Digifesto

Category: science

December 7, 2015

Heisenberg on technology as an out-of-control biological process

In Langdon Winner’s Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought, (1977) there is this quote from Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy (1958):

“The enormous success of this combination of natural and technical science led to a strong preponderance of those nations or states or communities in which this kind of activity flourished, and as a natural consequence this activity had to be taken up even by those nations which by tradition would not have been inclined toward natural and technical sciences. The modern means of communication and of traffic finally completed this process of expansion of technical civilization. Undoubtedly the process has fundamentally changed the conditions of life on earth; and whether one approves of it or not, whether one calls it progress or danger, one must realize that it has gone far beyond any control through human forces. One may rather consider it as a biological process on the largest scale whereby structures active in the human organism encroach on larger parts of matter and transform it into a state suited for the increasing human population.”

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December 7, 2015

Mathematics and materiality in Latour and Bourdieu’s sociology of science

Our next reading for I School Classics is Pierre Bourdieu’s Science of Science and Reflexivity (2004). In it, rock star sociologist Bourdieu does a sociology of science, but from a perspective of a sociologist who considers himself a scientist. This is a bit of an upset because so much of sociology of science has been dominated by sociologists who draw more from the humanities traditions and whose work undermines the realism the scientific fact. This realism is something Bourdieu aims to preserve while at the same time providing a realistic sociology of science.

Bourdieu’s treatment of other sociologists of science is for the most part respectful. He appears to have difficulty showing respect for Bruno Latour, who he delicately dismisses as having become significant via his rhetorical tactics while making little in the way of a substantive contribution to our understanding of the scientific process.

By saying facts are artificial in the sense of manufactured, Latour and Woolgar intimate that they are fictious, not objective, not authentic. The success of this argument results from the ‘radicality effect’, as Yves Gingras (2000) has put it, generated by the slippage suggested and encouraged by skillful use of ambiguous concepts. The strategy of moving to the limit is one of the privileged devices in pursuit of this effect … but it can lead to positions that are untenable, unsustainable, because they are simply absurd. From this comes a typical strategy, that of advancing a very radical position (of the type: scientific fact is a construction or — slippage — a fabrication, and therefore an artefact, a fiction) before beating a retreat, in the face of criticism, back to banalities, that is, to the more ordinary face of ambiguous notions like ‘construction’, etc.

In the contemporary blogosphere this critique has resurfaced through Nicholas Shackel under the name “Motte and Bailey Doctrine” [1, 2], after the Motte and Bailey castle.

A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of pleasantly habitable land (the Bailey), which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier, such as a ditch. Being dark and dank, the Motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason for its existence is the desirability of the Bailey, which the combination of the Motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible, and so neither is the Bailey. Rather, one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land.

In the metaphor, the Bailey here is the radical antirealist scientific position wherein facts are fiction, the Motte is the banal recognition that science is a social process. Schackel writes that “Diagnosis of a philosophical doctrine as being a Motte and Bailey Doctrine is invariably fatal.” While this might be true in the world of philosophical scrutiny, this is unfortunately not sociologically correct. Academic traditions die hard, even long after the luminaries who started them have changed their minds.

Latour has repudiated his own radical position in “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matter of Concern” (2004), his “Tarde’s idea of quantification” (2010) offers an insightful look into the potential of quantified sociology when we have rich qualitative data sets that show us the inner connectivity of the societies. Late Latour is bullish about the role of quantification in sociology, though he believes it may require a different use of statistics than has been used traditionally in the natural sciences. Recently developed algorithmic methods for understanding network data prove this point in practice. Late Latour has more or less come around to “Big Data” scientific consensus on the matter.

This doesn’t stop Latour from being used rather differently. Consider boyd and Crawford’s “Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon” (2012), and its use of this very paper of Latour:

‘Numbers, numbers, numbers,’ writes Latour (2010). ‘Sociology has been obsessed by the goal of becoming a quantitative science.’ Sociology has never reached this goal, in Latour’s view, because of where it draws the line between what is and is not quantifiable knowledge in the social domain.

