Review: Shock of the Old (Part II)

This post constitutes part two of a review of David Edgerton's book Shock of the Old. I shall attempt to make this post stand alone by itself but read Part I if you want the review of the actual book rather than my mad musings.

In Part I, I ended by facetiously summarising my objection to the ideas in the book by saying: Yes. And?

I agree with David Edgerton's ideas. I don't see much problem with them: of course we should take a complete look at the history of technology, rather than one that--as this 2006 Guardian interview with Edgerton says--describes 1940s technology history as one of supersonic flight and atomic power.

Supersonic 1940s: The Bell X-1

When I read this interview (before having read the book) my response was dramatic. Who thinks that the 1940s was a decade of supersonic flight? Is this a popular conception that I've somehow missed out on or an absurd academic one? In the Guardian interview and in the book, Edgerton insists on using the term "we" to describe the position he is attempting to counter. "We think that..." "We believe..." Who is this we and why do they have a rather bizarre view of the 1940s? I absolute agreed, before reading the book, that the 1940s were more of a time of "tanks, aeroplanes, cars, coal and wheat and pig farming."

You could ascribe my objection to pure high and mightyness: I don't think that because I am superior and magically have more knowledge (or the right kind of knowledge) than most. 

Let me defend myself by trying to explain why I think I didn't come into this book with the expectation that technology history, either popularly or academically, never seemed to be quite as extreme as Edgerton makes out (perhaps we should allow that he may have been hyperbolising to make a point).

Finally I will actually disagree with Edgerton. Hold on to your hats, things will get crazy.

Still reading? Something of what Edgerton is worried about, this focus on the absurd magic of the cutting edge, seems to come from the futurist ideas of the 50s-70s, when people were landing on the Moon and everyone fully expected we would have at least a Moon colony and flying cars by now. The science fiction of this period--think Thunderbirds, 2001 and even Back to the Future--are I think symptoms of the possibly more sensible expectation of the everyday person. The future was going to be awesome and it was barely fifty years away, if that.

Alternate future: the Firefly crew on their crowded, jury-rigged bridge.

But I was born in the mid 1980s and my teenage TV science fiction was quite a different story. Dark Angel (2000) was set in a post-apocalyptic future populated almost exclusively by the kind of technologies Edgerton wants to draw attention to: bicycles instead of cars, jury-rigged ways of keeping up with the vanguard of technology. Firefly (2002), the beloved space western, was similar-- the heroes didn't have the cutting edge technology. Unable to access the most cutting edge technology, they too made us of elderly technology (although it looked futuristic to us). Even Stargate which gives us an alternate 'now', has humans in general scrambling to keep up with other technologies and doing many of the things Edgerton wants to highlight: borrowing, reverse-engineering, imitating, jury-rigging. The Dial Home Device for the Earth Stargate was missing and Earth scientists have managed to hack one together out of what, compared to the original technology, amounts to some bits of string and duct tape.

 A generation after Edgerton, I think, the myth of the future has changed from one of the gleaming inventiveness of humanity to one of borrowing and jury-rigging. It's changed enough for me to be genuinely surprised that anyone would look at the 1940s and think "supersonic flight" above "Spitfire" or would feel it necessary to be quite so bombastic about making this point about old technology being important as if it was completely groundbreaking. 

 That's the "Yes" of my fascetious argument. The 'And' therefore expects more from this line of argument. If we have in fact established that there is more to technology that what was invented yesterday, how can we begin to investigate this or make sense of it? This is what I would have liked to read in the book-- some clear suggestion not only that we should look at old, borrowed, regressive and maintained technology as equally important but how we should approach it. The book contains plenty of examples, but I don't think I ever got the sense that Edgerton really knows what the next step is. Perhaps he's got there now, as the book is now a good six years old!

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And now I must disagree with Edgerton. Or rather, I must query how he appears to conceive of technology (or perhaps how he appears to conceive of how "we" conceive of technology). There is a sense that technologies invented are intended to eclipse their predecessors. For example, I see no reason why the machete as a killing tool should necessarily be outmoded by the gun, bomb, rocket or atomic warhead-- which the book appears to suggest is what is intended by the rocket's invention. If I live in London and want to get people in Paris, I don't have to be in Paris to kill them if I have a rocket. I can simply line up my rocket and fire it. It may not be the cheapest, most efficient or effective method, but it plays quite a different role.

