Myers-Briggs, Culture Wars, and the Avant-Garde

In the process of reading The Introvert Advantage, a few facts converged in my mind:

• Extroverts outnumber introverts 3 to 1 in the general populace.
• The science, space, and engineering communities that I support (as a semi-extroverted introvert, I'll note) are dominated by introverts.
• My extroverted friend Darlene the Science Cheerleader has been fighting against stereotypes and for broader public participation in science- and technology-related debates.
• Awhile back, I wrote an article about the arrival of professionals (i.e., extroverted marketing types) into the space advocacy business.

It has since occurred to me that the "two cultures" identified by C. P. Snow in the early 1960s were misidentified. The war might not be between cultures but between temperaments: between the introverts and the extroverts.

Consider a few side effects of being introverted:

• Natural quietude and deep (internalized) thinking.
• A tendency to focus deeply on topics of personal interest, often in compensation for social awkwardness.
• A tendency to believe, often rightly, that others don't understand you or your interests.

The result of these introverted tendencies is a long-running snobbery by introverted and technically minded individuals against generally socially minded extroverts. This snobbery is not limited to the science or engineering worlds, however; introverted artists often exhibit pessimistic or depressive outlooks and tend to look down on optimistic extroverts (e.g. cheerleaders).

What, then, is the "culture war" or "temperament war" about? I think it has to do with influence, power, and money. There are many, many more extroverts than introverts, yet introverts often monopolize the cultures of high technology and the arts, which generate much of the wealth in this country. The majority wants a piece of the action.

That is why "geek" is now more chic.

That is why fantasy, science fiction, and comic book-based movies are now the big money makers in Hollywood.

That is why the shape of space exploration is shifting toward a more participatory activity.

That might be why we have our first nerd President.


"Geek" might be chic, but the extroverts are taking over, and they now want their say on issues which, up to now, were controlled by introverts because they were the only ones with enough interest to pay attention to them.

So what will be the end result of this invasion of the introverts' domain by extroverts? Speaking as a moderately extroverted introvert, if I had to guess I'd say that as "geek space" becomes more mainstream, the introverts will move on to other, even more esoteric interests, ideas, art forms, and technologies.

Introverts might not say much, but they do keep the avant-garde moving steadily onward, continually pushing the boundaries of the human experience. So the "war" won't be won or lost. Instead, the introverts will simply move the battle lines somewhere they can get a little peace and quiet. As with anything avant-garde, by the time the avant-garde has become mainstream, the frontier has already moved on, simply because introverts hate crowds.

Science, Culture, and Politics

I received the following email from Darlene the Science Cheerleader just before I was off to see Star Trek last night:

Tomorrow morning, I'll be part of a panel discussion (moderated by Chris Mooney at the NY Academy of Sciences) examining the merger between the two cultures of science and politics-what has happened thus far and what remains to be done. Obviously, I plan to talk a bit about the potential a renewed Office of Tech Assessment--one that includes mechanisms for public participation--holds in this realm. I'd like to hear from you. What efforts, in your opinion, have improved science/politics relations; which have hurt; and what innovative approaches should be considered? Thank you for your thoughts. I'll report back on developments.

-Darlene
http://www.sciencecheerleader.com/
http://www.nyas.org/events/eventDetail.asp?eventID=14210&date=5/9/2009%208:00:00%20AM

My first response to Dar was more in line with the two cultures C. P. Snow actually wrote about: science and the humanities. It ran something like this.

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I think the sciences and humanities have begun making better connections than before, and the feedback has gone both ways. Since the late 1800s, science fiction in its modern form has sought to address the moral and social implications of new technologies by simply telling stories about machines that hadn't been invented yet. Aside from some deep thinkers like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, most SF writers--and writing--were kept on the back shelves, sometimes with good reason.

