Year: 2016

Managerialism, Leftism, Scientism, You Name It.

Two or three threads came together this morning.

Ongoing debates about European responses to “immigrants”, “anti-semitism” and “islamism” – politically correct to the point of perversion of sense. Insanity. And of course later (lower down) #Chilcot. Where to start?

Here a piece by Chris Corrigan posted on Facebook by Johnnie Moore, on managerialism and the conflict between “efficiency” and common humanity, at the inevitable expense of care and attention to the latter.

“Management practices these days manage for efficiency which on the surface is widely accepted as a good thing. But there are things in human experience for which efficiency is devastating. Love, care, community, and attention are all made much worse by being efficient.”

I responded:

“Absolutely! It’s a shared mental illness to objectify anything we need to manage (to justify, govern, make efficient, etc) and remove any aspect of compassionate caring humanity from our equations. (A contagious fashion, a meme. Scientism I’ve been calling it for 15 years.)”

Here two tweets by Anne Marie Waters on what should be sympathetic compassion for those punished for crimes against individuals who end up feeling guilty and behaving irrationally as the victims.

[Post Note :

End Post Note.]

Anne Marie calls it “Leftism” – her perspective rejecting dysfunctional socialist politics, seen as ignoring these issues for reasons of political correctness, freeing herself to address the issues head-on.

What Chris calls “Managerialism”, I’ve been calling “Scientism” throughout this blogging project. But what’s in a name? Underlying the whole is the meme that expects “objectification” of anything we’re dealing with, so we can manage it, justify it, quantify it, put them in our logical and arithmetic equations.

This ignores common humanity, compassion, care and love. By design they’re excluded from any objective analysis. It’s a collective mental illness to think this way. It’s not complicated, but it must be resisted.

Also related this exchange from Nassim Nicholas Taleb denying the value of Game Theory in his statistical equations. He’s right, they won’t fit his rigorous logic (I have a separate draft post on this) but they therefore exclude the psychology between subjects, empathetic or competitive. A kind of mental illness, autism to exclude personal subjective impression, to reduce psychology to objective guesswork (ie sophisticated statistical analyses).

Need to join-up those three threads, they may even seem counter-intuitively related to my point, but they’re part of the same underlying meme.

Continuing, today is of course publication of #Chilcot, and exactly the same problem, in BBC summary he concludes:

“[F]uture military action on such a scale [should] only be possible with more careful analysis and political judgement.”

Wong again. Analysis may be more rigorous, but never careful. It’s care-less by design. We murder to dissect. What is really meant is:

“more careful analysis and political judgement.”

Judgment by analysis is mere “fudgement” – a scientistic managerial way of justifying action, but very unwise judgement. Specific issues in the #Iraq / #Chilcot case are about “planning” the follow-through of taking action, not about the tough decision to take action. It’s the decision and (military) action that needs care, not the analysis. What we need is practical wisdom. Analysis is a mere tool. The fudge of the WMD Dossier was always a fudge because it could only ever be a fudge for what was already (properly) a judgement.

Furthermore:

Exactly – liberal intervention was a good & wise call then, and it still is. It’s wisdom however, was destroyed by having to satisfy (ie fudge) objective justification, thereby taking eyes of the real ball of planning for the complex and long-term consequences of “regime change” – because this complex judgement of reality and planning options had to remain hidden so that a simplistic facade could be presented. Lots of good people (politicians and journos) had their careers destroyed knowing there was a lot wrong, but having no means to get the underlying issue addressed credibly for a world craving ethical simplicity.

No shit Sherlock ….

So it goes ….

There Is No Scientific Method?

Jerry Coyne ranting in response to this NYT piece by James Blachovicz.

A recurring topic, but I had to react to this:

Blachovicz: Scientific method is not itself an object of study for scientists, but it is an object of study for philosophers of science. It is not scientists who are trained specifically to provide analyses of scientific method.

Coyne: All I can say here is “WTF”? Does this man have any inkling of the difference between science on the one hand and philosophy or poetry on the other?

All I can say is WTF? Does Jerry Coyne have any inkling of the difference between philosophy and science?

