Computer scientists today are like economists in the early 2000s and Freudian psychiatrists in the 1950s

There’s a new hegemonic science in town

Regular readers of our blog will trace my short career as a Freud expert to a post from 2012, Economics now = Freudian psychology in the 1950s: More on the incoherence of “economics exceptionalism”.

But recently I thought we need to update this analogy.

Back in the early part of this century, economists were riding high: they were the country’s all-purpose pundits, they had tons of influence but were lamenting that they didn’t have enough, and they were going on and on about how special they were, most amusingly in the self-contradictory argument that they were different because they “assume everyone is fundamentally alike; we believe circumstances, not culture, drive people’s decisions.” I’m still not sure what is the difference between “circumstance” and “culture” except that maybe talking about the former is associated with overconfidence.

Nowadays, though, economics is just one more social science. OK, I don’t want to overstate things. I assume they still get paid more than sociologists and political scientists, and, yeah, there’s a Council of Economic Advisers but no Council of Sociology Advisers. Still, I think that economics has lost some of its standing in the past twenty years, partly as a result of the crash of 2008 and its aftermath (political polarization, Brexit, etc.) and partly just the natural ebb and flow of influence, the inevitable cycle of hype and disappointment. Econ hero Steven Levitt was supplanted by data analyst Nate Silver (who identifies as a poker player, not an economist), and we’re not hearing from economists so much anymore, except to hear them fighting in vain against tariffs.

There’s a new hegemonic science in town, and it’s information science, or computer science.

Computer scientists currently have a lot of prestige. Fair enough: they’ve earned it through all the amazing things they’ve built. Indeed, it worth comparing to the earlier alpha-dog social scientists. What Freudian psychiatry and neoclassical economics were powerful, all-explaining theories that addressed people’s concerns about mental health, happiness, prosperity, and future prospects. They had big theories, which is great. (The theories were not falsifiable, but that can be fine, as the function of such all-encompassing theories is not to make predictions or to explain the world but rather to supply a framework by which the social world can be studied.) Computer science is different–they didn’t develop a theory of society, but they built impressive tools that change how we live in the world.

Now I’d say that computer science today is like economics at the beginning of the century or Freudian psychiatry in the 1950s in being at apex academic and social prestige and influence. Computer scientists, or computer-science-associated businessmen, are the new gurus, in a way that wasn’t the case before. Yes, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were culture heroes back in the 80s and 90s, but nobody was particularly interested in what they had to say outside of their narrow technological realms. Nowadays, many computer scientists and tech lords present themselves, and are often taken as, all-purpose pundits. As with the economists and Freudians of past eras, they are presented as having some special authority derived in part from their almost inhuman hyper-rationality, a willingness to tell uncomfortable truths.

But then you get the same problem we had before, which is when the gurus and their hangers-on start to believe their own hype.