Ways of Knowing: The Game Changer and Specialization

Philip ManningCleveland State University

Public LectureWays of Knowing in the College of Liberal Arts and Social

SciencesApril 8, 2015

The Project in a Nutshell

At its most general, this talk is about three dichotomies:

(1) The tension between the specialist and what Max

Weber called the ‘dilettante’. We normally understand

this to be about the rise of the specialist and the

decline of the amateur (or ‘dabbler’). However, the

etymology of the dilettante indicates that this is a

person who brings joy to something.

(2) The transition from revolutionary to normal

science. These are Thomas Kuhn’s terms. Normal science

is our existing problem-solving techniques;

revolutionary science is a proposed alternative to

these techniques. The need for revolutionary science

occurs because of dissatisfaction with the results of

normal science.

(3) The troubling divide between value-free or value-

neutral research and value-laden research. In the

latter, the researchers have some vested interest in

the outcomes of the research.

1

As a way in to these broad concerns, consider an episode in

the career of one of the most important (albeit now largely

forgotten) quantitative sociologists: Sam Stouffer. After

graduating from Morningside College in Iowa with a degree in

Latin in 1921, Stouffer became interested in journalism and

eventually sociological research, getting a PhD from the

University of Chicago in 1930. In 1941, he received a small

fortune - $325,0001 - from the American Government to

conduct attitudinal surveys of soldiers. This means that Sam

Stouffer is the original poster child for transferable

skills. Tellingly, today Morningside College does not offer

degrees in either Latin or Sociology and appears to have no

institutional knowledge that one of their alumni went on to

become one of the leading academics of his time.

Very early on in his work for the U.S. Government Stouffer

was asked how the military could lower the rate of

desertions among soldiers on leave. Stouffer asked whether

the men went home in civilian clothes. When he was told

that they did, he suggested that it should be military

policy for them to show up at home in military uniform. The

desertion rate dropped dramatically after this and as far as

I know Stouffer’s suggestion is still policy today.

1 This is about $5.5 million today, adjusted for inflation. My guess is that the buying power in 1941 of this grant was even greater than this adjustment suggests.

2

What struck me about this vignette is that Stouffer’s

ingenious solution to a military problem worked despite it

having nothing to do with his specialist training in

statistics – or for that matter, his earlier training in

Latin. Rather, he approached the problem as a dilettante

and found a solution that specialists had missed. He

offered what Kuhn might call revolutionary science that

could then be confirmed by normal science. In short,

Stouffer found a new way to solve a problem that could then

be broadly applied. And despite the fortune put at his

disposal, Stouffer’s solution was value-free in the sense

that he had no financial stake in the outcome. Later, when

he had to justify the large cash outlay on attitudinal

surveys, his work had become value-laden in the sense that

he had been hired by the Government and wanted to show value

to his client.

The project I’m going to discuss today is based on a very

simple idea that also has its origins in the work of a

dilettante. Imagine you want to check your bank balance.

After going online or going to an ATM, you are asked to

enter your password. On the screen you see a bunch of board

games – Scrabble, Monopoly, Chess, a Crossword puzzle,

Hangman and so on. You click on Monopoly and with your

finger drag three hotels onto Park Avenue and put a hat in

jail. Immediately you see your bank account, transfer some

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money and log out. A few minutes later you want to check

your email on your smart phone. Again you see a bunch of

games on the screen. This time you click on Chess and put a

white king on each of the four corners of the board.

Immediately you have access to the contents of your phone.

So what I plan to discuss today for the most part is whether

this is a good way of protecting the many disparate pathways

we have to the electronic infrastructure of the modern

world. Telling this story raises general questions that have

been asked in different times in the history of sociological

theory. Max Weber often wondered whether instrumental

rationality and specialization will outlaw the generalist or

dilettante. Thomas Kuhn wondered why and how the normal

scientific way of solving problems was sometimes replaced by

a revolutionary way of solving problems. And Max Weber and

later Talcott Parsons (Stouffer’s boss at Harvard) wondered

what happens to the university and the values it represents

when it is fully commodified. Is a university that is not

value-free a university at all?

