Hermeneutic Heretic

On The Media I’m not a psychologist, but I think that at some deep level, if the situation you’re living is a lie, and the situation these boys were living was one, and, moreover, at least the father was complicit in some way in the murder of these children’s parents - that situation, I do not believe, can be healthy.

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Argentina lived under terror. When societies emerge from these states, any society emerging has to balance truth with justice.

And then he had to say this:

Lost Children, Lost Truths - New York Times

But they had the truth, or something closer to it than a peaceful Paraguayan yard reeking of repressed crime. We journalists are intruders who move on. Was this intrusion worth it? For the dead, and for Argentina, I say yes. For the twins, I don’t know.

Truth or justice? Every society emerging from terror must choose. But truth is messier, and justice less adequate than we acknowledge. Life resides in half-tones newspapers render with difficulty, rather than in absolutes.

This folk magical assumption about the elemental and deep-rooted nature of the truth that is so essential that it seeps into our very existence no matter how much we are trying to paint a veneer of ignorance over it.

Cohen is right. He’s no psychologist, but then neither are a lot of psychologists. Truth is like language. When you grow up in the context of a lie, you will speak the lie fluently and the truth will be just as disruptive as the introduction of a new language.

But this is not just a random quirk of an American journalist brought up on cultural reflections of the psychoanalytic therapeutic tradition. This is a demonstration of one folk theory of truth and it is the same one that underlies our myths about science that is most often represented through something called ‘reductionism’.

And as fractals seem to indicate, this will also be part of science’s undoing. Wilson’s failure in Conscillience to understand science (despite his grasp of the humanities) is a great example of this. Another one is Skinner’s reductionism and re-labelling of old problems with new words in Verbal Behavior which was so deftly analysed by Chomsky. And, of course, Chomsky’s own insistence on limiting language description to that which is subject to reduction. And it also pertains to things like the Sokal hoax and the science wars. And it drives the search for the Unified Theory.

The problem is that the folk assumption about the fundamental nature of scientific truth forces scientists into seeking further and further underlying principles in order for it to be scientific. For instance, genes driving all morphological development of an organism. This is a bad model for science and an even worse model for social science.

An insight from fractals and chaos might help us find a better way. (The following is simply a fractal-inspired metaphor). ‘Truths’ exist on levels of magnification. They exist as tendencies that are exact at certain moments but sensitive to initial conditions.

This might allows us to admit that there are certain things social scientists know with just as much certainty as natural philosophers know the laws of physics. Only the numerical outcomes and predictive powers are plotted on attractors rather than linear curves. For instance, we know that depriving a group of people of resources will result in social unrest, and that not all individuals will participate in that unrest. We don’t know what the breaking point is nor do we know what forms the unrest will take but that’s not insignificant knowledge.

Moreover, it’s knowledge similar to the knowledge of scientists. Scientists know a lot about the chemistry and physics of metals but all that knowledge is idealised (as in ideal gasses). To actually build a bridge engineers need lots and lots of manuals with translation tables that provide constants that can be plugged into equations. These constants are empirically established and can change with changing conditions.

Social engineers have history to do the same job but the translation tables have to be publicly negotiated analogy (as I’ve show in many other posts).

The job of the natural and social philosophers, then, should be to seek the right levels of magnification for their knowledge and proceed with extreme caution when finding causal links between layers.

[This is all very sketchy, at the moment, I suspect I will have a more to say about this later.]

Ubuntu: Just how popular is it? - Starry Hope Productions…Ubuntu has managed to gain a large portion of the Linux mind share, at least amongst the tech community.

Wikipedia: Mind share is the amount of attention required by something and the time spent thinking about something. It can also refer to the development of consumer awareness about a specific product or brand in hopes that they will buy the product or brand. One of the main objectives of advertising and promotion is to establish what is called mind share, or share of mind.

