Post #4043217

2026-07-23 18:09 UTC

Something I often encounter from STEM folks is a belief that understanding human behavior and human society is akin to understanding a math or engineering or physics problem. There’s one correct answer that you can discover or achieve if you know the parameters, define the variables, and do the math properly. And, if you don’t get the answer you were expecting, then it’s the people who were wrong, not the work, and so it’s understandable or even desirable to want to shove people into the correct configuration. Not every STEM person who believes this, and not every person who believes this has a STEM background, but it’s a noticeable pattern. There’s a reason so many of the original members of al-Qa’ida were engineers. Society is an engineering problem, with a correct optimal answer, and sometimes you’ve just got to brute-force it.

Replies (1)

@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social 2026-07-23 18:16

I’m coming back to Tom Murphy, the astrophysicist who doomed himself into being a primitivist who celebrates babies dying because there are too many people and high infant mortality makes us love the survivors even more. Here he is, helpfully illustrating my point in my post above: “I lean toward the conclusion that modernity was inevitable. My position is reasonably strengthened by the observation that we are, in fact, where we are.” https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/09/was-modernity-inevitable/ In other words, human society produced an outcome, which means that outcome was inevitable, and to prove it was inevitable, Murphy can point to the facts that a) the outcome exists and b) things happened in the past before the present. Murphy bolsters his argument by invoking “game theory” without actually explain in what he means by this or engaging in any actual game theory (he is, after all, an astrophysicist and not a game theorist). This is a common trope in this sort of STEM approach to human society—an invocation of a sort of naive, “folk” game theory, in which one can imagine a plausible set of interactions that might lead to one outcome prevailing over another. A Just So story about states and industrial capitalism inevitably and inexorably emerging and dominating all alternatives.

Open ##4043216