Philosophy of Conspiracy

Philosopher fight! So Barbara Forrest published an article in a special issue on evolution of the journal Synthese where she said nasty things about Francis Beckwith, a rightist creationist/ID supporter. The journal editors, apparently under pressure from the ID crowed, inserted a disclaimer, and this has caused a minor outrage in the philosoblogosphere, with calls to boycott the journal, everyone in high dudgeon.

My first-order reaction: get over yourselves. This is a perfect example of academics getting their panties in a twist over the exceedingly trivial (in this case, the propriety of the disclaimer). Second-order: the underlying dispute (theism v. atheism) is really, really boring, but even so, there must be better ways to argue about it than to take offense at editor's notes.

But in poking around in this mess, I noticed something more interesting -- one of the guest editors of the journal issue is James Fetzer, whose name I was vaguely familiar with from the old days because he worked in philiosphy of AI for awhile. But now he seems to have become a full-blown conspiracy theorist, in the most literal sense -- he's published an academic paper on it (Reasoning about Assassinations), which looked interesting at first glance. The issue of how one properly evaluates evidence in such cases is pretty interesting from an epistemological viewpoint, especially to someone like me who likes to dabble with fringe beliefs without losing my mind over them.

But on second glance it looks like he's just become sucked into a rather standard hole, and is now an unquestioning supporter of various Kennedy assassination theories, 9/11 conspiracies, climate change denialism and the like, as well as even kookier-sounding ones like a conspiracy by Johnson & Johnson to murder someone over a dental floss-related invention. He's founded a site called Assassination Science, which might qualify for my Academic Units with Amusing Names series, although it doesn't look recognized by any institution, or likely to be. The paper above doesn't seem like it's meta to conspiratorial thinking as its name suggested; it's just an example of it.

But the really interesting thing is that the initial offense of the original paper was exactly the sort of conspiracy-flavored thinking that Fetzer seems to be promoting, although in a much milder form. Here's an extract:

In addition to the ideological congruences between Dembski'™s views and those of declared dominionists, there are more direct connections between ID and CR [Christian Reconstructionism --mt]. The CSC has received major funding from Howard Ahmanson, a former board member of the Reconstructionist Chalcedon Foundation... In 1999, speaking at Christian Reconstructionist D. James Kennedy's "Reclaiming America for Christ" conference, Phillip Johnson urged attendees to reclaim the intellectual world "œwhile we're recapturing America ... Kennedy, a staunch ID supporter, produced a 2006 anti-evolution documentary featuring CSC fellows Michael Behe, Richard Weikart, and Jonathan Wells as experts. CSC fellow Charles Thaxton was among the "conference faculty" at a May 2006 CR conference held by American Vision (AV), one of the most extreme CR groups. Journalist John Sugg describes AV leaders Gary North and Herbert Titus:  œTheir imposition of a theocratic state would not, by their standards, be tyranny. Public schools to them are tyrannical. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) labels AV a hate group because of its virulent anti-gay attitudes. Similarly, Beckwith is listed among the conference faculty of Summit Ministries, which SPLC reports "œgraduates more than 1,300 students a year--”all steeped in "¦Christian dominionism and anti-gay politics" ... [references omitted --mt]

Now, I don't see anything particularly wrong with this. Weaving strong networks of ideas, people, and evidence while attacking your opponent's corresponding networks is just how argumentation works. But it does seem to stray a bit from the academic norm into something more journalistic, polemical, personal, and mildly conspiratorial. Doesn't bother me but I can see how it might bother someone with more devotion to the academic ideal. I've argued before that ad hominem is a perfectly valid form of reasoning, or at least close to one. Apparently Charles Taylor and Paul Feyerabend have also defended ad hominem in their own ways, so I'm not alone in this. The passage above is not even all that ad hominem, although that seems to be the basis for why it has offended its target.

Oh well I'm rambling. The interesting thing here I think is the paper Fetzer didn't write, on how to think productively about conspiracies and conflict, how to account for the reliability or bias of sources, how to do ad hominem right. How do we factor in to our world models the revelations of Climategate or Wikileaks, or the fact that intellectuals we might admire or not are bankrolled by the Koch brothers? How do you think about the hugely important role of networks of power and influence without becoming a kook? These are actually useful, indeed crucial questions that professional epistemologists ought to be applying themselves to.

