Demanding Change

Linking Facial Expressions

2009-09-20T19:33:00.000+01:00

Two studies about facial expressions have been reported by the BBC in the past few weeks.

Facial expressions 'not global' (14 August 2009). In research carried out by a team from Glasgow University, East Asian observers found it more difficult to distinguish some facial expressions. (Findings published in Current Biology journal.)

Delinquents 'misinterpret anger' (19 September 2009). A Japanese study of young offenders found they often misread facial expressions. (Findings published in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health journal.)

I have not read the academic papers, but it looks as if there might be an interesting link between the two studies. There are some missing perceptions in some people (perhaps by culture and/or personality type), and these are linked to patterns of behaviour. The Japanese researchers are looking at personality type, while the European researchers are looking at cultural differences.

But how do such links ever get identified, especially as it is perfectly within the bounds of possibility that there is nobody who reads both of these journals? I only spotted it myself, because I read the second story and recalled having read something similar not long before, and because I was able to find my way back to the first story.

The first general point to pay attention to here is the process of memory retrieval, in this case involving a collaboration between my brain and a simple internet search.

The second general point is about the fragmentation of knowledge and the "architecture" of joined-up research. How do such accidental links influence not only what we happen to know, but also what becomes available to be known?

Hard science

2009-03-30T11:41:00.000+01:00

Found an extraordinary exam question in a post called GCSEs are dumbed down and getting worse, by Cabalamat, taken from an actual physics exam (Edexcel GCSE Physics P1b reference 5010 taken on 9 November 2006) (via Ben Goldacre).

Our Moon seems to 'disappear' during an eclipse. Some people say this is because an old lady covers the Moon with her cloak. She does this so that thieves cannot steal the shiny coins on the surface.

Which of these would help scientists to prove or disprove this idea?

A - collect evidence from people who believe the lady sees the thieves
B - shout to the lady that the thieves are coming
C - send a probe to the Moon to search for coins
D - look for fingerprints

I have read this question several times, and I am still unsure what answer they are looking for.

A - Well, this is exactly the kind of thing that social scientists would probably do. The question doesn't specify what kind of scientists it is talking about.

B - Well, this is a good experimental approach. If shouting affected the outcome, and if shouting about thieves produced a significantly different outcome to shouting about other things, then this would be good evidence in support of the hypothesis. However, if shouting didn't affect the outcome, this wouldn't help to disprove the hypotheses because there is a vacuum between the Earth and the Moon and sound doesn't carry in a vacuum. The old lady might have cybertronic ears, but then again she might be deaf.

C - Finding or not finding coins doesn't really help us much. If there are coins, it could mean that the old lady has outwitted the thieves, or that the thieves thought it would be unlucky to take all the coins, or that there aren't any thieves. If there are no coins, it could mean we are looking in the wrong place, or it is the wrong time of the month, or Fred Goodwin's got them.

D - Fingerprints. Same as coins. By the way, are we looking for fingerprints on the coins, or fingerprints on the cloak?

I suspect that any child who really understands science and the scientific method will waste more time on this question than a child who hasn't a clue. So this isn't just dumbing down, it is levelling down.

Thinking with the Majority

2009-03-14T11:53:00.001Z

A.A. Milne "wrote somewhere once that the third-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking". (War with Honour)

I wrote somewhere once that "thinking with the majority" is an excellent description of Google.

'The suggested improvements (in Google) are just great for those people who want to ask the same questions as everyone else, and get the same answers. Google rankings already depend on the clicks of previous websurfers, and this dependency will become more sophisticated. Google will therefore support, with ever-greater efficiency and effectiveness, an intellectual activity characterized by A.A. Milne (author of Winnie-The-Pooh) as "Thinking with the Majority". '

And as Titus-Armand points out, it is also a good description for

'reliance upon authority in which the “authority figure” is represented by the entire population rather than a single individual or a particular group'.

What about thinking with the minority? There is a popular meme known as "thinking the unthinkable", and I think this is what the third-class mind supposes the second-class mind to be doing.

If you are one of those who are happiest when thinking, please subscribe to this blog and also follow me on Twitter.

Update: within a few minutes of this item's being syndicated on Twitter, Al Chou reminds me of a related quote: "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." Was it Churchill or William James? The authority of the majority (aka Google) prefers the latter; who am I to argue?

Learning from Experience

2009-03-02T09:35:00.000Z

Under the heading Big Fish Eat Little Fish, Dave Snowden posts a series of photos, telling a visual story with a dramatic conclusion. (Go on, look at the story, I can wait here until you come back.)

An obvious lesson to draw from this story is one about learning from experience.

However, there is a further twist: the final photo in the series turns out to be faked. (There is further explanation of this on Snopes.)

In addition to learning from experience, another lesson we could draw from this story is to be a little wary of situations whose narrative structure is too good. (When there are forces within a story that make us so want it to be true, maybe that's the time to switch logical levels.)

But of course, even if the story is part-fiction, that doesn't stop us learning from it. We do need to learn from experience, and experience includes fiction. The story is therefore True (at some level) because it is Relevant and Meaningful.

