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Great Books

In between writing, reading and filleting good books on topics of the day as far as my social-knowledge and decision-making research agenda is concerned, I like to catch up on the great books. They’re great books for a reason, and the reason is often timeless.

It’s three weeks since I posted for some reason. I cleared my decks in order to attend the Meaning 2016 conference in Brighton, drafted a very long post of reflections of that. Good, positively recommended, but at the same time disappointing. Needs a bit of editing before I post publicly. See, the new business and economic models are genuinely exciting, yet nevertheless timeless. Innovation is overrated – there’s really nothing new under the sun. The excitement is that pockets of people pick-up on their value and resolve to work towards them, not that they’re new.

In fact, my main agenda is to address why pockets of goodness do not generally spread. The memetic effect, that simplified “received wisdom” spreads much quicker and more easily than good ideas.

Even behind the great firewall of China again, as I was on business earlier this week, I had full VPN access to the rest of my world this time, but still barely posted, even on social media. Didn’t even snap and share any selfies walking around the old town parts of Chengdu, all bejazzled for the Christmas tourists. Pandas anyone? When I wasn’t being over-fed by the hospitality of my hosts, I was reading.

Anna Karenina is one of those great works, like Tolstoy’s other magnum opus, that I must have started, even read up to a handful of chapters, half-a-dozen times. Already familiar with his “unhappy families” and even Vronsky at the horse race – but always too distracted to read on through the patronymics, familials and informals to actually get the point of greatness. And of course I must have seen two or three film and TV dramatisations over the years, not to mention the meme of recalling Anna everytime I’ve set foot on a snowy windswept railway platform, typically for some reason at Slependen, Oslo, in my memories. Meme upon meme.

I’ve just finished reading the Penguin Classics Pevear & Volokhonsky translation, whose cover blurb includes:

“[T]he vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and meaning to his life – and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.”

We probably all know Tolstoy as a “devout Christian” and of course I’m an atheist, rationalist, humanist, so it would be easy to be prejudiced against Levin’s (ie Tolstoy’s) enlightenment. But it’s an enlightenment I feel I share.

I know in fact.

The word may translate as God, but it is God as in “the good” – no superhuman, supernatural, omniscient, omnipotent, causal agent here. Church too, but not as organised religion or ritualised superstition, simply as socially shared knowledge of the good. And knowing that it is good in the collective action of individuals and not in any disembodied rational conception of scientists and philosophers. Beyond words. Rationality is our most powerful tool, but love is greater, being neither thing nor tool.

Good philosophers know this. Good people enact it. The good man Jesus and Christ the scoundrel anyone? Jeez – even good humanists know this.

There’s a lot of agriculture and “what about the workers?” in Karenina. Oh, and – spoiler alert – sadly, Anna doesn’t make it through her paranoia. Too great for mere me to do it justice in any actual review or selection of quotes.

Simply, a great book.

We’re on a Road to Nowhere

There’s no view from nowhere.
[Via PressThink Top Ten Problems.]

That’s not just a lesson for science (after Nagel) it’s also true of objective journalism. Objective journalism is in danger of being politically-correct, false-neutral, bogus-balance “platforming”. Perversely, the more scrupulously neutral (I’m talking to you BBC), the bigger this problem.

No-platforming is not censorship of free-speech, it’s a publishing and retailing choice. [BBC and John Lewis] If you’re going to give a platform to hateful bollox, it needs to be in a context of explicit challenge, not reasonable openness.

You can help me sing the song
And it’s all right, baby, it’s all right
They can tell you what to do
But they’ll make a fool of you and it’s all right
Baby, it’s all right
We’re on a road to nowhere
[David Byrne]

God Save the Expert – She Ain’t no Human Bein’

The core of this post I almost drafted some months ago, but thought it might have been a bit sour grapes, a bit jealousy even, certainly patronising. Honestly patronising. Whenever I’d have written it, it would have been honest, but sometimes you have to ask yourself, speech may be free but is it always worth it. Keep counsel, choose your time, choose your battles.

Triggered to post today because I found the same person is guilty of sharing/liking fake information on social media and, as I write this, not having noticed or retracted, not even acknowledged, let alone apologised. I’m not bitter or anything.