There’s an misalignment of concepts here that illustrates nicely the problems of locating collective concepts such as language, culture in the minds of the individuals. On the one hand, there is no doubt that to speak a language or to behave as a recognizable member of a culture, something has to be happening inside the individual (mostly but not exclusively the brain). However, our access to these concepts is mostly through the collective. Even notions such as ‘private language’ whether possible or not (and the theoretical ‘private culture’), are secondary and defined in contrast to their default framings as collective concepts.

It isn’t just a question of access. Theoretically, we could study the individual’s body/brain/mind to get to the bottom of how the collective is represented there. The problem is that this kind of reductionism would deprive us of an important level of description. This is similar to the fractal notion (as I understand it, anyway). It is possible to reduce anything to something else, but an important part of that original something is lost. So basically, when we’re describing the collective by reducing it to the neural or mental, we’re describing something functionally and essentially different than when we’re describing it as a collective phenomenon.

The Starry Hope analysis is particularly interesting because it uses purely collective measures to infer both a collective notion (popularity) and an individual notion (mind share). There are interesting folk theories of mental causality at play here.

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - Freedom, not climate, is at risk
As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.

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â– Any suppression of freedom and democracy should be avoided
â– Instead of organising people from above, let us allow everyone to live as he wants
■Let us resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term “scientific consensus�, which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority

I have hinted before (in Czech press) that the Czech (my) president is an idiot. However, he is not a total idiot. Anybody who can call somebody else “a Malthusian pessimist” has to have at least read a book and Klaus has read more than a few. Everytime I read him I am puzzled by this strange combination of insight into the reality of social science and at the same time complete divorce from it. Such as when he forbids the politicization of science and at the same time exhorts scientists to take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinion:

The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.

So it is hard to say whether he makes some interesting points or just that some of his points are interesting. I definitely like the idea of opposing the “scientific consensus” or rather a more general “scholarly consensus” at pretty much every turn. That doesn’t necessarily mean disagreeing with it but rather not invoke it as part of the evidence. Consensus is simply a rhetorical device and scientists have agreed on erroneous ideas more often than on those that withstood the test of time. Of course, academic consensus also plays a social and discursive role. Anybody who every taught first year undergraduates has to distinguish between interesting challenges to accepted doctrine based on freshness of perspective and annoying disruptions based on lazy ignorance. They’re usually easy to spot (the former being much rarer) but there is no easy heuristic for these decisions (for instance, Godel’s initial presentation of his theorem was almost completely ignored by the assembled mathematicians).

Moreover, if today’s vision of science as a process of hypothesis formation and challenge is an accurate depiction of actual practice (and it isn’t), any consensus must be purely provisional (see Dawkins’ cowardly insistence that there is a small degree of probability that there is a God).

So that bit is interesting and not often heard by a head of state. Of course, Klaus is/was all too happy to rely on the scholarly consensus of Thatcherian economics to shepherd in a semi-successful economic reform that resulted in a disgraced exit from office amid corruption allegations and his eventual transformation into a petty (or populist) nationalist.

But the paradox central to his column is worthy of consideration. Science never is and cannot be apolitical. There are elements of it that seem to be (e.g. mathematics) but they are all tied to essentially political considerations (e.g. mapping of variables onto the real world). Therefore, all of these decisions eventually have to be political. And the rhetoric of environmentalism is a perfectly valid part of political decision-making. As are decisions about which freedoms to curtail for the greater good. Klaus is only too happy to give complete freedom to economic agents but not when they interfere with the rights of the nation(alistic) state, for example, he favors great restrictions on migration. So I say, it serves him and his rich buddies right if they are forced to negotiate with the rabble of global environmental movement.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the global warming science proved to be inaccurate and the consensus just another example of how easy it is to be for the majority to be wrong. However, it seems that most of the proposals of the green lobby make sense independently of the global warming scare: renewable energy sources, sustainable development,  recycling, the occasional hug to a tree. And their promotion could spur just as much economic growth as oil subsidies.
So the conclusion is: let us oppose “scientific consensus” but accept science in the political arena as a valid participant with the same rhetorical and other symbolic rights as all other political actors. That’s different than saying the practice of science itself must be political. Only that it becomes political when it becomes public. And since all scientific endeavor has a public dimension, there is a bit of politics even in the most innocuous bits of science. (Politics meaning ‘reflective’ of communal matters - whether internal or external to what is so strangely called the ’scientific community’.)

digg - The Digg Comment Algorithm
Everything in this world can be shown as a flowchart algorithm. This, of course, applies to the complex and not well researched field of “Digg comments“. Here’s my humble attempt to define an algorithm which should encompass all of the many possibilities of comment development on Digg.

