Steve Jones’ Scientific Smackdown
June 9, 2011
This is a follow up to the post “Brian Cox’s Huw Weldon Lecture”.
It appears that Prof Cox’s increasingly bombastic dismissal of universes beyond his own conception brought attention from Britain’s scientific senior class and a public rebuke (if you know what to look and listen for).
I was listening to Radio Four’s BAFTA award winning Infinite Monkey Cage (Series 4, Part 1). Its an engaging piece of pop-sci co-hosted by the ubiquitous Prof Cox and Robin Ince (a British stand-up comedian). Its usually funny in a nerdy kind of way. But this time the guest, Prof Steve Jones, one of the UK’s scientific grandees shoved Prof Cox’s head down the toilet and flushed repeatedly.
Unlike Cox, Jones recognises the limits to science and science’s role in discovery of knowledge AND truths. His is a mature and humble perspective on humanity’s role in the universe. Based on current scientific knowledge he estimated (or quoted estimates) that ‘we’ understand to a good degree 1/10^120 of the universe. That is the inverse of ten to the power of 120 or 1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of all matter in the universe.
Put in that perspective modern physics, though undoubtedly a powerful AND truthful representation of the known universe, actually knows almost none of the universe and therefore remains in its own terms mainly composed of theories and partial evidence.
We only have to look at our understanding of how DNA operates or how a planet forms to see how close to home the unknown resides and in turn to appreciate our personal contexts. I don’t mean for this to suggest that scientific progress is not the most relevant or most successful mechanism that humanity has to better understand its own context, rather that science has a perspective that is per force both limited and directional (with time). In contrast the human mind has the power to reject time as an argument and work outside the historical context of scientific development. One only has to look at science fiction authors such as Verne, Wells or Clarke to see that value in expressing an imagined future, deeply unscientific though it is. If our minds can do away with a fundamental, universal variable with almost no effort and invent limitless and coherent internal universes, how can that be seen as any less powerful that the collective experience of scientific progress.
Anyway, if you get the chance to listen to this radio show listen for the negative space, the things unsaid and watch for the looks exchanged to find a young, brash, star-spangled scientist getting a lesson from the wise old wizard.
The Virtual Revolution – An Overview
February 21, 2010
Its been an interesting experience seeing the net through another’s eyes, or in the case of this short series of programmes – an number of other peoples eyes.
If you’ve read the other posts in this series you’ll know my views on the specific topics raised, but I thought that I’d just put a little piece together on what I thought of the work as a whole.
It wasn’t bad. It was wrong in places, naive in others, superficial in yet more, but as an accessible work summarising 20 years of the biggest shared technological endeavour of my lifetime it was OK. Seven out of ten.
It was remarkably short of forward looking content, but then it was a historical piece rather than a forecasting piece. It was also short on deeper analysis of what the technological trends say about us as people and as a species, but then we are only really now starting to find ways of looking at that. And on that point I’ll promote the Web Behaviour Test in order to maximise the data that they can gather.
It characterised me as a Web Leopard;
Fast-moving – Web Leopards like you are adept at getting information from the internet very quickly. Your speed is a trait you share with real-world leopards, which are among the fastest land animals.
Solitary – Leopards live alone, fending for themselves in isolated home ranges. Similarly, the Web Leopard likes to go it alone when looking for information, rather than rely on social networks, or other sites where the users create the content.
Specialised – Web Leopards are best suited to performing one task at a time rather than multitasking. The real-world leopard is similarly specialised, being perfectly adapted to silently tracking its prey before pouncing.
So now you know; I’m a fast-moving, predatory loner with a narrow view, big teeth and an attractive pelt. So much for the internet 
The Virtual Revolution – Part Four
February 21, 2010
Part Four – Homo Interneticus sees the good Doctor approaching some of the more interesting questions regarding the internet, though she still doesn’t really do any digging into the whole shared cognition/nature of reality connundrum which is one of my current favorites.
So just to go through some of the points raised;
Has Facebook change the nature of friendship ? It turns out that no, its just re-branded it.
