PHYSICS, CHEMISTRY, BIOLOGY: Flat Track Bullies.

Of course it's precise. It's EASY.

Hello there,

I know I said I’d publish something on Monday. I am late. I apologise for that. But it does seem it was slightly ambitious to think I’d record everything in a week.

I did however, build a vocal booth to record the vocals in. Which, as procrastination goes, is pretty good.

But I wanted to publish something soon, as it’s important to keep the routine of writing. I also got my legal practicing certificate back after eighteen years off this week, so you know, there’s been stuff going on.

Anyway, here’s this piece. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I fucking love it.

PHYSICS, CHEMISTRY, BIOLOGY: FLAT TRACK BULLIES.

Physics, Biology and Chemistry are on the golf course. Suddenly, up pop their three kid brothers: Economics, Psychology and Politics.

Always poking her nose in, Politics pipes up first.

“Hey big brothers, can we play?”

The three older siblings glance at each other, then roll their eyes. Physics speaks for the defence.

“Children. We are professional golfers. Between analysis of the best materials to make clubs, how a golf ball might optimally fly through the atmosphere and perfecting the mechanics of posture and alignment, we are honing in on the limits of what is physically, biologically and chemically possible in golf.

You three, are a bunch of useless hackers. Go away.”

Never to be deterred, Economics excitedly enjoins, “We’ve got money.”

“Pfft. It’s not about the money. It’s about the purity of golf. Of the quest for perfection, knowledge, mastery.

Cheeky as always, Psychology pipes up.

“You know what? For three so called geniuses, you’re pretty defensive about meeting us on the same playing field. It reeks of insecurity to me.”

“Insecurity?! Ha!! I’d say you were joking if I thought you understood anything precisely enough to skewer it. Alas...

Maybe if you guys could hit a golf ball...”

“I can hit a golf ball!”, screams Politics. “I hit that one at the Royal and Ancient, remember?”

“One hundred quid for that round.”, laments Economics. “At least we made it last seven hours. That’s value for money right there.”

Biology scorns them both, as it might a man born without a face.

“Economics. Ancient describes the last time I saw you hit a drive forwards. Or make a putt!

And Politics. Have you no shame? Bringing up St. Andrews. I was mortified! You chopping up divots in the hallowed links with that ridiculous sand wedge of yours, that Chomsky.”

“Hey! I chipped in on the ninth with that Chomsky!”

“And on any hole with a tendency to the right you couldn’t have been further off target with it!

Now if you’d let me finish, I was saying maybe if you guys could hit a golf ball with any degree of regularity, we’d let you play.

But you can’t. Playing with you takes five times as long and, well…”

“It’s frustrating.”, says Physics. “Nothing goes the way it should, it’s downright discombobulating is what it is. It ruins the um...what’s the word I’m thinking of here Chemistry?”

“Chemistry?”

“That’s it! It ruins the chemistry. Of golf. So vamoose. We don’t want you here.”

And with that, the three brusqueteers turned their backs to their brethren and resumed their game.

Isn’t that cute? He thinks he’s a science.

Social science has always been real science’s kid brother. Ask any real scientist, they’ll tell you. Maybe it’s science, but it’s not hard science.

The physical sciences study the physical world; its patterns, its regularities. These are and continue to be a sequence of stunningly difficult questions, the answers often lying in the detection of waves, particles, genes, etc which were impossibly hidden to us until enough base knowledge was collected to even conceive of their existence, let alone measure them.

The geniuses of physical science are titans: Einstein, Newton, Curie, Darwin. This tower of giants, each standing on the shoulders of the last, is rightly considered one of humanity’s transcendental collective achievements.

For a physicist or real science stan¹ to look down their nose at an economist or a psychotherapist is a bit rich, considering that physical scientists as a whole, and forgive me my flammable language here, are a group of shiftless good timers, who have flipped ambition the bird, taken the slacker’s way out and dedicated themselves to a suite of infinitely easier sciences.