There are two ways to look at this statement. One is to take it as evidence of ‘folk theory’ of the nature of the world. If Penrose and others are right, there is an infinity of phenomena that cannot be described adequately by an algorithm of the type that can be represented by a flowchart.

However, it is also possible to take this statement at face value and speculate that in fact there is a level of magnification at which everything (although we’ll need to be caution about what a thing is in the everything) can be actually shown through an algorithm. But that algorithm may not be very useful for most of the ways that ‘thing’ is relevant to us. A good example would be language and communication. At some level they are easy ‘to flowchart’ but these flowcharts are not easy to ‘zoom in’ on or if we can magnify them we find them not being accurate anymore or even resemble the data. Level of magnification, then, is the key (taken from fractal theory). Now, the really interesting question is how can we make the different levels of magnification interact and does the fact that a certain kind of description/perspective/looking glass produces ‘bad’/irrelevant/incorrect data/results/stuff when magnified (positively or negatively) mean that we must reject that perspective in its entirety? If not, and my vote would be for not, how can we marry two useful but incompatible perspectives that each produce results at only one or just a few levels of magnification? (Such as generative and cognitive grammar? or quantum mechanics and Einsteinian physics?) My favorite example is the flat earth theory. Which is great (indispensable) for walking and traveling to Australia but breaks down once we zoom out (or go sailing or build tall buildings). Round-Earth theory is useless to us in 99.999% of our daily activities (although we might benefit from its consequences with radio, satellites, weather and such) but it is an inescapable fact (and we would consider anyone suggesting a flat Earth backward and simply wrong). In that same way, for instance, typical generative grammar doesn’t sustain the behavior of language in almost any normal communicative situation but at a certain magnification it may be just as real and relevant as other approaches to grammar (although, here I personally believe its sphere of relevance to be negligible). This certainly bears exploring further.

On The Media: Transcript of “God No!” (December 15, 2006)
In response to the global challenge posted by religious extremism, a small group of impassioned atheists has taken a new approach. They target the tolerant with both reason and ridicule. “The New Atheists”, as they were dubbed by Gary Wolf in a recent article in Wired magazine, condemn, quote, “not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong, it’s evil.”

Let’s be clear on one thing! There is no chance that there is a god of the sort any of the world’s major or minor religions envision. There is not even a universal spirit or anthropic principle that the uncertain or pathologically polite like to claim. There is no need to be agnostic about this, no ‘wait-and-see’ approach is necessary! There is no God! Might as well be atheist. However, there is also no evolution, individual potential or basic humanism (see Rousseau to Arendt) that secular humanists profess a faith (rational certainty) in. All of these are social constructs, that is, they don’t exist like cars and trees exist (well, even cars and trees are social constructs in a way but they are more closely tied to tangible objects as you discover when one falls on you).

