Year: 2021

Don’t Panic Captain Mainwaring #COP26

Pointing out that hypocrisy has become the standard of all political discourse rather than addressing substantive content. Great post from Jamie Bartlett earlier today:

(And actually a good thread of comments reinforcing the point that “taking sides” against opponents is generally destroying all political decision-making nuance.)

In fact as I frequently point out (after Brunsson) hypocrisy is an essential political skill – being able to hold conflicting positions in different contexts over different times. Anyone who can’t is a simpleton and shouldn’t be allowed near a difficult decision.

The rest of this post is just a dump of thoughts I really can’t be bothered to append to every social-media post or response.

So much in the opening COP26 speeches by national premiers and treasures “out-rhetoricking” each other in how close to midnight / extinction / crisis / emergency / rebellion / time-bomb / now-or-never / last-chance we are on climate change. It just ramps up the political stakes – rallies “troops” – without adding anything to any solutions. Indeed it simply leaves more meaningless hostages-to-fortune lying around for hypocritical hypocrites to pick over next time round. All it does it make future rational action much harder and in the meantime increases the risk of taking dumb counter-productive actions because they are populist vote-catchers.

And in a similar vein from Tom Chivers too:

Some specifics:

The new Workington coal mine? How can the UK claim climate leadership whilst building a new coal-mine. Quite simple really:

And now after commitments to net-zero carbon-equivalent footprints and fossil-fuel usage, driven by global-warming calculations we have a methane commitment. We keep setting targets based on simple single numbers. Tunnel vision on a few easy tangibles, ignoring the ecosystem as a whole:

Teli Chinelis (on LinkedIn)
“Once again they left out noise pollution. The second biggest environmental health risk after air pollution (according to WHO). Whoever deals with Net zero etc assessments is laughing all the way to the bank!!!”

a close up of text on a white background

Me in reply:
“It shows *that* some things are connected, but nothing about *how*. Anything this complex needs a level of abstraction – and systems thinking and complexity as explicit subjects in their own right. As soon as one tries to be specific, any list (eg of emissions or pollutions – air, water, noise, light, …) will be incomplete. But I agree with the thrust of the post. The “tunnel vision” comes from focussing on the specific countable things. Carbon equivalent, average temperature, … ‘one species loss is a tragedy’ anyone?”

Matthew West, further reply:
“I think the mistake here is to think that focusing on one thing means not focusing on something else, that somehow these things are mutually exclusive. Personally, I’d go for the UN sustainability goals. We need to address all of them, and addressing one does not mean not addressing the others. https://sdgs.un.org/goals – 17 distinct goals.”

Yet again the UN itself has high-quality content. Just like with human rights from freedom of expression of thought and belief downwards, it has sustainability well covered as a complex interdependent system.

Which leaves a few things for now.

The Biodiversity angle of terrestrial sustainability? A huge amount of focus is put on individual species and mutations, but there are zillions of them. The way I see it we should obviously avoid artificial mono-cultures, at least ones without more natural ecosystems joining them up. BUT at any given point in time (roughly) 1/3 of those zillions of species are going extinct quite naturally, 1/3 enjoy stability and 1/3 are still finding their secure niches. Sure, the gene-pool might lose a potentially valuable gene somewhere at some point (it’s losing 1/3 zillions of them quite naturally) but we can’t “focus” on every individual gene.

(Same as we can’t focus on counting individual Covid deaths in a pandemic.)

And as I also often point out hydrocarbons, fossil and living, in the soil and deeper in the earth are themselves entirely natural, methane included. There are places where they bubble to the surface entirely naturally.

Forest fires too. Recent years we are actually having fewer fires over smaller areas than has historically been the case quite naturally. They’re just hitting the media more (a) because it’s fashionable and (b) because thanks to more human habitation closer to less managed wild forests more humans are being affected directly. (Trump – the fuckwit – was actually right on this one. See Jamie’s “finding hypocrisy” post at the top.)

And finally for now – I really must get someone to answer this question directly. We’ve got very focused on global-warming and carbon-dioxide (and methane) as greenhouse gases as the primary mechanism to deal with. (And I know there’s an ongoing controversy about sabotaging the hockey-stick data from East Anglia Uni – where coincidentally Rupert Read is employed.) BUT Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has been an issue for me throughout the industrial age. Surely a large part of the AGW simply comes from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics – energy<>entropy / order<>disorder. We are filling our ecosystem with low-grade heat faster than any previous species, simply due to our energetic activity?

