Psybertron Asks

Latest news on Google in China is about some bureaucratic hiccup, but the censorship story hits the headlines again …

Google, together with other major technology firms, has [] come under fire in the US for helping China censor the internet. Earlier this month, members of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus said four US firms were putting profits before American principles of free speech.

[But] Google’s policy of telling users which pages are censored has also drawn the wrath of some [local] newspapers. “Does a business operating in China need to constantly tell customers that it’s abiding by the laws of the land?” asked the China Business Times, comparing Google to an uninvited guest.

The overt censorship actually reminds the community it is being censored by the laws of the land. Take it from there.

Also from Mark Federman, a piece on research he is doing on organisational effectiveness. The point that interested me, apart from the general parallel with my agenda, and my earlier dissertation is his focus on Chris Argyris “espoused theories” concept – ie the idea that they are different to actual “theories in use”.

Something I’ve since come to equate with Nils Brunsson’s institutionalised organisational hypocrisy. One of the defense mechanisms we have developed as parts of organisations, to overcome the conflict between simple rational reasoned decisions and holistically understood best courses of action. (Equally well mis-exploited the other way round, to post-rationalise why not taking the best course of action was “the right decision at the time”.) Spot on Mark.

A series organised by “General Creative” apparently (broken link ?) [via Mark Federman]. Two interesting editions mentioned …

“Mythdemeanour – relationship between myths, the social construction of our world, and love.”

“Argument – the ways we used to know things, and what the electronic future may hold for us …. tactile reasoning by choreography.”

Some great stuff happening in Toronto.

Global Province – Picked-up on a search cross-hit. A dense site, full of stuff – interesting ideas if not uniformly high quality. Worth a browse, to work out its value.

This BBC report on American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Missouri.

The AAAS president, Gilbert Omenn, says

“It’s time to recognise that science and religion should never be pitted against each other.”

Hear hear.

“The intelligent design movement belittles evolution [and] it makes God a designer – an engineer.”

said George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory. Sanity prevails at the Vatican, as noted earlier.

Mark Gihring, a teacher from Missouri sympathetic to intelligent design, said

“I think if we look at where the empirical scientific evidence leads us, it leads us towards intelligent design. [It] ultimately takes us back to why we’re here and the value of life… if an individual doesn’t have a reason for being, they might carry themselves in a way that is ultimately destructive for society.”

Apart from the logical fallacy in the induction from “scientific evidence”, this really illustrates the problem. IDC is a search for “life purpose”, rather than knowledge. Right problem, wrong solution, which isn’t to say the problem doesn’t deserve a solution.

The problem is clear enough. One [no doubt religiously motivated] legislative bill in Missouri suggests that

“schools should teach only science which can be proven by experiment.”

That of course, would be precisely nothing. Science curricula must be devised by people who at least understand what science is. (Of course it’s all too easy to reach for the rhetorical riposte that perhaps religiously motivated IDC’ists should be constrained to teach only material which can be proven by experiment too – level playing field and all that. But of course that’s why scientists shouldn’t set religious agendas either. We need to recognise metaphors on distinct levels, instead of looking for conflicts on a single level. You listening Dawkins ?)

Anyway, as ever, humour helps – as Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education said

“I think as a [proposed science curriculum], intelligent design is dead. That does not mean intelligent design as a social movement is dead … this is an idea that has real legs and it’s going to be around for a long time. It will, however, evolve.”

🙂 Magic.

I guess this is the right place to link that recent “pain” cartoon from Tim Kreider.

Try this. [via Rivets]

And one of so many other goodies from Rivets, endless fun.

Nature.com article reports on Dutch research in Science [via Anecdote]

For [] simple decisions, students made better choices when they thought consciously about the problem. But for [] more complex choice, they did better after not thinking about it, Dijksterhuis and his colleagues report in Science.

At least when making some complicated decisions … the results suggest that we would actually do better to go with our gut … [otherwise] we simply lose the big picture with complex decisions.

Just a holding post for a thought that struck me yesterday ….

At a meeting yesterday discussing XML Languages best suited to modelling semantics, there was given some description of different flavours of OWL (Web Ontology Language ). In general with OWL(Full) and OWL(DL) it is possible to make ontologically impossible assertions – the infamously non-existent “The barber who shaves all people who don’t shave themselves.” (Think about it) ie Russell’s paradox highlighting the limitations of simple set theory concerning the set of sets that includes itself. The idea being that there is nothing to prevent circular networks of taxonomic (classification) relationships that express the impossible. The story is that OWL(FA) where FA = “Fixed-Level Metamodelling Architecture”, in principle forces individuals, classes and classes-of-classes and classes-of-classes-of …. etc into distinct levels in its metamodel.

The argument is actually inconclusive, in the sense that in any variant of the language one can choose how to implement and constrain the entities and relationships modelled, according to your chosen semantic model, but the striking point is that in OWL(FA) the circularity is broken by level-shifting.

This is Douglas Hofstadter’s “strange loopiness” – things that look like impossibly recursive loops, but in fact represent possible realities, because the loops shift across conceptual levels. Illustrated ad infinitum by Hofstadter in his “Godel, Escher, Bach” with “Quined Sentences” – sentences that have themselves as their own subject in mathematical and logical as well as natural languages. Hofstadter’s ultimate point is that things that “work on themselves” (like human minds) have some interesting spiralling evolutionary traits towards consciousness.

Small world indeed – in the same meeting another concept was openly recognised – in a hard industrial engineering context – that information expressed in any language, even a formal semantic one, contains much implicit knowledge that may be inferred, in addition to that objectively encoded, leading to cybernetic / AI / informatic-automation approaches for using such models too.

Great convergence happening.

(Possibly a side issue, but it feels related. My argumentation style, always wants to retain complexity, ie not make overall simplifying assumptions applicable to the whole argument, but to separate distinct issues, which may individually be simpler, whilst collectively complex …. see “only & just”, see exclusive-OR’s, inclusion of opposites, see Follett, see synthesis, see integration, in earlier threads ….)

This article from yesterday’s UK Daily Telegraph (Thursday 16th Feb) “Boot Camp Tactics Won’t Win the Battle” is an interview with Management Consultant / Guru, John Seddon of Vanguard Consulting. It’s right from my own manifesto, summarised in the header – things go wrong when management mistakes itself for a science.

… so much management time wasted doing “the wrong thing righter”
… so much game-playing,
… producing inaccurate and even meaningless numbers.
… origins of this [TQM] approach lay in the work of FW Taylor,
… so-called “scientific management” influenced subsequent generations …

He goes on to outline his preferred holistic “systems thinking” approach. Worth a read.

Personally, as my dissertation conclusions attest, TQM itself is not wrong, just its application to a misplaced focus on things that can be measured objectively with numbers, rather than things that can be assessed more qualitatively in the round.