Book Reviews: Free Agents and Determined

Disciples of the secular religion of science argue over competing idols, clinging to false security against the existential terror of epistemic uncertainty

One of the simultaneously fun and horrifying things about parenting is that your child shares half your DNA, and so has a similar brain, and so does some of the weird stuff that you do, unbidden. And then you get a little meta-cognition assist on your own weirdness from literally seeing yourself from the outside — whether you like it or not.

My beloved threenager, for example, fixates on mistakes. If I say something wrong — which stuffed animal he wants to take on a walk, which fruit is on his plate — he will repeatedly ask me what I said. He wants me to answer with what I said that was wrong, plus the fact that I made a mistake, and the correction — to replay the scene where something went wrong and fix it, again and again (and again). This is, not coincidentally, what loops in my head after many a conversation, encounter, or draft. (All writing is draft, but some drafts are published.)

Thus, as is often the case, I’ve been meaning to do an update on my “determinism as uncertainty aversion” post after reading a pair of massive new books on both sides of the issue. I have the nagging sense that it warrants correction, but don’t know why, so a book review seemed like a good next step. The books are genetics and neuroscience professor Kevin J. Mitchell’s Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will and biology and neurology professor and popular science icon Robert M. Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.

There’s an excellent short summary of both here (h/t Sander Greenland). But its author, Emily Cataneo, comes out on one side (Sapolsky’s) instead of critiquing the scientific discourse as itself lacking in science (in Greenland’s parlance). To which I say: Don’t hate the player, hate the game. Or at least observe it as a funny game we humans are playing to deal with our fear — the existential fear of powerlessness in the face of the unknown, with uncertainties in life threatening us with our limits like so many little deaths. Like continually fixating on correcting mistakes to deal with being afraid of making them, even though making them is unavoidable.

This is a post about how the free will/determinism discourse shows scientists exhibiting common cognitive biases, linked as they often are by uncertainty aversion. The threat of limitation (unknowability) triggers biases, as time pressure, emotion, and threat often do (“Fear is the mind-killer” and all). Let’s look at the limit.

How the Causal Cookie Crumbles

In his 1996 epilogue to Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, (NY: Cambridge University Press, p. 401-428, 2009), “The Art and Science of Cause and Effect” (h/t SG), causal revolutionary Judea Pearl shows that whether it’s a deterministic or agentive human world depends on where you cut the Descartes drawing above (p. 419-420, slides 36-38). Hone in on the subject, and the free will position holds. Center the outside world, and the deterministic position carries.

As Greenland writes:

That nonidentification is as one would expect once one views the deterministic vs. free-will positions as representing a dichotomization of a sequential-feedback continuum. What we perceive ranging from no control (no free will) to complete control or causality (free will) depends on what point we take as the origin (which is called the agent, who may or may not appear to have free will at that point) (email, Nov. 5, 2023).

The causal cookie crumbles where you break it. To Greenland, this makes the question of free will as it’s usually defined (“real causal autonomy,” Mitchell p. 299) unanswerable. In this, it’s not sui generis:

For me, the predetermined vs. free-will debate is just the analog in psychological language of the determinism vs. stochastic (intrinsically random) world debate in physical language. As such any answer is nonidentified: every deterministic model of the world will have a stochastic analog and vice-versa. This is then an interesting discussion for metaphysics and language philosophy, but I find it of no practical consequence other than providing mental exercise and entertainment.

This accords with a standard philosophy reading of the free will/determinism debate as hinging on the deterministic/stochastic universe question. An alternate interpretation of this indeterminacy, however, is that it makes the question a matter of interpretation. We interpret scientific evidence all the time.

A later Pearl seems to take this view — and interpret the matter rather more decisively, saying in interviews (1, 2) that there is no free will, we live in a deterministic universe based on Newtonian physics, but apparently evolved to have the illusion of free will and base consequences like going to jail on it. He wonders why evolution gave us this illusion, and maintains it so vividly.

