在倫敦政治經濟學院(LSE)讀哲學是怎樣一種體驗？

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去年在lse讀了一年哲學（大一），這是迄今為止我做過最後悔的決定。由於我高中最後兩年是在美國讀的，所以比較的基準點是倡導不同學科融合交流的美國大學。

一、為何不建議讀哲學

a.哲學分為三個branch：metaphysics, epistemology,ethics.倫敦政經只教分析哲學，如果你想學貫東西、遍讀墨子康德John Rawls,John Searle,Daniel Dennett，請去美國。

第一個學期的第二個星期起，我就發現哲學這門學科中的形而上學和認知學沒有研究的價值。如果你對認知學感興趣，很不幸的是，就連哲學家也意識到哲學的研究方法（閉門造車）並不能增進知識的總體，具體可閱讀Paul and Patricia Churchland這對在迂腐的哲學界掀起巨大風浪的教授夫婦的經歷，Two Heads - The New Yorker

Along with his wife, Churchland is a major proponent of eliminative materialism, the belief that everyday mental concepts such as beliefs, feelings, and desires are part of a "folk psychology" of theoretical constructs without coherent definition, destined to simply be obviated by a thoroughly scientific understanding of human nature.——from Wikipedia

哲學家可能是最缺乏科學素養，卻又跟科學研究範圍重合的群體，也是肆無忌憚地使用繁複術語包裹樸素道理的一群人。

By the same token, this guiding image of classic prose could not be
farther from the worldview of relativist academic ideologies such
as postmodernism, poststructuralism, and literary Marxism, which
took over many humanities departments in the 1970s. Many of the
winning entries in the Dutton contest (such as Judith Butler』s "The
move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood
to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a
view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to
repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question
of temporality into the thinking of structure ....") consist almost
entirely of metaconcepts.

—————哈佛心理學教授Steven Pinker談伯克利女權哲學教授Judith Butler的prose style

（http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/why_academics_stink_at_writing.pdf）

哲學在認知科學中扮演比較雞肋的角色，甚至在20世界50年代至90年代拖累了人工智慧的研究。

In the early 1950s, as calculating machines were coming into their own, a few pioneer thinkers began to realise that digital computers could be more than number-crunchers. At that point two opposed visions of what computers could be, each with its correlated research programme, emerged and struggled for recognition. One faction saw computers as a system for manipulating mental symbols; the other, as a medium for modelling the brain. One sought to use computers to instantiate a formal representation of the world; the other, to simulate the interactions of neurons. One took problem solving as its paradigm of intelligence; the other, learning. One utilised logic; the other, statistics. One school was the heir to the rationalist, reductionist tradition in philosophy; the other viewed itself as idealised, holistic neuroscience.

————Making a Mind versus Modeling the Brain: Artificial Intelligence Back at a Branchpoint

(Making a Mind versus Modeling the Brain: Artificial Intelligence Back at a Branchpoint on JSTOR)

以分析哲學對rationality的理解為指導原則，Marvin Minsky等人在1960s發表豪言壯志，要在20年內解決strong AI，結果呢，研究了幾十年都毫無進展。再看看經驗主義派從神經科學和統計為切入點，做出了 neural network，machine learning,statistical learning等驚艷的成果。

上了edX上MIT 的Philosophy: Minds and Machines之後，我更是堅定了這個想法。如果你對於理論感興趣，更推薦你學theoretical neuroscience。像是任何對空間和時間的本質感興趣的現代人會學物理，而不是柏拉圖對於宇宙的理解，哲學中關於認知的觀點由於無法證偽、年代久遠，完全可以忽略。

談到ethics，任何脫離具體語境、專業領域的關於道德的討論是沒有意義的，特別是在哲學已經發展（aka，停滯）了兩千多年後

只有一個特定領域的從業人員從實際情況出發的說理才有會對現有行為模式產生影響，比如biomedical researchersbiomedical ethics。

作為學術追求來說，哲學已死。走在學術前沿陣線的，比如耶魯的Joshua Knobe在做experimental philosophy，採用心理學研究方法。

哈佛的Joshua Greene更是哲學博士讀到半路跟神經科學phD一同做實驗研究基於理性客觀計算（cold calculation）的功利主義道德判斷（utilitarianism moral judgment）是否優於基於義務的道德判斷（deontological moral judgment）。

https://www.edge.org/conversation/joshua_knobe-daniel_kahneman-a-characteristic-difference

https://www.edge.org/panel/joshua-greene-the-role-of-brain-imaging-in-social-science-headcon-13-part-vi

