tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34342476669177387872024-02-20T11:04:58.528-08:00The Knowledge Producing EnterpriseUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3434247666917738787.post-72932963288054936812018-05-31T18:03:00.000-07:002019-04-12T19:10:25.375-07:00From Single Neurons to Ultrasociality<h1 class="entry-title">
From Single Neurons to Ultrasociality</h1>
<div class="post-info">
<span class="date published time" title="2017-07-18T12:49:06+00:00">By <span class="author vcard"><span class="fn">Hal Morris </span></span>Originally published July 18, 2017 on Ribbonfarm.com as "</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">From </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #6a6a6a; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; font-weight: bold;">Monkey Neurons</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> to the Meta-Brain."</span></div>
<div class="post-info">
</div>
<div class="post-info">
<span class="author vcard"></span></div>
<div class="post-info">
<span class="author vcard"><span class="fn"></span></span> </div>
<div class="entry-content">
What
can one neuron tell us about brain function? Neuroscientists "jumped out of their chairs" when they stumbled across one neuron in one brain that meant the patient was looking at a picture of Jennifer Aniston - any of several very different pictures of Jennifer Aniston, and showed no response to any other stimuli.<br />
<br />
In 2005, a brain surgeon and researcher named
Itzak Fried was probing part of the brain in patients
with epilepsy to pinpoint the source of their seizures. This is open
brain surgery done while the patient is conscious (the brain doesn’t
have pain receptors). These patients agreed to additional probing in
the interest of science. Fried was showing patients pictures of
famous people, and kept running into neurons that would fire to multiple
representations of the same person. “The first time we
saw a neuron firing to seven different pictures of Jennifer Aniston–and
nothing else–we literally jumped out of our chairs,” recalled R. Quian
Quiroga, who did subsequent work on the phenomenon with Fried.<br />
<br />
Serious study of neurons in the brain have gone on for more than a century, yet any new discovery that can say "This neuron does X" is apt to strongly excite the neuroscience community, and leak out into the world of journalism.<br />
<br />
In a study by Quiroga, Fried and others, severe epilepsy patients
each had 64 tiny probes implanted in different parts of the brain, to study the origin and paths of spreading of the spasms of excitement that make up a seizure. The patients also agreed to view sets
of images while the probes were monitored, in the general interest of science. A number of invariant
responses (the same neuron firing to multiple views of the same
person/thing) were found. “In some patients, <i>Jennifer Aniston neurons </i>
would also fire to her fellow actresses in <i>Friends</i>, … But they would never fire to other similar-looking, but otherwise unconnected, actresses” (<a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091014/full/461866a.html">Nature Magazine</a>). Either way, a connection was made between a <i>concept</i> and
a single neuron. Already, for seven decades, we have had demonstrations that single neuron <i>stimulation</i> can trigger laughter, remembered childhood scenes or hearing snippets
of music, but listening to neurons. But finding an association with a concept, such as that of a
certain person, was quite new, and instantly became and remains a major focus of brain
research.<br />
<span id="more-6018"></span><br />
<h3>
Mirror Neurons</h3>
About 10 year earlier, Italian neuroscientists were studying macaque
monkeys with their brains exposed to probing, trying to map body
movements to particular motor neurons. They found a neuron that fired
whenever the monkey grasped something, just the sort of thing they were looking for. But then the same neuron was seen to fire when one of the lab workers
grasp something, and this turned out to be very replicable.<br />
<br />
So the monkey watches someone grasp something, and has
an inner experience of grasping it himself? And could <i>imagining</i>
a hand movement possibly cause motor neurons to fire as if one were
actually performing it without <i>causing</i> the imagined movement? If dreaming is a kind of imagination, the answer is yes. Studies have shown that during dreams, our brains initiate a lot of starting
sequences for action, that are somehow inhibited, <i>unless</i>, that is, one has a disorder connected with excessive thrashing in bed and even
sleepwalking. <br />
<br />
The other startling thing is for monkeys to be so in
touch, with another being who happens to have hands, as to spontaneously
imagine doing what the other is doing, and in such a neurologically
realistic way. We might call this phenomenon motoric empathy. The finding was replicated in many
variations, and analogues were found in human beings.<br />
<br />
Neurons that fire both when you are doing something, and when the
same action is observed, were dubbed “mirror neurons”. It sounded, and
still sounds, in some accounts, like mirror neurons were a particular
unique <i>kind</i> of neuron whose function is to cause or indicate
empathy, but as with the “Jennifer Aniston neurons”, the "mirror neuron" could just be <i>some</i> neuron in or connected to a brain circuit for producing grasping movements was encountered. The "mirroring" is whatever happens between seing a hand grasping, and some kind of inhibited (in this case) impulse to grasp in the same way.<br />
<br />
Mirror neurons are also used to support the “Simulation Theory” of mindreading in Alvin Goldman’s <a href="http://amzn.to/2u866F3"><i>Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading</i></a>
(2008) . By “mindreading”, or “theory of mind”, philosophers
and cognitive scientists mean our ordinary ability, such as it is, to
intuit what other people are thinking; simple things like if Joe sees a ball put in Box A, and is out of the room when it gets
moved to Box B, you know that Joe probably thinks the ball is in Box A. It was long considered proven that children cannot imagine a false belief in another. High functioning adults with
autism may also lack this quick facility of knowing what another probably thinks or knows.<br />
<br />
One man diagnosed with Aspergers wrote a wise and funny book
called <a href="http://amzn.to/2tdQz3e"><i>The Journal of Best Practices</i></a>.
One “best practice” was “Don’t turn off the radio when my wife is
singing along to it. Simulation Theorists say “figuring it out” is too
clumsy a tool to explain the speed and accuracy of most people’s
“getting” what should be in anothers' mind.<br />
<br />
At the height of the mirror neuron excitement, Goldman and Vittorio
Gallese (One of the original discoverers of mirror neurons) wrote
“Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind-reading” <i>Trends in Cognitive Science</i>,
1998 Dec 1;2(12):493-501. I had the opportunity to ask Goldman “Why
monkeys” and he thought, well that’s just what they happened to be
studying. But 25 years after the first discovery, we have hundreds of
follow-up studies of monkeys and some of humans, and no other branches
of the animal kingdom. Has even more than one species of monkey been
studied extensively? I’m not sure. But recent experiments have shown
mirror neuron activity in marmosets, whose common ancestry with Macaques
goes back 30-40 million years. This suggests a very old adaptation made by an early monkey ancestor<br />
<br />
I’ll go out on a limb and bet that monkeys are something of a special
case, and predict that close studies of monkeys traveling in groups
from tree to tree (see video) will show that if monkey A is following
monkey B, A will generally copy B’s way of grabbing the next branch. We
might also find that the most agile monkeys take the lead in traveling.
Jumping from a branch across several feet and catching hold of another
branch high in a tree is a tricky business. I don’t know anything about
the speed with which macaques or other monkeys roam among trees, but to
move quickly in a group might be highly dependent on this ability. If such an adaptation is rare or unique, it
could be a key to the evolutionary success of monkeys, by which they
leave behind many predators. Chimpanzees are a striking exception. In
most accounts of them hunting for food, they are hunting monkeys. But then Chimpanzees are more or less descended from monkeys<br />
<br />
Are monkeys very good at imitating in general? According to Goldman,
his coauthor Gallese, who studied them in labs, said “No”. This
suggests that monkeys’ motoric empathy might be little used except in
treetop locomotion, so perhaps we should call it <i>limited</i> motoric empathy. On the other hand, a <i>Science Magazine</i> article, “<a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/325/5942/880.full">Capuchin Monkeys Display Affiliation Toward Humans Who Imitate Them</a>”
notes that “wild capuchin groups routinely synchronize their behavior;
for example, for travel, feeding, and predator defense”.<br />
<br />
Where am I going with this?<br />
<br />
This article, based on various scientific and philosophical works and
my own thinking, suggests a path from simple motoric empathy to empathy
in the broadest sense, and beyond that to what Philippe Rochat, cited
in Sarah Perry’s <a href="https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/04/08/the-essence-of-peopling/">The Essence of Peopling</a>, calls <a href="http://amzn.to/2t569OO">“Others in mind”</a> – having, in our minds, a continuous presence of models of others, as illustrated by this image from <a href="https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/04/08/the-essence-of-peopling/">The Essence of Peopling</a>:<br />
<br />
<h3>
<img alt="" class="attachment-266x266 size-266x266 aligncenter" height="266" src="https://206hwf3fj4w52u3br03fi242-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Alice_and_friends_SPerry_essence_of_peopling-300x300.jpg" width="266" /></h3>
<h3>
Action parsing in monkeys and humans</h3>
The skill of “reading” physical actions, not necessarily for
imitating, is called “action parsing” (or action processing), a theme
touched on repeatedly in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Shape-Thought-Adaptations-Evolution-Cognition/dp/0199348316/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1500221737&sr=8-2&keywords=shape+of+thought"><i>The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve (Evolution and Cognition</i>)</a>
by H. Clark Barrett, and is a major topic for both neuroscientists and
AI researchers. If we knew just how action processing works, we could just show a task to a
robot, rather than programming it. This <i>has</i> begun to happen,
but it’s taken a long time, and many iterations of Moore’s Law. Our
closest relatives, chimpanzees seem to have a high level of action
parsing because they are very good at picking up techniques from one
another, including rudimentary tool use, and do so much more quickly and
with fewer trials than monkeys. Domesticated chimps living with humans
have been able to learn sign language to a significant degree, and they
seem to do a lot of communicating through hand gestures in the wild.<br />
<br />
High expressions of how humans use action-parsing might be watching
and performing a choreographed dance, or those comic routines in which
one person pretends to be the mirror image of another. Recognition that
one is being imitated is more widespread than being able to imitate
competently, according to the article noted above: “<a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/325/5942/880.full">Capuchin Monkeys Display Affiliation Toward Humans Who Imitate Them</a>”.
