Celebrity scientists and the McKinsey bagmen – Beragampengetahuan

Josh Marshall writes:

Trump doesn’t think of truth or lies the way you or I do. Most imperfect people, which is to say all of us, exist in a tension between what we believe is true and what is good for or pleasing to us. If we have strong character we hew closely to the former, both in what we say to others and what we say to ourselves. The key to understanding Trump is that it’s not that he hews toward the latter. It’s that the tension doesn’t exist. What he says is simply what works for him. Whether it’s true is irrelevant and I suspect isn’t even part of Trump’s internal dialog. It’s like asking an actor whether she really loved her husband like she claimed in her blockbuster movie or whether she was lying. It’s a nonsensical question. She was acting.

The analogy to the actor is a good one.

Regarding the general sort of attitude and behavior discussed here, though, I don’t think Trump stands out as much as Marshall implies. Even setting aside other politicians, who in the matter of lying often seem to differ from the former president more in degree than kind, I feel like I’ve seen the same sort of thing with researchers, which is one reason I think Clarke’s law (“Any sufficiently crappy research is indistinguishable from fraud”) is so often relevant.

When talking about researchers who don’t seem to care about saying the truth, I’m not just talking about various notorious flat-out data fakers. I’m also talking about researchers who just do unreplicable crap or who make claims in the titles and abstracts of their papers that aren’t supported by their data. We get lots of statements that are meaningless or flat-out false.

Does the truth matter to these people? I don’t know. I think they believe in some things they view as deeper truths: (a) their vague models of how the world works are correct, and (b) they are righteous eople. Once you start there, all the false statements don’t matter, as they are all being done in the service of a larger truth.

I don’t think everyone acts this way—I have the impression that most people, as Marshall puts it, “exist in a tension between what we believe is true and what is good for or pleasing to us.” There’s just a big chunk of people—including many academic researchers, journalists, politicians, etc.—who don’t seem to feel that tension. As I’ve sometimes put it, they choose what to say or what to write based on the music, not the words. And they see the rest of us as “schoolmarms” or “Stasi“—pedants who get in the way of the Great Men of science. Not the same as Donald Trump by a longshot, but I see some similarities in that it’s kinda hard to pin them down when it comes to factual beliefs. It’s much more about who’s-side-are-you-on.

Also incentives: it’s not so much that people lie because of incentives, as that incentives affect the tough calls they make, and incentives affect who succeeds on climbing the greasy pole of success.

ekonomi kreatif, ilmu ekonomi adalah, pelaku ekonomi
, kegiatan ekonomi adalah, sistem ekonomi

#Celebrity #scientists #McKinsey #bagmen