王思聰之所以在UCL讀哲學，很大程度上是因為哲學，像20世紀初以前的拉丁文，是西方上流階層擁有特權—無盡時間—的象徵。

我推薦你看Paul Graham寫的這篇文章How to Do Philosophy

他本科畢業於康奈爾哲學系，是矽谷最有影響力的天使投資者（即專門投資初創企業），投資了dropbox，Airbnb，他的essay充滿了對人性、商業的洞見。

二、為何不建議來LSE

在這個答案（LSE學生滿意度為什麼一直都這麼低？ 多年來都這麼低，還低得這麼可憐 ？ - 留學英國）的基礎上，我再補充幾點：

1.首先，你選了專業後一般沒法改，然而18歲的你怎麼可能預測未來三年的學術興趣？其次，課程都幫你規劃好，學生無法發揮主觀能動性。lse的老師主業是研究，師生之間的互動非常少，學校對學生的關懷的唯一體現是career service。

2..lse一年上課20個星期，每個星期的1小時lecture，1小時討論，每人只能上4門課。

20*（1+1）*4=160小時。我個人覺得LSE的course load輕得不能再輕,教學內容古板，第1到第6個星期之間沒有需要交的作業。這是非常可怕的事情，因為沒有作業就意味著沒有反饋。對於學文科的同學，lse老師給你essay的反饋不會多於1個paragraph。也就是說，在一整年裡，從一門文科課中，你得到的反饋大概是三個paragraph。美國任何一個文理學院的教授都會把你的essay變成紅色的海洋，因為不去深摳每個句子、每個論點，寫文章永遠在原地踏步。

美國大學一學年為30個星期，每節課每周的lecture至少3小時，1小時discussion，可以在能力範圍內上任意數量的課，但至少上三門。

拿我在美國讀數學同學為例，她上了5門課，其中三門課的lec為3小時，兩門為2小時，discussion一共為5小時，30*（3*2+2*2+5）=450小時。

3.倫敦政經如果不進行徹底改革（eg.跟帝國理工合併，自由選課，選專業），會極度削弱學生的競爭力。大部分人都覺得lse是個技校，主要培養banker，accountant，consultant and lawyer，但這些傳統的高薪工作正經歷極其劇烈的technological disintermediation，它們所需要的skillset在lse的課程里完全找不到蹤影。一個具體的例子可參見Michael Lewis的Flashboy。

之前跟一個今年去accenture（consulting firm）的學長聊過，他說想做technological consulting，問他會不會machine learning/big data analytics之類的，他說只會excel，期待參加公司培訓。他讀的還是business maths and statistics，不禁有點懷疑這十年里lse的course catalogue有沒有變過。

4.最後想說的是，因為社科說到底是domain knowledge that could be picked up along the way，但這個時代的好工作所需要的計算機統計數學等知識卻不能。另外，去年的advisor，an associate professor in philosophy，已經離開LSE，貌似改行研究Electrical Engineering了。

Profile - Experts

三、為何人文學科的思潮好像總比時代慢個三十年？

1.Chip Morningstar, "How to
Deconstruct Almost Anything, My Postmodern Adventure"(1993).

選段：

Looking at the field of contemporary
literary criticism as a whole also yields some valuable insights. It is a
cautionary lesson about the consequences of allowing a branch of academia
that has been entrusted with the study of important problems to become
isolated and inbred. The Pseudo Politically Correct term that I would use to
describe the mind set of postmodernism is "epistemologically
challenged": a constitutional inability to adopt a reasonable way totell the good stuff from the bad stuff. The language and idea space of
the field have become so convoluted that they have confused even themselves.
But the tangle offers a safe refuge for the academics. It erects a wall
between them and the rest of the world. It immunizes them against having to
confront their own failings, since any genuine criticism can simply be
absorbed into the morass and made indistinguishable from all the other
verbiage. Intellectual tools that might help prune the thicket are
systematically ignored or discredited. This is why, for example, science,
psychology and economics are represented in the literary world by theories
that were abandoned by practicing scientists, psychologists and economists
fifty or a hundred years ago. The field is absorbed in triviality.
Deconstruction is an idea that would make a worthy topic for some bright
graduate student"s Ph.D. dissertation but has instead spawned an entire
subfield. Ideas that would merit a good solid evening or afternoon of argument
and debate and perhaps a paper or two instead become the focus of entire
careers.

