CONCEPT
The Pretence of Knowledge
Hayek’s Nobel Prize diagnosis of scientism—the systematic bias toward what can be measured and modeled, and away from the tacit and particular knowledge that actually matters most—applied to AI as the structural mechanism by which the false precision of metric outputs launders ignorance with the appearance of exactitude.
When
Friedrich Hayek accepted the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974, he used the occasion to deliver a rebuke to his own profession. Economics had made itself unscientific by imitating the wrong sciences. It had taken the methods of physics—the search for quantitative laws relating measurable variables—and applied them to a domain where the essential variables are not measurable and the essential knowledge is dispersed and tacit. The result was a discipline that confined its attention to the things it could measure and built confident models from them, while systematically ignoring the things that mattered but resisted quantification. He called this scientism: not science, but the superstitious imitation of science’s surface, the mechanical transfer of methods from a field where they work to a field where they do not. The relevance to artificial intelligence is hard to overstate, because the entire enterprise of modern AI runs