Razib talks about a subject I've dealt with many times before, but he does it with more authority and precision: Science is rational; scientists are not

Just a small point. I do not believe scientists are particularly rational people as compared to the normal human. Because the average scientist has a higher IQ than the average artist I am willing to grant marginally higher rationality to an average scientist. Their ability to decompose and abstract any given conceptual system is greater. That being said, the contrast between the disciplines of art and science are far greater than those of individual artists and scientists. Why?

Because at the end of the day science does not rely on the rationality of a scientist. It relies on the cumulative and self-correcting rationality of the scientific community. It is the "wisdom of the crowds" at its apotheosis. Additionally, the domain which science addresses is generally skewed toward those which are amenable to abstraction and decomposition. I do not believe that physics is such an awe inspiring science in comparison to biology simply because physicists are more intelligent. They are more intelligent, on average, but that in an of itself does not explain the ability of physics to predict at such a fine grained level. Rather, it is the subject matter of physics which is the variable that makes it so.

I bring this up because many scientists believe that because science is such a superior method of extracting information about the world around us, and constructing predictive models which have been shown to have great utility, that that means that they as scientists can simply transfer their godlike powers to other domains with the greatest of ease. But as the above should make clear I believe this is a false perception, because the power of science arises from the intersection of the communal wisdom of tens of thousands of individuals over decades with the nature of the subject at hand. Granted, there are individual geniuses of great brilliance such as the great Isaac Newton, but the outcomes of his dabbling in alchemy and scriptural hermeneutics should go to illustrate that cognition applied to a fool's errand only results in glorious foolery.

In an old post, Long Waves, this sort of "glorious foolery" was discussed a bit.

A good deal of the heat in my posts is a consequence of my disbelief that these are novel insights for those who claim any sort of expertise. Are they that ignorant? Are the old jokes about the brilliant physicist, mathematician or social scientist true, that they have deep knowledge of their speciality but haven't the wit to cross the street unaided? It seems more likely to me that they knowingly foist their ideas onto a gullible public for instrumental reasons.

Reflecting both ignorance of how technological change occurs, and the need for tractable mathematics in complicated models, innovation is usually modeled as an exogenous factor that integrates smoothly and homogeneously into scenarios - the IPCC curves are a good example.

But, as the long waves themselves indicate, fundamental technological innovation is inherently contingent, disruptive, and chunky, and always co-evolves with equally fundamental institutional, social, financial, and cultural change.

Examples from economic history are legion. For example, the automobile mass consumption culture required the development of personal financing structures and the rise of a middle class that could afford mass consumption. The railroad required co-extensive communications networks, development of new forms of management and financial engineering, and even stabilization of time across national and international regions. The information revolution creates firms that look like networks, not hierarchies.

We can't know what future technological disruptions may look like. We do know that extension of smooth trend lines, such as in the Limits to Growth or Population Bomb treatments, is always wrong.

I know that. You know that. We all know that. Don't we? When we hear politicians, such as Stern in the UK, advocating devastating changes to current policies to achieve objectives a century or two from now we should laugh out loud. What is this fellow smoking? That's just silly! A century ago we were worried about drowning in horse shit, never dreaming that we would be worried about climate change induced by colorless, odorless, non-toxic gasses. A century and a half ago the world's fifth largest industry was whale oil extraction and distribution! We hauled ourselves and our goods about with beasts of burden and lit the night with whale fat! We went to war on horseback!

This Year's Girl quoted an old Meadows column in which she belatedly grasped the failures of her career and the whole commnading-heights and limits-to-growth ideology and methodology she had preached: it can't work. But, she obfuscated by asserting that the dream was still viable in a loosey-goosey sort of way.

Systems thinking leads to another conclusion, however - waiting, shining, obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. It says that there is plenty to do, of a different sort of "doing." The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can't be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can't surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. We can't impose our will upon a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.

We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

Desperate "glorious foolery". The desire to deform systems according to an agenda is undiminished. It has been conceded that it can't be done, but she still advocates a Quixotic quest to impose a predetermined agenda having no grounding in reality. She will only "listen to what the system tells us" a little bit, and not in honest engagement in which learning is possible. The vision is blinding, as well as deafening.

Which brings us back to Razib's point:

Engineering is a magnificent profession which serves as one of the bases of our civilization. It is constructed upon tried & true science of the first caliber. Standing upon the shoulders of the geniuses of the past some engineers with little knowledge outside of their domain, great sincerity, and ideological convictions of extra-rational origin, confuse their facility with the tools of their trade with a general ability to conquer any systematic body of knowledge. But of course the power of engineering is due to the centuries of accumulated wisdom on the part of scientists and engineers, not the acuity of any given individual.

It's the method that is admirable, not the practitioners, and when they step outside their supportive frameworks they may well be even less able than ordinary people, generalists who may not be as intelligent, but who are smarter in some important ways. The trick is to know the limitations:

[T]he only sin the generalist can commit is assuming that a generalist understanding can do more than it ought, that it trumps the specialist on questions that reside with specialization. Which, unfortunately, is a sin that a lot of generalists commit. The generalist is built to communicate and translate from a specialization to a wider public, and to translate back to specialists the question, “So what?”

So, what about these long waves?

The long wave is also called the Kondratieff wave, after Nicolai Kondratieff, a Russian economist who spent the 1920s studying long-term patterns of industrial output in the United States, France, Germany, and England. What he saw at first glance was the century-and-a-half-long expansion of the industrial revolution. Then he removed the underlying growth trend from the data and discovered - cycling above and below the central upward tendency - a wobbly cycle, decades long, especially in the production of basic industrial commodities such as iron and coal. . .

