Ever since the President of Harvard Larry Summers on a sunny day in April 22, 2005 commented on sex differences between men and women and how they may relate to the careers of women in science the Heat has been On. Summers was forced to resign over the heat he drew upon himself. But the seminar at Harvard University was about the research on mind, brain, and behavior relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired difference between the sexes. The Edge reports on one of the most vivid debates between Elisabeth Spelke and Steven Pinker – nurture vs nature in a battle between two great psychologists.

Further reading on the brain and gender

In Sweden gender troubles have been illuminated in many different fields and in general all large state organizations have equality plans to help facilitate a discussion and move toward less discrimination. But now the backlash is a fact: the universities of Lund and Göteborg have both in recent cases been the targets of policies implemented from above in order to secure a gender perspective on all research fields. People like Steven Sampson have raged against the idea of a gender certificate stating that it is a way of the feminist forces to issue their influence upon the rest of the university. And yes, surely it is an idea that is using the worst of leftist paternalistic strategies, but there is nothing principally bad with the idea of letting a power perspective influence research in various fields of the university.

But the question of the female brain and the strategies of erasing bias from our public sphere must be held at a reasonable distance from each other. You cannot make swift inference from a few MRI’s and connect it to an immediate policy decision where teachers at universities are forced to give equal time in the class room to males and females, as is the case in a recent report in Sweden. My view, as always, is that the cognitive research in this field must be expanded and the humanities must come closer to scientific knowledge. Science in turn must start a discussion of political bias in Academia in order to stop the slanted and patriarchal structuring in all forms of knowledge production and development.

An important point made by neuroscientist Melissa Hines when discussing gender/sex in the brain is that the once-established dichotomy between sex and gender is really impossible to sanction. Mainly because the supposition that certain aspects should be analyzed biologically (sex) and others socially (gender) is from a brain perspective wrong, the social brain and the physical brain cannot be separated.

Further reading to recommend:

Annica Dahlström one of the leading proponents of the nature assumption of gender says it all.

The sexual brain by Simon LeVay

Brain Gender by Melissa Hines

The most tenacious curator around - Hans Ulrich Obrist – moves his marathon project he started at The Sepentine a few years ago to a collaborative model with John Brockman, a New York based literary agent and publisher of Edge.org into book form. People like biologist Ricky Dawkins, cognitive scientist Stevie Pinker and genome sequencer Craigie Venter have all been present at the “Experiment Marathon” during 2007 and later in Reykjavik Art Museum, involving Olafur Eliasson as well. Over 100 figures from the art world and science have been involved and I will defintley try to get my hand on this one asap.

Until then watch videos from the Marathon.

Jon Peder Zane is one of numerous dedicated, serious folks who are working to keep good reporting and good writing alive at the News and Observer.  He was the book editor until the drastic changes under McClatchy’s management turned him into the Ideas Reporter, and I have actually very much enjoyed the products of his new beat.  He has written about everything from banned Christmas trees to bioethics.  He has also consented to create a series of videos for NandO’s website – Fist Bumping is typical. ( He really turns being stiff into a comic artform).  But this guy’s writing is just downright stimulating!  His book,  The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, has gotten a great, well-deserved response, and his 1999 Distinguished Writing Award proves he has been doing great work before and through all the changes at NandO.

 J Peder Zane: Science visions, dark and bright

   He has outdone himself, in my mind, with his response, this year and several previous years, to the Edge annual big question.  These highly provocative writings cast a huge net in searching for the meaning of our times.  In the essay linked above, he sees hope in the prospect of vastly improved bodies, and justified fear in the idea of transmitted neural signals.  He ends with the hope that science will continue to be of overall benefit, as in the past.  Zane  focuses on issues about which he has written before – stem cells and genomics.  But he gave a sense of the wide ranging ideas contained in the series, and I went and downloaded and printed them.  I will be processing what I read for a long time, but I will offer the notes below, with thanks to Jon Peder Zane for the motivation and stimulus!

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Edge  World Question Center 2009

What will change everything?

     I love SF, and these essays skirted SF with regularity, while offering very real solutions for some pretty big problems – like death, endless energy, and radical transparency in the marketplace.   The most sinister visions by far concern our growing ability to monitor and “tinker with” the mental experiences generated by the brain.  Helen Fisher, an anthropologist from Rutgers, thinks Vance Packard’s “Hidden Persuaders” will take chemical and totally effective form.  But we alter our consciousness with drugs and media all the time, and I think we’re more resilient than that. 

    The most practical visions derived from nanotechnology, with the idea that developing molecular, self-directing machinery would make materials goods as “free” as information is already fast becoming.  An intermediate step in this process is suggested by both Chris Andersen and David G Myers: universal computers and all that implies.

  The truly revolutionary nature of information technology is overshadowed by hyperbole about it.  Kevin Kelly of “Wired” envisions a conscious intelligence arising from the Web – a “ubiquitous AI embedded in the feedback loops” of cyber civilization.  Kevin Sloan, a “digital technologist,” predicts the accretion of a universal memory.  As I read through the numerous essays that predicted the reality of artifical intelligence, I was always disappointed by the clear fallacies in the various positions, and comforted by the divining rod of clarity I received so many years ago from Coleridge.  Clarity, that is, as to the certain uncertainty in defining the creative element that informs and energizes the human mind.  They can map every darn neuron and correlate every one with a function, but that still won’t give them what they need to build a true thinking machine.  Coleridge described it as a balance of “Fancy” and Reason – later Chomsky used the very methods of rational science to prove the uncatchable infinity that is human expression.  Art represents a conscious presentation of creative forces that inform every aspect of human culture.  That element will always be missing from artificial intelligence.  Not that it’s missing from true science – which is the making of new knowledge.  Timothy Taylor, an archeologist, points out the creativity generated in the “tension… between fixity and change” – science, in his view, being the major source of change.  Science gives us our material culture, art attempts to re-present and name the meaning of that culture.  The latter, for Taylor, is attempting fixity, but I think that’s true only for the linguistic scientist, not the poet and artist.  Good art gropes to name and describe the changes, and thus makes in actuality a “new thing.”