Big Data offers the humanistic disciplines a new way to claim the status of quantitative science and objective method. It makes many more social spaces quantifiable. In reality, working with Big Data is still subjective, and what it quantifies does not necessarily have a closer claim on objective truth – particularly when considering messages from social media sites. But there remains a mistaken belief that qualitative researchers are in the business of interpreting stories and quantitative researchers are in the business of producing facts. In this way, Big Data risks reinscribing established divisions in the long running debates about scientific method and the legitimacy of social science and humanistic inquiry.

While Latour (2010) is arguing for a richly quantified sociology and has moved away from his anti-realist position about scientific results, boyd and Crawford fall back into the same confusing trap set by earlier Latour of denying scientific fact because it is based on interpretation. boyd and Crawford have indeed composed their “provocations” effectively, deploying ambiguous language that can be interpreted as a broad claim that quantitative and humanistic qualitative methods are equivalent in their level of subjectivity, but defended as the banality that there are elements of interpretation in Big Data practice.

Bourdieu’s sociology of science provides a way out of this quagmire by using his concept of the field to illuminate the scientific process. Fields are a way of understanding social structure: they define social positions or roles in terms of their power relations as they create and appropriate different forms of capital (economic, social, etc.) His main insight which he positions above Latour’s is that while a sociological investigation of lab conditions will reveal myriad interpretations, controversies, and farces that may convince the Latourian that the scientists produce fictions, an understanding of the global field of science, with its capital and incentives, will show how it produces realistic, factual results. So Bourdeiu might have answered boyd and Crawford by saying that the differences in legitimacy between quantitative science and qualitative humanism have more to do with the power relations that govern them in their totality than in the local particulars of the social interactions of which they are composed.

In conversation with a colleague who admitted to feeling disciplinary pressure to cite Latour despite his theoretical uselessness to her, I was asked whether Bourdieu has a comparable theory of materiality to Latour’s. This is a great question, since it’s Latour’s materialism that makes him so popular in Science and Technology Studies. The best representation I’ve seen of Bourdieu’s materiality so far is this passage:

“The ‘art’ of the scientist is indeed separated from the ‘art’ of the artist by two major differences: on the one hand, the importance of formalized knowledge which is mastered in the practical state, owing in particular to formalization and formularization, and on the other hand the role of the instruments, which, as Bachelard put it, are formalized knowledge turned into things. In other words, the twenty-year-old mathematician can have twenty centuries of mathematics in his mind because formalization makes it possible to acquire accumulated products of non-automatic inventions, in the form of logical automatisms that have become practical automatisms.

The same is true as regards instruments: to perform a ‘manipulation’, one uses instruments that are themselves scientific conceptions condensed and objectivated in equipment functioning as a system of constraints, and the practical mastery that Polanyi refers to is made possible by an incorporation of the constraints of the instrument so perfect that one is corporeally bound up with it, one responds to its expectations; it is the instrument that leads. One has to have incorporated much theory and many practical routines to be able to fulfil the demands of the cyclotron.”

I want to go so far as to say that in these two paragraphs we have the entire crux of the debate about scientific (and especially data scientific) method and its relationship to qualitative humanism (which Bourdieu would perhaps consider an ‘art’.) For here we see that what distinguishes the sciences is not merely that they quantify their object (Bourdieu does not use the term ‘quantification’ here at all), but rather because it revolves around cumulative mathematical formalism which guides both practice and instrument design. The scientific field aims towards this formalization because that creates knowledge as a capital that can be transferred efficiently to new scientists, enabling new discoveries. In many ways this is a familiar story from economics: labor condenses into capital, which provides new opportunities for labor.

The simple and realistic view that formal, technical knowledge is a kind of capital explains many of the phenomena we see today around data science in industry and education. It also explains the pervasiveness of the humanistic critique of science as merely another kind of humanism: because it is an advertising campaign to devalue technical capital and promote alternative forms of capital associated with the humanities as an alternative. The Bailey of desirable land is intellectual authority in an increasingly technocratic society; the Motte is banal observation of social activity.

