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<\/a><\/div>\nAfter reading my slam on David Brooks\u2019s The Social Animal<\/em><\/a>, Dylan had some objections:<\/p>\n \u201cOther than the fact that it\u2019s terribly, terribly written and completely expository (it makes the Emile, on which it is clearly modeled, look like an actual novel by comparison), what\u2019s so \u201cyikes\u201d about the exact passage you excerpted? Can you really be such a HP&TMoR<\/a>\u00a0fan\/transhumanist and also think that treating so-called \u201ccognitive biases\u201d as limitations to be overcome is tantamount to \u201cunweaving the rainbow\u201d? I agree that David Brooks\u2019s (I know you\u2019ll be crotchety about that, too, but it\u2019s actually the older convention for non-plural possessives when the word ends with an S) broader conception of happiness and fulfillment seems pretty bankrupt, but I don\u2019t see how this passage illustrates that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I want to start by clearing up one serious<\/strong> misconception: I do not object to the possessive of Brooks being Brooks\u2019s, in fact, I vastly prefer it to Brooks\u2019. \u00a0Now on to the content.<\/p>\n One of my objections to Brooks is that \u2018unweaving the rainbow\u2019 is only ok if you know what you\u2019re doing. \u00a0Brooks tends to overstate the science he cites. \u00a0The review today at The New York Times<\/em> disapprovingly\u00a0references<\/a> this\u00a0tendency\u00a0as follows:<\/p>\n \u201cBrooks seems willing to take seriously any claim by a cognitive scientist, however idiotic: for example, that since people need only 4,000 words for 98 percent of conversations, the reason they have vocabularies of 60,000 words is to impress and sort out potential mates.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Brooks\u2019s is willing to simplify complex phenomena past what the data and theories will bear. \u00a0In my head, I was using the phrase \u2018unweaving the rainbow\u2019 to mean discarding what you can\u2019t explain, refusing to acknowledge the whole for fear of revealing the weaknesses of the model. \u00a0Now that I\u2019ve gone to look at the origin of the phrase (an accusation by John Keats against Isaac Newton), I can see it\u2019s not a good fit for my critique. \u00a0Keats meant to indict Newton and other scientists for spoiling things with any attempt at explanation. \u00a0A poor choice of phrase on my part.<\/p>\n My larger objection to Brooks, and the reason I would not put him in the\u00a0HP&TMoR<\/a>\u00a0fan\/transhumanist camp, is that he presents a great deal of data and doesn\u2019t want to do much of anything with it. \u00a0He goes over priming<\/a> and other discoveries of evolutionary psychology to make it clear our rational minds have less control over us than we think. \u00a0But, as far as I can tell, he doesn\u2019t outline any measures we can take to wrest this power back.<\/p>\n This is a major contrast with the folks at Less Wrong<\/a>, who turn explanation into tools for engineering. \u00a0Brooks seems satisfied with describing some factors\u00a0underlying\u00a0the status quo. \u00a0It\u2019s interesting<\/em> to know that holding a warm drink may spur me to have warmer feelings<\/a>; it\u2019s useful<\/em> for me to grab a hot chocolate before I go to meet someone I know I habitually treat uncharitably.<\/p>\n As far as I can tell from reviews, Brooks\u2019s characters narrate their psychology to themselves but never try to shape it. \u00a0(I\u2019m not planning to buy the book, given the reviews, but I\u2019ll browse through it in the bookstore when I get back to campus and let you know if I\u2019m wrong about this). \u00a0The NYT<\/em> hypothesized that Brooks\u2019s avatars never act because they have no telos<\/em>:<\/p>\n \u201cLife, morality and politics are not science, but their improvement requires thought \u2014 not only thought about the most effective means of shaping people, which is Brooks\u2019s concern, but thought about what our ends should be. Such questions don\u2019t appeal to him, since they cannot be settled by empirical evidence of the kind he feels comfortable with.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I don\u2019t know if the reviewer\u2019s complaint is accurate about Brooks\u2019s beliefs, but the fact that this book keeps prompting this reaction strengthens my discomfort. \u00a0Whether Brooks meant to or not, he seems to have written a sterile, simplistic book on human behavior that continues to turn people off. \u00a0Fostering that distaste is a disservice to science, to transhumanism, and to the pursuit of human virtue.<\/p>\n P.S. Interested in thinking some more about problems of being human? \u00a0Christian from The Thinking Grounds just posted part 2<\/a> of his series on the boundaries of Self and Body<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n After reading my slam on David Brooks\u2019s The Social Animal, Dylan had some objections: \u201cOther than the fact that it\u2019s terribly, terribly written and completely expository (it makes the Emile, on which it is clearly modeled, look like an actual novel by comparison), what\u2019s so \u201cyikes\u201d about the exact passage you excerpted? Can you really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviewsrecommendations","tag-transhumanism"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lh6.googleusercontent.com\/-dk5nChcfBRw\/TXxkaXJMuTI\/AAAAAAAABUY\/1LaAiI-kKdg\/s320\/the_social_animal_brooks_torrent.jpg\")
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