Engineering and the sciences have, to
a greater degree, been spared this isolation and genetic drift because of
crass commercial necessity. The constraints of the physical world and the
actual needs and wants of the actual population have provided a grounding
that is difficult to dodge. However, in academia the pressures for isolation
are enormous. It is clear to me that the humanities are not going to emerge
from the jungle on their own. I think that the task of outreach is left to
those of us who retain some connection, however tenuous, to what we
laughingly call reality. We have to go into the jungle after them and rescue
what we can. Just remember to hang on to your sense of humor and don"t let
them intimidate you.

2. Science
Is Not Your Enemy by Steven Pinker

Note: Rebecca Goldstein, wife
of Steven Pinker and a former philosophy professor in Barnard, published a
couple well-regarded books on Plato and Spinoza in the modern context. Harold
Bloom has given her favorable review. She talked about how these endearing
ancients are relevant by imagining Plato in a Google headquarter and Spinoza
in an orthodox Jewish girl』s life.

Selected Paragraphs from

An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled
professors, and tenure-less historians

BY STEVEN PINKER

August 7, 2013

The great thinkers of the Age of
Reason and the Enlightenment were scientists. Not only did many of them
contribute to mathematics, physics, and physiology, but all of them were avid
theorists in the sciences of human nature. They were cognitive
neuroscientists, who tried to explain thought and emotion in terms of
physical mechanisms of the nervous system. They were evolutionary
psychologists, who speculated on life in a state of nature and on animal
instincts that are 「infused into our bosoms.」 And they were social
psychologists, who wrote of the moral sentiments that draw us together, the
selfish passions that inflame us, and the foibles of shortsightedness that
frustrate our best-laid plans.

These thinkers—Descartes, Spinoza,
Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith—are all the more remarkable
for having crafted their ideas in the absence of formal theory and empirical
data. The mathematical theories of information, computation, and games had
yet to be invented. The words 「neuron,」 「hormone,」 and 「gene」 meant nothing
to them. When reading these thinkers, I often long to travel back in time and
offer them some bit of twenty-first-century freshman science that would fill
a gap in their arguments or guide them around a stumbling block. What would
these Fausts have given for such knowledge? What could they have done with
it?

We don』t have to fantasize about this
scenario, because we are living it. We have the works of the great thinkers
and their heirs, and we have scientific knowledge they could not have dreamed
of. This is an extraordinary time for the understanding of the human
condition. Intellectual problems from antiquity are being illuminated by
insights from the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution. Powerful
tools have been developed to explore them, from genetically engineered
neurons that can be controlled with pinpoints of light to the mining of 「big
data」 as a means of understanding how ideas propagate.

One would think that writers in the
humanities would be delighted and energized by the efflorescence of new ideas
from the sciences. But one would be wrong. Though everyone endorses science
when it can cure disease, monitor the environment, or bash political
opponents, the intrusion of science into the territories of the humanities
has been deeply resented. Just as reviled is the application of scientific
reasoning to religion; many writers without a trace of a belief in God
maintain that there is something unseemly about scientists weighing in on the
biggest questions. In the major journals of opinion, scientific carpetbaggers
are regularly accused of determinism, reductionism, essentialism, positivism,
and worst of all, something called 「scientism.」 The past couple years have
seen four denunciations of scientism in this magazine alone, together with
attacks in Bookforum, The Claremont Review of Books, The Huffington Post, The
Nation, National Review Online, The New Atlantis, The New York Times, and
Standpoint.

The eclectic politics of these
publications reflects the bipartisan nature of the resentment. This passage,
from a 2011 review in The Nation of three books by Sam Harris by the
historian Jackson Lears, makes the standard case for the prosecution by the
left:

Positivist assumptions provided the
epistemological foundations for Social Darwinism and pop-evolutionary notions
of progress, as well as for scientific racism and imperialism. These
tendencies coalesced in eugenics, the doctrine that human well-being could be
improved and eventually perfected through the selective breeding of the
"fit" and the sterilization or elimination of the
"unfit." ... Every schoolkid knows about what happened next: the
catastrophic twentieth century. Two world wars, the systematic slaughter of
innocents on an unprecedented scale, the proliferation of unimaginable
destructive weapons, brushfire wars on the periphery of empire—all these
events involved, in various degrees, the application of sceintific research
to advanced technology.

