The Ugly Truth
I love a good mash-up, so let me ask you this: What do you get when you mash-up the ideas of two prolific female academics, one in social work and the other in theoretical physics?
The answer is: my musings for this week’s post, which boils down to the phrase “the ugly truth.”
A Tale of Two Academics
So which two academics am I talking about and which two ideas? Here’s a quick rundown (I’ve included links to their webpages at the bottom of this post in case you want to follow-up):
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Brené Brown – Ph.D. in social work
Currently based at the University of Houston, Brown studies topics like the intersection between courage, vulnerability, and leadership. She’s an academic researcher, a public speaker, and runs a non-profit that disseminates much of her work in the form of research-based tools and workshops.
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Sabine Hossenfelder – Ph.D. in physics
Currently based at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Hossenfelder studies topics like the foundations of physics and the intersection between philosophy, sociology, and science. She’s an academic researcher, a public speaker, and writes pieces communicating science to the public as well as maintaining a blog well-known in physics circles.
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In the midst of simultaneously reading the most recent popular books published by these two researchers (Dare to Lead by Brown and Lost in Math by Hossenfelder), I was struck by a link between the two. That link had to do with the premise of Hossenfelder’s book and one of the leadership skills Brown promotes in her book.
Both of these involve the word “beauty.”
Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math
Hossenfelder argues that physicists (in her case, especially taken to mean theoretical particle physicists and cosmologists) have been led astray by using the concept of “beauty” to guide theoretical decision-making as well as lobbying for which experiments to carry out to test those theories. By “using” I mean that she illustrates through one-on-one interview snippets how theorists rely on beauty to help them make choices about what to pursue and what to pass by. She also illustrates, through a review of the literature, how theoretical physicists have tried to define beauty both with words (like “simplicity” and “symmetry”) and with numbers (through concepts like “naturalness”, the belief that dimensionless numbers should be close to the value 1).
According to Hossenfelder, this beauty principle does not drive the theoretical effort among just a small few, but among the working many. And she thinks it’s a problem. Her main reason for pointing the finger is the belief that this strategy has not yet produced any new successful theoretical results in the last few decades.
The best quote to sum up Hossenfelder’s book in my reading so far is this:
“The modern faith in beauty’s guidance [in physics] is, therefore, built on its use in the development of the standard model and general relativity; it is commonly rationalized as an experience value: they noticed it works, and it seems only prudent to continue using it.” (page 26)
Funny that Hossenfelder should mention values. Values are something Brown talks about at length.
Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead
The crux of Brown’s book Dare to Lead is about acknowledging and leveraging qualities that make us human (vulnerability, empathy, values, courage) in a forthright, honest, and authentic way in order to become better leaders. Brown illustrates her concepts with numerous organizational and individual leader case studies peppered throughout the book, as well as copious academic research from her team on this specific topic.
According to Brown, the prime cause of a lack of daring leadership is cautious leadership, best expressed through the metaphor of entering an arena fully clothed in heavy duty armor. The energy put in to developing and carrying the armor takes away from the energy left to masterfully explore the arena.
Here, I’m most interested in her thoughts on values and the role they should play in daring leadership.
In case you’re wondering, Brown defines leadership as “anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.” (page 4)
(It’s the idea of developing potential, which resonates with scientific discovery, that caught my eye when I read the back cover of the book on a lay-over in Amsterdam.)
Brown traces much of our motives to our values: they drive our behavior and determine our comfort level when we take actions that either align with (causing us to feel purposeful or content) or run counter to (causing us to feel squeamish or guilty) our values.
The best quote to sum up Brown’s discussion of values is this one:
“More often than not, our values are what lead us to the arena door – we’re willing to do something uncomfortable and daring because of our beliefs. And when we get in there and stumble or fall, we need our values to remind us why we went in, especially when we are facedown, covered in dust and sweat and blood.” ( page 186)
One last detail from Brown’s book will prime you for my mash-up: On page 188 of her book, Brown gives a lengthy list of 100 plus items (derived in her research) from which to identify your core values.
The ninth word down on the list of values? Beauty.
Beauty is Just Another Motive
So here’s where the mash-up begins. And let me throw in one more element, just to make it fun. Let me put this all in a metaphor, like something from a cheesy crime procedural TV show. Ready to put two-and-two together and solve a mystery?
So, according to Hossenfelder a crime against physics has been committed (the failure to come up with something new in a timely fashion, after spending a lot of money trying to come up with something new).
Physicists have taken advantage of the means (applying beauty as a guiding principle) and the opportunity (being employed as physicists, exclusively at academic institutions in her examples) to commit this crime.
If you watch enough crime shows, you’ll know the overused phrase that TV detectives rely on. Find the “means, motive, and opportunity” and you’ll find your criminal.
Hossenfelder has already singled out physicists as the perps. But as a detective she would be at a loss for motive (other than maybe, “everybody else was doing it and I wanted to keep my job”).