This makes sense as to imitate requires “reading” another’s action
while action parsing might go on passively if there is no motive to
imitate. It might, however, provide quicker anticipation of how another might attack.<br />
<br />
Or consider the degree of action parsing evident in this description of a hunting party from Sarah Perry’s essay <a href="https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/02/11/what-is-ritual/">What Is Ritual?</a><br />
<blockquote>
One day, deep within the forest, Agaso, then about 13
years of age, found himself with rare good shot at a cuscus in a nearby
tree. But he only had inferior arrows. Without the slightest comment or
solicitation, the straightest, sharpest arrow of the group moved so
swiftly and so stealthily straight into his hand, I could not see from
whence it came.<br />
At that same moment, Karako, seeing that the shot would be improved
by pulling on a twig to gently move an obstructing branch, was without a
word already doing so, in perfect synchrony with Agaso’s drawing of the
bow, i.e., just fast enough to fully clear Agaso’s aim by millimeters
at the moment his bow was fully drawn, just slow enough not to spook the
cuscus. Agaso, knowing this would be the case made no effort to lean to
side for an unobstructed shot, or to even slightly shift his stance.
Usumu similarly synchronized into the action stream, without even
watching Agaso draw his bow, began moving up the tree a fraction of a
second before the bowstring twanged.</blockquote>
Quoted from E. Richard Sorenson, <i>Preconquest Consciousness</i><br />
While there must be action parsing, much more seems necessary
for what the article aptly calls “group proprioception”, or the several
boys moving like one body.<br />
<h3>
Infants train selves to be social</h3>
Much of the explanation, I believe, is summarized in 8 pages in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25641998">“The Ultra Social Animal”</a> <i>European Journal of Social Psychology</i> (Apr 2014) by Michael Tomasello, the briefest and most accessible overview of a vast set of research and analysis.<br />
“The Ultra Social Animal” (tUSA) among other things, illustrates and
analyzes some non-obvious aspects of how children engage in cooperative
tasks. If the task produces a reward that can be shared, children
insist on fair division, and sharing only among those involved in the
production; quite unlike chimps who simply grab and what they get
depends mostly on how close they are to the prize, and if some
bystanders are close to the prize and get some, they are no more
resented than are participants. Commitments seem to be phenomenally
real to older children. “When 3-year-olds need to break away from a
joint commitment with a partner, they even ‘take leave’ through some
form of implicit or explicit communication—as a way of acknowledging and
asking to be excused for breaking the commitment” (tUSA, p189) This
suggests that being a “we” in such a joint endeavor might involve a
special mental state<br />
Another aspect noted is that often children operating in different
roles are conscious enough of the others that they can switch roles with
little or no evident lag in competence. Tomasello suggests we have a
“bird’s eye view” of social situations. Could some conscious or
unconscious part of our minds have such a view? Could it have anything
to do with out of body experiences, in which one looks down at oneself
and one’s surroundings? Sarah Perry, in <a href="https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/09/03/cartographic-compression/">Cartographic Compression</a>
cites cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky’s time among speakers of the
Australian aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre language. This language
incorporates what roughly amount to compass points, and a person is
expected to have a sense of one’s orientation to them at all times.
Boroditsky failed miserably at this at first, but then<br />
<blockquote>
After about a week of being there, I was walking along,
and all of a sudden I noticed that in my head there was an extra little
window, like in a video game. And in that console window was a
bird’s-eye view of the landscape that I was walking on, and I was a
little red dot that was traversing that landscape.</blockquote>
Boroditsky shared the cognitive change she experienced with a native
speaker of the language, who commented, “well of course – how else would
you do it?” It is noted casually that a third of human languages have
such a feature. There are approximately 6,000 identified languages, <i>most</i>
of them spoken by small wilderness-dwelling tribes as in Australia,
Papua New Guinea, and the Amazon, so this may be predominantly a feature
of such cultures. Tomasello’s “bird’s eye view” doesn’t of course call
for such a literal phenomenon as an inset screen, but if the latter is
even possible, the former is made more plausible.<br />
According to Tomasello’s research, and summarized in tUSA infants
begin, as early as 9 months old, to initiate their own preparation for
being good collaborators. Well before the 2nd year, infants begin to
seek out “protoconversations”. Perhaps you’ve experienced this with a
stranger’s baby in a supermarket checkout line. The baby smiles
tentatively; you smile back, and the baby smiles broadly. You may
initiate some surprising but not too alarming gesture, which you then
repeat the baby comes to anticipate and it is done over and over to
laughs like a sort of little game.<br />
Somewhat later, infants want to point out interesting sights to
familiar adults, with the clearly desired result of a shared emotive
attitude, of surprise, laughter, or maybe sometimes worry (“Uh Oh”,
being one of the first things children learn to say).<br />
In his book <a href="http://amzn.to/2ttWzEE"><i>Origins of Human Communication</i> (2008)</a>,
Tomasello provides these examples of parents’ diary observations of
infants’ pointing in the context of everyday social interactions.<br />
<ul>
<li>At age 11 months, J points to the closed window when he wants it open.</li>
<li>At age 11.5 months, J points to the door as Dad is making preparations to leave.</li>
<li>At age 11.5 months, after Mom had poured water into J’s glass at the
dinner table; a few minutes later J points to his glass to request that
she pour him some more.</li>
<li>At age 13.5 months, while Mom is looking for a missing refrigerator
magnet, L points to a basket of fruit where it is (hidden under the
fruit).</li>
</ul>
As in the example of the refrigerator magnet, Tomasello’s <i>laboratory</i>
work shows many instances of children at about this age displaying a
seemingly sophisticated understanding of both the fact that someone is
looking for something, and a reason why they don’t know where it is.
Recall that a false belief perception is when you know that someone
else has the wrong picture of what is going on due to a missing fact or
observation.<br />
<br />
Until recently, false belief tests involved setting up a situation where X should have the wrong idea about where something is, and asking "Where will Sally look for (the ball)?". Children fail at these verbal analytical tasks until around the age of four. But from all the experiments I have read on infants and very young children it seems that, like nonverbal animals, they have visual reasoning, but their visual reasoning is very superior to that of animals.<br />
<br />
One way to account for what we observe in these experiments is to suppose that from a very early age, we carry avatars in our minds, simulating simple physical experiences of other, so that a 14 month old, having observed another go outside the room when the ball was moved from Box A to
Box B, can briefly replay a scene from the perspective of the avatar, not being in the room and missing the ball being moved, and as the avatar merges with the person observed, feel surprise at her acting like she has knowledge the avatar shouldn't have.</div>
<div class="entry-content">
If this sounds fantastic, bear in mind the strangeness of the fact we are trying to account for; that of 14 month old children knowing things that they will not be able to work out with linguistic thought until the age of four; in fact, it seems that linguistic thinking hinders and conflicts this early form of thinking, whatever it may be like.</div>
<div class="entry-content">
<h3>
“Others in Mind” when we Dream</h3>
So far, we are looking at very contingent and ephemeral social
situations. A recent analysis of dreaming suggests something about
ongoing relations with people we see repeatedly, and it speaks
explicitly of avatars.<br />
<br />
One of the most common theories about dreaming held by researchers is
that it is necessary for turning the ephemeral memories of a day into
permanent memories. What are permanent memories like? A naive idea might be they
are like stored film clips. The beginning of this paper dealt with a
kind of memory, of who Jennifer Aniston is and what she looks like, like what we call an idea or concept, which is beyond any assembladge of snapshots or film clips.<br />
<br />
Another sort of memory is what that
valley, or the top of that hill, or the first home that you remember is
like. Turning the film clips of the day into <i>idea-like</i> memories,
or assimilating them to existing memories would seem to require a lot
of processing, perhaps with a good bit of parallelism, probably best
done when the brain is “off line”, and the idea that dreams are a
by-product of such a process makes intuitive sense, and might shed light
on the chaotic nature of many dreams.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://open-mind.net/papers/the-avatars-in-the-machine-dreaming-as-a-simulation-of-social-reality">“The Avatars in the Machine: Dreaming as a Simulation of Social Reality”</a>
(2015) by Antii Renvonsuo, Jarno Tuominen, and Katja Valli, introduces a
theory of dreaming, which I think can be related to the idea of "mind reading" as occuring, at least in infants and toddlers' minds, in the form of simulations.
The paper is part of a virtual forum organized by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Metzinger">Thomas Metzinger</a>,
and appeared alongside papers by Daniel Dennett, Ned Block, Paul
Churchland, Vittorio Gallese (mentioned previously), Allan Hobson, and
Jesse Prinz.<br />
<br />
The primary author, <a href="http://www.his.se/en/about-us/Facts-and-figures/staff/Antti_Revonsuo/">Renvonsuo</a>, has studied dreaming and consciousness for two decades.<br />
The paper summarizes a great deal of research by
saying in essence that dreaming provides opportunities for trying out
encounters with people in one’s life, or especially in children's dreams with beings unlike oneself.