A young mum of twins, post-doc science researcher making her way in some branch of particle physics. Drawn to her originally because of her catholic taste across many different branches of science, already rubbing shoulders with a few “greats”, focussing on public “sci-com” blogging it seemed, already being picked-up and quoted in other media. Good luck to her. Seriously, I wish her well. Patronising, I know. No, I’m not bitter.

Recently as well as her “Back Reaction” blog feeds into her social media channels, she also has a personal channel where she post and links political and social content. You know – liberal, anti-Trump – aren’t we all? This is the context where today’s fake-post gaffe arose. So, interestingly, within minutes of her re-tweeting this post:

She liked the fake tweet version of this story:

I replied pointing out her gaffe, but as I say, no ackowledgement so far.

However before today, I had already stopped trying to interact with her – over a year ago – on alternative physical and philosophical views of particular science stories, when it became clear her echo-chamber was reinforcing her (scientific) prejudices, and her attention was drawn to her own growing audience. The accepted position was received wisdom. Total scientistic rejection of the value of any philosophical thinking or questioning. No point my simply being a pain in the ass. Only so many hours in the day to address “somethings wrong on the internet”. And I’m not bitter.

Having withdrawn when I did, I missed this “Talk to a Physicist” move. She had some freetime between assignments, so she set herself up as an on-line consultant to answer lay-person questions – for a fee – on physics. Great creative entrepreneurial move. Other “experts” should do it. There is of course a platform – Quora – built on exactly this idea, but without the fee. I would have taken her up on it, since I am prepared to put my money where my mouth is, to get a few moments of quality-time attention. Quality attention matters. I have skin in this game too. The game of honest science, and good knowledge generally. But I missed it. Bitter, who me?

It was when she posted the “findings” of her expert-for-a-fee exercise that I very nearly made this post. Aparently all autodidacts with alternative physics and philosophy ideas are sad middle-aged white guys with sheds, and so their ideas are without formally publishable objective evidence, and are worthless. I made just one passing reference to her “autodidact” report, here. Really, I’m not bitter.

Nothing personal, but this is archetypal, prejudiced, self-reinforcing, confirmation-biased, echo-chamber garbage. She is no expert in any valuable sense of the word. Also today she’s just shared this (and I responded):

And she’s just the example I’ve picked to illustrate the problem – seriously, nothing personal. Science really is as politically compromised as any branch of entertainment, political or cultural media. As compromised as any win-lose debate. As compromised as any election.

The expert is dead, long live the expert.
What we need is love, and trust.
Come on Sabine, we can sort this out.

Information & Communication are Fundamental

That information and communication are fundamental properties and behaviours of the universe, human and cosmic, has kinda been part of my worldview since I started this blogging project, but it’s one of those “facts” that becomes ever more clearly defined. And I don’t believe it’s just the self-reinforcement of echo-chamber and confirmation-bias. If anything, it’s a view I hold despite not many others who admit to holding.

My most recent confirmations, in just the last couple of weeks, are here;
Valuing Difference (human, cultural, political) and here,
Rovelli’s Quantum Loop Gravity (cosmic, physical, metaphysical)
Significant Bits are the fundaments of the entire universe.

A recurring web-meme is people posting “Maslow’s Pyramid” (*) of human needs, with internet connection (technology, apps and/or power, whatever) as an additional foundation layer.

Image result

It’s so wrong, it’s right or maybe vice-versa. I love it and loath it all at once.

The pyramid itself has been regularly subject to debunking and re-habilitation many times. I happen to hold it as capturing some important generic truths, even though as a simple-picture-painting-a-thousand-words it is (obviously) subject to much debate about details and contexts of applicability [see the (*) footnote].

Today Erin Noonan posted the above version on Facebook, and I was moved to respond (expanded and clarified here for the blog context):

I love this meme, because it is so wrong.
Couldn’t be more wrong.

WiFi (connectivity in the world) has to be the biggest “proof” that the rest of the pyramid (based on Maslow’s work) is 100% right – complete AND consistent.

