I was flipping through my alumni association magazine and was struck by a couple references to the challenge of interdisciplinarity in academia. As a relative latecomer to professional academia, the problem of disciplines, and particularly making judgments about disciplinary conclusions when one is not a member of the discipline, is a familiar one to me. It happens all the time that a CEO has to weigh conflicting professional advice, or a general counsel has to weigh conflicting advice from specialized lawyers, or regular people have to weigh conflicting advice, say, from different doctors about the prudence of a particular treatment. I have written extensively about it, both in the micro sense of making decisions about our own affairs and the macro sense of relying on experts who are supposed to do things like manage the damn economy.
The letters to the editor had some reactions to an interview with Stephen Schneider, a Stanford climatologist, who objected to the participation of petroleum geologists in the climate change debate. Here are the excerpts that interested me (and let me make it clear that my point is not about the merits of climate change, but about the intractable issues of inter-disciplinarity):
They wouldn't even put that person on the air [referring to herbalists who reject modern medicine], so why put on petroleum geologists—who know as much about climate as we climatologists know about drilling for oil—because they've studied one climate change a hundred million years ago? The reason that we do not ask focus groups of farmers and auto workers to determine how to license airplane pilots and doctors is they have no skill at that. And we do not ask people with PhDs who are not climatologists to tell us whether climate science is right or wrong, because they have no skill at that, particularly when they're hired by the fossil-fuel industry because of their PhDs to cast doubt. So here is where balance is actually false reporting.
How do experts make their judgments, according to Schneider?
In climate science, or any other complex system, there's no single best answer because there are multiple possibilities with different likelihoods. So what honest scientists do is frame the problem as a bell curve. We know we have a rough 10 percent chance that [the effect of global warming] is going to be not much; a rough 10 percent chance of 'Oh, My God'; and everything else in between. Therefore, what you're talking about as a scientist is risk: what can happen multiplied times the odds of it happening. That's an expert judgment. The average person is not really competent to make such a judgment.
But is it possible, then, for an average person to decide between the conflicting experts? Says Schneider:
Scientists also create some of their own trouble because we're a very snooty, elitist bunch, and we believe [in] a very high-knowledge entry barrier before you're even entitled to have an opinion over technical issues. Part of that entry barrier is high because we're so incompetent in explaining things simply. You really do have to know what you're talking about before you have an opinion on facts, but you also have to explain the facts simply. If you use metaphors, you can get the average person in an hour to know what they need to know to make a good value judgment.
This is really tricky stuff. (1) If a scientific discipline is involved, and you don't have a Ph.D. in the subject, you have "no skill;" (2) average people are not competent to make judgments of risk within a discipline; but (3) an expert can use metaphors to get the average person to know what they need to know to make the value judgment to accept one expert's opinion and reject the other's! But what if the opposing experts have equally compelling metaphors? That was the point of the SEC v. Goldman Sachs exercise. All that derivative trading stuff, synthetic CDOs and credit default swaps, and so on, was largely incomprehensible except by metaphor. If you took the metaphor of confidante, Goldman Sachs was a villain; if you took the metaphor of bookie or casino, Goldman Sachs was a business facilitator (even if a little squirrelly, like the Race & Sports Book at Caesars Palace).
Another view of interdisciplinarity came from neuroscientist William Newsome, who happens to be part of the Stanford Law and Neuroscience Project with Hank Greely of the Law School and psychology professor Anthony Wagner. One of the challenges of the interdisciplinary project is the very difficulty of communicating across disciplines.
"One of the things I don't like," he says forcefully, "is scientists of any stripe making pronouncements on some other field or some other aspect of intellectual or personal endeavor that they really don't know much about. And they're given outsized attention because they're famous scientists, as though being a famous scientist gives you special authority to make pronouncements. I don't want to be that kind of scientist. I want to be the kind that respects the accomplishments, traditions and scholarship of other fields."
I read that not as complete deference to the other discipline, but a call for some empathy - trying to understand the other point of view - and humility - not being so convinced of the rightness of one's own particular paradigm so as to be unable to be empathetic.
In recent books, a couple of Harvard professors have explored the disciplinary dilemma: Louis Menand in The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, and Michele Lamont in How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. Far be it from me, without a Ph.D., to be judgmental about disciplinary expertise, as I probably have a natural bias about it. (In my defense, however, the area in which I am a certified expert - cough, cough - I'm equally skeptical about disciplinary boundaries, whence arises my general skepticism.) So I was struck by the following no doubt autobiographical paragraph in Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's novel The Mind-Body Problem, which I just started reading. (NB: Goldstein is a philosopher-novelist with her Ph.D. from Princeton, and the author of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.) Here she is describing her reaction to the "linguistic turn" the field, but not she, had made, which she discovered upon arrival at Princeton as a philosophy grad student:
The philosophical mind has long craved a limited universe. The pre-Socratic Pythagoreans, in their tables of opposites, listed "limited" on the side occupied by "order," "light," "good," and "male." But only the last generation or two of philosophers have managed to show how very limited reality really is, extending no farther than our powers of expression. What a relief. What a blessed relief. No more bogeymen jumping out of dark corners shouting, "It can't be known! You'll never understand it." These epistemological horrors used to be awaiting at every philosophical turn. Now the nursery lamp of linguistic analysis has been turned on, dispelling all those scary shadows. There is the bright, cheery world of the nursery, small and familiar, with no sense of the unknown creeping in.
Even in the most speculative and unbounded of disciplines, islands of certainty in an ocean of wonder....
I was going to recommend Lamont's book - glad you beat me to it! I just finished it and found her analysis of the various disciplines and the trend towards interdisciplinarity to be fascinating.
Posted by: Archana | October 15, 2010 at 07:29 AM