Dead Cert

2008-11-07T12:00:00.000Z

BBC Radio Four broadcast an excellent programme on political doubt and certainty last night.

"Doubt seems a dangerous thing in politics. If possible, you don't admit it; not about your values, nor your analysis, nor the policies that will magically bring about the change that you are certain is needed. Confidence, by contrast, thrives: confidence in the power of our own analysis, of who is to blame and why, the strident confidence of politicians or business people in their preferred remedies. In this edition of Analysis, Michael Blastland asks whether these common assumptions might actually have their own dangers."

The programme will be repeated on Sunday 9th November at 21.30 GMT; podcast and transcript are available from the programme website for limited period only.

I shall post a review later.

You don't have to be smart to search here ...

2008-11-07T09:25:00.000Z

... but it helps.

I'm prompted to write this post by a throwaway remark from David McCoy, in a post on election statistics: "You don’t have to be smart to search nowadays - all you have to do is enter the key snippet."

Ah, but how do you find the key snippet?

My son had a school essay to write comparing two films, so we thought it would be worth looking on the internet to find some analysis. But if you just search for the names of the films, you just get endless cinema listings and DVD sales, plus a few fairly superficial newspaper cuttings.

So we tried another tack. Who are the key figures (film theory, media studies, sociology) that might be name-dropped in a serious essay? Let's start with Lacan.

When we added "Lacan" to the name of one of the films, the search engine suddenly unearthed an entirely different set of web pages, including a bunch of blogs apparently created as part of a high school project (sixth-form) and talking about a set of related films including the two we were interested in. Could we have found these blogs any other way?

Okay I admit it, my son hasn't read Lacan, hadn't even heard of him, but he had a bit of parental help. The point I'm making here is that sometimes the more knowledge you can put into the search, the more useful the results.

Even Microsoft sometimes misses important stuff when it searches the internet - for example when checking a brand name. See my post on Google and Longhorn.

Internet search looks rather like a P v NP problem. It's fine for checking unoriginality: for example, if the teacher suspects a student of plagiarism, she can put a suspiciously well-phrased sentence into an internet search engine and confirm that the sentence is not original. It is also fine for finding well-structured material: if you want to check Missouri voting statistics, you can probably find something relevant. But if you want to find an unusual thought, you will have to find an unusual combination of search terms.

You do have to be smart to search here.

Confirmation Bias

2008-09-14T09:40:00.000+01:00

Adam Shostack has a couple of posts on Confirmation Bias. I've added some comments on Adam's blog; here's a digest of the discussion.

Things Only An Astrologist Could Believe

Adam picks up an astrological analysis of a recent action by Google: apparently the timing of the Chrome release was astrologically auspicious.

Vedic Astrologer: "Such a choice of excellent Muhurta with Chrome release time may be coincidental, but it makes us strongly believe that Google may not have hesitated to utilize the valuable knowledge available in Vedic Astrology in decision making."

Adam: "This is a beautiful example of confirmation bias at work. Confirmation bias is when you believe something (say, Vedic astrology) and go looking for confirmation. This doesn't advance your knowledge in any way. You need to look for contradictory evidence. For example, if you think Google is using Vedic astrology, they have a decade of product launches with some obvious successes. Test the idea. I strongly believe that you haven't."

Myself: "What our Vedic friend is actually telling us is that Google "may not have hesitated" in its use of Vedic astrology. To be honest, I also find it hard to believe that Google executives sat around dithering about whether to use Vedic astrology or not."

In further comments, the Vedic astrologer argues that the astrological method is no different from other forms of observational science, using the scientific method, which requires the prediction of future results.

Hypothesis: The sun comes up every 24 hrs.
Method: I will time when the sun crosses the horizon.
Results: I successfully predicted 50 sunrises with a 100% degree of accuracy. This is further evidence that my hypothesis is correct.
Caveat: Although, I note that since 24 hrs is the period between sunrises by definition of a day, this is circular.

Actually, the statement that the sun rises exactly in 24 hour intervals is only believable if you live near the equator and you know nothing about astronomy, or if you adopt a solar method for measuring the length of an hour.

What confuses me about the hypothesis posed by our Vedic friend is whether he is trying to predict the decision-making behaviour of Google executives or the successful outcome of their decisions. Even if Google executives are making auspicious decisions, this could be "explained" either by the fact that they are employing the services of an astrologer, or by the fact that Google happens to have good (= astrologically blessed) executives. Or something.

(See my post Does Fortune-Telling Work?)

More on Confirmation Bias

According to an old article by Michael Shermer in the Scientific American [The Political Brain, June 2006], "a recent brain-imaging study shows that our political predilections are a product of unconscious confirmation bias". Devan Desai concludes that "hardcore left-wing and hardcore right-wing folks don’t process new data".

When I first read that line about "hardcore left-wing and hardcore right-wing folks" quoted in Adam's blog I assumed it was talking about serious extremists - communists and neoNazis. Turns out it was just looking at people with strong Democrat or Republican affiliation. Maybe any party affiliation at all seems pretty hardcore to some people.

As far as I can see, the study only actually looked at people with strong political opinions, and didn't compare them with any control group. Like, er, the middle-of-the-road folks who fund and write up this kind of research.

