Evidence, Surveillance, and the Optimism of Scientists

Edge, an online salon of public intellectuals with a scientific bent, posed a question to its contributors: “What are you optimistic about? Why?” They received 160 short essays in response. Open Source Radio hosted a few of the contributors for an on-air discussion. I was hoping for something about life on Mars but what I got was probably better: some provocative ideas about life on Earth.

Clay Shirky, of the NYU Graduate School of Interactive Telecommunications Program, wrote about the increasing use of evidence in decision-making. Shirky begins:

As schoolchildren, we learn that different weights fall at the same speed. This simple and readily tested observation, first published by Galileo, refuted Aristotle, who claimed that heavy things fall faster. As Galileo put it in Two New Sciences “I greatly doubt that Aristotle ever tested by experiment whether it be true…” We are left to wonder how people could have believed what they were told, and for two millennia at that, without ever checking? Surely the power of evidence over authority is obvious.

Except it isn’t. Even today, evidence has barely begun to upend authority; the world is still more in thrall to Aristotle than Galileo.

But Shirky sees a slow move towards evidence upending rhetoric, of hypothesis-testing overtaking blind-faith. How does this affect our discussion of international law? We have already discussed one aspect of this in considering the empirical turn of legal scholarship. Moreover, Shirky writes:

We will see a gradual spread of things like evidence-based politics and law — what is the evidence that this expenditure, or that proposed bill, will have the predicted result? The expectation that evidence can answer questions about the structure of society will discomfit every form of government that relies on sacrosanct beliefs. Theocracy and communism are different in many ways, but they share the same central bug — they are based on some set of assertions that must remain beyond question.

Social science is expanding because we are better about gathering data and about understanding it. We have gone from a drought to a flood of data about personal and social behavior in the last generation. We will learn more about the human condition in the next two decades years than we did in the last two millennia, and we will then begin to apply what we learn, everywhere. Evidence-based treaties. Evidence-based teaching. Evidence-based industrial design. Evidence-based parenting.

While I find this notion of rational, empirically-based treaties attractive, I think there are always means to get around joining even an evidence-based treaty. Commission your own studies (No climate change after all!) or focus on the risk of unintended consequences (Curb greenhouse gases? The economy will tank!). Evidence is all well and good but, when we leave the hush of the lab for the hurl and burl of politics, fear and distrust are pretty powerful counterweights.

But perhaps I am being too pessimistic. Another essayist also considered the topic of evidence, but from a different angle. Chris Di Bona, the Open Source Programs Manager for Google, entitled his response “Widely Available, Constantly Renewing, High Resolution Images of the Earth Will End Conflict and Ecological Devastation As We Know It.” Di Bona spends a lot of time working on Google Earth and he writes about how it, and programs like it, allow the general public to have massive amounts of information—satellite and overflight intelligence, to be specific—that in years past had been available only to governments and a select few scientists. Not only is this information more widely distributed than ever, it is updated more rapidly to give, although not up to the minute, at least very recent imagery. And people may add information to the imagery, allowing for massively decentralized knowledge sharing that law professor Cass Sunstein has recently written about.

DiBona writes:

With sufficient resolution, many things will be as clear to all: Troop movements, power plant placement, ill-conceived dumping, or just your neighbor building a pool. I am optimistic enough to think that the long term reaction to this kind of knowledge will be the recognition of the necessity, or the proper management and monitored phase out of the unwanted. I am not as optimistic about the short term, with those in power opting to suppress this kind of information access, or worse, acting on the new knowledge by launching into a boil the conflicts that have been simmering for uncountable years.

Can our leaders stand before us and say a thing is not occurring if we can see via our low earth orbiting eyes that it is in fact occurring? Only the truly deluded will be unable to see and then perhaps we can remove them and their psychopaths from power. A more honest existence, with humankind understanding the full, global, impact of its decisions, is in our future if we can reach it. It is likely to be a rough ride.

As the commentator on Open Source described it, it is like getting rid of Big Brother for a bunch of Little Brothers.

Agree or disagree with their views, these essays and the hundred-and-fifty-odd others can be thought-provoking. And counter-intuitive. For example, there’s psychologist Steven Pinker’s piece on the decline of global violence.

Have fun browsing and feel free to let us know what you think. I’ll leave you with the opening of biotech venture capitalist Juan Enriquez’s essay about the implications of a knowledge-based economy:

Freedom to create, to work, to fundamentally alter is unprecedented. For better and worse, science and technology provide ever greater power. Individuals and small groups can leverage this power to set their own rules, make their own lives, establish their own boundaries. Paradoxically, this is leading to massive global networks and ever smaller countries.