What, Why & How do we Know ?
Perhaps a little harsh, but this cartoon posted by Georganna, rings true.
Blog post writing can barely do justice to the impulse to “hold that thought” or “capture that link”. Quality writing might need a different vehicle.
(The cataloguing, categorizing and linking of thoughts is of course a very Pirsigian approach to writing, and he didn’t do so bad.)
One of my pet subjects is the fact that in (free democratic) systems of governance, there must be institutions that are not free and democratic, not in the sense of the popular “one man one vote” mantra.
OK, so most people quickly see that total freedom for popular decision-making is a recipe for anarchy, not democracy, which demands institutions to defend and preserve rights and freedoms of individuals and groups from other individuals and groups. There are “greater goods” than individual rights and freedoms. And it is easy to see that pragmatically authority has to be delegated to elected representatives or delegates in order to achieve timely decisions and actions on behalf of the electorate.
However what is harder to see, because it appears paradoxical at first, is that some of those institutions must also have intrinsically “elitist” non-democratic arrangements.
At the very least they need to have meritocratic arrangements that are insulated from direct popular democracy. They require a caucas of people “who know better”. Of course they have to be “trusted” to know better, trusted to make “unpopular” decisions without the question of direct public decision-making input. There must ultimately be free and democratic sanctions, answerable to the “popular” constituency when that trust is lost, but that trust does not have to be sought on the same timescale as the operational decisions of that population.
Of course any sophisticated national government with a history knows about meritocratic appointees to high-ranking public servant positions, high-court judges and the like. These will be appointed democratically (well, by political horse-trading maybe) by one or other house of popular elected government institutions (one level removed from popular vote) and on tenures longer than the popular election cycle of those elected institutions (a second level of insulation from popular voting).
That way the appointers can consider their candidate appointees independently of their electoral considerations, and merited in terms of greater considerations of quality, value, truth and good. Of course the higher (public) profile the particular positions, the greater the (public) political pressures anyway, but the principle is well established.
This is rarely noticed however in new / young institutions embracing the free & democratic “dogma”. And the “received wisdom” view of evolution, particularly in the power of crowds empowered by free access to communications media and technologies, is to completely overlook this issue, and to positively rail against any hint of attempted, even suggested, control by higher “authority”. Two or three posts into a discussion on the subject and some well-intentioned individual – supported by a crowd baying for blood – is invoking liberty and personal freedoms, accusations of control-freakery or pretensions of higher knowledge, screaming “censorship” and pointing out Hitler, Mao and Stalin and the historical lessons of fascism. Well, all the easy bits ayway, the popular received wisdom of the lesson, minus anything else of value – necessarily of greater value, since by defintion they will be valued by fewer of the population – paradoxically, the opposite of democratic. (There’s a name for that syndrome – counting how many posts before someone makes a “fascist” reference in a contentious correspondence thread – lost it for a moment.)
Anyway, memes always promulgate the easy to understand bits, never the valuable subtleties.
I have pointed out before that excellent inventions like Wikipedia are wonderfully valuable in capturing high quality knowledge where the content is uncontentious and low profile … anywhere where it is “political” the mechanism fails and is replaced (devalued) with a power of conflicting wills and attrition, often disguised by many layers of rhetorical and ironic game-play.
Encyclopedia Brittanica seems to understand this – avoiding falling for the obvious Wikipedia model. Somethings, to be definitive, need to be authoritative. W3C itself knows this [Figure 7 Semantic Web Layers], by having “trust” at the top of its architectural stack of web technologies, but those using the power of mass communications often ride over this with their personal democratic dogma.
Some things need to be managed by those with the pretensions, the presumption, the wisdom …. to know better. That’s really, really, really free.
[Post Note – Hooray, and even Wikipedia itself has seen the error of its (simple popular) democratic ways …. nobody said the alternative was easy, just better … as with any publicly shared reference data, publication can be fast, but quality can take a little time. ]
Plus c’est la meme chose. Vive l’Anglais.
It’s a memetic evolutionary loop, but English is a very expressive language because it is used for global communication above and beyond trans-atlantic drivel, and yes it will evolve into “Globish” in the process and even lose the tag “English” if it offends the French. Defenders of English as she is writ and spoke proper should remember that Shakespear is written down, so it’s not going anywhere, provided democratic free cultural evolution enforces the taboo on book-burning. Some things are not free in a free democratic global village. Preservation and freedom can, must, live side by side.
Come on France, the water’s lovely, and bring your best stuff with you Madame Pecresse.
The BBC is right to express concern at the potential mis-use of the fundraising behind this Disasters Emergency Committee appeal, but is getting its priorities back to front and making more of a partisan stance by not carrying this humanitarian appeal.