This is not to say that the cultural capital of the humanities is not valuable in its own right. However, it does raise questions about the role of habitus in determining taste for the knowledge as art, a topic discussed in depth in Bourdieu’s Distinction. My own view is that while there is a strong temptation towards an intellectual factionalism, especially in light of the unequal distribution of capital (of various kinds) in society, this is ultimately a pernicious trend. I would prefer a united field.

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October 11, 2015

notes towards “Freedom in the Machine”

I have reconceptualized my dissertation because it would be nice to graduate.

In this reconceptualization, much of the writing from this blog can be reused as a kind of philosophical prelude.

I wanted to title this prelude “Freedom and the Machine” so I Googled that phrase. I found three interesting items I had never heard of before:

  • A song: “Freedom and Machine Guns” by Lori McTear
  • A lecture by Ranulph Glanville, titled “Freedom and the Machine”. Dr. Glanville passed away recently after a fascinating career.
  • A book: Software-Agents and Liberal Order: An Inquiry Along the Borderline Between Economics and Computer Science, by Dirk Nicholas Wagner. A dissertation, perhaps.

With the exception of the song, this material feels very remote and European. Nevertheless the objectively correct Google search algorithm has determined that this is the most relevant material on this subject.

I’ve been told I should respond to Frank Pasquale’s Black Box Society, as this nicely captures contemporary discomfort with the role of machines and algorithmic determination in society. I am a bit trapped in literature from the mid-20th century, which mostly expresses the same spirit.

It is strange to think that a counterpoint to these anxieties, a defense of the role of machines in society, is necessary–since most people seem happy to have given the management of their lives over to machines anyway. But then again, no dissertation is necessary. I have to remember that writing such a thing is a formality and that pretensions of making intellectual contributions with such work are precisely that: pretensions. If there is value in the work, it won’t be in the philosophical prelude! (However much fun it may be to write.) Rather, it will be in the empirical work.

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October 9, 2015

Protected: partiality and ethics

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September 10, 2015

de Beauvoir on science as human freedom

I appear to be unable to stop writing blog posts about philosophers who wrote in the 1940’s. I’ve been attempting a kind of survey. After a lot of reading, I have to say that my favorite–the one I think is most correct–is Simone de Beauvoir.

Much like “bourgeois”, “de Beauvoir” is something I find it impossible to remember how to spell. Therefore I am setting myself up for embarrassment by beginning to write about her work, The Ethics of Ambiguity. On the other hand, it’s nice to come full circle. In a notebook I was scribbling in when I first showed up in graduate school I was enthusiastic about using de Beauvoir to explicate what’s interesting about open source software development. Perhaps now is the right time to indulge the impulse.

de Beauvoir is generally not considered to be a philosopher of science. That’s too bad, because she said some of the most brilliant things about science ever said. If you can get past just a little bit of existentialist jargon, there’s a lot there.

Here’s a passage. The Marxists have put this entire book on the Internet, making it easy to read.

To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed. Science, technics, art, and philosophy are indefinite conquests of existence over being; it is by assuming themselves as such that they take on their genuine aspect; it is in the light of this assumption that the word progress finds its veridical meaning. It is not a matter of approaching a fixed limit: absolute Knowledge or the happiness of man or the perfection of beauty; all human effort would then be doomed to failure, for with each step forward the horizon recedes a step; for man it is a matter of pursuing the expansion of his existence and of retrieving this very effort as an absolute.

de Beauvoir’s project in The Ethics of Ambiguity is to take seriously the antimonies of society and the individual, of nature and the subject, which Horkheimer only gets around to stating at the conclusion of contemporary analysis. Rather than cry from wounds of getting skewered by the horns of the antinomy, de Beauvoir turns that ambiguity inherent in the antinomy into a realistic, situated ethics.

If de Beauvoir’s ethics have a telos or purpose, it is to expand human freedom and potential indefinitely. Through a terrific dialectical argument, she reasons out why this project is in a sense the only honest one for somebody in the human condition, despite its transcendence over individual interest.