My pet hate – a real trigger – “young” people suggesting “old” people don’t care about their future. How little they know.

We really ought to be spreading our sustainability concerns and actions over a much broader and joined-up range of human activities and at the same time being realistic about which are natural features where we need to work with mitigations rather than fool ourselves into imagining we can reverse or even stop.

The catchy rhetoric of “No more X by <date>” is bollox.
For the birds. (For the voters actually.)

[Climate previously on Psybertron.]

Nolan Chart Political Compass

Having some debate with (apparently / claimed) “Libertarian” colleagues about the relationship to a “Liberal Democrat” position. Obviously quite different things, but what exactly? Are we talking the same language?

The Nolan Chart has been around since Hans Eysenck described it in 1954. David Nolan published his standard diamond representation in 1971, but he has partisan US Libertarian motives from the start, so his position is top, front and centre in his presentation.

Despite Eysenck developing the idea in a UK context, almost all development since Nolan has a US focus. (The people I’m in debate with are neither UK nor US, just to complicate matters. Basically I’m not believing they’re as Libertarian as they claim – a matter of perspective of lived experience vs ideals.)

The so-called “Simplified Nolan Chart” at least has “Left” where the UK experience would expect it, what the US would call Liberal (though confusingly in this square version the left<>right axis is not horizontal):

Like all 2D diagrams of the human world – thank Boston Consulting Group for their “2×2 BCG Grid” meme – there are many other dimensions and some developments have attempted 3D and more, with or without time. The best developed version I’ve found in web-searches is from “Atheist Republic” who clearly, as well as being pointedly atheist, are aligned with US republicanism, but so far as I can tell it only exists on their social-media pages and I can’t see who to credit for its creation. (The even weirder thing about this version – although the real-world positions map very well imho – is that it is flipped, with Libertarianism towards the bottom and Authoritarianism / Totalitarianism at the top. Doesn’t affect the ability to map, but may reflect political bias on whoever created it. It is in fact very close to the simplified version – apart from the flip – but with the “extreme” variants peppered around it.)

Where would the different political ideologies lie on the political compass test? - Quora

Whether good or bad, this version also maps Liberalism onto Centrism, which at least fits UK experience. The confusion with Left / Liberal is just one part of the modern shift that – unless you are one of the more extreme positions – Left<>Right is no longer really dominant and the question is more one of Freedom<>Authority.

Easy to see a Nolan-diamond un-flipped version of the above?

Anyway …

… a holding post to be developed into a longer conversation.

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Post Notes:

Thought … maybe the Cynefin idea (Complicated<>Complex) might free us from the BCG 2×2 Grid?

Oh wow, the new “Libertarians” that this dialogue was intended for are now promoting Ayn Rand as their hero. Looking more like extreme US Right Libertarianism by the day!:

Poetic Naturalism – Sean Carroll

I’ve been racking my brains for a day or two as to how I came to be reading Sean Carroll’s 2016 “The Big Picture – On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself”, indeed how I came to buy it in the Spring of this year?

I can’t read every book by every credible scientist and science communicator. There are just so many of them and only so many times you can read summaries of the evolution of science from the big bang to Copenhagen and beyond.

I’m only 1/4 to 1/3 through as I type, and in a sense 98% nothing new to me, and yet the way it’s ordered is fascinating, so much so, that the chapter headings are very tempting to skip forward to see where we’re headed. But in fact I’m reading slowly, sequentially and annotating profusely as I go.

I’ve been “following” Carroll (CalTech theoretical physicist) since before this book was written, without actually reading any of his books. On-line friend and physicist Rick Ryals, since deceased, had a lot of time for dialogue with Carroll, eg on his Facebook page. Rick (Island) was for me an influential proponent of the idea that Einstein was right by virtue of changing his mind about his cosmological constant being wrong. The fact that most of science failed to heed his change of mind about what he’d initially characterised as a “blunder” is a kind of anthropic blind-spot, a denial that has persisted to this day, thanks to the success of the “shut up and calculate” approach post-Copenhagen. (See @skdh piece in the previous post).

Already Carroll, in discussing gravitational anomalies, eg in the pattern of cosmic microwave background radiation, has suggested:

“There is a very obvious and robust candidate for what the culprit might be: vacuum energy, which Einstein invented and called the cosmological constant.”