In fact, technology rarely eclipses a previous technology complete because-- like Darwin's semi-apocryphal finches--it occupies quite a different evolutionary niche. A "better" bird doesn't necessarily entirely displace the previous bird because the ways in which it is different may outweigh the ways in which it fills the same task as the earlier bird.

In the killing technology example, the bomb will never replace the machete entirely because the bomb will always play a different role: it is more difficult to acquire, especially in quantity (even with the internet), more indiscriminate and less personal. It destroys people in quite a different way, which must have sociological and psychological implications.

1869 Ladies' Pedal Bicycle

We walk for different reasons and on different journeys than we bike, take a train, drive  or fly. While these are successive transport technologies I just don't see that anyone really dismisses biking because planes exist. This is the level on which Edgerton makes his stand: Bicycles fly in the face of the innovation myth. But do they really?

Consider the bicycle made today. Not the bicycle grandfathered--that's a different story--but the bicycle constructed today. It has a certain shape--penny farthings and choppers being unusual--an airfilled rubber tire, air brakes, a unisex (usually) diamond frame.

There has been innovation. Something has happened to the bicycle to refine it: each component has been initially invented and used and nowadays there is a general consensus on how to make an affordable general-use bicycle that is modern at least to the last 30 years. Even where poverty abounds and jury-rigging is rife, people tend to take what is best and use it. This bicycle is not old at all! The concept of 'a bicycle' may be over a hundred and fifty years old, but since then it has undergone near-continous innovation taking in advances/changes in design, materials, construction methods, methods of maintenance, social norms and changes in use-- all the things Edgerton wants to talk about.

A different kettle of fish: The modern diamond-frame bike.

For me, that is the history of technology and it is absolutely one of innovation. The main invention of technology is important but not nearly so important as the inventions that will improve it-- and they are inventions and I can't really get behind the idea that they aren't new.

I saw a thing once about a lighting technology used in some towns in the Philippines which consisted of a plastic bottle full of water wedged in a hole in the roof. You can try this at home! The water acts as a lens to 'capture' and redirect the light more effectively than a simply using a piece of plastic as a window.

Edgerton would love this as a piece of Old Technology. But is it old? It makes use of simple materials and a basic understanding of light (or even an observation of it), it's cheap and near-universally available. But it wasn't being done ten years ago and now it's being done. It's not advanced, certainly, but that's not necessarily what we're talking about.

The Shock of the Old has something to say, but it doesn't seem to have enough to say. We need to know: what is a distinct technology? When is a technology newly invented and when merely updated? If an old thing like a bicycle is made out of radically innovated parts and materials, is it still an old technology (I'm looking at you, Bugatti Veyron)? Is the Concorde a new thing entirely or just an updated plane? Shouldn't we be looking at technologies more closely (e.g. the tires of a bicycle rather than the bicycle as a whole) to make more sense out of the progress of technology? Are innovations in maintenance of old things innovations? What role does the niche of technology play in how it is eclipsed, or not? Without these questions being at least addressed-- at least asked-- the whole book boils down to the rather unshocking observation of: "not everyone uses the newest stuff".

Yes. And?

Review: Shock of the Old (Part I)

I finished David Edgerton's book Shock of the Old earlier this week, but I've been letting it sit and stew for a while. I'm going to do this review in two halves because I think it's important for me to separate my response to the book from my response to the ideas, because I simultaneously agree and disagree with the thesis of the book. In order to articulate my argument, I think I need two halves. This is part one, in which I mostly enjoyed the book and agree with Edgerton.

If a book's goal is to challenge what you think, the Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 is very successful. Edgerton's aim is to shake up the field of technology history, leading some reviewers to describe him (not unhappily) as revisionist. The book is full of Edgerton-coined terms such as 'creole technology' and a sense of indignation and righteousness.

