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\title{{\em Statistics, Science, \& Public Policy:\\ The Two Cultures?}\\
\vspace{0.5in}
{\LARGE Shifting cultures: \\ Stimulus to the
individual}}
\author{R.W. Oldford \\ University of Waterloo}
\date{April 23, 1999}
\maketitle
{\em {\footnotesize 
This is the transcipt of an invited talk as presented to the
conference {\em Statistics, Science, \& Public Policy: The Two Cultures?}
at Hearstmonceux Castle, England.  The session was entitled `The University Culture'.

The talk was intended to complement the presentation by Professor Mary Thompson of the
University of Waterloo.
The chair of the session was Dr. Suzanne Portier of Queen's University; the conference
organizer was Professor Agnes Herzberg, also of Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario).
}}

%{\large
\section*{Transcript}
Thank you Suzanne.  And thank you Agnes for the opportunity to speak here today.

As Mary Thompson said earlier, she and I decided on complementary talks along
a common theme of `Shifting Cultures'.  Mary addressed the wider context
where university research culture shifts with respect to funding sources
and societal expectations.  My task is to look at those cultural shifts which have
affected, or will soon affect, the individual university student and hence the university culture itself.


\section{Shift in culture}
In 1959, Snow was writing
at a time when the `scientific culture' was ascendant and enjoying great popularity.
The twentieth century was a new age of enlightenment likened to that of the Elizabethan,
with Rutherford as Shakespeare.

Although the twentieth century, and particularly the times between and after the two
world wars, had been very good to science, it was not so good to the letters.
George Orwell wrote ``The literature of liberalism is coming to an end.
As for the writer, he is \ldots merely an anachronism, a hangover from the Bourgeois
age, \ldots from now onwards the all important fact for the creative writer is going to be
that this is not a writer's world.''\footnote{Quoted from de la Mothe, p. 34.}
Overstated perhaps, but it does convey the widely held sentiment that it was a better time
to start a scientific career than a literary one.\footnote{This case is convincingly made by
de la Mothe.}

For the most part Snow's essay on the `Two Cultures' was directed at the `other culture' --
the older, established culture of the literary intellectual.  Just look at the tests
he applies.  It is hard to imagine, even now, that any native English speaking scientist could have made
it through secondary school without having read at least one play of Shakespeare (and Shaw, and Ibsen, and Chekhov,  ...);
but it is still debatable whether a non-scientist should know the second law of thermodynamics (at least as {\em The Second
Law of Thermodynamics}). 
% How about the third law?  Especially since soon after Snow's
%lecture, knowledge of the first two laws has been put to song by that contemporary, comic, yet cultured
%English singing duo Flanders and Swann -- the third law might have been more challenging.
A somewhat comparable literary challenge might be having read and appreciated Horace or  Cicero.

Perhaps the most telling sign of this one-sidedness is that scientists, for the most part, seem to agree
with Snow's
assessment while humanists have been quite dismissive of Snow's `superficial' and even `silly' dichotomy.\footnote{E.g.
Allan Bloom, Russell Kirk, F.R. Leavis, Northrop Frye.}
Snow's `scientific culture', feeling its youthful strength and insecurity, wants
recognition from the established `intellectuals'.  To me, this seems to be more symptomatic
of a shift than of a separation.

In his rebuttal to critics, written four years after the Rede lecture, Snow struggles to defend his choice
of the word culture and of the number two.  Parenthetically he remarks that ``No one, I think, has
yet complained about the definite article.''

The choice of `culture' is defended by appealing to a dictionary definition meaning ``intellectual development,
development of the mind'' and also to the anthropological distinction made between living groups of people.
Were he to adopt a definition from Coleridge of culture being those `qualities and faculties which
characterise our humanity', Snow admits that neither the literary nor the
scientific constitute cultures but rather sub-cultures.  In this light, the cultural shift is one
of emphasis. In Snow's view, too long has our culture nurtured the literary and starved the scientific.
Snow is interested in having the balance redressed.

