// Below was a comment then went on for too long, in response to a conversation sprawled out across a few threads on G+, in response to Jon Lawhead’s criticisms of Judith Butler in light of having recently received the Adorno Prize. Of course I agree with you, Jon, that packaging matters; my argument is that this fact alone doesn’t give much direction for evaluating some particular packaging. The only justification offered in defense of your objections has been admittedly grounded on pure ignorance, which is clearly not suitable ground for drawing policy or funding decisions. If all it took to convince you of the worthlessness of some text is a single rambling or incoherent sentence, then virtually all of science and literature would go down the drain. A few days ago I was struggling with the math in a paper, and John Baez helped me parse it, while still admitting some important notational (that is, packaging) difficulties.Sometimes you have to scavange for the good bits of knowledge, and it isn’t always easy. Your complaints about Butler’s packaging go no deeper than to show that you aren’t willing to do the work to harvest from the results. Its reasonable enough to want others to do it for you, or at least tell you why its important, but when they do by awarding her a prize for the work, you complain that the prize is illegitimate. Its a completely failed position. The fact that you (and your communities) don’t find the packaging useful (yet) doesn’t mean that other communities haven’t found a use where the work has importance and possibly foundational meaning. Human brains aren’t particular good at thinking clearly, but they are really damn good at doing the best they can with what they have available, and then making that […]

// First a quote, then a rant below. This quote comes from the Christof Koch interview in the Atlantic > The Internet now already has a couple of billion nodes. Each node is a computer. Each one of these computers contains a couple of billion transistors, so it is in principle possible that the complexity of the Internet is such that it feels like something to be conscious. I mean, that’s what it would be if the Internet as a whole has consciousness. Depending on the exact state of the transistors in the Internet, it might feel sad one day and happy another day, or whatever the equivalent is in Internet space. > You’re serious about using these words? The Internet could feel sad or happy? > Koch: What I’m serious about is that the Internet, in principle, could have conscious states. Now, do these conscious states express happiness? Do they express pain? Pleasure? Anger? Red? Blue? That really depends on the exact kind of relationship between the transistors, the nodes, the computers. It’s more difficult to ascertain what exactly it feels. But there’s no question that in principle it could feel something. This is incredibly sloppy work. It just won’t do for any kind of serious analysis. First of all, the fact that the internet has millions of nodes makes no real difference to the complexity of the system. The billions of grains of sand on a beach can be modeled as a network, but the complexity of that system isn’t particularly remarkable and the number of nodes certainly doesn’t make it comparable to the human mind. Complexity isn’t a a quantitative matter of how many things are hooked together, it is a dynamical matter of what the resulting network does. Brains are interesting because they do interesting things, […]

I teach at a summer camp for gifted students called the Center for Talented Youth. The program encourages bright and creative teenagers to engage each other in an active learning community, and it puts particularly strong emphasis on self-expression and respect for diversity. The camps have been running for decades and students often return for multiple summers in a row, so by this point there are a body of rich traditions that the students carry over every year, including a strange communal rendition of American Pie, and wearing bathrobes and carrying towels on Thursdays in honor of Hitchhiker’s Guide. At the site in Lancaster, PA, which is the largest of the camp sites and where I’ve taught a philosophy of mind class for the last 7 years, the rituals included a tradition that until this year was known as The Last Supper. This year, CTY formally forbid the students from continuing the tradition in its existing form. Here is the official statement from Stu Gluck, an Assistant Director for CTY and who oversees the Lancaster site, which was sent to employees a few weeks before the summer session began: Gathering to celebrate the summer’s experience is perfectly appropriate. However, the use of religious symbolism, which has increased over the years, has not always been perceived as respectful of the diverse religious beliefs of students in our program. This year students will be expected to find a way to celebrate their experience that does not include religious symbolism. I think Stu’s reasoning here is consistent with CTY’s overall teaching philosophy, and on the surface there’s nothing that seems inappropriate. I also understand perfectly well the kind of legal and political pressure that CTY is under to adopt such a policy; I remember hearing many people remark that they were surprised the […]

