Four from the Gray Lady
I received four interesting articles in my inbox today from The New York Times [Use BugMeNot.com to bypass registration.]

First, we have a story about Dracunculiasis, or Guinea worm: Dose of Tenacity Wears Down a Horrific Disease. Infectious diseases have long interested me, and this one is particularly gruesome:

Ogi is one of the last areas of Nigeria infested with Guinea worm, a plague so ancient that it is found in Egyptian mummies and is thought to be the "fiery serpent" described in the Old Testament as torturing the Israelites in the desert.

For untold generations here, yardlong, spaghetti-thin worms erupted from the legs or feet — or even eye sockets — of victims, forcing their way out by exuding acid under the skin until it bubbled and burst. The searing pain drove them to plunge the blisters into the nearest pool of water, whereupon the worm would squirt out a milky cloud of larvae, starting the cycle anew.

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"Are search engines making today's students dumber?" asks the author of Searching for Dummies, who argument focuses mainly on the demise of Boolean Searching:

Google modestly declares its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." But convenience may be part of the problem. In the Web's early days, the most serious search engine was AltaVista. To use it well, a searcher had to learn how to construct a search statement, like, say, "Engelbert Humperdinck and not Las Vegas" for the opera composer rather than the contemporary singer. It took practice to produce usable results. Now, thanks to brilliant programming, a simple query usually produces a first page that's at least adequate — "satisficing," as the economist Herbert Simon called it.

The efficiency of today's search engines arises from their ability to analyze links among Web sites. Google led in ranking sites by how often they are linked to other highly ranked sites. It did so using an elaborate variation of a concept familiar in natural science, citation analysis. Instead of looking at which papers are cited most often in the most influential journals, it measures how often Web pages are linked to highly ranked sites — ranked by links to themselves.

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"Why do we ignore the culture behind young blacks' plight?" asks the author of A Poverty of the Mind. Conservatives, knowing that culture is much more fundamental than economy or politics, would agree with this:

The main cause for this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960's: the rejection of any explanation that invokes a group's cultural attributes — its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its members — and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing.

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Finally, a review of the latest book by America's most famous ex-neoconservative: Neo No More. The reviewer concludes on a note that echoes to a certain extent the theme of the previous article:

Fukuyama describes the Hegelianism of "The End of History" as a version of "modernization" theory, bringing his optimistic vision of progress into the world of modern social science. But the problem with modernization theory was always a tendency to concentrate most of its attention on the steadily progressing phases of history, as determined by the predictable workings of sociology or economics or psychology — and to relegate the free play of unpredictable ideas and ideologies to the margins of world events.

And yet, what dominated the 20th century, what drowned the century in oceans of blood, was precisely the free play of ideas and ideologies, which could never be relegated entirely to the workings of sociology, economics, psychology or any of the other categories of social science. In my view, we are seeing the continuing strength of 20th-century-style ideologies right now — the ideologies that have motivated Baathists and the more radical Islamists to slaughter millions of their fellow Muslims in the last 25 years, together with a few thousand people who were not Muslims. Fukuyama is always worth reading, and his new book contains ideas that I hope the non-neoconservatives of America will adopt. But neither his old arguments nor his new ones offer much insight into this, the most important problem of all — the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them.

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The last two articles seem to call into question one of the 20th Century's worst ideas: Scientism, the attempt by the Humanities and so-called Social Sciences to ape the methodology of the pure sciences.

After all, the "structural factors" mentioned in the first article and "the predictable workings of sociology or economics or psychology" mentioned in the second are much easier to quantify than culture or "the free play of unpredictable ideas and ideologies." The attempt to quantify everything is doomed to fail because human beings, God bless us, whether as individuals or groups, lie far beyond what mathematician John Allen Paulos termed "the complexity horizon."