The case from the right, captured in
this 2007 speech from Leon Kass, George W. Bush』s bioethics adviser, is just
as measured:

Scientific ideas and discoveries about
living nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in themselves, are
being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral
teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and
dignity. A quasi-religious faith has sprung up among us—let me call it
"soul-less scientism"—which believes that our new biology,
eliminating all mystery, can give a complete account of human life, giving
purely scientific explanations of human thought, love, creativity, moral
judgment, and even why we believe in God. ... Make no mistake. The stakes in
this contest are high: at issue are the moral and spiritual health of our
nation, the continued vitality of science, and our own self-understanding as
human beings and as children of the West.

Scientism, in this good sense, is not the
belief that members of the occupational guild called 「science」 are
particularly wise or noble. On the contrary, the defining practices of
science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are
explicitly designed to circumvent the errors and sins to which scientists, being
human, are vulnerable. Scientism does not mean that all current
scientific hypotheses are true; most new ones are not, since the cycle of
conjecture and refutation is the lifeblood of science. It is not an
imperialistic drive to occupy the humanities; the promise of science is to
enrich and diversify the intellectual tools of humanistic scholarship, not to
obliterate them. And it is not the dogma that physical stuff is the only
thing that exists. Scientists themselves are immersed in the ethereal medium
of information, including the truths of mathematics, the logic of their
theories, and the values that guide their enterprise. In this conception,
science is of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism. It
is distinguished by an explicit commitment to two ideals, and it is these
that scientism seeks to export to the rest of intellectual life.

The first is that the world is
intelligible. The phenomena we experience may be explained by principles that
are more general than the phenomena themselves. These principles may in
turn be explained by more fundamental principles, and so on. In making sense
of our world, there should be few occasions in which we are forced to concede
「It just is」 or「It』s magic」 or 「Because I said so.」 The
commitment to intelligibility is not a matter of brute faith, but gradually
validates itself as more and more of the world becomes explicable in
scientific terms. The processes of life, for example, used to be attributed
to a mysterious élan vital; now we know they are powered by chemical and
physical reactions among complex molecules.

Demonizers of scientism often confuse
intelligibility with a sin called reductionism. But to explain a complex
happening in terms of deeper principles is not to discard its richness. No
sane thinker would try to explain World War I in the language of physics,
chemistry, and biology as opposed to the more perspicuous language of the
perceptions and goals of leaders in 1914 Europe. At the same time, a curious
person can legitimately ask why human minds are apt to have such perceptions
and goals, including the tribalism, overconfidence, and sense of honor that
fell into a deadly combination at that historical moment.

Many of our cultural institutions
cultivate a philistine indifference to science.

The second ideal is that the
acquisition of knowledge is hard. The world does not go out of its way
to reveal its workings, and even if it did, our minds are prone to illusions,
fallacies, and super- stitions. Most of the traditional causes of
belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom,
the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and
should be dismissed as sources of knowledge. To understand the world, we must
cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism,
open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of
ingenuity. Any movement that calls itself 「scientific」 but fails to nurture
opportunities for the falsification of its own beliefs (most obviously when
it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific
movement.

In which ways, then, does science
illuminate human affairs? Let me start with the most ambitious: the deepest
questions about who we are, where we came from, and how we define the meaning
and purpose of our lives. This is the traditional territory of religion, and
its defenders tend to be the most excitable critics of scientism. They are
apt to endorse the partition plan proposed by Stephen Jay Gould in his worst
book, Rocks of Ages, according to which the proper concerns of science and
religion belong to 「non-overlapping magisteria.」 Science gets the empirical
universe; religion gets the questions of moral meaning and value.

Unfortunately, this entente unravels
as soon as you begin to examine it. The moral worldview of any scientifically
literate person—one who is not blinkered by fundamentalism—requires a radical
break from religious conceptions of meaning and value.

To begin with, the findings of science
entail that the belief systems of all the world』s traditional religions and
cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are
factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to
a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government,
and writing late in its history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a
genealogical tree that embraces all living things and that emerged from
prebiotic chemicals almost four billion years ago. We know that we live on a
planet that revolves around one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy,
which is one of a hundred billion galaxies in a 13.8-billion-year-old
universe, possibly one of a vast number of universes. We know that our
intuitions about space, time, matter, and causation are incommensurable with
the nature of reality on scales that are very large and very small. We know
that the laws governing the physical world (including accidents, disease, and
other misfortunes) have no goals that pertain to human well-being. There is
no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine
retribution, or answered prayers—though the discrepancy between the laws of
probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people believe
there are. And we know that we did not always know these things, that the
beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified,
doubtless including some we hold today.

