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I’m listening to the infamous William Lane Craig vs Christopher Hitchens “Does God Exist” debate, and I was reminded of Carl Sagan’s clear and simple (opening) statements of how pointless the cosmological / cosmogenetic first-cause “something from nothing” argument is as a basis for a “creator”. Craig leads off on this – before going off on a misunderstood summary of “fine-tuning” arguments against coincidence and improbability.

The theist is concerned primarily with “objectivity” and “evidence” of “great facts” – Jeez – yet says we mustn’t focus on “external arguments” for our individual beliefs and inner voices – Jeez. And shameless strawmen like “atheists say there is nothing wrong with rape” etc. Why am I listening to this ? (Just interested in why so many evangelical theists see Hitchens as having been slaughtered in this debate … 2 hours of it … but all the standard rehearsed arguments and tricks from the theist side so far.)

And lo and behold, Hitch leads off on the irony of the theist using “scientistic” arguments, physics and cosmology that could never have been available to the original prophets. Retrospective evidentialism – infinitely updatable hindsight – not worth arguing against. If that’s your argument, you win the undisprovable pointless point. And eventually we get to first cause  … see above.

Interesting that the riposte is basically agnosticism vs atheism. The “meta-why” argument. Why would you want “proof” – what would “proof” look like anyway ? It’s why I say non-theist. (Oooh, Craig also suggests non-theism.) Too important to be agnostic (evasive), too sceptical to expect proof – just balance of rational argument needed to “explain”. The wrong argument(s) – a non-debate.

The ubiquitous golden rule. Human solidarity.

I’m often guilty of confirmation bias. I have a particular world-view that favours balance across multi-levelled patterns, over extreme positions at any one level, so being an unfashionable position (in the blogosphere) I often latch onto examples that illustrate points that support my position. I was expecting Kahneman’s best selling “Thinking Fast and Slow” to be one long confirmation. In a sense it is, but it’s also a major disappointment in that it falls short and remains remarkably naive, for a Nobel-prize-winning effort.

OK, so there’s nowt so queer as folk, and psychology is everything when it comes to human behaviour in the world, even the world of economics. My agenda is the psychology of decision-making, how we use what we know to make (moral) decisions that govern our activities. So “the most important psychologist alive today”, also being an economics Nobel-laureate has to be a winning combination.

Kahneman’s book is full of “cognitive biases” that confound simple rational logic. The trouble is, his book is a summary of 30+ years research of his, with Amos Tversky and Nassim Taleb to name but two. So, if it’s a subject you’re interested in you’ve probably heard of most of them before, and seen references to most of the key experiments and case-studies, in works by others. If the concept of “cognitive biases” messing with our economic decisions as “rational agents” is new to you then Kahneman’s collection is definitely worth reading. His “prospect theory” overturns most utility-theory-based economics textbooks. But any economics that favours statistical objectivity over the subjectivity of its “subjects” has long been branded “autistic” – economics without social skills. Personally, I’ve already moved on.

In fact as I write this I’m a chapter or two from completing “Thinking Fast and Slow” and I’m documenting some criticisms in the hope Kahneman is about to overturn them in his conclusions.

(1) So many of the case studies and experiments are academics using their students as source material. One issue is that so many such “experiments” are questionnaire-based or if not the “real value” in the choices is nevertheless in an experimental context. However the biggest criticism is the participants – intelligent and educated, but still students – the lack of “wisdom” involved.

(2) Much of the book, the title is a reference to the fact, is about System 1 and System 2 thinking. 1 being intuitive and immediate (fast) 2 being considered and calculating (slow). Clearly the subjective psychological angle of 1 is constantly traded against the objectively reasoned angle of 2, and in particular – we are often talking about academic subject matter experts here – how 1 interferes with even expert judgements applied to the inputs and outputs of 2. Seems strange to me to completely miss any opportunity to link this to the right-left-right brain behaviours (see Iain McGilchrist “The Master and his Emissary“. Where R-L-R = 1-2-1; That is inputs (and outputs) are filtered and interpreted by our intuition even if the process of deliberation is explicitly objective and rationally considered.)