Do I have your attention now?

Physics studies the ‘objective world’. These are phenomena which, by definition do not change. In fact, if something changes too much, it gets called an anomaly and kicked out of the ‘objective reality’ club.

Social sciences study human beings: living, changing, multivariate systems either alone or in parallel with any number of other similarly complex systems. All this under constantly changing environmental conditions.

Social science is a sandcastle being fruitlessly built, destroyed, then rebuilt anew on shifting sands.

A house of cards reaching not sky high, but thigh high. Always beautiful, but also constantly one jostle and bump away from demolition. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

A physicist might liken say, an economic theory to the collapse of a wave function. It could be absolutely anything, until you observe it closely, at which point the whole thing collapses. But not into a particle. Just more questions.

Far from being looked upon as laws of nature, attempts to codify human behaviours like Meyers-Briggs personality types are looked upon as frivolous things, perhaps to be played with online for a laugh.

The idea of it being real science is scoffed at, nay actively resisted, lest it taint the purity of science proper.

The fact that half of social science’s household names are already discredited or in the process of being discredited doesn’t help. One does not bring Marx to a Planck fight.

Social science is no tower. There is no catalogue of titans.

Psychology has two household names: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. One thought everyone wanted to fuck their mother, the other dabbled in then declaimed Nazi ideology before years later being co-opted and misrepresented by ‘The Secret’. I still like him though.

Economics has Adam Smith and Karl Marx. One of their ideas is credited with killing millions through famine and all the rest of it, whilst an aggressive reading of the ‘good’ one’s theory is the reason we might all go extinct because it’s not cost effective to survive. Hardly a pantheon.

No one sees Newton being discredited soon. One might argue that Einstein’s theory of relativity ‘discredited’ Newtonian physics, but it merely revealed a deeper truth of which Newton’s truth was a complete and accurate subset.

What does it mean when the worst thing you can say about your discredited theories is that they’re still 100% right, but only 99.99% of the time?

It means that now trickle down economics looks even worse than it already did. And that’s not an easy thing to achieve.

So what’s going on here?

It seems obvious to me that there are only two reasonable answers to this question.

The first is that humans and their decision making processes are unable to be studied scientifically.

Humans being are all so intrinsically different, so mysterious that to attempt to predict their behaviour just cannot be done. It’s tantamount to magic.

This is clearly preposterous and in general any scientific theory that sounds like old Catholic men in the 1950s discussing the mysteries of the female psyche should be immediately discarded.

Noone who has lived long enough whilst paying even cursory attention would argue that human behaviour doesn’t follow patterns.

Why are famous sayings famous sayings? Because broadly, they’re true.

• The early bird gets the worm.

• Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

• Don’t shit where you eat.

Now does this make “The early bird gets the worm" true? Does it make it true like E=MC^2 is true? Well what is E=MC^2?

It says that the amount of energy in a piece of matter is equal to the mass of the matter times the square of the speed of light, which is 390,000km/s. That’s a lot.

But still, what is it?

Well it’s a series of relationships. Between potential energy, mass and the speed of light. It’s a pattern of these things. Where you find this thing, you also find that thing. Cataloguing and improving those relationships. That’s science.

But it’s not that because someone says it is. It’s that because when you pay attention to reality in a repeated way, that’s what happens. You’re not inventing anything. You’re reporting on reality. That’s also science.

What about “The early bird gets the worm.”?

It’s saying that arriving early before others gives one the best opportunity to acquire resources which may be scarce.

It’s also a relationship between things. Not mass and energy. But diligence and success. And the relationship it posits contains truth, but not at anywhere near the confidence intervals of Einstein’s theory. But it can’t. Nothing involving humans can.

So I s it true like E=MC^2 is true? Yes. And no.

Having lived life, been early and late, I agree it never hurts to take care of things earlier, to give yourself more time. Often, it’s beneficial. In the absence of other things, it’s true. But it’s not a guarantee. It’s certainly not a law. It’s subject to everything else around it.

