Its all coming together Part Two
May 13, 2010
So in Part One I tried to persuade you that we are living in the transition between two scientific and technological epochs or to use Kuhn’s terms ‘scientific paradigms’. Epoch One lasted until 1930s when Turing published “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in reply to Godels work on his incompleteness theorem and set in train the start of formal exploration of cybernetics and artificial intelligence and its counter-point; the examination of the human mind using physical and mathematical means.
At that point in time (well, that generation) there was also a crux in mathematics and physics as the mathematics of complexity and quantum physics started to come to the fore. A new paradigm was born either side of WWII and it had nothing to do with steam power or communication networks. It was a change in the fundamental endeavour of science from automating and enhancing things that our bodies do (higher, faster, more accurately, stronger, bigger, further) towards doing things that our minds do (smarter, with more empathy, more responsibly, more beautifully, happier).
In understanding this we can start to understand how the current changes in communication networks, democratic engagement and the changing role of journalism fit together with wider technical and societal changes.
For example, if we accept that the internet represents a vast and near universally accessible library of all fact and opinion (which is questionable right now, but we’re closer now than ever before) then the role of the journalist is equatable to the role of the academic librarian or research assistant. Send them to seek and sooner or later they will find. Sounds like something to automate, yes ? Absolutely ! In fact lets start a company, call it Google and make cash off the back of advertising through it as millions of folk send out their own librarians to find the information that they want. Dead easy. Also at its most basic its a simple piece of maths in the ‘causal’ vein, but Google is a bit smarter and uses users to provide relativistic data in its performance so that the next search is incrementally more probable to meet the next users requirements. Up the ladder of sophistication we go.
What Google can’t do is generate opinion to kick its performance up the ladder. That is a function of mind. That is you telling the librarian “No, that’s not quite the sort of data I want. Bring me books with more blue on the cover”. Google’s vast size allows it to ape mind function, but it still us that dictate page rank in the end.
So there are different approaches towards this automation of mind.
There is the world of computation, where patterns are sought in vast data sets and those patterns linked to probability functions which relate to success or failure. Computation assumes that all answers are available somewhere in the information universe and that calculations are maps to find the answers. Where uncertainty exists a set of the most likely answers can be gathered and presented a la Wolfram Alpha.
There is the Google way of hiding behind stolen opinions and making believe that intelligence exists.
And there is the human way of just having more minds available operating with access to data that has a higher level of sophistication (its called education).
We don’t yet have a functional model of consciousness. We’ve been working on it for 70 years give or take, but we’re not there yet and there are doubts whether we yet have the tools to get there. My own suspicion is that just as the electronic age required a new physics and maths to advance, the age of the mind will too. We need to really understand quantum computing and strange effects like entanglement to get anywhere close to having the brute computing power of the human brain.
So again how does this affect journalism and democracy. Well for all the cost efficiencies of news aggregators, the multiplicity of voices in the ether means that journalism has two very different routes.
The first is as computer engineer designing search algorithms to seek out the juiciest data and re-present it a la carte. Quite frankly that role will not last long as available compute power rises. It is also the least sophisticated solution. Its cause and effect. ‘The data is now there, so lets go and get it’.
The second route is to abandon objectivity as core to definition of journalism. This is the more sophisticated route to take. Actually take the time and make the effort to have a valid opinion. Use the mind to its greatest advantage. Embrace plurality as a mode of expression. BUT you have to educate everyone to make sure that they too may have access to the same raw data and be able to understand it, in order to be able to critically assess your opinion.
So bloggers are a potential future, so are twitterers or whatever comes next, but only if we are smart enough to understand what is being said and why.
That’s all for now. I’m having a break from thinking in order to earn some money.
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
Veracity Values Redux
September 5, 2009
The redoubtable Wikipedia has started the ball rolling on visualising veracity. Its not in the wild yet, but they have started testing.
Reported in Wired, NowPublic, and with tongue in cheek here.
Here is a search result from Wikipedia all about just how complicated it actually is to do this and a discussion on the different approaches that you might make at this kind of thing.
I’m glad that Wikipedia has made a move on this. Looking at the way that they are approaching it the algorithm looks relatively simple, at least nothing like as complex as it could be, but I suppose the issue for a non-profit is external cost more than anything. The reason that I say its relatively simple is because it only looks at internal data to come to its assessment of how much you can trust the information on a page. I don’t like that by the way. Trust is not what you want in data. Verifiability is what you want in data. Everything else is faith.
Reading the Wired article I think that I agree with the researcher from Palo Alto who said that normal readership would probably find it distracting. My idea would see veracity as much more like a security certificate that you could investigate if you wanted, but would otherwise be just an icon somewhere on the browser (or whatever is being used at the time).