     The basic point is made by several writers in the series.  Celebrating our “new” awareness of rationality’s limits, Randolph Nesse from the University of Michigan sees good science “recognizing that the body is not a machine.”  Stuart Kaufman, a proponent of the value of “biocomplexity,” simply states: “the universe is open, neither fully lawful nor random.”  Every artist, aware or not, assumes a non-linear infinitude of possibilities in order to work.  These essays have taught me that scientist working in many fields have so much reason to feel the same.  Closing with the words of Mr Nesse: “Some evolved systems may be indescribably complex.”  For me, a comforting thought.

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Postscript

     From the future to the past, J Peder Zane just wrote a couple of pieces for NandO that take a hard look at Southern culture.  First he really stuck his Yankee neck out with a call for destruction of the Confederate memorial on Capitol Square.  Several people were really ready to chop down on that neck!  Today’s Sunday edition brings a look at Southern comic caricatures and what they say about the South.  Keep up the good work, Mr. Zane!  We natives need all the intellectual prodding we can get!

So the Edge.org submits an annual question to 151 intellectuals, artists and scientists, among others. This year they ask “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” Many of the answers are interesting. But I want to focus for a moment on a bias among the respondents. The first thing I notice is that many respondents answer that a development within their field of expertise will be the game changer.  This is very suspicious and self-serving. (Nevermind that some of these folk need more attention to raise more money for their projects…squeaky wheel gets the oil.) 

Why not tie a betting market to this question?

 

Demon curator Hans Ulrich Obrist

John Brockman, the science minded intellectual behind Edge.org poses his annual query of 2009 to the demon curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. His response to the question “What will change everything?” is laden with Wallersteinian utopics: 
 

In order to find a new sense of fulfillment, individually and collectively there will be a tendency towards increasing the number of de-commodified institutions. 

So Obrist tries to delineate a world system analysis based on the notions of de-commodification, proposed by political philosopher Immanuel Wallerstein. And although his text is ripe with Marxist rhetoric enough to make you dizzy, he compiles a great story of art, architecture and common culture that in his words blatantly have transformed the roots of thinking. The ideas that never were are just a way to draw a curved line between reality and the unrealised ideas holding it up. 

French artist Philippe Parreno, was also given the 2009 question to which he responded: 

Could we take the next step by breaking down the strict distinction between reality and fiction: NO MORE REALITY!

(I am not sure what he was smoking while writing this, but my guess is a pink colored toy penguin, bought at Palais de Tokyo. Mmm, raspberry!)

Jokes aside, others answering are Eric Kandel, Richard Dawkins, Terence Koh[!] and Frank Wilczek, check it!

The Edge Annual Question – 2009 is this: “What will change everything?” Or more explicitly: “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

If you’re not yet familiar with Edge.org, then you should be. Here’s a little history of Edge provided at their website:

Edge Foundation, Inc., was established in 1988 as an outgrowth of a group known as The Reality Club. Its informal membership includes of some of the most interesting minds in the world.

Contributors to Edge own the copyright to their original writing posted on this site and their posting is in effect a license permitting Edge Foundation, Inc. the electronic use of this work. In the event Edge Foundation, Inc. wishes to use the work in a print medium it will not do so before asking and securing the written permission of the author. Edge Foundation, Inc. owns the cumulative copyright to the site.

“What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

Die edge-Foundation stellt auch dieses Jahr (wie auch die Jahre zuvor) ein weltbewegende Frage an Wissenschaftler. Natürlich wird es auch dieses Jahr (wie auch die Jahre zuvor) allein dadurch keine weltbewegenden Veränderungen geben. Der Vorlauf von wissenschaftlichen Ideen, die ihrer Zeit voraus sind bis zu ihrer Verwirklichung bzw. allgemeiner Akzeptanz ist oft eine Generation oder mehr. Trotzdem finde ich John Brockman´s edge-Projekt in diesem Jahr (wie auch die Jahre zuvor) äußerst spannend…

Now here’s a MEATY discussion on Edge.org about the role scientists should play in helping improve the economic conditions.  Chew on this awhile.

Here’s one of my favorite chunks of the discussion lifted from George Dyson’s comments:

Brown, Kauffman, Palmrose, and Smolin have hit the nail on the head. But is it the right nail? When the patient needs first aid, do you ask “is there a modeler in the house?”

Financial systems exhibit the Gödelian incompleteness characteristic of all (sufficiently powerful) formal systems: within the given system it is possible to construct statements (or financial instruments) whose value appears to be sound, but cannot be proved within the system itself. The same limitations apply to models of financial systems.

There is good news and bad news in this. No financial system (or model of such a system) can ever be completely secure and closed. On the other hand, there is no limit to the level of concepts that an economy (or a model of that economy) is able to comprehend.

So, what should we do? Assigning an international team of experts to formulate a global economic model is a worthy undertaking, but can the rest of us afford to hold our breath and wait? We also need Plan B, just in case. Plan B is to nurture new, grassroots economic systems that directly (and honestly) couple the flow of currencies to the flow of goods, services, and information—down to the last bit, and the last dollar, from the bottom up.

“Ten years ago I started a company based on the assumption that people are basically good,” argued E-Bay founder Pierre Omidyar (at the Santa Fe Institute) in 2004. “And now I have the data to prove it.” Instead of putting a dozen scientists in a room to come up with a better model of the existing global financial system, we should put a dozen Pierre Omidyars, Elon Musks, Salar Kamangars, and Jeff Bezoses in a room (with Danny Hillis) and let them actually build one (a new financial system, not another model).