Accepting Snow's choice of the word culture, it is easy to see that the number two could
be many more.  Every specialization could be called a culture. Indeed, in the forty years
that has passed since the Rede lecture, sufficient has been written on Snow's `Two Cultures'
that it might legitimately constitute a specialization of its own -- 
a humbling thought for those of us here who have been asked to address the matter for the first time.

Snow defends the number `two' on grounds of simplicity -- it crystallizes the two extremes for contrast.
It is interesting that Snow briefly considers three by the possible separation of technology
from science.  He dismisses it because he has observed that
the technologist, when designing a new technology,
goes through much the same experience as a scientist in designing an experiment.
To this I feel compelled to
add the words of the professional chemist,  Primo Levi, whose fame is established as a writer.
They should evoke kindred feelings from any theoretician:
\begin{quote}
\ldots I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure,
similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of
differential calculus.  It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is,
commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and
describe them with the greatest rigour and the least clutter.''

{\footnotesize From {\em The Periodic Table}, 1975, p. 160.}
\end{quote}
\noindent
A more understandable justification would be that technology has so long been
tied up with science that its separation seems unnatural to Snow.

One thing that the number two has resulted in is an entire cottage industry devoted to
finding number three.
Snow himself started this.
Although `technology' was rejected, in his rebuttal to his critics he did  introduce what he
saw to be the
beginnings of a third culture.  This third culture was being formed
by the social sciences, in Snow's words those 
\begin{quote}
``\ldots intellectual persons in a variety of fields -- social history,
sociology, demography, political science, economics, government (in the American sense), psychology,
medicine, and social arts such as architecture. \ldots All of them are concerned with how human beings
are living or have lived -- and concerned, not in terms of legend, but of fact. 
% I am not
%implying that they agree with each other, but in their approach to cardinal problems --
%such as the human effects of the scientific revolution, which is the fighting point of this whole affair
%-- they display, at the least, a family resemblance.''

{\footnotesize page 70 of {\em The Two Cultures} second edition.}
\end{quote}
%\noindent
%These are what we now call the social sciences.

Allan Bloom, in his 1987 book
{\em The Closing of the American Mind}, identifies the big three disciplines which
``rule the academic roost and determine what is knowledge'' (p. 356).  These are
the natural sciences, which are doing well, the social sciences which are more robust being more in
harmony with the natural sciences although in Bloom's opinion they only succeed in ``aping \ldots the
methods of natural science'' (p. 358),
and the humanities which are languishing having decided ``to proudly set up shop next door'' rather than
to ``humbly find a place at [the] court'' of natural science (p. 358).
The shift from Snow's view of the cultural problems to Bloom's is staggering.

Snow thought that when this third culture came into existence it would serve to ease
communication between the two cultures.   This was because this third culture would have to
 ``be on speaking terms with the scientific one \ldots just to do its job.''
Perhaps it has but, if Bloom is correct, the communication sadly ended there.

More recently, John Brockman and others have seized on the communication between
science and others as the hallmark of the third culture.
His third culture consists of scientific thinkers who are able to communicate
directly with the lay public.  These include well known scientists like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould,
and Roger Penrose, and well known computer scientists like Daniel Hillis and Marvin Minsky.
%, and the occasional philosopher and science writer.

The primary medium for discourse seems to be the internet where
articles and follow up commentary are posted to open discussion groups.
The principal web site is www.edge.org\//3rd\_culture.
Whereas early scientists, at least as early as Archimedes, exchanged their ideas in letters written to other scientists,
challenging them to think on them, this third culture purports to replicate the exchange but with a much larger
collection of thinkers (scientists and the lay alike).
The writers and commentators are the third
culture, a culture of individuals whose ideas are reviewed by the public rather than by more traditional (and likely more
conservative) peer system.  Brockman writes
\begin{quote}
``Unlike previous intellectual pursuits, the achievements of the third culture are not the
marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: They will affect the
lives of everybody on the planet.''
\end{quote}
\noindent
Heady stuff.
Absent the internet, and so the immediacy of discussion, and this is just a
bunch of scientists, albeit articulate ones, trying to communicate to the lay public.
Nothing new to that.