However, I’m also interested in a second, quirkier,

question. This is one that someone asked me at a talk I

gave on this project a while ago at Case Western. There I

was asked why I thought my work had anything to do with

sociology. And in responding to this provocation (or

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compliment?) I was led to wonder how I came up with the idea

in the first place and how my collaborators, Ye Zhu and

Conor McLennan, then took the idea in directions that I

certainly hadn’t thought of myself. The short answer to

this is that I believe that revolutionary science is

produced by manufactured luck. Revolutionary scientists

either win the lottery for new ideas or they expose

themselves to disparate influences that put them in the

fortunate position of ‘seeing’ a solution that others had

missed. This solution has then to be confirmed by existing

normal science methodology or it has to point to a new

methodology that can validate it.

A Narrative of the Project:

From Manufactured luck to Revolutionary Science to Normal

Science

This project came about not because of events at CSU but

because of discussions at NSF. A meeting of great minds

there had decided that there were a number of computer-

related issues that had befuddled specialists. They decided

that enough time and money had been spent without producing

breakthrough solutions to a range of apparently intractable

problems and that it was now worth taking a punt at

something new. The NSF therefore authorized pilot money to

be spent on projects that engaged a multidisciplinary team

to offer new solutions to thorny old questions. By

multidisciplinary the NSF had in mind not just

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collaborations between, say, software engineers and

mathematicians but between technical specialists and

generalists from outside of the natural sciences.

One of my collaborators here at CSU, Ye Zhu, had a track

record with the NSF and, as a Professor of Electrical

Engineering, was aware that this funding opportunity was

forthcoming. He contacted me and arranged a meeting. There

he outlined about ten technical, computer-based problems

that the NSF had identified as ones where progress had

largely dried up. Optimistically, he asked me whether I had

any ideas, however hesitant, about how we could make any

headway with any of them.

When luck is needed, timing is everything! In fact, the

‘open systems’ that social scientists and historians study

are such that both good and bad luck play a much bigger role

than we often want to admit. And so is the case here. Just

before I met with Ye Zhu I had been told about an entirely

different kind of multidisciplinary collaboration and this

had made a big impact on me. I had just heard my wife

(Maria Hatzoglou, a Professor at Case Western) describe a

workshop hosted by a Foundation interested in finding a

treatment for Huntington’s disease. As with the NSF, the

old heads at the CHDI Foundation feared that specialists

were not making tangible progress toward a cure for this

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neurodegenerative disorder. They therefore set up workshops

across the United States. Local contacts were asked to

identify smart people with no prior ties to research on

Huntington’s disease and invite them to an all day retreat.

There, specialists explained the current state of knowledge

and asked for ideas. Maria, who knew nothing about the

disease ahead of time, pointed out a way of approaching the

problem that was new to the specialists. A few days later

she received an email offering her $100,000 to carry out the

experiments to find out whether the idea would fly.

So, I was unusually receptive to the unlikely idea that a

social theorist such as myself might have something to offer

a specialist in cyber-security and electrical engineering.

If Ye had walked into my office the year before there’s a

good chance I would have said ‘not my area’. Glancing at the

ten or so possible topics for collaboration I fixated on the

password security. Why was I interested at all in password

security?

First, because I try to read the Economist magazine and

something had caught my eye in a recent issue. What had

interested me the week before was something different: an

article on password security. There I had discovered that

the most common password in America is the word, ‘password’.

The same article also pointed out that an iPhone has a four

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digit authentication code and hence its security blanket has

only 10,000 permutations – not exactly bulletproof.

The Economist then gave what I thought was an interesting

example of a more secure password (than the word

‘password’):

TBONTBTITQ.

This bit of gobbledygook is actually meaningful. Each letter

represents the first letter of ‘To be or not to be, that is

the question’. Replacing the two uses of ‘to’ with the

digit 2 and then adding an exclamation point at the end

could strengthen the math of this potential password even

further.

This then gives us the possible password:

2BON2BTITQ!

This approach seemed to me then and still today to be

promising. The experimental question to be answered is

whether the world contains too many Hamlets for this

password to be secure. But if testing shows that

participants have their own favorite literary, poetic, movie

or song lines that they are willing to spice up with a

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couple of digits and a symbol or two, this might be a good

stopgap cyber-security measure.