Anyway so far, what’s new and fascinating about Carroll’s 2016 book are two things:

Firstly, the realisation that what we have is “poetic naturalism“. An acceptance that whilst all sorts of wackier simulation, illusion, multiverse ideas are possible, it makes most sense (after Wittgenstein) to accept that everything we experience and detect is real and has a “natural” explanation, even if that explanation might be uncertain. And “poetic” because many different “ways of talking” about such explanations can be valid.

Which leads to, secondly, the importance of emergence and the significance of different ways of talking as maybe different levels of reality? Whether “weak emergence” where higher levels still may have lower level causal explanations in principle even where it makes sense to talk in terms of higher levels, or whether “strong emergence” where a higher level may not necessarily have causal explanations in terms of (existing) lower. [In fact, quite a lot on older models of 4 (or 5) levels that would appeal to Pirsigians – Physics > Chemistry (still physical) > Biology > Mental > Social – as a given in many independent sources.] Even space (or is that time?) is emergent. And a recognition that deterministic reductionism is a kind of dogma against the possibility of any strong emergence (al la Dennett re consciousness and free-will etc).

“Let’s note that memories are of the past but not the future and note that causes precede their effects for now, postponing for the moment the contentious issues of choice and free-will. We will get there (I predict).”

Lots more on understanding causation, more on information and on entropy as the direction of time and the complement to information. Contra Marletto previously, strong support for Boltzmann and statistical thermodynamics as one of those valid emergent levels. It made a big impression on me back in 1973 when Bronowski visited the inscription of Boltzmann’s formula on his gravestone.

Who are the most unfortunate scientists of all time? - Quora

In fact I notice that S=k.LogW (a detail from this or a similar image) is the header graphic on Carroll’s own blog pages.

Something Wrong with the Foundations of Physics

That there is something wrong with the foundations of physics is nothing new here on Psybertron. As an engineer and epistemological-ontologist rather than a physicist I’m not an academic expert in fundamental physics, but I have been following the logic of many writers in physics and philosophy for over two decades.

Sabine Hossenfelder (@skdh) is a physicist and a science communicator I’ve followed for at least half of that period. She’s always thoughtful and open to philosophical thought, even if I’ve sometimes found her dismissive of any non-scientific philosophy talk – not in itself empirically falsifiable.

This @skdh piece in Cosmos is typically thoughtful and far-reaching and picks-up on a thought often expressed here, that unsuccessful searches for dark matter (and dark energy and assorted missing particles and symmetries) often appear to be in denial of the possibility that the effects of  their apparently invisible existence are really indicators that core theory predicting them is itself wrong. A wishful denial that has led to decades of stagnation (and wasted investment) in any real progress in fundamental physics. Jim AlKhalili agreed with her today.

@skdh says:

We’ve known of dark matter since the 1930s [… but] we still don’t know what it is made of: in fact, we don’t know whether it’s made of anything … it could just be we use the wrong theory for gravity.

Nowadays [… the] phrase “physicists say” is all too frequently followed by speculations [we have no evidence of]. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be associated with this discipline.

But the worst part is that most of my colleagues think this situation perfectly okay. For starters, they would probably disagree that we have a problem in the foundations of physics at all.

After a bit more on philosophy-friendly naturalism:

The misgivings that philosophers had about quantum mechanics, it turned out, weren’t entirely irrelevant after all. If physicists hadn’t been so dismissive of philosophy, they might have seen that sooner.

Earlier she already hinted about “the wrong theory of gravity“:

“the cosmological constant is back”

And she concludes:

“I believe that physicists made a big mistake in the 1980s when they banked on […] increasingly larger and expensive particle colliders. [And politicians “following the science” were too scared to say no.]

In hindsight, physicists should have focused on the problem in front of their eyes, the one they’ve seen in myriad experiments: the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.”

Hallelujah! Progress. That media-and-politics-friendly “scientists say” meme has been a turn-off for me for longer than those two decades. I’ll say more about the cosmological constant in the next post (Sean Carroll’s “Poetic Naturalism”).

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W. Edwards Deming Misrepresented

My route into metaphysical “quality” started with industrial quality management and its evolving guises TQM, 6-Sigma etc. The bean-counting focus on  managing what you can measure was always hard to fight. Deming was one the gurus much cited – wrongly it turns out.

Coincidentally, I mentioned Deming recently when recalling one of those gurus I met in the flesh was Fred Lennon of Swagelok. Measurement was passionately front and centre in the material production quality management processes – but management of the people is a wiser skill. Stainless steel fittings don’t have psychology.

