Josh Miller points us to this post by Kevin Mitchell, who writes:
Gotta hand it to Sapolsky here . . . it’s quite ballsy to uber-confidently assert we do not have “the slightest scrap of agency” and then support that with one discredited social psych study after another…
I don’t understand Mitchell’s confusion at all here. It seems pretty clear. Robert Sapolsky is a Ted-talking science hero who’s accustomed to getting adoring press coverage. You don’t have to be a David Brooks-level sociologist to understand that these people do not have the slightest scrap of agency when it comes to backing down on any of their claims.
In the above post, Miller was referring to a podcast where Sapolsky is interviewed by credulous physicist Sean Carroll.
P.S. I’ve written about agency before! See here, here, and here. Also, like everyone else, I enjoy Dix pour cent.
I think I tried not to reply and failed. Or did I try? Or did I fail? Or am I even asking these questions?
Certainly there are degrees of agency. I look at a researcher like Ellen Bialystock who was facing a couple of good meta-analyses showing there wasn’t really anything to some of her primary claims. She, and a few of her acolytes, have been adamant in defending her position. At the time I had commented that she’s not just someone who came up with an idea that turns out to be wrong but she has a lab, grant funding, grad students, publications, course plans, etc,
Oops… posted before finishing. Anyway, I argued that she had quite a few motivations to maintain and defend her position, which she has never left even though quite a bit of the field considers that defence untenable.
Nevertheless, I understood she had a lot to lose, not only for her self but staff, students, etc. She had a singular research program. There wasn’t any diversity. If her main idea is discredited it’s problematic for the next round of grants when every iota of her research career is given to this idea.
On the other hand… the idea should have been able to be killed… but it hasn’t. I just checked and she has a Wikipedia page and it hasn’t even been dented by the controversy.
There is, however, an argument for admitting the mistake: eventually her grant funding could dry up if people perceive her work as fundamentally flawed; or grad students might become few and far between as their undergrad profs recommend against working with her.
I guess whether that happens or not depends on how many friends you have in the right places, or how many punches you can decide to give or pull. Amazingly though somehow people in this position in all sciences seem to manage to forge ahead into lala land with no consequences whatsoever.
Agreed Anonymous. Such foresight has been shown to be difficult to come by under pressure though. :)
Ultimately we all have the free will to do things that are right in the face of pressure to the contrary. Sometimes the limit is more that the pressure can obfuscate what right is. I forgot to highlight that this is a researcher with many publications supporting her hypothesis, not just one or two. Her lab generates the results and she trusts her lab. Perhaps for her it comes down to an expertise argument.
I just finished reading Sapolski’s “Determined,” published last year. It would take another reading to check whether Sapolsky never backs down on any of his claims, but I seem to remember him chiding himself early in the book for having been too credulous about some studies in years past.
I don’t watch Ted talks, so I don’t know whether he gives them, but it’s certainly not ALL he does. The book is four hundred pages of creditably well-structured arguments that hang together in a coherent whole. It didn’t show aversion to nuance, it did not in fact show uber-confidence, whatever that is, and it didn’t sound as glib and polished as Ted talks used to (OK, I watched a couple a decade ago).
“Determined” left me a little disappointed. Sapolsky started with assertions that match my own general belief-inclinations about free will and its implications for morality, then seemed not to close the case for those assertions; still, he advanced the case a long way, showing communicative skill, intellectual honesty, and, yes, modesty along the way. His effort deserves a hearing, not dismissal as the work of a “ballsy” stubborn public intellectual, with links to comments about agency in fictional(!) characters.