Loci of Knowledge

While rummaging around through all of human knowledge for shiny bits that I could stick into the paper (now submitted, yay), I came across lots of interesting material that just wouldn't fit, and occasionally things that were gateways into whole subfields of learning I had no idea existed. here's one such out-take: The Knowledge-Based View, Nested Heterogeneity, and New Value Creation: Philosophical Considerations on the Locus of Knowledge, by Teppo Felin and William S. Hesterly, Academy of Management Review 2007, Vol. 32, No. 1, 195-218.

The major point of this article is somewhat "reactionary", in that it's a reaction against a trend in management and sociology to think about organizational learning, cultures of learning, and things like that. Apparently that's gone too far, and the authors are reasserting the more common-sense view that it is people that know things, not groups. Well, I can easily imagine an intellectual trend overreaching itself, but since I'm not a sociologist or (god help me) a professor of management, I still find the idea of social learning much more interesting. I tend to like things that challenge or modify the standard model of individuality.

The authors acknowledge that they are running heading into some pretty deep and fundamental issues:

Our analysis has limitations of course. First, in many ways, we have raised some age-old philosophical questions regarding the fundamental origins of knowledge, which have yet to be completely resolved. ... future empirical work sorting out individual and collective effects remains to be done.

I'm not sure what empirical work they have in mind, since there's the fundamental problem that individuals are never encountered outside of a social grouping (and even if they are lone inventors in a basement, they bring along the social basis of their training with them). They cite all sorts of stuff, including Chomsky's battle with Skinner over innate vs environmental factors of intelligence, which seems to be confusing a separate hard question -- the innateness (or not) of language doesn't really say much about where knowledge about, say, drug design lives (they use the biopharma industry for some example)

The topic of this paper strikes me as a very interesting issue (that is, the relation between individuals and their groupings and how knowledge is managed at the various levels) but a very dumb question (that is, are individuals or collectives the chief locus of knowledge?). This kind of either/or thinking drives me crazy. Obviously everything interesting in knowing involves both social and individual factors. They even have a picture:

Obviously, the right model is to have the arrows running in both directions. So I wonder why this simple, obvious truth is not mentioned? I often have this reaction to academic papers, and sometimes I wonder if they create these battles of oppositions because they truly believe it has to be one or the other; or instead they do it because conflict gets dialog going, it gives you an excuse to publish a whole series of papers arguing over big-endian vs. little-endian egg-cracking, you get invited to panels. I've noticed the same phenomenon in pop-technology books, which all seem to be marketed either as tech-is-the-greatest-thing-evar or omg-tech-is-slowly-sapping-our-humanity. One might hope that academics would be better, but I suspect that the dynamic that makes such conflicts profitable is a universal.

The Social Construction of Scientific Sausage

[updated below]

Bruno Latour is a sociologist of science best known for his insistence that scientific facts are constructed rather than discovered. He's widely reviled by scientists and critics of postmodernity; I rather like his work myself and feel that it's usually misinterpreted. Anyway, my guess is he's laughing his Gallic ass off right now at the so-called Climategate affair, which seems like a perfect test case for his point of view.

Thanks to the acts of some hackers, we got to see some politicized science construction in action. The scientific consensus around climate change is revealed to be the result of an ongoing human process, involving a variety of academic politics and a few somewhat shady-sounding practices, including:

• applying pressure to journals to keep conflicting articles out of press
• instructing people to delete emails, possibly in violation of the law
• applying fudge factors to data to make it conform to theory

It appears that at least in this case the making of science is like the making of laws or sausage: not for the squeamish. The import of any of this stuff is up for contention. Is it improper? Unusual, or just normal behind-the-scenes stuff? Does it imply anything at all about the physical facts of the matter? After a couple of hours of scanning the web and looking at some of the email and code that was stolen, I don't know. I have a couple of insights which I may post about later; for now I'm just interested in the sociology.

One thing is clear -- it's pretty clear that even a relatively science-literate layperson can't hope to have a reasonable opinion on this stuff which relies only on raw data and not its suspect interpretations. I suppose if I spent 2-3 months on this stuff I might understand it well enough to be useful, but without that much time to spend I am stuck relying on the judgement of others. And given that, my most important decision is deciding which others to trust. There have been some self-proclaimed experts diving into the material and proclaiming fraud; my impression is that while there is some suspicious stuff there it is impossible to tell exactly what they mean at this stage.