So taking it to the next level, where external data sources are checked rather than just counted as this implementation seems to do, and you need to run it under a different business model. Until all data is open access, the scientific publishing hegemony is broken and no bad people exist checking that data is true, or even verifiable, will cost money. Last time I looked a single scientific paper costs about $30. At that price its no wonder a professional class exists to exclude mass access to information. When I do research I might look at 100 papers, properly read 20 or so and need to read more than the abstract of 50 to see if they are relevant. That’s a hell of a commercial barrier to entry. $3000 to properly research a note that no-one may read. That’s the sort of return that most speculators would balk at, hence academia. Or at least old model academia, where research topics were chosen by the researcher just because they want to know more about something.
So the moral to the story is – if you want to really kick off the knowledge economy using the new economics of data proliferation break up the scientific publishing houses, or at least force them to open their vaults a chink.
PhD Place
May 28, 2009
I’ve just heard that I have a place to do my doctorate, to start this September.
My research question is about how information flows between individuals (such as you and I) interacting online (as we are doing now) are translated into actions in face space.
I won’t bore you with the whole text, but I’ll be using the debate around energy, how its ‘won’, distributed and used, to explore how directly what is said here online relates to the actuality.
Around that are issues of subjective and objective truth, leadership, social network formation and evolution and the formation of social norms within those social networks. In a wider context there are applications within future political debates and engagement, cross-boundary politics, establishment of new social norms, assessment of online veracity and even interpretation of citizen journalism.
I’m looking forward to it. I just need to find a few extra quid to make sure that I don’t go hungry doing it 
Veracity Values, Radical Truth and Global Individualism
April 10, 2009
This is not a fully formed idea, but I’m going to put it on ‘paper’ to see how it looks.
There appears to be a pretty good consensus, amongst European intelligentsia at least, that the world is now searching for a new economic and social paradigm. Socialism died in the 1980s. Free-market capitalism is in the intensive care unit and looking like its on its last legs. What else is out there ?
How about we all start telling the truth and allow everyone the freedom to decide themselves ?
Sound like free-markets to you ? Well, its not.
If you legislate the truth, the dynamic of competitive advantage changes dramatically. If everyone knows the way that everything is produced, then you should end up with infinite choice and mass customization right down to raw materials used and energy used to make them.
The idea of tailored markets enabled through technology is not new. There’s plenty of Silicon Valley scions working on just this. What is, I think, new is coupling this with the ability to massively link evidential data in a semantic web-style application to enable the individual to make an informed choice.
I call this concept ‘valuing veracity’.
Take two widgets physically identical in every way. One was made from ‘organically’ mined stuff in Sweden, the other from ‘chemically’ mined stuff in Congo by 12 yr old kids. Both were fabricated in the same Japanese factory and shipped to the consumer, one by plane, the other by boat. So which one do you want to buy ? Do you want the plane-shipped Swedish widget or the child-mined boat shipped Congolese widget ? Or do you want to imagine that you are getting the boat-shipped Swedish widget ?
The truth is that there is no way to tell them apart, so you might as well buy the one that provides you with the best satisfaction at point of sale (economists call this maximising the utility function).
BUT ! If you could tell them apart by looking at an audit trail of what the widgets materials are made of, how much they cost in energy/emissions terms, the working conditions, the local labour conditions, etc, etc. You could have a very different view on what constitutes maximisation of your utility. You might feel bad that your widget was made by 12-yr old kids and choose one that was made by 13-yr olds instead. Next year the 12-yr old’s widget line goes out of business (making all the 12 yr olds redundant) and there is a new 14-yr olds widget line available instead.
The example is fatuous, but it illustrates a point. If you change the information available you are likely to change what constitutes satisfaction. From then on its up to the individual on how they interpret their own minds.
So where do radical truth and veracity values come in ?
Radical Truth first – Jeff Jarvis (blog Buzz Machine) recently told of a workshop he carried out at this year’s Davos meeting. In it he asked groups to come up with concepts for redesigning banking. One team came up with the concept of Radical Truth. Basically making all decision-making open and all business streams fully accountable, all the way to the Main Street customer in order to rebuild confidence in the system.
Tim Berners-Lee recently called for all raw data to be published. Databases on anything you like should be available in raw form, not as press releases or handy journalist-digestible quotes, but as raw statistical data.
Before his talk at TED I was playing with using text-mining as a way to parse large amounts of data to divine trends in resource use and came up with a ‘certificate-based’ authentication system to track resources from production in order to embed their social cost of production. Not an absolute truth, but a measure of veracity or verifiability – a veracity value that would work in a similar way to security certificates, but have a sliding scale of values and links to the evidence trails.
So. Bring the ideas together – audit trails for every bought item, open databases and certificate-based authentication for those data and you get the ability to choose on a level that you never chose before.
You can’t do this in a completely free market because data is considered proprietary and there is no legal or economic compunction to tell the truth.
You need to have a really strong global trade policy to enforce the audit trails and a mechanism to support areas unexpectedly affected by consumer choice (maybe people don’t want New Zealand lamb because of the food miles, maybe they do because of the welfare standards, who knows which will outweigh the other).
I know. Immensely difficult to implement and looks politically unworkable, but I propose it anyway. We have the computer power now, we have the tracking technology (just about) and we are not really at all close to the global governance.
There you go – Veracity Values, Radical Truth and Global Individualism
