the same time. In other words, you have to check to see if the concept of consistency is applicable to this set of sentences. It's a type of investigation for sure, but it's not of the empirical variety.1

So there's empirical issues, which can be checked with your five senses or through systematic observation, and non-empirical issues, such as value judgments ("Heavy metal is the best genre of music!") and conceptual investigations (like when one checks to see if a set of sentences is consistent). Here's the important lesson: keep track of which is which! It's happened to me before that the person I was having a conversation with didn't seem to recognize that some issues can only be resolved through empirical approaches while others require something else—say, a conceptual investigation. Not keeping track of which is which will lead to the hollow enterprise of attempting to see if an empirical claim is true through conceptual approaches. (Silly philosophers!) Of course, there's also some disagreements that have no resolution. If one person prefers jazz and another prefers heavy metal and they're both claiming that their preferred genre is "the best", then it's not clear how that would be resolved definitively.

 

Do Stuff

The following mini "debates" are from Lyons and Ward (2018: 346-47). I like these prompts because they show how convoluted disagreements can be. For example, consider this deliciously confused debate:

A: I think abortion ought to be illegal, at least late-term ones.

B: Why would you think that?

A: Because there's no significant difference between an 8-month fetus, for example, and a newborn baby, and it's clearly immoral to kill a newborn baby.

 

Newborn homo sapien

What issues are arising in this debate? Well, clearly the main point of the discussion is a conceptual investigation: the interlocutors (i.e., the speakers) are discussing whether the concept of moral wrongness applies to late-term abortions. I say that this is a conceptual investigation because, as far as I know, there's no way to track moral wrongness with your five senses or with an experiment. You can't see the property of moral wrongness itself; you only recognize that the concept of moral wrongness applies to some things, like murder. You never see the moral wrongness itself, since it is (it seems) not a physical thing that can be seen(!). However, within the debate there's a comparison between an 8-month fetus and a newborn baby. To be honest, I've no idea how similar an 8-month fetus is to a newborn baby. I'm no expert in gestation. However, I do know that I could find out how similar those two are by consulting with a specialist in obstetrics and gynaecology. These specialists have spent years learning the knowledge that has been gathered by medical practitioners on pregnancy and childbirth. In other words, these specialists have amassed empirical knowledge on pregnancy and childbirth. Since Speaker A is using this analogy to fuel his argument, then it seems we must assess his evidence to see if his argument is sound. In other words, he is using an empirical claim to motivate his conceptual conclusion. Moreover, if you really want to pick some nits, Speaker A is assuming that there is a clearcut way of moving from empirical facts to conceptual conclusions. In other words, A is making the assumption that anyone who believes that there's no difference between an 8-month fetus and a newborn baby would naturally also believe that abortion is wrong. This is not as clear as A might think. So, in summary, this debate features both empirical and conceptual investigations.

So here's your assignment. Choose a mini "debate" from the list below. Then discuss what type of investigations are underway. Are they empirical? Are they conceptual? Anything else? Lastly, try to resolve these investigations. In other words, if the issue is empirical, look for the answer; if it's a conceptual investigation, try to figure out whether the concept is applicable in the given situation or not. If you can't resolve the issues, at least point out who or what might might help. For example, in my discussion above, I didn't really come to a conclusion on how similar an 8-month fetus is to a newborn baby, but I didn't point out who might be able to help. Type up your answer (which should be between 250-500 words) and submit it in Quiz 1.7+.

Here are the prompts:

  • People keep asking me, "How do you know you'll make a great president?" And I tell 'em, "I will be a great president. It's just a fact."
  • A: You can't legally say, "It would be a better world if the president were dead." That's a threat, and it's illegal to threaten the president.
    B: That's not a threat; it's a statement of fact. What do you mean by "threat"?
  • A: There's excellent scientific evidence that there's no causal connection between vaccination and autism.
    B: You don't know. You're not a scientist.

Argument Extraction

 

 

 

Teaching Submission

Plato's curriculum for the Guardians, auxiliaries, and citizens—a curriculum that now includes the myth of the metals—appears to be designed to keep each element of the kallipolis firmly in their place. The Guardians do the ruling, the auxiliaries do the enforcing, and the citizens perform their individual roles and duties. Some students have expressed their horror at the very notion of "programming" preferences into young people so that they fall in line. However, as we saw in the last lesson, some thinkers (e.g., Loewen 2007) believe that the American high school history curriculum has been doing just that. In particular, we saw that Loewen argued that history, as it is being taught, teaches students blind nationalism and mindless optimism. Here's another contentious point that he makes: the history curriculum reinforces social stratification since it is primarily composed of anti-working class, pro-boss perspectives.

 

Lies My Teacher Told Me

Ok, so what is Loewen really saying? Well, Loewen is arguing that the history curriculum teaches students to be ok with the massive wealth and income inequality seen in the United States—to not really question it. For example, Loewen (2007: 53) claims that the way the Columbus story is taught, where he suppressed his men’s near-mutiny, reinforces the stereotype “that those who direct social enterprises are more intelligent than those nearer the bottom.” Now I didn't learn the Columbus story in this way (since I went to primary school in a different country), but, per Loewen's review of the literature, young students are taught that Columbus' crew wanted to turn back. It was only due to the courage and resoluteness of Columbus that they stayed on course. Of course, this was mighty fortunate for Columbus and his crew (although not for the Native Americans), since they were able to "discover" a new continent. The way this story is told, argues Loewen, stresses that the crew should stay in their place and just obey their commander.

Here's another example. As discussed previously, Loewen (2007, chapter 1) shows that the story of Helen Keller told in history textbooks usually has a glaring omission: her radical socialism. There is typically no mention whatsoever of the political activities which occupied Keller from young adulthood until late in life. (Keller died in her 80s, by the way.) Given that history textbooks ignore the majority of her life, the way her story is told reinforces the notion that the most important thing she ever did was overcome her disabilities, not protest against her government. Again, the (implied) message is: overcoming your disabilities is good but not agitating and protesting against your government.

