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.
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.
The Openness Bug
June 11, 2009
I’ll admit it, I have a thing about openness. Whether it be personal or professional I strongly prefer ‘open’ communication. It can be coded if you like, to save blushes where social norms preclude a frank discussion, but if you can’t be honest then there is something in what you are doing or saying that doesn’t sit well somewhere along the line.
I’ve advocated quantifying veracity as a way to pry apart the doors of truth and I am 100% with Tim Berners-Lee when he asks for access to previously closed databases. So it is really heartening to see that, firstly I’m not the only nutter out there, but secondly that even the US administration is taking this topic seriously. Take a look at the US Chief Information Officer’s (Vivek Kundra) Blog and see what you think.
The US has always been miles ahead of the UK in terms of accountability and a big part of that is because the raw data is available. Until relatively recently this didn’t really help that much because all data was compartmentalised in its originating department. Things are changing.
Check out Data.gov. Its not perfect and I don’t have a clue whether it is ALL the available data (the fact that they are asking what other datasets we would like to see suggests that it isn’t), but its a step in the right direction.
We need the UK and the EU to do the same and more.
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