The second serendipitous event that led to the research

project that the NSF ultimately funded is that someone broke

into my house. At the time I didn’t appreciate how lucky

I’d been. Among the stolen items was an unopened and I’m

told very special Kentucky bourbon, a twenty-year old Tag

Heuer watch that had been the beginning of my interest in

watches and, unfortunately, my Green Card. A few days

after the break-in the burglar was arrested breaking into

another house. Since he was wearing my old and rare Tag

watch the police were able to link him to me. When they

searched his house they found the very special Kentucky

bourbon. Actually, they only found the empty bottle. So

instead of a hangover courtesy of the bourbon I just had the

hangover of having to deal with Homeland Security to replace

my Green Card. In fairness, Homeland Security proved to be

very supportive. My difficulty was mainly that I needed to

log into their system to initiate the process of getting a

replacement Green Card and to do that I needed to construct

a password that their system recognized as secure. To pass

this test I had to come up with a long list of unrelated

letters, digits, symbols. This proved impossible for me to

memorize. As a result, I had to do the one thing you’re

really not supposed to do: I wrote my password down. As I

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did this, I understood that I was compromising the security

of the system – but what to do? From this experience I

learned the tabiya of cyber-security research: passwords

can be memorable or secure but not both. So I now knew what

the NSF wanted non-specialists to help them solve.

The third event is really a non-event: for much of my life

I’ve been a competitive chess player and because of this I

sometimes see the world through the prism of chess. Chess is

both an exhilarating and a frustrating game. The path to

victory in games played between strong players is often

quite narrow and an aesthetically pleasing set of moves can

be undone by one simple oversight. When I was studying

chess seriously even twenty years ago computers were helpful

but not the final word. Now they are the final word.

Watching super-grandmasters play online today is interesting

because the internet allows enthusiastic amateurs such as

myself to follow the game while seeing at the same time a

computer analyze and confirm the main variations. It’s not

unlike televised poker tournaments where viewers can see the

players’ hole cards.

After my troubles with the password requirements for

Homeland Security and while engrossed in a grandmaster chess

tournament I came up with a password system for myself that

a competitive chess player would recognize instantly.

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Consider this password:

e4e5f4?exf4Nf3d6!

This password has 17 components mixing digits, lower and

upper case letters and symbols. It has the pleasing

appearance of gobbledygook but a competitive chess player

will instantly recognize it as Bobby Fischer’s supposed

refutation of the romantic King’s Gambit. Thus for a former

competitive chess player such as myself, this password is

both trivial to remember and probably quite secure

mathematically.

So, returning to the day when Ye walked into my office

looking for a partner for an NSF grant, it’s possible to see

that the stars were aligning in completely unexpected ways.

I suggested to him that we could propose using games such as

Chess or Monopoly to store passwords. I drew a chessboard on

a piece of paper, drew four pieces on four of the squares

and said that this could be an ‘iconic code’. Although not

convinced, Ye said he would think about it and get back to

me.

After he left I wondered whether the idea had any hope. For

my own curiosity I got out a piece of paper and a pencil to

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figure out how many permutations there were of four chess

pieces on a chessboard. Now I realize that for many or most

of the people in this room this is not a very challenging

math problem. However, it’s important for you to realize

that the zenith of my math ambition is to count down

correctly when playing 501 darts after having drunk a couple

of beers. Ordinarily I would have done what I normally do

in these situations: ask someone else to figure it out for

me. Today I might text my older son who is studying

economics and math at university, asking him to tell me the

answer, especially because he would enjoy being able to do

it, just as my younger son enjoys pointing out to me and

anyone in earshot just how useless I am at doing anything on

my iPhone. But on this afternoon I decided I should make

the effort and so I sat down to figure it out. My intuition

was that I was looking for an answer in the millions. After

a while I had something that I thought might be right but I

wasn’t sure. I then did what I really wanted to do from the

get go: I knocked on Myong Chang’s door (the Chair of the

Economics department) and asked him to figure it out. Myong

is a mathematical economist, maybe a very mathematical

economist, who comes out of a background in engineering. I

would happily challenge Myong at squash, running or chess

but I would definitely not challenge him at math – even 501

darts. Remember this as I tell you that I then explained the

math problem to him, told him I had tried to solve it and

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had what may be the answer in my hand and that I wanted him

to solve it independently of me.

In a nice way he said the problem was trivial, punched a few

numbers on a calculator and told me that there were several

thousand possible permutations. Now I was sure that he was

wrong about this and, as there’s only so much kneeling I can

do at the altar of mathematical economics, I told him to try

harder. He asked me to explain the conditions again and

then took me into his second study. Yes, it’s true:

economics is so important a discipline that its chair has to

have two connected offices, not just one like the rest of

us. No matter that they only have twelve majors. Now Myong

turned on the supercomputer, got the pure math software

warmed up and went back to work. Meanwhile I was thinking

that the math whiz got to use the computer with the fancy

software package while the idiot had to attack this problem

with a pencil and paper.

