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Rhetoric and Rheology

Those whose words and deeds fly in the face of the ambient reality call to my mind a scene near the end of the 1986 movie Ruthless People (embedded at the bottom of this post).

Ambient reality? One way of conceiving of the present networked information age is to draw an analogy between 'reality' and matter. Units of information are analogized to particles of matter. (This analogy lives in the classical mechanical realm; this is not a quantum theory of Ruthless People, so think of bits and collections of bits (not qubits) as the information particles in the analogy).

Particles of matter may be found in different states (e.g., gas, liquid, solid), depending on the physical context. From Wikipedia:

A State of matter is a class of materials, usually solid, liquid, and gas. Plasma and also Bose-Einstein condensate are also states of matter, though less known ....

There is a classic general science description of each of the phases: A solid is a material that maintains its shape and its volume; a liquid maintains its volume but takes on the shape of its container; A gas takes on both the shape and volume of its container.

The collection of particles in a gas has "an indefinite, unstable shape.... In a gas, the particles are far apart from each other, and they can move around quickly."

Absent any means to record and correlate units of information, the units remain in rapid motion relative to each other, and far apart, like molecules in a gas. As the ability to store, retrieve, and relate information increases, the behavior of the particles relative to each other "settles down" -- becomes more coherent -- more like a liquid. The particles are still free to move about the volume, and slide easily past each other; and their overall shape still conforms to the container (shape of container being part of the analog of 'context,' which can be manipulated (reshaped) through rhetorical framing of information).

But in the "liquid" state, particles of information form discrete surfaces; and the distance between particles is less than in a "gas." As liquids tend toward solids, up a scale of viscosity, so too does commonly perceptible reality become more "viscous" in this analogy, with advancements in information technology. From Wikipedia:

Viscosity is a measure of the resistance of a fluid to being deformed by either shear stress or extensional stress. It is commonly perceived as "thickness", or resistance to flow. Viscosity describes a fluid's internal resistance to flow and may be thought of as a measure of fluid friction. Thus, water is "thin", having a lower viscosity, while vegetable oil is "thick" having a higher viscosity.

In the present networked information society, the collecting, cataloging, and sharing of evidence is vastly more efficient (and egalitarian) than ever before in human history.

• We are seeing the emergence of filtering, accreditation, and synthesis mechanisms as part of network behavior. These rely on clustering of communities of interest and association ... but offer tremendous redundancy of paths for expression and accreditation. These practices leave no single point of failure for discourse: no single point where observations can be squelched or attention commanded – by fiat or with the application of money. Because of these emerging systems, the networked information economy is solving the information overload and discourse fragmentation concerns without introducing the distortions of the mass-media model. Peer production ... is providing some of the most important functionalities of the media. These efforts provide a watchdog, a source of salient observations regarding matters of public concern, and a platform for discussing the alternatives open to a polity. [Benkler, The Wealth of Networks 271-72; see also Jack Balkin, "What I Learned about Blogging in a Year" (Balkinization 1.23.2004 )].
  

• While there is enormous diversity on the Internet, there are also mechanisms and practices that generate a common set of themes, concerns, and public knowledge around which a public sphere can emerge. Any given site is likely to be within a very small number of clicks away from a site that is visible from a very large number of other sites, and these form a backbone of common materials, observations, and concerns. ... Users self-organize to filter the universe of information that is generated in the network. This self-organization includes a number of highly salient sites that provide a core of common social and cultural experiences and knowledge that can provide the basis for a common public sphere, rather than a fragmented one. [Benkler, The Wealth of Networks 256; see also Of Strategies and Substrates].

So the ambient reality in the present networked information age is increasingly 'viscous.' Reality is still vulnerable to rhetorical framing, but not nearly as much as it was just a very few years ago. It is now practical for individuals to record, retrieve and relate information rapidly enough to feed back into the equation. Rhetoricians and all other actors may increasingly be held to account.

It is important to emphasize the recency and magnitude of this change. Vast swaths of society still do not conceive (or refuse to believe) that a phase transition [cf.] is underway, altering the very nature of the ambient reality. This explains why political actors (including, but not limited to, corporations & politicians) continue to behave as though reality rapidly evanesces, or that it may be endlessly reshaped; that nobody can enforce a logical consistency among the various things that are known, and hold politicians and others to account for what they do and say.

But it doesn't work that way anymore -- people can check! [cf.]

The old-style Rove-Atwater-Machiavelli-Thrasymachus politics can no longer outpace the rigors of reason, and are anathema to the upcoming digital natives.

Which brings me back to the Ruthless People clip. Judge Reinhold's character (in the clown outfit) has kidnapped Danny DeVito's character's wife, hoping to gain a huge ransom. The scene depicts the handoff of the ransom money. Both parties are well aware that the handoff is being observed by scores of armed police. That is the ambient reality in the scene.

About a minute and a half in, as Reinhold's character prepares to leave with the suitcase full of money, a third party (played by Bill Pullman) enters the scene and attempts a holdup. Only Pullman's character is totally unaware of the ambient reality that the plaza is ringed by police. As summed up by one police lieutenant (@ the 7:00 mark), "this could very well be the stupidest person on the face of the Earth."

You'll make no mistake in imagining those who are ignorant (or incredulous) of the ongoing phase transition wrought by the networked information society to be like Pullman's character in this clip:





p.s. Rheology is the study of viscosity and related aspects of the mechanical behavior of materials.

network perspective

Siddhartha: "... teachings are of no use to me; they have no hardness, no softness, no colours, no corners, no smell, no taste — they have nothing but words...."


tb: How do you feel about rich media, my friend? Teachings can now be made more tangible -- the words can acquire some hardness, some softness, some colors, some corners in the new substrate. Your description of words (and teachings) is like to a diffuse vapor, imperceptible for more than a few fleeting moments after emission. But now the world features an information substrate that is rendering reality more viscous. Structures can be built and made to persist and proliferate.


Siddhartha: "Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. I suspected this when I was still a youth and it was this that drove me away from teachers."


tb: Maybe not; but one can self-exemplify wisdom. Rich media bolsters the effectiveness and extends the reach of self-exemplified wisdom. [a humble example; another] And, Siddhartha, I think I can further phase-transition your enlightened ferryman mind with just a little discourse on network theory and related perspectives. Like a cooking show, where the host can take the finished cake out of the oven right away, allow me to jump to the network-perspicacious hypersegments of the 4D Siddharthapillar.


Siddhartha: Wow! It sure is nice to have a robust theoretical apparatus on which to hang all my hitherto incommunicable wisdom. You have succeeded in communicating much wisdom to me, thereby self-exemplifying your point that it is possible. I might quibble -- in an attempt to save the purity of my 'can't communicate wisdom' wisdom I was trying to impart to Govinda -- that you too are like all teachers in that you have also only shown me knowledge; that my network perspicacity has sprung from the depths of my own soul, as ever.

But I am not so small-minded: You have demonstrated a material shift in the quality of reality, and my former view has given way. Perhaps you have only shown me knowledge, but the new substrate has changed the ratio of knowledge-exposure to wisdom-emergence profoundly. Quibbles about what is being communicated (knowledge vs. wisdom) melt away.


tb: Thank you, my friend. You told Govinda that you do not attach great importance to thoughts; that you attach more importance to things. Do you still feel that way, Siddhartha?


Siddhartha: Yes, but thoughts are now more thing-like, in this new substrate. Thoughts and words and images are now instantiated physically and interconnected as never before.

[Siddhartha bent down, lifted a stone from the ground and held it in his hand.]


Siddhartha: Previously I would have said, "This stone is a stone; it is also animal, God and Buddha. I do not respect and love it because it was one thing and will become something else, but because it has already long been everything and always is everything. I love it just because it is a stone, because today and now it appears to me a stone. I see value and meaning in each one of its fine markings and cavities, in the yellow, in the grey, in the hardness and the sound of it when I knock it, in the dryness or dampness of its surface."

I do not feel otherwise now, but I wish to point out that my respect and love for artifacts like microchips surpasses my respect and love for stones by some orders of magnitude.

[Siddhartha opened his coarse hempen knapsack and drew forth a 4GB micro-SD chip.]


On this tiny flake of matter is encoded vast stores of interconnected knowledge. I have seen electron micrographs displaying its intricate patterns, and with your help I have come to understand the physics of its function.


Without diminishing the beauty of the stone, I perceive a higher order of value and meaning in the microscopic markings and cavities of the microchip, as compared to the chaotic markings and cavities of the stone I hold in my other hand.

And when I put the micro-SD chip into my web-enabled handheld over in my third hand, it becomes physically connected to far-reaching networks of people and information, and wondrous new meta-things emerge and self-organize. Thoughts, knowledge and information are made tangible and communicable and accessible, acquiring a utility far surpassing the humble stone in the hierarchy of things in the thingosphere.

Asperger Notes

How to climb out of the Asperger 'gravity well'

• Let Asperger's itself become the Aspie special interest.


• Iterate.

That's it!

cf. metacognition

For neurotyps

Learn up on Asperger's, seeking clues to what an Aspie worldview might be like; seek out some of the readily available Aspie testimony too -- i.e., try to break out of the neurotyp 'syndrome' mentality, and dig the multidimensional phase space of human cognition -- array, if you will, all human intelligence on this multidimensional hyperboard, yours included.

You are on the same hyperboard, is the point, with the 'Aspies.' You must relax your conception of yourself as 'normal' or 'typical' and see yourself on the same 'spectrum' as all other humans, Aspies included. The Aspie/Autism 'spectrum' encompasses a multitude of cognitive attributes, each one represented by its own orthogonal dimension in the phase space of human cognition. A 'diagnosis' of 'Aspie' means that the clinician has located the subject in a subset hyperarea within that phase space.

The boundary of the hyperarea enclosing 'Aspies' is not well defined, and differs along with the tastes of different practitioners, I imagine (I only imagine, because I am only roughly familiar with a/A spectrum clinical practice; but measurement of cognitive attributes has some serious error bars attached, I further imagine, yielding up ye fuzzy boundary).

Anyway, the point, for neurotyps, is that you almost certainly share some of the attributes that contribute to the 'Aspie' score. They are not binary "on" or "off" attributes, but each one varying along a subspectrum (not necessarily one-dimensional either). You might even register 'Strong Aspie' (or whatever they call it) on some of these attributes, but not very many; and you may register 'Mild Aspie' on a number of them, but not enough to approach the score thresholds of the 'Aspie' diagnosis.

The armchair scientist in me wants to venture that for every individual clinically diagnosed 'Aspie' there are some large multiple of other individuals who would also be diagnosed 'Aspie' if measured. And there is an even larger multiple of individuals who would not be diagnosed, but who inhabit neighborhoods of the phase space of human cognition overlapping the Aspie environs (and Autie environs too).

don't fight it

This is where the 'relax your conception of yourself as normal' thing comes in: it's not that you're 'normal' and Aspies are 'abnormal' or 'mentally ill.' I am hopeful that you will come to understand that overlapping the Aspie environs is nothing to be afraid or ashamed of. Some of the attributes in question are things like meticulousness and industry and transcendent musical brilliance -- got a problem with any of that? So you can imagine that you only overlap in those kinds of attributes if you like. But you can see yourself arrayed on this same hyperboard -- in the same phase space of human cognition. Do you see how you can overlap in a subset of these dimensions?

OK, that's progress. Now: please do not suspect that I am attempting to gain a foothold from which to argue that all of the rest of the Aspie bag must be allowed into polite neurotypical company. I am not arguing that point one way or the other.