I wonder whether anyone would get research funding or wide publicity for exploring the converse hypothesis - that people with strong political opinions are actually relatively open-minded, and that the people who have the most entrenched opinions are the bureaucrats who staff the research funding bodies and the people who write popular articles for Scientific American.

(Of course I'm jumping to conclusions myself here, that's what bloggers do isn't it?)

I'm not saying I believe that bigots are more open-minded than wishy-washy middle-of-the-roaders. I'm just saying we need to be mistrustful of studies that are designed to confirm the prejudices of the researchers, and suspicious of people who latch onto these studies to prove a point. The problem is that there may be confirmation bias built into the way these kind of pseudo-scientific studies are funded, organized and then publicized. Not surprising then if "the FMRI findings merely demonstrate what many of us already knew".

As director of the Skeptics Society, Michael Shermer latches onto a study showing that people are biased. Shermer himself has a particular set of bugbears, including evolutionary psychology, alien abductions, prayer and healing, and alternative medicine. Are we really to imagine that he approaches any of these topics with a truly open mind? And why should he anyway? The rest of us don't.

Peer Review

2008-08-04T23:29:00.000+01:00

Tonight's Science programme on BBC Radio 4 was critical of the peer review process, in which scientific articles are filtered for publication according to the comments of other researchers in the same field. [Peer Review in the Dock, 4 August 2008]

The purpose of peer review is to give us confidence in the quality of published scientific research. Like many other social institutions, it has well-known weaknesses as well as strengths. [BBC News, Science will stick with peer review]

I have often been asked to provide peer reviews on articles for journals and conferences. Sometimes I find I know much more about the subject of the article than the authors, or at least some aspects of the subject. Even when my knowledge is less, I can usually find some areas of weakness or confusion in the article, demanding (in my opinion) either a significant re-write or complete rejection.

Having gone to the trouble to provide these reviews, I used to be shocked when I discovered that papers sometimes slipped through to publication without the identified flaws being adequately corrected. Experienced authors (or their supervisors) know how to game the system, and most journals and conferences simply don't have the resources to prevent these games. Some years ago I wrote a critique of this process and identified a number of negative patterns [Review Patterns].

The BBC programme this evening identified several more, including the "famous institution" bias and the "publication" bias. The latter is particularly important for research that involves sophisticated statistics (such as medical research), because if only publishable data are included in the analysis, then the publication criteria may themselves distort the findings. The publication bias also affects the opinions of so-called experts, whose assumptions will have been reinforced by the papers they have read.

URL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/cx6wbv

Memory and the Law

2008-06-17T17:32:00.000+01:00

Rebecca Fordham writes:

"Many experts are challenging the view that eyewitnesses recounting what they saw is the best way of tapping their memory. Some think brain scans could be the way forward." [Memory Mixup, BBC News Magazine, 17 June 2008]

We already have technology that is supposed to detect discrepancies between what the witness remembers and what the witness says - it's called a polygraph or lie detector. Now we apparently need another technology that detects discrepancies between what the witness consciously remembers and what is buried in the witness's unconscious.

The lie detector has been controversial ever since its invention, and features in a Chesterton story called "The Mistake of the Machine". (Of course it is not the machine that makes the mistake, as Chesterton's hero Father Brown points out, but the people using the machine who misinterpret its output.)

Chesterton and Friends: Lie Detectors
David Wallace-Wells: The Big Lie (Washington Monthly, April 2007), via AntiPolygraph.org

Of course humans sometimes lie, and sometimes this can be detected by the polygraph, but that doesn't make the polygraph an instrument of truth. (For that matter, people sometimes blurt out secrets under the influence of alcohol or torture, or get artistic inspiration under the influence of mind-bending drugs, but none of these are reliable instruments of truth either.)

And human memory is sometimes unreliable, but that doesn't make the brain scan an instrument of truth either. Constructing evidence from the unconscious contents of a brain is no more reliable than constructing history from an archaeological sift through a mediaeval rubbish tip. It may be possible, and may yield some intriguing results, but the results are always speculative and uncertain.

Meanwhile, our "common sense" understanding of the brain and its contents is probably less accurate and less coherent than our understanding of mediaeval waste disposal. That's why psychoanalysts make more money than archaeologists. They do, don't they?

Update

"India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine." [Source: New York Times, via Bruce Schneier]

Solitary Thinking

2007-11-30T15:33:00.000Z

Hackers get busted. Dan Cvrcek raises a very interesting question about the flaws in thinking committed when bright people try to solve problems in isolation.

Science and Censorship

2006-06-20T19:46:00.000+01:00

Dark materials. Nuclear scientist Joseph Rotblat campaigned against the atom bomb he had helped unleash. Is it time for today's cyber scientists to heed his legacy?

"There is an ever-widening gap between what science allows, and what we should actually do. There are many doors science can open that should be kept closed, on prudential or ethical grounds. Choices on how science is applied should not be made just by scientists."

Essay by Martin Rees
President of the Royal Society
[Guardian, Saturday June 10, 2006]

We cannot allow the terrorists to terrorise us. Scientific research shouldn't be halted simply because it might fall into the wrong hands.

