The HIPP27 HUMAN PROGRESS Call explores how insights from the humanities and social sciences can contribute to research in the natural sciences and help address complex environmental challenges.
But what does HUMAN PROGRESS actually mean? We spoke with the project’s coordinator Professor Dr. Thilo Gross about the idea behind the call, interdisciplinarity and the impact the project hopes to achieve.
What does HUMAN PROGRESS stand for?
Thilo Gross: The name HUMAN PROGRESS seeks to spark discussions. It combines the word HUMAN, to represent our need to understand humans better, with the term PROGRESS, which is omnipresent in natural-science thinking. For us, human progress means that we want to make progress by understanding humans (how they affect the environment, collect data, construct narratives, etc.), but it also reminds us to ask which humans are served by the progress we create, and perhaps also who is impacted negatively.
The project aims to foster interdisciplinarity, which is essential for marine sciences. What exactly do you mean by this in regard to the everyday work of a researcher, and where do you see the biggest hurdles?
Thilo Gross: Every academic discipline has a corpus of methods and picks its battles accordingly. We are trained to recognize problems for which our methods work, and we think of those problems as worthwhile targets of our attention; if we encounter a problem for which we don’t have the right tools, it is easy to dismiss it as intractable, boring and not worthy of attention. This creates the biggest problem in interdisciplinary research: agreeing on what is a cool problem and what are the standards of success. This obstacle can be overcome by developing a mutual appreciation, by recognizing that, say, today’s historical research is every bit as advanced and sophisticated as today’s nuclear physics. Once you have this appreciation you realize that all the other disciplines have their own corpus of highly sophisticated methods that allow to address completely different types of questions. And of course once you know the methods the questions that they address are suddenly fascinating and the world just fills with wonder.
Could the integration of social data into scientific models lead to complex social dynamics being oversimplified? How can we counteract this?
Thilo Gross: Oversimplifying is good. We make models because the world is too complicated, and if we make models too complicated we can’t analyze them properly. If you oversimplify and the model still gets something right, you have likely discovered a deep principle, but that only really shows your intuition was good from the start. If your model fails and it is simple enough, then you can analyze the failure, and this allows you to get new insights and improve your intuition! This is how we make progress. Models are primarily tools for thinking and they work mostly by failing. This is why modellers need to work with people from diverse backgrounds: they teach us to criticize our models in new ways, so we can be wrong more often and make progress faster.
The success of the project will be measured by whether it has a ‘demonstrable impact on research in the natural sciences’. How do you define this impact – and where does the impact lie, more within academia or in society and politics?
Thilo Gross: In academic research. At the moment the natural sciences suffer because we do not get enough input from social sciences and humanities. This is a radical idea, isn’t it? There is a division between the STEM disciplines on one hand and social sciences and humanities on the other. Creating this division made sense in the 19th century when the disciplines were establishing their core. To discover the basics of ecology it made sense to study pristine nature, far from human influence. Today a pressing need is to understand how nature survives in systems severely impacted by humans, and that creates a need to incorporate human behaviour and decision-making in our thinking. Also our longest ecological datasets span only decades, but people have recorded nature for millennia. This data is not widely used in ecology, because it is colored by the perceptions of the time. But, we can unlock it if we work with historians who are experts on these perceptions. Even in mathematics, the research is done by humans, and the results are papers that present narratives to humans. Learning to understand humans better will unlock much progress in science — Human Progress.
Interested in learning more? Explore the HIPP27 Human Progress Call and discover all five positions