Without a doubt, my favorite “big idea” is the Attention Economy. Attention Economy is a protocol for social organization and economic management that works by accounting for what all the system’s users attend to. The idea is one part Augmented Reality, one part Internet of Things, one part Use-Theory of Value, and one part Cognitive Surplus. I am utterly convinced that an attention-economic system will ultimately replace both money and centralized governance as the dominant method for large-scale organizational management, and moreover that it is the only method for ensuring a timely and effective response to global climate change andsustainability. There’s a lot to say about how such a thing works, but the best illustrationmes from existing science fiction, in Bruce Sterling’s 2009 novel The Caryatids. The novel takes place 50 years in the future, after massive environmental and social collapse; presumably, these system failures didn’t prevent the march of technological progress. I want to quote a passage at length, and then I’ll give some discussion and links to more information below. When they had docked at Mljet in their slow-boat refugee barges, they’d been given their spex and their ID tags. As proper high-tech pioneers, they soon found themselves humbly chopping the weeds in the bold Adriatic sun. The women did this because of the architecture of participation. They worked like furies. As the camp women scoured the hills, their spex on their kerchiefed heads, their tools in their newly blistered hands, the spex recorded whatever they saw, and exactly how they went about their work. Their labor was direct and simple: basically, they were gardening. Middle-aged women had always tended to excel at gardening. The sensorweb identified and labeled every plant the women saw through their spex. So, day by day, and weed by weed, these women were […]

A reply to Evgeny Morozov. There are two ways to be wrong about the internet. One is to argue it doesn’t live up to its hype. Speculative futurism and unabashed mysticism have become commonplace in discussions of technological change, and it isn’t hard to find people ready to claim that the internet is a panacea heralding everything up to and including immortality. In such an environment, one need only be moderately critical about the internet to position oneself as a pariah standing against a swarm of naive technoidealists. Democracy doesn’t even work on Wikipedia, the argument goes, and so it is foolish to think that “liquid democracy” will change the form of legitimate governance (read: the nation-state) in any substantive way, hype be damned. The problem with such criticisms is that they treat the possibility of internet-generated change as all-or-nothing: either the internet meets the expectations of its most wide-eyed advocates, or it is a waste of time with all the sociopolitical importance of a video game. There’s no room in this view for registering the subtle cultural shifts that can change the practice of legitimate governance over time, or for understanding how the ideals of extremists can change the discourse even when their ideals are not achieved. The other, more insidious way of being wrong about the internet is to accept that the internet changes things subtly, and proceed to argue that the old ways were better. That’s what I take Evgeny Morozov to be doing in this article, and it’s important to see how regressive his arguments (and the institutions they support) are. Just to be sure I have the argument right, I’ll try to charitably reconstruct its key points before blowing them to pieces. Morozov’s core argument against Johnson’s “internet-centrism” is that it is shallow: It’s not […]

My response a draft of Jon’s: The more I read it, the more I hate this paper. It is actually a stunning example of historically ignorant and completely unsatisfying metaphysics. It is also just bad philosophy. I wrote you a drunken text about it last night, and let me continue to be belligerent about it here. This whole issue was gone over quite thoroughly in post-positivistic philosophy of science, sometimes as a discussion of reduction (which I know you are familiar with) but also as a discussion of the unity of the sciences, or the autonomy of the special sciences. There’s even an SEP article about it: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-unity/ It mentions, among other things, about philosophy of science pre-1990 (which might never have happened from the look of your paper), and Ian Hacking’s critique of the unity of the sciences from the early 90s, which is worth knowing, relevant to this discussion, and also completely absent. You’ll also see that a range of pluralistic positions are described in the encyclopedia entry, none of which make an appearance in your paper. I see no substantive progress being made by your work here that isn’t already in the literature available in the field. Instead, I see a paper written by someone who has yet to realize that the field exists and has some homework to do. This is one of the major problems with philosophical practice, especially in metaphysics, today: some kids who know nothing of the history of ideas have an idea that they think is novel, but has actually been studied carefully for years; but because they know nothing of history also know nothing of the problems with various formulations of the views, and therefore carelessly recapitulate so many of the mistakes that so many people already worked so hard to […]

Note: I recently posted a major effort post on the Something Awful forums to introduce some recent research in complex systems theory. This is basically a curated version of my G+ stream from the last few months to highlight research relating to complexity and organization, so there isn’t really anything new. Still, I thought it would be good to archive and repost the work here. ________________ It shouldn’t surprise anyone that our ability to model the global climate, to visualize partial 3D neural pathways, to complete the standard model, to predict the spread of disease epidemics or the outbreak of food riots all happen to occur at roughly the same time in history that computers start beating humans at Jeopardy! and 2.4 billion people (almost 70% of the west) are busy collectively churning out about 2.5 quintillion bits of data every day. In the last two decades, humanity has become very good at collecting, moving, and sorting through massive amounts of data, and have become more comfortable with the network theory and computational tools for modeling information at these scales. These models allow one to view system-level activity and organizational behavior unlike anything we’ve had before. It’s had a strongly unifying effect in the sciences, and in addition to changing many of our customs and norms (and successfully knocking the environment out of a relatively stable state) it has also brought some important changes to the way we think about science. This combination is already starting to have some dramatic impact on our future and what we can do with it. “Big Data” is a term that is obviously designed to scare the ignorant and emasculate the public. What matters, of course, is not the size of the our data but fact that the mountains of information we all constantly […]