"The scientist's job is to shine light in the darkness, and if we occasionally burn our fingers on the candle, so be it. Lord Rees can choose the darkness if he wants. I'm not going to."

Response by Ross Anderson
Chair of the Foundation for Information Policy Research
[Guardian, Tuesday June 20, 2006]

I am uneasy about both sides of this debate. Should science be restrained - either by scientists or by society. Do politicians represent the interests of society, or is there a better and more democratic way for society's interests to be represented?

The fact is that science is already restrained by all sorts of social and commercial forces - above all the willingness to fund particular kinds of research and not others. The choice is not simply between a risk-averse establishment (represented by the Royal Society) and a risk-seeking free-thinking radical alternative (represented by the Foundation).

Of course Anderson is right to be wary of the distorted perceptions of risk by politicians and the non-scientific public. But the proper response to this is a properly constituted debate. Meanwhile, politicians will often seek stupid measures to use and abuse scientists.

As I reported last year (Research Under Fire), scientists and engineers at the University of Berkeley are wary of academic restrictions imposed by the US Federal Government in the name of national security. Thankfully this isn't the kind of restraint Rees is advocating.

Technorati Tags: censorship research science

A reasonable percentage (3)

2006-06-09T22:46:00.000+01:00

One piece of intelligence was accurate.

A man described as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's "spiritual adviser" inadvertently led US forces to the spot where the militant leader was finally located and killed, the US military says.

Major General William Caldwell said the operation to track down the most wanted man in Iraq was carried out over many weeks, before he was killed after two US air force F-16s bombed a house in a village north of Baghdad.

"The strike last night did not occur in a 24-hour period. It truly was a very long, painstaking deliberate exploitation of intelligence, information gathering, human sources, electronic, signal intelligence that was done over a period of time - many, many weeks," Gen Caldwell said on Thursday.

[BBC News]

One piece of intelligence was flawed.

Anti-terror police raided a house at Forest Gate last week after saying they received "specific intelligence" that a chemical device might be found there.

Scotland Yard later said they had "no choice" but to act while the prime minister said it was essential officers took action if they received "reasonable" intelligence suggesting a terror attack.

Tony Blair said he backed the police and security services 101% and he refused to be drawn on suggestions that the armed operation had been a failure.

[BBC News]

It's a reasonable percentage. (Previous posts: April 9th, April 18th.)

But that's part of the problem with intelligence - it delivers probability rather than certainty. Perhaps the outcomes are the right way around this time - the presumed-guilty man was killed, and the presumed-innocent man merely injured. (So we shouldn't complain, should we? Imagine the complaints if it had been the other way around!)

But over the long run, are there too many errors? (Difficult to tell, as we only know of some of the better publicized successes and failures.) Should we be uneasy about the errors of intelligence, and the consequences of acting upon erroneous intelligence? There are fundamental questions here about the relationship between knowledge (or ignorance) and action (or inaction).

Conflicting Opinions

2006-05-26T17:20:00.000+01:00

Disagreements are unsettling. In a stable world, we like our experts to provide simple and authoritative truth.

Science isn't really supposed to work like that. Science should be constantly open to new discoveries, and new interpretations and explanations of old discoveries. [Kant, Peirce] Science is supposed to work with conjectures, proofs, refutations and paradigm shifts. [Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend] These are essentially architectural notions. [See my earlier post on Open Architecture]

But the institutions and bureaucracies of science don't conform to this stereotype. There is a closed loop of research funding and journal publication, based on so-called peer review. In a recent report the Royal Society, Britain's most prestigious scientific club, deplores the popular media coverage of science and calls upon scientists to exercise greater self-restraint in publicizing findings that have not undergone the proper peer review process. [Source: John Kay, Financial Times, May 22, 2006]

As John Kay argues, this is essentially an appeal for scientists to be dull and boring. Peer review is inward looking, inhibits new and radical ideas, and serves as a kind of professional censorship. He concludes

"Any form of censorship, including self-censorship and censorship by fellow professionals, encourages complacency and discourages innovation. The history of modern scholarship is that, more slowly than we would wish, truth and new knowledge emerge only from a cacophony of conflicting opinions."

Technorati Tags: architecture Kant knowledge open Peirce uncertainty

A reasonable percentage (2)

2006-04-18T18:14:00.000+01:00

"It seems like every time someone tests airport security, airport security fails. In tests between November 2001 and February 2002, screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns, and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. And recently, testers were able to smuggle bomb-making parts through airport security in 21 of 21 attempts."

[Bruce Schneier]

If security finds nearly half the bombs, does that count as success or failure? (Glass half-full or half-empty?) Schneier reckons it's probably good enough, and points out: "Against the professionals, we're just trying to add enough uncertainty into the system that they'll choose other targets instead."

"Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned."

[Saint Augustine]

"One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It's a reasonable percentage."

[Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot]

A reasonable percentage

2006-04-09T00:49:00.000+01:00

"Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned."

[Saint Augustine]

"One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It's a reasonable percentage."

[Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot]

One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett (whose centenary falls in a few days time) had a deep interest and understanding of the topic of knowledge and uncertainty.

