What, Why & How do we Know ?
Two football posts in two days. Great headline, lifted from one the red-tops, just about sums it up. Sex discrimination or plain ignorance, Gray is just a dinosaur ex-player (Rio is right – there’s a first) with a stock of punditry clichés, good riddance. Keys is a professional broadcaster, he should have the book thrown at him.
Their offence is incompetence and plain ignorance of the rules of the game and the jobs the officials do – for any women in sport or officials of either sex, it’s sure water off a duck’s back. Before the story broke, we were already laughing at the predictable on-screen comments that the decision was in the least doubtful, doubly funny that Massey did actually make an offside error a few minutes later, though not in a critical goalscoring opportunity, so no-one seems to have picked up on that. Errors are errors. In my experience women make better match officials, provided the have the basic command / authority, because on the whole they are more intuitively concerned with the point of the rules than their anal interpretation and application to the letter.
Not been following all the details of the Spurs vs Wet Sham vs UK Athletics on the “legacy” use of the new Stratford Olympic stadium, but I have to say.
Aha, so here is the problem … Spurs chariman Levy wants to:
“Strip out the emotion.”
Such people should be banned from sports management.
A discussion at the science museum next week, evening of Thurs 27th Jan featuring Ian Angell (previous post).
[Post Note: Over-subscribed already.]
Seems Ian Angell is a Costa Coffee man. A man after my own taste. Actually, I prefer Cafe Nero, but either way, anything but Starbucks.
I first mentioned Angell when I heard him on Thinking Allowed discussing his book “Science’s First Mistake” with Laurie Taylor. I mentioned in the footnote there, the suggestion, gained from other essay’s on his web site, that sometimes his language suggests he’s less agnostic and more theistic that he claims, which led a number of people with whom I shared the Thinking Allowed link to react against him. This is not an isolated problem. Take the recent Anthropic Principle thread that spun out of PZ Myers blog. It’s impossible to point out flaws in any scientific response to non-science without being branded as “anti-science” – somehow representing “the other side” or “playing into their hands”. And of course this flaw is the whole “neurosis” of science to use Maxwell’s term.
Anyway, I responded to Laurie Taylor and exchanged a few emails with Ian Angell since then. I discovered, as Laurie did in this interview in the current edition of the New Humanist, that Ian is a man on a mission, who’s positively enthusiastic about using language intended to inflame scientists (or theists, who cares). The interview concludes :
Angell’s book is a fascinating read, a clever, insightful, philosophically persuasive account of the limitations of science. But this wasn’t the first time in the interview when I felt he’d been so outraged by scientific arrogance that he was prepared to employ some dubious logic in order to pursue his case. I wondered if it was his fury about the manner in which science had robbed the world of enchantment that led him into another strange assertion, the declaration that the world was safe from science because it was, in his word, “magical”.
“It is magical. It is wonderful. Don’t you wake up in the morning and think this is incredible? You know, since I stopped being scientific, nothing is drab or predictable. It’s totally astounding that every day is different and you never know what will happen. Science is drab. It’s not a humanist way of looking at the world. To me humanists have to believe in magic. Because life is magic. It is magic that we can actually operate at all. The fact that we can categorise is magic. All thought is sympathetic magic. And it is wonderful. Every day is a bonus. If tomorrow’s going to be the same as today, then why bother?”
This new-found enthusiasm for life was almost alarmingly evident as he led me across Kingsway to his beloved Costa coffee house. He greeted the baristas behind the glassed cakes as though they were old friends. When I insisted on paying he cheekily demanded an extra stamp on his own loyalty card and noticed as he did that the card was now complete. “Free coffee tomorrow!”, he cheerily boomed as we carried our lattes to a table.
In one of his robust, no punches pulled email exchanges, he concluded:
I’m just having fun!
God is a comedian, but His followers have no sense of humour. And neither do Scientists.
He’s right of course, the outrage is scientific arrogance. And this reference to fun, and his “dubious tactics” put me in mind of Zizek’s use of the Lacanian “jouissance“. I’m reading (almost finished) his “Living in End Times”. It also put me in mind of another subject – I often get backlash against “game theory” suggestions, as if the whole idea is somehow discredited. One of my two criticisms of Maxwell’s excellent “Is Science Neurotic” was that there was no acknowledgement of game-theory in his Aim-Oriented Rationality processes of scientific progress. (My other criticism was overlooking what US Pragmatist philosophers have to say on the subject.)