In fact Snow had been quick in his rebuttal to point out the existence of such writers as J. Bronowski, G.H. Hardy, and A.N.
Whitehead who in ``some of the most beautiful prose of our time'' (p. 63) wrote directly for public consumption.
But this not a third culture in Snow's view, but simply additional evidence that science was deserving
of the word `culture'.

Scientists, curiously, have often not been kind to other scientists writing for the lay public,
particularly if it is found to be promoting a pet theory.
An early example is Descartes's biting review of Galileo's famous book, the ``Two New Sciences'':
\begin{quote}
``... his fashion of
writing in dialogues, where he introduces three persons who do nothing but exalt
each of his inventions in turn, greatly assists in [over]pricing his merchandise.''

{\footnotesize In a letter to the great experimental scientist Marin Mersenne (1588-1647),
dated 11 October 1638}
\end{quote}
\noindent
One is reminded of the current and much more public disagreement between Gould and Dawkins
where one worries publicly that the other writes perhaps too well.

A more interesting, and to me much more plausible, candidate for a third culture is the one
rejected by Snow, namely, technology. Not technology as Snow understood
it in 1963.  Far too much has changed since.  And not that of the specialized technology
expressly designed to address scientific questions.
The critical technology here is the general
purpose computer which now appears in schools and homes throughout every industrial society.

The ubiquity of this extremely malleable technology together with the instantaneous
worldwide communication between its users has enabled the growth of what Kevin
Kelly, the executive editor of {\em Wired} magazine, has called the `nerd culture'.

Kelly coined the term last year in
an essay in {\em Science}.  There he described the nerd culture as an outgrowth of science but
one which is quite separate from Snow's two cultures.
\begin{itemize}
\item The nerd culture pursues neither understanding of
the natural world nor of the human condition; it pursues novelty.
\item
Questions are framed so that the answer is
a new technology.
\item
It creates possibilities.
\item
Creation is preferred to creativity.
\end{itemize}
According to Kelly:
\begin{quote}
The culture of science, so long in the shadow of the culture of art, now has another
orientation to contend with, one grown from its own rib. 
\end{quote}
If Kelly is right, our culture is shifting in an important way again.  This time in a direction
which might affect science more than the humanities.

\section{The student}
Imagine a student now entering university.
% in the midst of this new cultural shift.
The `nerd culture' is part of his or her culture.
It could not be otherwise. 
%He or she could not avoid exposure to the `nerd culture', it is pervasive
%in books, movies, arcades, advertisement, school, and home -- it is part of today's student culture.
What does this student expect of a university education?
What do we expect of this student?

It is a time honoured tradition in academe to lament that students are not what they
once were.  But this just isn't true in any important way.  In terms of
intelligence and motivation little has changed since ancient Greece.

Students have always enjoyed, and will always enjoy, the contemplative and the puzzling.
And, they have always been, and will always be, interested in personal gain -- whether financial, or affiliation with an elite,
or fame, or power for its own sake.
It is no accident, for example, that students appearing in the Platonic dialogues
are intent on honing their rhetorical and dialectical skills so as to acquire and wield political
power.
Nor is it coincidence that the elite of Athenian society would charge Socrates not just with impiety
but also with the corruption of their youth.
One can imagine the appeal of a classical education to a youth in classical times.

Our principal means to give meaningful power to students is through specialization.
Acquiring some mastery of a subject requires spending considerable time
immersed in it, exploring a terrain so well that it not only becomes familiar
but that one can at least imagine how it might be extended into new territory.
This is an intellectual power that every educated person should experience.
Even so, a specialization which cannot assure the student a certain success in
society after graduation will be avoided, if not shunned.

Natural science might still provide that path to success but the nerd culture
has already informed students that computer science delivers in spades!
It is fresh, exciting, important, modern and has yet to experience its Chernobyl.

Like earlier times in the natural sciences,
the nerd culture presents an encouraging and friendly face.  Internet newsgroups
and the like provide a supportive and competitive forum for neophytes and experts alike.
Recall nineteenth century science, when letters to Nature might recount the
strange behaviour of a gentleman's dog, or describe flora and fauna observed on a
trip abroad.