The main thesis of the book is that the history of technology focuses far too much on the history of invention and innovation. In fact, more than that--Edgerton argues that the history of technology and our very understanding of technology itself almost is that of invention and innovation and that is is wrong. We should instead look at the use of a given technology. This would mean, for examine, that we examine the use of a tool like a metal blade as a killing tool not as an outdated bronze-age technology but as a technology that continues to be crucial and effective to this day, even with the proliferation of other killing technologies such as guns and bombs. Edgerton illustrates this particular example (which I have phrased somewhat differently from him) with the devastatingly brutal use of the machete in Rwanda, in which millions were efficiently murdered.

In the conclusion of this article published in the Journal of History of Science and Technology (which slightly more academically reinterates in a compressed fashion many of the points, and a lot of the language, made in the more popularist book, if you're looking for a quick fix), Edgerton writes,   

If [this paper] calls for anything it is for the history of technology to ask and answer historical questions, to engage in historical and other debates. It argues that to do this we need to attend very carefully to nature of the standard narratives that are at work in today's academic  histories, which, for example, privilege the ‘question of technology'; conflate invention/innovation/technology and equate technology with the rich world, or the internal study of technology with invention, and much more besides.

 I wish this paragraph had been in the book, because I think it articulates what Edgerton was trying to do more clearly than his book does. I am not familiar with the academic histories of world technology, but I am happy to accept that there may in fact be a problem in academia like that described above. In that light, I do agree with Edgerton: technology is clearly about use as well as its invention. Technologies do not necessarily displace their predecessors, nor does the poorer world precisely trail after the richer technologically or lack a distinct technological history. There is value to examining the roles of resurgence, maintenance and the sharing/transition/imitation of technologies both temporally and geographically. The examples Edgerton provides are interesting and illustrative. In short: I agree.

What else is there left to say? I hear you cry. What's not to love? Why aren't you, like prominent reviewers, glowingly ending this review on a positive note?
  
Well, there are two things I object to, the first of which I shall articulate here, the second in my second post. My first objection is that I found this book poorly written. If (lol) this had been submitted to me as a paper, I would have sent it back because I found it quite badly constructed and in some cases, poorly explained. The text was bookended by the thesis, but did not make a cohesive argument throughout. In fact, I frequently found myself wishing each individual chapter had been a standalone article and that within each article, there was rather more discussion and rather fewer examples. In places, the reader was presented with a pile of data and examples presented without explicit links to the argument.

I think this all comes down to the book being more of an argument about the problems in academic histories without ever referencing the academic histories--or indeed, historians--it is apparently attempting to counter. At the same time, it's being a popularist, technological storyteller that sells in bookshops-- more like the lovely book The Battery that I recently read. The result was frustratingly neither a cutting examination of a failed historical narrative nor an interesting and innovative delve into the history of 20th century technology.

And so that is my first objection. My second is much more of an objection of ideas, and it can be partly touched upon with the terribly facetious comment: Yes. And?

You will have to read Part II for more. 

Mission Creep: Baggini vs. Krauss

The Guardian newspaper hosts an exchange of ideas between philosopher Julian Baggini and physicist Lawrence Krauss about science's so-called mission creep into other fields including, but not limited to, philosophy.

While he seems quite happy with science, Baggini picks up on whether science is capable of fully answering moral questions, giving a compelling example of the claims concerning the (and he quotation marks them as well) evolutionary benefits and biological basis of rape which is generally considered to be barbarous. Baggini points out that there is something non-scientific and measureable about the moral condemnations of certain activities and also the occurance of (maybe more positive) others.

Krauss, on the other hand, argues that facts of a scientific nature should and do form the basis of moral decisions, and argues that in order for science not to apply in a situation involving something extraordinary as self-sacrifice, "there would have to be something beyond the purely 'physical' that governs our consciousness. I guess I see nothing that suggests this is the case." He concludes by saying that there may be areas where science falls down, but that these particular areas will not be known until science has tried to explain everything.

I don't get along particularly well with philosophy. A lot of the time it seems to hinge rather tenuously on the definition of a word, an initial assumption or to completely lose track of its point completely and, like a Simpsons episode, end up in a place totally unrecogniseable from where it started out.