A few seconds later Myong told me that he had in fact jumped

the gun earlier and that the real answer was as follows:

12x64x12x63x12x62x12x61=3.162038e+11.

This password is very secure mathematically: as there are 12

possible icons (a black and white pawn, knight, bishop,

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rook, queen and king) that can be placed on any of 64

squares on the board, the number of permutations is

therefore: 3.162038e+11.

It took me a while to recognize that Myong’s math answer

with its awkward letter and the numbers on my piece of paper

were miraculously the same: putting four chess pieces on a

chessboard generates over 316 billion permutations.

Instantly this became my new favorite number. As I then

explained the nascent project to Myong I was keenly aware

that any security system that generated 316 billion

permutations so easily might very well have a future.

Simple additions – such as multiple game choices and so on –

will take the base count into the trillions. The engine

behind the math in this example is multidimensionality: the

icons are stored not just in space but in a location, the

existence of which dramatically increases the number of

possibilities that a would-be hacker has to wade through.

The following week Ye reported back, saying that the idea

might have legs but we needed a psychological theory to back

it up. Looking back, his realization that we needed a

theory from the psychology of memory was a key moment in the

project. Even though I was resistant to contamination from a

cognate social science, I agreed to try to find an expert on

campus. That person turned out to be Conor McLennan. I

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honestly believe that if we had not found Conor this project

would have gone nowhere. Ye’s hunch was correct:

psychologists with expertise in memory really do have

theories that affect how we should understand this

electrical engineering project. As I explained to Conor

what I understood about the project I could see that a light

bulb had gone off in his head. He told me that one of his

research interests was in the role of ‘interference’ and

‘neighborhood effects’. It turns out that psychologists

interested in memory and language issues are aware that we

easily confuse words that are close to other words; that is,

words that have many noisy neighbors. In the context of

research on passwords, this is an important insight because

most security systems require users to change passwords.

Here at CSU we have to do so every six months.

Interestingly, everyone knows the reason why the concept of

interference is important for password security: when we

have to choose a new password we often choose one that is

very similar to the old one. We therefore inflict the

problem of neighborhood effect or interference on ourselves

by choosing passwords that we are likely to mix up in the

future. Conor understood straightaway that what I was

proposing had merit because users could store different

passwords in different games in which there would be zero

interference. How can anyone confuse the Monopoly and

Chess examples I gave at the beginning of the paper? From

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this, the title of the project, although a cliché, made

sense: we had a solution to cyber-security based on The Game

Changer. In our case this wasn’t a metaphor but a literal

description of what we were proposing.

Conor’s input was still, to use Thomas Kuhn’s term, ‘normal

science’. This means that what he pointed out was in

keeping with the ways that psychologists typically solve

puzzles in his disciplinary paradigm. What he suggested

next was, in my view, more important. He emphasized that

what was key about this approach, above and beyond

mathematical robustness and memorability, was fun. That is,

storing passwords on Monopoly boards can be fun and

creative. Remember the misery Homeland Security put me

through. Instead my password (or ‘iconic code’) could have

been ‘two houses on Park Ave, a shoe on GO and a community

chest card informing me that I had won third prize in a

beauty competition’. Fun, we came to realize, was not

ephemeral or cosmetic but a major advantage of our approach.

Ye’s technical ability and keen awareness of the viability

of this approach led to the successful submission of the NSF

grant and a provisional patent filed by CSU. Without his

initiatives this project would have remained at best a set

of loose ideas.

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In the past few months we have been testing The Game Changer

using CSU students and High School participants. In the

future we hope to find out whether older populations who

might be less enthusiastic adopters of new technology find

our system useful. Initial findings are promising. At this

point it looks like 9 out of 10 test participants can

remember their iconic code on either a Chess or Monopoly

board well enough to store it in their long-term memory.

Most people can also enter their iconic code easily enough

on an iPad but the dexterity needed to move icons on a

Monopoly board on a smart phone is challenging. So we’ve

learned that not all games are equal and not all platforms

are equal. Had we tried this on the keypad on a home

security system I don’t think we would have had any trouble.

Early feedback from participants suggests that they found it

cool but worry that it’s not as mathematically secure as

their iPhone security. In this estimate, participants are

off in their informal calculations by more than 316 billion!