Recall that episode of Bewitched where some old Aunt put a spell on Samantha, compelling her to append a rhyme to the tail of every utterance. E.g., "Give it to me ... fiddle dee dee." I know a person who exhibits a similar compulsion in that he cannot miss an opportunity to issue forth puns, and apparently has no filter; it is hard to discern any limit in the extent to which he will reach in order to interject something 'witty' into a dialogue. He believes that this is good, first-class wit; whereas I perceive it to be a degenerate form of wit. We are on either side of one or more A/a attribute borderlines on the pun thing. I am not arguing that anybody needs to put up with this sort of thing.

And coming back to my point, dear Neurotyp, consider the merits of rigorous dialectic habits in this networked information age. This new world characterized by self-organizing interlocutors communicating via interactive multimedia (aka 'rich media'). Iterating out a wikiworld of connected understanding.

Now my point is that the bag of tricks necessary to navigate (and co-create) this world, includes several items from the Aspie bag that -- check out my Aspie aspect -- have been being thrown out with the bathwater in many communities.

So for example, computer programmers to this day are castigated as 'nerds' or 'geeks' etc. by the neurotypicool set. But in the information age, algorithmic sensibilities are necessary! A facility with logical structures, with mathematics more generally -- with complex adaptive systems and network theory and fractal geometry -- these are increasingly necessary literacies. If neurotyps would only relax their aversion to these 'geeky' neighorhoods, they would be doing themselves a favor. In my experience, it is often not lack of interest that keeps their minds closed, but rather fear of having this interest found out by other neurotypicools and being branded 'nerd' or whatever. That's a sorry anti-intellectual memetrap indeed.

Anyway: all that by way of suggesting to you, dear reader who may be a neurotyp interested in Aspergers, that it would be salutary if you made an earnest attempt to see the world a little bit through clear Aspie eyes.

On the Merits

Neurotyps complain about aspie's inability to 'empathize' among other deficits (from the neurotypical perspective).

But at bottom, what the complaint is often about ... is aspie's unwillingness (or inability) to cave on the merits.

For example:

Neurotyp complains that aspie does not see things from her perspective enough (or at all).

But if her perspective, in a given case, is that she should get her way despite the merits of the situation, then all aspie has done is fail to cave on the merits.

Empathy does not involve necessarily caving on the merits just because neurotyps would prefer it.

If one's feelings won't be sufficiently soothed until one gets the thing one wants, one should take care to want things that, on the merits, one may legitimately expect to get.

And if called out on the merits ... then defend the merits.

Don't say, off-the-merits, that, e.g., aspie's tone of voice is now the problem (attempting to multiply any merit-based arguments of his by zero), or that aspie is too [nerdy / geeky/ type-A / erudite / pointy-headed, etc.], or whatever off-the-merits ploy.

sometimes I think it is a question of different perspectives on what "the merits" are. E.g., you may not want to make the 5-hour drive for the weekend because it has a low ratio [of enjoyment to hassle] ... those are the clear merits, but she doesn't care about that so much because she believes the value of being in some other place for 35 hours is worth the 10 hour driving investment.

If the merits cannot be defended, then:

• It is not aspie's fault!

If the merits can be defended, but not real time, then neurotyps should take some time to think it through and then communicate in writing or something.

If neurotyps turn out to be wrong on the merits, they should admit it.

And if they are wrong a lot of the time, they should reflect on that and stop giving aspie so much trouble.

In any event, neurotyps should drop the idea that they are automatically right on the merits; or are entitled to some presumption of being right on the merits; or that they are entitled to summary judgment on the merits; or that the merits need not even be discussed.

To your point above: certainly it's a question of different perspectives on what "the merits" are.

But one should have the opportunity to advance arguments on the merits that will be entertained in good faith; conversely, one should have the obligation to hear the other persons well-reasoned arguments on the merits and entertain them in good faith.

Neither side should get to decide the issue based on unfounded ipse dixit or any other off-the-merits strategy.

Often a [neurotypical] interlocutor protests that s/he 'can't be expected to defend the merits,' or 'think through the issue a little more clearly' due to some information deficit or cognitive disadvantage relative to aspie. This is advanced in lieu of substantive response, in the expectation that it it can overcome the merits and win the argument. Now even if it were true (regarding information processing disadvantages relative to aspie), this would not be aspie's fault; and even if it were chargeable to aspie somehow, such a state of affairs would not impact the underlying merits at all.

1) i don't think you should lump all neurotypicals together in that regard

2) not all aspie's are of superior intelligence and that makes a big difference

1) I'm not;

2) I don't maintain that.

I mean: the subset of neurotypicals who do that; or better yet, people (without labeling them) who do that.

More Aspie Pearls

"Those with [Aspergers] will have problems with communication [and] in reading nonverbal signals, such as facial expressions and body language, and also being able to give the right responses when talking."

Maxine C. Aston, The Other Half of Asperger Syndrome (National Autistic Society 2001).

Let’s examine these communication problems from a different perspective. I think I am onto some neurotypical behaviors that might account for this type of communication breakdown.

Namely, the habit of saying something other than what is meant. If one party to a communication persistently utters words that do not match the meaning they hope to convey, why is the fault for the ensuing communication breakdown assigned to the person who is not in the habit of doing this (and who is, moreover, in the habit of seeking a clear, unambiguous understanding in every interaction, and being thwarted in that pursuit by the aforementioned word/meaning mismatch habit of the other person)?

In my experience, people often seem very uncomfortable (or even unable) to say what they mean directly. They may not say it directly for any number of reasons: because it does not sound so good out loud; because if the interlocutor picks up too readily on the actual meaning, it may produce an undesired response; because the speaker is not capable of articulating their meaning, or perhaps they are not clear on their meaning to begin with.

A frequently observed behavior is to pull utterances up short; that is, not finish sentences, expecting the interlocutor to clue in on the rest of what is meant (this is especially pernicious in those instances in which the speaker is not even capable of finishing the thought, and is just fishing for someone else to do the critical thinking for them).

A clear-headed communicator, faced with any of the above, is faced with a cloud of potential ambiguity. There is too much of a range in what is possibly meant. Now, it may be neurotypical for participants in conversations to ride through the information gaps, throwing lifelines to each other, guessing as to meanings. And it may even be that people can get very good at guessing meanings, and develop a willingness to play at communicating in that fashion.

But it is a reckless way to communicate, because it is so imprecise; whole worlds of ambiguity are opened up, and often on purpose. For example: let’s say Ann wants her co-worker Bob to take on a particular task. If Ann doesn’t come right out and say “I think you should do that task,” then whatever indirect thing she does say will create a palpable ambiguity, to be danced around, regarding who is to do the task in question. Bob may be well aware that Ann wants her to do the task, but let’s say he doesn’t want to do it. He may respond in like fashion, with some indirect way of attempting to keep the task off his plate. This is an inefficient way to make decisions and achieve the requisite clarity, and I suspect this kind of communication dynamic accounts for a lot of dropped balls.

Let’s inject Clare into the same discussion. Clare favors direct, unambiguous communications, bucking the conventional “dance around sensitive issues” pattern. So now Ann tries to float the task over to Clare’s plate, and Clare shares Bob’s desire not to have that task land on her plate.

So Clare comes out with a direct "I don't think it is appropriate for me to do that task; Ann, that's squarely in your area of responsibility; I think you should do it."

Ann gets bent out of shape, because Clare didn't play the neurotypical game of allowing the merits to be decided unfairly, with improperly supported arguments.

Now, for some (most?) Aspies, I think they genuinely lack insight into what is meant (if it is very different from what is said, especially).

I feel like i have no idea what other people are thinking or how they think....is that an aspie trait? can neurotyps tell better what people are thinking or do they just THINK they can tell what others are thinking?

Often they guess correctly but too often, they do not, but continue to act as if they have (and as if their mode of communication is 'normal' and clearer; more logical forms are abnormal).

I don't know so much about the run of aspies for whom neurotyp meanings are opaque. For me, it's not an inability, or a disability, in discerning meaning, but a kind of hyperability.

For example, I am very Bob-like, quick to clue in when someone else, e.g., is inappropriately trying to waft something over to my plate. I'm extremely, think-12-steps-ahead, quick to clue in and the next thing I do or say is a direct response to what is actually meant (within the limits of my putative hyperability to guess what that is). This often comes as a slap in my interlocutor's face because they may not even know that they mean that; i.e., they may not have gotten that far in the chain of reasoning to understand the logical implications of their utterance.

Or, they may know very well they mean that, but were trying to disguise it, and resent getting hit in the face with it.

Well, anyway, sticking with my solipsistic universe for a second ... I often can't pull out the meaning either; but more often, I can, but simply refuse to play the game of 'communicating' like that, because it's too frustrating and inefficient. And THAT is the kind of reaction that neurotypical writers of books on Asperger's syndrome depict as 'inappropriate communication sensibilities' and the like.

What I do is bottom-line the thing, way earlier than conventional people. I figure (not always correctly) that if I can't understand something, then it needs clarification. Even if I am wrong (and some huge % of others would not find any ambiguity), the thing still needs clarification if one of the parties to the conversation isn't getting the incoming communication (no matter whose fault that is).

It is this process of disambiguation that neurotyps often object to, and often apparently because of their own shortcomings in the articulation and critical thinking departments -- which shortcomings, paradoxically (in my experience anyway), are often advanced in lieu of substantive rejoinder (as discussed above: 'I can't be expected to think as fast as you; so I get to win the point notwithstanding the merits...').

Objecting to that kind of logic is some kind of sin against neurotyp nature, apparently.

Language is Music is Math

Quoting from The Art of Music (Cannon, Johnson & Waite 1960)

What is Music? In every age a different answer has been found. Today music may be the art of organizing tones so that an aesthetic experience may result. It was once held to be sound related to number, and at another time the union of word and tone. Two thousand years after Plato, Johannes Kepler still adhered to Plato's idea that music was a force regulating the universe through the mathematical relationships inherent in musical intervals. For a man of the Enlightenment music was matter in motion, while a man of the nineteenth century would have described it as the language of the emotions, an irrational form of speech capable of expressing the inexpressible.

* * * *

There is another reason why music has been such an important aspect of human thought. For millenia music was held to be not only an art, but a science. Tradition ascribes to Pythagoras, a Greek thinker of the sixth century B.C., the discovery that the relationships of musical tones are measurable by specific mathematical proportions. Although the earliest makers of musical instruments, such as the person who bored holes in a wooden pipe to produce different tones, must have had some knowledge of these numerical relationships, it was not until the fifth or sixth century B.C. that they were formulated mathematically.

This discovery, that sound is subject to the rational laws of number, was one of the first intimations the Greeks had that nature is an orderly process. If the harmony which exists between tones is the product of mathematical proportions, could it be possible that other aspects of the world are regulated by the same numbers? May not the succession of the seasons, the ebb and flow of the tides, the balance and discords of the human spirit all be related through the same proportions? May not music be the foundation of the universe? As a result of such speculations music became the companion of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as a science that measures and explains the causes and relationships of the universe. In subsequent centuries the evolution of music as an art was continually to be influenced by the premises of music as a science. Even today the mathematical aspect of music is an important element in the theories of many composers. (see also math rock).

* * * *

[E]ven in the prehistory of Greece music was pre-eminent among the arts. In the earliest Hellenic times before the establishment of laws, it was the poet-musician who preserved and guided the traditions of his people through a recitation of the deeds of the heroes of his race. For the early Greeks music was not simply tone as such. It was a composite art: word and music united in the utterances of the bards. The poet, composer, and singer were one, the lawgiver who guided his primitive political society through the examples of proper action recited in his songs. Through the force of his thought, ennobled by musical expression, the musician could move his audience to emotions and actions. This power of music was felt to be of divine origin, and it was said to have come into the possession of mortals as a gift of the gods who had invented musical instruments.