Sidenote: Now, there are a few things that might be worth being agnostic about. For me the foundation of agnosticism about the transcendental rests on a quote from St Agustin about time: “God created the universe with time, not in time.” That, by analogy, defines the boundaries of agnosticism or that is how I would choose to interpret the anthropic principle. We are limited by our humanness in how we see the world. If something “exists” outside these limits (such as 4 dimensional beings - see sci fi) there is no way it can ever enter into our sphere of relevance in its essence. In fact, even the very concept of existence may only apply within our own conceptual world as do all notions of causality, so to assume that for instance this hypothetical 4-dimensional world will have any impact on or relevance to our own world with paltry 3 dimensions, is to say too much. This is my reading of Wittgensteins “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (Although he probably meant something else by it. So I would replace the second part by ‘thereof one is inevitably silent’ and ’speak’ in the first part by ‘conceive’.) Also, where Parmedides sings of the totality of existence he probably means something similar. All that we can do about the truly transcendent is refer to it as something that is completely beyond our grasp. However, there is nothing mystical or wondrous about this as some postmodernist seem to be inclined to suggest. Neither does it mean that we should consciously avoid exploring certain areas that are presented to us by the inclinations that limit our world. However, when something gets within our grasp that previously appeared beyond it, we cannot conclude that we’re slowly ‘bit by byte’ eating away at the unknowable until there is nothing left. It just means that our own conceptual inclination isn’t very good at exploring its own boundaries and unequivocally point outside them.

The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof condemned the New Atheists as obnoxious and militant and in your face. And he wrote that this, quote, “charge of the atheist brigade” in its treatment of conservative Christians is, quote, “often just as intolerant and mean.”
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SAM HARRIS: If you think the creator of the universe is letting people fly planes into our buildings because we are tolerating gay marriage, or he’s whipping up hurricanes in the Gulf because we’re tolerating gay marriage, you have to try to legislate against gay marriage.
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PAT ROBERTSON: What we’ve got to recognize just there in this case is that the evolutionists worship atheism. I mean, that’s their religion. So this is an establishment of religion contrary to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

This is a debate that might be worth investigating in some detail (although it is not nearly as crucial as it might appear). Is atheism a form of religion? Equating religion and atheism may seem oxymoronic by definition (although in languages Czech it is also oxymoronic in vocabulary, náboženství - lit. ingoddiness) but the Latin-English etymology of binding suggests otherwise. In fact, religion has much less to do with God than with social and political consideration. Religion is a strong determinant of social identity and although some intellectual and faith baggage does come with it that might fall within the purview of clinical and/or cognitive psychology, it is much more profitable to study its social aspects at the group level. While there must have been many individuals who converted as a result of private revelation (cognitive dissonance or licking the wrong/right kind of mushroom) the majority of conversions of populations in history happened for political or economic reasons. On some level, belonging to a religion is not psychologically and socially that different from supporting a football club. The God thing really only muddles the waters. So once we dispense with the ecstatic bit of religion, atheism in the form presented below (and most of the expressions in faith of science) qualify as religious.

ELLEN JOHNSON: It’s demeaning to atheists. It’s saying that under very dire circumstances or frightening situations, atheists will stop being atheists. They will start believing. And this is really just a wish on the part of the religious, because it’s not based in fact.

JOHN BURNETT: I thought it was a good line for the tape.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: NPR’s John Burnett.

JOHN BURNETT: And I didn’t realize that it was so offensive to atheists. And I learned that in spades after this story came out. They spammed me for weeks with e-mail, saying, we’re outraged. So now I know.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And did you sort of see their point?

JOHN BURNETT: I do see their point. I literally hadn’t thought about it before. And, frankly, I will think twice about using the phrase again.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What’s an atheist to do? American Atheist President Ellen Johnson, says they have to organize.

ELLEN JOHNSON: Until the atheists start voting their atheism and be identified as a voting block in America, the politicians aren’t going to listen to us. We’re not going to have any influence in the public schools. We’re not going to have any influence in the media or anywhere else.

If things can be demeaning to atheists, if they can organize and vote in blocs, and all of this to opposition to religion, how different are they from religion? Not very. There are two arguments against atheism as religion position that might be worth taking into account. First, atheism is not an organized institution with a guide to personal behavior. In this it is more useful to look at it in opposition to monotheism or religiosity. Second, by blithely reducing religion to not much more than a tupperware party with the occasional crusade, we need to deal with the fact that now almost everything can be a religion. Why should we then even bother pointing out its religious aspects when we don’t do it for the Women’s institute?