The issue is that science uses many methods, many of the creative ones it uses are shared with many other arts and crafts, but the real point must surely be which particular methodological aspects distinguish it as science as opposed any other rational pursuit. Obviously rationality is part of it, but it’s part of any rational pursuit, and simply leaves us with narrow or broad definitions of rationality to worry about instead of definitive features of science. No progress there. (Good news is that Coyne respects Dennett on being helpful to science as a philosopher. Maybe he’s also noticed Dennett is not a fan of premature definitions or greedy reductionism.)

Blachovicz is right, and Coyne wrong, on his meta-point that scientists may self-identify as such, but cannot thmselves define what makes them so. That’s on another level, one for the philosophers.

My own thrust is that the definitive feature of science is the repeatable empirical falsifiability, where scientific empiricism demands tight & closed, objective & logical, framing of the hypothesis and of any repeatable test(s), in order that a conclusion (false or not) can follow from any test result.

This limits science to those fields usefully amenable to such closed objective definitions. For so many fields of human endeavour it may not be the most useful approach to understanding and problem solving. Experienced human empiricism may not be scientific but is nevertheless “real”. Much human endeavour, even life in general, can never really be a repeatable experiment, and indeed the exclusively objective rationality of science is (by design) ignorant and even destructive of subjects, human or otherwise.

Reinforces my impression to date, that Coyne may be a staunch defender of the place of (Darwinian) evolution in science, but is not sophisticated epistemologically, nor particularly scientific or rational in his approach.

[Hat tip to @ChrisOldfield for sharing the original link.]

[Post Note – Tangentially related, but distinguishing wrong thoughts and beliefs from wrong ways of thinking and rationalising them is the key here. The one is meta to the other. Here Alan Rayner’s Best Thinking reinforces the point again:

And in fact the same “scientism” thread pretty much continues in the next post …..]

Where I Diverge From @PaulMasonNews

Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism is an excellent recipe for enlightened future socio-economic arrangements that recognises the realties of individual freedoms and transactions in times of mass communications and social-media that bypass so much “mediation” by corporate organisations and institutions that have been taken for granted in established economic models.

Unfashionably even perversely, but quite correctly, he also identifies that the idea of “unions” becomes more important the more individuals act individually, in order that common interests can be properly pooled in economic activity.

Obviously it’s a Marxist project. Mason is a Marxist. But it is very a carefully nuanced socialism, as indeed was Marx himself before being consumed in various communist projects. Scary to many if we do not take the trouble to understand the subtle and nuanced detail. Mason’s project is “Project Zero” – the idea that we can create this enlightened future arrangements by following his prescription, a prescription that recognises much detail cannot be prescribed but must be nurtured through it’s own evolution. Again scary for those who prefer a good plan, but Project Zero couldn’t be further from any idea of central planning. It’s about understanding how things may best work.

Thus far, I cannot fault Paul Mason, Postcapitalism or Project Zero; zero because it requires a ground zero that established economic beliefs need to be completely let go.

Where I diverge is the pace of change. Paul is uncompromising in his revolutionary intent. Anything social, liberal or democratic that isn’t part of his project is fair game as collateral damage. “Neoliberalism” is a failed project. Indeed it is, but there are lots of babies in this bathwater. A lot of participants that can’t easily or quickly fully understand and appreciate the enlightened subtleties of Postcapitalism but may nevertheless be swept along. We need to recognise the evolution of understanding and action inherent in Project Zero and not let our impatience and principled dogmatism replace the evolution with a revolution, just because “in vs out” is easier to understand than messy reality.

There will need to be collaboration and migration across existing socialist, liberal and democratic mind-sets, and probably migration in democratic arrangements themselves. Popular voting itself will probably require proportional arrangements unless genuine union of partisan interests is achieved, which is ever less credible. Flocking around popular memes may seem an attractive way to achieve concensus, but such memes are unlikely to hold and share the subtleties our future requires.

The plan needs to be a meta-plan for how the necessary evolution can be nurtured, not a revolution whose collateral damage (eg to the Labour party / Labour movement, but not only these) also destroys the good will such a plan entails.

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[Post Notes:

Previously on Psybertron: Mason Whipping-up a Capitalist Crisis.

