Hermeneutic Heretic

ABC News: Male Domination of the Internet Is Over, Study Finds

The study says 68 percent of men and 66 percent of women now go online. Since women make up a larger portion of the population, that means they outnumber men in cyberspace.
…
Although a similar percentage of men and women use the Internet, the study found they often use it quite differently.

The research suggests men largely go online to pursue solitary pursuits, while women use the Internet to enrich their existing relationships.

Men go online to further their hobbies, for example. They are much more likely to use the Internet to read online, take Web classes and take part in sports-fantasy leagues. More men than women will download software and music or use a Web cam.

By contrast, 94 percent of women who go online do so for e-mail. Women see e-mail as a way to nurture friendships. They’ll write to family and friends to share news and stories, ask for advice and discuss plans. When men use e-mail, it tends to be for work-related activities or for forwarding jokes or humorous stories. Believe it or not, women are just as likely as men to use the Internet to play games, listen to music, watch videos and share files. And both sexes are equally likely to gamble online. In fact, 4 percent of the population surveyed gambled online.

Both sexes have tapped the Internet as a powerful research tool, but Pew found they seek different information. Men go online to find weather, news, sports, political, financial and do-it-yourself information. For women, searches for health, medical and religious information are more typical.

Women are also more likely to use the Internet to obtain maps and directions. It seems some things never change. Men hate asking for directions so much that many won’t even ask a computer!

These results are of course quite predictable. Some because of the different socializations of men and women but many (and it would be interesting to study this in more detail) because of the cognitive models we have available to us for the behavior of genders. The Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus model. Of course, a piece of information such as women looking at maps more is easy to assimilate into this model and as such will be accentuated. However, women equaling men as a percentage of gender and outnumbering them in total numbers is not pointed out as flying in the face of this popular model. This slight cognitive dissonance is assumed and the rest of the article (and quite possibly the research study) is designed to undermine the possibly radical nature of that fact. In fact, most people when asked would probably say that men use the internet more than women but this prediction is not sustained.

(It is not inconceivable that a very tiny and possibly impossible to isolate proportion of the differences is due to some chemical and/or brain-structural differences some of which might even be genetic in origin - kudos to this article for not mentioning that - I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if there were others that do.)

Update: It didn’t take long and an article with the Mars/Venus headline appeared:
Men Are From Google Women Are From Yahoo. It contains a bit more detail of the survey and begins:

On the Internet, as in life, men and women have different motivations for doing what they do. According to a recent report from Pew Internet and American Life, women view the Internet as a place to extend, support, and nurture relationships and communities.

No surprises there, then. And no attempt to transcend the conventional. I find it interesting that depite their free-spirit and open-mindedness in many areas the tech community is very traditionalist and conservative when it comes to gender. The possible reasons are too obvious to mention and as such probably too simplistic.
Another example of the selective progressivism of any group or movement (some conservatism is simply necessary to maintain the community).

Propp and other formalists had many things figured out quite right. Then the structuralists came and elevated emergent properties to the level of meaning creation. This post is an analogy in the sense that it compares the idea of the ‘morphology of the folktale’ but takes the source domain from cognitive morphology rather than traditional semi-structuralist morphology.

At the centre of this concept is the idea of morphology or any form being entirely subjugated to the needs of creating meaning. (Now, this subjugation is only partial because any formal element of language can itself be hypostasized and become part of meaning. And this has been confusing formal linguists for decades now - see my forthcoming analogy on linguistic structures as spandrels). Traditionally, morphology has been seen as separate (almost modular) from the concerns of meaning as it is normally conceived (i.e. something associate with autosemantic rather than synsemantic elements). On this view, morphemes are only interesting in as much as they help differentiate the meanings of lexemes in certain contexts. Cognitive linguistics and construction grammar (Lakoff, Langacker, Croft and others) have largely dispensed with the autosemantic/synsemantic distinction. Language is mostly a structured (in a non-structuralist sense) collection of constructions that are integrated to create meaning. Both lexemes, morphemes, phonemes and syntactic structures all have what can be called ‘constructional meaning’. For most morphemes, this meaning is schematic while lexemes usually possess more richly imagistic content. The distinction, however, is one of scale. ^[1] At any rate, the importance of meaning is paramount (and it bears reminding ourselves that the formal properties of an element can also form a part of its meaning).