In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir speculates on the possibility of redemption. He starts with the story told by Saint Luke and used by Saint Augustine - that one of the two sinners crucified with Jesus was forgiven. It's a reasonable percentage.

So which of the two characters will be saved: Vladimir or Estragon? (In some interpretations, Vladimir represents the intellectual side of man, while Estragon represents the physical.) Does Vladimir's knowledge of the Bible improve his chances, or his determination to survive? Does his speculative thinking result in presumption or despair?

Vladimir then introduces another degree of uncertainty. Only Saint Luke tells this story about the two sinners. One gospel tells a conflicting story (both were damned), and the other two omit the story altogether. So the uncertainty - the reasonable percentage - is itself based on uncertain information, from contradictory sources.

And what about Beckett himself? Many Christian preachers discuss St Augustine's principle, and often refer to Beckett in passing. For example, Richard Harries (Bishop of Oxford). Meanwhile, Gatsinzi Basaninyenzi regards Godot as an anti-Christian text (largely on the assumption that Godot is supposed to represent God), and provides detailed advice on how to teach such a text from a Christian perspective. Do not presume, do not despair.

Beckett himself repudiated the simple equation of Godot with God. "If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot."

So we have three types of uncertainty here - uncertainty of outcome (one of the thieves was saved), uncertainty of knowledge (only one of the Evangelists tells this story), and uncertainty of meaning (what exactly does Godot represent anyway). Enough to be going on with?

Further material: Champion of Ambiguity (Terry Eagleton), Godot Almighty (Peter Hall), Godot Almighty (Simon Callow).

Dilbert on Intelligent Design

2005-11-12T11:46:00.000Z

Interesting post by Dilbert on Intelligent Design, which raises some interesting questions of Knowledge and Trust.

He makes the following points.

1. The arguments for Darwinism (and intellectual defences against the "flaws" identified by the Intelligent Design and Creation folk) are complex.

2. Belief in Darwinism depends on trusting the vast majority of scientists working in the field.

3. However, the scientific field relevant to Darwinism is compartmentalized. Scientists are required to trust evidence from other specialisms and disciplines. We are not just talking about non-scientists trusting scientists, but scientists trusting other scientists.

4. Therefore the entire scientific edifice of Darwinism is based on inter-disciplinary trust.

5. If the institution of science is anything like the organizations that Dilbert has made a fortune analysing and drawing, then we have to take seriously the possibility that they've all got it completely wrong.

Of course, the possibility that science has got things completely wrong has been explored by philosophers of science such as Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend. But Dilbert is pointing to a new angle on this - the institutional mechanisms (familiar in large organizations) that permit lots of small bits of evidence to be accumulated and amplified into false knowledge.

Dilbert is making a profound point about the way knowledge is composed from lots of bits of evidence. If much of this evidence is stronger when seen from a distance, and weaker when examined closely, this seems to call the whole body of knowledge into question. (Dilbert doesn't go into the recursive loops of analysis and interpretation, where the evaluation and interpretation of any piece of evidence depends on lots of prior knowledge from elsewhere - on what Bruno Latour calls Black Boxes. But this would add to his argument.)

What Dilbert is rejecting is the theory of repetition, whereby if you repeat something often enough it becomes true, or if you get enough bits of weak evidence from different sources, it becomes strong evidence. This is a theory that is embedded in the way that lots of organizations behave, and in the way that a lot of computer systems produce so-called "business intelligence". Dilbert is all-too-familiar with the ways in which false knowledge can emerge (or should I say evolve?) in complex social settings.

Technorati Tags: Darwin Dilbert knowledge science trust

Innocence or Ignorance

2005-10-26T21:27:00.000+01:00

“The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good deed by proxy, and to find it out by accident.” (with apologies to Lamb)

In 1987, the supposedly most powerful man in the world, a former radio sports commentator called Ronald Reagan, was forced to regain his credibility with the American people by claiming ignorance of a complex deal, cooked up by members of his administration.

Codenamed Irangate, the deal was to sell arms to self-styled moderates inside Iran, obtain the release of hostages in Beirut, and to pass the profits to the fighters of freedom in Central America. That does not concern us here. What does concern us is the profession of ignorance, and the advantages of it. Why does Reagan (who claims he knew nothing, or perhaps forgot) do better than Nixon (whose behaviour revealed his knowledge) ? What are the implications of knowing, or not knowing ?

See previous posts on Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.

There are two words in English for not knowing. The word innocent comes from the Latin and, perhaps because of its association with the Roman Catholic Church, is regarded as synonymous with moral purity. Knowledge compromises purity, knowledge is dangerous - witness the Fall of Adam. Thus innocence is usually a word of praise, within a system of values that deplores all knowledge but that of God.

The other word ignorance comes from the Greek, within the Renaissance system of values on which the modern notions of education and scientific humanism are founded. Knowledge is noble, knowledge is power. Thus ignorance is usually a degrading word.

The romantics were ambivalent. Goethe recreated the figure of Faust, to explore the implications of knowing too much. (This story was rewritten for the screen by the feminist wife of a romantic poet; she called her version Frankenstein.)