But is it Original?

I think that most people can accept that this approach to

cyber-security could be worth something. It is, after all,

a very simple idea that’s made robust by

multidimensionality. It’s also psychologically compelling

because of the absence of neighborhood effects due to game

changing and it’s also propped up by being a bit of a laugh.

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But like most simple ideas, the suspicion is that even if

it’s not too good to be true, it must be too good to be

original. Hasn’t someone else already been there and done

that?

As far as I know, three research groups have tried something

similar. One used Go, another Snakes and Ladders and a third

a modified version of Chess. So, these three after the fact

discoveries were also three doses of potential bad news for

us. On closer inspection, none of these competitors

recognized the importance of either game changing or fun.

However, they all understood the importance of

multidimensionality.

A fourth case is much more interesting and because it is

also much more ambitious its future success could render The

Game Changer obsolete. I had been made aware of this fourth

approach from the very start, as Ye knew about a group of

computer scientists at Stanford who had their own quirky

approach to cyber-security. When I first read their work I

was struck by how creative they were and also by my own

prejudices against people whose skill sets are primarily

technical. The Stanford researchers stored passwords inside

the game ‘Guitar Hero’. For those of you who avoided this

short-lived craze, in ‘Guitar Hero’ people play a plastic

guitar while looking at a computer screen belting out

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‘Stairway to Heaven’ or their own favorite track. The

computer screen also shows the player where to place his or

her fingers on the neck of the plastic guitar. The Stanford

group found a way of allowing a computer to recognize the

unique playing style of a ‘Guitar Hero’ fan. It works like

this: the user initially plays the game as the computer

monitors the playing style. After a while, the computer

announces: ‘Okay, I got it’. If that player returns a week

later, the computer can authenticate the user based on his

or her implicit, unconscious, playing style - in about

thirty minutes. They have published data suggesting they

can make this work. Now, although no-one apart from a 16

year old heavy metal freak is prepared to play Guitar Hero

for half an hour just so as to be able to check email, the

Stanford research group has to my mind established ‘proof of

principle’ that their approach works. It might therefore

only be a matter of time (ah, that’s a pun) before they or

someone else equally smart figures how to do this in three

seconds instead of thirty minutes.

What makes their approach so interesting is not just that

the password is stored in a game, if you consider ‘Guitar

Hero’ to be a game at all. What is so provocative is that

the Stanford group is proposing a cyber-security system in

which the users themselves employ a password without knowing

what their password is. If they ever succeed in a practical

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way they will have solved two longstanding dilemmas in

cyber-security research: ‘rubber hosing’ and ‘shoulder

surfing’. Rubber hosing is the idea that some people know a

password that they really must never divulge. Perhaps they

hold the launch key for nuclear weapons. Even if they are

tortured – rubber hosed – they must never give up the

password. The Stanford group has an ingenious solution to

this problem: for example, even if captured by ISIS,

President Obama can never reveal the password to initiate

the launch code for our nuclear submarines because he really

doesn’t know what it is. In order to start World War III,

the President will have to play ‘Guitar Hero’ for half an

hour. However, I do detect at least one weakness in this

approach. ISIS intelligence might figure out that this is

the case and purchase ‘Guitar Hero’ from Nintendo and then

torture the President until he agrees to play ‘Stairway to

Heaven’ for half an hour. But, joking aside, I take the

proof of principle point that the Stanford group appear to

have something new and something that could be extended to a

great many practices.

The shoulder surfing problem is less dramatic but more

common. This is important because passwords are routinely

stolen by low-tech and not hi-tech means: by someone

watching people and writing down what they do. If any of us

today wanted to, for example, we could probably

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surreptitiously watch someone enter an iPhone passcode. If,

later in the day, we could steal the phone we would have

become very low-tech cyber thieves.

Sociology and Specialized Knowledge

I want to finish this talk by returning to the question of

whether any of the foregoing discussion has anything to do

with sociology. To get traction with this, I want to make

some comments about the nature of sociology and about the

nature of science, most of which I draw from one of

sociology’s heavyweights, Max Weber.