Now, what would the fold tale look like with this “new morphology”? ^[2] Propp has this to say on how the tale can be described:

“[F]ive categories of elements define not only the construction of a tale, but the tale as a whole.�:

1. Functions of dramatis personae (e.g. villain, donor, hero, princess, false hero, etc.)
   
2. Conjuntive elements (ex machina, announcement of misfortune, chance disclosure – mother calls hero loudly, etc.)
3. Motivations (reasons and aims of personages)
4. Forms of appearance of dramatis personae (the flying arrival of dragon, chance meeting with donor)
5. Attributive elements or accessories (witch’s hut or her clay leg)

It is surprising, how far this simple formula can take us in describing a vast world of narrative (just like 15 tones can describe a vast world of music), although it was designed simply to describe a fairly limited corpus of Russian fairy tales. However, these elements are mostly defined through their narrative function, i.e. what role they serve in individual narrative “moves”. Propp is aware of the actual meanings of the folk tale but his morphology achieves classification through largely formal means. Meaning is always present (how could it not be) but kept in the background as an axiomatic distinguishing feature of elements which needs not be mentioned.

The shortcomings of this approach may seem obvious to us nearly a century later. For instance, the authors of the online Proppian fairy tale generator mention elements neglected by him which were necessary to produce cohesive tales: “Propp’s analysis also fails to recognize the importance of such story components as tone, mood, characterization, and writing style just to name a few.” But the most important shortcoming is the absence of meaning, that is concern for why these stories are being told so universally. ^[3] All of the elements play not only a structural role within the fairtale but also a cognitive one and a social one. These roles are probably important in how elements can be combined to form a narratively cohesive and mythically coherent narrative. A cognitively defined narrative element would then be a construction comprising a pairing of form and meaning (these being just opposite poles on a continuum). These constructions would then represent mental spaces which are blended in the narrative to form a new whole which can then in turn be integrated with broader social meanings. This approach might lose quite a bit of the simplicity of formalist and structuralist accounts but should account for more of the complexity of narrative. I do not have any specific examples at the moment, but hopefully, some will appear.

Now, here’s an analogy that occured to me as I was pondering the indeterminacy of the meaning of some technical term in social science (I think it was metaphor). But it occurred to me that creating meaning (in the Brunerian sense) is very much like playing certain instruments (such as slide guitar). With slide guitar, a note is played by approaching the position on the fretboard. However, unlike playing a normal tone, i.e. pressing a finger on a certain position, the note is held by constant motion of the slide over the fret. The constant motion adds tention but also creates an illusion of a single note. Similar technique is used in bending (both on guitar and harmonica and probably other wind instruments). I understand that much of violin playing is similar, although it is much easier then to achieve a single accurate tone. Slide guitar is a good example, because without the notion no useful tone emerges. This is different from playing the keyboards where one key unambigously produces a perfect note (although many techniques exist to distort the tone - e.g. pedals). And, of course, the whole concept of jazz is built around the idea of suggestion - the players may play perfect notes but frequently only similar to those which might occur in a straightforward melody.

The analogy contrasts a traditional view of semantics, which sees the creation of meaning as a simple playing of a melody on the piano, with a much more dynamic (cognitively oriented) view which sees the benefit in defining meaning through suggestion and constant cognitive motion. Just like in music, the former approach only produces very simple meanings. However, meaning to help us get attuned to the complexities of the world around us, cannot be expressed in such simple terms (or melodic lines). The problem, both in music and language, is that very few simple units (notes, words) produce a very large number of possible combinations thus making it seem a sufficient method for capturing music or language in its entirety.

This is important in academia, where most scholars (even those who study meaning) hold the piano perspective of meaning. This comes through in clichés such as ‘define your terms first’ or ‘you’re breaking the Occam’s razor’. Simple and minimalist definitions are considered not just superior but ultimately the only academically acceptable way. But, there is ample evidence to the contrary. Helen Keller in her Century of the Gene gave an excellent account of the indeterminacy of the use of a term as supposedly straightforward as the ‘gene’. To continue with the analogy, constantly approaching and distancing away from the term gene, allows researchers to better capture a concept in all its difficulty.

Of course, this analogy has long been around in the shape of the ‘define an elephant’ parable.

Does this analogy break down? Well, all analogies do eventually, and this one isn’t any different. However, at this stage I don’t see any particularly relevant break. This is partly due to the fact, that the analogy makes relatively few isomorphic claims.