On the other hand, I'm not a scientist and I took enough political science courses to come to the conclusion that attempting to explain human-scale activities using social scientific theory is almost always absurd. It's much worse when someone comes to the conclusion that a particular theory should guide the future and we should all start living by an idea cooked up in a booth in a Manchester bar.  (I don't have anything in for that particular theory above others and get that we have to have ideas in order to make attempts to improve but you get the idea in a casual sense).

Social scientific theories, however, are always quite falsifiable (and old but relatively reliable way of discounting a scientific idea as completely accurate) and usually falsified. Ask a physicist if he or she thinks that political science deserves the name 'science' as we understand it today, and the answer is almost certainly 'no'. Not to say that political science and the humanities aren't valuable, however.

I think this is why most sensible discussions of this kind end up talking about brain chemistry and "the illusion of" free will. Using brain chemistry, we can or very well may be able to explain an individual human, say some scientists. Ultimately, this could mean that we could explain humanity and morality (whether such a thing is practical or not).

This is when I run into trouble and it's not because I think that there is something about humans that is not measureable by science in some respect. Complexity of modelling such an unimaginably enormous system usefully aside, I'm concerned that looking at people as individuals doesn't always translate into looking at people in a society in a reasonable way. This doesn't mean it's not possible, but it does mean that even small unpredictable and unreasonable events in the chemistry and physics of a person could actually have enormous and counter-scientific ramifications in the world.

I think that boils down to me finding myself partway between Krauss and Beggini's agreement to almost agree, but with no actual evidence for my argument. I think my lack of evidence for my argument says it all.

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On a note I will probably come back to later, in terms of actually investigation of philosophy vs. science I still think that philosophy (and political 'science', social 'science' etc.) is useful even if science can ultimately explain 'everything' (whatever that means) just as biology is still useful even though physics could be used to explain it.

The New Experimentalists (and Deborah Mayo)

On Sunday, I chickened out of describing the New Experimentalists’ philosophy of science because I actually couldn’t remember very much of what it entailed. I promised myself I would come back to it and so here I am, exploring New Experimentalism.

This blog post is a bit silly because instead of starting at the beginning I’m actually describing here a recent addition to the philosophy of science. It’s also not very well sourced. Most of my understanding, in broad strokes, comes from Alan Chalmers’ What is This Thing Called Science?

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Part of the problem with anything called “New” is that there is necessarily an old which probably needs to be understood before the new can be understood. In her 1994 paper which coined the name ‘New Experimentalist’ Deborah Mayo writes…

“[New Experimentalists] hope is to find ways to steer a path between the old logical empiricism, where observations were deemed relatively unproblematic, and the more pessimistic post-Kuhnians, who take the failure of logical empiricist models of appraisal as leading to underdetermination and holistic theory change, if not to denying outright the role of evidence in constraining appraisal”

Mayo, 1994

In a nutshell, the story of the Philosophy of Science (as I roughly understand it) goes like this: In the beginning, things were relatively straightforward. Scientists were thought to undertake experimentation which led to facts that joined together to make theories (inductive reasoning).

Thomas Kuhn, Science Philosopher

But then philosophers thought some more and started getting worried. Surely theory plays a part in the way that scientists see the world and which experiments they choose to carry out and how they carry them out. The interpretation of the results of experiment also relies on theory as scientists have to determine what results of an experiment are valuable and significant and they can often use their theoretical understanding to help them with this.  

Thomas Kuhn and his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a significant marker in this change from a focus on experiment to one on theory theory. One of the ideas that made sense to me that I think comes from Kuhn is that aliens or other extra-theory people conducting the same experiments or viewing the same results might actually produce an understanding of the world very different from our own. There is nothing, argued these people, particularly definitive about experiment.

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, things got crazy. Experiment was dependent on theory which was clearly almost always wrong. People like Paul Feyerabend took this to extremes, eventually arguing that since theory was always wrong and experiments were dependent on theory, very little about science could be said to be more correct than it had been before. In short, science was paddling around in circles.

I don’t know for sure, but I get the sense that Feyerabend’s ideas were the trigger for everyone else to go, “Hold on a sec.” Enter the New Experimentalists who, according to Mayo’s footnotes, were writing in the 80s.