Kondratieff was not the only person of his era who saw cycles. In 1939, the great economist Joseph Schumpeter hypothesized that technology runs in fifty-year waves. Not waves of invention - human creativity seems to perk along at a fairly constant pace - but waves of adoption, building innovation into the operating hardware of an economy. . .

Then in the 1970s Jay Forrester and his team of computer modelers at the Sloan School of Management at MIT came up with a persuasive long wave theory - all the more persuasive because they weren't looking for one.

Forrester was trying to understand how the economy works. He was especially interested in the short-term (four-to-seven-year) business cycle, the most obvious dynamic characteristic of market economies. Forrester is an engineer, not an economist or historian. At the time he began his economic modeling, he had never heard of Kondratieff or Schumpeter's technical waves or Speeches from the Throne. . .

In Forrester's model the long wave period is fifty to sixty years because of the combined delays of capital build-up and depreciation in both the consumer-goods and capital sectors, with the added delay of capital self-ordering. The linked economy is a complex, ponderous Slinky. . .

The long wave has been operating since the industrial revolution began, but it hasn't penetrated our understanding. One reason for that is that technical and social changes over the course of a single cycle ensure that no upturn, downturn, peak, or trough is exactly like the one before. The downturn of the 1930s was sudden, steep, and imprinted indelibly in memory and history. The depression of the 1880s and 1890s was undramatic, more like the slow, discouraging slide we are experiencing a century later. There are too many sources of variation, there is too much complexity, learning, institutional change, and social evolution for cycles to repeat themselves exactly. . .

The good news about a long wave is that what goes down must come back up, at least as long as there's room on the planet for the exponential growth of the industrial revolution. (Some of us believe there's little or no room left, but that's another computer model.) In the coming upturn technical opportunities will blossom. The IBMs and Xeroxes of the future are forming now around, I hope, solar energy, nanotechnology, digital information transfer, radical energy efficiency, fuel cells, hydrogen fuel, zero-emission manufacturing and total materials recycling all of which would help the limits problem too.

The most important thing to understand is that downturns are no one's fault. The hard times are not caused by Republicans, Democrats, Indonesians, South Koreans, Japanese, immigrants, unwed mothers, overpaid CEOs, environmentalists, gays, feminists, Russians, Mexicans, investment bankers, Hillary Clinton, Rush Limbaugh, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the National Rifle Association, NAFTA, GATT, the United Nations, El Ni?o, Comet Hale-Bopp or any other handy scapegoat. Most of us enjoyed the ride up. We can minimize the slide down by being compassionate with one another and by stepping back far enough to understand, accept, and counterbalance intelligently the ups and downs of the market system. . .

Asia was probably the main reason why this particular long wave downturn was more gradual than the last one. Asia provided a great sponge to soak up investment that had few other places to go. But now significant parts of Asia are themselves overbuilt. Card-houses are tumbling down. There could yet be a spectacular implosion, if overvalued financial assets come back down to earth quickly.

If no implosion, if we've managed by now to let off most of the steam of the overpressured economy, relatively unscathed by panic and totalitarianism (compared to last time, anyway), there ought to be an upturn sometime within the next ten years. It's an important one. It's the one we get to use to build the technologies and institutions and attitudes and understandings that will let us live sustainably within the limits of the planet.

The various long wave theories are interesting - informed groping in the dark. It will be interesting to see how they hold up over time, how well they predict future outcomes. From my mountain home far removed from academia and political power this is all pretty commonplace, a retelling of what we call the cattle cycle out here in the toolies. Since you can't just wave a wand and suddenly have more cattle there is a delay in response to demand changes, just like the consumer/capital goods interactions. Some heifers that would not otherwise have been kept as breeding stock might be pressed into service, but it takes 9 months gestation to make a calf and 2 years of growing - give or take - to raise another cow who can then also have a calf, and so increase the number of calves produced in each year. Demand may skyrocket but all things considered it takes roughly 3 years to fully respond, and so prices go up. That brings in outsiders looking to make a fast buck, and before too long the supply exceeds demand. Then there is massive culling and the cycle starts again. Each cycle is an opportunity to make changes - such as introducing new methods or genetics - and that adds confusing wrinkles in the next cycle so that the whole thing is unpredictable except in the very broadest sense, and timing is just guesswork.

The sinful part is in not knowing the limitations - the "glorious foolery" of the brilliant but not quite rational scientists or artist, the ideological convictions of extra-rational engineer, and the visions of the political advocate. Why would we want to "live sustainably within the limits of the planet" even if we had a clue what those limits might be? Some of us may well find it to be an attractive idea, but it's just a preference with no grounding in reality - the rapture of the creeps and cranks. That vision is no more valid than the rapture of the nerds who long for a singularity that will free humanity from the limits of a single planet - assumed to exist even if they can't be precisely known. These are the extremes of a whole spectrum of visions, each of which has as much claim to validity as any other, and all of them will be proven to be naive at best when the future finally arrives.

But, how do we teach such wisdom to the arrogant scientists, engineers and political activists who all assume that they have special abilities that somehow qualify them to impose their views on others? How do they differ from sociopaths who have no regard for others? Even when they try to hide behind the skirts of democracy - it's the will of (some of) the people, might makes right - it's still institutionalized sociopathy.

I don't know. The best I can come up with is that it is in all of our interests to point and laugh at the wackos of every persuasion as a way to reduce the amplitude of the inevitable excursions into irrationality while we cycle our way into an unpredictable future. That takes close attention and real engagement - rather than visions or other sorts of closed mindedness - and all but guarantees that none will allow you to sit at their table. Odd that. If you are not a sociopath then you are a social pariah.