Poetry and music were the transmitters and the mainstay of culture. The first form of education was "musical," by which the Greeks meant an indoctrination into the arts of music and poetry as well as the assimilation of the examples and laws furnished by poetry. Music was considered to be necessary for the preservation of the community and it was inextricably interwoven with the life of the state. All public occasions were graced by music, often performed by the populace. Contests were established in which both singers and instrumentalists participated to win public acclaim. ...

Fog of War

War & Peace | The Black Swan

War & Peace
Modern Library, Constance Garnett trans.

Part 2, ch. XXI, p. 177-78

Prince Bagration thanked the several commanding officers, and inquired into details of the battle and of the losses. The general, whose regiment had been inspected at Braunau, submitted to the prince that as soon as the engagement began, he had fallen back from the copse, mustered the men who were cutting the wood, and letting them pass him, had made a bayonet charge with two battalions and repulsed the French.

“As soon as I saw, your excellancy, that the first battalion was thrown into confusion, I stood in the road and thought, 'I'll let them get through and then open fire on them'; and that is what I did.”

The general had so longed to do this, he had so regretted not having succeeded in doing it, that it seemed to him now that this was just what had happened. Indeed might it not actually have been so? Who could make out in such confusion what did and what did not happen?

“And by the way I ought to note, your excellency,” he continued, recalling Dolohov's conversation with Kutuzov and his own late interview with the degraded officer, “that the private Dolohov, degraded to the ranks, took a French officer prisoner before my eyes and particularly distinguished himself.”

“I saw here, your excellency, the attack of the Pavlograd hussars,” Zherkov put in, looking uneasily about him. He had not seen the hussars at all that day, but had only heard about them from an infantry officer. “They broke up two squares, your excellency.”

When Zherkov began to speak, several officers smiled, as they always did, expecting a joke from him. But as they perceived that what he was saying all redounded to the glory of our arms and of the day, they resumed a serious expression, although many were very well aware that what Zherkov was saying was a lie utterly without foundation. Prince Bagration turned to the old colonel.

“I thank you all, gentlemen; all branches of the service behaved heroically – infantry, cavalry, and artillery. How did two cannons come to be abandoned in the centre?” he inquired, looking about for some one. (Prince Bagration did not ask about the cannons of the left flank; he knew that all of them had been abandoned at the very beginning of the action.) “I think it was you I sent,” he added, addressing the staff-officer.

“One had been disabled,” answered the staff-officer, “but the other, I can't explain; I was there all the while myself, giving instructions, and I had scarcely left there.... It was pretty hot, it's true,” he added modestly.

Some one said that Captain Tushin was close by here in the village, and that he had already been sent for.

“Oh, but you went there,” said Prince Bagration, addressing Prince Andrey.

“To be sure, we rode there almost together,” said the staff-officer, smiling affably to [Andrey].

“I had not the pleasure of seeing you,” said Prince Andrey, coldly and abruptly. Every one was silent.

* * * *

Part 10, ch. 1, pp. 637-38

[Tolstoy surveys various current 19th Century historical narratives about Napoleon's war on Russia.]

... [A]ll these hints at foreseeing what actually did happen on the French as well as on the Russian side are only conspicuous now because the event justified them. If the event had not come to pass, these hints would have been forgotten, as thousands and millions of suggestions and suppositions are now forgotten that were in current at the period, but have been shown by time to be unfounded and so have been consigned to oblivion. There are always so many presuppositions as to the cause of every event that, however the matter ends, there are always people who will say: “I said at the time that it would be so”: quite oblivious of the fact that among the numerous suppositions they made there were others too suggesting just the opposite course of events.

. . .. ... ..... ........ oOo ........ ..... ... .. . .

Charles Joseph Minard, Tableaux Graphiques et Cartes Figuratives de M. Minard, 1845-1869

see also Wikimedia Commons

The above is the classic of Charles Joseph Minard (1781-1870), the French engineer, which shows the terrible fate of Napoleon's army in Russia. Described by E. J. Marey as seeming to defy the pen of the historian by its brutal eloquence, this combination of data map and time-series, drawn in 1869, portrays the devastating losses suffered in Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812.

Beginning at the left on the Polish-Russian border near the Niemen river, the thick band shows the size of the army (422,000 men) as it invaded Russia in June 1812. The width of the band indicates the size of the army at each place on the map. In September, the army reached Moscow, which was by then sacked and deserted, with 100,000 men.

The path of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow is depicted by the darker, lower band, which is linked to a temperature scale and dates at the bottom of the chart. It was a bitterly cold winter, and many froze on the march out of Russia. As the graphic shows, the crossing of the Berezina River was a disaster, and the army finally struggled back into Poland with only 10,000 men remaining. Also shown are the movements of auxiliary troops, as they sought to protect the rear and the flank of the advancing army.

Minard's graphic tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data, far more enlightening than just a single number bouncing along over time. Six variables are plotted: the size of the army, its location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of the army's movement, and temperature on various dates during the retreat from Moscow. It may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.

. . .. ... ..... ........ oOo ........ ..... ... .. . .

Taleb, The Black Swan, p.8:

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what' s inside the body, how the mechanisms work. What I call the generator of historical events is different from the events themselves ....

This disconnect is similar to the difference between the food you see on the table at the restaurant and the process you can observe in the kitchen.

The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are:

• the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize;


• the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality); and


• the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories ...
  

Nobody Knows What's Going On

The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.

I was constantly told by adults that the [Lebanese civil] war, which ended up lasting close to seventeen years, was going to end in “only a matter of days.” They seemed quite confident in their forecasts of duration, as can be evidenced by the number of people who sat waiting in hotel rooms and other temporary quarters in Cypress, Greece, France, and elsewhere for the war to finish.

* * * *

p. 251: The Ubiquity of the Gaussian

One of the problems I face in life is that whenever I tell people that the Gaussian bell curve is not ubiquitous in real life, only in the minds of statisticians, they require me to “prove it” -- which is easy to do, as we will see in the next two chapters, yet nobody has managed to prove the opposite. Whenever I suggest a process that is not Gaussian, I am asked to justify my suggestion and to, beyond the phenomena, “give them the theory behind it.”...

Theory shmeory! I have an epistemological problem with that, with the need to justify the world's failure to resemble an idealized model that someone blind to reality has managed to promote. ... This ubiquity of the Gaussian is not a property of the world, but a problem in our minds, stemming from the way we look at it....

I sometimes get a little emotional because I've spent a large part of my life thinking about this problem. Since I started thinking about it, and conducting a variety of thought experiments ... I have not for the life of me been able to find anyone around me in the business and statistical world who was intellectually consistent in that he both accepted the Black Swan and rejected the Gaussian and Gaussian tools. Many people accepted my Black Swan idea but could not take it to its logical conclusion, which is that you cannot use one single measure for randomness called a standard deviation (and call it “risk”); you cannot expect a simple answer to characterize uncertainty. To go the extra step requires courage, commitment, an ability to connect the dots, a desire to understand randomness fully. It also means not accepting other people's wisdom as gospel.

Then I started finding physicists who had rejected the Gaussian tools but fell for another sin: gullibility about precise predictive models.... I could not find anyone with depth and scientific technique who looked at the world of randomness and understood its nature, who looked at calculations as an aid, not a principal aim. It took me close to a decade and a half to find that thinker, the man who made many swans gray: Mandelbrot – the great Benoit Mandelbrot.

. . .. ... ..... ........ oOo ........ ..... ... .. . .

See also The Geebus (April 14, 2006)

excerpt from Bellow

from Saul Bellow, “What kind of day did you have?” in Him With His Foot in his Mouth and Other Stories (1984).

page cites are to the Penguin Books paperback edition (1985)

This is the part in which the great art critic Victor Wulpy (modeled after Bellow's University of Chicago colleague Harold Rosenberg) encounters an old acquaintance, Larry Wrangel, a Hollywood sci-fi film producer, while stuck in the airport in Buffalo ...

--oOo--

background, p.98:

Victor tells Katrina, his traveling companion ...

about a note he had received at the hotel from a fellow he had known years ago – a surprise that did not please him. “He takes the tone of an old chum. Wonderful to meet again after thirty years. He happens to be in town. And good old Greenwich Village – I hate the revival of these relationships that never were. Meantime, it's true, he's become quite a celebrity.”

“Would I know the name?”

“Larry Wrangel. He had a recent success with a film called The Kronos Factor. Same type as 2001 or Star Wars.”

“Of course,” said Katrina. “That's the Wrangel who was featured in People magazine. A late-in-life success, they called him. Ten years ago he was still making porno movies. Interesting.”

She spoke cautiously, having disgraced herself in San Francisco. Even now she couldn't be sure that Victor had forgiven her for dragging him to see M*A*S*H. Somewhere in his mental accounts there was a black mark still. Bad taste approaching criminality, he had once said. “He must be very rich. The piece in People said that his picture grossed four hundred million. Did he attend your lecture?”

“He wrote that he had an engagement, so he might be a bit late, and could we have a drink afterwards. He gave a number, but I didn't call.”

“You were what—tired? disgruntled?”

“In the old days he was bearable for about ten minutes at a time—just a character who longed to be taken seriously. The type that bores you most when he's most earnest. He came from the Midwest to study philosophy at NYU and he took up with the painters at the Cedar bar and the writers on Hudson Street. I remember him, all right—a little guy, quirky, shrewd, offbeat. I think he supported himself by writing continuity for the comic books—Buck Rogers, Batman, Flash Gordon. He carried a scribbler in his zipper jacket and jotted down plot ideas. I lost track of him, and I don't care to find the track again....”

--oOo--

p. 136:

They now saw Victor working his way back to the booth, and Wrangel signaled to the waitress to serve their lunch. The glazed orange duck looked downright dangerous. Circles of fat swam in the spiced gravy. Famished, Victor attacked his food. His whiskey glass was soon fingerprinted with grease. He tore up his rolls over the dish and spooned up the fatty sops. He was irritable.

Wrangel tried to make conversation, as a host should do. Victor gave him a gloomy if not sinister look – a glare, to be more accurate – when Wrangel began to point out connections between cartoons and abstract ideas. When people spoke of ideas as “clear,” didn't they mean reductive? Human beings, in reduction, represented as things. Acceptable enough when they were funny. But suppose the intention wasn't funny, as shorthand representations of the human often were, then you got an abstract condensation for the Modern theme. Take Picasso and Daumier as caricaturists (much deference in this to Victor, the expert). It might be fair to say that Daumier treated a social subject: the middle class, the courtroom. Picasso didn't. In Picasso you had the flavor of nihilism that went with increased abstraction. Wrangel in his rolls of fur and his chin supported by silk scarf and cotton bandanna was nervous, insecure of tone, twitching.

“What's this about reason?” said Victor. “First you tell me that ideas are trivial, they're dead, and then what do you do but discuss ideas with me?”

“There's no contradiction, is there, if I say that abstract ideas and caricature go together?”

“I have little interest in discussing this,” said Victor. “It'll keep until you get back to California, won't it?”

“I suppose it will.”

“Well, then, stow it. Skip it. Stuff it.”

“It's a pity that my success in sci-fi should be held against me. Actually I've had a better than average training in philosophy.”

“Well, I'm not in the mood for philosophy. And I don't want to discuss the nihilism that goes with reason. I figure you've done enough to f___ up the consciousness of millions of people with this mishmash of astrophysics and divinity that has made you so famous. Your trouble is that you'd like to sneak up on real seriousness. Well, you've already made your contribution. Your statement is on the record.”

