Developing the argument about arguments
June 14, 2010
I’ve put forward the proposition that different Kuhnian scientific paradigms have associated with them different modes of argument (Newtonian-causal, Einsteinian-relativistic, Quantum/complex-probabilistic). This shouldn’t be a big surprise and is almost a definition for a paradigm shift in itself.
What I would like to suggest is that in order to perform an argument for or against a specific piece of science the rhetorical tools that you employ must be of at least the same level as the science itself. So you cannot employ causal arguments in a debate about the aerodynamics of Formula One racing cars and hope to win, but you could employ causal arguments of momentum transfer when discussing the science of playing snooker. Likewise the basic chemistry of cooking has no use for relativistic rhetoric, but the evaluation of emotional response only really has meaning in relative terms. You could not hope to argue successfully that a weather system will or will not respond to your building of a new house in simple black and white terms, but you may be successful if you provide a probability factor that you will induce a rain shadow on your new garden by raising the roof-line by a meter.
So if we take this thesis one step further we have a ready made quality of debate-o-meter. All we need to do is look at the paradigmic position of the arguers with respect to the subject matter of the argument to give a gross overview of whether one or other will be able to defend his position. Those who use the correct tools for the subject being more likely to win the argument because the opponent has not understood that in order to argue a scientific position you must first understand where that position fits in the schema of scientific paradigms.
At this point I should just state that we can definitely use a scale of increasing effectiveness (causal-relativistic-probabilistic) because scientific discovery is cumulative and even scientific dead ends like phlogiston taught scientific method by error.
So next time you read or have a real debate about a subject that has science at its heart look at the paradigm that your argument belongs to against the paradigm that the science belongs to.
Thats it. A simple one today.
Fit the argument to the paradigm and you will have more success.
and
Later paradigms are more likely to win than early paradigms.
However this has an potentially vast implication regarding scientific communication, the use of experts, the role of education in democracies, all sorts of things. We may get to those eventually.
As I work towards my PhD I’m trying to develop an understanding of where new journalism fits into our new networked society. I think that its starting to come together, but its a bit deeper than I thought that it would be.
Here is my theoretical framework so far;
There are several parallel themes in society and technology. They cross and interact and, to a certain extent, some workers are getting confused about what they mean and how they will work together in the future.
These themes are specifically; the development of the internet and integration of networked living into more general societal settings, the collapse of business models that support conventional print journalism and so support the 4th estate model of democratic journalism, the rise of the open database/open government model, the rise of empirically or evidence supported policy-making (as opposed to ideologically motivated policy-making), the role of science in policy-making, the media portrayal and public understanding of science, the rise of advanced numerical neuroscience and (finally) the rise of the individual as a politically relevant actor.
Lots there, but we can simplify things.
First if we use the Kuhnian notion of scientific paradigms we can do two things. The first is to separate scientific advance into two core paradigms ‘Automation of Body’ and ‘Automation of Mind’. ‘Automation of Body’ is virtually all scientific and technological endeavour until Alan Turing proposed a computational mechanism that theoretically might be able to replicate the function of the human mind. ‘Automation of Mind’ is the development of mechanisms that enable mind function to be off-loaded or enhanced. At this point we must be careful of the distinction between mind function and brain function, but there is a relatively simple philosophical question that enables us to tell if a specific action falls into ‘Mind’ or ‘Body (which includes brain)’.
Ask yourself ‘Do my memories count for anything in this task’. If the answer is yes, then we are dealing with a mind function, if no then its a brain/body function. Its shorthand, but it seems to work most of the time. The reason why is something to do with how we form opinions and make memories, because we don’t do it in isolation from our prior experience or emotional responses. I may spend some time developing this idea.
So we can separate science into ‘Automation of Body’ and ‘Automation of Mind’. So what ?
Well, it allows us to analyse whether standard computational, mechanical, chemical or physical techniques can be applied to the problem or whether the more advanced mathematics of complexity and probablility, itterative evolutionary design or quantum mechanics need to be invoked.
Here we come to a second, probably more familiar, layer of Kuhnian scientific paradigm. I’m calling these three physical paradigms ‘causal’ (with broad parallels to Newtonian mechanics), ‘relativistic’ (parallels to Einsteinian physics) and ‘probabilistic’ (similar in ethos to Quantum Mechanics). I believe that we can use these three scientific paradigms to analyse the way that people understand their physical and social interactions.