Science, then, becomes one of several activities which one undertakes to expand this human potential.

Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom.

Science is the process of free inquiry, not the product of a particular discovery. The finest scientific discoveries open up new discoveries.

What about technics?

The attempt is sometimes made to find an objective justification of science in technics; but ordinarily the mathematician is concerned with mathematics and the physicist with physics, and not with their applications. And, furthermore, technics itself is not objectively justified; if it sets up as absolute goals the saving of time and work which it enables us to realize and the comfort and luxury which it enables us to have access to, then it appears useless and absurd, for the time that one gains can not be accumulated in a store house; it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent, and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.

Here we have in just a couple sentences dismissal of instrumentality as the basis for science. Science is not primarily for acceleration; this is absurd.

But actually it is not a question of giving men time and happiness, it is not a question of stopping the movement of life: it is a question of fulfilling it. If technics is attempting to make up for this lack, which is at the very heart of existence, it fails radically; but it escapes all criticism if one admits that, through it, existence, far from wishing to repose in the security of being, thrusts itself ahead of itself in order to thrust itself still farther ahead, that it aims at an indefinite disclosure of being by the transformation of the thing into an instrument and at the opening of ever new possibilities for man.

For de Beauvoir, science (as well as all the other “constructive activities of man” including art, etc.) should be about the disclosure of new possibilities.

Succinct and unarguable.

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September 9, 2015

scientific contexts

Recall:

  • For Helen Nissenbaum (contextual integrity theory):
    • a context is a social domain that is best characterized by its purpose. For example, a hospital’s purpose is to cure the sick and wounded.
    • a context also has certain historically given norms of information flow.
    • a violation of a norm of information flow in a given context is a potentially unethical privacy violation. This is an essentially conservative notion of privacy, which is balanced by the following consideration…
    • Whether or not a norm of information flow should change (given, say, a new technological affordance to do things in a very different way) can be evaluated by how well it serve the context’s purpose.
  • For Fred Dretske (Knowledge and the Flow of Information, 1983):
    • The appropriate definition of information is (roughly) just what it takes to know something. (More specifically: M carries information about X if it reliably transmits what it takes for a suitably equipped but otherwise ignorant observer to learn about X.)
  • Combining Nissenbaum and Dretske, we see that with an epistemic and naturalized understanding of information, contextual norms of information flow are inclusive of epistemic norms.
  • Consider scientific contexts. I want to use ‘science’ in the broadest possible (though archaic) sense of the intellectual and practical activity of study or coming to knowledge of any kind. “Science” from the Latin “scire”–to know. Or “Science” (capitalized) as the translated 19th Century German Wissenschaft.
    • A scientific context is one whose purpose is knowledge.
    • Specific issues of whose knowledge, knowledge about what, and to what end the knowledge is used will vary depending on the context.
    • As information flow is necessary for knowledge, the purpose of science, the norms of information flow within (and without) a scientific context, the integrity of scientific context will be especially sensitive to its norms of information flow.
  • An insight I owe to my colleague Michael Tschantz, in conversation, is that there are several open problems within contextual integrity theory:
    • How does one know what context one is in? Who decides that?
    • What happens at the boundary between contexts, for example when one context is embedded in another?
    • Are there ways for the purpose of a context to change (not just the norms within it)?
  • Proposal: One way of discovering what a science is is to trace its norms of information flow and to identify its purpose. A contrast between the norms and purpose of, for example, data science and ethnography, would be illustrative of both. One approach to this problem could be kind of qualitative research done by Edwin Hutchins on distributed cognition, which accepts a naturalized view of information (necessary for this framing) and then discovers information flows in a context through qualitative observation.
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July 26, 2015

a refinement

If knowledge is situated, and scientific knowledge is the product of rational consensus among diverse constituents, then a social organization that unifies many different social units functionally will have a ‘scientific’ ideology or rationale that is specific to the situation of that organization.

In other words, the political ideology of a group of people will be part of the glue that constitutes the group. Social beliefs will be a component of the collective identity.