I’ve linked Deborah Mayo and New Experimentalists together, but in fact her 1994 paper actually attempts to fix some of the problems which she perceives to be part of the ideas of what she dubs the New Experimentalist movement. I will come back to those at the end.

At the beginning of the 1994 paper linked above, Mayo invokes an ‘apt slogan’ to explain the New Experimentalists that was used by New Experimentalist Ian Hacking in a 1983 paper: “Experiments have a life of their own”. This of course stands in opposition to earlier theories where experimentation was theory dominated.

She articulates three ways of interpreting this slogan, which I’ve summarized…

1. Much of experimentation is “local” to a specific problem, focusing on extracting results from background noise, for example, and bears little reference to theory.
2. If you are making up a philosophy of experimental science, “it cannot make the very concept of observation become suspect.” (Hacking again)
3. The results of experiment are not only valuable within the theory they were created in. After Newtonian physics fell, observations made under it were still valid and a new theory or theories had to take most of those observations into account.

Relieved experimenters (Clipart: Philip Martin)

New Experimentalism put experiment back into philosophy of science, which must have been a big relief to those people carrying out experiments.

Mayo goes on to discuss a problem with this new idea-- that this is all well and good, but the myriad possible errors of observation, perception and the evaluation of what the results actually are still pose a problem between the carrying out of experiments and the induction of fact.

For me, it is easier to understand Chalmers on Mayo than Mayo explaining herself. He describes Mayo thus:

“A key idea underlying her treatment is that a claim can only be said to be supported by experiment if the various ways in which the claim could be at fault have been investigated and eliminated. A claim can only be said to be borne out by experiment if it has been severely tested be experiment, and a severe test of a claim, as usefully construed by Mayo, must be such that the claim would be unlikely to pass it if it were false.” (pg 202)

She articulates how this might be done although it does appear that each individual experimental case might require a specific assessment of what the possible sources of error could be and then a specific elimination of each possible error, much like making up the dreaded, ‘risk assessment’ before going on a field trip (my words not theirs).

All in all, New Experimentalists allow for science to include facts known to a high level of probability and for those facts to be added to: it can be both (relatively) correct and progressive, which I think is a win for science.

Book Review: What is This Thing Called Science?

Scrubs' J.D. wonders "What is This Thing Called Science?"

So my excuse for the long break, or most of it, is moving house and having a broken computer fan. I am now moved (for now) and my computer is back, so here's something to be going along with.

I'm always reading something on the History of Science, often more than one something. A few weeks ago I finished a book charmingly named What is This Thing Called Science? by Alan Chalmers. I feel the title should always been said with a finger on the chin and a quizzical look. 

It was quite a charming read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Essentially, it's a play-by-play of (some?) of the important various philosophies of science over the 20th century. I had encountered Thomas Kuhn and the interestingly anarchic Paul Feyerabend before, but not people like Imre Lakatos. Chalmers details the ideas, decides how they are useful, helpful and flawed before moving on to the next thing. He finally settles, albeit slightly uncomfortably, on Deborah Mayo and the idea of New Experimentalism.

I'm afraid I will need to come back to New Experimentalism and Mayo, although the major key to the philosophy is there in the name-- science is something heavily connected to experiment... and that's the best I've got at the moment. One thing that Chalmers does do is try to battle his way out of the idea that Feyerabend put forth-- that science is not progressive or produces results any more accurate than reading the entrails of unfortunate goats. Throughout the book Chalmers is determined to find something about science that is, if not based on a single unified metholodogy, at least productive and progressive.

Think of the goats, Feyerabend!

I liked that about the book. Feyerabend's somewhat cheeky and anarchic ideas are fascinating and hold a kind of perverse sense (I'd better come back to him as well) but are counter-intuitive and I can understand that somebody would want to start with a bit of a proposition that science is useful, is progressive and while it might be slightly less easy to package up than we are sometimes led to believe it is, does actually have value over those poor goats.

I recommend this book. The internet informs me it's an excellent introduction to the Philsophy of Science and, for once, I agree with someone on the internet.