Your friends and social group are still the same number and mostly the same people that they would have been without the software.
Which begs the question; why is it so successful if it offers no new reach to your social circle ?
Prof Robin Dunbar casually dropped the bomb that apart from the 150-ish people that you can claim as your clan/social circle/address book everyone else on your friends list is probably just a voyeur. So has Facebook replaced the soap opera as the acceptable face of curtain twitching ? Find your own surrogate family to watch out of interest, only now its not the Duckworths or the Fowlers. In the UK we’ve seen soap opera viewing figures decline by 50% over the last 10 years or so, it’d be interesting to know how much is direct replacement activity.
Update – No, not soap operas, reality TV shows. Those surplus friends are our own personalised Big Brothers.
We had Sherry Turkle (great name !) talking about the consumption of the private person as a result of the action of ubiquitous sharing of thought and activity, and about feeling obliged to openness in the networked society.
I’m not sure what to think about that comment. I’m not sure if that is simply a misunderstanding of the type of openness that the net engenders or an attempt to big up the profession of the psychologist (of which she is one) as professional listeners, or am I confusing them with psychiatrists ?
For myself I’m only open to the degree that I want to be. I feel no compunction about not answering personal questions if asked on the web. I don’t volunteer my deepest and darkest secrets. I treat this form of mediated interaction as I would a conversation in a pub, and assume that the interested will continue to read and the rest will slope off to the bar and find a more apposite conversation.
Information overload and associative vs linear data storage/retrieval was the next big topic. One that is close to my heart. Here the programme missed a big opportunity in not addressing one of the fastest moving sectors of quantitative neuroscience and its philosophical implications for fields as diverse as democracy & law and the nature of the mind. I’m not going to delve into all that right here right now, that’s for a later date. Suffice it to say that the Obama web campaign is small fry if a mathematical model of mind can be shared.
I’m going to follow up with a bit of reading around Vannevar Bush and Prof David Nichols because I don’t know their work.
In her summary the doctor passed two comments that I’ll paraphrase as;
At its best the internet may be an equivalent to the serendipity of the city – meaning that the melting pot of ideas and beliefs that has produced most of modern world’s innovation in science, technology, art and commerce is there to be had in a free and open web. I agree utterly and completely, its just a shame that in its efforts for global reach it has become fragmented and balkanised, as subsumed by commercial and political interests as any piece of prime real estate.
And second; the the web has the power to liberate humanity. I’m not sure what from though, presumably the commercial and political interests, but it might be more interesting if it were to free us from the constraints of our own inhibitions and provide an opportunity to evolve our thoughts past division and towards unity. The global mind as it was suggested.
The Virtual Revolution – Part Three, finally we’re getting there
February 14, 2010
At last the BBC’c Virtual Revolution Series series is starting to deliver with Part Three – The Price of Free.
I get the feeling that this is ground that the presenter is much more confident on. Away from that pesky technical detail which for some reason she still characterises as West Coast techno-utopian and on to the developing sociology of the world wide web. I’m sorry but you can’t say that the body of the web is independent of its internet bones. But I’ll stop flogging that particular horse as I’ve dealt with in in parts one and two of this four parter.
The first half of the programme is a pretty decent historical analysis of the development of the commercial internet, from the faltering steps of the Dot.com boom/bust (enter Martha Lane Fox of lastminute.com) and Amazon’s winning model, through Google’s idealistic beginnings and on to the global trade in personal information.
The central position of this episode is that we don’t actually know what the current winning commercial model of ‘targeted advertising using mass surveillance of web activity in order to support free at the point of delivery services’ will cost in socialogical terms in the long term. Its a good and relevant question given the relative youth, the relatively-unregulated nature of and global pervasiveness of the web, but one that you can pose about any commercial or even institutional activity.
Lets have a look at that statement; The other big ‘free at the point of delivery’ services that we get are more often supplied by government (in the UK). A few examples being the police, the health service, the armed forces & the legal system. We pay generalised taxes to support those services and the government decides how to apportion that money to those services. We don’t currently pay an Army tax which goes up every time the UK fights a war and down when peace comes (that could really change the political dynamic of war fighting, no ?), nor do we pay an explicit police tax (though much of the UK’s policing is supported by locally raised taxation rather than generalised taxation), we definitely don’t pay an NHS tax.