A social science may be the elaboration of one such ideology. Many have been. So social scientific beliefs are about capturing the conditions for the social organization which maintains that belief. (c.f. Nietzsche on tablets of values)

There are good reasons to teach these specialized social sciences as a part of vocational training for certain functions. For example, people who work in finance or business can benefit from learning economics.

Only in an academic context does the professional identity of disciplinary affiliation matter. This academic political context creates great division and confusion that merely reflects the disorganization of the academic system.

This disorganization is fruitful precisely because it allows for individuality (cf. Horkheimer). However, it is also inefficient and easy to corrupt. Hmm.

Against this, not all knowledge is situated. Some is universal. It’s universality is due to its pragmatic usefulness in technical design. Since technical design acts on everyone even when their own situated understanding does not include it, this kind of knowledge has universal ground (in violence, sadly, but maybe also in other ways.)

The question is whether there is room anywhere in the technically correct understanding of social organization (something we might see in Beniger) there is room for the articulation of what it supposed to be great and worthy of man (see Horkheimer).

I have thought for a long time that there is probably something like this describable in terms of complexity theory.

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July 26, 2015

structuralism and/or functionalism

Previous entries detailing the arguments of Arendt, Horkheimer, and Beniger show these theorists have what you might call a structural functionalist bent. Society is conceived as a functional whole. There are units of organization within it. For Arendt, this social organization begins in the private household and expands to all of society. Horkheimer laments this as the triumph of mindless economic organization over genuine, valuable individuality.

Structuralism, let alone structural functionalism, is not in fashion in the social sciences. Purely speculatively, one reason for this might be that to the extent that society was organized to perform certain functions, more of those functions have been delegated to information processing infrastructure, as in Beniger’s analysis. That leaves “culture” more a domain of ephemerality and identity conflict, as activity in the sphere of economic production becomes if not private, opaque.

My empirical work on open source communities is suggestive (though certainly not conclusively so) that these communities are organized more for functional efficiency than other kinds of social groups (including academics). I draw this inference from the degree dissortativity of the open source social networks. Disassortativity suggests the interaction of different kinds of people, which is against homophilic patterns of social formation but which seems essential for economic activity where the interact of specialists is what creates value.

Assuming that society its entirety (!!) is very complex and not easily captured by a single grand theory, we can nevertheless distinguish difference kinds of social organization and see how they theorize themselves. We can also map how they interact and what mechanisms mediated between them.

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July 18, 2015

Hannah Arendt on the apoliticality of science

The next book for the Berkeley School of Information’s Classics reading group is Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, 1958. We are reading this as a follow-up to Sennett’s The Craftsman, working backwards through his intellectual lineage. We have the option to read other Arendt. I’m intrigued by her monograph On Violence, because it’s about the relationship between violence and power (which is an important thing to think about) and also because it’s comparatively short (~100 pages). But I’ve begun dipping into The Human Condition today only to find an analysis of the role of science in society. Of course I could not resist writing about it here.

Arendt opens the book with a prologue discussing the cultural significance of the Apollo mission. She muses at shift in human ambition that has lead to its seeking to leave Earth. Having rejected Heavenly God as Father, she sees this as a rejection of Earth as Mother. Poetic stuff–Arendt is a lucid writer, prose radiating wisdom.

Then Arendt begins to discuss The Problems with Science (emphasis mine):

While such possibilities [of space travel, and of artificial extension of human life and capabilities] still may lie in a distant future, the first boomerang effects of science’s great triumphs have made themselves felt in a crisis within the natural sciences themselves. The trouble concerns the fact that the “truths” of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought. The moment these “truths” are spoken of conceptually and coherently, the resulting statements will be “perhaps not as meaningless as a ‘triangular circle,’ but much more so than a ‘winged lion'” (Erwin Schödinger). We do not yet know whether this situation is final. But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we are dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.