Why do we do this? Maybe the practice makes us better at dealing with
real situations, and while we don’t remember much of our dreams, they
may be shaping our ability to imagine possibilities in response to a
real situation, or to respond swiftly even without consciously imagining them.<br />
<br />
A social reality simulator would be quite an impressive thing to have
evolved. It is doubtful that animals we evolved from had such a strong
need of social simulation, yet unlikely that the short period of human
evolution created such a thing out of whole cloth.<br />
<br />
Would animal’s dreams have been simulating something simpler? If
animal brains could have a simulation engine, what kind of simulation engine, and how best could it serve the needs of survival? While some animals, like snakes, seem to trigger an innate fear in various species, successful species get scattered far and wide, encountering physical environments and a variety of other animals beyond what instinct can prepare them for. Predators could benefit from an ability to form concepts (or complexes of associations) of various species, like
where to find them, how to run them down, and what they do to defend
themselves. Prey animals have a corresponding need to know about
predators, how to get out of their reach; how to fool them, etc. All of this must be gained quickly from a few encounters, and it would be ideal if a few encounters could stimulate a broad repertoire of how to act when encountering them in the varieties of terrain typical of their environment, and indeed in various nooks and corners of their range.<br />
<br />
No animal, unless it dwells in a featureless desert, or has a tiny
range, like cave fish, can inherit full knowledge of its environment.
Animals, especially w.r.t. species that prey on them, need to gain as
much competence as possible from as few “close calls” as possible. This reminds me of the requirements of a flight simulator. What if they had a simulator in which to play “war
games” with antagonistic species? If dreams can bring to mind threat or
prey species, with characteristics we know by observation, and
superimpose avatars of these on familiar and realistic landscapes, new
response sequences can be imagined and stored away. A squirrel is
surprised by a fox and he escapes by popping into a hole. Suppose it has dreamed of encountering the fox near this very hole, which has conditioned its nerves and muscles to make the best response.<br />
<br />
Two suggestive bodies of
evidence have developed lately. Studies of mice and rats have shown that if the shape of their
environment is changed, the nature of their dreaming becomes more
intense for some period, and brain areas concerned with navigation are
particularly active. Now if only the experimenters had thrown in some
novel simulated predators, or new ways of acquiring food.<br />
<br />
For the second bit, returning to Renvonsuo’s paper, one finding is
that children are much more prone to dream of animals than adults, <i>except</i>
if the adults have something like a hunter-gatherer existence, the
proportion of dreams of animals remains high. This would be consistent with a recent adaptation of the role of dreaming from mostly elaborating and perfecting ones inter-species responses to very largely perfecting ones social interactions with other humans.<br />
<br />
In recurring dreams, we often face the same people, or for children,
the same monsters repeatedly. If these represent avatars, then might an
avatar of, say your mother, brother, boss, or spouse be a sort of
permanent fixture, that hangs around from night to night, helping you
refine attitudes and responses to these people?<br />
<br />
Might it turn up in the daytime? Have you ever had an imagined
argument, often a rehash of a bad, mad conversation, that just keeps
playing and you can’t stop it. You try to improve on a dumb response,
and they come back with something else, and then you say whatever and
then they say whatever, all pretty much in character (or our
flawed version of the other’s character). I know I have. Anyone else?
People on the autism spectrum, Yes or No?<br />
<br />
Dan Sperber is a cognitive scientist who thinks and writes more like a philosopher. In 1986 he wrote, with Deirdre Wilson, <i>Relevance: Communication and Cognition</i>.
In effect, it says when we communicate with a person (one whom we
know), we don’t simply “send a signal”. We know as we bring the
listener to mind what is relevant to them and what is not. We may know
that in the context, a single word, or glance in a certain direction
may be all it takes; and we act accordingly, usually without any
consciousness of doing so.<br />
<br />
When we communicate with someone, do our communications go by way of the avatar, whose mind we can read because it is inside of our mind, which is a simplified model of the person we're speaking to? And is this avatar the same, or at least
continuous with, what we get when we happen to dream of that person?<br />
<h3>
Peer to Peer: Implications and Further Directions</h3>
The way humans seem designed to interact, and create action and
knowledge seems to me very much like a sort of peer-to-peer protocol —
for combinations of people in roughly equal relationship; <i>not</i> a protocol for one to control many. As Venkatesh Rao wrote in <a href="http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa593&id=0f299f9100">Your Passport to the Meta-brain (<i>Breaking Smart Newsletter</i>)</a>,
“In the non-exclusive mutual containment metaphor, however, each of us
exists as both a living conscious being, and as an evolving digital
ghost presence that others can include in their second brains.” We seem
designed for free agent collaboration. Our sociality and our
individuality are equally necessary. Infants take <i>their own</i> initiative in learning the social skill of language and in teaching themselves to be social.<br />
<br />
We are by nature curious and driven autodidacts, but this produces a
restless energy that educators have hardly ever known how to channel. I
would argue, given more space, that the Khan Academy’s methodology is
far more suited to model of humanity I have been developing here.<br />
<br />
Most evidence indicates the hunter-gatherer societies in which our
nature took shape lacked extreme dominance. A settlement typically had
something anthropologists call a “headman”, but he generally needed a
lot of persuasion and sometimes yielding to the prevailing sentiment, rather than issuing diktats.<br />
<br />
The potential for the “alpha male”
typical of chimpanzee society didn’t disappear from our natures, but
reemerged with a vengeance on the heels of the <i>ultimate disruptive technology</i>:
agriculture. Early agrarian empires, at least in Mesopotamia, South
and central America, and China, all seemed to pass through a
horrendously cruel phase. James C Scott’s recent work: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Against-Grain-History-Earliest-States/dp/0300182910/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1500227732&sr=8-1&keywords=james+c+scott+against+the+grain">Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States</a> partly <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ukte-je8k">dealing with barbarian cultures having long parasitic, and fairly happy (for the barbarians) relations with such civilizations</a>
might provide some insight. Early agrarian societies were tied to a place,
rapidly growing in population, too big for headman/consensus governance,
and piling up surplus that made them the inevitable target of less
sedentary tribes. The experience of war with its necessity for acting
en masse, preferably with the unpredictability that a single dominant
secretive mind may have led to the predominance of such relations, continuing more or less until
the time of emergent democracies.<br />
<br />
Ever since the acceleration of technology reached a certain point, the
superior creativity of more peer-to-peer-ish societies tended to
prevail, but in recent decades, a great many non peer-to-peer societies
have literate elites capable of gathering technological power that they
could not have created, and these elites often become parasitic.<br />
<br />
While much writing on the “singularity” is foolish, we do seem headed
towards a very big, strange, and accelerating unknown. We are
experiencing something like the Gutenberg revolution which helped
unleash two centuries of religious wars, but we are experiencing it in
more like two decades. In a torrent of disruptive changes, including
those that might put the ultimate destructive weapons in the hands of
the least wise and balanced, it seems very unwarranted to think we know how it will
turn out, and the fact that so many have a definite prediction may reflect one of the native imperfections of the human mind. Just to give
one example, genetic engineering could reach a state where any
unbalanced but highly intelligent fool could design an “ultimate” virus,
capable with the right dispersal methods of wiping out a population in
days. The same technology should in theory provide the means of quickly
analyzing and stopping such a virus, but it won’t matter if we have a
failure of imagination and are oblivious to such possibilities (and if I
thought I could think of <i>all</i> such risks I’d again be foolish).<br />
<br />
Many threats are analogous to the virus example; we have races
between dangers and remedies, both accelerated by Moore’s Law and
a knowledge explosion. If we are to reach a happy rather than nightmarish
version of <a href="http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa593&id=0f299f9100">living in the meta-brain (Venkat, <i>Breaking Smart Newsletter</i>)</a>, or whatever the future looks like, this model, if correct might be <i>one</i> necessary addition to our toolkit.<br />
<br />
Evolutionary biology is slowly becoming relevant to human social
problems. If evolutionary psychology seems stuck at “Just So Stories”, I believe, in time, it will become unstuck. Within a decade, we could make real progress in understanding
how the genome produces the developmental process out of which humans
are formed, and such an intimate knowledge of the genome, and a
refactored way of seeing it should reveal more about our mental and
social development, and what parts are built on what other parts (Sean
B. Carroll in <a href="http://amzn.to/2uawaAc"><i>The Making of the Fittest</i></a>
gives interesting examples of this) and allow us to define more
operationalized versions of human social and other qualities. We are
somewhat at the stage where we call anything that swims in the sea a
fish, whereas deeper knowledge tells us there are fish and cetaceans,
totally different from one another.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3434247666917738787.post-91089928478126954832018-03-13T09:37:00.001-07:002020-05-31T10:51:03.226-07:00The Knowledge Producing Enterprise: New Official IntroThe phrase "knowledge explosion" usually refers to "what is known" in some abstract sense, as if there was an official (<b>W</b>orld) <b>S</b>torehouse <b>o</b>f <b>K</b>nowledge (<b>WSoK</b>). The question of whether I know, or you know, or how many people know a thing hardly registers.