Here, I imagine Brown chiming in as her spunky detective partner. Hossenfelder has laid out her analytic, but impersonal accounting, and now Brown swoops in to add the humane touch. “No, no, Sabine,” Brown says. “Beauty was not the means; it was the motive. The means was getting the research funding, the students, the equipment. But the motive, well that’s just people being people: it was the pursuit of beauty they could call their own.”
Okay, maybe melodrama and mash-ups don’t go together so great, but this is an interesting line of thought:
Brown’s work suggests that the pursuit of beauty as a methodological choice may not just be about expediency or experience, but also about personal fulfillment. That’s deep stuff. And if it’s true, then it throws the idea of changing tactics into a different category.
Then it means your changing the motive, not the means. Beauty isn’t just about a guiding principle that might work, it’s about what you believe gives your work meaning when it does succeed. And convincing someone to change their motive is a much taller order than convincing them to change their means. Especially if their motives are values-driven (whether they realize it or not).
If You Can’t Be the Change You Want to See in the World then Bring the Change
Trying to constrain what motives are most likely to bring about scientific discovery seems to me like it might be a fool’s errand.
Odds are it’s about the right time, right place, and right motive, to put you in a position to recognize the undiscovered. In Hossenfelder’s defense, I think she is unwilling to accept human motives (in an appendix she advises that you try to remove human bias completely) because she’s afraid it will undermine the ability to understand the truth (understanding and truth are numbers 109 and 108 on Brown’s values list). But there’s more than one way to reach an outcome. If our motives are driven by values and run deep, then instead of asking scientists to change motives, we could also just bring in more people with different motives and give them a seat at the table. In that way you bring these alternatives by bringing in people who value those approaches and use them by default.
And Brown’s values list includes a lot of words that easily might be interesting alternative motives (or guiding model-building principles), like adaptability, balance, curiosity, efficiency, harmony, independence, knowledge, learning, legacy, nature, order, and simplicity (just to name a few).
In the spirit of a seat at the table of debate, Hossenfelder’s book offers a counter-value to the beauty principle in model-building (understanding and truth). And Brown’s book offers a counter-value to the stoicism principle in leadership (courage and vulnerability, # 24 and # 113 on her values list). These two researchers bring their own motives and values, serving as the bearers of not only alternative perspectives, but more importantly alternative actions that might help make progress.
[In case you’re wondering, my three core values, in priority order, are hope (# 52 on the list), respect (# 87), and affection (not on Brown’s list). That may help clarify my motives for everything on The Insightful Scientist website.]
The Ugly Truth
You might wonder why I suggest giving more people with different values a seat at the table, your discussion round table.
Why not just try one set of values and if it doesn’t work then replace them with a new set of people with different values? Or why not just try and change your values until you achieve success?
The tricky thing about values is that it’s hard to change them once their set, usually sometime in middle childhood. The useful thing about values is that it’s also hard to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. That lack of imagination, empathy, and sympathy usually turns into skepticism. And skepticism done right can be tremendously helpful to science, especially when it comes to verifying possible discoveries.
If we can’t understand, or don’t agree with, someone else’s motives then we automatically want and need more data and evidence to agree with their conclusions. We set the bar of proof higher when it’s an ugly truth (to us) than when it’s a beautiful explanation (to us).
For example, suppose one scientist believes that embracing complexity captures the wonder of nature by valuing diversity, while another scientist believes that simplicity captures the wonder of nature by valuing connection. We may find that while one of these people thinks needing many models for specific cases has a greater feel of “truthiness” the other person believes that having as few models as possible means you’re on the right track. The gap between these two approaches must be bridged because at the end of the day scientific discovery is about consensus converging to a base set of truths through observation and evidence. Filling the gaps between scientific findings and their associated motives ensures that science has a more solid foundation. And, in our example, we may find that while at one time resources make simplicity the better strategy, at another time complexity may be just the thing for a breakthrough.
Conflicting values and the guiding principles they generate in scientific work are like unfamiliar or misshapen vegetables usually hidden from view. It’s going to take more convincing to put money into it by buying it, to invest effort in it by cooking it, and to be willing to internalize it by swallowing it. You’d maybe rather just ignore it or toss it in the garbage. But you never know, one person’s ugly truth may turn out to be another person’s satisfying ending. If we don’t all sit down and share a meal together, how will we find out?
Interesting Stuff Related to This Post
- Website – Brené Brown’s homepage
- Website – Sabine Hossenfelder’s blog Backreaction
- Elisabeth Braw, “Misshapen fruit and vegetables: what is the business case?”, The Guardian (online), September 3, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/misshapen-fruit-vegetables-business-case.
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How to cite this post in a reference list:
Bernadette K. Cogswell, “The Ugly Truth”, The Insightful Scientist Blog, August 9, 2019, https://insightfulscientist.com/blog/2019/the-ugly-truth.
[Page feature photo: A pretty, pert bunch of Laotian purple-striped eggplants, roughly the size of ping pong balls. Photo by Peter Hershey on Unsplash.]