The first argument is only valid in so far as we think of atheism as an independent position. However, atheism is strongly associated with scientific rationalism and secular humanism, which provide the religious part of its ideology (institutionalization, rituals and holy texts). That’s where we find liturgies and rituals (many overlapping with religious ones). Citizenship classes are a great example of a religious-like indoctrination and there are many rituals that many people perform to signify their ‘devotion’. They are mostly enacted through popular culture (any TV series - which is why the claims of a liberal bias in media are not so far-fetched although looking in the wrong place) and modern story-telling is full of them. There are even pilgrimages (eco-tourism), holy places (museum of natural history) and clergy (Richard Dawkins, TV personalities) of secular humanism and rational scientism. Art, universities and scholarship that once used to support religion (let’s not forget that origin of mathematics both in Greece and India were in service of religion) now fully support rational scientism and humanism. There are no places that are full equivalents of cathedrals but there are certainly many monuments build to science (Millenium dome in London). In short, an scientific atheist can lead as fully a devotional life as a religious person, in which no aspects of the religious experience are missing, although they are not concentrated in one place. Anti-religionists, or those who only go to church infrequently, often forget that the ‘religious’ - i.e. connected - life is and always has been much more varied and less monolithic than is often portrayed. And neither do they realize the varied and often surprising role science plays in social and devotional life of atheists (as well as religious people). A long time ago, I noted this short passage from Agatha Christi which I think described the state of modern rational scientism very accurately over half a century ago:

Agatha Christie, A Pocket Full of Rye, 1953 p. 102: Describing the room of a young servant girl: “There were cuttings about flying sauycers about secret weapons, about truth drugs used by Russians, and claims for fantastic drugs discovered by American doctors. All the witchcraft, so Neele thought, of our twentieth century.� p. 221: Miss Marple: “It’s interesting, you know, and very instructive–the things these girls cut out of papers and keep. It’s always been the same, you know, all through the ages. Recipes for beauty, for attracting the man you love. And witchcraft and charms and marvelous happenings. Nowadays, they’re mostly lumped under the heading of Science. Nobody believes in magicians anymore, nobody believes that anyone can come along and wave a wand and turn you into a frog. But if you read in a paper that by injecting certain glands, scientists can alter your vital tissues and you’ll develop frog-like characteristics, well, everybody would believe that.�

The second argument (i.e. one why not call a kitting club a religion) is fair in so far as we could associate other social group with religious-like nature on their surface. What sets atheism apart, however, is the fact that it deals with the very ‘foundational’ issues of human existence that religion has heretofore dealt with and it does so in explicit opposition to religion. So it not only invites a comparison with what it attacks, its attempts to supplant it and its proselytizing aspects only make it more similar to religion. If it is true, then, that religion is an inevitable condition of human existence (both personally and socially) atheism, if it wishes to do away with it, must become more like. Rather like the cult of the Virgin Mary and Catholic Saints was introduced to provide an equivalent to pagan spirit and the Goddess. (Islam, being distributed by sword rather than political alliance, was a little more fortunate and remained less influenced in its doctrine, although Sharia law is an example of its blending with local cultural patterns.)

No religion and an end to war: how thinkers see the future | Science | Guardian Unlimited People’s fascination for religion and superstition will disappear within a few decades as television and the internet make it easier to get information, and scientists get closer to discovering a final theory of everything, leading thinkers argue today.

This is a good example of religious zeal in the atheist community, although, not necessarily completely incorrect. There is apparently only one good faith and that faith will be revealed to the world and the true and righteous will know it and only the low and wicked will turn away from it. (Presumably they will then be saved by science when the big disaster strikes and taken to new science-built colonies on the moon in a rapture like event.)

Wired 14.11: The Church of the Non-Believers
The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it’s evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there’s no excuse for shirking.

…Bad ideas foisted on children are moral wrongs. We should think harder about how to stop them…Dawkins: “the big war is not between evolution and creationism, but between naturalism and supernaturalism.” … Harris argues that, unless we renounce faith, religious violence will soon bring civilization to an end. Between 2004 and 2006, his book sold more than a quarter million copies.

