Research

During my time at the University of Pittsburgh, I had a mentor who liked to say: "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be research."

It was a comforting thought (and likely repeated as often as it was for my benefit).

Research is a difficult thing. Some research requires a lot of money, or at least access to resources that cost a lot of money. Most research requires a lot of time.

Over time, my research interests have been theological, historical, scientific, philosophical, and historical again. Whether circuitous or "rhizomatic", I consider the ongoing, incremental development of my own independent research to be my primary vocation. The essay that follows attempts to provide a mostly linear account of how I came to define what I consider to be my professional research interests.

I enjoy likening my experience as an undergraduate researcher to that of climbing a mountain.

Those who have ascended to a sufficiently tall summit over a sufficiently long trail know that even during the long days of summer one must begin an attempt very early in the morning, often well before sunrise, to avoid storms which frequently arrive at midday or in the afternoon. These climbs are (as my "research" was) slow at first, and foggy, such that my small contributions felt like genuine acts of trailblazing. It was exciting.

Such excitement can give way very suddenly if one does not understand that scientific research, like mountain climbing, rarely requires one to blaze new trails.

Science is a social phenomenon. The advancement of science requires the careful placement of a card atop a house of cards under construction by a horde of very intelligent strangers, most of whom will disagree with you about the placement of your card.

Most mountains feature a markedly difficult "middle part", perhaps where a lower forest gives way to scree. Here, a pace which only just quickened with the lifting fog once more slows. A trail might be lost, but one can no longer ignore that one exists, and the task at hand becomes joining back up with the trail. By this point a good scientist should have the perspective to understand much more trail has been blazed, and any summit is quite far ahead.

After tripping on a few loose boulders, looking up at a mountain that seems to have only gotten taller, the prospect of foregoing the trail ahead and enjoying one's lunch from halfway up the hill is very attractive. This is where I found myself in 2017, reflecting that my study of science had provided some beautiful and quite instructive views, even if I had only ascended partway up any peak.

Around this same time, I experienced a crisis of faith regarding what I had seen as a fundamental character of physics research.

As I learned more of the history of science, I saw modernity less as the edge of the future and more like the future past. Perspectives like those of Hacking, Feyerabend, and Lakatos, alongside some puzzles in foundational mathematics, collided with earlier interests in history and folk knowledge to transform my view of scientific knowledge from one of a mountain we were climbing to a bowl we were filling.

Reality was still a fascinating, open question and scientific research was still, in my opinion, the primary method of expanding into that open space. But in being a surface of this liquid volume, science felt flat. There is a tension that requires one to be "all in", as merely keeping up with ongoing card construction easily consumes the hours of a full-time job.

Further, I developed a perspective that this bowl we were filling had a leak. The efforts of science weren't only fraught due to the tensile forces on the surface of knowledge, but also because of this hole in human culture.

The hole in human culture is responsible for two deleterious effects. First, it slows the progress of our filling the bowl by removing substantive knowledge through a natural process of attrition. The knowledge a culture pursues and retains is scoped by the material structure, activities, and values of that culture. Everything must be passed on, or it will be forgotten. As the values and needs of culture shift over time, our persistent forgetting creates pits which inevitably researchers must turn back to and fill.

This is a more practical problem for researchers than the idea that it is worth knowing our history, though I very much believe this to be true.

Medicine, and the goals of ethnobotanical research, provide one instructive case. Traditional medicinal knowledge has driven numerous discoveries in modern medicine. While the rigor of clinical trials and the availability of precision technologies have greatly enabled safer, more sophisticated medical treatment, the social form of our science has for some time directed the efforts of science with a heavy emphasis on profit. The pursuit of profit, coupled with the harshly skeptical character of scientific inquiry and the unignorably prejudicial history of many scientific institutions, has closed many avenues of scientific research. This effect proceeds both through a filter on what knowledge science incorporates from our pre-scientific history and a leash on what new discoveries are worth pursuing from the perspective of those who control and allocate capital, and deserves to be explained much more carefully than I intend to within this essay.

The second deleterious effect of the hole in human culture is that around these pits there are more structurally concerning cracks that develop through the structure of scientific knowledge. Cracks in our knowledge develop more systematically, often through processes of technologization or acculturation, which has a tendency to impair participation in knowledge making enterprises as they advance, due to the accumulation of specific facts, technical abstractions, and implicit norms.

A worrisome manifestation of this hollowing is apparent in our broad relationship with technology. As the number and prevalence of technological systems continue to increase, technical literacy is in decline. If this were only due a decline in interest in our most modern, "sophisticated" technological inventions in favor of a return to the simple technological practice of pre-industrial societies, I might note this optimistically. Unfortunately, our culture largely relegates traditional technological practice to the realms of historical trivia and quirky hobbies while favoring delegation and automation in modern technologies that are more often expected to operate without a human-in-the-loop. We have, on the whole, become a culture of users and subjects rather than practitioners of technology.

This particular fracture, the Promethean gap between human capacity and technological capability, is in my opinion the most dangerous crack in human knowledge. All technologists have a responsibility to advocate for and design accessible, human technologies and I make great efforts in any work I engage with as a "day job" to respond to what I consider a pedagogical imperative for technologists.

Alongside this praxis, my research interests center historical perspectives on technology. While supporting the idea of progress scientific knowledge, most evident in our sophisticated technological capabilities, I believe the relations between individual humans, culture, and technology demonstrate consistent patterns across various technological forms. As such, the study of history is a worthy trail for an socially conscious technologist to follow. I am particularly interested in the work of German philosopher Günther Anders and maintain an active translation project with an aim to introduce more of his sharp, unashamedly polemic writing to English readers.