Why is this my favorite?  He seems to be saying, get on with it.  Rather than endlessy try to model things you can’t model, start creating.  I’m not a huge fan of the Omidyar quote, as it’s not an accurate nor useful statement.  However, the idea that we can generate all sorts of new ways to buy, sell, create and generate things/services people want is right. We do it all the time and we need to do even more of it.  It’s about the do.

There’s also a fallacy brought up many times by the various contributors that science and modeling can somehow FIX this.  It can’t.  It helps us explain and make sense of things, but that doesn’t imply control.

Also worth noting is seeing how scientists attack a “real life” problem.  Are they shrinking back from the tough stuff or being realistic in what science and scientific approaches can contribute?

Eric Weinstein answers that question:

To be clear, the world’s markets are going to be analyzed, modeled, and regulated by panels of “experts”. That is not at issue. What is at issue is whether the scientific community has the moral luxury, as some commenters here heartily recommend, to sit this one out and complain from the sidelines when most of the skills needed to debunk seemingly sophisticated failed market theory are scientific in origin. But to believe in one’s own ability to improve a theory and make contributions across disciplines require taking serious risk and I well understand that some may find such risk frightening. I would be happy enough for those who feel sure they have nothing to contribute to avoid such an undertaking.

Descartes was wrong. Whatever you think: your reason is not you. There’s more to know than the rational part of your mind can tell you. And if you ever want to feel in control of your life, you’d better start to explore your other senses.

(if you’re a how-to-list-kind-of-person: scroll down, it’s at the end of this post)


Have you ever seen anyone who’s ‘in the zone’, like a basketball player making all his shots or an actress delivering this great soliloquy or a jazz pianist playing the greatest solo you’ve ever heard?

Have you noticed how these people seem to be somehow disconnected from reality?

If you’d ask them about how they’ve experienced these moments, they’ll probably tell you that these moments were like a heightened sense of life. They were there, and they weren’t there at the same time.

Last weekend I read that Belgian’s olympic champion high jump Tia Hellebaut couldn’t recall the sensations and the emotions she had during the olympic final. She knew she was there, but today it feels like it was just completely the opposite.

For me that’s an intriguing paradox.

These people seemed out of control and yet at that specific moment they controlled life in a very powerful and even unimaginable way.

Some people call this the “flow”.

Why is it that people who are in a flow seem more in control while at the same time ‘letting go’ is something we tend to describe as being passive, as allowing yourself to be out of control?

All life is movement
Suppose all life is movement. Everything strives for something and everything is driven by something at the same time.

If that’s true then when are you in control?

When you understand the full picture and you can consciously manipulate reality?

How on earth would you be able to grasp reality to its fullest extend? How on earth could you possibly recognize and control all the impulses in life that trigger your thoughts and reactions. Let alone that you’d be able to measure the impact of everything you do?

We can’t. Or at least, we can’t if we only rely on our sense of reason.

Reason as we know it (do we?)
This sense of reason works like a filter. We’ve designed it to help us to rapidly pay attention to those things which are more important than others in our quest for survival. In short: we depend on reason to make clever judgements. It gives us a picture of life which makes it easier to handle, so it seems.

Yet this instrument is far from perfect. Because however smart we are, we still manage to make a tremendous amount of mistakes which seem to make sense. People actually believed they earth was flat you know. And it made perfect sense.

Also, I highly doubt that any one knows exactly when it’s appropriate to use our sense of reason and when not. Mainly because no one told you to but also because letting go of reason seems like a pretty silly thing to do.

It’s something which artists do, or yogi or other people who don’t need to take reality that seriously. In fact, we believe this can actually be a dangerous thing to do. Madness is luring around.

In fact, we’ve become so used to using our sense of reason that we’ve forgotten that it is only one of the many useful ways we use to deal with knowledge about this world.

We’ve also become so obsessed with it that it actually made us teach ourselves that it is the single most important sense we have and that it is basically the only one you can trust. So worrying about when to use it and when not is not even a valid question. It’s common sense, for all you know. (Something Theodor Adorne refers to as the instrumentalism of reason)

Imagine a world without reason (and it’s not a dream)
It has even become hard for us to imagine that the world would be meaningful without our sense of reason.

And yet it is.

Because besides our sense of reason there’s also something which I call physical intelligence (*). Physical intelligence is the way your body (to its fullest extend) reads reality and responds to it.

Physical intelligence is basically what helped you growing up and understand about life on earth long before you even had a sense of reason and long before you could understand how reason would help you to get on in life.

We don’t know this physical intelligence that well because we tend to unlearn how to trust it. The older we get the more we get the impression it becomes useless. It is not useless, but we’ve made it useless though the way we’ve organized and designed our lives: i.e. in a rational way.

Still, our physical intelligence remains far from useless and it actually keeps us more alive than reason allows you to realize.

The power of physical intelligence
Once and a while, when physical intelligence takes control – or when we allow it to take control – it turns out to be more suitable to life then we could ever imagine.

That’s when people are in a flow. That’s when they allow their physical intelligence to do its work.

And for a lot of people, that’s a frightening experience.

Because your sense of reason can’t understand what’s happening. It just has to sit there and watch how something else takes over your life which is something it’s not used to (and the chances are you’re either).

The secret of being in control is … being
People who are in a flow allow their whole body to ride the wave, to go with the flow.

And since they intensely feel the flow (which is actually a set of very complex movements), I believe they are also in control because they allow everything to do it’s work, gravity, the wave, the board, the surfer.

They truly are. Here. Now.

And they have faith.

Because without faith they’d probably start thinking about how they’d get control over the whole situation, how their mind should give their body directions, how it should read the wave, how you should position your feed, what size your board should be, and so on …
Now being in control is also knowing (or should I say sensing) when to get in and out of the flow.

At some points it is actually quite useful to reason about something (ask your accountant).

The hard thing to grasp is that this is actually something which is hard to understand for your sense of reason since your sense of reason makes you believe he’s all you’ve got.