Perhaps determinism proponents would argue Man is not the center of his own universe, much as the Earth since the Copernican revolution is generally accepted to not be the center of our solar system. But we don’t have a God’s eye view from which to decide where to cut the causal diagram. Questions of consciousness could very well center brains and bodies, as well as structures and circumstances. So probably we can’t know whether someone’s action is the primary cause or a final effect of other causes.

In reality, of course, courts and cohorts cut the diagram differently in different cases all the time, passing judgment on people’s actions to mete out consequences. Scientific indeterminacy doesn’t spell social and political indeterminacy. But scientists should still recognize it as such.

Of Meaning and Matter

The scientific evidence doesn’t settle the question. Quantum indeterminacy is consistent with causal indeterminacy. When philosophers Grush and Churchland (h/t Thomas Metzinger) critiqued Penrose’s quantum mechanical explanation for a neuronal-level possibility of free will, they concluded: “Nothing we have said in this paper demonstrates the falsity of the quantum consciousness connection. Our view is just that it is no better supported than any one of a gazillion caterpillar-with-hookah hypotheses” (p. 24 Grush and Churchland). In other words, we don’t know.

Mitchell says “the prevailing view in physics” accepts this “indeterminacy observed in the evolution of quantum systems” as “real and fundamental” (p. 157 Mitchell). Sapolsky denies that this indeterminacy could possibly scale to practical significance in the brain — or that, if it did, randomness could hold space for what we experience as free will (p. 214-238 Sapolsky). Mitchell argues that we harness it (p. 170-193 Mitchell): “As Epicurus said [countering Democritus], some things are caused by necessity, some are due to chance, and some are up to us… The elements of randomness at work in our brains give some leeway for us to have the final say in settling the matter” (p. 193).

Different narratives are plausible to different authors on the basis of the same ambiguous, uncertain evidence. That doesn’t necessarily mean we should weigh their arguments and pick a side. It probably means the practical meaning of quantum indeterminacy for consciousness is, well, indeterminate. Everything else is cognitive bias, including clear, pervasive confirmation bias in Sapolsky’s case.

So why have smart people been heavily invested for thousands of years in definitively answering a question that we probably can’t answer? Why does it look like (either way) the scientists are winning an improperly framed debate over whether free will exists, when we probably can’t know and they should know better? And who cares? Why does this at least strike a lot of people as really important? Could it be, far from an angels-dancing-on-pinheads intellectual distraction, a psychologically and politically existential matter?

Science as Secular Religion

The free will/determinism debate is a case study of the use of science as secular religion, and as such it has two main psychosocial functions: (1) to help individuals grapple with powerlessness and despair, and (2) to help make people’s lives better by proscribing actions that are imbued with social power to enable them to get what they need (rituals). Both of these functions are important and can be used to promote desirable ends, like rule-abidingness (free will), suicide prevention (free will), criminal justice reform (determinism), and other modes of forgiveness (determinism). But you don’t have to believe in the Lord’s Prayer to eat the wafers. Maybe both ideologies can produce good effects, and we needn’t choose.

Free Will Ideology vs. Despair

Sapolsky is characteristically witty and open about his view that free will ideology is a sort of magical thinking akin to or deeply linked with religiosity, and the concerns it evolved to help us grapple with are existential. It’s worth hearing him out on the “nutty” neurobiological underpinnings of religiosity. (His videos remain the best source for this.)

He’s not alone in these observations. It’s widely accepted that inventing Protestantism helped Martin Luther with apparent OCD, and he’s not some bizarre anomaly. Freud (1907) noted the resemblance between religious and OCD rituals. Wallace (1966) and others noted rituals reduce anxiety. Dulaney and Friske (1994) theorized the grand theory — rituals and OCD look a lot alike across cultures, because they share a mechanism that “enables people to mark and constitute life transitions, to reinforce and transform social relationships, to cure illness and cope with misfortune, to express and to respond to the ineffable paradoxes of human life” (“Cultural Rituals and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Is There a Common Psychological Mechanism?” Ethos, Vol. 22, No. 3, Sept. 1994, p. 243-283; quoting p. 276, h/t Richard McElreath). The main difference between pathology and religion is rituals’ shared meaning. When the mechanism goes haywire and people go overboard with rituals they know are meaningless, it’s either pathology, or a new religion.