Start up costs are minimal. One achieves 0 to 60\% effectiveness in real world application remarkably fast.
Many budding computer science students make money with these skills before reaching university -- graduate specialization is
unnecessary.  Think of the feedback to the student: older generations are amazed and the skills transfer easily to almost any
area of application!

Intellectually, general purpose computers are machines which manipulate symbols  -- some of these just happen to
represent floating point numbers.  The technology is extremely malleable and so provides
a new medium for representing ideas, expressing relationships, and modelling just about anything.
The only bounds are the imagination and the finite but very large number of states.

This is power -- power with some immediacy.  Joseph Weizenbaum expressed it first, and best, as follows:
\begin{quote}
The computer programmer, however, is a creator of
universes for which he alone is the lawgiver.
So, of course, is the designer of any game.
But universes of virtually unlimited complexity
can be created in the form of computer programs.
Moreover, and this is a crucial point, systems so formulated and elaborated
{\em act out} their programmed scripts.
They compliantly obey their laws and vividly exhibit their obedient behaviour.
No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful,
has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command
such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.

{\footnotesize  {\em Computer Power and Human Reason}, 1976, p.115.}
\end{quote}
Of course, Lord Acton's dictum applies. That this power corrupts was Weizenbaum's point,
applied to the often over-reaching claims of Artificial Intelligence.

\section{Challenges}

The nerd culture is, I think, a genuine cultural shift.  Perhaps not as large
as that from a humanities dominated culture to a science dominated culture,
but it does seem more a shift than a fashion.
How we are to accommodate this shift is a significant challenge to the university.

The last shift, that heralded by C.P. Snow's Rede lecture, was accommodated
at a substantial cost to the humanities -- a cost from which we have yet to recover.
Standing proudly aloof, as Bloom said of the humanities, seems a strategy
intent on reducing one's influence.  And aping the methods of the foreign culture
is quickly seen for what it is.  
%The natural sciences might learn something from this experience.

Fortunately there is much in the sciences that is already heavily computational
and this could easily be made more visible to the student.
Gratuitous computational use, however, is not on -- aping is aping.
It is important to remember that, while we may regard the computer as a powerful and even essential tool,
in the `nerd culture' it is a medium for expression.
%Requiring computer science courses is only a partial solution and
%one that needs to be adopted with care.

The challenge remains as to how we are to incorporate important cultural shifts.
We have a new shift that requires addressing and we have yet to
deal justly with the last much larger shift.  The same questions still need to be
answered.  What should constitute
an education?  Must specializations be so specialized?  And so soon?

Allan Bloom suggests that posing some of these questions would be a threat
to the peace, yet pose them we must.  But  where?

The enduring attraction of these conferences is that they
provide a rare and natural forum for these and like questions.

On that note, I thank you for your time and attention.
\end{document}

 Applications cross many areas from science to business to
the arts.


 


And never forget that the 
or power.
If something can be sufficiently mastered in a short period of time and which enables
them to  
 I would maintained that the students are in
fact what they always were, motivated by the same things now as in the past.
What has changed has been the nature of the surrounding culture within which
the student was raised.

In ancient Greece ....
Would a student then have chosen this?
The platonic dialogues are filled with young men who sought to acquire and to wield political power.
According to his biographer, John de la Mothe, Snow too was caught up in the trappings of
power.

It is a tradition amongst reflections of academics

When I look at my university, I see that in many ways the shift has already occurred and
continues to occur.  Waterloo has a reputation as the most innovative university in Canada.
Following Allan Bloom's method, I find that the most powerful disciplines at Waterloo are
the Faculty of Mathematics (where Computer Science resides) and the Faculty of
Engineering (where computer engineering resides).  The term `natural science' is a poor fit to
either of these disciplines; even `applied science' does not fit as well as `technology'.
The Faculty of Science is the third largest voice and the `social sciences' and the `humanities'
are just heard.  Born only two years before the Rede lecture,
Waterloo has built a reputation by responding to the cultural shift in education
from emphasis on the humanities
to emphasis on science to emphasis on technology.