<br />
<br />
Many attempts to explain the "knowledge revolution" involve exponentially rising graphs, perhaps of academic journal pages, or or everything published to date, or in recent days, the total number of words on all the pages on the web, glossing over the fact that much content on the web isn't static, but potentially unlimited combinations of content from a back-end database. But surely not everything that is published, or written on a web page, is "knowledge". To my mind only a tiny fraction could possibly deserve to be called knowledge. <br />
<br />
Partly to answer such questions, there is a philosophical discipline called epistemology, or "The study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief."
Another question an epistemologiest might ask is "If one person in some discipline has arrived at some correct conclusions, such that a decade from now everybody will know he was right, while the other hundred people in their discipline think the opposite can we say 'it is known', or it belongs in the <b>WSoK</b>?"<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
If I had to venture an opinion on the question, it would be "No". Perhaps we should say that the fact has entered the <b>WSoK</b> or simply "it is now known" when some critical mass of "the" pertinent discipline has been persuaded. But is "the" pertinent discipline a valid concept? <i>Consider the history of plate tectonics becoming "accepted science",</i> as described in last section of <a href="https://tkpeorg.blogspot.com/2018/03/science-in-nutshell-from-projectiles-to.html">"Science in a nutshell"</a>.<br />
<br />
A really large fact, such as <i>the movement and rearrangement of continents over time</i>, may have implications for several different disciplines. It may be accepted and well demonstrated in one discipline, while in another, current theory contradicts it, then we must accept people in that discipline saying <i>we don't agree or at least this is not been demonstrated to our satisfaction there seems to be a contradiction when we look at the facts of our domain</i>. Then again, some may disregard it if the dissenting discipline is much less of a "hard science" than the one in which "it is known".<br />
<br />
We might tend to call continental drift, or plate tectonics, "settled science" when the last of the disciplines with a stake in it was able to say we "<i>we find strong evidence for this within OUR discipline.</i>"<br />
<br />
Here is an "important, if true" observation. Within the hardest and least ambiguous scientific disciplines, facts have a sort of a <i>global self-propelling quality</i>, such that their becoming part of the <b>WSoG</b> is a self-organizing (social) process; they are like a kind of life form; "memes", but in the most positive sense. I'm talking about non-local facts about SPECIFIED arrangements of matter, OR facts about one particular object (such as the planet Jupiter) observable by anyone (not, e.g., "my soul" or my feelings about X, or a spirit that only comes when asked in the "right way". <br />
<br />
Human events, and facts about societies may be just as real, but certainly lack a <i>global self-propelling quality</i>. They have an unfortunate tendency to be propagated by those whose purposes they serve, and denied by those whom they don't serve.<br />
<br />
I assert (though I doubt I'll get universal agreement) that <i>history</i> has one thing in common with hard sciences. A sufficiently literal/objective claim about an event either is or isn't true (unlike in the case of political principles). It's philosophically conceivable that we really live in some kind of dream logic or Hollywood script logic in which something that happened can unhappen but according to my axiom, and this is a sort of faith, we DON'T live in that sort of universe, but in a universe where a sufficiently literal occurrence either happened or it didn't, and nothing can change that fact. BUT here's the rub. We believe this despite the fact the vast majority of "things that happened" appear to be unknowable, because nobody observed them, or maybe one or more person did, but their witness can be doubted.<br />
<br />
Actually, we have to admit even this is false at the level of quantum mechanics but for all practical purposes, true at a macro-level. Maybe someday, some amazing use of quantum mechanics will produce a TRUE ambiguous fact at the macro level; a real life Schroedinger's cat, but that does not seem worth dwelling on for now, and we are stuck with, say, the person who either <i>was or wasn't</i> taken up by extraterrestrials on a certain date, and examined and then returned to Earth. I, at least, claim that we have to say this either happened or it didn't.<br />
<br />
Returning from history and the world of transient happenings, a really USEFUL hard, non-local physical fact, can not only stand on its own, seemingly causing "knowers" to accumulate just by virtue of being true, written down in the right sort of place, and useful. Such a fact ATTRACTS knowers; i.e. it can <i>"go viral"</i>, and its truth, importance and usefulness, in the right sort of society, will tend to generate widespread agreement via a self-organizing process.<br />
<br />
Now, transient "facts" are about as unlike this as they could possibly be. They will not go viral on their own, or if they do, there is likely to be something dishonest about the process; such viral "facts" are often not facts, but disinformation.<br />
<br />
Even if true, and of vital importance, such facts <i>really</i> need a lot of help to actually be known to any useful extent. They need reporters at the very least; actually, they need advocates; some structure of people committed (if only for the money) to making some things known, which means that someone (or more than one) must judge them IMPORTANT. Can we distinguish honestly motivated reporter/advocates from propagandists? For this we need honest brokers. In fact, we need a very powerful structure of brokers and an inquiry into what would make such brokers, and/or some process of capturing and recording events that really happened.<br />
<br />
Humanity is moving along on a path whose endpoint seems to be indistinguishability of real and fake news. To prevent this, I suggest we will need institution(s) into which we pour a huge amount of energy, making them work, and ensuring that we can trust them.<br />
<br />
To that end, we need to understand the process by which one or more people's observation is reliably turned into knowledge. We need this more urgently than we need a more perfect definition of what exactly <i>is</i> knowledge, and what <i>isn't quite</i> knowledge, an inquiry that shows little signs of progress IMO.<br />
<br />
* Philosophers of Knowledge, whose main concern has been to define knowledge, or ask how do we know what we know.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3434247666917738787.post-51865516342508665232018-03-12T11:26:00.000-07:002018-03-13T11:29:23.339-07:00Science in a Nutshell: From Projectiles to Invisible Elephants to Plate Tectonics<h1 class="entry-title">
Science in a Nutshell: From Projectiles to Invisible Elephants to Plate Tectonics</h1>
<div class="post-info">
<span class="date published time" title="2017-01-12T11:05:45+00:00">January 12, 2017</span> By <span class="author vcard"><span class="fn"><a href="https://www.ribbonfarm.com/author/halmorris/" rel="author">Hal Morris</a></span></span> </div>
<div class="entry-content">
For
our pre-technical ancestors, the clockwork at the bottom of the
material world was so clothed in messiness that hardly a trace of it
appeared on the surface. But you could say that three exposed bits
collectively formed a Rosetta stone to the mathematical language of
nature: a thrown rock, a pendulum, and the solar system, revealed by
the night sky. The last had to be viewed from such a difficult angle
that reams of tables, centuries worth of exact observations, and a huge
advance in mathematics were required to see it, but it was there to be
seen.<br />
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_5720" style="max-width: 531px;">
<img class="wp-image-5720" height="391" src="https://206hwf3fj4w52u3br03fi242-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/orrery-1024x768.jpg" width="521" /><br />
<div class="wp-caption-text">
Clockwork Model of the Solar System, source: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orrery_-_Nov._2010.jpg">Wikimedia</a>, Creative Commons 20<br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
</div>
The concept of <i>machine</i> pervades our culture, and has driven many philosophical debates for centuries.<br />
For example, it is often argued that living organisms, or the
human mind, are “ultimately just machines”. I.e. underlying all the
messy organic complexity of the world’s surface is a level at which
things function with mechanical or mathematical precision. Sometimes it
is then too blithely concluded that this proves we can eventually
replicate anything, including the human brain.<br />
But if “everything is a machine”, it can’t contribute anything to any
argument because it doesn’t distinguish anything from anything else.<br />
<span id="more-5699"></span><br />
The fact is, we have intuitions about what a machine is, namely a
man-made object the exact size, shape, and other properties of whose
parts are precisely specified and realized so as to behave, or respond
to manipulation, in precise and predictable ways.<br />
In nature, without high-tech tools, one finds virtually nothing like
this. To find mechanical behavior in a non man-made earthly environment
with pre-modern eyes, we have to start with systems <i>simpler</i> than
what we normally think of as a machine. A good example is a rock
traveling through the air after it is thrown. Once set in motion, there
is such predictability about the trajectory of the rock that a skilled
person can make it strike in a certain place from 100 feet away or
farther.<br />
The business of throwing rocks has two parts: first the thrower has
an aim to hit a target, and does whatever it is that sends the rock into
the air, and second, the rock flies along a predictable path until it
is stopped by something (hopefully the target).<br />
A good account of the first part was completed in the 17th century by
Newton, “standing on the shoulders of giants”. As for what goes on
between having the aim, and a human hand’s release of the rock, we are
still connecting the dots<br />
The path of a flying rock or cannonball, as science tells us today,
is simple and predictable (to some approximation) because we have
managed to almost isolate just two forces out of the usually messy stew
of nature. We can almost say that the rock’s path is determined by (a)
its initial velocity, including direction, and (b) the earth’s gravity,
and the interplay between these two is indeed simple, and reducible to a
formula, as Newton showed.<br />
Now the caveman rock-thrower could not work out even the “easy part”
(the one Newton solved); but the right-brain, a kind of analog computer
which deals with spatial relations in a nonverbal way, <i>was</i>
solving it in a way. We know there is another complicating force, wind
resistance, but it is strongest with light objects like feathers, and
negligible, to a useful approximation for rocks and other compact heavy
bodies.<br />
Machines are built on this principle of isolating forces, so that
those affecting any one part are extremely simple to understand and
control. Forces like friction, usually in conflict with our design
goals, are minimized partly through using polished, precisely straight
or precisely round, or otherwise precisely, regularly, fashioned
surfaces, and arrangements. Once set in motion, we know which way our
mechanical contraption will go; or if we want it to go a certain way, we
know how to make this happen. Where do we find anything of such
regularity in nature?<br />
Our rock in free flight may be just the thing. Being a system that
only exists for a second, it seems a stunted sort of “machine” at best.