Ritual assumes that what we do makes a difference. This is also the essence of popular belief in free will, and its proponents take comfort in some behaviors that look awfully ritualistic. Neurobiology professor and popular science communicator Andrew Huberman, for instance, famously espouses cold plunges as part of a larger ideology of evidence-based self-improvement predicated on agentive power; ablution is a common ritual type. I haven’t seen any studies blocking on subjects’ belief in ritualistic treatments, which seems like what one would want to see to assess their efficacy in psychological terms. But I guess they work for some value of working for the people who do them? Just like people who listen to podcasts with titles like “How to Unlock Your Potential, Motivation & Unique Abilities” believe that they can find the right, scientifically evidence-based rituals to do those things, and that belief could be its own placebo. If the cost is the time of consuming the media or taking the cold plunge, and the benefit is feeling better, it seems like a good deal.

But free will ideology doesn’t have a monopoly on religion. That’s a false opposition. America’s Plymouth Pilgrim forefathers, for instance, were hard-core Calvinist separatist dissenters from the Church of England. In spite of their belief that salvation came from faith alone (not anything you do), we get our modern, Western work ethic (more work = more good) from them. The story that squared this circle goes like this: There are two types of people in the world — saved and not saved. The saved (the Elect) are blessed, and you can tell. They wear expensive black clothing and whatnot (they can afford the most expensive dye). So Calvinists worked harder hoping to show that they were saved, because this belief system linked material with moral/spiritual success. Point being, Calvinist ideology was a deterministic one that still worked like a free will technology (more on this below). It can happen that, even operating under deterministic beliefs, what we do can seem to make a difference, and it’s perception of agency that empowers people in the face of despair, and motivates us in the face of structural inequality. It’s motivating to think we can move some levers even if we don’t control their functionality.

On the topic of despair, it also seems worth noting that neurodivergent people have sometimes been outsize cultural influencers who got other people doing their crazy, a crazy (ambiguity/uncertainty aversion) which is in us all to varying degrees. And along comes Sapolsky, retelling his life story of having an existential crisis at 13, rejecting religion, and realizing the universe was deterministic and we have no free will, before proceeding to be a lifelong depressive. He says if there’s free will, it’s in boring and shrinking places, and expects we’ll see increasing recognition of the biological basis of behaviors. He admits this is depressing, but thinks things couldn’t be worse anyway, and it’s true. What could go wrong?

Free Will as Technology

Why legalize abortion on demand if women don’t really have a choice? States, families, and partners have historically exerted power over their reproductive decisions. And abortion carries substantial possible risks — most notably a 2x+ increased suicide risk. But societies design laws assuming that free will exists in spite of its widely acknowledged structural limitations. People are allowed to make choices they might not even like. This makes logical sense; if free will exists even a little bit, that’s enough for moral agency and personal responsibility.

It’s also how our institutions themselves were designed. In this view, free will is more than an ideological security blanket against existential despair. It’s an ancient technology with important socio-political implications.

This is why philosopher Daniel Dennett (a running presence in both books) critiques neuroscientists saying neuroscience shows we don’t have free will. If you don’t think you have it, he says, you’re disabled in terms of exercising your moral competence. In support of this argument, he cites Vohs and Schooler’s experimental research showing that a determinism prime (a reading selection from Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis calling free will an illusion) made more college students cheat. Bracketing the usual criticisms of these sorts of studies (artificiality, weirder than WEIRD sample, subject expectancy effects), it does provide some preliminary empirical support for the plausible hypothesis that what people believe affects their behavior, and believing in moral competence might be a necessary condition for exercising it in ways society wants people to exercise it in the public interest. Indeed, all legal systems are predicated on free will. See punishment, avoid punishment, make a better world.