In other words, the worldview that
guides the moral and spiritual values of an educated person today is the
worldview given to us by science. Though the scientific facts do not by
themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities. By
stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters,
they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality. The
scientific refutation of the theory of vengeful gods and occult forces
undermines practices such as human sacrifice, witch hunts, faith healing, trial
by ordeal, and the persecution of heretics. The facts of science, by exposing
the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, force us to take
responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet. For
the same reason, they undercut any moral or political system based on
mystical forces, quests, destinies, dialectics, struggles, or messianic ages.
And in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions— that all of us
value our own welfare and that we are social beings who impinge on each other
and can negotiate codes of conduct—the scientific facts militate toward a
defensible morality, namely adhering to principles that maximize the
flourishing of humans and other sentient beings. This humanism, which is
inextricable from a scientific understanding of the world, is becoming the de
facto morality of modern democracies, international organizations, and
liberalizing religions, and its unfulfilled promises define the moral
imperatives we face today.

Moreover, science has contributed—directly
and enormously—to the fulfillment of these values. If one were to list the
proudest accomplishments of our species (setting aside the removal of
obstacles we set in our own path, such as the abolition of slavery and the
defeat of fascism), many would be gifts bestowed by science.

The most obvious is the exhilarating
achievement of scientific knowledge itself. We can say much about the history
of the universe, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we』re made of, the
origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our own mental
life. Better still, this understanding consists not in a mere listing of
facts, but in deep and elegant principles, like the insight that life depends
on a molecule that carries information, directs metabolism, and replicates
itself.

Science has also provided the world
with images of sublime beauty: stroboscopically frozen motion, exotic
organisms, distant galaxies and outer planets, fluorescing neural circuitry,
and a luminous planet Earth rising above the moon』s horizon into the
blackness of space. Like great works of art, these are not just pretty
pictures but prods to contemplation, which deepen our understanding of what
it means to be human and of our place in nature.

And contrary to the widespread canard
that technology has created a dystopia of deprivation and violence, every
global measure of human flourishing is on the rise. The numbers show that
after millennia of near-universal poverty, a steadily growing proportion of
humanity is surviving the first year of life, going to school, voting in
democracies, living in peace, communicating on cell phones, enjoying small
luxuries, and surviving to old age. The Green Revolution in agronomy alone
saved a billion people from starvation. And if you want examples of true
moral greatness, go to Wikipedia and look up the entries for 「smallpox」 and
「rinderpest」 (cattle plague). The definitions are in the past tense,
indicating that human ingenuity has eradicated two of the cruelest causes of
suffering in the history of our kind.

Though science is beneficially
embedded in our material, moral, and intellectual lives, many of our cultural
institutions, including the liberal arts programs of many universities,
cultivate a philistine indifference to science that shades into contempt.
Students can graduate from elite colleges with a trifling exposure to
science. They are commonly misinformed that scientists no longer care about
truth but merely chase the fashions of shifting paradigms. A demonization
campaign anachronistically impugns science for crimes that are as old as
civilization, including racism, slavery, conquest, and genocide.

Just as common, and as historically
illiterate, is the blaming of science for political movements with a
pseudoscientific patina, particularly Social Darwinism and eugenics. Social
Darwinism was the misnamed laissez-faire philosophy of Herbert Spencer. It
was inspired not by Darwin』s theory of natural selection, but by Spencer』s
Victorian-era conception of a mysterious natural force for progress, which
was best left unimpeded. Today the term is often used to smear any
application of evolution to the understanding of human beings. Eugenics was
the campaign, popular among leftists and progressives in the early decades of
the twentieth century, for the ultimate form of social progress, improving
the genetic stock of humanity. Today the term is commonly used to assail
behavioral genetics, the study of the genetic contributions to individual
differences.

