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.
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
Scientific Method as Strasberg’s Method
March 3, 2010
We’ve been hearing a great deal about science in the media in the context of climate change and new energy sources lately, and the quality of some scientific work has been called into doubt, and there have been calls for an increased understanding of science to try and stop misrepresentation by the media, blah, blah, blah. This call for dialogue between the fields of arts and sciences is happening on more and more occasions as science gets more difficult and mass media becomes less patient. Anyone still remember CP Snow ? So why don’t we look at things a slightly different way ?
Science is media
That sounds a bit odd, but philosophically science is a mechanism by which we try to understand the physical reality that we inhabit and mass media (especially news journalism) is also a mechanism to help understand the world around us. Their methods are different but their core goals are the same – enhanced understanding of reality.
So lets look at some recent science through a media lens. In fact let’s get PoMo on its ass !
Marshall McLuhan in ‘The Medium is the Massage’ posits that you perform the message that you wish to communicate. It doesn’t matter if that is verbally, ethically, artistically, mathematically or physically, what you do and how you do it IS what you say. On the other side of the coin if your performance does not tie in with your message the audience undergoes cognitive dissonance and the message is garbled, contradictory and ineffective.
Strasberg’s Method Acting technique is a great example of this. The actor does everything in his power to become the character in order that his whole performance reflects the experience of that being, in so doing the words and the physical body perform as one and, hopefully, the role is played well. The actor doesn’t actually become the character, that would be impossible, but he will take on or construct every aspect of that character that he can discover.
So if we take the recent CRU email scandal (yes, scandal), we have a set of scientists who perform their science under the scientific method which involves openness, respect for others results and views, self-criticism, peer-review and data validation. Over the years they have told us ‘trust us, we’re the best, we do good science’, in effect we’re following the scientific method, and now we find out that their performance is not backed up by their method. We thought that we were seeing the real thing, or at least a good approximation of the real thing with the scientists suffering for their art, but we were sold a poor performance. A shallow frontage. Its like finding out that a character that Al Pacino plays never actually liked coffee but Pacino forced a re-write because he couldn’t go without his morning joe.
For the record and as a former scientist I find the actions of the CRU scientists abhorant, but human (I never lived up to my own view of what a scientist is, which is why no longer call myself one, though I still perform the role of scientific critic). For me the affair doesn’t detract from the credibility of climate science as a whole, but its disturbing that their performance was more Lee Majors than Lee Strasberg.
They need to get their method back.
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.