How to understand that there’s more to life than you know? (love story)
Think of it as a long lasting relationship.

After all these years, your relationship isn’t what it used to be. In fact, most of the time you’re just arguing with each other. All your friend does is criticizing you for who you are, and trying to improve you or change you because according to him you’re far from handling life in a perfect way.

One day you meet this great guy who’s far more understanding. He listens to you instead of criticizing you and bossing you around. He actually loves you for who you are (how great is that?). You feel you’re falling in love with him (or what did you expect).

But that’s as far as it goes. Because all of a sudden you become afraid. And you decide not to take this relationship one step further even though deep down you feel that this is guy is way more pleasant to be with, and even though you feel that this might be the guy, he might be the one.

Aye, there’s the rub.

He might be the one. You don’t know for sure.

What you do know for sure is that you know your current partner. You’ve built a life together and it works, well,sort of. It’s not great, but at least you know what you have.

So why risk losing that if you don’t know how your relationship with the other guy will work out? After all, the world is a dangerous place and you never know what you’re going to get. And for all you know you current situation is pretty safe.

But it doesn’t make you happy, does it. And since happy people generally tend to live longer (they definitely enjoy life more), it’s not really what you’d call the best option

As far as the senses are concerned, bigamy is a great thing
Our relationship with reason is pretty similar. The good thing though is that we actually can explore different relationships without having to have a brake up first.

In fact, having different relationships with our different senses at the same time will actually make our relationship with our sense of reason healthier.

Descartes’ mistake
So whatever you think: your reason is not you. Descartes was wrong. There’s more to know than the rational part of your mind can tell you.

And if you ever want to be in control, probably the best thing to do is allow yourself to learn to use all your senses, so not only your sense of reason.

It means you’ll have to have faith in your physical intelligence. It means you’ll have to allow it to make mistakes without criticizing it and making yourself believe it is less smart than your sense of reason.

So how to start flowing?

• learn to play again
• allow yourself to lose yourself into small things
• enjoy wandering around
• if you find yourself in a situation where you cannot come up with a solution through thinking, why not follow your guts?
• love life
• love yourself
• getting lost is just life trying to tell you you’re about to discover something you haven’t seen before. Make sure you notice.
• have fun

For those of you who’d like a more reasonable approach to this matter, try Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational, Timothy Gallwey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi their writings or this brilliant lecture on consciousness as a movement.

“We should reject the idea that the mind is something inside of us that is basically matter of just a calculating machine. There are different reasons to reject this. But one is, simply put: there is nothing inside us that thinks and feels and is conscious. Consciousness is not something that happens in us. It is something we do.

A much better image is that of the dancer. A dancer is locked into an environment, responsive to music, responsive to a partner. The idea that the dance is a state of us, inside of us, or something that happens in us is crazy. Our ability to dance depends on all sorts of things going on inside of us, but that we are dancing is fundamentally an attunement to the world around us.

And this idea that human consciousness is something we enact or achieve, in motion, as a way of being part of a larger process, is the focus of my work.” (Alva Noë)

(*) It’s possible that what I call physicall intelligence is actually a general term for things like emotional intelligence or social intelligence, like they are described by Daniel Goleman.

It is often unstated, but nonetheless true, that the fundamental normative claim of behavioral economics is that people should be rational. The guiding aim of every “nudge” is to make neoclassical economics true.The behavioral economic utopia coincides with the neoclassical. Insofar as it seeks to make people better, it makes them better self-interested rational maximizers. What it doesn’t do is aim to make people more generous, compassionate, or industrious, unless, that is, those people already are driven by those values. Nudges are about means, not ends.

Of course, now that every moron on the left grasps onto the theory, they think it supports their values. Thus we arrive at buncombe like this from Andrian Kreye at the Edge.org: 

The aim of behavioral economics is to develop mechanisms that can enable what is called “nudging”—the psychological control of the Homo economicus.

No no Herr Kreye–you see, the guiding aim is not psychological control of homo economicus, since the descriptive claim of the theory is that homo economics doesn’t exist. No no, the aim is mould a homo economicus out of homo irrationalis.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Nicholas Carr wonders. After all, Google tricks us into endless foraging trips to satisfy our information hunger, which it does not. On the contrary, it only makes us more and more eager to look for more information. Before we know it, we are driven by our information urge, an instinct which is taking control of our lives. We divert from whatever we are doing, we skim and devour, but we never take the time to digest. In short: the world is falling apart, thanks to Google.

Carr provokes, delibirately. And his approach works. In Edge 250 other great thinkers of our time elaborate on Carr’s opinion, some agree, but most of them criticise Carr fiercely for his pessimism.

I agree with them because I do not believe internet nihilism is the way to look at the future of the information age. But what strikes me is that I cannot seem to find an answer to the question of what kind of skills we need to deal with this huge amount of information at close range.

Then what is that skill? Playing. Nothing more, but certainly nothing less. We are up for some serious gaming and it appears we are not ready for it. Yet.

Our ability to focus is heavily challenged by the upcoming need to be able to scan at a googlian capacity. But Google itself is not responsible for this evolution.

By introducing more and more media into our daily lives we were made to believe that we would get a better idea of the world as a whole if only we could a) process as much information as possible and b) were able to select the right information at the right time.

But at the same time this constant influx of new information lured us into believing that “the truth (being an affirmation of our own truth) is out there”. That there is something out there that can give us ultimate pleasure and ultimate insight. In other words, we became addicted to scanning by believing we could find our ultimate focal point.

The questions we need to answer today are: how are we going to cope with processing this range of information, how will we be able to select the right information to focus on and what are we supposed to do with valuable information when we find it? At the same time we might ask ourselves what valuable information is and why and how we can recognize information as such?