I realized that I needed another category dealing with issues related to the position of women in society and cognition. I decided to call it feminism in protest against the frequent dilution of the concept by labeling it ‘gender studies’ or ‘women’s lib’. Now, I very much agree that to understand the way our brains and our society conceptualize and treat women it is important to study men. If only to avoid making assumptions about what is normal. Labels (or the possible constructions of meaning based on the overall semantic field of the word serving as the label) aren’t that important but the people associated with or promoting particular label (for whatever reason) are. And I usually find myself not liking the dilutions associated with the people who promote the idea of ‘gender studies’ as a way of making ‘feminism’ more palatable. And feminism doesn’t deserve that. One of its strong points is precisely because its ability to provoke change of perspective. Feminism is one of the most revolutionary intellectual movements ‘mankind’ has ever seen, transforming our view of society and cognition with such force and vigor that it can never be the same. It deserves recognition of this and not a shame.

Radical feminism (like anything radical) is ridicoulous in one extreme but some of its insights (and only the future will pronounce a judgement on their proportion) are so philosophically profound and groundbreaking that it deserves to be present in our consciousness.

I will use this category to try to outline my perspective on feminism but feminist thinking will be present in posts in other categories, as well. (I also added some of the earlier posts to this category.)

Christmas season’s TV brings a lot of classic stories back to people’s narrative environment. Many of these contain complex and multilayered representations of humanity’s quest for self-understanding. These narratives play other roles, as well, connected to the psychological well-being of individuals. They are broadcast in moments of communal and familial rituals designed to promote group cohesion and they play a performative role, as well.

One of the complexities is the interweaving of new and old imagery much of which is self-contradictory. The old imagery’s validity is reinforced by the emotional value attached to it.

And a significant source of these contradictions is the representation of women and their roles. On the one hand, women in older narratives are frequently used to fill the roles of men’s catalysts defined by their appearance and desirability (possibly homekeeping/caring prowess or fertility). Complementary to this, is the negative version of the same image. E.g. a woman pretending to some of these qualities to capture the male.

But the picture is complicated by the presence (at least from the 30s) of an independent enterprising woman who has many of the traditionally male properties such as wit, courage, intelligence or physical prowess. This image is typically subordinated to at least some aspects of the other images but their presence, at least temporarily, gives them the role of an independent agent not defined only through their suitability or otherwise to the man.

The holiday favorite ‘Singing in the rain’ is one of the examples demonstrating this contradiction being on the cusp of a narrative transformation (Funny Face is an interesting throwback). The central female character is certainly independent and challenges the central male character intellectually (as opposed to the scheming vacuuity of the central negative female who is a fraud both intellectually and as a woman). However, one of the film’s musical intermezzos: ‘Beautiful Girl’ demonstrates with great splendor the woman as she should be - simply an object to be admired and whose only agency is to preserve her qualities as such an object.

What exactly is the impact of such a narrative is an open question. One of the weakest points in much of critical thinking (including feminism) is to assume a straightforward causal link between exposure to such a narrative and adherence to certain views or predilection for certain actions. But a suitable model has not yet emerged (which is the crux of much of misguided criticism of the humanities from sciences). The depiction of women in key narratives and the position of women in society certainly do seem to correlate but it is not as clear as it might be assumed what drives the change or even what principles govern the mutual feedback between the two.

For instance, in more recent narratives, the emphasis on the female role is frequently reversed. The woman is primarily an independent agent who is forced into the narrative mold only eventually. (This is a gross oversimplification that needs unpicking.) But the overall shape of both the position of women in society and their conceptualization is much more stabel than it might appear on the surface.

BBC - Radio 4 - Woman’s Hour -Phone-in: parents and schools
A recent survey from the Department of Education shows that parents are increasingly unhappy with their local schools. Satisfaction levels have fallen by 10% during the past year and more than half of parents saw no change in the quality of schooling or thought it had got worse.

Now it’s the turn of parents to help sort it out. In the government’s controversial proposals for education reform, parents are to be a big part of the solution. In a chapter of the ‘Parents Driving Improvement’ White Paper parents are given more say in the way schools are set up and run, including the introduction of new parent councils.

Woman’s Hour looks at the proposed new relationship between parents and schools - and asks will it be too high maintenance?

This was a very interesting debate because it encapsulated all the important perspectives on causality within education and the system of schooling. Almost every possible cognitive model (frame) of education was expressed in one way or another by the callers. It was also very clear that model-switching (cognitive equivalent to code-switching) is very common in normal cognition but extremely difficult when the models/frames are hypostasized into a theory (anywhere on the folk-expert continuum).

BBC - Radio 4 - All in the Mind
It’s just under a year since the Tsunami devastated coastal communities around the Indian Ocean . Raj reports from his recent visit to the Tamil Nadu region of India with the charity Action Aid, where he met some of the people affected, and observed the work that’s being done on the emotional rebuilding of their lives.