So maybe we don’t want to undermine the foundation of all legal systems to see how that affects things like law-abidingness. Sapolsky acknowledges these concerns (p. 390), but suggests the state of the world is already so terrible that we might as well just say how terribly profound and depressing our powerlessness is. He suggests calling this one a draw.

We don’t have to. As instrumentalists living in a pluralistic society, we can take some of free will ideology for making people feel and act better, and some determinism ideology for helping people escape carceral-surveillance state brutality. There is no requirement that beliefs be genuine, coherent, or correct in order for them to be used effectively to achieve social and political ends.

Still, we should try to say things we believe to be true as scientists, both as a matter of first principles and to encourage public trust. And we should think twice before undermining people’s beliefs in a technology (free will) that makes laws work, imperfectly.

Free Will as Money-Maker

As I wrote previously, the current scientific consensus has long favored determinism. But that’s among the likes of physicists, neuroscientists, and philosophers. It’s also worth noting that entire fields swing the other way. (See the irresistible XKCD commentary on the perceived relationships between these fields.)

In particular, psychologists and other wellness-makers tend to sing the popular melody that free will exists, people can change, and you, too, can feel great if you follow the right steps. Of course they do; their livelihood depends on it. But, perhaps surprisingly, even rationalist field leaders like Scott Siskind (aka Scott Alexander) promote manifestations of this ideology. He says on his private practice Depression resource page:

David Burns is one of the gurus of cognitive behavioral therapy. His book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy is the canonical guide for do-it-yourself-CBT. I understand he has just put out an updated book, Feeling Great – I have not read this one and can’t confirm it is as good, but the title seems promising.

Step into my rabbit hole: In Feeling Great and elsewhere in his offshoot multimedia empire (website, blog, podcast, app), Burns references his scientific papers on causal relationships between thoughts and feelings. These are (1) “Why are depression and anxiety correlated? A test of the tripartite model,” D D Burns and R J Eidelson, June 1998; 66(3): 461-73, and (2) “Do changes in dysfunctional attitudes mediate changes in depression and anxiety in cognitive behavioral therapy?” David D. Burns and Diane L. Spangler, Behavior Therapy, Volume 32, Issue 2, 2001, p. 337-369. Both use structural equation modeling (SEM) without employing do-calculus or other structural analysis interventions. The second explicitly describes these efforts as measurement models, meaning they grapple with identification without using the right tools from the causal revolution. Why is this a problem?

My heuristic is whether a paper cites Pearl and uses do-calc, because I am lazy and that is fast. But if you want to know why shoddy causal modeling is actually a problem and is common in psychology, Julia Rohrer et al explain in “That’s a Lot to Process! Pitfalls of Popular Path Models,” Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 5(2). Publication norms favor papers that look like they have done their causal modeling homework, but often these models are bad and do not fulfill their most basic jobs (e.g., ensuring there’s no reverse causality, ruling out confounding). These papers are good enough to get published under “publish or perish” pressures, but not good enough to do what they say they are doing (causal identification). Bad science, normal social problem (Goodhart’s law).

In this particular case, though, we don’t even have to go there. Burns and Spangler’s paper actually found:

There did not appear to be any causal effects linking the DAs with depression or anxiety at intake or at 12 weeks. Instead, the analyses suggested the existence of an unknown variable with simultaneous causal effects on dysfunctional attitudes, depression, and anxiety. This common cause accounted for all the correlations between the attitude and mood variables, and also appeared to mediate the effects of psychotherapy and medication on dysfunctional attitudes, depression, and anxiety (p. 337).

This finding differs starkly from Burns’ popular translation of his research, in which he repeatedly states that negative thoughts cause negative feelings (e.g., Feeling Great p. 66) — a hypothesis his scientific research explicitly rejected. One needn’t attribute any bad motives to Siskind or Burns. It is, rather, characteristic of wellness work broadly to reject the deep epistemic uncertainty of mental health and happiness with respect to selection bias.