As many other surfers these days I sometimes get overwhelmed by a sense of being lost while wandering around through the internet. Wherever I am, whatever piece of information I am being fed, every focal point I choose is instantly reduced to triviality by the mere notion that this particular piece of information is just not it. Google might give it a high page ranking but at the same time Google also lists hundreds or thousands of other related links which might prove as valuable or even more valuable than the one I am reading at the time, if only I had the time and the skills to sort it out. It seems that there is nothing I can do about this. Which is basically the underlying premise for internet nihilism.

Yet we do have a choice here. We can approach this notion of immobilizing vastness in a different and more fruitful way. The internet forces us to learn how to play again. In a sense, being a modern day information worker, being a part of the Information Age is all about becoming a homo ludens again.

As children we learn to handle the world through playing. This is not a funny business, we take it very seriously as it can cause tremendous fears as well as intense feelings of joy. Playing enables us to explore and handle a radical amount of seemingly uncatalogued and unindexed information in a fairly good way. Nature as well as the family nucleus provide us with their own structured reality, but most of these rules remain fairly implicit. By playing we force them to become explicit. By playing we discover, internalize and anticipate them. And at the same time we learn a lot about ourselves and our skills.

Playing is different from studying in that it is not about following a set route or path. It is about going somewhere with a certain goal while being willing to wander around and wonder at the same time. As a kid, getting lost in the game is simply another way – or should I say the way – to become smarter and adjusted to life. Give a kid a cube and it will do wonderful things with it. It will play around with it for hours. It might be told or taught to put other cubes on top of it, but by fooling around with the toy the child will also learn about its behaviour in different positions, about its texture and so on. It will learn about shapes, angles and corners, about ballance and maybe about much and much more. It might not complete the task of putting two cubes on top of each other but that does not matter.

These things change dramatically as we become familiar with the notions of sense, purpose and efficiency. Through rationalisation we are taught to believe that we can predict the outcome of our actions and therefore modify our behaviour in such a way that it becomes highly efficient. We turn much more to thinking to avoid pain. Secondary to avoiding pain comes gaining pleasure. And foremost we become obsessively task oriënted. We have a job to do, a goal to obtain. And the only way to complete these tasks is to use your brains. Be smart.

In other words we become addicted to roadmaps and GPSs. Suppose you have to visit a friend who is living quite far away. So you go to Google Maps, enter your coordinates and those of your friend and there you have your route. Great, you think, I will be there in no time. Now somewhere along the route it turns out also that you are no longer on the right track. What do you do? All you have are these printed instructions lying next to you on the passenger’s seat. They won’t tell you where to go. Nobody to call because you left your phone at home. And nobody around as well to ask for directions.

Most of us would get frustrated by this situation. We do want to get to our destination as fast as possible. Everything else is plain wrong. Diversions are unnecessary and cause distress. But since we have no overview anymore and seemingly no directions to get us back on track, we feel lost. Some of us might even become paralysed, simply because driving further does not guarantee you that you are heading in the right direction. For all you know you might be driving away from where you are supposed to go. Others go back on their tracks and try to start all over again. And some just bluntly persist and keep driving along no matter what.

And then there are the players. They try to continue their journey but not by stubbornly following the path they have chosen. If they do so, they do it with enthusiasm and curiosity. They notice what is around them, they notice the experience. For all they know they might discover a new, more interesting route.

Players do not let the sense of being lost overwhelm them. Why is that? Because they do not see their purpose of getting to their friend as an ultimate purpose that should be reached as quickly as possible. Of course, they would like to get there in time. But they are open to whatever comes their way en cours du route. They also avoid criticising themselves all the time as that would blur their focus and keep them from sensing what is happening.

For them a route does not only make sense when it is the shortest route to get from point a to b. Their route makes sense simply because they themselves make sense of it. But before they can make sense of it, they must allow it to make sense in the first place. And this is a fundamental difference between internet nihilism and the approach of the homo ludens. Every route these players take touches them, changes them, it makes them wander and wonder, and they know it.

While surfing the internet you can get overwhelmed by the information you come accross. It might frustrate you, keep you from continuing your journey, but it never ever can keep you from taking it into account and making the most of it.

Does that mean you should divert freely from your initial goal, your initial search? Does that mean that all purposes are in a sense irrelevant? Not necessarily. Players know that everything they meet tells them something about their quest, about themselves, about the initial goal they are trying to reach, about the world they are living in. In short, playing is all about getting there by being there.

While it proves to be a crucial skill these days playing does not outrule the use of a rational approach. As an advertisingprofessional it is crucial to manage and manipulate the balance between these two. You delibirately start playing around looking for a great idea which serves a purpose. Along the way you meet other great ideas which might serve another purpose but which also serve the purpose of making you more creative and getting you closer to yet another great idea. Rationalisation steps in when time tells us it is time to chose, pick a few concepts and work them out. Rationalisation also steps in when we start thinking about how we can realize our ideas, how we can keep the costs down, etc… But we never ever do take these steps into account at the same time.

For brainstorms the order in which you use playing and rationalisation is quite well-known. But for working with the internet no one has actually come up yet with an workable approach which takes into account the notion of playing. Simply because up to now we have failed to recognize the importance of playing in dealing with the amount of information the internet contains and with the way this information is presented to us.

We also should stop downplaying ourselves next to Google or the internet. After all, it is not Google or a particular webpage which will make us write, do, create great things. Sure Google might prove a source of inspiration, but it in the end, it is what we do with this information which makes the difference.

Google should not be treated as an oracle. Nor should we think of it as a map and a guide at the same time. Although we belevied knowledge would set us free from dogmatic beliefs Knowledge inc. aka Google aka the Internet has become our new god to whom a lot of us feel enslaved, simply because we do not and we cannot know all.

In Edge 250 W. Daniel Hillis writes ‘We evolved in a world where our survival depended on an intimate knowledge of our surroundings. This is still true, but our surroundings have grown. We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth.’

What Hillis writes is right but not in the way he states it. For being able to be broad, we not only need to be capable of scanning and processing information in a new way. Remember the first time you needed to study your course notes at university or at college? First thing you did was to write a summary or get one from your fellow students. While scanning and skimming the web we are looking for the ultimate summary. And that in itself is a paradox.

