I know this is a bit old, but I think about this a lot and thought I’d leave some of my ideas.
Here goes. Attention warning: 600+ words. I have cut it down quite a bit but have the edits saved if you are interested.
(1) It is important to remember EBNA-style thinking has its own intellectual history.[1] An “emotionally sensitive person” from the 17th century would be totally different (in actions, skills, self-perception, and social perception) from one today. To the extent modern EBNA people think of their intuitions as having unique epistemic and intellectual utility, they are probably following the “romantic” movement. Call them “Humanities-EBNA types”
Romanticism is explicitly committed to irrationality, a lack of systemisation; incompleteness; and the unreliable of generalisation, abstraction, causality, predictability, legibility, and order. For the Romantic, a map not only fails to represent the territory, but the process of mapping destroys it.[2] Obviously this is to analytical rigour as oil is to water.
The rationalist tendency is to think of social intuition as a potent, but ultimately reproducible, heuristic. The intuition of EBNA people is like, as you say, mathematical intuition or intuitive grip strength when making a cup of coffee. Is there a way to learn these skills systematically...? Call these types “STEM-EBNA types.”
(2) STEM-EBNA people believe in the utility (and necessity) of interdisciplinary study. (In terms of intellectual history, this is straightforwardly a descendent of 18th century Enlightenment views).
In practice, you end up with highly interdisciplinary social science which brackets messy human subjectivity into shape-rotatable boxes and then operates on them systematically. The extent to which there is signal loss depends on (A) your goals and standards for signal/noise; and (B) the complexity of the qualia in question being bracketed.
This is presumably the kind of research you are interested in and which you think EBNA skills could be used to great labour-saving effect.
(3) You will have noticed such bracketing appears incompatible with the romantic, Humanities-EBNA type of thinking. Love is not just a chemical in the brain… I am a naturalist myself, so for me the question is how much signal loss occurs when you bracket messy romantic feelings like “love”, “sense of justice” or “loyalty.” Some humanities scholars say the loss is 100% because every feeling is radically unique. A more reasonable test for signal loss:
is the subjective meaning lost when bracketing perceptible to the average person, such that it alters any of theirrecordable behaviour?
There is no reason this cannot change over time: as our methods get subtler and more fine-grained the signal loss decreases. That said, we should remember what is lost could be numerically insignificant but sometimes causally, or intellectually, of great importance. The most direct expression of this heuristic is Cloud Atlas. See also “the unreasonable effectiveness of small groups with radical ideas.”
Two extra points of interest.
The first is that romanticism has penetrated very deeply into the modern (western?) mind. Even the most thoroughgoing naturalists—say, Gwern—remain at least emotionally attached to a romantic residual present in great art. We like to believe in the ineffable human experience which cannot be explained away by regression models or evo biology. Human after all.
The second is that there is another group committed to a materialistic, rational view of human behaviour: Marxists. It is an open question whether Marxist Russians and Chinese people deeply internalise this materialism. Perhaps they think in a thoroughly ‘disenchanted’, systematic manner and their thought, as a result, does not produce the same problem of signal loss. Are they merely unconverted romantics...?
Much of this is from Isaiah Berlin’s essays in The Crooked Timber of Humanity and The Roots of Romanticism. Worth reading if you want to learn about the origins and structure of current EBNA thinking.
I know this is a bit old, but I think about this a lot and thought I’d leave some of my ideas.
Here goes. Attention warning: 600+ words. I have cut it down quite a bit but have the edits saved if you are interested.
(1) It is important to remember EBNA-style thinking has its own intellectual history.[1] An “emotionally sensitive person” from the 17th century would be totally different (in actions, skills, self-perception, and social perception) from one today. To the extent modern EBNA people think of their intuitions as having unique epistemic and intellectual utility, they are probably following the “romantic” movement. Call them “Humanities-EBNA types”
Romanticism is explicitly committed to irrationality, a lack of systemisation; incompleteness; and the unreliable of generalisation, abstraction, causality, predictability, legibility, and order. For the Romantic, a map not only fails to represent the territory, but the process of mapping destroys it.[2] Obviously this is to analytical rigour as oil is to water.
The rationalist tendency is to think of social intuition as a potent, but ultimately reproducible, heuristic. The intuition of EBNA people is like, as you say, mathematical intuition or intuitive grip strength when making a cup of coffee. Is there a way to learn these skills systematically...? Call these types “STEM-EBNA types.”
(2) STEM-EBNA people believe in the utility (and necessity) of interdisciplinary study. (In terms of intellectual history, this is straightforwardly a descendent of 18th century Enlightenment views).
In practice, you end up with highly interdisciplinary social science which brackets messy human subjectivity into shape-rotatable boxes and then operates on them systematically. The extent to which there is signal loss depends on (A) your goals and standards for signal/noise; and (B) the complexity of the qualia in question being bracketed.
This is presumably the kind of research you are interested in and which you think EBNA skills could be used to great labour-saving effect.
(3) You will have noticed such bracketing appears incompatible with the romantic, Humanities-EBNA type of thinking. Love is not just a chemical in the brain… I am a naturalist myself, so for me the question is how much signal loss occurs when you bracket messy romantic feelings like “love”, “sense of justice” or “loyalty.” Some humanities scholars say the loss is 100% because every feeling is radically unique. A more reasonable test for signal loss:
is the subjective meaning lost when bracketing perceptible to the average person, such that it alters any of their recordable behaviour?
There is no reason this cannot change over time: as our methods get subtler and more fine-grained the signal loss decreases. That said, we should remember what is lost could be numerically insignificant but sometimes causally, or intellectually, of great importance. The most direct expression of this heuristic is Cloud Atlas. See also “the unreasonable effectiveness of small groups with radical ideas.”
Two extra points of interest.
The first is that romanticism has penetrated very deeply into the modern (western?) mind. Even the most thoroughgoing naturalists—say, Gwern—remain at least emotionally attached to a romantic residual present in great art. We like to believe in the ineffable human experience which cannot be explained away by regression models or evo biology. Human after all.
The second is that there is another group committed to a materialistic, rational view of human behaviour: Marxists. It is an open question whether Marxist Russians and Chinese people deeply internalise this materialism. Perhaps they think in a thoroughly ‘disenchanted’, systematic manner and their thought, as a result, does not produce the same problem of signal loss. Are they merely unconverted romantics...?
Note, there is also critical theory and postmodernism which are particularly popular today. These are such gobbledygook they do not bear discussion.
Much of this is from Isaiah Berlin’s essays in The Crooked Timber of Humanity and The Roots of Romanticism. Worth reading if you want to learn about the origins and structure of current EBNA thinking.