It's somewhat amazing to me how closely the opinions on AGW line up with people's political sensibilities, considering that this is presumably over a physical question which has a matter-of-fact answer (unlike, say, the definition of "conservatism"). But the climate of the past is something that cannot be measured directly, so there is plenty of room for variant interpretation (I suppose a proper sociologist of science would say that nothing is "measured directly"). Almost all the global warming sceptics I come across are also libertarians or right-wing cranks of one stripe or another, who have a vested ideological interest in the denial that there is a vast collective action problem to be solved. And of course, the scientists who support AGW have a vested interest in climate being a significant social problem because it affects their funding. There seems to be no light between the politics and the science, which of course is one of Latour's points.

There have been calls as a result of this for greater openness and transparency in the process of science. The Open Notebook Science movement is already on this. At first glance this seems like a great idea, but I'm somewhat sceptical about the workability, because science is no different than any other field in being a staged performance requiring a backstage zone where the performers can work on the non-public parts of the show (that's a link to Erwin Goffman, another favorite sociologist).

So, channeling my inelegant, Americanized version of Bruno Latour again: here's a situation where there is presumably a physical matter of fact (the actual state of the earth's climate in the past, and the various proxy measurements like tree-rings that we hope reflect it). There are scientists, journals, computer programs, datasets, and funding agencies which are all being deployed to construct competing theories. Only one gets to win, and the battle is enjoined on many levels with little regard for the supposedly neutral gentlemanly rules of combat that the Whig version of science history gives us. That's what the social construction of science is, only now it will occasionally get spread out all over the Internet for all to see. The rubes are shocked; scientists and sociologists are not.

Extras:

Full 61M of released materials.

A bunch of podcasts with a variety of philosophers of science.

Mapping Controversies on Science for Politics is a really interesting-sounding project by a bunch of European labs (including Latour's) to do just what it says.

[[update: I called Latour's attitude fairly accurately:

What I found so ironic in the hysterical reactions of scientists and the press was the almost complete agreement of opponents and proponents of the anthropogenic origin of climate change. They all seem to share the same idealistic view of Science (capital S): "If it slowly composed, it cannot be true" said the skeptics; "If we reveal how it is composed, said the proponents, it will be discussed, thus disputable, thus it cannot be true either!". After about thirty years of work in science studies, it is more than embarrassing to see that scientists had no better epistemology to rebut their adversaries. They kept using the old opposition between what is constructed and what is not constructed, instead of the slight but crucial difference between what is well and what is badly constructed (or composed).

from An attempt at writing a "œCompositionist Manifesto" (pdf) ]]

Social construction is not arbitrary

In a rather stupid discussion on tggp's blog I managed to articulate a point about social construction that I have not previously seen made in any reasonable and concise form, so I'm pulling the thought out and expanding on it here, for the edification of the world.

The point I was trying to make is that while many things are socially constructed, that doesn't imply that they are 100% arbitrary. We make the world but we do not make it just as we please. Whatever is constructed must conform to the structure of physical reality and of human cognition. So, for instance, while religion is a paradigmatic example of a socially constructed system, with different cultures having very different religions, they all have some broad similarities based on the cognitive and cultural role of religion (eg, to use one of Boyer's examples, all religions posit supernatural agents that care about human action -- there is no religion that has indifferent supernatural beings).

When it comes to the social construction of science, there is a great deal more confusion, which I'm not going to clear up in a blog post. Without going into the details, suffice it to say that even the most radical of constructionists of science (like Bruno Latour) don't believe that scientists can just make science anything they want to.

The subject of the original discussion was the ontological status of mental illness, which seems like a great example -- it's clearly a socially constructed category, since what counts as a mental illness varies greatly over time (homosexuality used to be, now it's not, for instance). Yet it's also quite clear that in at least some forms of mental illness there is something objectively physical going wrong, although we don't know what it is. So our categories for them, as detailed in the DSM-IV, are quite obviously made up but also reflect something going on in reality. People like Thomas Szasz argue that it's entirely made up and therefore illegitimate, but anyone who has had to deal with a genuinely disturbed person is not likely to buy into his view.

Anyway, here's the interesting parts of the earlier discussion, initiated and provoked by the sort of rampaging halfwit-convinced-of-their-own-genius that one finds on the internet.

melendwyr:

Do you believe agents of the Party can fly around the room if they so will?

me:

Saying something is socially constructed does not meant that it is wholly arbitrary. This is a common confusion.