In the 50+ years since World War II, and the 40+ years since C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures was written, the humanities and the sciences have become better acquainted with each other because they had to. Our technologies have advanced at an increasingly rapid rate at all levels--computers, materials, genetic engineering, aerospace, etc.--and since especially the late 1960s, human beings have begun to wrestle with serious moral and ethical dilemmas related to these developments. This is the perfect stuff of storytelling. Of course in order to tell a story, you have to get smart about your subject, or you'll look like a fool when half the world's physicists call you out for an obvious factual error. Science fiction writers have had to follow these rules for decades, but it's only now, as SF has become part of the mainstream, that more and more writers have had to "get smart" about how the scientific and engineering world works.

At the same time that the humanities are "discovering" Heinlein, Vonnegut, Ellison, Herbert, Asimov, and Clarke, the science and engineering communities are faced with the sometimes-embarrassing fact that they are now celebrities or role models or voices of authority. However, since these are the folks who have their hands on the levers that move our society and very economy, they are now subject to much greater scrutiny. Fearless beliefs in automatic progress are beginning to become embedded in our culture (something that happened in Europe after World War I). Scientists and inventors (engineers) are no longer the amiable, but fundamentally good cranks tinkering in their garage; they are often now seen as the bad guys in movies. Or, if not the bad guys, sometimes naive fools who have let uncontrollable death upon the world. A currently popular sub-genre of SF is "alternate history," in which historical events take different turns (say, the Germans winning World War II, or the South winning the Civil War). This genre is more or less a reaction to the different ways history is now interpreted in schools through the filters of feminism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, etc.

For a good look at science fiction today, one can point to the late Michael Crichton, who doesn't even appear on the SF shelves anymore; or to Kim Stanley Robinson, who has written books about environmental collapse here on Earth or environmental development on Mars; or to Mary Doria Russell, who has written a couple of brilliant books about "first contact" with alien species and the terrible errors that can come about through misunderstandings. Or one can open up a simple romance like The Time Traveler's Wife. I believe even Danielle Steele has taken on technology-related themes on occasion.

So, to summarize, the relationship between science and the humanities has improved to the point where science fiction has become one of the bestselling literary and movie genres in the world. People are interested in the effects of advancing technology because they see it happening all around them, and SF has a long tradition of helping people anticipate the future. What remains to be seen is what sorts of stories will be told in the future as literature and the other arts hold the mirror up to ourselves and ask us what we want it to look like.

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This morning I got my head clear and thought about Dar's specific question, which was about science and politics. I didn't come up with very many solutions, but hopefully they're discernable if one reads between the lines.

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On the plus side of science, technology, and government: since World War II, governments have come to recognize the importance of investments in basic science and technology as fundamental parts of the national infrastructure. In a capitalist society, research and development that does NOT have any potential to show a profit rightly belongs to the public sector. The government can afford to spend the time and money on things that might or might not become useful in a practical sense. Once their findings are known, these findings should then be shared with the general public, because knowldege is something meant to be shared.

However, where government gets it wrong, and has continued to get it wrong, is by funding targeted, applied research. The Manhattan Project and Project Apollo are the pre-eminent triumphs of government R&D. Again, only governments can do things like this. If money is no object, but time is, government can command the resources and throw as much money as they want at a problem, and eventually it will be solved.

There are several negative side effects to government R&D:

1. The Manhattan Project showed that any technical problem CAN be solved if you throw enough money, people, and resources at it. This is the model that eventually gave birth to America's landing on the Moon. All well and good--both projects were immensely successful, created new knowledge, and employed thousands of new people in technical disciplines. Unfortunately, every scientific and technology field since then has hoped for that type of funding from Uncle Sam instead of relying on private nonprofit organizations. Everyone comes to feed at the federal trough now.
2. Some people--politicians and scientists/engineers--end up believing that ONLY massive federal efforts will produce great results. Some people believe that the Saturn V rocket was the only way human beings could get to the Moon. Untrue, as the differing designs from Russia, Europe, and China have proven. There is more than one solution to a problem. Saturn V was not a reusable vehicle. U.S. near-space R&D up until the late 1950s was trying to expand our capabilities by building on our knowledge of airplanes, which are meant to be reusable. Instead, our space vehicles are based on nuclear weapons, which are only meant to be flown once.
3. Worse, politicians bought into the notion that "If we can put a man on the moon, we can do X," with "X" being to solve some social problem, like poverty or racism, which isn't as susceptible to Manhattan Project or Apollo-like engineering.
4. It picks winners and losers. Government has a long history of investing in winners and losers, from canals to railroads to airlines. Again, the proper model is for government to serve as an incubator of fundamental, basic science and technologies, and then a distributor of information to the private sector so that individuals and businesses can profit from creative applications of new knowledge. The more government tries to pick winners and losers--the current example is by trying to force developments on "green" technology--the more intrusive it will continue to be in the efficient functioning of the free market.

Not sure how much of that, if anything, that Darlene will be able to use, but I thought I'd get the ideas out there one way or another. Comments welcome.

Two Cultures Event in NY

This just came over the wire from Darlene the Science Cheerleader. If you have no idea what the "Two Cultures" book is all about, see my review here: http://bartacus.blogspot.com/2008/01/book-review-two-cultures-c.html

Come meet me in NYC on May 9th at the NY Academy of Sciences. I’m one of the speakers at the Two Cultures event, described below by Shawn Otto, CEO of ScienceDebate.org:

We live in a time when more scientists are being trained than ever before, with nearly 30,000 science PhDs awarded in 2006. Yet scientists find themselves frustrated by inaccurate media coverage, poor science education, public science illiteracy, a resurgence of anti-evolutionism, and challenges to scientific expertise on issues like climate change.

In his seminal lecture, “The Two Cultures,” delivered on May 7, 1959, the British ovelist, physicist, and government science adviser C.P. Snow famously decried a “gulf of mutual incomprehension between science and the humanities.” For Snow, this rift was “a sheer loss to us all.”

In an age when the world’s greatest challenges revolve around questions of science and technology, in a world governed by policymakers and a public sometimes unaware of science’s role in dealing with those challenges, this rift can undermine political will and the ability to solve them. This rift is the focus of our work at Science Debate.

On May 9, 2009 visionaries, scientists, authors, and the media will join together to explore the persistence of the “two cultures” gap and how it can be overcome. Don’t miss this unique and important event, featuring keynote addresses by Pulitzer Prize winner E.O. Wilson, former Congressman John Porter, and Segway inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen, and panelists including Matthew Chapman, Darlene Cavalier, Ann Druyan, Ira Flatow, Lawrence Krauss, Kenneth Miller, Shawn Otto, Stuart Pimm, Corey Powell, Andrew Revkin, and many others, cosponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, Science & The City, the Science Communication Consortium, ScienceDebate.Org, and our media sponsor, Discover Magazine. The moderators include Science Debate’s Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum, co-authors of the forthcoming book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.

Book Review: The Two Cultures

C. P. Snow delivered a lecture to an audience of intellectuals at Cambridge in 1959 about the “two cultures” of the humanities and the sciences. His essential thesis was that the West was suffering—and would continue to suffer—from this disconnect between the two groups. He followed up this lecture with a second in 1963, responding to some of the criticisms and comments he received regarding the first lecture. These two lectures comprise The Two Cultures, and they are well worth reading today. The book also includes a long introductory essay, which I confess not to have read because I don’t like people explaining to me what something means if I can figure it out for myself.

As a technical writer, I have a special connection to this topic simply because my job is to translate between the two cultures. The other professionals that operate on the border between the two are science fiction writers.

When I was an undergrad pursuing a B.A. in English Lit, my peers didn’t seem to mind so much that I was taking science and history classes in an effort to become an SF writer (didn’t work, but what’d I know?). However, my experiences when going for a tech writing M.A. made the arts-sciences divide clearer to me. I noted the occasional distaste or fear that the literary types in the English department had for things technological, and can only second Snow’s findings.