(3) He makes a couple of asides about “something your grannie could have told you” when commenting on empirically demonstrated effects, but doesn’t seem to pick up on the existence of wisdom in adages like “a bird in the hand” or “possession is 9/10ths”. The biases in accounting for cost and risk vs strict statistical odds for losses and gains are not some perversion of rationality – they are refinements of rationality. Long run odds may be relevant to actuaries but are irrelevant to individuals – we don’t live by endless streams of binary choices with clear odds, such as those presented in the experimental tests, not every swing has a roundabout. Heuristics of what really matters are probably built into System 1 behaviours – eg: I’ve done the calculation, but on balance I’d prefer …

Wisdom says, life’s just complicated enough for simple logic to not be quite enough.

It’s almost as if (as I said before) we don’t actually want to believe what’s right before our eyes.
https://www.psybertron.org/?p=3933
https://www.psybertron.org/?p=3931

Earlier I responded to David Gurteen suggesting that the IM / KM debate didn’t need any new “definitional” debates beyond those already established.

Here a new post from Chris Collison – a blogger with a similar background to mine – again tweeted by David.

Really the same Wisdom > Knowledge > Information > Data “definitional” stack for me, but an attractive way of defining the knowledge > information distinction. Chris says:

Knowledge is information with life left in it.
(Information itself – is useful and usable – but is dead,
…. whereas knowledge is alive.)

That’s good. And in that same vein, I make the meta-statement:

Wisdom is to know that knowledge is information
…. with dynamic quality.

Just a list of headings from Alain de Botton’s TED talk.

• Religious vs atheist – some confusion of gods and religions?
• “There is no god” is just the start of the story.
• Ritual, moral, communal aspects – cherry-picking “the good bits”
• Shakespeare, Plato, Austen (etc) – cultural sources of morality tales.
• Universities have forgotten to teach “how should we live” – as if we don’t need help, we don’t want to be treated “like children” – whereas most of us are barely holding it together.
• Repetition of old truths (nothing new, etc.) rather than valuing novelty for its own sake.
• Religious calender to ensure ideas cross our paths regularly.
• Looking at the moon – a ritual
• Oratory – rhetorical skills for communication. Praise be to Shakespeare. Plato, Austen
• Associating the physical with the moral lessons – to cement / anchor.
• Art – no such thing as art for art’s sake, always a message / lesson / reason for art. (Explanatory labelling in art galleries.)
• Love, fear, hate and death in religious art. Reinforcing (propagandising) old truths. Art organized according to their didactic message.
• Branding of massive common institutions. Not just individual books by individuals – they can’t change the world, without scale and repetition.
• Travel as pilgrimage.
• You may not agree with the ideas, but you have to admire the processes.
• Politeness is a much overlooked virtue.

All my posts go to twitter, and selected one’s are filtered by dlvr.it to facebook and linkedin (and a few other targetted channels).

I’ve only recently – last 2 or 3 months – started actually following anything (#) or anyone (@) on twitter. (Since for me it was just a channel to other discussion spaces I never really saw the point of watching a twitter feed, and I’m trying to understand who does actually use twitter as their primary user interface.)

None of the people with big followings seem to watch responses to their own general feed, except from people they are already following or have addressed explicitly – not even “replies”. They are just one-way “look at me” feeds.

@GeorgeGalloway is predictable, but a good source of contentious political stories that don’t break in the mainstream media, oh and “me, me, me” posts about is own media appointments – mercifully few.

@AlanSugar and @PiersMorgan are like eight-year-olds – all “me, me, me” promotion of follower numbers and slaves to inane re-tweet requests, and yobbish partisan footie comments. (Stopped following both … pity ‘cos I had a a lot of time for Sugar’s business sense.)

@RichardBranson is interesting and intelligent, both earnest and fun. Most of his tweets are fed from one or other of his other blogging / publishing channels – always related to Branson & Virgin initiatives – but not specifically self-promoting.

@RickyGervais – you already know whether you love or hate his comedic style – and his tweets don’t disappoint – they seem honest. All about him, his media output and I suspect testing out his comedy ideas (as well as his atheist agenda). Cruelly merciless in mocking the “twonks” who don’t always get it – as you’d expect. Making heavy use of “phones smarter than the twonks who own them” at the moment.

Since someone asked – where does IP fit with the MoQ ?