I can testify that this recrimination
is not a relic of the 1990s science wars. When Harvard reformed its general
education requirement in 2006 to 2007, the preliminary task force report
introduced the teaching of science without any mention of its place in human
knowledge: 「Science and technology directly affect our students in many ways,
both positive and negative: they have led to life-saving medicines, the
internet, more efficient energy storage, and digital entertainment; they also
have shepherded nuclear weapons, biological warfare agents, electronic
eavesdropping, and damage to the environment.」 This strange equivocation
between the utilitarian and the nefarious was not applied to other
disciplines. (Just imagine motivating the study of classical music by noting
that it both generates economic activity and inspired the Nazis.) And there
was no acknowledgment that we might have good reasons to prefer science and
know-how over ignorance and superstition.

To simplify is not to be
simplistic.

Take our understanding of politics.
「What is government itself,」 asked James Madison, 「but the greatest of all
reflections on human nature?」 The new sciences of the mind are reexamining
the connections between politics and human nature, which were avidly
discussed in Madison』s time but submerged during a long interlude in which
humans were assumed to be blank slates or rational actors. Humans, we are
increasingly appreciating, are moralistic actors, guided by norms and taboos
about authority, tribe, and purity, and driven by conflicting inclinations toward
revenge and reconciliation. These impulses ordinarily operate beneath our
conscious awareness, but in some circumstances they can be turned around by
reason and debate. We are starting to grasp why these moralistic impulses
evolved; how they are implemented in the brain; how they differ among
individuals, cultures, and sub- cultures; and which conditions turn them on
and off.

The application of science to politics
not only enriches our stock of ideas, but also offers the means to ascertain
which of them are likely to be correct. Political debates have traditionally
been deliberated through case studies, rhetoric, and what software engineers
call HiPPO (highest-paid person』s opinion). Not surprisingly, the
controversies have careened without resolution. Do democracies fight each
other? What about trading partners? Do neighboring ethnic groups inevitably
play out ancient hatreds in bloody conflict? Do peacekeeping forces really
keep the peace? Do terrorist organizations get what they want? How about Gandhian
nonviolent movements? Are post-conflict reconciliation rituals effective at
preventing the renewal of conflict?

History nerds can adduce examples that
support either answer, but that does not mean the questions are irresolvable.
Political events are buffeted by many forces, so it』s possible that a given
force is potent in general but submerged in a particular instance. With the
advent of data science—the analysis of large, open-access data sets of
numbers or text—signals can be extracted from the noise and debates in
history and political science resolved more objectively. As best we can tell
at present, the answers to the questions listed above are (on average, and
all things being equal) no, no, no, yes, no, yes, and yes.

The humanities are the domain in which
the intrusion of science has produced the strongest recoil. Yet it is just
that domain that would seem to be most in need of an infusion of new ideas.
By most accounts, the humanities are in trouble. University programs are
downsizing, the next generation of scholars is un- or underemployed, morale
is sinking, students are staying away in droves. No thinking person should be
indifferent to our society』s disinvestment from the humanities, which are
indispensable to a civilized democracy.

Diagnoses of the malaise of the
humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to
the commercialization of our universities. But an honest appraisal would have
to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities
have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant
obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness. And
they have failed to define a progressive agenda. Several university
presidents and provosts have lamented to me that when a scientist comes into
their office, it』s to announce some exciting new research opportunity and
demand the resources to pursue it. When a humanities scholar drops by, it』s
to plead for respect for the way things have always been done.

Those ways do deserve respect, and
there can be no replacement for the varieties of close reading, thick
description, and deep immersion that erudite scholars can apply to individual
works. But must these be the only paths to understanding? A consilience with
science offers the humanities countless possibilities for innovation in
understanding. Art, culture, and society are products of human brains. They
originate in our faculties of perception, thought, and emotion, and they
cumulate and spread through the epidemiological dynamics by which one person
affects others. Shouldn』t we be curious to understand these connections? Both
sides would win. The humanities would enjoy more of the explanatory depth of
the sciences, to say nothing of the kind of a progressive agenda that appeals
to deans and donors. The sciences could challenge their theories with the
natural experiments and ecologically valid phenomena that have been so richly
characterized by humanists.

In some disciplines, this consilience
is a fait accompli. Archeology has grown from a branch of art history to a
high-tech science. Linguistics and the philosophy of mind shade into
cognitive science and neuroscience.

Similar opportunities are there for
the exploring. The visual arts could avail themselves of the explosion of
knowledge in vision science, including the perception of color, shape,
texture, and lighting, and the evolutionary aesthetics of faces and
landscapes. Music scholars have much to discuss with the scientists who study
the perception of speech and the brain』s analysis of the auditory world.