“You yourself have written about ''divine sickness,” Victor. I would suppose that any creature, regardless of his worldly status, had one ticket good for a single admission if he has suffered – if he paid his price.”

But Victor wouldn't hear him out. He made a face so satirical, violent, so killing that Katrina would have turned away from it if it hadn't been so extraordinary – an aspect of Victor never manifested before. He drew his lips over his teeth to imitate bare gums. He gabbled in pantomime, not a sound coming out. He let out his tongue like a dog panting. He squeezed his eyes so tight that you couldn't see anything except the millipede brows and lashes. He put his thumbs to the sides of his head and waggled his fingers. Then he slid himself out of the booth, took up the duffel, and started for the door. Katrina, too, stood up. She held Vanessa's fiddle in her arms, saying, “I'd apologize for him if you didn't also know him. He's in very bad shape, Mr. Wrangel, you can see that for yourself. Last year we nearly lost him. And he's in pain every day. Try to remember that. I'm sorry about this. Don't let him get to you.”

“Well, this is a lesson. Of course it makes me very sad. Yes, I see he's in bad shape. Yes, it's a pity.”

It had cut him up, and Katrina's heart went out to Wrangel. “Thank you,” she said, drawing away, turning. She hoped she didn't look too clumsy from the rear.

Victor was waiting for her in the concourse and she spoke to him angrily. “That was bad behavior. I didn't like being a party to it.”

“When he started on me with Daumier and Picasso, I couldn't stand it, not a minute more of it.”

“You feel rotten and you took it out on him.”

He conceded this in silence.

Doofus Turing Test

(from 5.23.2007)

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's capability to demonstrate thought. Described by Professor Alan Turing in the 1950 paper "Computing machinery and intelligence," it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. It is assumed that both the human and the machine try to appear human. [from Wikipedia]

In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of the machine instead of its ability to render words into audio), the conversation is usually limited to a text-only channel such as a teletype machine as Turing suggested or, more recently, IRC or instant messaging.

Thus, the Turing test takes as its objective measure the best-informed subjective impression of the human judge.

I propose an analogous test, which I will call the Doofus-Turing Test Notwithstanding the tradition of naming such proposals after their proponents (anticipating the doofus retort). The Doofus-Turing Test involves communication between a human judge and a human subject, not between a human and a machine. Like the Turing test, however, it takes as its objective measure the best-informed subjective impression of the human judge.

In other words: I am borrowing the notion from the AI field that it is useful to employ such a measure of intellect. Turing himself suggested several objections which could be made to his test, and I am not here arguing whether the Turing test holds up as a useful test or not against such arguments. I have observed, however, that computer scientists and AI researchers won't shut up about the Turing test, and neither shall I.

If a human judge's subjective impression is a useful construct in measuring machine intelligence, then perhaps it can also be employed to measure aspects of human intelligence. That is the extent of the analogy I draw.

So, what aspects of human intelligence do I imagine might be measured by the Doofus-Turing Test? I imagine that the human judge will rank the subject along a spectum of doofusheadedness. I shall call this measure the Doofus Quotient. I do not here propose the method of assigning an objective rank, nor the mathematical form of the index. That is to be worked out later, by actual smart people (once this proposal passes their Doofus-Turing Test).

The Doofus Quotient, or DQ, scores the depth and consistency of the subject's understanding. A subject who manifests a shallow, superficial or rote understanding of a topic under discussion would score higher, and especially if the topic is one on which the subject holds him or herself out as having specialized knowledge. Conversely, subjects who evince deep knowledge and whose remarks hold together logically would score lower (they would be less doofusheaded). High DQ scores for adherents (or spouters) of idea-sets lacking strong empirical and theoretical foundation; low DQ scores for practitioners of rigorous and intellectually honest analysis.

My premise is that a human judge with sufficient acuity in a given area can easily recognize others with a similar or greater depth of understanding; and conversely, the same human judge can readily sniff out spurious “experts.” The more data points, the better (as usual); but it does not take very many data points, I propose, to distill out a useful DQ. If the subject produces accurate, consistent responses to, say, five penetrating questions in a row, this tells the judge a lot. If the subject can only manage canned, superficial bullet-pointy soundbites in response to the same five questions, all the while maintaining the façade of specialized knowledge, the judge can also learn much about the subject. Even a subject who has a deep understanding in some areas may yet score high on the DQ scale, if the subject over-leverages this expertise by feigning expertise in other areas, for example. Indeed, such behavior may warrant a multiplier of some sort!

The Doofus-Turing Test looks for logical inconsistencies. If there are any pockets of irrationality in the subject's reasoning, it is a sign that there could be many similar pockets. The Doofus-Turing Test is attuned to the spouting of talking-point memes, divorced from factual or empirical basis. The Doofus-Turing Test exposes the deployment of rhetorical trickery tending to deflect attention from the merits of the subject at hand.

Someone who spends too much time writing a piece such as this one would score higher on the Doofus-Turing Test; someone who stops here and attends to other matters in life would tend to score lower.

___

[Update: someone who came back to edit this post likely just spiked his DQ.]

___

rw said...

On the subject of the DTT and the DQ, which results therefrom, I am puzzled by a population stratification bias. There are categories of people (let's select politicians as one subgroup) who clearly cluster around a high DQ. They are forced to speak to constituents, the debate floor, or their party often at times when they have nothing to say, or for that matter, they are rhetorically modifying a party line to overemphasize its strength. For instance, the republican party during the Lewinsky scandal continuously turned the debate on the floor, whatever the issue actually was at the time, to the notion of morality in this country. One might argue that the morality of an illicit affair and even the lying to cover said act up is dispicable. But, at what point does the act of a single man, even one so high in office as the President condemn the morality of an entire nation?

Herein lies the efficacy of artfully used dufusheadedness. By taking a single situation and extrapolating it to win political sway, we also have a form of high DQ. I view the DTT as having two sub categories. There is high DQ A, which is highly rhetorical debate with no substance or intellectual reference wherein the dufus is merely talking to pontificate. And, there is high DQ B where the dufus knows exactly how wrong and untruthful the use of rhetoric is but chooses to perpetuate it because rhetorical sound bites amplify his position. This is the most dangerous form of a dufus. The high DQ B dufus is the one who turns entire political platforms into a few sound bites (i.e. decline of family values, defeating terrorism, etc.). It is ironic that in many cases those dufuses have been caught violating their own "rhetorical moral code" when they are caught in a scandal (e.g. Mark Foley) or act to undermine their own rhetoric (Abu Graib, Walter Reed, and a lack of suitable armor on Hummers).

What is truly incredible is the ability of the high DQ B dufus to quickly spin a tale so as to marginalize the subject of a scandal and form a new rhetoric which draws attention away from it (i.e. new sound bites such as "the Democrats do not support our troops because they want to bring them home"). I submit that the high DQ A dufus is easy to find, and often easy to discredit, but the high DQ B dufus is much more careful about what, where, and who actually sends the message (case in point, who was hung out to dry in the Valerie Plame scandal, those who contemplated the leak or those who actually perpetrated it?) The high DQ A dufus is one who plagarizes a speech in his first run for the Presidency, manages to rebound to make another run more than a decade later, only to make another stupid comment about his competition (e.g. Joe Biden). This is someone who knows rhetoric works but does not know how to use it or even when he is using it.

I do not want to leave out low DQ A and B dufuses as well. You might suggest that if the DQ is low, then one is not a dufus. On the contrary, I would argue that a party who is up against another group of nearly pure high DQ dufuses and still cannot find a way to win sway must also be called to the carpet. This is the low DQ dufus A. That is someone who clearly references and understands the argument and can argue intelligently and with data against a high DQ dufus but often does not formulate a proper argument or is so lazy as to not realize they can powerfully use the tools of the high DQ dufus B against them. The only gem in this crowd is the low DQ dufus B, who are few in numbers. These are the class of people who gather data, cross reference it, form an opinion, and articulately display it in a form such as to totally discredit the opinion editorial nature of the high DQ dufus.

Alas, I search for this person in the political realm and find none. There are too many high DQ dufuses, particularly B's, who so quickly make the situation unenjoyable for the low DQ dufus B, so why would anyone worth the job actually ever choose to do it.

May 26, 2007 11:01 AM

truthboy said...

Low-D QB wondertwin powers activate! Form of a network; shape of a phase transition.

June 12, 2007 11:11 AM

. . .. ... ..... ........ oOo ........ ..... ... .. . .

& test of machiavellianism salon.com 9.13.1999

Human Memome Project

This title does not refer to tribe.net or anything else that pops when you search “human memome project” on Google. As it happens, the title turns out not to have much to do with this piece at all.

So why is it still the title?

cf. Wikinomics 85 et seq. re open-source.

Open Source Human Cognition, by which I mean: the Human Memome Project.

Memome?

Like genome, but for memes.

Got it. Proceed.

Pretending for a moment that there were such an open-source project (which I have to do, as I sit here unaware of the activities of any such extant open-source communities, conceived & conducting themselves explicitly on the open-source model, pursuing the memome project).

Go onnnnn..... [clockcycle, clockcycle, clockcycle ...] ☺

Well, the 'board' on which you array the information-product of the community ...

[I was here interrupted by a ½-hour business call to get my 'first-blush-quick-idea-check' on a business idea. The idea worked, from every angle I could think of. I battle tested it, shot it through, turned it round & round my hypersoccerball of {udap | k | reg | complex adaptive systems | etc...}.

It was a Σ [win₁-win₂-win₃-win₄ ... win_n] situation, by karate man lights. A real nonzero summer. Karate man knows 'em when he sees 'em.

But here's the key thing, the reason that I am bothering to write down this digression into my client call: I expressed this effectively to the client.

How?

¿Shall I go onnnnnnn?

☺¡Go onnnnnnnn!☻

Well, karate man doesn't hold back in telling you how much he dislikes the whole neighborhood some of your questions are coming from.

How many times hasn't karate man read you out some riot act down to the foundations of your understanding of the universe, when all you asked him was a question about credit card disclosures?

Karate man thinks it is important to balance that out and express to you how much he likes a construct that floats through all constraint-gauntlets untouched, in a nonzero sum kind of way, win-win-win ... (or, solve-solve-solve-solve, with all the solutions achieved at once by the same construct).

Why nonzero sum?

Solutions cost money. Solving two problems at the same time, expending only the effort and money it would take to solve either alone, is a net gain. Solving multiple problems at once multiplies the gains.

Each 'win' is a problem solved or avoided; win₁, win₂ ... win_n corresponds to a phase space of n mutually orthogonal dimensions, one for each problem to be solved. When a solution is hit upon that solves this rubik's hypersoccerball, the thing starts glowing in the dark. That's karate man's way of saying: it is apparent when this occurs.

It is also a very good thing all the way around. So, what a perfect opportunity for karate man to balance out his hypercritical truthstructionism.

May I ask, who is 'karate man'? Is that you? I didn't catch where karate man (km) came into the discussion.

Karate man is a voice. Voice as in, writer's voice, 'public voice'; but not as in 'hearing voices.' [you should pardon the digression, but it's very interesting – this hearing voices movement – another backlash against neurotypical psychiatry akin to Aspies for Freedom.]

It is based on the original Eddie Murphy karate man bit from Trading Places, with certain ironic differences. Murphy's character (km_em) is pretending, contrary to fact, to be a bigshot & infallible karate man. Whereas, the km voice I am employing (km_tb) has a basis for his utterances (as opposed to zero basis). km_tb is the real deal.