Yet much of what Galileo learned about nature came from studying such
trivial mechanical systems as a compact body in passive free fall or
flight.<br />
Humankind has tried for millennia to make sense of the night sky.
Early observers noticed exact arrangements of stars, or constellations
seeming to glide across the night sky, locked in one large
configuration, with the moon slowly passing among them. But a handful of
lights in the sky wandered through the fixed background making strange
loops, if one takes the trouble of mapping them night after night. These
tantalized humans, who rightly intuited something important behind the
irregular regularity of the planets. Mostly all they got were some
concepts of cyclic time, useful for agriculture, and astrology. But it
drove people to keep meticulous records, from Babylonian times, always
looking for something more.<br />
In the 17th century, with the help of ancient record keepers, and
more recent astronomy, Isaac Newton revealed the whole celestial machine
from rocks to planets in a new mathematical language. As Alexander
Pope wrote “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in the night. God said, Let
Newton be! and all was light!”, and science was never the same. He
showed that the rock, in its parabolic path, and the moon in eternal
orbit were two instances of the same thing, and that the earth and those
wandering dots in the sky were as well, in orbit around an unimaginably
large sun, and he mathematized their movements<br />
The movement of the planets appeared slow (only due to their vast
distance), and nightly plotting of their position against the fixed
stars revealed a sense of their motion in an appropriate time scale
(days). But there was no way of discovering the laws of motion of
earthly objects in their brief free flights, so as to make any
comparison without a way to measure seconds, and smaller units of time.
The pendulum with its one moving part was the next best thing to a
natural machine. Galileo discovered its ability to “count time”. Some
inexact clocks existed, so seconds were at least thinkable. Soon after
Galileo, it was discovered that a 39.1 inch pendulum marked off a second
with each swing, and clock technology began to improve rapidly.<br />
Galileo noted the more fundamental fact that a pendulum could go on
swinging back and forth for days, and even as its speed decreases and
its swing shortens, the length of <b><i>time</i></b> for each swing
remains almost exactly the same. To explain this in terms of physics is
quite complex. The formula given by Wikipedia is:<br />
<img alt="pendeqn" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-5702" height="51" src="https://206hwf3fj4w52u3br03fi242-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/pendeqn.png" width="327" /><br />
We’ve noted that any kind of mechanical regularity is hard to spot in
natural objects, or in any object as simple as a pendulum. We have to
look very hard to find it, and in doing so, we develop a habit of <i>focusing</i> on the regular., and taking it for granted.<br />
We see the regularity that we do, in fact, wherever we look, not so
much because we “discovered” the regularities of nature. It is more
because we <i>rearranged</i> the substances of our world into regular,
governable, objects of a sort not found in nature. We have done this so
well that it is hard to imagine <i>not</i> finding mechanical regularity all around us.<br />
The invention of the clock, and discovery of clock-like regularity in
the universe were needed to launch modern physics, and the mathematical
sciences that came in its train, and we can’t overstate the impact that
had in creating a true scientific attitude to nature.<br />
But some respectable disciplines begin with less perfect and well-polished touchstones.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
Any science requires, and is shaped by, a <i>tractable domain</i>, and the progress of science is measured in the tractability we have <i>found</i> or <i>engineered</i> with our observation, theories, and instrumentation. Just what qualifies, and how we learn to <i>see</i> a tractable domain, is more a matter of art than logic.<br />
The parable of the blind men and the elephant, generally leads to a
dead end of ignorance, but if our blind men were a bit more clever and
persistent, we might have a parable of a portal into a tractable domain.<br />
The story comes from India. One version, in<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant"> Wikipedia</a> follows:<br />
Six blind men were asked to determine what an elephant looked like by
feeling different parts of the elephant’s body. The blind man who feels
a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail
says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the
elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear says the
elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says the
elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the
elephant is like a solid pipe.<br />
If only our blind men had been used to the customs and incentives of
science, comparing notes, arguing this interpretation and that, they
could have eventually made sense of the critter, perhaps making a clay
model of an elephant that one person could get their hands around. Of
course if they are no good at listening to each other, or lack
persistence and/or the right sort of discipline this won’t happen.<br />
Earlier, I argued that the decipherment of a tiny number of “natural
machines” pointed the way towards solid analytic science. Now I’d like
to suggest a different metaphor that finding the touchstone of a
science is like finding and comprehending invisible elephants (rather
than make all scientists blind, let’s for the moment imagine elephants
as invisible).<br />
What does it look like when we are failing to find our elephant? Maybe one man really <i>is</i>
grasping an invisible pillar, another an invisible tree branch, or hand
fan, and another pushing on a wall. No wonder their observations don’t
add up. If they still try to force their observations to add up to one
thing, something like the theory of humours (see below) may result.<br />
So what does a science finding its elephant look like? There should
be some convergence of observations when the blind men work together
effectively. Maybe four men are saying “this is like a pillar”, and
they can tell by listening they are close to each other, and reach out
to grasp each other’s hands, and get a sense of where each man is.
Maybe all link hands to discover that the pillars are in a rough
square. Someone again says this is like a rope, and they wave their
hands around until the one with the “rope” finds he’s roughly
equidistant from two of the “pillar” men. And on and on. Someone says
“this is like a creek”, and the others say “You’re too far away, come
back over here.” And as long as they stay in contact with the object,
certain observations occur repetitively, and all the relations between
the observations begin to add up to something. Maybe someone bounces a
basketball their way, one grasps it and says “Aha! something new!” but
they soon realize it isn’t part of the thing they’re trying to
understand. It is “irrelevant data”, or “noise” as in Nate Silver’s<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159420411X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=159420411X&linkCode=as2&tag=talesoftheear-20&linkId=3V6D2CPDJLJW5HYV"> The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t</a>.<br />
After recognizing one specimen, where might invisible elephantology
go? In seeking more elephants, one might carry around a clay model of
one, some instruments (as simple perhaps as tape measures) for measuring
the circumference of a leg, or height and length; one might discover
related phenomena, such as elephant footprints, leading to a methodology
of following them to see where elephants go and congregate, and so on.<br />
When observations add up and complement each other, and it becomes
increasingly clear which observations belong to the new object of study,
and which do not, we can say there is a tractable domain. I’ll make
no attempt to define tractability, but hope I have somewhat illustrated
it. Until the 20th century, medicine was largely <i>intractable</i>.
We had only glimmerings of understanding here and there that could not
be worked into any sort of whole. Failure to admit this — wishful
thinking — led to systems like that based on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism">“humours”</a>
(or 4 basic fluids supposed to account for the body’s workings and
malfunctions) which lead to inappropriate bleeding and purging, and
sometimes even stopping up things that shouldn’t be stopped up, all on
the theory that too much or too little of some “humour” caused a given
syndrome.<br />
A tractable domain means one has a good sense of the thing that is
under study – and graspable techniques that can lead one deeper into its
understanding; techniques likely to be very specific to the domain.
It might be invisible elephants, or equally invisible atoms, whose
properties can only be known via more complex and roundabout ways than
merely looking. The idea that all scientific methodology can be
summarized by one “method” is more often heard in disciplines that are <i>trying hard</i> to be scientific, such as the social sciences, than in those that have actually produced a wealth of regularities.<br />
Consensus that we are talking about the same thing (from different
angles) is a sign that we may have found our elephant. In 17th century
physics it was the Earth, Moon, planets, and Sun and it lead to powerful
general principles. In the 18th century, various manifestations of
electricity presented many novel mysteries; for example, sparks
generated by various electrical machines looked like tiny lightning
bolts, but could they actually be the same thing? Benjamin Franklin is
supposed to have answered this, on one of the first of many steps
towards drawing electrical phenomena out of the mists and and into
tractability.<br />
***<br />
Many of the most interesting and important results of mature science
must be reached through interaction, and sometimes hot debate between
different disciplines or specialties, and the ultimate arrival at
consensus.<br />
This essay was partly inspired by an argument with someone who
insisted experiments supporting AGW (human contribution to global
warming) were clearly not following “the scientific method”. His
“scientific method” was received from a psychology professor some
decades ago, as selecting a hypothesis, choosing a test group and a
control group, and so on. I.e. we get to science by collecting
inductive evidence for true-false questions.. This generic methodology
is, I think, symptomatic of an <i>aspiring</i> science (like psychology,
at least several decades ago) that has too little sense of the shape of
its object of study — its invisible elephant.<br />
I’ve tried to suggest that a hallmark of a mature science is a
methodology that reflects or fits the object studied. The kind of
interaction that pulls an object out of obscurity will, as the unique
shape of the object emerges, call for new techniques for answering
questions of a sort no one ever dreamed of before. No single method
tells us we are being scientific. I don’t see how one can judge a
science as mature and truth-generating without familiarity with other
sciences, and getting into the substance and details of the science
Perhaps all sciences use the textbook “scientific method” on occasion,
just not exclusively. But generally, in assessing the solidity of a
science, we must look at both the methodologies and the manifestations
of the object(s) of study, and the processes by which they interact, and
there is no simple rule for how we judge that.<br />
Cosmologists, to understand the structure of the universe, turn
optical, radio, and nowadays highly computerized telescopes to the sky
so it can be scrutinized bit by bit. They say “this looks like one of
those” (galaxy, nebula, certain kind of star, or black hole), and if on
closer and closer observation, it looks more and more like one of those,
they are kind of relieved, and kind of disappointed, because this isn’t
the day they see something that nobody else knows about. If they can’t
identify a thing, they will try to do “whatever it takes” to arrive at
some understanding. The spectroscopy that discovered helium on the sun
(see below) before it was found on earth, and showed the sun to be
mostly hydrogen and helium shows us there are other kinds of stars with
heavier elements. Such are some of the methods of cosmology.<br />
The late 18th and early 19th centuries were a heyday of exploration and of <i>natural philosophy</i>,
and the scrutiny, analysis, description, collecting, and classifying of
everything on the surface of the earth, or accessible via digging.