Communication runs right through the pyramid. It’s not just an additional foundation layer in the direction of the human motivation axis. It’s independent of, and fundamental to the whole fabric of the pyramid (and everything else) from a completely orthogonal direction

So working up from the bottom of the pyramid:

Physiological – The air we breath to be able to talk and listen, is our most basic communication, not to mention the other physical senses and signalling.

Safety & Security – Protecting our physical well-being from threats also depends being able to communicate, whether it’s interpersonal (having friends check on each other or hit the alarm when threats are perceived) or institutional (who ya gonna call, 999 / 911 / 112 in emergencies).

Social Needs – The term social-media says it all.

Esteem – The fact social media runs on likes and follows, feeds our own extrinsic social worth back to us.

Self-Actualisation – The enabling power of electronic media, social or otherwise means that we’re can all be creators of intrinsic value now, whether blogging communications for their own sake or doing so as part of some other creative enterprise.

It’s no coincidence that an important feature of the pyramid of drivers is that they do indeed range from the most basic physical to the most conceivably creative.

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(*) The “pyramid” is of course a 2D triangle and it’s not actually Maslow’s. But apart from that, it’s simply the evolved result of scholars of behaviour and management summarising Maslow’s work. If you ever pin down an original source, I’d like to hear from you. As something I value, I have maintained and updated my own piece on it’s current state in the world, here.

Experts, Polls and Journalism

During the recent US election night I followed the BBC coverage from Times Square, backed-up by the real-time New York Times dashboard, and all the social-media feeds I could handle. (So did Robbie.)

The BBC coverage was excellent, probably second to none. Andrew Neill, Katty Kay and Emily Maitlis are as good as journalism gets, so we can maybe forgive the utterly naff virtual-reality graphic fills dumbed-down by Jeremy Vine, adding absolutely nothing to the proceedings. Emily had everything at her fingertips already, even if the content and the ticker strapline was sometimes cautiously behind the real-time chatter out there. Validation and verification is the reason we have mainstream media after all. And I repeat, it doesn’t come much better than this team.

For most of the night, at the left side of the panel sat Norman Ornstein. A political science commentator with about as much credibility and authority as anyone could have in that role. My main agenda, aside from the politics of the US election itself, is the less sexy topic of epistemology. Knowledge itself – how do we know anything and how do we decide to act and/or communicate based on what we think we know.

I posted this Facebook (and Twitter) comment, early on, ie before the prediction graph flipped (below).

“Norman Ornstein sounds like a real expert.
I so hope he’s right.
(Nothing to do with US election –
just on behalf of experts everywhere.)”

Part of it is statistics – still less sexy – how we handle and interpret the data we do have, and my authority of choice there would be Nassim Nicholas Taleb. But part of it is even deeper than that – the origins and basis of each individual “bit” of data – the models and methods and tools being used by the surveyors and the surveyed. You know they say garbage in garbage out, but we’re dealing with the psychology of game theory and the like here. Where’s the garbage? Good voters are no more beyond a good joke than a good journalist. Where’s the skin in the game. It’s not simply a matter of more tools and more analysis, it’s more a matter of the right data and the right analyses. Less may be more.

It’s possible Ornstein is, in Taleb terms, an “Intellectual-Yet-Idiot” but I sincerely doubt it. But, we are all idiots if we don’t carefully unpick what’s going on here.

nyt-chances-768x364

The Relational Dimensions of Memory

One from Ed Yong in The Atlantic a couple of weeks ago, on Cambridge Neuroscience research by Jon Simons. Here the original blog post by Simons.

The refreshingly credible aspect is the multiple independent dimensions to memory – a “3-way fork” of precision, correctness and confidence – not simply “storage”. Like all things memory is relative – relations between multiple brain activities – not simply objects to be stored.

triplememory

 

Valuing Difference

Just a quickie riff.

Whether is gender differences – male vs female cognitive difference anyone? – or race, or religion or whatever …

Difference matters.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that “significant differerence” is THE fundamental “particle” of the universe, the source of all information and all things. Whoah, but that’s maybe just me, I digress!