For example, “The early bird gets the worm” is true. But “The early bird generally gets the worm, but no-one likes people who turn up early for parties” is also true.

Lesser (or perhaps looser) truths like these have been expressed along with a million other ‘laws of nature’ in infinite ways by a similar titanic tower of poets, painters, singers and playwrights. It’s called art.

Unlike physical truths, they’re presented abstractly rather than concretely, they’re all a bit wobbly and my gut feeling is that this is where the whole ‘social science isn’t science’ seed begins germinating.

If you think science is concrete facts and figures, then the idea of labelling a metaphor presented in two ways by two different subjective minds a ‘law of nature’ probably makes you want to retch, reach for the phone and dial the constabulary of woo.

Did you identify yourself with that person I described in the last paragraph? Some readers undoubtedly will.

My question then is, how did I know that to write it? I’ve nailed you, but I don’t know you. But I’ve lived, I’ve met people, I’ve paid attention. I’ve undertaken significant research.

So I sat here with my experience, pondered preconceptions about science, projected them out to a sceptical, hypothetical reader and wrote that paragraph. And I was right.

You might call it ‘insight’, you might call it something else. You wouldn’t however call it science.

But the fact of the matter is, that humans are predictable, just to a far lower accuracy than electrons.

“Well that’s why it’s not a real science”, you might claim.

Bullshit. That’s why it’s a hard science.

Say what you want about the wonder of particle physics, and I am a nailed on, lifetime fan, but you know what you’re getting with particles. They are compliant subjects.

Atoms gonna atom.

Quarks gotta quark.

Even Quantum Physics is predictably probabilistic.

On the scale of difficult things, they’re easy. Physical sciences are easy difficult things.

Anyone can prove things to 5 sigma when the things they’re observing are boring and predictable.

It’s still monumentally difficult and yes, you need geniuses on the floor and on the bench to work it out. But watch monotonous things do the same thing again and again, and eventually one of these geniuses will suss out what’s going on.

But predicting the behaviours of large numbers of people? Well, swivel me clockwise and fuck me sideways. It’s nigh on impossible no matter how many geniuses you throw at it, and it proves so again and again.

Social sciences are orders of magnitude more difficult than physical sciences. Deal with it.

The reason you didn’t study humanities, is because you blinked in the face of the task. Hey, it’s fine. It’s not for everyone.

The glacial progress of social science.

Firstly, social science is severely hamstrung by the speed at which it can be undertaken.

Many of Karl Marx’ ideas have been discredited, but that took seventy years of Communist rule. And at the end of that, we only had one data point.

There are still Marxists around to this day saying that the Bolsheviks aren’t representative of real Marxism (there’s that word again!) They might be right. But they might be wrong. We really don’t have enough data. But it really didn’t go too well last time.

But was that just last time? Maybe Marxism is amazing? Maybe it would have worked if they didn’t have half the world aligning to destroy them while they did it? Maybe Stalin was just a confoundingly grumpy Georgian douchebag?

We could try to test it using a double blind longitudinal study, setting up fifty different Marxist societies, each with slightly differing Marxist interpretations. That would take 3500 collective years and we’d still only have fifty data points.

To be really scientific, we’d want to repeat each society a few thousand times to make sure that it was the economic system itself and not the people implementing it.

And so on. Hard science.

Sorry you lost your house, I was conducting an experiment.

Social science is also hamstrung by the fact that you can’t see if something works in the real world without trying it out in the real world, on real people.

The Gold Standard of Standards.

The Gold Standard (backing each dollar of your currency with a certain amount of gold bullion) served global economic stability well for fifty years,

But after WWI that changed. A long list of countries, highly indebted from fighting, out of gold and unable to control their money supply significantly contributed (amongst other factors) to the Great Depression. At one point, countries were running out of their own money.

Soon, numerous countries came off the standard to give themselves more flexibility in fighting the sudden waves of poverty ravaging their nations. Germany was one.