We can read into Arendt a Heideggerian concern about man’s enslavement of himself through technology, and equally a distrust mathematical formalism that one can also find in Horkheimer‘s Eclipse of Reason. It’s fair to say that the theme of technological menace haunted the 20th century; this is indeed the premise of Beniger‘s The Control Revolution, whose less loaded account described how the advance of technical control could be seen as nothing less or more than the continuing process of life’s self-organization.

What is striking to me about Arendt’s concerns, especially after having attended SciPy 2015, a conference full of people discussing their software code as a representation of scientific knowledge, is how ignorant Arendt is about how mathematics is used by scientists. (EDIT: The error here is mine. A skimming of the book past the prologue (always a good idea before judging the content of a book or its author…) makes it clear that this comment about mathematical formalism is not a throwaway statement at the beginning of the book to motivate a discussion of political action, but rather something derived from her analysis of political action and the history of science. Ironically, I’ve read her “speech” and interpreted it politically (in the narrow sense of implicating identities of “the scientist”, a term which she does seem to use disparagingly or distancingly elsewhere, when another more charitable reading (one that was more sensitive to how she is “technically” defining her terms (though I expect she would deny this usage)–“speech” being rather specialized for Arendt, not being merely ‘utterances’–wouldn’t be as objectionable. I’m agitated by the bluntness of my first reading, and encouraged to read further.)

On the one hand, Arendt wisely situates mathematics as an expression of know-how, and sees technology as an extension of human capacity not as something autonomous from it. But it’s strange to read her argue essentially that mathematics and technology is not something that can be discussed. This ignores the daily practice of scientists, mathematicians, and their intellectual heirs, software engineers, which involves lots of discussion about about technology. Often these discussions are about the political impact of technical decisions.

As an example, I had the pleasure of attending a meeting of the NumPy community at SciPy. NumPy is one of the core packages for scientific computing in Python which implements computationally efficient array operations. Much of the discussion hinged on whether and to what extent changes to the technical interface would break downstream implementations using the library, angering their user base. This political conflict, among other events, lead to the creation of sempervirens, a tool for collecting data about how people are using the library. This data will hopefully inform decisions about when to change the technical design.

Despite the facts of active discourse about technology in the mathematized language of technology, Arendt maintains that it is the inarticulateness of science that makes it politically dangerous.

However, even apart from these last and yet uncertain consequences, the situation created by the sciences is of great political significance. Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being. If we would follow the advice, so frequently urged upon us, to adjust our cultural attitudes to the present status of scientific achievement, we would in all earnest adopt a way of life in which speech is no longer meaningful. For the sciences today have been forced to adopt a “language” of mathematical symbols which, though it was originally meant only as an abbreviation for spoken statements, now contains statements that in no way can be translated back into speech. The reason why it may be wise to distrust the political judgment of scientists qua scientists is not primarily their lack of “character”–that they did not refuse to develop atomic weapons–or their naivete–that they did not understand that once these weapons were developed they would be the last to be consulted about their use–but precisely the fact that they move in a world where speech has lost its power. And whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.

There is an element of truth to this analysis. But there is also a deep misunderstanding of the scientific process as one that somehow does not involve true speech. Here we find another root of a much more contemporary debate about technology in society reflected in recent concern about the power of ‘algorithms’. (EDIT: Again, after consideration, shallowly accusing Arendt of a “deep misunderstanding” at this stage is hubris. Though there does seem to be a connection between some of the contemporary debate about algorithms to Arendt’s view, it’s wrong to project historically backwards sixty years when The Human Condition is an analysis of the shifting conditions over the preceding two millennia.

Arendt claims early on that the most dramatic change in the human condition that she can anticipate is humanity’s leaving the earth to populate the universe. I want to argue that the creation of the Internet has been transformative of the human condition in a different way.)

