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.

. . .. ... .. . .

staging ...

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.

. . .. ... .. . .

xtranormal version 2010.03.02

____

cf. Jorge Luis Borges, "A Profession of Literary Faith" (1926), in Selected Non-Fictions 23, 26 (Eliot Weinberger, ed., Viking, 1999).