Although he couldn’t have known so at the time, when Weber

gave his justly famous lecture on ‘Science as a Vocation’ in

the winter of 1917, the end of the Great War was not too far

off. For his audience who may very have expected the troops

to be home by Christmas of 1914, the end of the war could

likely not come soon enough. Weber eased his audience into

his discussion by contrasting the experiences of professors

in Germany and in the United States, although he did pause

at one moment to remind his audience of the rampant anti-

Semitism in Germany at large and in the universities in

particular. But then Weber focused on his main contentions:

science can only be advanced by people with a passion for

what they do. Further, just as politicians have to live for

politics and not off politics (as Weber said in a lecture

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just after the end of the war), so scientists have to live

for science and not off it.

But the passion of a scientist is nevertheless value-free

and self-destructive. What Weber meant by this is that

whether scientists passionately conduct research about

either the natural or the social world, they must recognize

that their findings will inevitably be short-lived. In fact,

it is not just that these passionate scientists must

recognize that their contributions will soon be surpassed;

they must also welcome the defeat of their own ideas. For

example, in Weber’s day, naval military strategy was based

on a set of assumptions that were metaphorically and

literally sunk with the arrival of the Dreadnought – a new

kind of warship that rendered everything else obsolete.

Weber also pointed out that science leads to

‘disenchantment’. By this he meant that modern life makes

us aware of the omnipresence of calculation and this empties

the world of its magic. David Owen, an undergraduate

classmate of mine from the University of Durham, wrote

recently in a commentary on Weber that disenchantment makes

sense if we think of the phrase: ‘she’s got it down to a

science’. We use this to suggest that someone can reproduce

something successfully over and over again. For example, a

few years ago I had a heart procedure. I remember asking the

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cardiologist if he performed this procedure often. He gave

me the answer I was looking for: ‘I do it about 500 times a

year’. He has it down to a science.

Weber then advocated specialization in science, stating very

clearly that greater and greater academic specialization was

inevitable. On the face of it, this is an easy claim for us

to accept. For example, for my cardiologist to have this one

procedure down to a science he cannot be performing a lot of

other heart procedures and he is also not making psychiatric

diagnoses and he is definitely not fixing cars. Or, a

historian who is an expert on the Great War may very well be

an expert on an aspect of the Great War rather than the

terrible event as a whole. And such a historian will not

likely be an expert on the Roman Empire or the history of

Cuba and so on. And in my neck of the woods, it is asking a

lot of a sociological theorist to be an expert on Marx,

Durkheim and Weber and that is before we mention other

interesting figures such as Sumner, Mead, Freud, Parsons,

Goffman, Foucault and so on. And to find a sociologist who

knows about all these great predecessors and is also up to

date on the latest quantitative methods, trends in urban

development and so on is ridiculous. That said, we do half

joke in my department that this is actually a relatively

accurate description of my colleague Jim Chriss’ areas of

research expertise.

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But although it seems that Weber’s observation about

specialization and science is obviously true, I think that

the matter is more complicated. Ironically, Weber himself

is evidence against his own assertion. At different times

in his career he appeared to be a lawyer, an economist and a

sociologist. In terms of his research interests, he might

fairly be described in an entirely different way as a

specialist in comparative religion. Fast forward to today

and many of our leading researchers in the humanities and

social sciences are similarly very hard to pin down

departmentally. Think of Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty,

Quentin Skinner or Michel Foucault.

The choice of these examples might lead you to suspect that

the social sciences are in disarray. That might be true but,

if anything, the situation in the natural sciences is more

contradictory. Since I’ve already used my wife as an

example of the payoffs of multidisciplinary work, let me use

her experiences again. Two years ago Maria was a Professor

of Nutrition. This year she is a Professor of Pharmacology.

Next year she has accepted a position as a Professor of

Genetics. In the mean time she has turned down a very

senior position in a research center conducting liver

research. She also declined a separate offer in a research

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center studying degenerative eye disease. The last position

she didn’t apply for; they just offered it her anyway.

So how can it be that such an intuitive idea as Weber’s,

suggesting that science requires specialization, can be so

difficult to demonstrate in practice? Or why is it that when

at CSU the occasional tenure track position opens up,

departments are usually completely unwilling to consider

anyone outside of their narrow specialization?

As an undergraduate I read Jeffrey Bergner’s The Origins of

Formalism in Modern Social Science. After a thirty-year

hiatus I’m drawn back to this slim book. I think his take-

home message is that sociology as Durkheim conceived it to

be does not exist. That is, there is not a special social

reality for sociologists to study and there are no methods

for sociologists to monopolize. Rather, sociology, just

like every other social science discipline (and academic

History as well) has to study the same ‘total social-

political-economic-historical reality’. Further,

sociologists can study this reality from a variety of

perspectives – all of which are available to all other

social scientists to use as they see fit.