James Hutton and Charles Lyell convinced the scientific world that the
earth’s surface had evolved for millions of years, that much of the of
rock found on land was formed as silt in the sea, and, joined with
countless other layers formed by various processes formed a sort of rock
parfait , with each deeper layer formed at an earlier time. The
layers, representing “deep time”, often contained fossils of plants and
creatures that grew stranger the deeper and older the layers. This
study is called <i>stratigraphy</i>, a part of geology. The classical
“elephant” might be a geological record, in rock, of hundreds of
millions of years in some region, revealed by instances of identical
“earth parfait” found hundreds of miles apart, the strata being the same
not just in color and consistency, but down to the kinds of sea-shell
fossils found in a given layer.<br />
The 19th century was also the century of chemistry, and the
“elephants” were new elements. The isolating and understanding of
oxygen, followed by hydrogen, led to a new idea of pure substances, or
elements. Various metals were among the first elements identified,
through the heating of ores to remove oxygen, and over time, more
complex processes. By around 1860, it was discovered that each element
gave off light only in a certain set of frequencies (the prism, since
Newton, was shown to split mixed light into component frequencies).
This lead to the discovery of helium as a major component of the sun,
long before it was ever found on earth. The methods were a kind of
grab bag, evolving as greater insight was gained, as can be learned
(with pleasure) by reading Oliver Sacks’ <i>Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood</i>, which is both memoir and history of science.<br />
Set pieces like the trial of Galileo occupy and excite our
imagination, and were used to promote the importance of the
Enlightenment and shedding of old orthodoxy. The individual vs the
greatest ideological power of the time makes a great story. But it also
flatters our tendencies to see great matters from a “God’s-eye view”;
the attitude of hero vs the universe (and world of men), often great for
scientific puzzle solving, but sometimes destructive to hard-won and
well deserved trust. No ideology has a monopoly on this sort of
narrative. Liberals have had Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, Vincent Van Gogh
and they used to have Columbus; others favor Dirty Harry, Jack Bauer
and Anthony Watts of the “Watt’s Up With That” anti climate change
website, all viewed by their fans as standing alone with their truths
against the establishment.<br />
But Newton, as he said, stood on the shoulders of giants, not to
mention hundreds of humble sky watchers making their notations night
after night. Science took its first big steps towards benefiting
society in the age of salons and establishments like the Royal Society,
with its “Transactions” the first real scientific journal, and simple
reproducible experiments presented for groups to comment on.<br />
Science still on occasion needs the unique visionary who finds a new
elephant, or finds out that everybody else had the elephant upside down.
Sometimes they can’t make themselves understood, and suffer
frustration, but, at least in the hard sciences, a unique and true
vision in the end wins the greatest rewards, such as the the Nobel
Prize. Scientific culture is such that if nearly everyone is mistaken,
and one person can demonstrate this, they may be controversial for a
while, but will be lionized in the long run (sometimes posthumously).<br />
<b><i>Scientific consensus has been confused with group-think, </i></b>but
is really a matter of many scientists putting maps, table, graphs,
observations and experiments together and after much wrangling coming to
approximate agreement about what they add up to.<br />
A discipline may be so vast that no one scientist fully understands,
and like ordinary mortals, they need screening methods to determine who
to trust and what is solidly known. In some cases, as in discovery of
the “top quark”, a study with 451 co-authors as noted in Paul Thaggards’
1997 “Collaborative Knowledge” (Noûs, 31: 242-261), no one person can
follow the entire demonstration, so trust is essential, though it should
be earned in an atmosphere of skepticism.<br />
One harsh criticism aimed at Global Warming is that if there is a
consensus, it is just that sort of authoritarian “group think” that
Galileo confronted in the Inquisition, or that mainstream climatologists
have abandoned “the scientific method”. Some who say they have a case
against AGW maintain that <i>they</i> are practicing the true
“scientific method” and since their demonstrations or studies aren’t
adopted, someone has to be rejecting the scientific method.<br />
There is a wonderful case study in Miriam Solomon’s book <i>Social Empiricism</i>
(Bradford Books, 2001), of how over several decades, a consensus was
reached on continental drift i.e. plate tectonics. (It is also covered
more vividly and with less of an overt Social Epistemology emphasis in
Naomi Oreskes 2003 <i>Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History Of The Modern Theory Of The Earth</i>).<br />
At the end of the 19th century, Eduard Suess an Austrian
paleontologist and geologist proposed that India, South America, Africa,
Australia, and Antarctica had all been connected in the distant past,
based on similarities in stratigraphy, and the occurrence of certain
fossil plants from particular prehistoric times <i>only</i> on these continents. India, not even <i>being</i>
a separate continent but broadly connected to the rest of Asia makes
this especially hard to explain. The part of India studied was called
Gondwana, and Suess thus called the joined region Gondwanaland. He did
not think of <i>movement</i> of continents, but of long vanished land
bridges. Others in the past had speculated about some or all of these
continents having been physically joined and later dispersed, based on
the way they seemed to fit together, which is now the accepted theory.<br />
Continental drift was first proposed by a German geologist and
meteorologist named Alfred Wegener in 1912, but the theory didn’t go
very far for a couple of decades. In the 1930s, geologists studying
the formation of mountain ranges became interested in paleomagnetism,
the study of variations in the Earth’s magnetic poles in the distant
past, which induced slight magnetism in volcanic rocks as they
solidified, oriented with the current state of the poles. Actually,
although these changes were first thought to represent “wandering” of
the poles, later evidence showed rocks formed at the same time on
different continents pointed in different directions, as if one or both
had rotated since these rocks formed. Reconstruction of the putative
Gondwanaland, and movement of continents as they separated suggested a
rotation consistent with this. While paleomagnetists were pursuing this
argument, some in other disciplines <i>not</i>, finding any confirmation of the astonishing “wandering continents” hypothesis ridiculed them as “paleo<i>magicians</i>” (Solomon p104). The data could be very confusing and contradictory indeed, until it was realized that the poles <i>frequently reversed polarity</i>
throughout geological time (even as recently as approx 10,000BCE).
Before recognition that the record is full of 180 degree reversals,
looking for subtle rotations showed inadequate grasp of the “elephant”.<br />
Such research was halted by WWII, but the most dramatic piece of
evidence for drift came as a byproduct of the war and subsequent cold
war, which lead to extensive mapping of the ocean bottom to facilitate
games of hide and seek between submarines. Sometimes called “magnetic
striping”, it was the discovery of ridges in the ocean floor from which
magma or molton volcanic rock seemed to ooze, and “stripes” on either
side of the ridges of volcanic rock which were older the further they
were from the ridge, and whose polarity was that of the Earth’s at the
time of their creation. These alternating polarities showed clearly
that the ocean crust was moving away from the ridges, and as other
research placed dates on these reversals, provided a timetable of the
spreading.<br />
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_5700" style="max-width: 409px;">
<img alt="(Wikimedia Commons)" class="size-full wp-image-5700" height="329" src="https://206hwf3fj4w52u3br03fi242-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/geomag.png" width="399" /><br />
<div class="wp-caption-text">
(Image from Wikimedia Commons)</div>
</div>
It remained only to see these ridges as one of three kind of
boundaries between ocean plates: divergent (just described), convergent
(ocean floor descending under the edges of continents), and transform
(plates sliding past each other) and a comprehensive theory, called
Plate Tectonics emerged in the mid 1960s.<br />
The next group to support the theory were seismologists who found
correlating data in the ages of volcanic islands formed on either side
of a ridge, the furthest away being the oldest, and also in the patterns
of earthquakes in the vicinity of convergent boundaries.<br />
As the picture took shape, there were many interdisciplinary
conferences on the new findings, attended by some in the lagging
disciplines (stratigraphy, and paleontology, ironically the source of
some of the first clues), and within a few years these disciplines began
adding to the evidence for continental drift.<br />
The picture can be seen in <a href="http://homepages.see.leeds.ac.uk/~eargah/Gond.html">this animation</a>
of the last 200M years, in which India seems to fly across the southern
seas, and you can imagine it slamming into Asia to form the world’s
highest mountain range.<br />
This kind of process is really what is meant by scientific consensus.