Trouble is in the less rarefied levels of everyday life, built-on / evolved-from a zillion levels of nuanced variety across time and space (history of the world as we know it – so far) we deal with things we find significant – things we care about – every day.

We give ’em names. As soon as we do, we have:

the named
vs
the named-otherwise

We have a binary shorthand for the thing we are currently talking about, for some reason we care about. Obviously there are differences between these things – male vs female – really big ones as it happens, at the level were at. But, however great and significant that difference, the common components in the current evolved state are even greater. Obviously. As in, Duh!

We don’t talk about men and women to deny our common humanity, or deny any spectrum of variability in gender assignment, we do it to communicate our current thought. We do well to remember the huge common ground behind every choice of name for the current subjects of our conversation, and of course it’s mostly unsaid. We’d never get anything said if we qualified every difference (content) with the entire common ground (context).

It becomes PC to ….

“don’t mention the difference”

…. because you may have some evil intent to exploit the difference, or even accidentally mislead, in an unsaid way.

We have to talk about the things that matter.
Differences matter, Difference is material in fact.

And we have to trust each other.

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This is the thread from yesterday with Andy Martin, that prompted the riff:

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Carlo Rovelli is right, in the sense that …

Interesting review of Carlo Rovelli’s latest “Reality Is Not What It Seems” by Michael Brooks in the New Statesman.

In my own review of Rovelli’s introductory work “Seven Brief Lessons“, I felt compelled to add a footnote to ensure readers understood he was peddling a minority view in Quantum Loop Gravity. Interesting in Brooks’ review of Rovelli’s latest, he highlights the well understood paradox that Gravity and Quantum theories can’t both be right.

Both are right ….
in the sense that …. they’ve both
[made useful repeatable predictions].

And both must be wrong, too.
[Since neither supports the other].

Brooks takes umbrage at Rovelli’s dismissal of more “popular” current theories – eg String and SuperSym – that aim to provide more fundamental physics than the current combination of Gravity and Quantum. Rovelli spends the final third of his latest work promoting QLG.

Being right in this world is about being useful for two or three generations – Kuhn / Kondratiev – but that is hindsight of course. Those proven right – or consigned to obscurity – are always in a minority of one when they first point out the advantages of their alternative.

A minority view, but I think Rovelli is mostly right, however successful QLG proves to be. He’s right even if QLG is wrong. And right in a more fundamental sense than simply utilitarian. Consisent with Smolin and others there is a serious attempt to bring time and law-like causation within the explanatory scope of the model, not to mention a respect for the value that philosophy brings to fundamental thinking. And then there is that healthy scepticism of the celebrity status of heroic Galilean mythology.

I’m less inclined to follow fundamental physicists who are dismissive of time, causation and philosophy than those that are dismissive of popularity.

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[Post Note : Another related review / book. Bell’s is another interpretation I have time for. Hat tip to Rick Ryalls on FB. Minority interests are not new, they just get trampled in the crowds following popularity contest winners, long before social media was invented. Same with science as any other topic of cultural interest.]

Civic Identity

One positive thought coming out of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s second Reith lecture this morning is Civic Identity

As with the first lecture on Credo, this second installment on Nationality came across again as statements of the obvious on the broad difficulties in being “definitive” on such matters of Identity Politics. Mistaken identity for sure, but what about “appropriate” identities with values to support them?

The positive thought came up in one of the later questions on Civic Identity. Having thrown-away cheap-shots on philosophers wanting to be definitive, citizens of the world vs citizens of a nation, and his own father’s belief in “Unitary (National) Citizenship” one philosophy student raised the idea of Civic Nationalism.

There is always a question of “we”; a presumption that there is one that means anything. Obviously there are many that mean many things. Any identity chosen by multiple individuals for their collective identity is a statement of caring enough about that identity. (Whatever genetic or memetic, biological or cultural – familial, ethnic, religious or territorial “heritage” forms the basis of that identity. The issue is simply that we have many of these at many levels.)