RIP Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi- Flow Theory Architect, Hungarian-American Psychologist, Dies Aged 88 (hungarytoday.hu)

“Architect” of the “flow” idea, who died recently and who was a common interest to those of us who got into philosophy via William James via Bob Pirsig. The “Zen” enlightenment of true engagement with the current task.

I’ve often used “flow” implicitly attributing it to James (Varieties of Religious Experience) and forgetting Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s role in properly developing the idea in practice.
(that’s Chick-Zent-Me-Highly)

“The Science of Can and Can’t”

Preamble

I’ve been following Chiara Marletto (and David Deutsch before her) for more than a decade as the idea of a “Universal Constructor” has become an even more generic concept than the “Universal Turing Machine”. A machine that can do arbitrarily creative stuff in the physical world as well as perform arbitrary information processing tasks. (It helps to let go of any mental picture of a machine as a mechanical device or of a computing machine as an electro-mechanical device – rather a machine as any “system” that does stuff.)

Her new book …

“The Science of Can and Can’t”
by Chiara Marletto

… I’ve already mentioned and part/pre-reviewed once or twice as well as referencing numerous interviews about it. (For example, this one with Sean Carroll, this one with The Dissenter – both allow her to describe her ideas at length in her own words.)

Review

[It’s several months since I read and reviewed the “imaginative” introduction – a house move and a new job intervened – but the last few evenings I’ve read it cover to cover. Recommended.]

The subtitle “A physicists journey through the land of counterfactuals” nails her main topic beyond Constructor Theory. That is the idea that most if not all of physical science, and its chances of finding solutions to any number of long-standing problems, is improved by thinking in terms of meta-laws about what’s possible or impossible (counterfactuals) rather than laws about what is (facts).

She works through examples from the physics of simple mechanics to thermodynamics and living systems illustrating how counterfactuals can work and how testable thesis can be derived. It’s written very simply for lay readers and interspersed with thinly-disguised autobiographical (?) fictional passages about formative and inspirational experiences within and beyond physics.

Quite easy for me to sympathise with the meta view of counterfactuals as constraints on the processes of evolution and emergence. I’ll leave it to expert scientists as to whether identifiable scientific leaps are actually enabled.

In many ways I already see Boltzmann / Statistical / Entropic thinking in thermodynamics being about bounds and constraints on the possible rather than exact “what is”, so it is the one area (Chapter 6) where I didn’t quite understand how her counterfactual take is new or an improvement. I might have been left underwhelmed if it were not for the realisation of the importance of the information-theoretic thread running through the whole. (As it is, I will undoubtedly re-read chapter 6.)

The real revelation is not simply that physical process are information-theoretic. In thermodynamics at both human and cosmological scales information-based arguments have been used on the entropic limits to behaviour of matter and energy – from single particles passing through two slits to knowledge of black-hole event horizons. Information is practically the complement to entropy after all – and these already look like counterfactuals, as I say.

No, what she does is show that the counterfactual view brings limits to information and knowledge into physics itself. Knowledge and limits to what can be known cannot be dismissed as matters of human subjectivity. There is a good deal of explanation of the significance of and differences between information and knowledge – the latter being information that sustains itself for re-use as it passes through creative processes. Not new concepts to anyone who has followed information-independent-of-physical-embodiment arguments through physical, biological and mental evolution (a la Dennett say, DNA anyone?) but firmly pinning definitions of information and knowledge as part of physics itself.

Dennett has left information as something disembodied from physics for now, subject to evolution in rational discourse, and many others (myself included) see information as something prior to physics (as well as prior to mental, metaphysics if you like, pan-proto-psychism if you prefer). Marletto bringing it objectively within physics must surely encourage more orthodox scientists to take the information-theoretic view seriously – however sceptical they might be that physics has any specific problem(s) requiring such a solution. An alternative view can’t be a bad thing.

That I think is the masterstroke of The Science of Can and Can’t, bringing information and knowledge within science.

But that’s not all. In her final fictional piece and in her own pen-picture she makes clear not only her physical science credentials and her Italian literary aspirations but also her recognition of the significance of epistemology. Her fictional speculation on the young Alexander being tutored by Aristotle and even planning the library at Alexandria makes clear the importance of the abstract, that discussion and open-ended dialogue beats pedagogy and debate on the tangible.

“The purpose was to have *conversations* with the great philosopher. The boy did not enjoy regular classes that much; but the conversations were a different matter: They were open-ended, exciting and far-reaching.