He’s also joined in the studio by Dr Uni Krishnan, who specialises in psycho-social care for Action Aid in Asia , and Professor Simon Wessely from Kings College in London who has researched post traumatic stress disorder, to discuss the best approach to help people deal psychologically with disasters like the Tsunami.

Interesting interview regarding the individuality of psychotherapeutic needs and some cultural influences. Wesley mentions that some of the assumptions about externalizing all stressful experiences may have been too ambitious. In fact he described some of the post-disaster interventions (psychological debriefing) as “a disaster in itself” and was worried that there might be some exporting of our “flawed models”. He praised the psychosocial care approach which combines infrastructure rebuilding and providing information (eg. on the causes of tsunamis). This avoids “overt psychologization of trauma” which will probably be more effective in the long term. The problem with this is that “it probably gets in the way of doing what comes naturally” which is turning to people you already know in the time and place of your choosing. This approach does not use ‘mental health professionals’ who have the view that “it’s good to talk and you have to talk now”. This might interfere with a “natural process of resilience and recovery”. Our generation prefers the externalization of feelings and the previous prefered stoic reticence. “Who’s to say which is right” says Wesley. A similar point was made recently by researchers into stress on Science Friday.

Of course, the metaphor in “emotional rebuilding of their lives” in the quote above is of interest in itself. The image of life as a structure that has a certain level of stability, can be brought down, rebuilt, built well or badly, needs to have foundations, etc. is a powerful sources of inferences.

BBC - Five Live - Mark Kermode film reviews included this and last week an interesting exchange. First, the reviewer claimed that watching the film The March of the Penguin makes it possible to assume some level of intelligent design (while criticising some American views stating essentially the same thing). Predictably, in the subsequent program, a discussion on this topic ensued which bore some interesting gems.

To a reasonable email from a biologist who pointed out that the theory of evolution can explain any behavior displayed by the penguin, Mark Kermode responded with a great quote:

“The great problem with determinism is that it means you can never say thank you for passing the sugar.”

Of course, this does not make his original claim any less ridiculous but it does encapsulate the central problem scientific and moral view of human nature face when juxtapposed.

Equally, interesting, or rarther illuminating was the continuation of Kermode’s self-defence.

“It is possible for anybody to look at a rose and say that there is an absolutely rational explanation and that is all there is. And it is possible for somebody to look at it and say you know I don’t think that happened by chance. And I have one view and he has the other view and that’s fine. I’m not promoting a particular view. It’s just honestly, I think, you look at some of the things nature does and say ‘and that’s an accident?”

It is easy to dismiss this as silly. And indeed, if this level of research into the natural world is enough to assume intelligent design, such a claim can be discounted as simply idiotic. However, since so many people are willing to make similar claims based on their personal experience, it might be dangerous discounting this as a matter of principle. (And yes, this second quote is simply idiotic.) In particular, since scientists often arrive at significant conclusions through identical routes. Kuhn, of course, has things to say here. But more interesting and detailed accounts can be found in Gould’ Time’s arrow, time’s cycle: myth and metaphor in the discovery of geological time and Gerald Holton’s Thematic origins of scientific thought: Kepler to Einstein. Both of these works amply demonstrate that a scientist’s thought processes are not necessarily different from those of somebody like Mark Kermode. It bears repeating, that it does not necessarily invalidate scientific views but that their defense (and the debunking of nonsense such as that curtesy of Kermode) has to rely on foundations other than those of the ineffably inevitable and exalted scientific method. ‘Scientific method’ only offers a set of hermeneutic and heuristic benchmarks but it stands within rather than without the cognitive domain of science. That’s why E. O. Wilson’s elevation of science to the ultimate hermeneutic role in Consillience was completely misguided (more on that some other time; this post is also relevant here).

Another great interview on onthemedia.org. This one dealing with the reliability of expert predictions (in the media and in general).

On The Media– THE GUESSING GAME
PHILIP TETLOCK: When an expert has very, very strong opinions on an issue, when the expert places a high value on simplicity and has little patience with contradictions or ambiguity, and when the expert is making longer-term predictions, that expert’s likely to go off the cliff.
…
PHILIP TETLOCK: And the more knowledge that expert has, the worse, interestingly, it becomes, because the expert is using the knowledge very selectively to justify increasingly extreme predictions.

This reminds of a quote that I’ve been trying to track down for a while now. I think it went something like this: “I’d rather be governed by the first 1000 people in the New York City phone directory than the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT.” (no idea who and when said this). The bottom line is that expertise is as much a blinding as an illuminating trait.