Science grew substantially in importance in western culture in the twentieth century.
The two world wars and the cold war contributed largely to that.
The humanities lost ground.
Now at the end of the century, western society has governments tumbling like
puppy dogs over one another each devoting scarce and important resources to
information technology so as not to be left behind.
The average citizen is inundated by messages from every direction that
the information age is upon us, that e-commerce is the future, that global competitiveness
demands that the society be wired, that individual competitiveness demands that you be `wired'.

Has our culture shifted?  A better question perhaps is how far has it shifted?
It is perhaps not so surprising that in this climate the basic research valued so highly by scientists
sounds so much like the contemplative research valued by the humanists.

So how does all this sit with us at the university?

This third culture, if it has any staying power and I don't see why it would not, seems
to threaten more the science

Again as science was becoming an increasing important part of our popular culture
It represents a shift in what is deemed important by our incoming classes, and by society

A literary versus scientific dichotomy is not a
serious concern right now.  More serious is the
emphasis on specialization -- within educated
circles and within government circles.

To me the point of Snow's two cultures is to ensure breadth over
the exclusivity of specialization.

what are the opportunities for the individual?
what does the individual perceive them to be?
What should we educators be trying to provide?

\section{What is the attraction of science?}

Primo Levi {\em The Periodic Table} pp. 45-46
\begin{quote}
His father had died when he was a child; they were simple, poor people, and
since the boy was bright, they had decided to make him study so that he would
bring money home: he had accepted this with Piedmontese seriousness but
without enthusiasm.  He had travelled the route of high school -- {\em liceo}
-- aiming at the
highest marks with the least effort.  He was not interested in Catullus and
Descartes, he was interested in being promoted, and spending Sunday on his
skis and climbing the rocks.  He had chosen chemistry because he had thought
it better than other studies; it was a trade that dealt with things one can
see and touch, a way to earn one's bread less tiring than working as a
carpenter or a peasant.

We began studying physics together, and Sandro was surprised when I tried to
explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly
cultivating.  That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of
trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I
had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility.
That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is
necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves:  and that therefore
Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were
labouriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than
all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it,, it
even rhymed!  That if one looked for the bridge, the missing link, between
the world of words and the world of things, one did not have to look far:
it was there, in our Autenrieth, in our smoke-filled labs, and in our future
trade.

And finally, and fundamentally, an honest and open boy, did he not smell the
stench of Fascist truths which tainted the sky?  Did he not perceive it as an
ignominy that a thinking man should be asked to believe without thinking? 
Was he not filled with disgust at all the dogmas, all the unproved
affirmations, all the imperatives?  He did feel it; so then, how could he not
feel a new dignity and majesty in our study, how could he ignore the fact
that chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being  in themselves
nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidote to Fascism which he and I
were seeking, because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every
step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness, like the radio and newspapers?
\end{quote}
\begin{quote}
It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology
is the beginning of the end of humanity; that the idea of great progress is
a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there
is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking
it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.

Wittgenstein.
\end{quote}


Following shows power associated with education of students of the elite.
\begin{quote}
The young man who has drunk for the first time from that spring is as happy as
if he had found the treasure of wisdom; he is positively enraptured.  He will pick
up any discourse, draw all the ideas together to make them into one, then take them apart
and pull them to pieces.  He will puzzle first himself, then also others, badger whoever
comes near him, young and old, sparing not even his parents, nor anyone who
is willing to listen.  He would not spare even the barbarians, if only he found an interpreter
...

Plato ..
\end{quote}

\begin{quote}
The following incident may be of interest to readers of Nature.

We have a black retriever dog, very well trained.  She is kept chained in a kennel
in the yard, to which a number of fowls have access.  During the last few days a black
hen nearly every day lays an egg in the kennel, the dog meanwhile outside.
UNless someone takes the egg out directly afterwards, the dog takes possession of it and
eats it.

This curious proceeding raises the question whether the hen lays the egg in the
kennel for the dog's benefit, and whether the dog for her own advantage allows the
hen to enter the kennel without molestation.

Nature Vol. 89, 192 1912.
\end{quote}