No one in these fields wants to acknowledge that maybe nothing works against the pain of existence. And most of the people paying them probably don’t want it acknowledged, either. Maybe it serves society better to deny this particular uncertainty, and so, as if by a gentlemen’s agreement — Pascal’s wellness wager? — entire fields are predicated on denying it. This is fine. No, really.

Because maybe it helps to think something may help sometime, or maybe you really find something that helps a little in your case, and at least society functions while people try jiggling the gears (of consciousness, well-being, and neurochemistry, for better and for worse). Ok, maybe it would make sense to have some more robust checks on systemic abuse of power, especially when it comes to vulnerable groups, lest big corporations profit from hurting little people, predatory guru types seek out desperate people to con, and all the other predictable sociopolitical dynamics play out here. But maybe there is a right lever to press to help some people live better lives sometimes, and some people are just getting paid for trying to find it.

Free Will Functions Recap

Anyway, free will has a lot of functions: anti-despair ideology, pro-lawfulness/obedience technology, moneymaker with a possible side of these social goods. Then along come determinists denying it, victorious in much of science as a subculture, but rejected in most of popular culture and professions that deal primarily with other humans on a regular basis. My point is that it’s ironic how determinism proponents are falling prey to the same uncertainty aversion as their opponents, determinism ideology can be used for the same functions (it’s all interpretive), and we should be wary of everyone who says “science says” they’re right about this, when science is a human institution fraught with error, bias, and corruption, and its evidence is typically uncertain, ambiguous, and limited.

Or maybe it’s not ironic, maybe we should expect this: We’re all just trying to get perspective on our parents’ mistakes and then winding up replicating them anyway, personally and politically. That’s been a theme of social and political reform throughout human history. There are always limits on our abilities to do better. There are always mistakes, and they rhyme.

Determinism as Religious Reform

If the free will/determinism debate is a manifestation of people grappling with our shared powerlessness including the limitations of what we can know, then it may make sense to view determinism as a religious reformation within science as secular religion — and texts like Mitchells’s as attempted counter-reformations. In this view, in a sociopolitical moment of structural powerlessness (e.g., with respect to climate change, increasing precarity, escalating corporate-state capture, etc.) it makes sense that the precariat would want a new ideology to explain these conditions. The problem with giving people the solace of deterministic ideology in this moment — when the truth is we probably can’t know whether free will exists or not — is that it may undermine the technology we need to actually exercise moral competence. It’s the difference between priming “captain of your fate” and “victim of circumstances” (Sapolsky, p. 260). The more socially dominant contender in the debate should arguably not be priming “victim of circumstances” at this moment in history, because it might hurt our slim chances of better addressing existential collective action problems we are failing to address.

So I suggest Sapolsky recant, and use his prominent public position of trust and visibility to spearhead instead a meta-scientific counter-reformation reflecting critically on science as a secular religion. His book is full of cherry-picked studies that could be ripped apart, thread by meta-scientific thread. His mind is up for the challenge. He’s already done all the research.

It ain’t gonna happen, though, and here’s why that’s ok: Reality has a well-established powerful bias. That is, spin science tends to reflect and support the interests of powerful social and political networks. Sapolsky understands himself as trying to counter that bias. And, like most reform efforts that are limited in their ability to not be shaped by what they’re rejecting, determinism as a religious reform is likely to have some good consequences along with some bad.

The popular myth of free will relies on the myth of meritocracy and reassures us that, if we listen to enough Andrew Huberman, we can develop the evidence-based discipline and strength to physically, mentally, and socially/professionally have a better life. This serves an obvious psychological and political purpose: By rationalizing away powerlessness as fault at worst, or part of a process of self-improvement at best, it staunches the pain of powerlessness.