Here’s a rather excessively long quote:

BROOKE GLADSTONE:: I guess in this case the experts do what the rest of us do when we consume media. They seek out information that confirms what they already believe.

PHILIP TETLOCK: Experts with that particular style of thinking are prone to that tendency, yes.

BOB GARFIELD:: Which brings us to the foxes and the hedgehogs. It’s an old Isaiah Berlin metaphor that you use to divide your experts into two camps. What are foxes and hedgehogs and how do they differ in their forecasts?

PHILIP TETLOCK: Well, the fox/hedgehog distinction goes back at least 2,500 years to classical Greece. The basic idea is that the hedgehog personifies someone who knows one big thing, someone who tries to organize everything into a comprehensive overall framework, whereas the fox is someone who knows many little things, is much more intellectually opportunistic, is willing to pick ideas from wherever. It doesn’t matter if it’s a liberal idea or a conservative idea. They are very flexible. [DL: Reminds me of another quote: ‘An educated man knows everything about something and something about everything’ But of course, there’s the ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ adage to put this into perspective.]

[Identified Churchill as an example of a hedgehog. Who was famously right about Nazi Germany and whose massive miscalculation regarding India (he even compared Ghandi to Hitler is largely forgotten).

PHILIP TETLOCK: By and large, that’s right. It is true that if you wanted to identify the experts who have made the most spectacularly far-sighted predictions over the last 50 years, the hedgehogs would be disproportionately represented. But if you were computing batting averages, the hedgehogs would be clearly statistically inferior to the foxes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:: [LAUGHS] And there’s sort of a perverse inverse relationship between how spectacularly wrong some hedgehogs are and how much they’re held responsible for those wrong predictions. The more wrong you are, the higher profile you are, the less you’re called to account.

PHILIP TETLOCK: Well, that’s an interesting feature of the political world. Hedgehogs are typically embedded in political movements or theoretical movements and they typically have people who will back them up. They can fall back on a base of supporters who will help them generate various types of excuses or belief system defenses that will neutralize the unexpected evidence. So they’ll be able to argue, “Well, what I predicted didn’t happen, but it will happen soon,” or, “I predicted that country X had weapons of mass destruction, and, well, it appears that it didn’t, but it was the right mistake to have made.”

BROOKE GLADSTONE:: [LAUGHS]

PHILIP TETLOCK: It’s better to have overestimated them than to have underestimated them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:: You note in your study that hedgehogs are more frequently wrong than foxes, but you also note that when it comes to experts, the media love, not wisely, but too well, the hedgehog - I guess because they make better TV.

PHILIP TETLOCK: The hedgehogs tend to provide better sound bites. I think that’s definitely true. They’re much more likely to offer unequivocal predictions, whereas the foxes are much more likely to attach lots of linguist qualifiers to their predictions. Their speech is larded with things like, “but,” “however,” “although” - all signs that you’re putting on the brakes. There’s also a team sport aspect to punditry. Pundits are often there to represent a certain point of view so they want to make sure they’ve got an entertaining liberal hedgehog and an entertaining conservative hedgehog and pit them against each other and let the sparks fly, and so it has this public spectacle aspect to it. It’s not particularly conducive to accuracy, but it is entertaining, and it really depends on what you want out of life.

Of course, as always, there are two stories to be told about expertise. One in which a far-sighted expert is right in the face of many simple-minded and bigoted oponents is most often applied. However, the other, of the expert blinded by his or her own expertise to the extent of not seeing ‘what is right in front of their nose’, is also very popular. In fact, Donald A. Schön’s book on the ‘Reflective Practitioner’ was dealing very much with the aftermath of one such application of the latter story.

A further complication, is the fact that, as I’ve noted before, the amount of information we need to digest is so vast that we need to rely on experts (or mediators of expertise such as pundits; and even experts on experts) simply because we cannot delve into each topic with sufficient depth. And the decisions we make about which expertise to go with are often ones to do with out political (and other group) identities.

A good example of is the film critic Mark Kermode’s response to accusations of misguided advocacy of intelligent design based on having seen the March of the Penguins movie. His response was to quote a name and an idea: Theilard de Chardin and puncutated equilibria (he called it something else and used it to support an argument that would make Gould turn in his grave; furthermore is mistakenly claimed that most people accept punctuated equilibria). This hodgepodge of expertise allowed him to make the claim that he has a valid alternative view to evolution. More details in this post.

My Week in Thought has found a new home right here.