Year: 2012

First Cause

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.

Better than the Real Thing?

Interesting how much creativity and ingenuity goes into the promo film simulation in advance of a project like this one – sponsored by Red Bull it seems. The real thing can’t fail to disappoint in comparison?

Apart from the development and testing programme for civilian spacesuits, what is the point?

Confirmation Bias

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

Living Knowledge @DavidGuteen

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.

We Didn’t Start the Fire

Latest from Sam Harris – on two levels – “The Fireplace Delusion“. On one level the emotional response of rational people to a long accepted aspect of life. Second, an analogy for how those of faith respond to scientific arguments against their faith.

I do like wood fires, we actually have them in the home now. The living fire, the warm focal point, the smell of “natural” wood. Yep, I get your point Sam.

But my response is not “fist-clenching” for the reasons you assume Sam.

Rationally, as an engineer and scientist, I doubt your science – I could research your references for a deeper view – but for now: Smelling wood and wood smoke is way different to inhaling concentrated smoke – yes anyone failing to combust completely to H2O and CO2 – making smoke, needs to take care both locally and environmentally who gets to breathe what concentrations of smoke unnecessarily – whether cigarettes or wood or coal or maladjusted diesel engines, whatever. Tobacco, coal and oil are as “natural” as wood. Concentrated, and continuous smoke is bad. Dilute and fleeting less so. The WHO numbers of premature deaths, beg many questions on what a premature death is, and on the consequences of alternative deaths, through causes of cold and disease. Need to see some balance in a complex set of causes and effects – on the whole history of humanity since the discovery of fire. But anyway, let’s assume your scientific summary is right.

As an atheist, the fist-clenching aspect is the treating of humans as physical bodies, prone to biological life or death, as if there were no social goods or costs, no intellectual goods or costs involved in our interconnected life stories. The scientific arrogance is breathtaking in believing a few (hundreds, thousands of?) scientific case studies of the physical and biological explains all we need to know. Balance is relevant across not only quantifiable scientific effects and values, but across all levels of value.

I actually like Sam’s philosophy – here his something rather than nothing interview with Larry Kraus – but the scientism is fist-clenching.

Science didn’t start the fire.

What about the fireside value of story-telling for example.

Atheism2.0 Checklist

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.

Coryton’s Future?

I did quite a few jobs at The Coryton Refinery over the years in the Mobil, then briefly BP, days before it was sold to Petroplus. Interesting that it is the Swiss parent company that is actually going bust – wonder where the losses actually are? And I wonder what their ownership is  – oil majors, or more general investors? (They also own one of the Teeside oil depots.)

Would there be any value in BP buying the concern back – I don’t believe they actually own and operate any UK refineries directly these days since Grangemouth was also sold to Ineos. Are old refineries just not viable in Europe/UK? What were Petroplus expectations when they originally bought Coryton, not really all that long ago?

(Pretty sure shortages is a non-issue other than distribution logistics adjustment.)

Twittering Sense

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.

IP and the MOQ

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.]

#Atheism2 @AlainDeBotton

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.