“I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.” [Oscar Wilde]

Power through knowledge, versus power through ignorance. The ability to have one's wishes carried out without one knowing, or needing to know. The best known example of this: the assassination of Beckett. Power through ignorance - is this not paradoxical ?

“ ‘Knowledge is power’ is a misleading slogan. Knowledge may well be important to the maintenance of power, but that does not mean that the knowledgeable are powerful.” [David Lyon, The Information Society (Cambridge, Polity Press/Basil Blackwell, 1988) p 62]

Nor that the powerful are themselves knowledgeable.

Indeterminacy

2005-09-16T14:33:00.000+01:00

Robin Wilton uses quantum mechanics to explain the behaviour of politicians under stress. He supports this idea with an analysis of a radio interview with Tony Blair, which was broadcast this morning on the BBC. (I didn't hear the interview, so I cannot comment on the accuracy or fairness of his analysis.)

But I think there is an important difference. On Robin's theory, the behaviour of politicians is overdetermined, closed. For example, once you have got consistent and succinct, you cannot also have logical. This is the very opposite of quantum mechanics, where the state of a subatomic particle is underdetermined, open.

People under stress are often unable to tolerate certain types of uncertainty and risk - they become uptight, clinging pathetically to a few would-be certainties. People in leadership positions are particularly determined to appear determined. Politicians (at least in public) appear to be in this overdetermined state most of the time.

Technorati Tags: indeterminacy leadership politics quantum mechanics stress uncertainty

Kevin Kelly

2005-09-16T10:57:00.000+01:00

Kevin Kelly is one of my favourite writers on modern technology. He wrote a great book some years ago about distributed intelligence, called Out of Control. (Required reading for those acting in The Matrix, apparently.)

KK maintains a Help Wanted website, where he asks readers to provide input to his ongoing projects. Previous requests have generated loads of comments.

On September 9th 2005, KK posted 34 new questions. These questions appear to be of a different logical type to his previous questions, and no comments have been posted yet. Perhaps this new collection leaves people baffled. Here are the first seven questions.

1	Point north	Point north
2	Sunset	What time is sunset today?
3	Drinking water	Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.
4	Sewage	When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?
5	Sea level	How many feet above sea level are you?
6	Spring wildflowers	What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?
7	Nearest watershed	How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours?

Reading the whole list of questions, I found myself paying attention not to the different content of each question, but to the shared characteristics of the list as a whole. What do these questions have in common, what is the possible purpose of asking questions like these? Understanding the purpose of the question allows us to judge what would count as a useful answer.

If you tell me that "Sunset today is at 6:45", I can use this information in at least two ways. The first is that if I'm in the same place as you, I know when my sunset is going to be. The second is that I should be able to calculate where you live (or rather a set of points where you might live). But does KK want either of these, or is he after something else entirely?

The juxtaposition of the questions changes the way they are read. KK is acting as the curator of an exhibition, hanging 34 questions in some perhaps carefully chosen sequence on the white walls of his blog.

All of the questions appear to be particular, grounded, local rather than global. So answering the question calls for a different kind of knowledge - know-how rather than know-what.

My hunch is that KK doesn't want an answer like "sunset today is at 6:45". He wants an answer like "I look this up every day in the local paper" or "I watch the behaviour of the birds as dusk approaches." He wants to see how many different ways people may have of grounding themselves in their locality, and perhaps also how many ways they have of failing to ground themselves.

For some of the questions in KK's collection, the particularity in the question is a little weaker. For example, question 4 could be answered in a rather generalized way, about sewage systems in general, rather than the particular sewage system connected to my house. But it would still be less than universal; and if you want to produce a general answer instead of a particular answer, you ought to think about places that don't have sewage systems of that kind, or places like New Orleans where the sewage systems are currently broken.

Of course, these are the kind of questions that many people don't know the answers to, wouldn't how to find out, and would probably say it doesn't really matter anyway. Reading the list made me aware how little I know about my own lived environment. (But in my defence I could draw up a different list of questions, based on those aspects of the environment that I do pay attention to.)

Does it matter? Well, if you live (or lived) in New Orleans, some of KK's questions may now seem rather more important than they did a month ago.

Technorati Tags: environment Hurricane Katrina know-how knowledge presence New Orleans

Update Sept 22

A number of comments have now appeared. Many of the answers offer know-how rather than kn0w-that. Among the know-that answers, most of them are pretty useless because they don't locate themselves (perhaps deliberately reflecting the ambiguous context of the question). Some people seem to have regarded the whole thing as some kind of test, focusing their answer not on the question, or how to answer it, but on themselves - their possession of knowledge and ability. I look forward to seeing how KK uses this material.

Shifting Standards

2005-09-08T02:23:00.000+01:00

Bruce Schneier blogs about a retrospective drug test for athlete Lance Armstrong. It seems that blood samples are kept for many years, and may be subject to new tests.

"Athletes considering using banned substances [not only] have to evade any tests that exist today, [but also] have to at least think about how they could evade any tests that might be invented in the future."

Bruce suggests athletes need escrow blood samples, to defend themselves against retrospective charges.