By this I don’t mean that we can use quantum physics to describe how people understand shopping (sorry Sokol, not playing that particular game). What I mean is that we can have different modes of understanding depending on our situation. For example lets take a statement ‘war causes poverty’. It implies a direct causal relationship and I would call this a causal relationship. However we could say that ‘war causes more poverty’. This would be a relatavistic statement and would usually have qualifier “war causes more poverty than …”.
Lets go for a third statement ‘war usually causes more poverty’. This is a probablistic interpretation since it uses the language of probability to express uncertainty.
I don’t think that there is any doubt that the probabalistic statement is more factually accurate than the causal, but if we didn’t know that there are vast profits to be made by some in supplying the materiel for war the statement would not make sense. We could say that it is also a more advanced and nuanced argument showing a higher degree of sophistication.
So again. So what ?
Because so much of what we call news is a representation of our physical and social universes the way that it is reported embodies much of our personal understanding of that universe. That understanding can be in terms of simple causal relationship (e.g. Katrina flooded New Orleans), in terms of value judgments (e.g. World Better Off Without Saddam) or probabilistic interpretation (e.g. Climate Chaos Likely). We’re sort of flirting with linguistics here, but I trying not to.
So that’s the basics;
We have a two-layer understanding of science and technological progress, with the movement towards ‘Automation of Body’ underlying most of our time as mankind and only recently the movement towards ‘Automation of Mind’ has got started though mathematically it started in the 1950s and we have been working on the technology to be able to pursue it since then.
There is currently a great deal of misunderstanding about the dividing line between mind and body, with many workers, in the physical sciences especially, overestimating the reach of the numerical understanding of the universe. We are only now really starting to understand brain function using fMRI and other techniques but as we get closer to that goal we will inevitably get closer to the ‘Automation of Mind’ paradigm and we are starting to see the confusion as our understanding start to cross over between the two. We’re not there yet.
That all appears to have no relevance to new journalism, democracy or political engagement.
Untrue.
If we consider evidence-based policy making as a desirable outcome, facilitated by open discussion and access to all available data then value judgments must, per force, be relegated in importance within government.
With the movement towards open databases, e-government and the like much of what currently constitutes journalistic endeavour can be automated, and if the current objectivity fetish persists journalists will, and indeed should, be programmed out of the loop because they will only introduce their own value judgments. (At this point we can talk about Herman & Chomsky and the impossibility of objective reporting within a corporate media framework, but this false concept of ‘journalistic objectivity’ works just as well within a game theoretic framework, and maybe even within a fairly humdrum psychological interpretation).
So ‘Automation of Body’ must result in the elimination of human journalists as purveyors of opinion ? Well yes & no, but only if journalism insists on objectivity as a core goal and value. This has not always been the case. back in the 1800s, journals used to be recognised as opinion pieces rather than factual accounts. The blogging movement may be an equivalent to a return to the opinion piece. Few commentators would say that bloggers are a fountain of truth. And here we start to see echos of Habermas’ Public Sphere.
End of Part One
Life logging and loosing yourself
May 2, 2010
In response to a couple of recent pieces on identity by Jeff Jarvis and one by Gary Wolfe of Wired on living by numbers.
It should be becoming obvious by now that I’m quite pragmatic about technologies, especially those that purport to replace mind function with mathematics, and these two threads are kind of along the same lines. Interesting, but not quite right. In fact Wolfe’s piece is quite wrong in some ways, but typical of the cyber-utopian and really getting very dull these days. We’ve had the net 20 years and its still a shiny box to be prayed to for some people. Get over it Wolfe and actually think about what you are saying ! Your words are more important than the technology.
Case in point; Wolfe’s piece describes a number of different strands to the general social and technological movement towards quantification and couples them with communication. Fine. No problems with that analysis. Automated diaries, blood sugar monitoring, chips in the soles of our shoes recording physical exercise, etc, etc, all feeding data into a set of databases that may or may not be accessible by other people to react to. A method of capturing all that time that is wasted without noticing it. A way to streamline activity. Be more productive. Really ?
Quote (of those subjecting themselves to self-tracking);
“they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means.”
