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).

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.

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[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?

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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.

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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.