It reminds me of the “Law of Requisite Variety” by W. Ross Ashby, cited also in Edge 250 by George Dyson who rephrases it as ‘any effective control system has to be as complex as the system it controls. This was the paradox of artificial intellegence: any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently; and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will not be simple enough to understand.’ In short: forget about finding the right summary because every summary gets it wrong in one way or another.

We just cannot get it. And yet we do. Yet we have managed to engage with reality through summarizing, through reasoning, through imagining and through playing. Our ability to unlock the paradox of the ultimate summary, the paradox of understanding reality as a whole by reducing it.

I believe we do have a system innate and so complex we can control reality. But not in a way we are made to believe. Playing is for kids, sportsmen and –women, and artists. Many of us believe it cannot be as complex or rather it cannot be an approach sufficiently complex to gain control over reality in a way science does. This does not make sense. Wrong, it does, in a way we cannot even imagine yet. Not yet. Not until we invent or should I say rediscover an adult 21st century of playing, a way of playing for survival, a way of playing for life.

Update: The Britannica Blog has also opened a forum about this topic. It contains several interesting articles.

Rough Type
The Reality Club (Edge)
Britannica Blog

I am hoping to give this blog a more public edge over time, e.g. by engaging from an anthropological perspective with some of the media-related issues discussed on the thriving scientific salon Edge.org. I’m a great fan of Edge.org but it does have a conspicuously low proportion of anthropologists as contributors.

For psykologiens løse kanon Judith Rich Harris er Freud og psykoanalysen lige så interessant som en udtjent floppydisk. Hun vil forstå, hvorfor mennesker er forskellige, og finder svaret i evolutionspsykologien. Omtale af bogen No Two Alike, bragt i Weekendavisen den 1.2.2008:

Læs mere her

Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis has an interesting piece on Edge.org right now.  He’s also done some cool research on a variety of subjects with social networks as the focus.

Here I present a critique of his dialog on Edge.org.  I eagerly await the actual publication of his Facebook.com-based research papers http://christakis.med.harvard.edu/pages/pubs/pub-sn_ihe.html.  In the meantime I’ve researched his publicly available papers (such as this one: http://christakis.med.harvard.edu/pdfs/077.pdf) and read his Edge.org piece several times.  He’s consistent in his approach and vocabulary across his publications.

My goal in commenting on the dialog isn’t to add more noise or to be an anti-academic ranter (nor is it altruistic!). Using social networks as a data source for understanding behavior is very useful for improving media, business and our lives.  Unfortunately in our collective business, academic, social and political rush to make use of all this data, our vocabularies and approaches are all over the place and the conclusions drawn from all the research do not yet provide much practical value.  The interest in this research has exploded and now is the time to coagulate it all.

I’m excited that Dr. Christakis is out of the gate and hopefully I can help us benefit from his work, refine it, and build from it.  I personally have several reasons to value is work – UChicago connection, health care (my family was one of the main subject of SiCKO), and social network studies (that’s what I do!).

That said, here we go.

“For me, social networks are like the eye. They are incredibly complex and beautiful, and looking at them begs the question of why they exist, and why they come to pass. Do we need a kind of just-so story to explain them?  Do they just happen to be there, for no particular reason?  Or do they serve some purpose – some ontological and also pragmatic purpose?  “

Complexity is only a weak connection between the development of the eye and the development of social networks.  That is, stating two things are similar because they are complex provides no value in understanding either.  It’s an anchor for saying “hey, here’s something that seems like it should have a purpose because it’s seemingly so well suited to what it does and the other thing over here has that same feeling to it.” Fine, I get it.  Unfortunately, I think using it as the headline to an article and lead in paragraph gets the reader linking the two subjects.  The evolution of the eye is such an abused ID vs evolution metaphor it’s best to not recall it.

Though the passive appeal to purpose is not helpful, at least Dr. Christakis does ask whether they serve a purpose or they “just happen to be there.”  He clearly understands that purpose itself is not likely to lead to understanding the social networks anymore than its helping in uncovering the workings and “origin” of the eye.

The eye and social networks are emergent properties of selection by consequences.  We can eliminate the purpose discussion right now.  When a scientist goes down the road of uncovering “purpose” it leads only to further linguistic logic, not to actual descriptions of relationships between variables.

“The amazing thing about social networks, unlike other networks that are almost as interesting – networks of neurons or genes or stars or computers or all kinds of other things one can imagine – is that the nodes of a social network – the entities, the components – are themselves sentient, acting individuals who can respond to the network and actually form it themselves. “

The sentient and acting qualities of the entities of social networks is hardly unique or amazing.  No doubt human behavior and social interaction is complicated, but there’s no mysterious free will or free creator aspect to any of it.  Other network entities like neurons, genes, stars, computers and particles all operate more or less under selection by consequences (the differences is in what “unit” is selected and what stimulus the unit can attend to.)

Social networks seem amazing to us, I suppose, because of their complexity and our inability to talk about about human behavior/social behavior without appealing to the “thinking” (sentient, acting) man.  Social networks become more measurable and understandable when we stop trying to measure mentalistic concepts and stop analyzing the behavior in terms of some unique quality of mankind.

“I began to see in a very real way that the illness of the person dying was affecting the health status of other individuals in the family. And I began to see this as a kind of non-biological transmission of disease – as if illness or death or health care use in one person could cause illness or death or health care use in other people connected to him. It wasn’t an epidemic transmission of a germ; something else was happening. This is a very basic observation about what I now call “interpersonal health effects, but as I began to have more and more clinical experience with such patients, I began to broaden the focus. I became interested not just in dyadic transmission of illness and illness burden, but also hyper-dyadic transmission.”