…We discuss what it might look like, this world without God. “There would be a religion of reason,” Harris says. “We would have realized the rational means to maximize human happiness. We may all agree that we want to have a Sabbath that we take really seriously – a lot more seriously than most religious people take it. But it would be a rational decision, and it would not be just because it’s in the Bible. We would be able to invoke the power of poetry and ritual and silent contemplation and all the variables of happiness so that we could exploit them. Call it prayer, but we would have prayer without bullshit.”

What better way to conclude than with a quotation that proves the point. It seems almost too easy. And the author of the Wired article takes the bait (his bias evident from the title):

…People see a contradiction in its tone of certainty. Contemptuous of the faith of others, its proponents never doubt their own belief. They are fundamentalists….The New Atheists care mainly about correct belief. This makes them hopeless, politically.

He is certainly right about the fundamentalism of certain atheists but political hopelessness is much more open to question. In many ways, the new religion of secular humanism and rationalistic scientism (with its dogmas of individuality, democratism, rationalism, scientism and Kantian ethics) has already supplanted the old in many areas (education, mainstream culture, historiography) and it may not be too long before it prevails completely. We can then expect it to develop some features of major religions such as organized ritual that are still partially missing.

To summarize: All arguments for the existence of God are idiotic but most arguments against the existence of God are not much better. The only worthwhile attitude towards the idea of God is indifference. However, given that religion (or something like it) governs all aspects of our life - personal and social (we need those bindings), it is difficult to reject it as something from all daily life. In other words, while God or Science are irrelevant, many of the rituals associated with our belief in them are structurally essential to our life and we would ignore them at our peril. Those are worth subscribing to or fighting against, and, in fact, we have no choice but to engage with them in one way or another if we want to remain recognizably human.

BBC - Radio 4 - Archive Hour - 21 October 2006
Matthew Parris uncovers the remarkable story of the Electrophone, the first sound broadcasting service to operate in Britain.

Electrophone (information system) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The name Electrophone was used for a telephone-distributed audio system which operated in the United Kingdom between 1895 and 1926, relaying live theatre and music hall shows and, on Sundays, live sermons from churches via special headsets connected to conventional phone lines.

Who knew that YouTube existed more than a hundred years ago. A fascinating program on the BBC showed a world full of excitement and technical innovation that was happening a hundred years ago. The question we have to ask is what is the real speed of innovation. If it took this long to deliver true ‘content on demand’, how long will it take for ideas like the ‘paperless office’ to become a reality? It is possible that many of the technical innovations we see know won’t bear fruit for decades if not longer.

The other, related, interesting aspect of this is Kuhnian notion of ideas being lost as well as found during paradigm shifts. While the Electrophone ultimately had to be superseded by the ‘wireless’ - simply because the ‘tubes’ were too narrow then - the idea of ‘content on demand’ was lost for many decades and could only be resurrected when the technology allowed it. Traditional radio itself (and push content in general) is now under pressure from new ways of offering content.

Maths has the reputation of a a ‘pure’ discipline which sets both the practice and essence of mathematics apart from all other fields of inquiry. Mathematicians often use this ‘axiom’ to remind other academics of their superiority. Many people mention Gödel’s incompleteness theorems as a proof to the contrary but given that his is a purely mathematical argument, it probably isn’t the case. However, there are at least some aspects of mathematics that are subject to what in other disciplines would be called an empirical inquiry (if not an experiment). Moreover, these were used to establish the very foundations of mathematics. I can think of three. (I’m sure mathematicians would deny all of this - and it is possible, if not likely, that I am monumentally wrong.)