Apart from the obvious internal contradiction, I wonder whether Wolfe questioned what it is about self-tracking that appeals to the American psyche (as his pieces seems to imply). What it is about systematically removing the spontaneous actions from everyday life that is seen as a positive ? To me its disturbing that a dominant global culture seems so eager to stop thinking and to export the idea that contemplation is no longer a valid goal in itself. Does that imply that Americans believe that understanding of self can only come with unceasing, unidirectional activity. Not only that, but a piece of mathematics is in a better position to tell you what you need than your own mind. Do you trust yourself so little ?
Of course there are good things about the life logging movement. Medical diagnostics is probably the best example, but the good things will tend to be the physical. Try as hard as you can to avoid trying to replicating mind functions. Please ? For me. Just this once.
This is where we cross into the issues around identity that JJ has been looking at. Online identity is something that I’ve dealt with professionally for the best part of a decade and I have to say, technically its no longer an interesting issue. However it is an interesting social and philosophical issue as we spend more and more time immersed in worlds made of other peoples imaginings.
The crucial thing to remember is that we cannot control how other people see us in a world where we can sprout wings and fly off to Brazil in a second. Identity as a projection of self is no longer irreducible if your existence is mediated. So while there is value in being able to prove that you are who you say you are in a transactional sense, there is less and less value in communicating who you are in a personal sense. Question; what is a hate crime in 2nd life ?
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.
Twitterstorms
October 31, 2009
Unashamedly focussed on a single news article this one, but it is very close to my heart and my area of academic interest.
Read this link to a story at The Guardian, think about it then get back to this blog if you want to.
OK. So we understand the concept. A technologically and socially adept set of first adopters have a tool that is globally visible, but exclusionary since not everyone can use it and not everyone can read or write meaning in 140 characters. What the article doesn’t mention is that twitter is also socially exclusionary since not everyone can use their phones at work, not everyone can afford to access it, some people sleep at different times and it is language specific (discourse is in the local language).
Right now, as the article correctly identifies, the twitterati are dominated by younger, liberal-minded, outward looking, technically and media savvy people. There is not a full representation of political and social diversity. You have to pay your way into the scene by learning ‘the language’ and buying the service and, of course, spending time interacting.
I’ve tried it, same as I tried Facebook and MySpace. They all take a great deal of effort to maintain at a level where you gain credibility (or friends or followers or disciples or whatever) outside your existing social circle. Whats different with micro-blogging is the speed and fluidity that the few million users can jump on and off emotive topics and the willingness that they have to transfer those emotions to offline actions.
Don’t have any delusions about the changing of minds happening within the twittersphere. No sane person changes an opinion that is already formed based upon a 140 character message or two. However what it could motivate is action on extant opinion.
Like the guy at the pub who suggests the curry. We all like curry, we’re all hungry after a few pints, we just hadn’t considered a curry tonight, but it sounds like a good idea. Lets do it.
Of course there could be downsides to this rapid response. To stretch the curry analogy; we’d be £20 lighter the next morning (we have spent time, money and effort participating in the twitterstorm) and may have a bad stomach (the results of the twitterstorm may not be what we personally wanted).
So there are risks attached to crowd-sourced actions based upon reactions to events. In that it is similar to democracy, but it is a very skewed democracy where information access is asymmetrical and the demos is selected.
Most times in a democracy the group takes collective responsibility for collective action until such time as it is no longer immediately relevant who suggested that action. If we can find out who initiated an action within a day or an hour of that action, what does that say for the quality and breadth of debate in such a speedy ‘democracy’ ?
I like to think about actions which I know will have consequences for others before I take them. I am analytical and make no apologies for that, but in the blink of an eye a twitterstorm seems to be able to effect superficial change. What does that say to me as someone who prefers to think for a day or two before I act ? Are my opinions irrelevant ? Is analysis dead and the wisdom of the crowd the only way forward ? Do we really believe that only emotion-led opinions are worthy of action ?
Hyperbolae of course. No-one is suggesting that everyone be given a twitterset and asked to opine on every option their elected government has, you’d be completely overloaded. As an individual in such a society you’d have to automate the routine decisions to reflect your already formed opinion, or tacitly approve through abstention.
We’re rapidly approaching the point where that automation is possible, but what about the opinion ? Do we set it through software user preferences ? Do we let a program learn our opinions by watching our real-world actions ? How would we sanction a program that failed to express our true opinion ?
I’ll leave you with this. I already automate my news gathering through an RSS aggregation tool. Its the only way that I can keep on top of the international scale topics that I look at. But that means that it excludes other news without consulting me. Am I forming my opinion ?