Now, km_tb is not perfect, which means that he will not have a perfect basis for his utterances, and he can therefore be wrong. To the extent that he is wrong, he risks being ridiculous like km_em. Of course, km_tb knows this quite well. To the extent he is wrong (and ridiculous), well, he's already playing a km character, which can easily switch over to km_em if necessary.

In other words, km_tb is a voice that allows the author to speak authoritatively and efficiently, but one that need not maintain a façade of intellectual infallibility. In other words, km_tb is allowed to say stuff that in an ordinary voice would be too pedantic (aspie) to hold the neurotypical conch for very long. So km_tb is, like km_em, doing a kind of rope-a-dope. In neurotypical society, being right is actually more dangerous than being ridiculous, because ridiculous people can be ignored more easily (or otherwise removed from the ring). Plus, ridiculous people can succeed quite well in conventional society, judging by the epidemic of doofuses we have been suffering.

So do you see the layers of irony in here? You've got km_tb prancing around the metaphorical jail cell, even though what he says is (mostly) not ridiculous. It's straight up, fact-based, logically consistent, pithy. His actions and utterances are perceived (or portrayed anyway) as ridiculous or otherwise not deserving of consideration on the merits. So km_tb has to dodge and weave and pull an escalating series of hyper-Marshall-McLuhans from behind the movie poster to keep his 'cellmates' on the run until he can make bail (i.e., transcend the 'jail cell' scene and no longer be vulnerable to the particular collection of neurotypical cellmates).

Can you give me an example?

No. I don't want to . Use your imagination.

Then I think you should stop writing now.

Well, I'll stop writing about who km_tb is.

Go.

Well, this was a digression to a digression anyway. Let me get back to the first level of digression: I was telling you about the business call that interrupted my big point I had to write down about memomes, etc. So, anyway, after the interaction described above, I told my client that that ½-hour session was an excellent example of how I can be efficiently leveraged. Not that I'm not good for anything else. But this kind of interaction adds more 'wins' to any win-win you already got going.

This increases the chance that the client will continue 'rolling up soccerballs,' by which I mean, collecting and connecting key information she regularly requires in her business. She will certainly appreciate this, not least because my bills will be a lot smaller; or rather, she can get more advice-utility per unit cost. I will appreciate it because I don't like to spin my wheels answering the same questions over and over, even at my high billing rate. I want to work with people who have a need for information, and who are in the practice of valuing it and understanding it and collecting it and applying it on their own. Then our interactions are always interesting. Questions come from perspectives of escalating expertise, so it becomes a richer dialog. Mutual learning ensues exponentially. Stuff gets easier; more can be accomplished with less effort.

Neurotypical nonexperts seem to expect that experts should be some kind of black box that spits out definitive answers that can be applied in all cases without the nonexpert having to do much critical thinking. There is no shortage of experts willing to provide services on this basis. Neurotypical nonexperts seem to prefer heavy consulting costs to moderate mental lifting.

In my view, an expert performs an iterative function – an expert is not someone who knows everything, but someone who knows a lot; and more importantly, knows how to learn and how to teach. How to find relevant information and collapse it into a concise, actionable understanding; and communicate that understanding; and nurture the emergent thought community whose job it is to implement that understanding.

So, my (digression) point is: I told the client this stuff, fairly explicitly (using different words, but same meaning). Why not say it explicitly, just in case my own elaborate thought process has not actually materialized whole inside her head yet. That is a kind of shortcut, heading off at the pass vast clouds of wheel spinning, for both of us.

Yes?

What starts rolling up to me are soccerballs that are 'rolled up' enough for me to start fitting them into “higher” orders of fractal rolled-up-edness.

Hunh?

Well, take the sierpinski triangle for example:

Let's say that represents a higher level of what I'm calling 'rolled upped-ness' than just a single triangle Δ, or pieces of a triangle like > or _. (I know, I'm mixing my metaphors.) What I get by way of an inquiry should ideally not be just a Δ or a > or an _ . What I start to get, from clients who are strong in the critical thinking department, is one of these:

which I can then much more easily fit into the higher order structure represented above. I don't have to start out each time explaining that they need an emergent thought community whose job it is to implement the understanding they have engaged me to convey.

Now, that's a toy example of what I'm talking about, but on-the-mark from a complex adaptive network dynamic mandelbrotian fractal synced scale-free emergent wikinomic econophysical perspective (pardon my redundancy).

So my role is not to administer neurotypical non-soccerball-roller-uppers (to be charitable; the worse issue is with those with no apparent normative understanding of the foundations of our society; or even worse, those with an understanding coupled with an indifference or antagonism).

No. My role is 'boundary spanner,' harmonizer of ideas and people. As Uncle Abe might say, “ass kicker.”

“You are going to have a big medical problem if you don't do X; you're going to need a major operation to get my boot out of your ass!”

Nice, Abe.

What if you use the community around you as an information processing apparatus ...

In the same sense that one might view a company, or a whole industry, or a group of industries, or a whole economy even, as a huge and complex adaptive iterating apparatus on which one's thought experiments can be run.

So, f'rinstance, you could query the system: “What if soccer-video-bloggers started self-exemplifying rolled-up nonzero soccerballness?” And then see what emerges by way of answers.

It's a way of lining up one's bundle of coordinated, rolled-up interests ... and the emergent product is “pulled” in by the audience (or not; but it is not pushed out). Plus, emergent phenomena can turn out to be extremely valuable in ways that are beyond present imagination.

Product?

Yes! For one thing, it's good to have a product. Otherwise, one risks not being productive (not to mention appearing unproductive). It's good for a product to be interesting to a somewhat broader audience than oneself

(ya think?)

It's even better if the product is interesting enough that the audience will 'pull' it at their convenience, with no (or very little) further effort or action by karate man.

But it gets better: the 'product' is a self-exemplifying unit, which can (and does!) both incent and equip others to emulate it. Who knows what nonzerosumness may emerge?

Anyway, that's the kind of system query I like to run, and I unabashedly have my thumb on the scale. I mean, I influence the system as it iterates by selective feedback. "The idea is to get the fire started; to kickstart the network so that it works on its own." [quoting Biz Stone, A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs, p. 183]

What network?

I am speaking of networks of ideas and tools and people and practices.

So, your scale is not thumb-free, eh?

Right, but my thumb is scale-free.

Uth. Can you get back to the human memome project?

Oh dear, sorry. Well, no. I mean, I don't want to anymore (please refrain from cheering).

Well, what about "the 'board' on which you array the information-product of the community ... " That sounded like a promising beginning. That's the only reason I read through all your digressions.

Oh, that. Well, I'm sure I was going to talk about the physical infrastructure of the information age, a hugely important gameboard for game theory that is new under the sun. You know, rant # 14-G.

Of Strategies and Substrates

Disparate subjective interpretations of reality characterize our world. Each worldview slices the n-dimensional reality loaf in a different way. The various interpretational strategies (worldviews) are cabals of various sorts, meme-gangs, iterating through design space (and, to paraphrase Professor Deutsch, forming crystals in the multiverse – persisting “across” numerous possible worlds).

Deutsch: "it is not living matter but knowledge-bearing [information encoding] matter that is physically special. Within one universe it looks irregular; across universes it has a regular structure, like a crystal in the mulitverse." [Fabric of Reality, p. 190]

Consider the putative strategy 'rigorously truthful.' I want to talk about the prospects for this strategy in today's networked information economy, out of which has emerged a robust physical substrate that is something new under the sun. The play of strategies is an information processing game. Information processing is a physical process. What can we learn about the prospects of the rigorously truthful strategy as it courses through this new physical information processing substrate?

We are masters at drawing conclusions from incomplete information. We are constantly observing the world and then making predictions and drawing conclusions about it. We never have enough information to completely justify the conclusions we draw. Being able to act on guesses and hunches, and act confidently when the information we have points somewhere but does not constitute a proof is a big part of what makes human beings such a successful species.

But this ability comes at a heavy price, which is that we easily fool ourselves. We fool ourselves individually and en masse. The tendency of a group of human beings to quickly come to believe something that its individual members will later see as obviously false is truly amazing. We are also easily fooled by others. Lying persists as a strategy because it is so effective. It is, after all, only because we are built to come to conclusions from incomplete information that we are so vulnerable to lies.

Our basic stance has to be one of trust, for if we required proof of everything, we would never believe anything. Without the ability to trust, we would be solitary animals. For the rigorously truthful community to survive, therefore, there must be mechanisms of correction, to resolve disputes and reconcile differences of opinion. Such mechanisms require that errors be uncovered and new solutions to intractable problems be allowed to replace older ones.

The rigorously truthful community shares the optimistic belief that as a society we can practice such correctives, enabling widespread trust, out of which will continue to emerge progressively more powerful non-zero-sum dynamics. [cf. Wright, Nonzero p. 5]

paraphrasing Smolin, The Trouble with Physics 299-301; see also.

So what kind of correctives does this community practice? I paraphrase Professor Smolin's description. Conceive of this description as an articulation of the local rules characterizing the behavior of individual actors iterating on existing physical substrates (the game boards of game theory). It is an algorithm, a program, which must be “run” on physical information processing substrates. And keep in mind the main idea, which is that the networked information society is a wonderful and entirely new kind of game board, potentially highly conducive to the success of the rigorously truthful algorithm.

Rigorously Truthful

By which I mean, the community defined and maintained by adherence to the following shared ethic, as rigorously as possible, at every juncture:

1. If an issue can be decided by people of good faith, applying rational argument to publicly available evidence, then it must be regarded as so decided.

• When we are forced to reach a consensus by the evidence, we should do so.

2. If, on the other hand, rational argument from the publicly available evidence does not succeed in bringing people of good faith to agreement on an issue, society must allow and even encourage people to draw diverse conclusions.

• i.e., Until the evidence forces consensus, we should encourage a wide diversity of viewpoints, which will prevent us from getting stuck in intellectual traps for too long.

Let us examine some of the implications of these two tenets:

• We agree to argue rationally, and in good faith, from shared evidence, to whatever degree of shared conclusions are warranted. Consider:

  • The collecting, cataloging, and sharing of evidence is vastly more efficient (and egalitarian) than ever before in human history. Quoting Professor Benkler (The Wealth of Networks):

  • We are seeing the emergence of filtering, accreditation, and synthesis mechanisms as part of network behavior. These rely on clustering of communities of interest and association ... but offer tremendous redundancy of paths for expression and accreditation. These practices leave no single point of failure for discourse: no single point where observations can be squelched or attention commanded – by fiat or with the application of money. Because of these emerging systems, the networked information economy is solving the information overload and discourse fragmentation concerns without introducing the distortions of the mass-media model. Peer production ... is providing some of the most important functionalities of the media. These efforts provide a watchdog, a source of salient observations regarding matters of public concern, and a platform for discussing the alternatives open to a polity. [Benkler, The Wealth of Networks 271-72]

  • In the networked information environment, everyone is free to observe, report, question, and debate, not only in principle, but in actual capability.... We are witnessing a fundamental change in how individuals can interact ... and experience their role as citizens. Ideal citizens ... are now participants in a conversation. [Agendas] thus can be rooted in the life and experience of individual participants in a society – in their observations, experiences, and obsessions. The network allows all citizens to change their relationship to the public sphere. They no longer need to be consumers and passive spectators. They can become creators and primary subjects. It is in this sense that the Internet democratizes. [Benkler, The Wealth of Networks 272]

  • The networked public sphere provides an effective nonmarket alternative for intake, filtering, and synthesis outside the market-based mass media. This nonmarket alternative can attenuate the influence over the public sphere that can be achieved through control over, or purchase of control over, the mass media. It offers a substantially broader capture basin to be filtered, synthesized, and made part of polity-wide discourse. The nested structure of clusters of communities of interest, typified by steadily increasing visibility of superstar nodes, allows for both the filtering and salience to climb up the hierarchy of clusters, but offers sufficient redundant paths and interlinking to avoid the creation of a small set of points of control where power can be either directly exercised or bought. [Benkler, The Wealth of Networks 260]

  • While there is enormous diversity on the Internet, there are also mechanisms and practices that generate a common set of themes, concerns, and public knowledge around which a public sphere can emerge. Any given site is likely to be within a very small number of clicks away from a site that is visible from a very large number of other sites, and these form a backbone of common materials, observations, and concerns. ... Users self-organize to filter the universe of information that is generated in the network. This self-organization includes a number of highly salient sites that provide a core of common social and cultural experiences and knowledge that can provide the basis for a common public sphere, rather than a fragmented one. [Benkler, The Wealth of Networks 256].

