The Problem Is Solved by Art, Not Science

The Problem Is Solved by Art, Not Science
by Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone Institute

So much of what is considered science today is really just art. It’s a subjective interpretation of the meaning of data. Data does not speak for itself. It does not tell you cause and effect. It provides no predictive map for the future. It’s often incorrect or merely a proximate rendering of the full reality. Even the best and most experienced experts and invested stakeholders cannot overcome this problem. 

The implications of this insight are vast. 

Let’s start with an easy example. 

Did you see Gladiator II? It had many of the same actors as the first movie that swept the awards and captivated audiences worldwide. It had bloody fight scenes. It had great music. It had creepy relationships, wicked power plays, feats of derring-do, displays of all kinds of cruelty and heroics, plus CGI of a recreated Roman Colosseum, this time with the floor flooded with water for a sea battle. 

And yet the movie left audiences with not much. The experience was overall evaporative and the message elusive. The magic was missing. That special story arc of drama that swept us up in the first was strangely absent. At some point halfway through – and speaking as someone who loved the first – it struck me that I could walk away and not really care how it ended. 

This often happens with sequels. It’s not just because the directors and producers see an easy buck by roping in audiences to throw down for tickets, hoping to relive the experience of the first. Sequels are often a pale copy of the first because the producers, scriptwriters, and directors are themselves not entirely sure why the first one was great. 

The movie makers can workshop this all day and for weeks. They can gather focus groups. They can talk to experts. They can pay the actors the big bucks. Everyone will have a theory, and they can try to recreate and reboot the thing as best they can. But at some point, no matter how hard they try and with many millions on the line, they leave the magical creative world of art and enter into the mundane task of recreation. With all their efforts, the drama is drained away. No one knows for sure when or how that happens. 

This example comes to mind in the midst of the continued meltdown over the logo change at Cracker Barrel. It seems obvious in retrospect that eliminating Uncle Herschel (a real person who was the uncle of the founder) and the barrel was a bad idea. It comes at a time of rising nostalgia and deep public suspicion of major corporations and their perceived attack on basic values. Maybe it is not entirely clear why this one logo change would have ignited populist fury in normal times but when you consider the loss of trust in everything, this struck people as deeply offensive. 

We learn from deeper reports on the decision that it was not arbitrary. The new CEO Julie Felss Masino, hired in 2023, was tasked with bringing back customers and the stock price after it was slammed during Covid lockdowns. That’s a huge challenge for anyone, especially given the roaring inflation that followed the money printing of the period. 

Julie reached into her communications undergraduate degree and her Master’s of Business Administration and found a possible answer. The goal is to attract a younger generation. She had heard from her social set many times that the union of the word “cracker” with a white guy in overalls has racist overtones. Maybe it refers to cracking the whip. Maybe it is a signal that only whites are allowed. Maybe the overalls suggest it is only for farmers or aging nostalgists. In any case, it seemed obvious to her that an update was in order. 

Further, the executive team brought in focus groups. They did customer surveys. They assembled all the empirical evidence they could find. In the end, they discerned that they would win more with a change than they would lose from those who would miss the old sign. This intuition was further backed by a plan for interior changes. Down with all the bric-a-brac on the walls and up with a cleaner look of an Apple store. After all, this is where interior design seems to be headed. Shouldn’t Cracker Barrel keep up?

And yet, once the announcement was made, the customers and the public were invited to respond. What they saw was one of the few franchises with symbolism that drew on cultural memory and its replacement by the soulless, barren, and deracinated symbolism that has defined so much of what everyone hates about public life today. It suggested that yet another huge corporation was trampling on history, tradition, and meaning. 

Consumers these days are interested in testing their power in ways akin to voters. They will buy or decline to buy as a way of rewarding or punishing companies that make decisions that affect the aesthetics of public life. We’ve seen this with Jaguar, Bud Light, Target, and many other companies that have run afoul of the emerging public mood that trends toward a kind of restoration. To reward or decline to do so is the very essence of the capitalist experience. It is a manner of taking back power for the people. 

Companies make mistakes all the time. That’s because marketing is not science. It is art, an extension of human judgment, just like making movies or writing songs. We can flatter ourselves that the answer is always in the data. They can do surveys and focus groups. But often all those techniques can lead managers astray to the point that they land far afield of what could be called common sense. If anyone from Cracker Barrel’s management had entered a restaurant and shown the two images side by side to an average customer, they could have anticipated the uproar. 

The problem is that ideology is blinding toward reality that any average person can see. The same is true of high-end credentials and impressive resumes. They confer not wisdom but exaggerated confidence in subjective judgment. 

The career of the new CEO took her from Sprinkles Cupcake to Starbucks to Taco Bell. Surely she has the requisite experience. But what if that experience consisted of working within a tight bubble of influence of people from her social and professional class? After all, she kept trading up in her career and now pulls in $6.8 million a year – not exactly in keeping with the medium family income of the typical customer of Cracker Barrel. 

The point is that her class and social bubble affected her judgment, as well as those around her. All the data, surveys, and focus groups did not dislodge her prevailing theory that modernization was the key to return to profitability. The test happened in real life: the decision was a calamity. Maybe it pleased BlackRock, which is the largest single stockholder. Maybe it pleased her social set. She was certainly pleased with the decision. But the general public flew into fury. 

Management and marketing in graduate school is often rendered as empirical sciences. That’s ridiculous but such is the bias of our age. Everyone thinks there is some system, some mechanism, some machine, some data set, that will point the right way. This applies in every area, including infectious disease, pharmacology, government, and thousands of other fields. 

The belief that the data speaks for itself is the religion of our time. The trouble is that it does not. We are just as controlled by value systems and subjective judgment as were men in the ancient world. All our techniques have changed nothing about this. 

This week, for example, Brownstone Institute found itself embroiled in a highly technical argument over the RSV shot for babies. An outside committee of the CDC approved it with only two no votes, one member of whom reported real doubts about the data. Sure enough, Brownstone reported the problems, which are highly technical. Then it got worse as more data scientists weighed in. Now there is a genuine question about whether the committee was presented with truthful data. 

The larger issue is that the manufacturer wanted the shot approved and so did the CDC. The study and data and appearance of science was secondary, a mere veneer to a larger agenda that was driven by a value proposition. They wanted the shot out there. The science was just the excuse. But then it fell apart or, at least, did not hold up to the promise. Now we find ourselves again in the awkward position of having trusted the experts and discovering that this was not a good idea. 

One of the great books of our age is Tom Harrington’s The Treason of the Experts. He writes from the point of view of the humanities, explaining many of the above points. He explains that everyone is working hard to find the science of what is really an art. 

This point applies to the healing arts as well. Why did anyone think that locking down society would be good for health? It’s nuts and anyone could have known that, unless the person had a head full of models and maths. The fake science literally blinded the entire world. 

What’s happened to many brands and to many countries traces to the adoption of a superstition with a scientific veneer. Fortunately, the people have some limited means of making a correction, smacking the fake experts around a bit, and resetting the world to operate in a way that is more humane and intuitively truthful. 

This could be the next stage of history. With the experts and the science having led us to a place of disaster, the principles, arts, and ethics of old can lead us back to a better place. 

The Problem Is Solved by Art, Not Science
by Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society