Abstract does not mean ‘unreal’.”

(Her emphasis in the original.)

Eco meets Rovelli? The literary skills may still be aspirational, but the abstract ideas are second to none.

Rationality According to Pinker

Start the Week – Rationality in an Irrational Age – BBC Sounds

So as defined by Pinker in his own words,

“Rationality is using knowledge to attain [human] goals.”
(Qualified by the fact that it cannot tell us what those goals should be, the focus being on knowledge & methods, and on concepts “such as logic, critical-thinking and causation”.)

And it’s his response to the question of why humanity is (appears to be) losing its mind, contrasting the peaks of rational attainment with the prevailing level of seemingly irrational public discourse. Amen to that.

Explicitly my own agenda for over two decades (and implicitly on the case since 1970’s Bronowski), BUT with such a broad definition from Pinker we will need also to recognise also that:

Using knowledge to attain (human) goals is Politics
Using knowledge to attain (human) goals is Cybernetics
Using knowledge to attain (human) goals is Game Theory
Etc, etc.

So in fact such a broad definition of rationality tells us nothing and what we really have is a shift back to focussing on definitions:

Which kinds of information count as rational knowledge and
Which ways of using it count as rational.
And our working definition of rationality then becomes:
Information represents rational knowledge if … [knowledge rules]
Ways of using knowledge are rational if … [methodology rules]
(And how valuable are things that fall outside those rules?)

[Aside: Information vs Knowledge? There have been many attempts at making distinctions between Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom (*). None are wrong, they just address different intended applications. At the human scale, I tend to use Information as indicating forms available to individual human interpretation and Knowledge as indicating forms available to shared human use. Data and Information have levels and associated definitions as fundamental as physics itself. One particular Information > Knowledge distinction I like is that of Chiara Marletto which suggests we think of Information as copiable and Knowledge as a form that is self-preserving through processes of use, even at physical & bio-chemical levels below cognitive intelligence.]

In situations where the knowledge is non-contentious representation of objective information and where causal paths are predictably non-contentious we have what I think of as Rationality-101 – the easy bit.

So sure, when dealing with “pre-Rational” humans who don’t see the need or don’t have the skills to check the objective truth value of information made available to them or understand basic logic and modern science of cause and effect, Rationality-101 has significant value. Value in educating the young or naĂŻve and in compensating for their ignorance of implicit political motivations and biases, including their own, or the unreliability of anecdotal knowledge or received knowledge from authority of power structures. Thanks to Lee Beaumont for giving me the pre-Rational contrast with my own post-Rational agenda.

However, Rationality-101 as caricatured above is only part of any solution to human progress. More scarily, if we persist in using it where we’re dealing with post-Rational issues – modernism or scientism – it is actually counter-productive. This is of course the point that Post-Modernists from Wittgenstein onward have been trying to make. Anyone suggesting PoMo’s were somehow intent on destroying science are missing their warning that post-Galilean science has its limits. I tend to brand myself PoPoMo to recognise that there is a growing caucus of rational scientists and philosophers that do get it, and are working to fix the fundaments of science itself, even space-time and causation, not to mention those human goals.

Meantime we simply need to accept
that “scientific” rationality
isn’t the answer to everything.

(If I’ve significantly missed what Pinker says rationality is – objective, positivist, scientific – I’d like to hear from you.)

To conclude, many people since Gödel have seen the bootstrapping problem of how to change the foundations of the edifice we’re operating in – the whole cannot include its own definition. Obviously we’d like to use rationality whilst trying to fix or replace it, but this is quite different to the evolution of the contingent content within the body of rational knowledge. This isn’t just Trigger’s Broom (or the Ship of Theseus). This is meta on several levels. I used to call it Catch-22. Pinker himself has been using the (jokey) riposte that people who argue against his thesis using rational argument are actually confirming his thesis. And many people – enlightened positivists – have equally gently posted memes mocking this.

Image

I counter with Dennett pointing out the problem that:

“if you agree to argue
only on your opponent’s basis,
then you’ve already lost“.

END

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[Post Note – (*) Wisdom is the property we’re really seeking, since we can never fully codify rules of Information & Knowledge, rules being for guidance of the wise, etc. Interestingly, Matthew d’Ancona who wrote that excellent piece on the deep rational issues in the “TERF War” for Tortoise, also wrote a shorter follow-up piece focussing on Wisdom in The Standard.]