First – IP is about (legal / contractual) rights to use copyright – not about property ownership per se. (See previous SOPA / PIPA threads especially the Kinsella reference.)

In a world where democratic mixed-economy is already the evolved norm, then contracts are clearly very common social level patterns, and could hold true whether the considerations were financial or in-kind / deferred / social-contract terms.

As one social pattern amongst a massive complex of trading and commerce patterns, there are clearly also many level-crossing patterns involved too. Socio-intellectual patterns in establishing and adjusting fair terms for such contracts, particularly in cases near or moving boundaries of existing legislation – where terms are not already established social patterns – (though of course in an evolved society the processes of debate and intellectual freedom are themselves regulated by established social patterns and institutions of governance). And there obviously socio-bio-physical patterns where cases of enforcement arise.

If we’re not in a world of democratic mixed economies, then we have a different starting point. We’re in another possible world, but we’d need to address questions of where trading and commerce (or their equivalent) fit as patterns.  That’s a different question, that would require a great deal of intellectual debate, not to mention social (even biological) evolution before we could start (would even need) to address IP.

Seems pretty straightforward ?

[Post Note : Oh, and another example of illegal internet uses …
and more from Megaupload – see previous.]

Excellent Edinburgh TED talk from Alain deBotton. Good on so many fronts, will need to comment more later. Even made BBC R4 Today programme this morning. Atheism2.0

I’ve always resisted identifying with the term “atheist” preferring non-theist or new-humanist, or maybe Spinozan pan-theist,  if I must choose a religious label. Mainly because atheism really has become an extreme anti-theist religion, that misses or debases the spiritual experience dimension of life, and is profoundly “anti” … devoid of love and respect … both words Alain is happy to use. The placing of scientific rationality on a pedestal to the exclusion  all others – scientism – is itself a religion based on misplaced idolatry.

Anyway, enough about me. It’s a must watch.

Thanks to Horse for this Register link “SOPA is dead, are you happy now ?”

I’m for fair IP Copyright licensing. Fair is a tough question – but I’m for answering it.

I’m against bad legislation – Duh, who isn’t, that’s what bad means, let’s improve it.

There is already legal enforcement of copyright in most democratic mixed economies, what new arrangements need to cover is how it’s enforceable when it crosses national boundaries via intermediary services. If people don’t make fair effort to comply, and knowingly encourage and enable others to break IP terms, then I can’t see any defence.

Half the rants seem to be anti-authoritarian – against mis-application of the legal powers of enforcement – ulterior motives of the establishment to use the cover of such legislation to trample unfairly over otherwise legal but inconvenient uses of internet communications – see fair.

The other half of the rants seem to be anti-capitalist – against any tendencies to make “loadsa” money (or even any money at all ?) out of selling fair use of copyrighted content – see fair.

Fair ? In a mixed-economy democracy ? These are the clues.

Previous threads
https://www.psybertron.org/?p=4099
https://www.psybertron.org/?p=4063
https://www.psybertron.org/?p=4059

Former Mozilla CEO John Lilly argues:

What’s extremely discouraging to me right now is that I don’t really see how we [the tech  world and the US Congress] can have a nuanced, technically-informed, respectful discussion/debate/conversation/working relationship.

Instead all we get is the media industries engaging in back room lobbying to get bad bills passed while the tech world shotguns abuse until Congress capitulates. Talk about a dysfunctional relationship.

[Ha – Megaupload were not averse to a little illegal capitalism then, magic.]

Inevitable, despite the attempts to associate the iconic brand with digital products.

[Yes, I know it’s misspelt, but the brand wouldn’t turn up in searches otherwise.]

Several people noted yesterday that it was significant that Wikipedia was joining today’s internet blackout – given the fact that Wikipedia are pretty hot on honouring IP copyrights. This Jimmy Wales interview reinforces that fact. I still despair at the rhetoric being traded – of course collaboration is needed to improve the wording of any bill – none of the bill content I’ve actually heard quoted seem at all unreasonable, the criticisms are simply being generalized. Freedoms (of speech and others) are a separate issue. The problem as ever is mistrust of authority applying its powers fairly. There can be as many self-policing arrangements as people want, but law enforcement is still the last resort. In the final analysis legal enforcement of copyright needs to have teeth where crime is committed.