Now the Lacanian “jouissance” is more than just fun and enjoyment, it has all the Freudian, sexual, phallic, orgasmic symbology you’d expect from a French PoMo. You know, pleasure (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). As a Lacanian, Zizek uses the term this way, but he also uses it as the point of “play” in general, in politics, in architecture, making progress in life in general – the pleasure principle. Pleasure is what we want, but too much pleasure hurts. In the interview above, Angell makes a remark about people who revel in their own misery and quips the question of whether this puts them at 2 or 8 on a 1 to 10 scale of pleasure. The point of the pleasure principle is that we need to play interactive games with ourselves and each other, and games involve psychological tactics, even dubious logic, to establish our optimum levels of pleasure. It’s what we do. It really is. And to deny it is … denial … Maxwell’s scientific neurosis.
Another reason I identify with Ian is that we share a historical route to our current positions (see my manifesto). I’m an engineer primarily, which naturally has scientific / technological underpinnings. Long before I became focussed on management per se, I had my doubts about the role of ambiguity in engineering management, but ever since the master’s study and wider management and consulting experience since, I am ever more convinced that mechanistic management tools are only ever a simplification over the underlying human reality. Of course the more interactive, social, story-telling approach to business management is no longer a novel idea. The point is this management problem really extends to all forms of governance in economics, politics, even science itself.
When things change, they don’t necessarily get better, they get more complicated.
We can use simplifying tools, but we mustn’t confuse this with believing we have simplified the underlying fun and games. The world does not reduce to science and simple choices.
[Post Note : Actually reading the book now. Noted this “real sociology” blog article too, linked to the original Thinking Allowed piece, which confirms the opinion that Angell may be reinforcing well established views on the scientific delusions of objectivity and causality, but comes across as
… quite angry … irritating …
End.]
One in a long series. Just collecting the links.
I’m a big fan of Howard Webb (defended him over the world cup final Dutch fiasco, for example) and in fact in the offending game here, he got both the controversial decisions right – Gerrard sending off and the Berbatov penalty – in our opinion. Anyway, after Kenny branding the latter decision a “joke” and Ryan Babel tweeting his photo-shopped image of Webb in Man U colours;
Priceless irony that a commenter on the BBC news page on the story, going by the handle of “Victory Through Harmony” should comment:
How sad have things got that now the players aren’t even allowed to have a pop at refs?
Harmony / Pop does not compute, mate. In the heat of competitive battle, refs handle plenty of “pop” with minimum sanction – but pre-meditated high-profile post-match public channels – they don’t have to take it.
Since I’ve just started reading Bennett, Dennett, Hacker and Searle’s “Neuroscience & Philosophy” I thought I’d post a link to the coincidence in the earlier post today, as a current reminder to myself to post some review notes.
My most considered reading of Bennett & Hacker was back in 2009. There I speculated on Dennett’s potential response, since Dennett was a clear target of that book. Wittgenstein’s importance means he’s in the background of many of these discussions, and just this morning I picked-up the Rob Minto reference to Wittgenstein in the post below. Rob’s tutor was Hacker, which led me to follow my own links back to my earlier reading of Hacker and Bennett and add this in a post-note there.
[I recently found that Dennett did respond and now obtained Bennett, Dennett, Hacker & Searle – “Neuroscience and Philosophy” A cover blurb quote from Akeel Bilgrami of Columbia Uni suggests:
“If you can get sworn and unrestrained philosophical enemies such as Dennett and Searle to join forces against you, you must be … the controversialists of our time.”
Fascinating. That was pretty much my take on Bennett and Hacker – controversial by design, with (hopefully) deliberate misreading of the scientific position on a philosophy of mind.]
Loop closed for now, until I have some notes on the Dennett response. Certainly looks, on the basis of a quick scan, like Dennett’s rebuttal is along the lines I imagined, and my own reading of Bennett and Hacker. Hopefully we can move on from attack and rebuttal to some common sense progress.
Just checked Dennett is still OK since his major surgery in 2006.
[Told] by friends and relatives that they had prayed for him, he resisted the urge to ask them, “Did you also sacrifice a goat?”
Interesting piece in WSJ, linked by Johan on FB. Global east-west power struggle to avoid dependence on US dominated proprietary software.
Interesting to contrast yesterday’s UK parliamentary knock-about between Milliband and Campbell with Obama’s call for healing in the rhetorical wars between US partizan politicians and commentators.
Blaming opponents for “all that ails the world” was unhelpful, he said.
Cameron and Milliband were downright personal in trading insults of each other and their colleagues – despite the thin veil of humour. Ridicule is not funny. OK in moderation, but not the basis of free and democratic progress. Politicians should focus on governance, not auditioning as court-jesters for Have I Got News For You.
[Post Note :
I was thinking how to contrast Palin’s response to Obama’s and found this on Sam’s Elizaphanian blog.
Excellent. Rob Minto’s tutor was Hacker no less. Really taken with Bennett and Hacker’s “Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience” on a second reading last year, and now reading Bennett, Hacker, Dennett and Searle’s “Neoroscience and Philosophy”. Hacker meets my personal hero Dennett. Small world.]