How to operationalize

If I could amend my last comments from yesterday's session, my departing wish would be that the silent war between "social" and "natural" scientists would end. Then, finally, the north would talk to the south, the east to the west, and all points in between would be chattering.

Observing an inquiry and capacity-building session

I feel fortunate to participate in (or at least observe) a full-day meeting among several thinkers in the area of inquiry and capacity building into the biosciences. My first observation is that there are no biologists here. This is a disappointment to me, as I believe that the second-order observations that these human scientists are making about the physical scientists need to be heard, and then understood, by the physical scientists themselves. But as the meeting progresses, I'm increasingly convinced that a card-carrying biologist wouldn't enjoy being here. A theme that came up more than once is that a biologist is trained to reduce complexity. Especially with synthetic biology, they are trained to "blackbox" complexity. This is directly at odds with ethical inquiry, which multiplies complexity. Furthermore, social scientists tend not to provide physical scientists with either the form for their ethical self-reflection (a problem of askesis) or a kind of reciprocal benefit in exchange for the increased complexity.

I identify a little more with the bioscientists than the social scientists, but I do wish there were scientists that were interested enough in critical ethical inquiry into their work to be here. I think they weren't invited because the social scientists knew they wouldn't have come. On the other hand, there's only one of CP Snow's cultures in this room.