// My Complexity thread in SA is starting to pick up some discussion. Here’s an essay I wrote for the discussion: McDowell wrote: Adam Curtis’ “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” deals with the history of Systems Theory, Ecology, and the political implications – primarily in part 2 I’ll repeat that this is a terrible documentary. Systems thinking and cybernetics should definitely not be conflated with individualism or Randian-style libertarianism, yet the documentary takes a critique of the latter as sufficient for damning the former. The move is not without precedent; as I mentioned earlier, Hayek famously argued (as you and Curtis seem to be endorsing) that the complexity of natural systems (especially human social and economic systems) makes them impossible to model and predict, and therefore the project of governing and planning for such systems is a hopeless waste of time, causing more problems than it solves. Hayek concludes the obvious free market libertarian positions; Curtis is a little more reserved and simply critiques the hype over computers as a stabilizing and organizing force. While it is true that computers aren’t necessarily a stabilizing force (anyone who has lived for the last 20 years has plenty of empirical evidence to the contrary), it is just as true that computer modeling is a successful way of generating reliable predictions in some domains, and that the predictive success of a model depends a lot on the nature of the model and the complexity of the system being modeled. Perhaps this is a place to talk a little more about complexity. One of the defining characteristics of a complex system is that there are many perspectives to take on the system, not all of which will be consistent, but each of which might nevertheless be useful for making predictive inferences […]

Community detection in graphs Santo Fortunato 2010 http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.0612 // This is a major literature review, totaling over 100 pages (including references), about different methods for detecting communities and clusters in graphs. There are lots of different methods and algorithms for defining and identifying a “community”, and there are no universally agreed upon definitions or methods, but these reviews are very useful for understanding the state of network science. // I went through and clipped the majority of the 40+ figures and example networks, and uploaded them to the photo album archive on my G+ stream. I’ve also curated a few pages of key information, especially concerning modularity and hierarchy, for easy browsing and reference here. // I strongly encourage people to check out the original paper, which includes an appendix introducing basic terms and concepts in graph theory. Abstract: The modern science of networks has brought significant advances to our understanding of complex systems. One of the most relevant features of graphs representing real systems is community structure, or clustering, i. e. the organization of vertices in clusters, with many edges joining vertices of the same cluster and comparatively few edges joining vertices of different clusters. Such clusters, or communities, can be considered as fairly independent compartments of a graph, playing a similar role like, e. g., the tissues or the organs in the human body. Detecting communities is of great importance in sociology, biology and computer science, disciplines where systems are often represented as graphs. This problem is very hard and not yet satisfactorily solved, despite the huge effort of a large interdisciplinary community of scientists working on it over the past few years. We will attempt a thorough exposition of the topic, from the definition of the main elements of the problem, to the presentation of most methods […]

Privacy is not a digital value. That doesn’t mean that privacy is dead, or that privacy doesn’t matter. It means that privacy is not the kind of value that naturally emerges from the system of concepts, technologies, and social norms that characterize the digital age. And that means privacy is going to be a hard value to maintain, so if privacy is something we value we’re going to have to do a lot of extra work because the framework we’re in doesn’t have much respect for it. I’m a digital advocate. I think the digital values are important and worth endorsing, and before we get all worked up about privacy it is important to remember the unique benefits of the values that the digital age does support. Sharing is the kind of value that emerges naturally from a digital framework; the concepts, tools, and social expectations of our age are all oriented to support it. In some sense it is the primary value from which all other digital values flow, the way that Aristotle’s virtues all followed the form of the Good. Sharing also allows for the reproduction-with-variation routine so popular in other natural arenas, which explains both the dynamism of our age and the readiness with which we adopt its rhythms. Sharing is also pretty obviously in tension with the value of privacy. While privacy is not a digital value, it is a value of humanism: that set of concepts, tools, and norms that characterized the age of enlightenment and its incredibly productive political and intellectual fruit. The core humanistic value is freedom, and privacy was valued in humanistic frameworks to the extent that it ensured the possibility of freedom. Privacy isn’t a core value of humanism the way sharing is a core digital value, so I don’t believe […]