National identity – a particular “peoples” collective as a nation – is a political identity – like all identities are in the final analysis. The suggestion is that this is a particular “Civic Nationalism” – one based on political principles AND narrative, existing alongside other affiliations with multiple constituencies of peoples. Broadly consistent and tolerant of difference and multiplicity, despite particular points of conflict, that we can agree to forget or give low priority in most practical situations of daily life. Again we (individually) must choose to self-identify our collective “civic” nationality as distinct from all other national and ethnic identities, the point being as a statement that we accept the practicality of the governance arrangements of that civic. We are nailing our colours to the mast of a civic identity – a nation – that we declare will be used as the basis of any significant governance of conflicts and inconsistencies arising with the many other overlapping identities. We are accepting this civic identity to handle changes and accomodations involving other identities. Choosing a civic identity in no way loses or ignores the existence of our other identities and narratives as people’s other than that civic identity.

Declaring citizenship of the world is fatuous as our civic identity until such time as there is a form of world governance “we” all genuinely share. It’s a fine identity many of us also have, and even an aspirational civic identity, but until then, governance is about jurisdictions and their borders.

I’m kinda hoping Kwame Anthony Appiah’s lectures will have some punchline in the fourth episode, to bring together practical necessities of identities which bind us for real world purpose. So far it’s all about how matters of identity are complicated and non-definitive. We already knew that.

A religion is not a race, it’s an idea?

It’s a common claim in some form, in many a situation, where were are in danger of confusing or conflating prejudice based on race with prejudice based on some other social construct. It works on the assumption that race is a naturally objective class about which an individual has no choice, whereas religion is a matter of individual choice in a cultural context.

Of course the form “a religion is not a race it’s an idea?” is invoked when it’s the religious (cultural) identity that is the main topic at issue – to put some clear water between that and other issues of race. Particularly in the case where the religion is Islam, where there are strong associations with ethnic and cultural identities, it somehow seems important to maintain the distinction between different issues.

But if our topic were a racial or ethnic identity in the first place, we might have “ethnicity is not race” and “neither is race a meaningful biological thing”. In fact if we get deeper into biology we also find that even species are definable only by convention and the appropriate conventions vary enormously with context and purpose. How many scientists are keen to emphasise how flimsy are the actual differences at the mental and cultural levels between humans and our kindred species.

Down with this sort of thing. We humans ain’t so special. This is very much about identity. And, for thinking beings, identity is very much about personal identity politics, and our conformity or reaction to our cultural context.

If we add the religious angle to this, we find that which binds people is only in very small part specific ideas and beliefs that are held in common. So much did Kwame Anthony Appiah remind us in the Credo part of this year’s Reith Lectures. In fact this take on Mistaken Identities was so underwhelming, that he was seen by many (in my twitter feed anyway) to be merely stating the obvious and missing the opportunity for any important insight [Refs].

When talking race and attempting to get a grip on what we really mean, any measure we choose – skin colour – is as good and imperfect as any other [Refs]. Even when talking genetics, as scientifically rigorously as you like, it’s ultimately about statistical distributions of many possible combinations and patterns, whose own boundaries are scarcely definitive.

Some conventions are deeper in accepted science, but pretty much all the objects we are talking about and the classes to which we assign them, depend for their identity on social constructs and our (pragmatic) acceptance of these.

This is not an excuse for an anything goes – w’evs – cultural relativism. Quite the opposite. Simply a reminder that we’re not going to solve any complex issue by being precious about a specific choice of words having hard and fast objective definitions. Islamism in its political and violent extremes, has a wide range of religious and racial, extrinsic and behavioural aspects, each themselves involving cultural patterns of identity over and above anything intrinsically objective in our individual biology.

You might be tempted to the easy conclusion that biology is our racial marker, distinct from religion. Sure an individual may generally have no choice about their biological make up, but how that particular biological entity is assigned to a class – even a biological one – is a cultural choice.

We’re always ultimately dealing with individuals. Prejudice against the freedoms and free-thought of individuals is still prejudice whatever class of race or religion we’ve assigned it to. From the individual’s immediate perspective it matters little whether the constraints on their freedoms are biological (genetic) or cultural (memetic), they’re still constraints, and at the individual level both are intertwined with each other and with collective group effects.

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[Post Note: Reference for social constructs and political theory around race in particular. Falguni Sheth – book and blog. Hat tip @contronline.]