Obviously this post was prompted by Paul Mason speaking at the Socialist Workers Party rally held with Jeremy Corbyn in Parliament Square yesterday evening at the very time when the Parliamentary Labour Party was discussing their vote of no confidence in his leadership and the 30-odd resignations from his shadow team.

This is one tweeted response this morning:

Creative destruction. Engineered chaos.
Ever the tools of revolution. And :

This one will run and run. And finally as asked by Clive, I should probably respond to Mason’s ProgExit plan – some of the specifics. He published it over the weekend in readiness for the Monday “meeting”. I’ll come back to the link later.]

[Post Note: Corbynomics from Guido Fawkes. I think the reasoning behind this reckless sounding clip from Mason is that 500 million is peanuts compared to the trillions of borrowing behind the deficit even after n-years of austerity, so IF it can support the Corbyn investment promises AND those promises have the desired benefits, THEN it’s worth doing. Still a pretty reckless gamble. Same poin raised by many noting the absence of the word “deficit” entirely from the main stage at recent Labour conference, and Mason put same Keynsian point more soberly to Andrew Neill when interviewed at the conference.


Reckless as in “everything else that’s been tried seems to be failing, so let’s try this”. Better understanding and truly collaborative working required by all, not just by Mason himself, before any chance of success. Evolutionary groundwork needed before revolution.]

The Ageism Reaction to #EUref

Lots of social media activity on the #EUref result and non-stop news events since, but one I need to write a longer piece on is the ageism.

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  • Any decision has future consequences, any decision, any poll, any vote, not particularly this referendum.
  • Any such future consequences affects the younger (with a longer future) more than the older, not particularly this referendum.
  • Any such decision will be made on more conservative grounds (emotional attachment to history) by the older than the younger (with less experience of history), not particularly this referendum.
  • To suggest old people / baby-boomers had it easy and therefore care more about themseves than their children / grand-children’s generation is manifestly untrue, offensive, grotesque and hateful.

Sure “we” may have secured creature comforts, assets, incomes, houses, pensions that the younger generations may have not yet, and (as ever) will be finding more difficult to achieve. There are many things wrong with political and economic systems contributing to that trend, and property values and pensions may be among the items at risk in the #Leave #EUref result, but no parent ever valued these over and above the value and security they provide to their offspring.

Too many are expressing frustration and anger at the older baby-boomer generation proportionately favouring the #Leave vote. I’ve pointed out the Pol Pot Cult of Youth history to a few. Thankfully some wags, are managing to poke the humour at the idea:

If my own 87 year-old mother spends a moment not worrying about her grand-children and great-grand-child I’ve yet to see it. (See also Sheila Hancock) Both closer to war generation than us baby-boomers, but insulting to suggest general lack of appreciation of human value.

Of course the anger and frustration are reasonable, but the reasoning is false and part of our addiction to numbers and technology. Age is a number that lends itself to arithmetic manipulation in a spreadsheet – but being easy doesn’t make it good. There are many more significant factors and nuanced values that better underly any meaningful view of the problems behinf #EUref and its result.

Here is just one example:

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(Which of course plays neatly into the final logical conclusion of the second piece above, even though it erroneously also brings in the ageism angle.)

And of course most of these correlations are based on (proven unreliable) polls, not on voting data as noted here by Brian Clegg amongst many.

So here a meaningful example:

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Continuing – a serious proposition is better definition of rules of suffrage.

Shouldn’t drop below 18, even 18 may be too low. Maybe could look at an upper limit, but where to draw such a line. Problem here again is focussing on age as a number, because that makes it easy to draw a line, but maybe not the right values. Setting a standard – civics curriculum / test etc, would also need to come with responsibility and commitment – but quite alien to the informal constitution concepts in the UK. The suggestion of lowering to 16/17 or raising to 65/70 are pretty fatuous. Responsible adult isn’t a number, but responsibility is the key concept. No rights and freedoms without it.

[Post Note : And some more:]

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Older US Views of European Union

This is really just a riff on some coincidental connections about what needs to happen around the fallout from #EURef (the result of which will finally be announced tomorrow morning.)