As for literary scholarship, where to
begin? John Dryden wrote that a work of fiction is 「a just and lively image
of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of
fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.」
Linguistics can illuminate the resources of grammar and discourse that allow
authors to manipulate a reader』s imaginary experience. Cognitive psychology
can provide insight about readers』 ability to reconcile their own
consciousness with those of the author and characters. Behavioral genetics
can update folk theories of parental influence with discoveries about the
effects of genes, peers, and chance, which have profound implications for the
interpretation of biography and memoir—an endeavor that also has much to
learn from the cognitive psychology of memory and the social psychology of
self-presentation. Evolutionary psychologists can distinguish the obsessions
that are universal from those that are exaggerated by a particular culture
and can lay out the inherent conflicts and confluences of interest within
families, couples, friendships, and rivalries that are the drivers of plot.

And as with politics, the advent of
data science applied to books, periodicals, correspondence, and musical
scores holds the promise for an expansive new 「digital humanities.」 The
possibilities for theory and discovery are limited only by the imagination
and include the origin and spread of ideas, networks of intellectual and
artistic influence, the persistence of historical memory, the waxing and
waning of themes in literature, and patterns of unofficial censorship and
taboo.

Nonetheless, many humanities scholars
have reacted to these opportunities like the protagonist of the grammar-book
example of the volitional future tense: 「I will drown; no one shall save me.」
Noting that these analyses flatten the richness of individual works, they
reach for the usual adjectives: simplistic, reductionist, na?ve, vulgar, and
of course, scientistic.

The complaint about simplification is
misbegotten. To explain something is to subsume it under more general
principles, which always entails a degree of simplification. Yet to simplify
is not to be simplistic. An appreciation of the particulars of a work can
co-exist with explanations at many other levels, from the personality of an
author to the cultural milieu, the faculties of human nature, and the laws
governing social beings. The rejection of a search for general trends and principles
calls to mind Jorge Luis Borges』s fictitious empire in which 「the
Cartographers Guild drew a map of the Empire whose size was that of the
Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations ... saw
the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun
and winters.」

And the critics should be careful with
the adjectives. If anything is na?ve and simplistic, it is the conviction
that the legacy silos of academia should be fortified and that we should be
forever content with current ways of making sense of the world. Surely our
conceptions of politics, culture, and morality have much to learn from our
best understanding of the physical universe and of our makeup as a
species.

Steven Pinker is a contributing editor
at The New Republic, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard
University, and the author, most recently, of The Better Angels of our
Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

四.總結下，在選擇學校、專業、職業上走了點彎路的人（包括我）可能犯了如下三個錯誤：

（1）.Underestimate the difference between your predicting self and future self（Daniel Gilbert的研究）他給出的方法是，做決策的時首要參考已成為未來的你的人的感受，並且樣本要足夠大，樣本的經歷和價值觀足夠相似（data cleaning）。選擇試錯代價比較小的選項。這也是婚姻的弔詭之處。

（2）.Overestimate our uniqueness and ignore the larger trends and stats.宏大

敘事之所以激動人心是因為它是無數個價值觀不同的理性人在特定的歷史條件下的行為軌跡。除開絕少數天才，如John Von Neumann/Terence Tao/Toni Morrison，形勢比人強。從分析未來的經濟里有哪些人是不可替代的倒推，結合已知智商上限，選取一個最佳學科組合。

（3）.Know the three most important conditions under which you will be happy.It"s quite hard because you usually don"t know all the componets of a given environment that enable you to thrive until you are in an unnurturing environment.So in order to figure out，you can ask yourself constantly:why do I feel content at this given moment?what are the sources of my sense of accomplishment?

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樓上君，第一你入學的時候連course structure都不看是誰的問題？其他branch的哲學其他英國大學有，你自己選擇了LSE，一個哲學系的名字都有scientific methods 的學校。你要多學科發展UCL有Arts and Science .第二沒有人能夠經典文獻都不讀就能和心理學各種interdisciplinary。 學物理這種不講究經典文獻的學科都要從經典力學學起何況是傳統深厚的哲學？你說的interdisciplinary的researcher哪個不是科班出身功底深厚然後才跨界？轉移研究方向也是很正常的事，每個學科都有。好高騖遠，夸夸其談，自視甚高是出不了成就的。

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