(Same issue as the Pogues Fairytale fiasco – need to separate political correctness in negative risk-taking, from direct support for the positive point of the exercise. Still at least the Beeb admitted its error that time. Here’s hoping.)
[Post Note : This one will run and run.
The high profile controversy has given this appeal more publicity than it could possibly have imagined getting – Mark Field, MP.
Maybe Auntie is smarter than she looks, by deliberately making it a political issue and upping the ante ? And Sky now joins the Beeb.]
Went to see “Slumdog Millionaire” last night not having an inkling what it was about. Had detected the Oscar buzz and noticed the poster image of the lead couple, but genuinely had managed to miss reading, seeing or hearing anything like a review or a trailer. I had even failed to connect some recent Bollywood media references with this film, and not noticed the “Who wants to be a Millionaire” references. So I went in cold, expecting some cheesey chick-flick.
What a treat, on so many levels. The best movie I can recall seeing in a very long time …. spoiler warning ….
On the face of it, it’s Hollywood plot #1, boy meets girl, circumstances drag them apart to near-death experiences, and mixture of fate and determination bring them to the obligatory tight-shot as they finally kiss, love having conquered all. I was actually disappointed that the (Oslo) audience did not get up to dance and cheer as the credits rolled with the Bollywood-style curtain calls. (But then we’ve had surreal cinema audience experiences here before. *)
The 2008 Mumbai hotel and railway station terrorist events must have created some interesting production team meetings, concerned as the film is with Hindu vs Moslem vs the underworld of the Westernization of the Indian economy set against those very same Bombay locations – setting brother against brother – from the perspective of street-wise Moslem kids. Brave stuff.
“Millionaire” provides not only the insidious example of a Western meme creeping in to dominate popular culture, but of course is the vehicle to create the suspense and tension as each “chapter” is played out. Inspired. Inspiring too the sights, sounds and smells of the locations and the characters, especially the child actors playing the eponymous slum-dogs.
Millionaire also provides the “riches” in this rags to Raja, raga-musical tale, where it is so evident that love drives the final gamble. He makes the right choice. It is of course not written, but determined; By all too human intentions.
OK, so maybe the predictable outcome was a little too cheesey, and why did they have to show us a shot of the cell phone falling onto the car seat to signal its later significance. Minor flaws in a well executed emotional whirlwind with some deep and lasting messages. Go see, and don’t fail to get up and dance as the credits roll.
[(*) The previous Oslo fim experience ? The audience laughing at the ironic discovery of the pet puppy hidden amongst the matket produce on the boat, after Apocalypse Now’s Mekong patrol crew had machine-gunned the local occupants . Irony yes, but laugh ?]
[Post Note … and this is reassuring.]
Interesting quote in this piece on rising fish stocks in the Med off the Nile delta as a result of increased agricultural run-off nutrients in the river.
We’re programmed in the West to think of ….
Those darned memes again.
Thanks to Sam for the link to this Grauniad piece. A series I didn’t know, featuring in this edition Niall Ferguson, a historian I’ve barely heard of.
We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It’s a miracle that we get anything right.
I’ve become a transatlantic human being – six months here with my family and six months in Harvard. I abuse caffeine on the way out and alcohol on the way in.
Cognitive biases and habits, and …
I don’t envy the historians of the current period. You have a disappearing decision trail in politics. It’s likely that databases of emails won’t be preserved, and if they are there will be so many that it will be extremely hard to use them. Plus, in investment banks they downgraded the use of email and switched to voicemail for key decisions, because of legal issues.
Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.
Truth eluded in the information age.
[Post Note : For heaven’s sake; Join up the dots between points one and four. It’s not the Oral aspect of history that’s at issue, but the elapsed time between the experience and the expression of it, written or oral. What is expressed is always related to what is experienced, via psychology … all of it ! ]
A 1980 film that passed me by, of a genre that I wouldn’t normally be looking out for anyway … but I discover includes footage of Stevie Lange performing The Stripper with Night, as well as performances from UB40, Pretty Things and B A Robertson. (A track not published in any other recording, except the inevitable YouTube. The clip – including a strip – has been removed, but the sound track is ripped here.) What a voice.
In her current line of voice-coaching and music-production business Stevie is promoting her work with heavy rock band from Virginia Sekshun 8.
Another great Einstein quote, provided by Steve Peterson in the Hildebrand / Dewey / Rorty thread mentioned earlier on MoQ.Discuss.
“Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears it ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of the mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.”
This is my “there is always a hole in any metaphysics” point. And, let’s not forget that ingenious is the root of “engineering”, Dennett’s preferred intentional metaphor for evolutionary processes … cue blind watchmaker … etc.