Metaversal Mining

In my previous post ‘End of Newtonian thinking, please !’ I made that case that the current scientific paradigm exemplified by a statistical view of the physical universe is not being reflected in everyday life. I’m going to explore that a little more deeply here.

Now that I’ve read around the topic a little I find that my view strongly reflects that of Thomas Kuhn, who’s position was that scientific endeavour can be represented by a series of paradigm shifts punctuating a continuum of scientific progress. For Kuhn the long phases of ‘normal’ development provided by a single dominant problem-solving paradigm allow scientists to test how far a particular mode of thought can be stretched before it breaks down, at which point we must assume that either progress slows or that paradigm is overturned by a new ‘revolutionary’ paradigm.
A classic example of this would be the acceptance of Einsteinian relativistic physics over Newtonian mechanics. Where Newtonian mechanics is a perfectly serviceable worldview for a set of problems, it breaks down when you start to apply it to problems that are outside, what I’ll call here, ‘everyday physics’ involved in stopping a car or building a house.

The Einsteinian revolution was quick in scientific terms. It only took a few decades to become the dominant scientific paradigm, but what I was trying to get across in my previous post was that in popular discourse it remains the dominant paradigm, when in actual fact science has moved on into the statistical worldview. We are not seeing the scientific paradigm being reflected in the dominant popular discourse.

I’ll leave science behind for a few moments to explain what I believe is currently happening at a very high level in popular discourse.

There is a trend within elites to strongly uptake the new statistical paradigm, I think that this is shown in the use of probabilistic modeling of financial markets and climate systems, evidence-based policy-making, and moves to democratise data access. These are all strongly rationalist moves based around complex systems that require non-deterministic analysis if the statistical paradigm is to be met.
I believe that there is a counter-point trend that is strongly deterministic in nature, and that adheres to the scientific paradigm of Newton’s mechanical universe. This is a hierarchical worldview that sees rationality in order and rejects complexity as a fundamental position. I see this position in ideology-based politics, rejection of the new mathematics of complex systems (whether that be climate science or quantitative financial analysis) and positions that advocate security over innovation or risk.

So I think we have a problem since the arguments deployed by adherents of either worldview will not cohere with the arguments of the other. They can’t since they are operating on either side of a scientific paradigm shift.

As populations age it is generally thought they tend to conservative positions (order, security, predictability), so I don’t think that it’d be much of a stretch to say that this issue is going to get worse in the short term, but I think that there may be things that we can do about it. You will have to indulge me for a moment while I explain how popular discourse could be shifted up the paradigm ladder in a novel and entertaining way.

To me the key is the TV game show. The most populist pursuit known to man. Sit down on a Saturday night and watch some bright lights and loud noises and lose the cares of a working week. Whatever your views on this kind of entertainment you can’t deny their success. They are on virtually every TV channel in the world.
In the 60s and 70s we saw simple question and answer game shows like Ask the Family and Mastermind. In the 80s and 90s we saw problem solving rise as a genre with The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor and 3-2-1, and now in the 00s we see the Big Brother phenomenon and the ‘talent’ show as dominant genres. It may seem a strange thing to say but I think that this represents a paradigm shift in popular discourse from Newtonian to a relativistic worldview (with a brief spell of meritocracy between the two).

That requires an explanation.
The simple mechanics of the Newtonian game show seems to me obvious; a problem is presented, it is solved or not solved and a reward or penalty is earned. There is a simple cause and effect relationship between the problem and the reward.
We’ll bypass the meritocratic game shows because I think that, while they may represent the turbulent revolutionary period when paradigms are shifting in the wider populist discourse (they coincide with Thatcherism and all the social and economic changes that it entailed), I don’t think that they themselves actually represent the new scientific paradigm. A new social paradigm maybe, but not the scientific paradigm that we are talking about here.
Into the noughties; Big Brother and its clones, and all the multitude of talent shows (the ‘Idols’, Britain’s Got Talent, Popstar, etc, etc). There is no absolute in these shows, no cause and effect. All individual success or failure is relative to the other participants in the shows. The mechanics have moved from Newtonian to relativistic.

The death of Big Brother and (soon to come) the whole reality show genre, and the popular subversion of the talent show genre (as shown by John Sergeant and Jedward) is starting to offer space for the next generation of game shows and I propose that their dominant rhetorical position should be from the statistical worldview. Populist discourse needs to catch up with scientific discourse if we are ever to have society moving in step. There will always be a lag between science in the fore and populist discourse in the rear, but the statistical worldview has been the dominant scientific paradigm for almost 80 years. That is too long a lag, populist discourse needs to catch up.