Not a high profile celebrity these days I guess, so I’d no reason to know if George Steiner was dead or alive, it hadn’t occurred to me he was a living person until I saw this long read The Idea of Europe posted today at OpenDemocracy.net (A link tweeted by @PaulMasonNews).

Several coincidental connections that spooked me when I saw it. Not least because I was reading F S C Northrop last night. Why is that a coincidence?

I’m currently reading Northrop’s Logic of Science and Humanities (1947), which makes several references to his Meeting of East and West (1946) and noted the publisher’s 1959 reference to his later European Union and US Foreign Policy (1954).

Back in 1973 Steiner’s “stellar reputation” was influential in his review of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) bringing it to wide and credible public attention.

Steiner obviously has a long-standing interest in Melville’s Moby Dick. Later in 2001 he quipped “Moby Dick” in response to the question of whether he had ever read anything trivial in his youth, and when reviewing Pirsig’s Zen and the Art back in 1973 he noted “the analogies with Moby Dick are patent”.

The connection? Reading Northrop’s East & West on a troopship back from Korea was the main influence on Pirsig’s own writing project.

So doubly coincidental to find both Steiner and Northrop writing their US intellectual views of the European Union last night and today, the day of #EURef.

Paul Mason, incidentally also posted this open letter to the president of the EU today, pointing out that like me, whilst voting #Remain, we still have many serious issues to resolve with the EU.

Now when Northrop and Steiner were first talking European “Unification” the post-war ideas pre-dated the specific beast that has evolved to be “The EU” but it brings up some serious US views of what the collaborative European project should look like. Personally I’m all for (proper) federal arrangements, and whilst I don’t support all of Paul Mason’s shopping list of specific items, I share the values they represent.

Values. “And what is good Phaedrus?” The future can be brighter if we work to make it so, and that work can be easier if we approach it collaboratively. There is no shortage of valuable resources to apply to the task.

How The Light Gets In 2016 #htlgi2016

At Hay on Wye HTLGI festival again for the final weekend:

My late arrival and changes to programme meant Friday pm didn’t quite go according to my pre-planning, but got to see and hear;

Denis Noble, Anne Bowcock and Rupert Sheldrake chaired by David Malone, talking on the promissory hype of the Human Genome project – The Emperor’s New Genes. Obviously successful as a project and undoubtedly delivering benefits to bio-medical sciences for rarer conditions with clearer genetic dependencies, but the point of Noble and Sheldrake is that the biological systems have much greater complexities and dependencies on many different layers of abstraction, with two-way processes of causation, than the focus on (ill-defined) genes and some kind of one-way predictable determined causation.

Chiara Marletto, Massimo Pigliucci & Bernard Carr, chaired by Tara Shears discussing A Goldilocks World. The seemingly unlikeliness of (our) being in any given universe. Calling this an Anthropic effect gives egotistical “special” focus on us humans, but question applies to complex outcomes like intelligent life (and created artifacts) generally. Type 2 multiverse interpretation seems to rule. How laws and constants – inc the cosmological and gravitational constants – come to be is part of “creation” of current universe. But views of probabalistic models always flawed by absence of any starting case on the population distribution of possibilities before staring conditions. Denial of free will and problem for physics actually modelling choice at all (See also Chiara in “Playing Dice” later.) (Brandon Carter and Martin Rees much referenced – see video recording now published.)

[Missed Frank Wilczek and Laura Mersini-Houghton on Gravity and Massimo Pigliucci on After Evidence and Missing Evidence with Rupert Sheldrake. See recordings.]

Peter Cameron, Michael Duff and Chiara Marletto chaired by Tara Shears Playing Dice with the Universe. Problem with probabalistic theories of physical behaviour is having any base case for the potential event population distribution in the design space. Chiara focussing on quantum theories (Chiara working with David Deutsch on Constructor Theory). Michael; thought experiments of supposed repeatable cases with particular sets of possible outcomes – Copenhagen / Schroedinger et al. Pragmatically it works – it it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Everett’s bifurcation into many worlds makes people uneasy (I’ll say). Peter; random events previously seen as the works of the gods – Dante “for luck your science finds no measuring rods”. Probability tools work. QM & Chaos (& global economics & insurance business, etc.) But can these functional tools for populations really apply at any fundamental level – without “populations” of possibilities? Chiara agrees, must be able to decompose probable outcomes into individually deterministic effects. Michael; Why … regresses back to some first cause(s) – big bang creating physics – laws of nature – itself. Only point of determination – things happen to be that way from some point such as that. Change, time and causation problematic even at fundamental mechanistic levels of dynamical laws. Physicists don’t like dualism – good. How consciousness interacts with (quantum) physics remains “mystical”. Bernard Carr asks – probabilitistic partial predictability not actually “random” – think directed creativity, in art or otherwise? So some “top down” causation (Bernard) – preparation in higher levels (Peter) even when creative moment is a bolt from the blue (Gauss, et al).

