Scientists Are Often Ignorant

The Zizians add their story to a long list of ignorant scientists. Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, a mathematics Ph.D. and Berkely professor, was cut from the same sort of cloth. These stories would be ludicrous if they had not involved murders of innocent people and wasted lives, including the criminals’ lives, and if they did not suggest deeper knowledge problems. Many of the Zizians had degrees in computer science. They were attracted to the “rationalist movement” and attended the Berkeley-based Center for Applied Rationality, although this group eventually expelled them. (See Zusha Elinson, “A Silicon Valley Intellectual Society Kicked Them Out. Now They’re Tied to a Killing Spree,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2025.)

José Ortega, a Spanish philosopher of the first half of the 20th century, believed that the typical scientific man was a “learned ignoramus” and an intellectual barbarian. Like the “mass-man,” the scientist is not interested in understanding the conditions of civilization or even the conditions for the existence of science, nor the closely related necessity of certain liberal institutions. He believes that prosperity “is the spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree.” (See my Regulation review of Ortega’s 1930 book The Revolt of the Masses.)

Frederic Hayek explained the problem of “scientism,” which he defined as an improper and naïve application of the methods of the exact sciences to the study of society. It is very tempting, especially for narrowly focused scientific experts with no knowledge of economics, to neglect the varied preferences that motivate individual actions and to ignore the unplanned social order that results. A social order efficient for satisfying individual preferences is impossible to engineer and reconstruct from above. We must be wary of what Hayek, in his Nobel lecture, called “the pretense of knowledge.” (See Hayek’s 1952 book The Counter-Revolution of Science, of which the first part reproduces a series of articles in Economica titled “Scientism and the Study of Society.”)

Scientists, and perhaps especially computer scientists, are subject to a professional bias that may lead them to believe that they have the tools to engineer society according to their own preferences. The Zizians and the Unabomber added murder to the engineer’s toolbox. At any rate, social engineering consists of coercively molding fellow humans’ minds and lives. A basic knowledge of economics, which studies the social consequences of individual actions including exchange, is a good antidote to cultism and social-engineering illusions. (Perhaps it can also be argued that a too-specialized or too-pretentious practice of economics also risks transmogrifying an economist into a social engineer.)

None of what I said is meant to condemn the use of reason. Rationality remains our main tool for understanding the physical and the social world, if one remains conscious of the limits of reason. Someone schooled only in a narrow field of science, without a conscience of the social world around him in time and space, risks becoming an ignoramus, a cultist, a barbarian, or all of that.

PS: Pardon my pun-ish French mind, but the Zizians are certainly not well-versed in the language of Émile Faguet for they would otherwise have found a less childish and patriarchal label for their cult. On French and puns, see the delicious article of Lucy Sante, “French Without Tears.”

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