I think it would be fair to say that Arendt, beloved a writer though she is, doesn’t know what she’s talking about when she’s talking about mathematical formalism. (EDIT: Again, a blunt conclusion. However, the role of formalism in, say, economics (though much debated) stands as a counterexample to Arendt in other ways.) And perhaps this is the real problem. When, for almost a century, theorists have tried to malign the role of scientific understanding in politics, it has been (incoherently) either on the grounds that it is secretly ideological in ways that have gone unstated, or (as for Arendt) that it is cognitively defective in a way that prevents it from participating in politics proper. (EDIT: This is a misreading of Arendt. It appears that what makes mathematical science apolitical for Arendt is precisely its universality, and hence its inability to be part of discussion about the different situations of political actors. Still, something seems quite wrong about Arendt’s views here. How would she think about Dwork’s “Fairness through awareness“?

The frustration for a politically motivated scientist is this: Political writers will sometimes mistake their own inability to speak or understand mathematical truths for their general intelligibility. On grounds of this alleged intelligibility they dismiss scientists from political discussion. They then find themselves apolitically enslaved by technology they don’t understand, and angry about it. Rather than blame their own ignorance of the subject matter, they blame scientists for being unintelligible. This is despite scientists intelligibility to each other.

An analysis of the politics of science will be incomplete without a clear picture of how scientists and non-scientists relate to each other and communicate. As far as I can tell, such an analysis is almost impossible politically speaking because of the power dynamic of the relation. Professional non-scientific intellects are loathe to credit scientists with an intellectual authority that they feel that they are not able to themselves attain, and scientific practice requires adhering to standards of rigor which give one greater intellectual authority; these standards by their nature require ahistorical analysis, dismissal of folk theorizing, etc. It has become politically impossible to ground an explanation of a social phenomenon on the basis that one population is “smarter” than another, despite this being a ready first approximation and one that is used in practice by the vast majority of people in private. Hence, the continuation of the tradition of treatises putting science in its place.

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July 17, 2015

One Magisterium: a review (part 1)

I have come upon a remarkable book, titled One Magisterium: How Nature Knows Through Us, by Seán Ó Nualláin, President, University of Ireland, California. It is dedicated “To all working at the edges of society in an uncompromising search for truth and justice.” It’s acknowledgement section opens:

Kenyan middle-distance runners were famous for running like “scared rabbits”: going straight to the head of the field and staying there, come what may. Even more than was the case for my other books, I wrote this like a scared rabbit.”

Ó Nualláin is a recognizable face at UC Berkeley though I think it’s fair to say that most of the faculty and PhD students couldn’t tell you who he is. To a mainstream academic, he is one of the nebulous class of people who show up to events. One glorious loophole of university culture is that the riches of intellectual communion are often made available in open seminars held by people so weary of obscurity that they are happy for any warm body that cares enough to attend. This condition combined with the city of Berkeley’s accommodating attitude towards quacks and vagrants adds flavor to the university’s intellectual character.

There is of course no campus for the University of Ireland, California. Ó Nualláin is a truly independent scholar. Unlike many more unfortunate intellectuals, he has made the brilliant decision to not quit his day job, which is as a musician. A Google inquiry into the man indicates he probably got his PhD from Dublin City University and spent a good deal of time around Stanford’s Symbolic Systems department. (EDIT: Sean has corrected me on the details of his accomplished biography in the comments.)

I got on his mailing lists some time ago because of my interest in the Foundations of Mind conference, which he runs in Berkeley. Later, I was impressed by his aggressive volley of questions when Nick Bostrom spoke at Berkeley (I’ve become familiar with Bostrom’s work through MIRI (formerly SingInst). I’ve spoken to him just a couple times, once at a poster session at the Berkeley Institute of Data Science and once at Katy Huff’s scientific technology practice group, The Hacker Within.

I’m providing these details out of what you might call anthropological interest. At the School of Information I’ve somehow caught the bug of Science and Technology Studies by osmosis. Now I work for Charlotte Cabasse on her ethnographic team, despite believing myself to be a computational social scientist. This qualitative work is a wonderful excuse to write about ones experiences.

My perceptions of Ó Nualláin are relevant, then, because they situate the author of One Magisterium as an outsider to the academic mainstream at Berkeley. This outsider status comes through quite heavily in the book, starting from the Acknowledgments section (which recognizes all the service staff at the bars and coffee shops where he wrote the book) and running as a regular theme throughout. Discontent with and rejection from academia-as-usual are articulated in sublimated form as harsh critique of the academic institution. Ó Nualláin is engaged in an “uncompromising search for truth and justice,” and the university as it exists today demands too many compromises.

