I have changed my mind mostly because of reflections on a few entirely different topics: the field of 'cultural evolution,' the field of 'cognitive science' and some broader thinking about the study of specific historical periods and the study of strategic theory.
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I read broadly, in very different fields. It is astonishing for me to discover how often very specific subfields will be debating the exact same problem as a specific subfield in a different disciple, yet be almost entirely unaware of it.
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The whole cultural evolution literature is an interesting case example. Fundamentally, "cultural evolution" is a catch all term for trying to understand what cultural practices are, where they come from, and how they spread or are reproduced.
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A significant side-field is the attempt to use formal models imported from population genetics, ecology, or epidemiology to describe these processes.
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Cultural evolution mostly has grown out of a merging of research done by evolutionary anthropologists, cognitive and cultural psychologists, and at the edges a few economists and archeologists. It is inherently inter-disciplinary. And because of that it has spawned a lot of
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interesting research! Research with relevance across many more domains than currently cite it. It might be thought of as a success of making a *topic* the focus of study instead of a methodology. A lot of modern academia is organized around methodologies, not topics.
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But on the other hand, there are other domains that are directly relevant to this cultural evo literature that have not made a dent on it. An example: did you know there was an entire subfield of organizational theory (org theory is hosted in business schools) that has tried
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to apply Darwinian models to firms and firm success in the market place? There are hundreds of papers on this but none of this has filtered back to the cultural evolution folks. I have also seen still born attempts to use Darwinian modeling in poli sci, again none of which cites
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or is cited by the cultural evolution folks (there are also areas where cultural evo could intersect with political psychology, but that is an entirely different potential connection IMHO).
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While it is easy for people in cultural evolution to say "this should apply to everything!" (and shouldn't? which topic in the humanities, social science, or behavioral sciences is not connected to culture?), it is difficult for them to actually go about building those
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connections with different fields. Another example on the theme. Over the last two decades an increasingly large number of economists have started building formal models to explain the emergence of various historical institutions. Political scientists
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especially those in the political economy field, have converged upon more or less the same methods. In fact I think political scientists tend to do it better because they work multiple methods: they will build a formal model like the economists do, they will do historical
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research to "process trace" (which basically means, "write a historical narrative") of a specific case study, and then if the data is of the sort that allows for it, they will do a large-n regression study of the same phenomena--the idea here being that if you can demonstrate the
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same case through multiple methods then the likelihood you've identified something real has increased. (Historical economists usually will do this when it comes time to expand their papers into books). I happen to think these tools are really neat. But what if someone
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wants to apply them to an era like Sengoku Japan or Han Dynasty China? Well, I think it is possible. But the hurdles are large. The people who study those periods tend to be lodged in East Asian Language and Civilization departments. They can give you the language and source
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training to work with those eras, but not the training in formal methods. On the flip side, no historical economist or political scientist can give you training in archeological data or classical Japanese. But what if you genuinely need *both* tool sets to answer the
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questions you want to answer? You have no options. The reason you have no options is partially because of the way each of the existing disciplines you would be working with defines what it studies. Why some area specialists will dissent from this, social scientists tend to ask,
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"which case studies best test theory x?" not "which theories best explain case x?" Another way to ask: does this field create experts in *case study x* or experts in *developing set of theories [a, b, c, ....] in the methodology of x*?
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Most fields are for the second. The promise of something like "progress studies" then is that if done right, it reorients expertise from a the study of a method to a study of a topic. Now Cowen is not really that clear in what the "progress" in "progress studies" actually means
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but what I *think* he is getting at is "fruitful epistemic communities." i.e., why do some communities create more knowledge/successfully apply that knowledge in form of usable technology than others? People made fun of this saying, "well that is what history of science is for"
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that is what is development economics is for" and so forth. But that rather misses the point. History of science, philosophy of science, economics of innovation, development economics, historical economics, several subfields of business studies, sociology of science & firms
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as well as a host of applied knowledge and lessons from practitioners that have yet to be nailed down into academic theories are all potential repositories of progress studies knowledge...
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but are they in dialogue with each other? Do they create researchers who are familiar w/ and can choose between the methodologies of *all* of these different fields depending on their needs? That is the utility gained by lumping it together as progress studies instead of keeping
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things in their home disciplines. But a warning: cognitive science was born exactly under these same auspices. Lets study the mind. Lets throw linguistics, anthropology, computer science, philosophy, neuroscience, and cognitive psych together into one research program.
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Four decades later and the data is in: as a discipline it has mostly failed. The main journals mostly publishes cognitive psychology; people in the other fields don't bother to submit. Most universities that offer a cognitive science degree do so as an adjunct to a psych degree
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with a few offering as an adjunct to a mostly AI degree. Real consilience is hard to find. (The sole exception being Stanford BA in symbolic systems and the CogMaster in Paris). What started out as a grand multi-disciplinary endeavor defined by a common topic ended up 1 thing.
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Now there were reasons for that--a lot of the assumptions about 'representations' that putatively tied the original disciplines together into one whole turned out to be incorrect. But the story is also partially a sociological one.
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That is the sort of thing Progress Studies founding fathers would have to think about carefully as they go about creating this new field.
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End of conversation
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