It is not groupthink, but different specialists deciding whether their
field supports a theory or not, and as long as one specialty holds out,
those who feel convinced of the theory remain uncomfortable, wondering
if the recalcitrant fields, whose work they don’t understand so well,
know something they don’t. Once scientists in all these fields
regularly produced discoveries supporting and helping elaborate the
theory, there was a consensus. Scientists will naturally and I think
rightly hesitate to confirm a thesis when their own discipline should
provide confirmation but so far, has not.<br />
As long as a proposed theory leaves one or more major disciplines
skeptical, general science publications will tend to say the matter is
controversial. It is generally only when the last discipline(s) are
convinced that these publications say there is a scientific consensus.<br />
I began to read science seriously around the time when continental
drift became a settled question in science, when plenty of older books
and articles still referred to it as controversial.<br />
I’ve been a casual observer of the global warming debate over the
decades, but the process looked very similar (to me) to that of
continental drift, moving from “this is a theory that some scientists
have” to “still controversial” to “scientific consensus”. As with
continental drift, the sources of evidence are diverse, from layers of
trapped atmospheric bubbles in ancient ice strata to meteorology to
seismology to chemistry and to computer model building to the physics of
the planet and the solar system.<br />
The picture is very difficult to assemble, especially to see a
tendency on top of several well known sources of climate oscillation.
Any single paper or piece of evidence for global warming should not
convince one, and some bear only tangentially on the main lines of
argument. Scientists look for many demonstrations from many different
angles, and keep looking even after they are convinced, at the risk of
finding something contradictory. Likewise, any single anti-AGW
argument/demonstration is not going to turn the world around. It has
never been the case that the most recent paper determines what is
believed in a field. If there is a contradiction then either the new
study is flawed or based on “noise” (the usual case) or the old ones are
wrong in some way.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3434247666917738787.post-36786881538547759212017-09-09T20:59:00.000-07:002020-02-20T07:15:03.036-08:00The Knowledge Producing Enterprise: Old, Verbose Intro<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-e3983559-90ef-309f-c5dc-afca1b1c99f8" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 3pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 34.666666666666664px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Old, Overly Verbose Intro to this blog, but with some account of how I got here.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Mma Ramotswe, heroine of the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> novels has an annoying habit of prefacing sometimes controversial statements with “It is well known that…”. Epistemologists (philosophers of knowledge) for centuries had an annoying habit of treating “It is known” or some equivalent as the only distinction worth making w.r.t. truth and knowledge. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Not</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> whether I know or you know, but seemingly just the abstract notion of whether a given justification for a proposition really, really qualifies it as knowledge. Whether one person or a million know X is not a matter for discussion. Anyway, the chances are if a million people “know” something, they don’t know it in a philosophically justified way, so if asked how many Americans know that Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen, they might say hardly any. </span><a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-social/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Social Epistemology</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> offers some promise of rising above this dilemma, but surveying where it is today, I don’t see it happening.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
</div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">My opinion is there may be little practical benefit to discussing knowledge in this way. Maybe the very idea of discussing or studying <i>knowledge</i> is the problem. Maybe the difficulties of advocates of rationality or critical thinking are due to this focus on this strange thing called <i>knowledge</i> - a product of the “view from nowhere”, which tends to break down in the social domain.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Instead, I suggest we look at <b>Knowledge Producing Enterprises (KPEs),</b> an idea likely to be criticized for over broadness, especially when I tell you what I mean -- that examples include an infant learning to speak, a university, a scientific discipline, the English Common Law, or Google. I mean any entity (or even phenomenon) which we can reasonably say (sometimes) produces knowledge, relying on mere common sense for what we mean by knowledge. I will add to “common sense” that producing knowledge can mean either discovering new knowledge, or, which is less conventional, <i>communicating</i> it to someone new, or </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">finding</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> knowledge, as in the Google case.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Despite a breadth that may seem excessive, there is something concrete about all the examples I have given. We can identify agents and processes. Very often, some sort of domain transformation leads to new insight, as in treating the (“selfish”) gene as the object studied by evolution. Often both approaches yield equal insight, but in this case I’ll throw out a provocative suggestion:</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The KPE may be to knowledge as living things are to “elan vital”, which we no longer believe in, and our knowledge of biology comes, not from going after some abstraction, but from exhaustively examining living things, and slowly building theories on that observation.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<h2 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<i><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">How did I get here?</span></i></h2>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">For the last 8 years, I’ve been focused on what we now call “Fake news” and the inability of so many Americans to make common sense or “educated guess” distinctions between essentially honest (though not perfect) sources, and those whose output is overwhelmingly driven by intent to get a certain result (e.g. for the Obama administration to fail, as Rush Limbaugh openly declared his intent), which for me is close to a definition of propaganda. I had intimate sources, one of whom viewed Rush Limbaugh as a hero, and </span><a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2011/08/my-not-really-right-wing-mom-and-her.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">my mother, who got a steady stream of anonymous emails containing the most bald faced lies</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, which she would send me asking “can this be true?”, and I which I usually disproved with 5-10 minutes of research on the internet.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As I wrote to a friend in 2010 “I've never seen a time when so many normal seeming people readily swallowed so much totally unjustified and worthless nonsense. My mother showed me a letter to the editor of her newspaper which started out characterizing Obama as a 'Marxist ex-street hustler' and was telling me it had some good points, and not blinking at the crazy characterization.”</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> I emailed old historian friends, and people who seemed to be addressing the problem in studies and articles, hoping for at least some stimulating discussion, but initially positive responses got more lukewarm with each email, so I wondered if I just seemed unhinged.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I conceived of a project whose ideal outcome might look something like a viral spread of people</span></div>
<ul style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">finding ways to insist on and incentivize standards of seriousness and accuracy from those who want to get our attention for whatever purpose. We can demand, in effect an adult to adult conversation. Tune out the circus.</span></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">implementing tools for checking and better understanding what we read and hear</span></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">insisting on archival record keeping structures with a credible transparency that would not allow facts, events, people, to simply disappear or become inaccessible "old news" or be “cherry picked” with no way to connect them to their context.</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I called it, “The Real Truth Project” The “Real” part was supposed to be transparently wistful, a joke, gesturing at our certainty and foolishness about truth. There were then two entities called the “Truth Project”, one of people insisting that the 9/11 explosions were an “inside job” of the US Government to provide a pretext for war; the other was a fundamentalist religious group promoting a more “Biblical” worldview.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">No real project took shape. I just kept seeing things that seemed like they would get me closer to the possibility, or to the possibility at least of exploring it with other stimulating people. I began reading all I could about the rise of the current right wing coalition in America, and also, to books like “</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Why Do People Believe Weird Things?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">” and the scientific approaches to cognitive bias like Kahnemann and Tversky and Jonathan Haidt. I imagined there should be such a thing as social epistemology, and by luck found that there was, of which the epicenter was just 40 miles away at Rutgers University, so I read books and papers on this, and, to cram in more study time while doing mundane things, learned how to send academic papers to my Kindle and listen to them with text-to-speech (not bad, except when, e.g. ST (“Simulation Theory”) gets pronounced as “street” or “saint”). I crashed some of the Rutgers Social Epistemology workshops and conventions. I tried LessWrong for a while. I read a great deal of neurology, cultural evolution, evo-psy and evo-devo, and wondered whether of not memetics was dead or hopeless, as so many proclaim, and thought much about how evolution of media from papyrus to the printing press to newspapers to radio to TV to the internet versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.0… Historians had much to say about how such transitions of the past created disruptions, religious wars, nationalism, but also science, technology and imaginative literature.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Perhaps my biggest success of the “project” was one article, in one of my five blogs: “Myths about Saul Alinsky (and Obama)”, which has had over 23 thousand views. This out of a couple of hundred too hastily written postings.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I wrote an assessment of it in 2014, which I update here somewhat:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 17.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Is this a Real Project? Or What?</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="margin-left: 0pt;">
<table style="border-collapse: collapse; border: none;"><colgroup><col width="362"></col><col width="262"></col></colgroup><tbody>
<tr style="height: 0px;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #000000 0px; border-left: solid #000000 0px; border-right: solid #000000 0px; border-top: solid #000000 0px; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: top;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 11pt; margin-right: 11pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 17.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img height="262" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/4Jb4pIgS9s8X6X292dCSK2HK4ZwzTU5CPRbsI_Mac9tyreOod4Ak2F54EN7JPCmqTh1ky3ohNZYtGxxyzFdlj63ycTnVB1ICIeV5NqDxjHhxlBBCmDTgrACmeFOSjSFHo31dgMqm" style="border: medium none; transform: rotate(0rad);" width="400" /></span></div>
</td><td style="border-bottom: solid #000000 0px; border-left: solid #000000 0px; border-right: solid #000000 0px; border-top: solid #000000 0px; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: top;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Whenever someone charges at the world waving the flag of truth, they almost never mean truth </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">in and of itself</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">; they mean some particular claim that for them burns so bright as to blot out everything else. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">"The One (All-Important) Truth" comes in many flavours: Christian</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> (Believe and You Will Receive Eternal Salvation)</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, anti-christian version (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Nietzsche's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Zarathustra</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> running down from the mountaintop to tell us God is Dead</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">), </span>or the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Truth of some massive conspiracy that will account for all that is wrong with the world</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. The "down from the mountaintop" image harks back to Moses delivering the Truth of the Ten Commandments. It's as if we have some (human) racial memory in which "the truth" can take as many unlike forms as Proteus, but they all are able to set </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">someone</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> or more likely </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">some group</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> on fire with devotion</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="margin-left: 0pt;">
<table style="border-collapse: collapse; border: none;"><colgroup><col width="300"></col><col width="324"></col></colgroup><tbody>