Retrospective tests introduce new modes of risk and uncertainty for athletes. Not only new tests as Bruce indicates, but possibly also new interpretations of the regulations, based on shifting expert opinion from scientists and lawyers. (Does chemical substance X2 invented at time T2 and detected in a blood sample taken at time T3 count as banned under a regulation enacted at earlier time T1, which refers to an almost identical substance X1, if a reliable test to discriminate between X1 and X2 wasn't perfected until a later time T4, and X2 itself wasn't explicitly banned until T5? Complicated, huh?)

An older and long-established athlete may have access to more expensive ways of cheating, as well as a greater incentive to cheat as athletic prowess starts to wane. Meanwhile the direct cost of being detected (in terms of suspension from further competition) reduces to zero as the athletic career comes to an end. Retrospective testing may increase the chance of detection, but it also increases the average delay between transgression and detection. So we might expect retrospective testing to amplify the age imbalance: greater compliance from younger athletes, and lesser compliance from older ones.

Meanwhile, crime writer Patricia Cornwall has a theory (Portrait of a Killer) about the identity of Jack the Ripper, based partly on DNA evidence. (Nineteenth century crime subject to twentieth century forensics.) So do we also need to think of escrow DNA, to deal with posthumous allegations of crime or paternity?

[Update] Bruce Schneier adds some useful game theoretic analysis to his earlier post, prompted by dope-testing of Floyd Landis.

Technorati Tags: escrow forensic regulation risk uncertainty

Open Architecture

2005-07-03T01:06:00.000+01:00

Philosophers from Kant to Peirce have discussed the structure of knowledge in terms of architecture.

Peter Lindberg (Tesugen) finds some interesting data to support this.

Quotes from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (first published 1781, via Amazon)
José Ferrater Mora, Peirce's Conception of Architectonic and Related Views (first published 1955)

In these quotes, Kant identifies some characteristic functions of human reason and science:

Human reason regards knowledge as belonging to a possible system.
It therefore allows only such principles as do not at any rate make it impossible for any knowledge that we may attain to combine into a system with other knowledge.
Science is architectonic, in that it makes a system out of a mere aggregate of knowledge

Kant presents our knowledge system as an open system - we are (or at least should be) always open to new knowledge that may trigger us to reconsider and reconfigure the knowledge we already have. This was a radical idea for Kant's time. Previous philosophers saw knowledge in terms of recovery (restoring what had been lost) and accumulation (adding to the sum of what was already known) - in other words, knowledge as a closed system.

Open-mindedness may be either an individual characteristic or a collective one. A person or an organization can be open or closed to new ideas and information, and can be tolerant or intolerant of uncertainty.

We can observe many settings where knowledge and uncertainty seem fragmented and brittle, and where they seem strongly resistant to reevaluation and change. In such settings, there is often a strong drive to add more knowledge, with more detail and precision, and yet the extra knowledge fails to have any useful effect.

Kant invites us to pay attention to the architecture (or architectonics) of knowledge - how knowledge is composed and decomposed. Equally, we must pay attention to the architecture of uncertainty - how uncertainty is composed and decomposed. This may often be the best route to opening up an organization to innovation and positive change.

Technorati Tags: architecture Kant knowledge open Peirce uncertainty

Classification

2005-06-20T00:59:00.000+01:00

James Governor posts an interesting conclusion from a post from Joho the Blog.

Formal taxonomy is a function of scarcity: not of the resources being classified, but of the resources to classify them.

I think there is a further conclusion. The structure of the taxonomy reflects the structure of the social process that creates the taxonomy. So if you have a formal taxonomy produced by a single authority (such as the great Linnaeus himself), you can expect a hierarchy (for some of the reasons explained by Herbert Simon). If you have an informal tagsonomy produced by a heterogeneous network - surprise, surprise - you get a network.

Shifting attention from the end-product to the process often yields new insights. (It's the opposite of reification - I call it ratification.)

The process of classification is in two halves. One half is attaching tags - the other half is using them. There is no point optimizing one half (against a given landscape of available resources) if the other half is impossible or seriously flawed.

Where knowledge is scarce the first half is centralized. One great biologist creates the taxonomy, an elite of followers maintain it (with content additions, but no significant structural changes), and everyone else just uses it. Under certain conditions, using a hierarchical taxonomy is much the simplest and requires the least thought. (Everything YOU need to know is on a single page - if it's not on that page, YOU don't need to know it.)

On the Internet, there is loads of knowledge, but with a vast quality range. Countless classification schemes are invented, presumably most of them meaningful to their creators. The challenge is in using these schemes.

At the present state-of-the-art, I find the usefulness of other people's tags patchy. It helps if I can broadly identify the tagger - is this someone for whom the tag "CA" is likely to mean Computer Associates rather than California or Canada? No doubt the software boffins are working on some clever bit of software that can perform this kind of semantic analysis.

And with sufficiently clever software, all the semantic problems of knowledge and classification will be solved. The Google, the Whole Google, and Nothing But the Google. Igor Palmer and Kingsley Idehen point out some of the flaws of what they call "The World Wide Web of Junk". In my previous analysis on Google, I argued that Perfect Googling gets ever closer to what A.A. Milne called Thinking With the Majority.

