Paradigms and popular discourse
February 6, 2010
In my previous post ‘End of Newtonian thinking, please !’ I made that case that the current scientific paradigm exemplified by a statistical view of the physical universe is not being reflected in everyday life. I’m going to explore that a little more deeply here.
Now that I’ve read around the topic a little I find that my view strongly reflects that of Thomas Kuhn, who’s position was that scientific endeavour can be represented by a series of paradigm shifts punctuating a continuum of scientific progress. For Kuhn the long phases of ‘normal’ development provided by a single dominant problem-solving paradigm allow scientists to test how far a particular mode of thought can be stretched before it breaks down, at which point we must assume that either progress slows or that paradigm is overturned by a new ‘revolutionary’ paradigm.
A classic example of this would be the acceptance of Einsteinian relativistic physics over Newtonian mechanics. Where Newtonian mechanics is a perfectly serviceable worldview for a set of problems, it breaks down when you start to apply it to problems that are outside, what I’ll call here, ‘everyday physics’ involved in stopping a car or building a house.
The Einsteinian revolution was quick in scientific terms. It only took a few decades to become the dominant scientific paradigm, but what I was trying to get across in my previous post was that in popular discourse it remains the dominant paradigm, when in actual fact science has moved on into the statistical worldview. We are not seeing the scientific paradigm being reflected in the dominant popular discourse.
I’ll leave science behind for a few moments to explain what I believe is currently happening at a very high level in popular discourse.
There is a trend within elites to strongly uptake the new statistical paradigm, I think that this is shown in the use of probabilistic modeling of financial markets and climate systems, evidence-based policy-making, and moves to democratise data access. These are all strongly rationalist moves based around complex systems that require non-deterministic analysis if the statistical paradigm is to be met.
I believe that there is a counter-point trend that is strongly deterministic in nature, and that adheres to the scientific paradigm of Newton’s mechanical universe. This is a hierarchical worldview that sees rationality in order and rejects complexity as a fundamental position. I see this position in ideology-based politics, rejection of the new mathematics of complex systems (whether that be climate science or quantitative financial analysis) and positions that advocate security over innovation or risk.
So I think we have a problem since the arguments deployed by adherents of either worldview will not cohere with the arguments of the other. They can’t since they are operating on either side of a scientific paradigm shift.
As populations age it is generally thought they tend to conservative positions (order, security, predictability), so I don’t think that it’d be much of a stretch to say that this issue is going to get worse in the short term, but I think that there may be things that we can do about it. You will have to indulge me for a moment while I explain how popular discourse could be shifted up the paradigm ladder in a novel and entertaining way.
To me the key is the TV game show. The most populist pursuit known to man. Sit down on a Saturday night and watch some bright lights and loud noises and lose the cares of a working week. Whatever your views on this kind of entertainment you can’t deny their success. They are on virtually every TV channel in the world.
In the 60s and 70s we saw simple question and answer game shows like Ask the Family and Mastermind. In the 80s and 90s we saw problem solving rise as a genre with The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor and 3-2-1, and now in the 00s we see the Big Brother phenomenon and the ‘talent’ show as dominant genres. It may seem a strange thing to say but I think that this represents a paradigm shift in popular discourse from Newtonian to a relativistic worldview (with a brief spell of meritocracy between the two).
That requires an explanation.
The simple mechanics of the Newtonian game show seems to me obvious; a problem is presented, it is solved or not solved and a reward or penalty is earned. There is a simple cause and effect relationship between the problem and the reward.
We’ll bypass the meritocratic game shows because I think that, while they may represent the turbulent revolutionary period when paradigms are shifting in the wider populist discourse (they coincide with Thatcherism and all the social and economic changes that it entailed), I don’t think that they themselves actually represent the new scientific paradigm. A new social paradigm maybe, but not the scientific paradigm that we are talking about here.
Into the noughties; Big Brother and its clones, and all the multitude of talent shows (the ‘Idols’, Britain’s Got Talent, Popstar, etc, etc). There is no absolute in these shows, no cause and effect. All individual success or failure is relative to the other participants in the shows. The mechanics have moved from Newtonian to relativistic.
The death of Big Brother and (soon to come) the whole reality show genre, and the popular subversion of the talent show genre (as shown by John Sergeant and Jedward) is starting to offer space for the next generation of game shows and I propose that their dominant rhetorical position should be from the statistical worldview. Populist discourse needs to catch up with scientific discourse if we are ever to have society moving in step. There will always be a lag between science in the fore and populist discourse in the rear, but the statistical worldview has been the dominant scientific paradigm for almost 80 years. That is too long a lag, populist discourse needs to catch up.
Politics and Journalism – Journalism and Politics
June 5, 2009
Are we seeing journalism and politics undergoing, what amounts to the same issue – changing models of accountability to their funders ?
Journalism, for the most part, has been funded by the sale of advertising space accompanying the content. As advertisers move their business to the internet, the drop in revenues has brought the newspaper industry to its knees in the US. In other words advertisers are no longer confident that they will benefit from funding journalism.
Is there a parallel in the crisis in UK politics ? The customers (voters) have lost confidence that Parliament will provide the government that they pay for. Putting it in cruelly economic terms – the meta-activity of politics is supported by the real activity of government, just as the meta-activity of journalism is supported by the real activity of advertising. The difference being that there is no current alternative to Parliament, where advertisers can readily jump ship to a ‘better’ ie cheaper solution.
We could argue about cause and effect, since the internet came before the crash in advertising revenues, whereas the crisis of confidence in British politics has gathered pace, arguably, as a result of several exogenous factors. But where journalism is struggling to find a new paradigm, British politicians are still in the throws of a fit of peek at the collapse of their glamour of invulnerability. The endless talk of parliamentary reform over the last few decades has not borne fruit. The scary thing about that is that now that ‘The Crunch’ is upon us, bad ideas hove into view. Parliamentary reform should not be crisis management.
Politics is useful. Journalism is useful. The models of accountability to their respective funders are both changing.
Restructuring Parliament – MPs without portfolio
May 30, 2009
The UK’s political parties are all a-quiver about parliamentary reform so I’m going to suggest MPs without portfolio. We’ve had ministers without portfolio, why not MPs to represent those with little by way of interest in local issues but lots to say on the bigger picture or who have cross-boundary issues.
You’d have a limited number of elected seats that are not geographically tied in order to represent people who live online, those who can’t get to MPs surgeries, those whose problems are not to do with local issues (for example online privacy) and those who generally don’t have much to say on local constituency issues.
If you want reform why not reform along the lines that society is working. My life isn’t limited to a 40 square mile block with 30,000 people. Is yours ?
Update – try as I might I cannot find anyone to suggest this to. No 10 doesn’t have a suggestions box (for obvious reasons), my local MP is a LibDem (so already has an agenda set on this), the parliamentary reform commitee doesn’t even have an e-mail address. How the hell do I actually get the suggestion into the system ? Answers on a post card please.
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