Bergner is therefore suggesting that the current

configuration of social sciences and history is artificial.

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Ironically, this book began life as a Princeton PhD and

therefore should have positioned Bergner for a top academic

job. After he graduated he did work in universities for a

short while, in what departments I’m not sure, before

becoming what seems to me to be a Machiavellian figure in

the backrooms of Washington political circles. So perhaps

he was a better observer than practitioner of the social

sciences. Interestingly, what Bergner claims for the social

sciences and history might already be established practice

for the natural sciences – an argument he chose not to make.

So what I’m left with is the idea that although there will

be increasingly technical specializations and increasingly

technical specialists, we should recognize that

breakthroughs need more than just specializations. There

will always be experts to translate Ancient Greek for us, to

perform surgical procedures, to do mathematical modeling and

so on. We can get these things down to a science. But above

and beyond these specialized areas of expertise, there will

be problems and proposed solutions that cross all known and

all artificial boundaries. These problems exist and are as

yet unsolved precisely because we haven’t got them down to a

science. We can only pursue them with a passion and with a

sense of excitement and humor – as I’ve tried weakly to

demonstrate here. We must also accept gracefully that our

proposed solutions are only one small conceptual or

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technological revolution away from obsolescence. In

striving to solve these problems – whether they concern

cyber-security, Weber’s sociology, the architecture of

memory, naval military strategy or Huntington’s disease, no-

one in his or her right mind will care what academic

discipline you temporarily and artificially claim as your

own. All that remains is a passion to solve the problem and

the honesty to recognize the superiority of rival solutions.

This honesty is part of what Max Weber understood by the

necessity of value-freedom in social science. In a modern

phrase, value-freedom is the commitment to let the chips

fall where they will and then honestly report the result.

What I’ve tried to do today is to show you how and why I had

fun trying to solve an aspect of the cyber-security problem.

Fun or no fun the project nevertheless required normal

science - the technical know-how of software engineers,

statisticians and others to make it real. The kicker though

is that university professors must live for science and not

off science, as Weber put it. Our job is not to make a

value-laden appeal about the importance of ‘our’ commodity

over and above another commodity. The fate of the Game

Changer password model described here is no different from

the fate of every other scientific product: it will be

surpassed by better solutions – and maybe the whacky Guitar

Hero approach out of Stanford is that better solution. Our

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responsibility as scientists is to stand at the door and

welcome in the people who will render us obsolete. If we

understand this and internalize it, we have grasped the key

characteristic of the ‘value-sphere’ or ‘life-order’ of the

university.

However, it is obvious that the commodification of the

university has passed the point of no return. Stouffer did

not cause this to happen when he took a lot of Government

money to produce surveys about the attitudes of soldiers but

– for sociology at least – that was a fork in the road.

Stouffer died before his time in a car crash in 1960. The

sociologists who continued his work in military sociology -

such as Morris Janowitz at the University of Chicago - were

later judged harshly by the radical students of the 1960s

and 1970s. On one occasion, they even burned an effigy of

him outside of his office. I doubt that they did this in an

attempt to promote value-free research. Rather, they

preferred their own value-laden research to that of

Janowitz.

The clash between value-free and value-laden research has

since produced many more forks in the road. The task as I

see it is for faculty is to continue to practice both normal

and revolutionary science: to manufacture luck and thereby

to produce revolutionary science that can be confirmed or

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disconfirmed by normal scientific means. Their vocation as

professors requires them to let the chips fall where they

may – and to do so happily. The task as I see it is for

administrators is to build an internal university firewall

between science and money. External pressures will make this

difficult for them, as will their own ambitions and salary

aspirations. The ambition of professors as professors2 on

one side of the firewall is to see their ideas replaced by

better ideas. On the other side of the firewall we see

concerns about grant dollars and enrollment trends. If the

firewall collapses, University Incorporated awaits us. Put

in Weber’s terms, the traditional value-sphere of the idea

of the university requires value-freedom. By contrast,

actual universities require money. Those universities that

don’t have enough money won’t be able to sustain the

firewall and the external demands on the university will

overpower its traditional value-free aspirations.

About 6500 words

2 Of course professors don’t have to act as professors. Manyyears ago I remember asking someone what his research was about. He told me it was about $3 million.

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