• Benkler uses the 'backbone' metaphor repeatedly:

  • Sites cluster around communities of interest .... In each of these clusters, the pattern of some high visibility nodes continues, but as the clusters become small enough, many more of the sites are moderately linked to each other in the cluster. Through this pattern, the network seems to be forming into an attention backbone. [WN p. 12]

  • [A]s the clusters get small enough, the obscurity of sites participating in the cluster diminishes, while the visibility of the superstars remains high, forming a filtering and transmission backbone for universal intake and local filtering. [WN p. 248]

  • ... a thematically defined navigational backbone. [WN p. 250]

  • Th[e] body of literature on network science suggests a model for how order has emerged on the Internet, the World Wide Web, and the blogosphere. The networked public sphere allows hundreds of millions of people to publish whatever and whenever they please without disintegrating into an unusable cacophony, as the first-generation critics argued, and it filters and focuses attention without re-creating the highly concentrated model of the mass media that concerned the second-generation critique. .... Individuals and individual organizations cluster around topical, organizational, or other common features. At a sufficiently fine-grained degree of clustering, a substantial proportion of the clustered sites are moderately connected, and each can therefore be a point of intake that will effectively transmit observations or opinions within and among the users of that topical or interest-based cluster. Because even in small clusters the distribution of links still has a long tail, these smaller clusters still include high-visibility nodes. These relatively high-visibility nodes can serve as points of transfer to larger clusters, acting as an attention backbone that transmits information among clusters.... The small-worlds phenomenon means that individual users who travel a small number of different links from similar starting points within a cluster cover large portions of the Web and can find diverse sites. By then linking to them on their own web sites, or giving them to others by e-mail or blog post, sites provide multiple redundant paths open to many users to and from most statements on the Web.... The result is an ordered system of intake, filtering, and synthesis that can in theory emerge in networks generally, and empirically has been shown to have emerged on the Web. [WN p. 253-54]

• Benkler was big on multiple redundancy, it seems (as am I)

• This is what I mean by a new substrate for information processing. How else does this help the rigorously truthful community members to keep their agreement to argue rationally, and in good faith, from shared evidence, to whatever degree of shared conclusions are warranted?

  • physical remoteness promotes calm discourse

  • as does time remoteness, which enables (along with the enabling technologies) rich, hyperlinked multimedia communications
    

• there exists in the world, now, a self-organizing, massively distributed collective that can enforce rationality and expose bad faith

• Back to paraphrising Professor Smolin:

• Each individual is free to develop his or her own conclusions from the evidence. But each individual is also required to put forward arguments for those conclusions for the consideration of the whole community. These arguments must be rational and based on evidence available to all members. The evidence, the means by which the evidence was obtained, and the logic of the arguments used to deduce conclusions from the evidence must be shared and open to examination by all members.

• The ability of individuals to deduce reliable conclusions from the shared evidence is based on the mastery of tools and procedures developed over many years. They are taught because experience has shown that they often lead to reliable results. Every individual trained in such a craft should be deeply aware of the capacity for error and self-delusion. [cf. Taleb, The Black Swan; Fooled by Randomness]

• At the same time, each member of the rigorously truthful community recognizes that the eventual goal is to establish consensus. A consensus may emerge quickly, or it may take some time. The ultimate judges are future members of the community, at a time sufficiently far in the future that they can better evaluate the evidence objectively. While an idea set may temporarily succeed in gathering adherents, no program, claim, or point of view can succeed in the long run unless it produces sufficient evidence to persuade the skeptics.

• Membership in the rigorously truthful community is open to any sentient being, including all human beings. Considerations of status, age, gender, substrate, or any other personal characteristic may not play a role in the consideration of an individual's evidence and arguments, and may not limit a member's access to the means of dissemination of evidence, argument, and information.

• While orthodoxies may become established here and there, the community recognizes that contrary opinions and idea sets are necessary for the community's continued health. The rigorously truthful community by definition is open to the future, leaving room for novelty and surprise. Members understand that the future will bring surprises, in the form of new discoveries and new crises to be overcome. Rather than placing faith in their present knowledge, members invest their hopes and expectations for the future in future generations, by passing along to them the ethical precepts and tools of thinking, individual and collective, that will enable them to overcome and take advantage of circumstances that are beyond the present powers of imagination.

[paraphrasing Smolin, The Trouble with Physics 301-05].

The rigorously truthful community stands in contrast to other communities, in which members come to agreement because they want to be liked or seen as brilliant by others, or because everyone they know thinks the same thing, or because they like to be on the winning team. Conventionally, most people have been tempted to agree with other people for motives such as these.

Members of the rigorously truthful community, at least the human members, are not entirely immune from these motives either. Adherence to the shared ethic is never perfect, so there is always room for improvement in the strategy. The task of formulating the rigorously truthful strategy may therefore never be finished. [Open to the future, I leave the question open.]

[paraphrasing Smolin, The Trouble with Physics 305].

But how much market share can it gain? Can it gain the upper hand and become the winner-take-effectively-all dominant strategy? Ice-9 the playing field?

Benkler stops short of the claim that the Internet inherently liberates:

• [M]y claims on behalf of the networked information economy as a platform for the public sphere are not based on general claims about human nature, the meaning of liberal discourse, context-independent efficiency, or the benevolent nature of the technology we happen to have stumbled across at the end of the twentieth century. They are instead based on, and depend on the continued accuracy of, a description of the economics of fabrication of computers and network connections, and a description of the dynamics of linking in a network of connected nodes. As such, my claim is not that the Internet inherently liberates. I do not claim that commons-based production of information, knowledge, and culture will win out by some irresistible progressive force.

• That is what makes the study of the political economy of information, knowledge, and culture in the networked environment directly relevant to policy. The literature on network topology suggests that, as long as there are widely distributed capabilities to publish, link, and advise others about what to read and link to, networks enable intrinsic processes that allow substantial ordering of the information. The pattern of information flow in such a network is more resistant to the application of control or influence than was the mass-media model.

• But things can change. Google could become so powerful on the desktop, in the e-mail utility, and on the Web, that it will effectively become a supernode that will indeed raise the prospect of the reemergence of a mass-media model. Then the politics of search engines, as Lucas Introna and Helen Nissenbaum called it, become central.

• The zeal to curb peer-to-peer file sharing of movies and music could lead to a substantial redesign of computing equipment and networks, to a degree that would make it harder for end users to exchange information of their own making. Understanding what we will lose if such changes indeed warp the topology of the network, and through it the basic structure of the networked public sphere, is precisely the object of this book as a whole.

[Benkler, WN pp. 260-61]

Bob Wright argues for such a force, an arrow of directionality to biological evolution and human history; a ladder of cultural evolution; a logic of human destiny. [Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.]

• [Y]ou can capture history's basic trajectory by reference to a core pattern: New technologies arise that permit or encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction; then (for intelligible reasons grounded ultimately in human nature) social structures evolve that realize this rich potential – that convert non-zero-sum situations into positive sums. ... [o]n balance, over the long run, non-zero-sum situations produce more positive sums than negative sums, and more mutual benefit than parasitism. As a result, people become embedded in larger and richer webs of interdependence.... In short, both organic and human history involve the playing of ever-more-numerous, ever-larger, and ever-more-elaborate non-zero-sum games. It is the accumulation of these games – game upon game upon game – that constitutes the growth in biological and social complexity....

• I like to refer to this accumulation as an accumulation of non-zero-sumness. Non-zero-sumness is a kind of potential – a potential for overall gain, or for overall loss, depending on how the game is played. ... Non-zero-sumness, I'll argue, is something whose ongoing growth and ongoing fulfillment define the arrow of the history of life, from the primordial soup to the World Wide Web. ... Globalization, it seems to me, has been in the cards not just since the invention of the telegraph or the steamship, or even the written word or the wheel, but since the invention of life. The current age, in which relations among nations grow more non-zero-sum year by year, is the natural outgrowth of several billion years of unfolding non-zero-sum logic.

  [Nonzero pp. 5-7]

• Anyway, the question of whether history's basic arrow will on balance make us freer or less free, will make our lives better or worse, is one I'll defer for now. I do think that in some respects history's basic direction makes human beings morally better, and will continue to do so. But that isn't the immediate point. The immediate point ... is that if we leave morality aside and talk about the objectively observable features of social reality, the direction of history is unmistakable. When you look beneath the roiled surface of human events, beyond the comings and goings of particular regimes, beyond the lives and deaths of the “great men” who have strutted on the stage of history, you see an arrow beginning tens of thousands of years ago and continuing to the present. And, looking ahead, you see where it is pointing.

Kurzweil: The power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating. (Singularity p. 3).

Borges & Bellow

The apparent publicity words receive from the dictionary is a falsehood.

According to?

Borges.

False publicity is it?

Yes. The language-using public is misled by clumsy pedants in every walk of life.

Into “increasing their vocabulary” in elevators.

And the like. That’s not it so much, though, the word-of-the-day in the elevator. And it’s not really false publicity; it’s not the Dictionary’s fault.

That’s where the pedants come in.

And not pedants. That’s not such a nice word.

And not the Dictionary either?

No, the Dictionary. But the grammar book too. Really, it’s the grammar book, the real domain of pedants. Not pedants. I’m trying to say, not the pedants. Not people. Well, people. But it’s the same with the Dictionary.

You’re confusing me. Are you talking to me?

Sorry. Yes.

What did Borges have to say about the Pedants? Who are these Pedants? I don’t understand you.

Well, I want to take back the word Pedants. That’s my bad habit. I start painting with my broad brushes and hurling epithets. I meant myself too, included. I admonish myself, but that doesn’t exactly shine through I realize. You have to listen to what you say out loud, what does it sound like? And I hear myself, but do I stop it? It’s a bad habit.

Yes, I see. So it wasn’t Borges’ pedants then?

No, he was talking about a grave error attributed to the academicians. The proliferation of words, the huge variety of words and the notion that they are all equally useful; that it is good to know a lot of them, more is better. Perpetuated by academicians, he said.

Did he have any particular academicians in mind?

I would think so, but I don’t know. And, see, now we’re talking about academicians. It’s not the academicians.

Then who? The pedants?

No, forget the pedants. We’re not talking about pedants. Not about academicians. We’re talking about the false publicity words get. Not false publicity. False inference: by the riders on the elevator. Not the elevator riders, the dictionary readers; it’s not the dictionary’s fault. But the neat columns of words in uniform fonts, defined, pronounced, histories stated. It doesn’t say, “Oh, by the way, if you ever try to use this word in real life you will be making a mistake.”

They’re not all real words.