The sad part is that the humanities-sciences divide has become, if possible, even more prominent than it was in 1959. Snow was speaking of his own Great Britain at the height of the Cold War, just as America was starting to get serious about science and technical education with the post-Sputnik National Defense Education Act. This was before the social upheavals of the 1960s and the arrival of the environmental movement in 1970, which only sharpened the divide between the perceptions of scientific and arts-focused people. Science, in some circles, has been seen as a positive evil rather than a liberator from illness and toil that characterized most of humanity’s history. Of course Snow notes this tendency even then:

Did anyone think that, in the primal terms in which I have just been discussing the poor countries of the present world, our ancestors’ condition was so very different? Or that the industrial revolution had not brought us in three or four generations to a state thoroughly new in the harsh, unrecorded continuity of poor men’s lives? I couldn’t believe it. I knew, of course, the force of nostalgia, myth, and plain snobbery…

Now we know something of the elemental facts of the lives and deaths of peasants and agricultural laborers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and France. They are not comfortable facts. J. H. Plumb, in one of his attacks on the teaching of a pretty-pretty past, has written: ‘No one in his senses would choose to have been born in a previous age unless he could be certain that he would have been born into a prosperous family, that he would have enjoyed extremely good healthy, and that he could have accepted stoically the death of the majority of his children.’…

The average length of life was perhaps a third of ours, and appreciably less, because of the deaths in childbirth, for women than for men (it is only quite recently, and in lucky countries, that women, on the average, have had a chance of living as long as men).

This longing for an innocent time is not so new, but it continues, especially in the light of the global warming movement, which seeks to dismantle our technological society (or tax it to death, which amounts to the same thing) because of the “evil” we are perpetrating on the environment. The real problem, of course, is that widespread technical and scientific ignorance is becoming rampant, leaving average citizens unable to logically or empirically judge the claims of a vocal group claiming to speak in the name of science. The people who win the global warming debate will most likely be those with the loudest voices and most political clout, not necessarily those with the best science.

As Snow notes, sometime during his lifetime, “intellectual” came to mean only the influential people in the arts community, not the sciences. Indeed, those who attained the title of intellectual have taken pride in the fact that they aren’t conversant in the methods and practices that make our technological civilization possible. This does our society no good if we intend to raise children who can continue build the widgets, gadgets, and doohickeys (note the technical jargon there—the sign of a true “intellectual”) that make life bearable, if complicated.

Here’s my take on the divide, having worked and socialized with both communities. The artsy among us are dealing with the universal emotions and experiences that every person can relate to. They speak or write in the common tongue, more or less, or portray their ideas in gripping visual and moving images. Their outcomes are stories or messages that tell other people what events mean in human terms. In these ways, they have an advantage. The technically inclined among us are able to analyze, visualize, and quantify how the universe changes around us. They, too, use English, but it is often of a specific, deliberately non-emotional sort to others of their kind because to do otherwise would be to interfere with their ability to learn what they set out to learn. The techies among us can use symbols and logic and numbers in a way that is as natural to them as describing two people falling in love might be for artsy folk. They have the ability to see, understand, and mold the basic forces that inhabit our universe, and our world would be much poorer without them.

It is my pleasure and privilege to translate the activities of NASA’s engineers into words that non-techies can understand. If Mr. Snow gets his way, more people will be educated to the point where the “non-techie” difference is negligible. Consider the characters of Star Trek as exemplars of Snow’s vision: they are all supra-competent techies, but they have the ability to remember, appreciate, and apply lessons from the artistic culture. Our future should be so lucky. Looks like I’ll have to do some more reading on education to try and find ways to implement Snow’s vision. It’s not like I’ve got any power, but I can at least offer some informed opinions.