[To be continued …]

John Searle (via link), Opheila Deroy and Rupert Sheldrake (standing in for Markus Gabriel) hosted by David Malone (standing in for Oliver Burkeman) on Matter, Mind and Mystery. Can our material view of the world explain consciousness? Ophelia – wrong question, really suggests our view of natural materialism is itself flawed and our view of consciousness is hides many different elements. Agreed. Not even see distinction between material objects and “thoughts” other than levels of interaction. Rupert – same, but fields (obviously) for these interactions – extensible systems of fields, extensible in both space and time (two way) are testable physics, despite tabo nature of these ideas. Searle – categories in the question not worth a damn (all agreed). Consciousness is a biological (physical) process – inside a brain. No evidence of fields beyond the brain. Entirely biological, but agrees problem is multiple levels of description, even though he priviledges the biological. Theme – ontological problem of “matter” at root? Clearly it’s the stuff of physics, even when it’s biological, but it’s actual ontological description cannot be limited by physicists current model at any given time. What is too dogmatic is that consciousness is just a process of the physically material. Systems are more complex, multi-level and multi-directional. The meaningful concepts are fields in this (whole) medium. One-way reductionist causation is the dogma behind the taboo. Panpsychism is not new to the taboo. But even Searle accepts as wrong, matter as component pieces of matter down to indivisible “atoms”; the components are “points of energy” (but not fields, fields which support and are influenced by attractors?). Searles problem (with Sheldrake) is that bringing in multi-dimensional and directional causation is the incoherent element. I say that’s the reductionist dogma. Searle of course is not anti any research, just certain how we need to base coherence on “what we know” – but isn’t this the dogma that leads to the taboos. Sheldrake is strictly testable empirical science, as we’ve noted before, even though much parapsychological (ESP) research has proven bogus. Proving consciousness exists in something we might accept as an otherwise “inanimate object” is hard, but it’s not actually possible to prove it in another conscious being without their conscious cooperation. (Searle – behaviour and mechanisms, not just behaviour. But isn’t this just circular on a particular predetermined view of what is conscious.) (Ophelia Deroy’s own IAI video here.)

Chiara Marletto on The Limits to Certainty in lunch conversation over new computable predictability of the universe from her work on constructor theory, with David Deutsch. In looking at questions about why certain constants and laws happen to be the way they happen to be, the idea of principles or meta-laws constraining  current actual states from within all conceivable possibilities is attractive. Interesting addition to debate on alternatives to greedy reductionism is the concept that impossible states in discrete component systems can be possible in another level of compound system, It’s not just the complexity or any suggestions of reverse causality, simply a principle that such states can be computed. [Also – error correction in computability seems to be complement to mutation in evolution?] Consequences for basic ontology and for causation as the world unfolds seems inescapable, even if the world as a universal quantum computer seems far fetched. Says a lot about fabric of universe as information and about consciousness – and will – as part of that.

[Terry Eagleton on The Swindle of the New. Traditional conservatism and acceptance of history and inevitable aspects of a future based on history mediated by the now are far from bad … innovation is not good in and of itself.]

Empty Brain – Empty Project

I criticised the Human Brain Project about this time last year, and recently responded to this Aeon piece by Robert Epstein;

“The Empty Brain.
Your brain does not process information,
retrieve knowledge or store memories.
In short: your brain is not a computer.”

Well actually, of course, I say it does and it is;

Your brain does process information,
does store memories
and does retrieve knowledge.
It does do computation.