<tr style="height: 0px;"><td style="border-bottom: solid #000000 0px; border-left: solid #000000 0px; border-right: solid #000000 0px; border-top: solid #000000 0px; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: top;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Trying to get a handle on truth </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">in and of itself</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> seems to me a lot like wrestling Proteus, or the "Old Man of the Sea", as described by</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menelaus" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Menelaus</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> in the</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Odyssey</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. The Old Man can answer any questions if captured, but capturing him means holding on as he changes shapes from a horse to a serpent to water to fire to whatever until he is worn out if one has the strength to wear him out.</span></div>
</td><td style="border-bottom: solid #000000 0px; border-left: solid #000000 0px; border-right: solid #000000 0px; border-top: solid #000000 0px; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: top;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 11pt; margin-right: 11pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img height="303" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/fSEIe2F7iFhD2oo3mv7eZdxFZb6xfQi1kXB4uL0EpU9t9KZFYEa5ozjnQDv6Glw9xOm9pqzrgbB9pAvAKeLiG2D4XHWBSZONBCyMaM50rGj2K76QA6CHNDEcVO9pOgDGOfk2gpdV" style="-webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad); border: none; transform: rotate(0.00rad);" width="237" /></span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<br />
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I am fascinated and deeply worried about how difficult it is to</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">ensure that we </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">really</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> know very important things about the world around us</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and how deeply this difficulty affects us. I want to explore what there is to do about it. I am also fascinated by how </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">easily satisfied</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> we humans tend to be with our own grasp of essential truths</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, untroubled, it seems by the fact that so many people have totally different views. We nearly always find ways of dismissing those other people..</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">How confident should we be of even the simplest kinds of truth? I'm not talking about "God is dead" or "America is a Christian nation", or even evolution or history above the level of bare events, but about questions most of us </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">could</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> agree on if only we could see the evidence, and somehow know that it's real, not forged or photoshopped or staged. Consider the controversies over questions like</span></div>
<ul style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Was X really born where he says he was born?</span></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Were there any Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq when the U.S. invaded?</span></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Who is a good and reasonable plumber or car mechanic?</span></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Did X really say ___?___ on her blog (esp. supposing it was erased and denied)?</span></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Was there really a political ad showing Gabby Giffords in the cross-hairs of a rifle?</span></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Did the US Post Office really issue a stamp celebrating a Muslim holiday?</span></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Did the US really send men to the moon?</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">These are all basically questions of unambiguous fact, yet we are a long way from a world where the vast majority of people would agree on the answers.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">So where is the "project" in all of this?</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I am convinced that far more is called for than just you or me learning better "rationality" or "critical thinking". How many times has some "vanguard" become euphoric over the idea that</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">"Now we know how to think rationally and we just have to get rid of all the old biases and learn the new ways of thinking?"</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As a serious student of history I would suggest it’s happened on the order of once every couple of decades starting with the Enlightenment (about 1700) or maybe earlier.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">No, we must actually reshape the world if we expect the truth to be there for us to see, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">and</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> for it to occur to, and be persuasive for others, so as to guide the world's responses to problems.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m not looking for a master plan to achieve </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the goal</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, but many venues and perhaps protocols for getting together on projects to improve some domain. Too often we react to frightening global situations with some sort of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">master plan,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> based on a God’s-eye view of the situation, which due to being conceptualized that way, requires a God or dictator to carry it out, so you get a dictator.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We are are up against some strong forces. The present right wing dominance of American politics gets much of its energy from people, many of them libertarians, in a panic over the supposed </span><a href="http://whatwasthecoldwar.blogspot.com/2010/07/illustrated-comic-book-in-fact-road-to.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">“slippery slope to totalitarianism”</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">making common cause</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> with often fundamentalist “paleoconservatives”, in a panic over runaway wild sexual license, often in their faces, and multi-billionaires who can’t stand that government can get in their way.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> According to </span><a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2011/02/integration-of-theory-and-practice.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">one of its primary manifestos</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">: (developed around 2000 under the guidance of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Weyrich" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Paul Weyrich</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, co-founder of the Moral Majority, Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and ALEC):</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“We must always operate based on this cardinal principle: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Leftists are never morally responsible for the evil they commit</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">; ... We must learn to treat leftists as natural disasters or rabid dog</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">s.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We will initially operate according to the belief that it is more important to win over the elites (or create a new, better one) than to build up a mass movement. Furthermore, it is more important to have a few impassioned members than a large number of largely indifferent members</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The new movement must be, in part, exclusive and elite. It must not be afraid to pass along a body of knowledge that is not readily accessible to and understandable by everyone. The strong appeal of a feeling of exclusivity and superiority will give our members a reason to endure the slings and arrows of popular disapproval.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> The New Traditionalist movement will appeal to the masses, but not immediately. The ideas of the masses never come from the masses.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If such a narrowly based movement could so transform the culture into its present direction, working largely in secret, could an open movement to make truth more manifest, and less obscured by lies and bullshit succeed?</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Recent work with a brilliant group of people around the <a href="http://ribbonfarm.com/">Ribbonfarm.com</a> blog and the “Refactoring group” has given me some hope that I might either create or fit in with a process of looking at such possibilities, and at the reasons humans so often do such destructive and self-destructive things.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’ll conclude by quoting a short article from “The Real Truth Project” blog that I think gives a tiny example the Knowledge Producing Enterprise approach shedding some light on a strange phenomenon of the social media world.</span></div>
<br />
<h3 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 4pt; margin-top: 14pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 17.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">"Fake News" peddlers have a huge asymmetrical advantage</span></h3>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Tom O'Bryan, a chiropractor and self-promoted "internationally recognized speaker specializing in Gluten Sensitivity & Celiac Disease" is one of the biggest promoters of the anti-gluten fad. People with celiac disease need to avoid gluten, but that disease affects about 1 in 100 people.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Now, some experiments with Google. Thanks to the filter bubble, different people will get different results from Google, unless you anonymize yourself, and "hit counts" are of very dubious value unless they are very small, so the following will give just a rough idea.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If you Google{ "Tom O'Bryan" } Google claims 330,000 hits, and you will go through many pages without finding anything critical of the good doctor. I gave up trying. When I did Google{ "Tom O'Bryan" quack }, I got 222 nominal hits, including</span><a href="http://www.celiac.com/gluten-free/topic/90900-tom-obryan-cyrex-laboratories" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">http://www.celiac.com/gluten-free/topic/90900-tom-obryan-cyrex-laboratories</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">/ and</span><a href="http://glutendude.com/scams/i-hate-gluten-free-society/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">http://glutendude.com/scams/i-hate-gluten-free-society/</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. My conclusion: he is pretty much below the radar and nearly all that ends up on the web about him comes from him and his associates or believers. If Wikipedia had an article on O'Bryan, that would have come up on the 1st page but they don't.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If you google "GMO", you will get a reasonable distribution of pro and con articles from the start. But when I google{ GMO "pig intestines" } I get, among 22,800 nominal hits, about a 9:1 ratio of items tracing back to a flawed study (</span><a href="http://www.naturalnews.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">www.naturalnews.com</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">) stating "GMO feed turns pig stomachs to mush! Shocking photos ..."</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The effects are worse in the political realm. If you google{ </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Obama wedding ring</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> } Google announces 3,600,000 hits and from the start it is about a 9:1 ratio of items claiming that something about Obama's wedding ring proves that he is a Muslim. There is much variety, including "BARACK OBAMA'S GAY SHARIA WEDDING RING!!!". In the first few pages, about 1 in 10 items is a Snopes or fact-check or some such criticism of the theory.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If you google{ </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Obama muslim</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> } you get a non-overwhelming majority of items critical to the idea, at least for the first few pages.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Finally, if you google{ </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Obama religion</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> } you get mostly items asserting Obama is after all a Christian. In general, the closer you get to a strange assertion that the vast majority of people never heard, of being pushed by a moneyed group or a few dozen true believers -- the more Google will seem to confirm that it is true.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Searches that represent the broad questions will elicit more criticisms of fake facts, while searches that represent an obscure supporting claim will come up almost completely positive.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">So we see one specific way that Google is a flawed KPE. Yes, it is flawed in so many ways that you might say “So what?”. But this is a particular mechanism that might show up in other contexts.</span></div>
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This seems to be of neutral causation; just an artifact of the way Google works. But if we view Google as part of the larger media ecology, note this: If any high visibility were to back the flat out lies of anonymous emails, (and now social media exclusively targeted to just the “right” consumers), they would draw refutations, and tend to defeat the lies. They don't, partly for reasons of their own credibility. I noticed this a long time ago, and </span><a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2010/07/get-email-with-extreme-anti-obama.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">noted it back in July 2010</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. They cannot be unaware of these items; their fans are sure to send them in, but do they publicly say “Don’t pay attention to Pizzagate, it’s all nonsense?”</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Seemingly not. I search for evidence on the site where the transcripts of Limbaugh’s shows reside: Google{ site:www.rushlimbaugh.com pizzagate } → no hits. I tried similar experiments back in 2010.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Here we are getting into anti-KPEs, which will be a thing to explore.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Stay tuned. I won't be sticking to my own little discoveries, but will look at some major ideas in anthropology, brain science, developmental biology, and more.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0