You don’t need most of the words. Nobody needs them. They are very seldom called for. Picaroon. Something to do with pirates, pirate ships. Have you ever heard that word? You might name your boat Picaroon. Is this still a word? Yes, it’s a word. In crossword puzzles. Not a living word, not any more. Do you need that word?

Would I use it? No. I don’t need it. Who would use a word like that? Banish that word!

That was on the elevator yesterday. The word of the day, build your vocabulary. It’s always something like that. With example sentences: “Hey, that guy over there is a picaroon.” No, more like, “Them scurvy rogues be picaroons.” Not even that much context. Really, you’d have no chance to pick out the meaning. It’s really always something like, “That guy over there is a real picaroon.”

“Plissé.”

Plissé?

Some kind of puckered fabric texture. “He was transfixed by her stunning skirt of dimpled plissé.” Uth.

But I mean it, the grammar rules are even worse. The kind that tell you don’t split infinitives, don’t start sentences with But. Why not? I mean, if that’s what you want to say.

No reason. Split your buts.

But it’s the words. Among thousands of words, Borges sought the handful that resonated with his soul. He confessed to having written whole books in order to write maybe a single page. To be read by the angels in attendance on Judgment Day. OK, not nine or ten, but what? Some dozens of words? However many, but the ones that are called for by experience, living words.

And which are the living words, Phaedrus?

Sorry?

I mean, I take your point. You decide for yourself which words are called for. Some are and some aren’t. And you just hear it; you have to hear it. Language is music is poetry.

Are you making fun of me?

No, not at all. I take your meaning. Really, I’m trying to be straight. I’m not very mature. Pay no attention to the grin on the face of the man.

I’m very sensitive, and I’m not interested in your straight sarcasm.

Inhibition is underrated.

Or your wisecracks. It’s almost a taboo, that there should be a clear channel. The channel is ritually filled with noise. Not noise. Well, noise. Distractions.

You always have a clear channel to your own soul.

Or your platitudes.

No, really, I’m trying to be straight. I meant that. I’m not making fun.

Do you believe that? The channel to the soul is always open?

No. But it can be. Sometimes it’s open.

It can be. You have the right of way, but do you ever drive your golf cart down that way? Or would you have to clear the weeds with your machete first?

OK, so I’m listening. What about this Borges thing? With the words?

Not Borges. Not so much Borges.

The words?

The words.

Dark the Dawn when Day is Nigh (Hustle your Horse and Don't Say 'Die')

Dark the dawn. Organized excellence is about to have its day. Burgeoning legions of righteously indignant and pragmatically networked knowledge workers are self-organizing, creating and linking up with the best information sources available (which are VASTLY better than sources existing even a few years ago). It is now orders of magnitude easier for the civil society to shine the light of truth on conventional norms, exposing every nanoscopic crag in the yawning chasm between rhetoric and reason. This is a recipe for much conflict in the coming years, between “conventional antiquarians” on one side and wikipedians (for example) on the other.

How? Information flow through the networks is much more ordered than a simple random walk in the cacophony of information flow would suggest, and significantly less centralized than the mass media environment was. [Benkler, Wealth of Networks Ch. 1, @ 12]

Some sites are much more visible and widely read than others.

This is true both when one looks at the Web as a whole, and when one looks at smaller clusters of similar sites or users who tend to cluster.

Most commentators who have looked at this pattern have interpreted it as a reemergence of mass media - the dominance of the few visible sites.

But a full consideration of the various elements of the network topology literature supports a very different interpretation, in which order emerges in the networked environment without re-creating the failures of the mass-media-dominated public sphere.

Sites cluster around communities of interest: Australian fire brigades tend to link to other Australian fire brigades, conservative political blogs (Web logs or online journals) in the United States to other conservative political blogs in the United States, and to a lesser but still significant extent, to liberal political blogs.

In each of these clusters, the pattern of some high visibility nodes continues, but as the clusters become small enough, many more of the sites are moderately linked to each other in the cluster.

Through this pattern, the network seems to be forming into an attention backbone.

"Local" clusters - communities of interest - can provide initial vetting and "peer-review-like" qualities to individual contributions made within an interest cluster.

Observations that are seen as significant within a community of interest make their way to the relatively visible sites in that cluster, from where they become visible to people in larger ("regional") clusters.

This continues until an observation makes its way to the "superstar" sites that hundreds of thousands of people might read and use.

This path is complemented by the practice of relatively easy commenting and posting directly to many of the superstar sites, which creates shortcuts to wide attention.

It is fairly simple to grasp intuitively why these patterns might emerge.

Users tend to treat other people's choices about what to link to and to read as good indicators of what is worthwhile for them.

They are not slavish in this, though; they apply some judgment of their own as to whether certain types of users - say, political junkies of a particular stripe, or fans of a specific television program - are the best predictors of what will be interesting for them.

The result is that attention in the networked environment is more dependent on being interesting to an engaged group of people than it is in the mass-media environment, where moderate interest to large numbers of weakly engaged viewers is preferable.

Because of the redundancy of clusters and links, and because many clusters are based on mutual interest, not on capital investment, it is more difficult to buy attention on the Internet than it is in mass media outlets, and harder still to use money to squelch an opposing view.

These characteristics save the networked environment from the Babel objection without reintroducing excessive power in any single party or small cluster of them, and without causing a resurgence in the role of money as a precondition to the ability to speak publicly. Benkler, Wealth of Networks, Ch. 1.

[The idea that a sufeit of information with no real way of separating the wheat from the chaff forms what Benkler calls the Babel objection. WN, Ch. 5, p. 169:

Individuals must have access to some mechanism that sifts through the universe of information, knowledge, and cultural moves in order to whittle them down to a manageable and usable scope.

The question then becomes whether the networked information economy, given the human need for filtration, actually improves the information environment of individuals relative to the industrial information economy.

There are three elements to the answer: First, as a baseline, it is important to recognize the power that inheres in the editorial function.

The extent to which information overload inhibits autonomy relative to the autonomy of an individual exposed to a well-edited information flow depends on how much the editor who whittles down the information flow thereby gains power over the life of the user of the editorial function, and how he or she uses that power.

Second, there is the question of whether users can select and change their editor freely, or whether the editorial function is bundled with other communicative functions and sold by service providers among which users have little choice.

Finally, there is the understanding that filtration and accreditation are themselves information goods, like any other, and that they too can be produced on a commons-based, nonmarket model, and therefore without incurring the autonomy deficit that a reintroduction of property to solve the Babel objection would impose.]

Let us hope that it is the dark of dawn, at best, from the contemporary-conventional sensibility that sees groupthinking doofuses as firmly in control of all the (traditional) levers of power. [hortatory subjunctive alert] Or is the sun is already visible in the morning sky?

What if incumbent doofuses in all walks of life are in the process of being hauled onto the carpet, Hearthstone-style.

[Hearthstone Fidelity served as a poster-child for regulators seeking to reign in an industry that had developed a ruinous appetite for increasingly unfair and deceptive acts and practices. One hallmark of that episode was the steadfast insistence by the regulatory community on honest-to-goodness honest governance. A seeming shot across the bow by the forces of reason. Query how well remarked this shot.]

Highly visible. The highest visibility. The tone from the top is now: truth be brought to bear. Truthpeople everywhere take heart and bring truth to bear on their local doofuses. Clearing channels, letting the light of truth flood in. Linking up, growing their numbers exponentially along with the effectiveness of their methods.

Doofuspeople peel off slowly, joining the crowd, adopting habits more conducive to being able to get along in this environment. Which, increasingly, involves being truthful, including especially to oneself. The slow-peelers ratchet up their outrageousness in proportion to the effectiveness of the “threat” from this new, intolerant, inflexible, non-negotiable force of nature now invading their bloated livelihoods—up to the limit of what they can maintain, in their particular circumstances. So this can get pretty ugly here and there. Or maybe everywhere.

Will the networked information society ice-9 the field fast enough to thwart destructive doofus-headed earth-scorching recalcitrance? Well, it is possible to see from herenow vast tracts of multiversal real estate in which this condition is true. Which is to say, it seems both possible and highly desirable to steer the system therethen.

Author’s note: therethen, in addition to being an (annoying?) coinage and bookend to the (even more annoying?) herenow of the previous sentence, is a deliberate (and annoyingly pedantic?) tweak of the potential use of thither in its spot (which stands signal to an egregiously pedantic patch of design space indeed, and by dissing it in this fashion, I counterbalance to my own satisfaction the annoyance of the coinages and leave them as dialectic vectors. Thither only gets us there; it doesn’t get us then. In addition to the vector economies, it is salutary to develop a background-independent intuition, which can be greatly aided by suitable vocabulary.When invoking quantum mechanical interpretations of reality (“multiversal real estate”), spacetime words seem more apt than mere space words.

Reference is once again made to this ancient articulation of the practical problems encountered by those who desire to influence the steerage of large ships. Consider: the networked information economy. Is there now in the world a substrate on which strategies based on truth and reason enjoy selective advantages?

Excerpt from Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics

Chapter 16

[279] In 2002, I was asked to write and present a review of the whole field of quantum gravity to a conference being organized in honor of John Wheeler, one of its founders. I decided the best way to review the subject would be to write down a list of all the major results established so far by the various approaches. My hope was to make an objective comparison of how well each approach was doing in the drive toward the goal of a theory of quantum gravity. I wrote a draft of the paper and, naturally, one of the results on my list was the finiteness of superstring theory.

To finish the paper, I of course had to find proper citations to papers where each of the results listed was demonstrated. For most of them, this proved no problem, but I ran into trouble in my search for the right citation for the proof of the finiteness of string theory. Looking at different sources, I found referenced only the original paper by [Stanley] Mandelstam – the one that, I had been told by mathematicians, was incomplete. I found a few other papers on the problem, none of them claiming a final result. I then began asking string theorists I knew, in person and by e-mail, about the status of finiteness and where I could find the paper containing the proof. I asked a dozen or so string theorists, young and old. Almost all who answered told me that the result was true. Most didn't have the citation for the proof, and those who did gave me the paper by Mandelstam. In frustration, I consulted review papers – these are papers written to survey the main results of a field. Of more than fifteen review articles I consulted, most either said or implied that the theory was finite. For citations, I found only earlier review papers or the paper of Mandelstam. I did find one review paper, by a Russian physicist [Andrei Marshakov], explaining that the result was unproved. But it was hard to believe that he was right and all the reviews by better-known people, most of whom I knew and admired, were wrong.

**** [280]

When I described this situation in my review paper, it was greeted with disbelief. I got several e-mails, not all of them polite, claiming that I was mistaken, that the theory was finite, and that Mandelstam had proved it. I had a similar experience talking to string theorists; some of them were shocked to hear that the proof of finiteness had never been completed. But their shock was as nothing compared with that of those physicists and mathematicians I talked to who were not string theorists, and who had believed that string theory was finite because they had been told that it was. For all of us, the impression of string theory as finite had had a great deal to do with our acknowledgment of its importance. None of us could recall ever having heard a string theorist point to it as an unsolved problem.

**** [281]

Carlo Rovelli, of the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseille, is a good friend who works in quantum gravity. He had the same experience when he incorporated the statement that string theory had never been proved finite into a dialogue he wrote dramatizing the debate between the different approaches to quantum gravity. He got so many e-mails asserting that Mandelstam had proved the theory finite that he finally decided to write to Mandelstam himself and ask his view. Mandelstam is retired, but he responded quickly. He explained that what he had proved is that a certain kind of infinite term does not appear anywhere in the theory. But he told us that he had not actually proved that the theory itself was finite, because other kinds of infinite terms might appear. No such term has been seen in any calculation done so far, but neither has anyone proved that one couldn't appear.