Update: Fiona Leslie has just posted some interesting comments on the panlibus blog about tagging the taggers: Tag - You're It! She also reviews Yahoo's new social search. Meanwhile Jackson Miller is sceptical about the new HonorTags proposal.

Update [July 2006]: Seth Godin applauds the fact that the Internet "reorganizes the scattered threads of discourse, creating a few (instead of a million or a billion) reading lists" and says "this satisfies a basic human need ... to do what others are doing, to read what others are reading". But as A.A. Milne wrote, it is the third-class mind that is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. Surely Seth and his readers would not wish to be so characterized?

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Other Technorati Tags: classification knowledge tags taxonomy Yahoo

Off-Label as Samizdat

2005-03-16T15:50:00.000Z

In a pharmaceutical context, Off-Label refers to uses of drugs drugs being used in ways that are not approved by the regulators and cannot therefore be printed on the product label or officially promoted by the drug company. More generally, it refers to any unauthorized or emergent use of a product or service. In this blog posting, I shall explore the implications of off-label for knowledge management.

Robert Stern describes some of the difficulties involved in disseminating Off-Label research data. There are clearly some potential conflicts of interest, and doubtless sometimes there is natural suspicion of the motives of the drug companies. However, the result is that data describing the behaviour of certain drugs in certain contexts are not available.

This means that many good uses of drugs may be suppressed by regulators, or self-censored by drug companies in order to get speedy approval. In a separate post, Robert Stern quotes a physician as saying "Often the drug companies will under-dose their labeling to get it through the FDA." So does the physician have some other way of finding out an appropriate dose, or is it all done by trial and error?

If the official channels are blocked, how does the medical community share practical knowledge about Off-Label. Is this all done by unofficial samizdat and word-of-mouth?

There is a newsletter for sceptical patients called What Doctors Don't Tell You. Perhaps there should be, if there isn't already, a newsletter for doctors called What Drug Companies Don't Tell You.

Safe is Risky

2005-01-04T01:20:00.000Z

Seth Godin markets the slogan Safe is Risky. Presumably the converse slogan also applies: Risky is Safe.

Seth's latest example is of a book launched on Amazon before the US election, which predicted the result. Of course, a clever but cautious journalist could write two different books before the election, with two different titles. If one of the books was a best-seller, it wouldn't matter that the other was a flop. If this is risk, it looks like a pretty safe kind of risk.

Meanwhile military thinkers such as David Alberts are adopting new modes of decision-making in relation to risk. Here is a brief summary of one aspect of this, posted by USN LDO (Ret).

The old way (conventional way) of decision-making… waiting to gather the maximum amount of information (intelligence) possible, minimizing (or what you think is minimizing) risk, and focusing on (more like worrying about) the unknowns (instead of focusing on what you do know).

Instead, we should make decisions rapidly (with “relative” speed) focusing on what is known in order to cease the initiative and disrupt (get into) the enemy’s decision cycle.

Several brilliant and thought-provoking works by Alberts are available free from the DODCCP website.

Update: I have removed the link to the Military Transformation blog, formerly maintained by USN LDO (Ret), because the domain appears to have been captured by someone else. I remain grateful to USN LDO (Ret) for introducing me to Alberts, but I am now a little embarrassed that I reproduced his rather clumsy and mis-spelled summary, rather than taking the trouble to write one myself. My apologies to racingsnake, and to Alberts himself.

Workflow Learning

2004-09-13T01:31:00.000+01:00

Jay Cross of the Workflow Institute raves about the component-based business (the subject of my 2001 book), which he calls a Business Singularity. He identifies some interesting consequences for what he calls Workflow Learning.

Workers are learning in small chunks delivered to individualized screens presented at the time of need. Learning is being transformed into a core business process measured by Key Performance Indicators.

This prospect raises interesting questions for what we might call the Architecture of Knowledge. If workers learn in small chunks, how can these chunks be assembled into a coherent body of knowledge? How does the way the work is decomposed between workers affect the learnings that are accessible to them?

In response to Jay's comment

Doesn't the underlying Business Process Management and Business Rules structure the KM as much as needed? The work itself lends the coherence, but some external taxonomy.

In my view, the structure provided by the Business Process Management and Business Rules is usually either underdetermined or overdetermined. The chunk is polymorphic, and takes on a different meaning according to the context in which it is framed.

Just because the workers digest chunks doesn't mean the chunks aren't part of a larger entity.

Indeed they may be part of a larger entity, but this doesn't happen by magic.

Think about the way a film director puts together a film. The actors may not know how their scene fits into the whole until they see the final cut. (Indeed, some directors deliberately leave their actors in the dark during the shoot.) Or think about the way a composer/arranger puts together strands of music. Composition/orchestration/editing is a skilled process, which the actors/musicians cannot always second-guess.

So if the work is distributed - perhaps across different organizations and locations - there is no guarantee that the coherence of the work is visible to the individual worker. Indeed, the composition of business processes out of services is one of the key challenges of the service economy. The point I was making here is that this composition also applies at the level of knowledge management and learning; and the possible fragmentation of knowledge is a serious issue.

More on this in my SOAPbox blog.