1/ zero - it’s always puzzled me greatly why it’s not possible to divide by zero (which is a surprisingly recent invention); from all the explanations I’ve hears is that the reason is because if we allow division by zero eventually other parts of mathematics would not work - but it took somebody ‘going to’ those regions of mathematics and discovering what happens if we divide by zero - well, that sounds pretty empirical to me
2/ set theory - why cannot a set be a member of itself? on the surface of it, there is no reason it should be; only if we take this premise and ‘experiment’ with it, does it turn out that a lot of things break (Russel’s paradox) - again, sounds pretty empirical to me
3/ Zeno’s paradoxes - these always intrigued me as the ultimate example of a mismatch between basic math and the world; to resolve this problem, we need to start making up lots of axioms (if perhaps marginal) to make math work

This thought is of no consequence to mathematics but it might be of more import to philosophy of science. Unless, this is complete non-sense (which statement is indicative of the intimidating power of pure and mysterious mathematics).

Cartoon Warfare (Ann Applebaum, WP)
In recent years “the personal is political,” a phrase whose origins are lost deep in the history of the women’s movement, has among other things come to mean that just about anyone is allowed to transform her personal experience into a political program. Writing about oneself has a long history: The memoir, the autobiography, the roman à clef, the essay that draws on personal experience to make witty social observations — all are legitimate literary forms. But writing about oneself and then turning these observations about one’s narrow social circle into a party platform or a tax policy — that is a more modern invention, and one of more questionable legitimacy and usefulness.

I wonder if this note is historically accurate. Certainly, Dickens tried to make social points as did Tolstoy and others. Using this ‘I know a guy who’ approach to social science also has a long tradition. But it does bring up a point of interest. Namely, what role does the ‘illustrative example’ play in our knowledge of social systems? It has an analogous question in the sciences where we could ask: ‘What role does our knowledge of the bevior of ideal gas play in our knowledge of the weather?’ The bigger question follows: does knowledge of parts (or purported parts) of a bigger system contribute to our knowledge of the system or should we approach the system as an independent entity with its own properties and rules governing its behavior (and treat the similiraty of these properties and rules to those of the systems components as the self-similarities we find in magnified fractal shapes)?

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).

TPM Online Article
So: whom to believe? There seems to be no doubt, as these authors and recent research suggest, that there’s a genetic component to obesity. Nor is there any doubt that obesity, like alcoholism before it, seems to bring out the self-righteous moralist in people; fat means you’ve been greedy, gluttonous, or slothful. Or, if you read other recent books, such as Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation or Marion Nestle’s Food Politics , fat is the result of heavy marketing by food conglomerates. Skepticism was a lot easier when we looked primarily at things that had been discredited hundreds of years ago.

Interesting summary of some of the skeptical views around the ‘obesity panic’ pointing out that “for every truth that seems obvious there’s a nay-sayer”. The same holds for the other popular wisdom ‘global warming’ or more recently ‘climate change’. The two modes of discourse (frames, models) in all these cases are 1) there is a common agreement, and those who oppose it do so for personal reasons (money - e.g. biostitutes, resentment or self-aggrandizement - e.g. the skeptical environmentalist); 2) the common agreement is wrong and those who follow it do so irrationally more on the because of group mentality than on the merits of evidence (e.g. many discriminatory views of the past - such as that on the inferiority of women; or past predictions of doom). Both models can be applied to either of these discussions and only time will tell which of them was more apt. However, it shows how difficult it is to make the decision purely on the ’scientific’ evidence.

The ‘global warming’ debate is interestingly complicated by the fact that the two opposing camps are both very powerful and powerless at the same time. The anti camp (Bush and cos) have material and political power but very much feel (and are) oppressed in the symbolic arena of the intellectual world (they exhibit typical behavior of the oppressed) . The pro camp have the weight of ‘educated’ public opinion behind them - the intellectual elites, science, much of the public - and have a lot of symbolic power. However, they feel (and probably are) relatively powerless as to financial and political resources. Of course, symbolic resources can be translated into actual ones (and vice versa) - but it takes time and is not guaranteed. At the moment, there is an interesting conceptual stalemate.

Private hunch: The basic formula of resource input must equal resource output of course holds. The ‘global-warming’ camp will probably be proven wrong on the straightforward application of this linear formula to a system that is probably not linear. The anti camp will probably be proven wrong (and has been in other issues) on the overreliance on the self-correcting system. Hopefully, I will have more to say about the conceptual foundations about these positions.