****

[W]hen and if the issue of finiteness is settled, we will have to ask how it happened that so many members of a research program were unaware of the status of one of the key results in their field. Should it not be of concern that between 1984 and 2001 many string theorists talked and wrote as if it were a fact that the theory was finite? Why did many string theorists feel comfortable talking to outsiders and insiders alike, using language that implied the theory was fully finite and consistent?

**** [283]

This cavalier attitude toward precise support for key conjectures is counterproductive for several reasons. First, in combination with the tendencies described earlier, it means that almost no one works on these important open problems – making it more likely that they will remain unsolved. It also leads to a corrosion of the ethics and methods of science, because a large community of smart people are willing to believe key conjectures without demanding to see them proved.

**** [284]

Let me summarize, so we can see where this is taking us. The discussion has brought out seven unusual aspects of the string theory community.

1. Tremendous self-confidence, leading to a sense of entitlement and of belonging to an elite community of experts.

2. An unusually monolithic community, with a strong sense of consensus, whether driven by the evidence or not, and an unusual uniformity of views on open questions. These views seem related to the existence of a hierarchical structure in which the ideas of a few leaders dictate the viewpoint, strategy, and direction of the field.

3. In some cases, a sense of identification with the group, akin to identification with a religious faith or political platform.

4. A strong sense of the boundary between the group and other experts.

5. A disregard for and disinterest in the ideas, opinions, and work of experts who are not part of the group, and a preference for talking only with other members of the community.

6. A tendency to interpret evidence optimistically, to believe exaggerated or incorrect statements of results, and to disregard the possibility that the theory might be wrong. This is coupled with a tendency to believe results are true because they are “widely believed,” even if one has not checked (or even seen) the proof oneself.

7. A lack of appreciation for the extent to which a research program ought to involve risk.

Of course, not all string theorists can be described this way, but few observers, inside or outside the string theory community, will disagree that some or all of these attitudes characterize that community.

I want to be clear that I am not criticizing the behavior of specific individuals. Many string theorists are personally open-minded and self-critical, and if asked, they will say that they deplore these characteristics of their community.

I must also be clear that I am as much at fault as my colleagues in string theory. For many years, I believed that the basic conjectures such as finiteness were proved. This is largely why I invested years of work in string theory. More than just my own work was affected, for among the community of people who work on quantum gravity, I was the strongest advocate for taking string theory seriously. Yet I did not take the time to check the literature, so I, too, was willing to let the leaders of the string theory community do my critical thinking for me. And during the years I worked on string theory, I cared very much what the leaders of the community thought of my work. Just like an adolescent, I wanted to be accepted by those who were the most influential in my little circle. If I didn't actually take their advice and devote my life to the theory, it's only because I have a stubborn streak that usually wins out in these situations. For me, this is not an issue of “us” versus “them,” or a struggle between two communities for dominance. These are very personal problems, which I have been contending with internally for as long as I have been a scientist.

So I sympathize strongly with the plight of string theorists, who want both to be good scientists and to have the approval of the powerful people in their field. I understand the difficulty of thinking clearly and independently when acceptance in your community requires belief in a complicated set of ideas that you don't know how to prove yourself. This is a trap it took me years to think my way out of.

All of which bolsters my conviction that we theoretical physicists are in trouble. If you ask many string theorists why scientists working on alternatives to string theory are never invited to string theory conferences, they will agree with you that such people should be invited, they will deplore the current state of affairs, but they will insist that there's nothing they can do about it. If you ask them why string theory groups never hire young people working on alternatives as postdocs or faculty or invite them as visitors, they will agree with you that this would be a good thing to do, and they will lament the fact that it isn't being done. The situation is one in which there are big issues that many agree on but no one feels responsible for.

I strongly believe in my string theory friends. I believe that as individuals, they are almost all more open-minded and self-critical and less dogmatic than they are en masse.

How could a community act in a way so at odds with the goodwill and good sense of its individual members?

It turns out that sociologists have no problem recognizing this phenomenon. It afflicts communities of highly credentialed experts, who by choice or circumstance communicate only among themselves. It has been studied in the context of intelligence agencies and governmental policy-making bodies and major corporations. Because the consequences have sometimes been tragic, there is a literature describing the phenomenon, which is called groupthink.

Yale psychologist Irving Janis, who coined the term in the 1970s, defines groupthink as “a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”

[Smolin, TWS 286 endnote 18 (@ pp. 368-69): Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), p. 9. Of course the phenomenon is much older. John Kenneth Galbraith, the influential economist, called it “conventional wisdom.” He meant by this “opinions that, while not necessarily well founded, are so widely held among the rich and influential that only the rash and foolish will endanger their careers by dissenting from them.” (from a book review in the Financial Times, Aug. 12, 2004).]

According to [Janis's] definition, groupthink occurs only when cohesiveness is high. It requires that members share a strong “we-feeling” of solidarity and a desire to maintain relationships within the group at all costs. When colleagues operate in groupthink mode, they automatically apply the “preserve group harmony” test to every decision they face. [Irving Janis, Crucial Decisions: Leadership in Policymaking and Crisis Management (New York: Free Press, 1989) p. 60.]

Janis was studying failures of decision making by groups of experts, such as the Bay of Pigs. The term has since been applied to many other examples, including the failure of NASA to prevent the Challenger disaster, the failure of the West to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union, the failure of the American automobile companies to foresee the demand for smaller cars, and most recently – and perhaps most calamitously – the Bush administration's rush to war on the basis of a false belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics, ch. 16, pp. 279-86.

The Thompson Memo

U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Deputy Attorney General
The Deputy Attorney General	Washington, D.C. 20530 January 20, 2003

MEMORANDUM
TO:	Heads of Department Components United States Attorneys
FROM:	Larry D. Thompson Deputy Attorney General
SUBJECT:	Principles of Federal Prosecution of Business Organizations

As the Corporate Fraud Task Force has advanced in its mission, we have confronted certain issues in the principles for the federal prosecution of business organizations that require revision in order to enhance our efforts against corporate fraud. While it will be a minority of cases in which a corporation or partnership is itself subjected to criminal charges, prosecutors and investigators in every matter involving business crimes must assess the merits of seeking the conviction of the business entity itself.

Attached to this memorandum are a revised set of principles to guide Department prosecutors as they make the decision whether to seek charges against a business organization. These revisions draw heavily on the combined efforts of the Corporate Fraud Task Force and the Attorney General's Advisory Committee to put the results of more than three years of experience with the principles into practice.

The main focus of the revisions is increased emphasis on and scrutiny of the authenticity of a corporation's cooperation. Too often business organizations, while purporting to cooperate with a Department investigation, in fact take steps to impede the quick and effective exposure of the complete scope of wrongdoing under investigation. The revisions make clear that such conduct should weigh in favor of a corporate prosecution. The revisions also address the efficacy of the corporate governance mechanisms in place within a corporation, to ensure that these measures are truly effective rather than mere paper programs.

Further experience with these principles may lead to additional adjustments. I look forward to hearing comments about their operation in practice. Please forward any comments to Christopher Wray, the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, or to Andrew Hruska, my Senior Counsel.

The 'Rigorously Truthful' Strategy

That code can’t say itself.

moral traditions profess truth

to the extent they succeed, they merge

to the extent they fail, they diverge

Thought experiment:

Conceive of an iterative memetic algorithm running on some suitable substrate. This experiment starts out being substrate-independent. You can run it on silicon-based digital computers, or using human agents in the biosphere, or whatever computing apparatus is available to model the system. (Like your brain, y’know, thought experiment?) OK, just like genetic algorithms, you see various strategies emerge – various persistent patterns.

Would you ever see a strategy that would fit the description “rigorously truthful”? Would it be possible for that strategy to emerge if it was not put into the system by hand? Would it be possible even to program that strategy in order to put it into the system?

Hold on. I know you mean 'meme' in the Dawkins / Blackmore / Aunger [2] sense. So I can conceive of a cultural evolution as an evolutionary algorithm, as an epigenetic dance of memes and genes. But has the reverse-engineering of the human brain produced any serious attempts at a rigorous explanation of the physical instantiation of memes? [3]

I guess what I’m really getting at is, how have you smoothed over the gaps in our understanding of how to model memes? Or, rather, it seems your thought experiment requires one to do so.

Well, there is plenty of promising work being done modeling human consciousness as emerging from networked networks of networked networks of neurons. My thought experiment apparatus isn’t powerful enough to do that level of calculation in the time available. But you seem to have put your finger on the point of the experiment: network dynamics affords a certain intuition not previously available, and I aim to discover whether this intuition is of any use in bootstrapping my way to a higher level of understanding.

A shortcut?

Yes. I need this higher level of understanding right away. It is very important. It may just be possible to “smoothe over the gaps” as you say, chunk up what we know into a model that captures the dynamics enough to perform useful and tractable calculations. On which you can run scenarios and find beautiful symmetries, expose tangled messes and resolve them into beautiful symmetries, that kind of thing.

But won’t you eventually need to demonstrate how you got there from here?

Not necessarily. Consistent explanations of commonly observable phenomena will stand on their own merits without meta-information about how they were conceived. And, in any event, it is always easier to go backwards out of a labyrinth.

You will be perceived as insane.

Hey, don’t label me, man. So, shall I get on with it? Ok, let’s suppose that there is a strategy “rigorously truthful” that persists (yes, this is the bootstrap). It would have the easiest time of all strategies in presenting itself consistently, at every juncture. It would have the least need of passing itself off as some expedient other form; indeed, it would by definition be incapable of doing so. So any circle you draw around any portion of this pattern would be perfectly consistent with any other portion (not identical, but easily mappable – logically consistent). Other strategies would not feature this degree of consistency, and would have to exert energy on subroutines that tie the parts together. Some strategies will expend vast resources to keep the cabal together.

But they all are vulnerable, if the light of truth can be made to shine upon the subroutines, to expose the points of discontinuity.

Right. I want to know if this really can be made to work in the world, or at least in the networked network of networked networks of networked networks of neurons in which I find myself. So far so good. But the question is, have the resources compiled by non-rigorously truthful strategies cornered the contest? Or has the networked information age finally produced a substrate in which the strategy “rigorously truthful” can gain market share? [071105: e.g.?]

---

[1]Originally written on the trusty Treo, on the BART and Bus, Feb. 17, 2006. Ironic circumstances must be disclosed: The Palm 'Memo' applet supposedly has a function enabling the user to send a memo via email, but this was not functional; The Treo saw the tablet via Bluetooth, but couldn’t complete the transaction. The Palm clipboard buffer is small, necessitating 4 copy & paste trips from 'Memo' applet to mail client. (I did not have an SD reader with me, alas.) So, this experience detracted quite a bit from the fantastic putative ability to compose and transmit data streams, as I sat there on the commuter train, inexplicably pecking out this text. But, one perseveres with what one has. On the V-bus, with 20 minutes spread leisurely before me, it turned into a video game – ‘Get the Satellite Data to the Mother Ship.’ 1-2-3-done. Seven minutes. Inelegant, but elegant.

[2] Etc., etc. Just listing a couple of names to tie down the meme meme, until I get my links in.

[3] At least as embodied in the pattern of neural connections and whatever other physical components comprise human consciousness. I’m not getting into the discussion of memes as embodied in non-brain substrates like art, tombstones, music, patterns of photons. This thought experiment does not seem to require resolution of the semantic problem of whether non-brain instantiations of cultural knowledge count as memes or “merely” as interim way stations of a different sort, between brains.

No I didn't

Testing Blogger Beta

Beta this, Geebus!