The Zizians add their story to the list of ignorant scientists. Ted Kaczynski, the so -called UnabomberA Mathematics Ph.D. And Berkely Professor, was cut from the same type of cloth. These stories would be ridiculous if they had not involved murders of innocent people and wasted lives, including the life of criminals, and if they did not suggest deeper knowledge problems. Many of the Zizians had degrees in computer science. They were attracted to the “rationalistic movement” and attended the Berkeley -based center for applied rationality, although this group eventually expelled them. (See Zusha Elinson, “An intellectual society of Silicon Valley kicked them out. Now they are bound by a murder” Wall Street JournalFebruary 22, 2025.)
José Ortega, a Spanish philosopher of the first half of the 20th century, believed that the typical scientific man was an “learned ignorance” and an intellectual barbarian. Just like the ‘Mass-Man’, the scientist is not interested in understanding the civilizing conditions or even the conditions for the existence of science, nor the closely related need for certain liberal institutions. He believes that prosperity is “the spontaneous fruit of an Edenian tree.” (See my Regulation Review of Ortega’s Book from 1930 The rebellion of the masses.)
Frederic Hayek explained the problem of ‘science’, which he defined as an incorrect and naive application of the methods of the exact sciences to the study of society. It is very tempting, especially for scary -oriented scientific experts without knowledge of economy, to neglect the varied preferences that motivate individual actions and to ignore the unplanned social order that results. A social order efficiently for the satisfactory individual preferences is impossible to reconstruct and reconstruct from above. We must be wary of what Hayek, in his Nobel College, called ‘The pretext of knowledge. “(See Hayek’s book from 1952 The counter -revolution of scienceof which the first part reproduces a series of articles Economica entitled “Scientism and the Study of Society.”)
Scientists, and perhaps mainly computer scientists, are subject to a professional preference who can make them believe that they have the tools to develop society according to their own preferences. The Zizians and the Unabomber added murder to the toolbox of the engineer. Social Engineering consists in any case of the mandatory spirit of fellow people and lives of Medisches. A basic knowledge of economics, which studies the social consequences of individual actions, including exchange, is a good antidote for culture and social engineering illusions. (Perhaps it can also be argued that a too specialized or pretending economic practice also risks transmogramming an economist into a social engineer.)
None of what I said is meant to condemn the use of reason. Rationality remains our most important tool to understand the physical and social world if one remains aware of the boundaries of reason. Someone has only trained in a scary science area, without a conscience of the social world around him in time and space, the risk an ignorant, a cultist, a barbarian, or to become everything.
PS: Pardon my Pun-like French Spirit, but the Zizians are certainly not at home in the language of Émile Faguet because they would otherwise one Less childish and patriarchal label For their cult. See the wonderful article by Lucy Sante, “About French and puns,”French without tears. “
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Scientist Re -Engineing Society