But by doing that, it also mitigates the subaltern threat of possible coordinated political action to change the status quo. Class action requires class consciousness, and free will is an individualistic ideology. Determinism, by contrast, is a collective one; it holds that our circumstances so shape our beings as to determine them, and it’s obvious that entire classes of people share a lot of circumstances in a way that it’s not obvious that anyone shares an individual’s moral authority.

More gently, one could say that structure constrains options within a range of possible outcomes. Free will ideology could help many achieve better outcomes within that range. And simultaneously help the sociopolitical system maintain stability, constraining people’s actions and outcomes within set ranges — for better (law-abidingness) and for worse (systemic injustice). So we could want both free will and deterministic ideologies floating around in our ecosystem, for different reasons. When neither side wins, maybe everyone wins.

The interesting black swan outcome here would be if determinism actually destabilized the sociopolitical order, like a religious reformation that got out of hand fast. But Sapolsky’s determinism is depressing, and depression demotivates people, so his is a politically safe ideology for the status quo to promote. It has untapped radical potential that will probably remain untapped.

More Scientific Science

Just because maybe we want people doing both these rain dances, doesn’t mean we should believe we can control the weather with either of them. It may be wise to instead acknowledge the limits of our knowledge and power, lest — like shamans who occasionally kill people they’re trying to heal — we do harm with the authority of a science that is itself not so scientific, after all. What are these limits? What (if anything) is worth worrying about here?

If the universe is deterministic and free will only a useful, evolved illusion and moral technology that encourages cooperative behavior in a complex primate society rife with predictable resource competition and coercion, then why can’t we model outcomes better? Why are revolutions, stock market crashes, and other major structural changes so hard to predict? Why don’t we even know why we evolved free will (as a fact, illusion, or a bit of both) — or what sociopolitical effects denying it might have? In other words,

why on earth should we expect the primitive social organisms of which we are a part to be any good at prediction of such complex and chaotic phenomena concerning their own behavior? We should not, any more than we should expect a precocious child prone to violent tantrums to predict its own behavior. What society can do already (such as tie its components together at near-light speeds in a world-wide web) is quite amazing, in the same way language acquisition and integration into a social unit in a child is amazing. The former doesn't mean society is capable of predicting all important phenomena (even something as neutral as weather forecasting is still not reliable beyond a week or two) or of organizing good responses (whatever that would mean), and latter doesn't mean a child driving the car (such as a teenage boy) is capable of accurately predicting motions of other cars in city traffic or making good responses to those motions.

One of the problems I see in most commentaries on topics (like free will vs determinism) where there is little risk of being discredited (whether because of lack of evidence or because of selective suppression, amplification, and distortion of evidence) is that it frees a writer to sound certain and portray the evidence as warranting that certainty, using fallacies and factoids as desired, which in turn will get them a secure following among those seeking certainty and those partial to the conclusions being derived. That is one reason I avoid the topics (SG, Nov. 17, 2023).

These excellent points make me question my draw to this debate. One instrumentalist case for meta-science generally is to limit possible harm from science that isn’t very scientific. But if you have to actually think through whether you have the power to do that — then I’m not sure why I write. It’s just what I do.

I think, though, that everyone has a stake in how we make sense of structural limits on agency. The reality of not knowing where outside forces stop and agency begins challenges me, as does the uncertainty about what those boundaries mean. I want to believe in Huberman and Mitchell’s stories, cold showers notwithstanding. That determinism proponents would use such a common desire as a means to discredit the opposition is ad hominem, albeit in a relatively decent manner. And the charge could equally be turned around to suggest that Sapolsky and other determinism proponents have (by brute luck) been dealt unusual brains that deny them the comfort of an evolved free will belief — and so they insist on denying it to others, without incorporating the perspective that this is itself a psychosocially limited perspective. But these lines of argument, however relevant to contextualizing the debate, risk shifting the substantive focus.