No, we pay income tax and VAT (purchase tax) that is raised by the government knowing about financial transactions that we as individuals choose to make. We accept that the services provided cost us money, and are willing to forgo some privacy in order that the money may be collected by an authority that is not partial or commercially oriented.
And that is the answer that this program seems to come up with; the bargain that we make with the commercial entity that is today’s web is ‘information for service and we, the service providers, will use the information however we want’. If internet users don’t know that this is the bargain that they are making they should, but at the end of the day targeted advertising is a form of taxation. The big issue with that transaction is that since the entities collecting the information are not governments accountable to electorates, they cannot be relied upon to treat the information with the respect that it deserves. Indeed as commercial organisations they cannot be relied upon to exist from one year to the next, so any regulation of data collection has a built-in trans-generational issue to get over as companies ‘inherit’ on another’s databases.
Its perhaps interesting to note that direct the parallel of this argument, the mass surveillance of web traffic by governments, is one that is massively contentious. It is challenged by legislators and civil society alike and portrayed as the end of responsible government by many and the beginning of it by some.
Next week’s program is going all psyche major and looking at a global shift in the ethics and understanding of privacy could mean. I’m going to set some homework – please read the PEW centre’s report on Teenagers use of social networks.
The Virtual Revolution – Part Two, better
February 7, 2010
The second of the BBC’s Virtual Revolution season was much better than Part One.
This episode directly contradicted the first episode on several occasions, which is a good thing for reasons that I spelt out in my previous post on this subject.
One of my continuing gripes though is this strange meme that the internet is unregulated. Communications traffic is regulated in almost every nation state in the world. The reporter managed to tear herself away from West Coast USA for a few moments, so could easily have asked around to discover this for herself.
Provision of the physical means of communication is regulated in most states and the routing infrastructure is certainly subject to regulatory oversight. Just because you don’t sign a specific ‘internet traffic’ contract with your telecoms service provider doesn’t mean that this traffic is not covered under the contract that you have with them and hence the regulations that they come under.
One of the strangest comments was that ICANN wasn’t subject to national control !? OK, there is no longer a direct chain of command eminanting from the US government, but so long as ICANN is an incorporated entity under US law it is subject to US government oversight. Its only 3 years since they actually let that chain of command slip somewhat, so don’t fool yourself that its gone entirely.
As a former mobile telecoms professional I used to install new national scale mobile phone systems around Europe. Each country had its own stance on control of telecoms; from the former Russian states that only had one provider and which required all handsets and phone lines to be registered to named individuals, to the liberalised markets where only the handset identifier was required to enable pay-as-you-go users to log on. The traffic through both models were equally subject to regulation, only the degree of specificity to a individual’s comms traffic is different.
So again the techno-utopian view was put forward again, that the net subverts and opens, only this time some more realistic downsides were addressed. Don’t misunderstand I like that tech can be used to pry open closed networks, but the thing is that every sub-network has a gateway that can be shut, so to say that what we have now is anything but a learning period for govts is (agreeing with the programme here) premature. That you can get round Iran’s IP filters is no great trick, all that means is that you know more than the Iranians about the technology that is in place. You have to remember that every nation still has access to the big off switch, they can still turn the routers off. So I’ll repeat what I said in my last review – until there is an entirely new infrastructure that is not regulated or government controlled the idea that the WWW is a free space is simply not true. A combination of satellites and dynamic mesh networks would do the job. Anyone fancy clubbing together to buy a constellation of broadband satellites ? I reckon 20 or so would probably do.
I wish that folks who talk about science & tech in the media would sometimes actually try and seek out people really involved with the deep and dirty bits, not just the headline acts and talking heads. Just because you started a fight 10 years ago it doesn’t mean that you are still up to date on the weapons being employed. Just as the net can become Balkanised, the self-reinforcing argument of automatic internet freedom has also become an unrealistic meme.