Loewen’s most powerful example is probably the fact that textbooks omit or regularly downplay the role of labor movements. I can attest to this. Almost all that I know about the labor movement I've learned outside of the classroom (and I went to an excellent college preparatory school). Loewen summarizes:

“[T]he most recent [labor] event mentioned in most books is the Taft-Hartley Act of sixty years ago… With such omissions, textbook authors can construe labor history as something that happened long ago, like slavery, and that, like slavery, was corrected long ago” (Loewen 2007: 205).

Again, I'm not making the case that we should teach the history of labor so that we can start a socialist movement. I can honestly say that I've never voted for the socialist parties in either of the countries in which I'm a citizen: Socialist Party (USA) and the Partido Mexicano Socialista (México). What I am saying is this: we can agree with Loewen that the history curriculum appears to have some gaps in it that seem to conveniently endorse one viewpoint over another. Plato would be proud.

And if you're still not convinced, here's some Food for thought that will outrage roughly half of you...

 

 

 

Sidebar

One related question that is instructive when discussing the empirical/non-empirical distinction is the following: Why is there such drastic income inequality? This question lends itself to a variety of potential answers. As you saw in the Food for thought, allegiance to a political party corresponds with the kind of answer you are likely to give. Let's consider one of these potential answers: Some jobs get better pay, and only some people are clever enough to go for those high-paying jobs. If you notice, this potential answer makes two claims—both of them empirical. The first states that there's only certain job-types that are associated with wealth on the level of "the one percent". The second claim states that there's a cleverness required for both recognizing these jobs and actually entering into them.

So let's attempt to assess these empirical claims. First off, what are the highest paid jobs? In other words, what are the jobs of the 1%? According to a 2012 study by Bakija, Cole, and Heim, the job-types most featured in the one percent is managerial positions (primarily in investment companies), lawyers (primarily if they work for Wall Street), and medical physicians (primarily with private practices). Some notable mentions are the CEO’s (of investment companies), supervisors (of investment companies), financial specialists, and those in financial services sales.

The second part of the potential answer makes a claim about what the one percent have in common with each other (besides wealth), namely that they're clever. So as to not bias our inquiry, let's think about what the one percent have in common more generally. In particular, let's answer the following question: What do the one percent have in common with each other (besides wealth)? Well, a New York Times article (using census data) found...

“The 1 percent are family-oriented, nearly twice as likely to be married as everyone else. They have more children, but not more cars, than middle- and upper-middle-class families. For them, education is critical. A vast majority of 1 percenters graduated from college, and in a whopping 27 percent of couples, both partners have advanced degrees.”

 

Mishel's graph

So, it does look like the one percent goes to college. This is all well and good. But as we saw in Three Red Flares, it's not clear that college actually imparts any lasting wisdom on graduates. In line with Caplan, consider that Lawrence Mishel, using data and methods from Piketty and Saez (2013), claims that the education premium cannot account for the wealth of the one percent. In particular, if you disaggregate the college wage premium and the income of the one percent and then plot them on a graph, you can see they are not well correlated. Moreover, if you look at the list provided by Bakija, Cole, and Heim, it's pretty clear that the financial sector is well-represented in the one percent—something the NYTimes article seems to overlook. (Manufacturing consent?) Clearly, being in finance has something to do with extreme wealth.

Since investment managers are the most likely to appear in the one percent, here's one more question to consider: Can we actually measure the effect of a “highly-skilled” investment manager? The short answer is no. The longer answer is this. There's no unambiguous factors that we can attribute to an investment manager (as opposed to luck) that have predictive power such that we can know which managers will do well. For example, in one study, researchers attempted to measure the relationship between the success of a company and the quality of the relevant CEO. The result: A generous estimate of the correlation found was .3. A correlation of .3 is not very good. Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains:

“A correlation of .3 implies that you would find the stronger CEO leading the stronger firm in about 60% of the pairs—an improvement of a mere 10 percentage points over random guessing, hardly grist for the hero worship of CEO’s we so often witness” (Kahneman 2011: 205; see also Bertrand and Schoar 2003 and Bloom and Van Reenen 2007).

In other words, Kahneman is saying that if you take the best management theories and apply them to the real world, your prediction will be a little better than chance, which is not very good at all. So why is there a kind of a cult of CEO worshipping in the USA? Well, if you believe Chomsky and Herman, it has something to do the media imbuing in you preferences that suit the interests of the elite. If you believe Loewen, your history curriculum taught you to favor people in positions of power and disfavor the working class. And if you ask me, well... I know nobody asked for my opinion, but I think it has something to do with the Cognitive Bias of the Day.

 

 

 


 

Do Stuff

  • Read from 400c-417b (p. 83-102) of Republic.

 


 

Executive Summary

  • Public relations techniques have been used by both companies and governments to persuade lawmakers and citizens of the agreeableness of a particular policy.

  • Loewen (2007) argues that the history curriculum has been designed to teach students blind nationalism and mindless optimism.

  • Critical thinkers distinguish between empirical claims and non-empirical claims.

  • Loewen (2007) also argues that the history curriculum imparts an anti-working class ethos to students so that they end up with a preference for those in a position of power.

 


 

FYI

Suggested Reading: Catalin Partenie, Introduction to Plato’s Myths

  • Note: Most relevant are pages 6-10.

TL;DR: TED-Ed, Plato’s best (and worst) ideas

Supplemental Material—

Advanced Material—

Related Material—

 

Footnotes

1. In case you're dying to know, not only is this set of sentences consistent but the sentences are actually equivalent!