The real reason I find myself vaguely defending some religious ideas against village-atheism is the same reason I used to go around getting into arguments with libertarians. It's that overly simple belief systems really annoy me, even if (especially if) I mostly agree with them. Libertarians used to make me crazy, because I always knew exactly what they would say in any situation (the spur for this post is this column (TNR subscribtion required) which makes the same observation about the New York Times op-ed libertarian, John Tierney). Same for the atheists, like PZ Myers. I can pretty much predict his reaction to any piece of news involving religion, which makes his posts on those subjects information-free (they can be entertainingly nasty though).
I guess I don't like fundamentalisms of any sort. Libertarianism and atheism both tend to be all-explanatory and ignorant of nuance. Libertarianism in its fascination with the distributed market model ignores anything which doesn't fit its framework, such as public goods, distortion of the market by the overly powerful (who can manipulate it unfairly) and the poor (who may have no motivation to respect property rights). Atheism tends to ignore the nature of religious belief, treating as something like bad science, rather than trying to understand what it might really be about. Let's just say God is the referent of the word "God", and while it may not exist the way a chair exists, it has a real conceptual role in thought which it might be useful to understand.
Showing posts with label vaguely. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vaguely. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Friday, January 27, 2006
Social networks and reputation in Russia
People interested in social networks and reputation systems ought to come here. Everything seems to get done by virtue of knowing somebody who knows somebody. We got into the opera at a reasonable price because it was arranged by Katya, who told us to meet Grigori at the door, who got us in at the native rate for a small surcharge (he either works at the theater, or knows someone there). Katya is a hub -- she runs the office of the company we work with, is in charge of sheparding foreigners around and much else. She carries three cell phones for her own use and has a bunch more she hands out to her charges, so she can tell them that Sergei will pick you up at 10 and deliver you to Alexi, etc. Sergei has been driving us around, at one point we had to decide whether it was safe to leave a couple of laptop cases with him. Turns out it is, because he gets lots of work from Katya and has a good reputation and it would be silly for him to jeopardize this healthy business relationship (another driver the company used didn't get the system and was summarily disconected from the network).
An American who lives here got laughed at by the Russians when he went to get his car inspected -- turns out that everybody else knows somebody whose cousin runs an auto shop and will sign the papers for you sight unseed, for a small fee.
It's pretty clear this elaborate informal network evolved so that people could operate a real economy while the official one choked on its own bureaucracy and corruption. This two-layer approach seems to have persisted past the fall of communism. I wonder if it impedes or helps the development of a full-blown capitalist economy. Or which is better. The favor-network sounds kind of nice, but is prone to corruption of its own and can shade off into organized crime, which is also plentiful here.
My seatmate on the flight here was reading a thick Max Weber book (in German). I vaguely recall that one of Weber's theses was that modern societies evolved away from this kind of informal network into more formalized, rationalized, bureaucratic structures. Given the history of such structures here, it's not surprising people prefer a more underground approach.
An American who lives here got laughed at by the Russians when he went to get his car inspected -- turns out that everybody else knows somebody whose cousin runs an auto shop and will sign the papers for you sight unseed, for a small fee.
It's pretty clear this elaborate informal network evolved so that people could operate a real economy while the official one choked on its own bureaucracy and corruption. This two-layer approach seems to have persisted past the fall of communism. I wonder if it impedes or helps the development of a full-blown capitalist economy. Or which is better. The favor-network sounds kind of nice, but is prone to corruption of its own and can shade off into organized crime, which is also plentiful here.
My seatmate on the flight here was reading a thick Max Weber book (in German). I vaguely recall that one of Weber's theses was that modern societies evolved away from this kind of informal network into more formalized, rationalized, bureaucratic structures. Given the history of such structures here, it's not surprising people prefer a more underground approach.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Dangers of isolation & random network thoughts
[not to be confused with thoughts about random networks]
Cosma Shalizi has a nice takedown of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, somewhat late for a book that came out in 2002. Back then, I leafed through it casually and my impression was that it was a mixture of self-aggrandizement and old ideas. Now Cosma knows much more about this stuff then I and has actually read the book, and come to much the same conclusion, so two points for my intuition.
Since everything I think these days gets mapped to network theory, the major lesson I draw from this (not very original) is that science is a network of people and ideas, and if you operate outside of that network you are very likely a crank. Wolfram's egomania led him to pull out of the standard networks of scientific exchange and build his own little cult empire. By draining energy from real science, his book is an anti-contribution.
Speaking of science as a network, I recently stumbled upon an issue of PNAS devoted to Mapping Knowledge Domains. Cool stuff, but why isn't there a tool to do this as part of Google Scholar or something? Ok, here is something called HistCite, developed by Eugene Garfield who has been doing this sort of stuff for decades, but it is proprietary and looks kind of ugly to use. Good data though. Really, it's time for Google to take over and conquer this lucrative market. [[update here]]
Hm, Cosma also proposes applying social network analysis to the study of government cronyism, something I was vaguely thinking about myself. As he says, a difficult project to fund.
Cosma Shalizi has a nice takedown of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, somewhat late for a book that came out in 2002. Back then, I leafed through it casually and my impression was that it was a mixture of self-aggrandizement and old ideas. Now Cosma knows much more about this stuff then I and has actually read the book, and come to much the same conclusion, so two points for my intuition.
Since everything I think these days gets mapped to network theory, the major lesson I draw from this (not very original) is that science is a network of people and ideas, and if you operate outside of that network you are very likely a crank. Wolfram's egomania led him to pull out of the standard networks of scientific exchange and build his own little cult empire. By draining energy from real science, his book is an anti-contribution.
Speaking of science as a network, I recently stumbled upon an issue of PNAS devoted to Mapping Knowledge Domains. Cool stuff, but why isn't there a tool to do this as part of Google Scholar or something? Ok, here is something called HistCite, developed by Eugene Garfield who has been doing this sort of stuff for decades, but it is proprietary and looks kind of ugly to use. Good data though. Really, it's time for Google to take over and conquer this lucrative market. [[update here]]
Hm, Cosma also proposes applying social network analysis to the study of government cronyism, something I was vaguely thinking about myself. As he says, a difficult project to fund.
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