Interpersonal health effects? Hyper-dyadic transmission?  These are big phrases more simply stated as behavior between two or more people.  Why add a higher level language construct when simply cataloging, measuring and describing the behavior and stimulus does the trick?

Dr. Christakis can do without the big phrases as he does in his following paragraph:

“For example, one day I met with a pretty typical scenario: a woman who was dying and her daughter who was caring for her. The mother had been sick for quite a while and she had dementia. The daughter was exhausted from years of caring for her, and in the course of caring, she became so exhausted that her husband also became sick from his wife’s preoccupation with her mother. One day I got a call from the husband’s best friend, with his permission, to ask me about him. So here we have the following cascade: parent to daughter, daughter to husband, and husband to friend. That is four people – a cascade of effects through the network. And I became sort of obsessed with the notion that these little dyads of people could agglomerate to form larger structures. “

Great! Here we can actually dig into the behavior of the people,  the consequences, and the web of feedback stimilus.

Interestingly you find that nothing is actually transferred nor spread between people.  There’s no unit of illness that is transferred.  It is misleading to suggest there’s a “nature of contagion within networks” when people do not actually exchange a contagion.

He somewhat agrees with that in saying “What spreads from person to person is a behavior, and it is the behavior that we both might exhibit that then contributes to our changes in body size. So, the spread of behaviors from person to person might cause or underlie the spread of obesity.”  But really it’s not behavior itself that spreads.  Nothing is spread at all.  An entity responds to its environment and the consequences to its own behavior. An entity does not catch behavior or even mirror behavior.  If an entity’s behavior is reinforced, it will continue.  Social networks have a variety of ways in which participants reinforce or extinguish behavior via consequences (humiliation, praise, points, money, jobs, credibility, reputation, pictures… and so on), they have no power to transmit behavior.  What is behavior?  What is the unit of behavior?

Saying behavior spreads is like saying time flies.  Time isn’t anything.  Time is a word we use to say “we’re going to count the frequency of events relative to other events.”  Behavior is a similar concept.  (I’m going to need to follow up on this or flat out delete it later as it may not be useful to anyone but me.)  The take away here is that if you can’t define something and literally see it transmit from one entity to another, the concept of spreading is kind of moot.  You can transmit a virus (literally watch the virus go from one host to another).  You can’t transmit behavior.  Behavior is what an entity does.  Other entities and the environment either reinforce the entity to keep emitting the behavior or to extinguish it.  If many individuals emit the same behavior in succession it may appear to be “spreading” but really the entities are likely responding to the same consequences in similar ways.  What’s the harm in thinking of it spreading?  The harm is that one starts looking for the transmission medium (remember “ether” in early physics!?) or other mental constructs to explain casual chains.

Here we see that play out:

“So we can begin to think about combining a broad variety of ideas. Some stretch back to Plato, and thinking about well-ordered societies, the origins of good and evil, how people form collectives, how a state might be organized. In fact, we can begin to revisit ideas engaged by Rousseau and other philosophers on man in a state of nature. How can we transcend anarchy?  Anarchy can be conceived of as a kind of social network phenomenon, and society and social order can also be conceived of as a social network phenomenon.  “

Dr. Christakis is going back to Plato for insight?  Hey, I like Plato as much as the next intellectual but I don’t ever look back to him for present behavioral insight  no more than I look to Aristotle to describe gravity to me.

Yes, you can permute philosophical ideas to social network phenomenons.  Who cares?

How do we transend anarchy?”

What does that mean?

Well ordered-societies?  The origins of good and evil? 

Really?  We’re not past that yet? When are we actually going to get down to talking about how people behave?

“This is how I began to think about social networks about seven years ago. At the time when I was thinking about this, I moved from the University of Chicago to Harvard, and was introduced to my colleague James Fowler, another social scientist, who was also beginning to think about different kinds of network problems from the perspective of political science. He was interested in problems of collective action – how groups of people are organized, how the action of one individual can influence the actions of other individuals. He was also interested in basic problems like altruism. Why would I be altruistic toward somebody else?  What purpose does altruism serve?  In fact, I think that altruism is a key predicate to the formation of social networks because it serves to stabilize social ties. If I were constantly violent towards other people, or never reciprocated anything good, the network would disintegrate, all the ties would be cut. Some level of altruism is required for networks to emerge.”

Altruism is another word that provides no explanatory power.  Take any definition of altruism you like.  and you still end up no where.  Lack of violence does not equal altruism.  No entity takes one for the team.  No entity is selfish.  These are personifications and metaphors.  Really, leave out selfishness and altruism and purpose and the analysis proceeds more smoothly.

Selection by conquences describes the social interactions accurately without all of the linguistic and mentalistic scaffolding.  Dr. Christakis layers on economics, topology, sociology, nuerobiology and as many other ologies and ics as is possible to explain behavior.  Let’s get it back to basics!

“Again, the study of social networks is part of this assembly project, part of this effort to understand how you can then have the emergence of order and the emergence of new phenomena that do not inhere in the individuals. We have, for example, consciousness, which cannot be understood by studying neurons. Consciousness is an emergent property of neuronal tissue. And we can imagine similarly certain kinds of emergent properties of social networks that do not inhere in the individuals – properties that arise because of the ties between individuals and because of the complexity of those ties. “

We’re getting closer here. The claim that consciousness is an emergent property of neuronal tissue is out of place though.   Consciousness as a concept isn’t needed here and is so ill defined it describes (relates) nothing.

Just as I think we’re finally moving on to the actual relationships between variables in networks, Dr. Christakis describes the spread of obesity.

“To us, it is a very, very fundamental observation that things happening in a social space beyond your vision – events that occur or choices that are made by people you don’t know – can cascade in a conscious or subconscious way through a network and affect you. This is a very profound and fundamental observation about the operation of social life, which we initially examined while looking at obesity. We found that weight gain in a variety of kinds of people you might know affected your weight gain – weight gain in your friends, in your spouse, in your siblings and so forth.  Moreover, people beyond those to whom you were directly tied also influenced your weight, people up to three degrees removed from you in the network. And, incidentally, we found that weight loss obeys the same properties and spreads similarly through the network.”

