On Earning Trust: The Case for the Social Sciences
Notes from the SSRC: 2025 College and University Fund Conference…
Trustworthiness: Universities as institutions must earn trust through actions: The first step on the path to public trust is making organizations worthy of trust by their practice—fixing monocultures, sharpening focus, and ensuring courses teach tools that grant access to real knowledge: The answer to the question of trust from our perspective is that we, first, need to be trustworthy. We know more or less how we do that…
Reframing ASI: Human civilization’s cumulative “Anthology Super-Intelligence”: ASI is not Artificial Super-Intelligence, the product of electronic microcurrents running through doped silicon crystals in square-mile data centers running roiling boils of linear algebra. The real ASI is the Anthology Super-Intelligence crystalized in the five-millennia‑long global—wide corpus of human ideas encoded in writing and scholarship: It is only to the extent that humans, or indeed summarization text-processing machines, can successfully jack-in to good ideas contained in that ASI that they can be worth anything, either in terms of living well as our graduates can do things that their employers find valuable, or living wisely by using the ASI as a source of ideas to enrich their lives…
Pedagogy’s core aim: Training people to plug into this collective human mentalASI: Education should equip students to connect to, interpret, and extend the accumulated corpus of human ideas; that is the durable mission across eras: When it does that, it is worth an absolutely, absolutely enormous amount. We are all in the business of training our students to do such. And what “such” is changes radically over time…
Skills evolve; the intellectual enterprise endures: The practical skills required to access and produce knowledge change radically over time, but the underlying intellectual task remains the same: 5,000 years ago, a good hour of your day as a scribe would be mixing the clay to the proper consistency o it would properly take the imprint of the stylus. Now we teach and need rather different skills. But it is still the same global overall intellectual enterprise...
Curricular focus on tools that grant access: Courses must deliver concrete capabilities—methods, literacies, and practices—that genuinely open pathways into the human ASI: Classes that do not give people the tools that they need to access that real ASI are classes that fail…
Continuity of knowledge work across media: From clay tablets to keyboards, knowledge work is still organizing, interpreting, and producing ideas: Now we are not punching in clay but punching on keys; however, it still in the service of the same overall intellectual enterprise…
Historical craft vs. modern competence: Expertises that once were essential underpinnings of competence (cuneiform clay mixing, fine chancery hands) become obsolete, underscoring the need to continually redefine “literacy” and “craft” for current mediums. Being “useful” is historically contingent on prevailing media and methods: Not only do I today not have any expertise at all in mixing clay to make a proper cuneiform tablet, I can’t even write an approximation of a fine chancery hand. Thomas Cromwell would dismiss me s completely useless: “You can’t prepare a legal document for me. Go away!”…
Doped-silicon microcurrent machines as summarizers, not sovereign oracles: Present‑day text‑processing systems have value insofar as they serve as relatively dumb natural-language front-ends to trusted, curated, scrubbed databases, not as oracles: OpenAI created a technology demonstration by setting out to create a text-prediction program that was the best possible approximation of an internet s***poster. And it succeeded. Now, on top of that, we have added RLHF, which has layered on a desperate desire to get the highest teaching ratings possible. So now you have two mammoth sources of complete FAIL built-in at a fundamental level. The solution is just enough neural network power to translate an English question into a well-formed database query, and no more…
Popperian falsification as a methodological anchor: Exposure to Karl Popper’s philosophy is recommended to ground scientific and social inquiry in testability and error correction…
Epistemic humility as civic virtue: The Oliver Cromwell injunction is a guiding ethic for inquiries and institutions: As Oliver Cromwell said, addressing the Scottish General Assembly: “Consider in the bowels of Christ that you may be mistaken…”
Historical patterns: With the post-medieval disenchantment of the world, or at least Western Europe, the things that students would study at university—so they could then understand and maneuver in society—those things shifted: from Aquinas’s “Summary of Theology” to Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Mill; Plutarch, Puffendorf, and Petty. And the students were happy with this—they were then enabled to tap into the time- and space-binding library of written-down human thought: both to enrich their lives by living wisely; and by being useful to their employers enabling them to live well as well.
How did the universities of these days figure out that this shift—this going all-in on proto-social-science—was the way to both become worthy of being trusted and become trusted? And what are the immediate actionable lessons from this for us now today?