Unfortunately, saddled by escalating massive war reparations and interest repayments, alongside the depression leaving one in three people unemployed, a Weimar German Mark now backed by nothing but a broken society became worthless, leaving large swathes of a previously strong country desperate, in poverty and receptive of the populist right wing message of the Nazis.

A few million deaths later, what did we learn about economics and politics? The gold standard was good, then terrible? Overly punitive reparations create Hitlers? One data point. No idea.

Anyone want to try Gold Standard again? Maybe it goes GOOD BAD GOOD? Best two out of three?

If you think physics would have progressed as far if every credible study took 3.5 million years, mock away. If every time we dissected a frog there was a possibility that millions might die, then sure, take the piss.

Otherwise, I would suggest you join up some thinking, get your head out of your arse and give social sciences a break.

Go easy, she’s had a hard day at the office.

It was over two thousand years between Democritus conceiving of the idea of an atom around 400BC and Erwin Mueller finally seeing one through a field ion microscope in 1955.

Meanwhile, we are only now through neuroscience, big data and machine learning beginning to enter an era in which the nature of thought, consciousness and what it means to be alive begin to avail themselves to rigorous scientific enquiry.

You can’t say that social scientists aren’t scientists. In fact, economics, philosophy and psychology theorists are tackling the most intractable problems in science.

But just as theoretical physicists are nothing without their experimental cousins constructing gizmos and doodads to test their theories, social sciences must also find ways of identifying and measuring the things they seek to understand.

It’s my hypothesis that with the right framework, that human behaviour is as predictable and comprehensible as physical reality. It will never be as precise, because physics is studying one atom, chemistry is studying a handful, biology is studying trillions, and social science is studying billions of those trillions all disagreeing with each other.

I believe it can be done, using a huge repository of data that already exists. Regrettably, at present, it’s predominantly being used to target us ads and sell us things. It’s worth far far more used there than it is in understanding ourselves.

You don’t need a degree in physics or economics to have predicted that. Everyone who’s seen a sunset knows. If you drop an apple from a tree, it falls to the ground. If humans can cheat, they’ll profit.

That’s just science. Glorious, rickety, science.

Social Science: A good walk ruined.

On the first tee of Elm Street links, six stand stoically.

“Fine!” quips Chemistry. “We’ve agreed to take your stupid bet and play your stupid course. Which way’s the green?

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about the green just yet.” says Psychology. “You’ve got about thirty doglegs to navigate before you’ll even see the hole.

This one’s a Par um...what’s par on this hole?”

“Seventy four”, replies Economics, in a tone both everyday and cutting.

”Nice short one to start!”, adds Politics.

Physics is seething.

“Par SEVENTY FOUR? Thirty doglegs?! I’ve never heard of anything so preposterous! This isn’t a real golf course!”

Politics picks up a stone, then hurls it at Physics.

“OW!!”

“Feels pretty real to me.”

All three junior parties laugh.

Psychology chimes in, “Don’t play angry, it makes the holes longer. Like actually longer.

“Poppycock!” exclaims Biology.

“Stuff and nonsense!” yells Chemistry.

On quite a roll, the three younger siblings carry on in jocular sequence.

“Should we tell them how the hole is smaller than the ball?”

“Or that the course changes around them?”

“Don’t let on that their biases affect their bunker shots.”

“They’ll see it soon enough. And then deny they saw it.”

“Remember last week down the back nine? I do hope their ball doesn’t begin to resist being clobbered and clubbed...”

“Golf balls matter...”

“All balls matter...”

“Ooooooh, very good!”

“A vexing issue no doubt!”

“Indeed. But that’s why we love the game of golf...”

YIANNI AGISILAOU - 23 JULY, 2022.

1. Stan (adj) - a reclaimed, previously pejorative term for supporters of Victorian premier Daniel Andrews during COVID 19 lockdowns. It was plucked out of the hashtag #IStandWithDan. Those who stand with Dan. Are Dan Stans. So stanning for something is to support it.