Two separate, shorter commentaries today.
The first is on a theme I’ve written about before, but which really came to the forefront of my consciousness as I read the New York Times interview with Anthony Fauci. It’s a good interview: David Wallace-Wells comes into it well-informed and pushes Fauci frequently at points where a more lax questioner would just let it slide.
There’s a moment that I think reveals just how ragged and unhelpful the seam between academic disciplinarity and technocratic governance has been for the last seventy years, leading to repeated disasters.
Social scientists in the academy will readily admit that the real-world situations they set out to analyze through model-making, statistical analysis, data collection are always more complicated and multimodal than they can represent in a finite inquiry. Most social science is consciously and programmatically reductionist because it has to be, but also because most of it is trying to find a meaningful variable that society could act upon to move a complex system to some new, preferable equilibrium. Not all social scientists have the ambition to inform or craft policy, but many do, and research institutions tend to hold that ambition up as the singular value proposition that makes this kind of scholarship worth supporting. (Natural scientists also get burdened with presumptions about the practical usefulness of their research, but there’s a bit more room for inquiry that doesn’t have to immediately pay out.)
In the Fauci interview, you can very precisely see the point where this system of knowledge production and professional training repeatedly leads to bad outcomes in the making of policy.