That is, we live under conditions of epistemic uncertainty that we often deny. We can see themes in and harms from these denials. Still, it’s stronger than us — we can’t stop making mistakes like this. We are, as Professor of Ethics and Technology Joanna Bryson says, “Apes that remember and run algorithms remarkably well.” Is it any wonder that we can neither determine whether “real causal autonomy” exists, nor functionally accept not knowing? We’ve never needed either of those bits to run the relevant algorithms.

On these terms, both Free Agents and Determinism could incorporate more humility about knowledge limitations and more respect for other perspectives. Normally a fan of profanity as part of bluntness in service of truth-telling, I found Sapolsky’s simplistic bombast particularly offputting, probably because I so enjoyed the more inclusive, self-deprecating wit of his earlier books. He acknowledges the problem (e.g., p. 388-389, footnote — “… worried that I’m going to come off as self-congratulatory,” etc.), but underestimates the extent to which that worry is well-founded, and its basis undermines his message.

But hey, this is science as social practice — a predominantly monotheistic minority subculture in which the only acceptable god is the author’s favorite method. It’s simultaneously science communication as popular discourse — a venue not known for nuance. As parts of the popular scientific discourse, both texts illustrate how hard it is to accept not knowing what we don’t know. And that insight highlights a familiar path to better science — and better politics.

More Political Politics

Going to the scientific literature to unsystematically source evidence supporting an ideology promoting your personal beliefs and/or preferred social and political reforms is not that different from going to any other religious canon uncritically for answers to personal and societal problems. It’s fine that people do this, but it’s not science. It’s politics. Please call it that.

Calling the use of debatable interpretations of scientific evidence to support particular reforms political raises the question: In addition to trying to have more scientific science, why not also try to have more political politics? The promise of free will is, in part, the possibility of parity (within limits) between powerful and powerless actors. After all, if the powerful can find the levers and pull them, why can’t the relatively powerless?

That seems to me another of those questions for which obvious answers abound, knowing how circumstances play a huge role. 
An example: Most kings and such obtained their power solely by inheritance, even when they were talentless and unintelligent; were you born a peasant, there was no chance to attain such power. Then there are those like the nobles who usurped the throne and founded dynasties. Then presidents like George W. Bush and Donald Trump who obtained brief power by virtue of having been born into a setting where levers were within reach for them having just enough intelligence (crudely, at the 90-95th percentile) to discern those levers and follow instructions on how to use them (allegedly, Trump was an ardent student of Hitler's rise, not for ideology but to see how he managed to get power); without their birth advantage, they might have been minor business successes but no more. The U.S. Congress is filled with people who would take power if they could, but lack the luck, inheritance, and talent to go beyond that level. 

Of course, sometimes those born relatively powerless do well - Hitler, Stalin and Mao weren't born into power, but they needed and had a lot more luck and talent for getting power in the environments they were in than did U.S. presidents (SG, Nov. 5, 2023).

If the sociopolitical context of determinism as a religious reformation is species-level existential threat from failure to solve collective action problems, then wouldn’t it make sense for a counter-reformation to tell a good, true story about how uncertainty about the limits of free will and determinism alike means that we should definitely try very hard to not drive the global ecosystem off the cliff ? The stakes are too high to not do more scientific science and more political politics. It’s not really a good time in human history to have a bunch of smart people throw up their hands and go “Oh, well, we can’t do anything, anyway.”

So if we’re going to have a renaissance or re-amplification of determinism as a religious reformation in science as a secular religion, then let’s please make it one that tells a plausible story about how we’re destined to rise to the challenges facing life on earth today. And let’s simultaneously have a series of conflicting but interesting counter-reformations about how causal agency exists (Mitchell), indeterminacy wins (earlier Pearl; Greenland), and consequences matter (we need to know what the effects of these ideologies are before razing institutional grounds with them, even though both knowing their effects and razing those grounds would be pretty hard to actually do.

On a smaller scale than civilizational persistence, this is all about trying to do a better job distinguishing science from politics when both are interpretive exercises. When we can see that we are spinning, as scientists, we have a moral obligation to not play that game. Which is not to say that we can do anything else; better, not perfect, is the attainable goal.