Magisterium is a Catholic term for a teaching authority. One Magisterium refers to the book’s ambition of pointing to a singular teaching authority, a new one heretofore unrecognized by other teaching authorities such as mainstream universities. Hence the book is an attack on other sources of intellectual authority. An example passage:

The devastating news for any reader venturing a toe into the stormy waters of this book is that its writer’s view is that we may never be able to dignify the moral, epistemological and political miasma of the early twenty-first century with terms like “crisis” for which the appropriate solution is of course a “paradigm shift”. It may simply be a set of hideously interconnected messes; epistemological and administrative in the academy, institutional and moral in the greater society. As a consequence, the landscape of possible “solutions” may seem so unconstrained that the wisdom of Joe the barman may be seen to equal that of any series of tomes, no matter how well-researched.

This book is above all an attempt to unify the plurality of discourses — scientific, religious, moral, aesthetic, and so on — that obtain at the start of the third millenium.

An anthropologist of science might observe that this criticality-of-everything, coupled with the claim to have a unifying theory of everything, is a surefire way to get ignored by the academy. The incentive structure of the academy requires specialization and a political balance of ideas. If somebody were to show up with the right idea, it would discredit a lot of otherwise important people and put others out of a job.

The problem, or one of them (there are many mentioned in the first chapter of One Magisterium, titled “The Trouble with Everything”), is that Ó Nualláin is right. At least as far as I can tell at this point. It is not an easy book to read; it is not structured linearly so much as (I imagine, not knowing what I’m talking about) like complex Irish dancing music, with motifs repeated and encircling themselves like a double helix or perhaps some more complex structure. Threaded together are topics from Quantum Mechanics, an analysis of the anthropic principle, a critique of Dawkins’ atheism and a positioning of the relevance of Vedanta theology to understanding physical reality, and an account of the proper role of the arts in society. I suspect that the book is meant to unfold on ones psychology slowly, resulting in ones adoption of what Ó Nualláin calls bionoetics, the new united worldview that is the alleged solution to everything.

A key principle of bionoetics is the recognition of what Ó Nualláin calls the “noetic” level of description, which is distinct from the “cognitive” third-person stance in that it is compressed in a way that makes it relevant to action in any particular domain of inquiry. Most of what he describes as “noetic” I read as “phenomenological”. I wonder if Ó Nualláin has read Merleau-Ponty–he uses the Husserlian critique of “psychologism” extensively.

I think it’s immaterial whether “noetic” is an appropriate neologism for this blending of the first-personal experience into the magisterium. Indeed, there is something comforting to a hard-headed scientist about Ó Nualláin’s views: contrary to the contemporary anthropological view, this first-personal knowledge has no place in academic science; it’s place is art. Having been in enough seminars at the School of Information where anthropologists lament not being taken seriously as producing knowledge comparable to that of the Scientists, and being one who appreciates the value of Art without needing it to be Science, I find something intuitively appealing about this view. Nevertheless, one wonders if the epistemic foundation of Ó Nualláin’s critique of the academy is grounded in scientific inquiry or his own and others first-personal noetic experiences coupled with observations of who is “successful” in scientific fields.

Just one chapter into One Magisterium, I have to say I’m impressed with it in a very specific way. Some of us learn about the world with a synthetic mind, searching for the truth with as few constraints on ones inquiry as possible. Indeed, that’s how I wound up at as nebulous place as the School of Information at Berkeley. As one conducts the search, one finds oneself increasingly isolated. Some truths may never be spoken, and it’s never appropriate to say all the truths at once. This is especially true in an academic context, where it is paramount for the reputation of the institution that everyone avoid intellectual embarrassment whenever possible. So we make compromises, contenting ourselves with minute and politically palatable expertise.

I am deeply impressed that Ó Nualláin has decided to fuck all and tell it like it is.

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