The quote about “agents of the Party” is funny and telling. You assume that society is some oppressive outside force. It isn’t. You’re soaking in it. You make it and it makes you.

And, to back off a little bit — not everything is a social construct. Reality is what it is (an instantiation of the Schrödinger equation, let’s say). Some concepts are biologically innate (color, objects, up vs down). But everything interesting that we talk about is a sociocultural construct. Not arbitrary, because it all rests on the other layers, but highly malleable and subject to all sorts of primate politics

This produced some sputtering insults from melendwyr that I won't bother to reproduce. Me again:

Let’s see. You said that social construction implies that people can fly at will. I pointed out that that is not, in general, what social constructionists believe. To repeat, Saying something is socially constructed does not meant that it is wholly arbitrary. You haven’t produced anything that supports your position over mine.

...There should be no doubt that some things are socially constructed. Institutions like the US Government or Microsoft are built out of people’s social practices, and obviously could be constructed differently than they are — but not arbitrarily (it would be hard, for instance, to have a government with sovereignty over left-handed people rather than over a particular geographic area).

To take a more challenging example, take Newton’s laws of motion. Are these social constructs? Well, sort of — that’s why we attribute them to Newton, and he himself admitted to standing on the shoulders of giants who presumably were also part of society. Also, the fact that we call them “laws” — an implied and imperfect metaphor based on human law is significant, as is the fact that they are an imperfect approximation to the actual regularities of the physical world. But, that doesn’t mean that Newton pulled them out of his ass, or that he could have just as easily come up with an inverse-linear or inverse-cube law of gravity.

Reductionist epiphanies

I sometimes troll the libertarians at Overcoming Bias, but there's a lot of insightful stuff there. A recent post on Fake Reductionism was particularly good, I thought. It dealt with the varying emotional experiences related to reductionist explanations, and it inspired me to write down this long-simmering thought.

Maybe it's peculiar to my own thinking, but I have over the years had a number of experiences which I call "reductionist epiphanies". These are moments when all of a sudden I understand some phenomenon that previously either has mystified me, or that I've simply taken for granted. Generally the answer to the mystery becomes so glaringly obvious that I can't quite remember what it was like to not have that understanding, but enough of my previous state is left around that I can at least recall the fact that I had a thunderbolt of revelation.

The suddenness of these insights seems to be a product of having large chunks of knowledge that were previously separated suddenly come together in a more powerful, unified whole. There's an almost audible feeling of pieces clicking into place.

Anyway, here are three questions which have rather simple and elegant answers. Probably you already know what they are. In case you don't, I'm not going to give it away so you can have the pleasure of revelation when you figure it out.

• How does a computer translate instructions into action?
  
  
• Why are there three primary colors, when light is a continous spectrum of wavelengths? How does the three-dimensional representation of color used in computer displays map to color as a one-dimensional wavelength?
  


• What makes a gene dominant or recessive? 
  

The answer to the first question is one that anybody with a CS or EE degree learns in the classroom, but because I had a fairly broken and twisted route through higher education I managed to miss this, and instead figured it out on my own -- an entirely more satisfying experience, so I'm grateful for that.

Everything you know is wrong

If by "you", I mean "science", and by "everything", I mean "most things":
In PLoS Medicine, John Ioannidis says:

There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.

This paper is written in an opaque style, but Alex Tabarrok clears up the murk. Bayes rules!

The grain of sand at the core of the wikipedia pearl

Holy shit, Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder and guru) is an objectivist. That is just weird on multiple levels. For one thing, it's another example of a right-libertarian being in the vanguard of what amounts to a left-libertarian vision. When I was at MIT the objectivists used to quite literally worship the $ sign, now we have one whose slogan is "free knowledge for free minds".

For another, the philosophy of wikipedia seems determinedly anti-objectivist, at least superficially. They disdain expertise and seem to expect that truth will bubble up from a crowd-based distributed process. This egalitarian attitude seems very un-Randian to me, although who knows, maybe it is objectivist on a deeper level.

Given that Wikipedia seems to have become the new default authoritative source of knowledge, it's guiding philosophy and structures of governance become exceedingly interesting and important. The fact that it's run by someone under the influence of a nuttily simplistic ideology is a wee bit disturbing. On the other hand, Wales does not seem to have the virulently rabid form of the objectivist meme, and it certainly hasn't interfered with the success of his efforts.