What’s wrong is the component model of a computer as some kind of CPU plus RAM/Storage. As I said when I commented earlier in the week, it’s actually a good article (recommended again today by Massimo Pigliucci) it just suffers from headline-writer’s click-bait.

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[Post Note : Jeffrey Shallit at Recursed blog, rejecting the same Epstein piece & headline above and who agrees with me for the same component modelling reasons:]

Yes, Your Brain Certainly Is a Computer

Did you hear the news, Victoria? Over in the States those clever Yanks have invented a flying machine!
– A flying machine! Good heavens! What kind of feathers does it have?
– Feathers? It has no feathers.
– Well, then, it cannot fly. Everyone knows that things that fly have feathers. It is preposterous to claim that something can fly without them.

And interestingly, here Epstein reviewing George Zarkadakis book on AI et al (now on order). Pigliucci was also at #HTLGI (next post). And, I responded to a few tweeted comments from Zarkadakis talking on transhumanism and related topics at BHA2016. And more from Zarkadakis. I’ll say more when I’ve read his book. I may be some time – I’ve read most of it but so far it feels like the usual breathless hype round AI.

And – Zarkadakis again – I support his disagreement with Musk over the sci-fi idea of an AI “Singularity” as a threat to humanity – but do NOT agree with his reasoning that machines cannot be conscious or have conscious intelligence as opposed to machine automation. Of course machines can become properly intelligent and conscious – they will have “real intelligence” when they do. Most so-called AI is simply unconscious automation.]

X-Plane – the Liminal Layer

Vaguely (subconscious irony) aware of David Gray’s upcoming Liminal Thinking publication, and reminded today by a Facebook post from Johnnie Moore (which itself has a hat tip to Jon Husband) that set me thinking – a riff linking some thinking, rather than any deep reading of the references (yet).

Johnnie’s trigger was “Tyranny of the explicit” which obviously resonated with my whole agenda. The memetic problem that we over-value the explicit, demand the implicit is made explicit, because it’s much easier to count, express, communicate, manipulate, select and validate explicit forms than simply accept the implicit. Our culture – the objective memeplex – rejects acceptance of the implicit. Ease-of-argument wins over value-of-content. (Obviously very consistent with my current Wittgensteinian Logical methods vs Language games vein of work, but that’s not the riff here.)

No, what fired off the links was the Liminal Thinking graphic on David’s web pages, presumably in his book:

Culture OS 016

The thing is the 3-layer model is my “everything comes in 3 layers, even the layers” mantra. Any “layer” of anything has three aspects, itself and interfaces to two others. This is useful anytime we express conceptual models in 2D or 3D views representing lines and surfaces, as we do mentally all the time whether we capture them explicitly or not (whiteboard, powerpoint, any information model in any publishable form – see “ease” memetic point above). But that’s a generic point. (XPLANE is the branding of David’s consulting business, which obviously uses his liminal thinking thinking – an obvious allusion.)

The specific important point is that this particular

Conscious <> Liminal <> Unconscious

3-layer model of thinking maps in an interesting way to a particular physical model of the brain

Left Hemisphere <> Corpus Callosum <> Right Hemisphere

Now, left-right brain myths won’t go away, even though many now find it easier to simply dismiss such ideas. The point is explicit myths about left-right brain differences are wrong. What is important is their three-layer architecture, not their differences. The interface mediates how processing in the two halves communicate with each other and keeps different forms of thought processing separate at any given time. Apart from some major, broad specialisations of dedicated connections, most of the cortex is generic and plastic enough to be involved in any kind of processing of any topics of consideration at any time – but the architecture is always there to enable joined-up thinking. (See Iain McGilchrist) Pretty sure the real (best) conceptual model of thinking has to be:

Particular & Explicit <> Liminal (Interfacing) <> Abstract & Implicit

The problem looks like explicit dominating the implicit, but in fact they interact not directly, through a zero-substance interface, but through a significant and substantial interface in which important processing happens. How literally the conceptual maps to the physical is not important – ie our physical models are ultimately conceptual (informational) anyway. Liminal thinking processes are worth understanding, valuing and learning to use.

Looking forward to Liminal Thinking by David Gray.