Obesity in an individual is a probability/possibility that depends on the reinforcement of healthy eating and exercise behaviors in media, in our friends, and in our families combined with genetics, epigentics and food/water supply all mashed into a web of contingencies.  A social network study may highlight that web, but it’s not any particular property of the network itself.

His other paper has the same faulty logic that the network layout is a causal agent. (N.A. Christakis and J.H. Fowler, “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years,” New England Journal of Medicine  357(4): 370-379 (July 2007) MS#077)

In Spread of Obesity study he observes:

“Although connected persons might share an exposure to common environmental factors, the experience of simultaneous events, or other common features (e.g., genes) that cause them to gain or lose weight simultaneously, our observations suggest an important role for a process involving the induction and person-to-person spread of obesity.

Our findings that the weight gain of immediate neighbors did not affect the chance of weight gain in egos and that geographic distance did not modify the effect for other types of alters (e.g., friends or siblings) helps rule out common exposure to local environmental factors as an explanation for our observations.”

Ruling out neighbors’ effects does not rule common exposure to local environmental factors.  You are more likely to go to work, school, shopping and church (local environment) with your mutual friends rather than your neighbors.  How is local environment defined?  When discussing obesity one must include the common exercising, eating and stress inducing environments, not simply the local neighborhood or grocery store.

If Dr. Christakis is best anchored in his language of social networks that’s ok as long as we all get an accurate understanding of the relationships between the variables he’s studying.  Unfortunately, in this dialog the terminology generates relationships between words, not between people and their behavior and consequences.  Less efficiently, he’s simply repackaging (almost as though it were NEW!) well known aspects of behaviorism, evolution and economics.

“We are interested not in biological contagion, but in social contagion. One possible mechanism is that I observe you and you begin to display certain behaviors that I then copy. For example, you might start running and then I might start running. Or you might invite me to go running with you. Or you might start eating certain fatty foods and I might start copying that behavior and eat fatty foods. Or you might take me with you to restaurants where I might eat fatty foods. What spreads from person to person is a behavior, and it is the behavior that we both might exhibit that then contributes to our changes in body size. So, the spread of behaviors from person to person might cause or underlie the spread of obesity.

A completely different mechanism would be for there to be not a spread of behaviors, but a spread of norms. I look at the people around me and they are gaining weight. This changes my idea, consciously or subconsciously, about what is an acceptable body size. People around me who start gaining weight reset my expectations about what it means to be overweight or thin, and this is what spreads from person to person: a norm. It is a kind of meme (but it is not quite a meme) that goes from person to person. “

Copying behavior? Norms? Memes?

Run from these explanations!  They add more layers of language.  So now to explain behavior I need to understand genetics, memes, norms, contagions!  Ugh.

Dr. Christakis’ conclusion:

“In our empirical work so far, we have found substantial evidence for the latter mechanism, the spread of norms, more than the spread of behaviors.”

Okay, so now we’re looking for the spread of norms. (another word for values).  Why introduce a world like “norms” to replace “values”? And whether you call it norms or values, it still isn’t anything that is spread.  I hate to beat a dead horse, but by using a spreading metaphor as a transmission method we move further from what is actually going on.

We are reinforced by what we value.  What we value can be altered by what others value (Super Size Me!) and our environment (If I only have access to junk food, I come to value it).

Really, we do not need all the extra terminology and models. Indentifying values, uncovering environmental variables, measuring behavior rates, and plotting schedules of reinforcement is the data needed.  The extra intervening variables (memes, norms, mirror neurons, contagion) do not predict anything and do not improve the explanatory accuracy.

Dr. Christakis points to his work on Facebook data.  I, too, think it’s a neat source of social data, but it should not constituite serious data for things like obesity, health, privacy and other complicated subjects.  Facebook is flush with noisy and commercialized information.  A lot of what people put online is not what they’d do if you met them, what they’d put in medical records, what they have in their photo albums at home, how they answer an anonymous survey and so on.  In other words, trying to suss out universal networking theories from a commercialized, college focused social networking site is probably not great.

Specific to my point let’s look at his statements on social ties:

“We have trawled through this large social network and grabbed information about people in the network, and their social ties, as is available on Facebook – for example, information having to do with their tastes, with the people with whom they appear in photographs, and so on.   For example, a person might have an average of 100 or 200 friends on Facebook, but they might only appear in photographs with 10 of them. We would argue that appearing in a photograph constitutes a different kind of social tie than a mere nomination of friendship”

Most photos posted to facebook are done in batches – usually within the initial sign up process or the “honeymoon” period when people are still excited about signing up.  Photos people post online are representative of who they are around physically most of the time and in picture taking settings.  The composition of your friends list is highly biased towards who is active on Facebook, who you might be in school or work with and so on.  It really isn’t great at suggesting the particulars of social ties in any real world kind of way.

So much of what you do on Facebook is heavily influenced by user interface and the software system.  Certain things are easier than others or more obvious AND the interface has changed constantly (how you post photos, how you set privacy, what’s set by default).  Also impacting use of Facebook is the savviness of the user.  There are far more people not using Facebook in this world than those that are.  Facebook skews far younger and savvier than the population at large, so the stuidies that come out are biased to that group (and that is important when discussing behavior!) http://www.quantcast.com/facebook.com/demographics

Again, it is a great source of data and certainly has value, but you need to have many secondary sources to back up conclusions based on online network data.  Also, what you don’t get access to is all the behavioral data – emails, alerts, pokes, system alerts, click throughs, ad response, eye tracking, referrers…

There are two other authors connected to Dr. Christakis’ dialog.  There isn’t much meat to their statements. Rushkoff’s metaphor of a “media virus” is pretty shallow and is another case of language complication.  One day I may go in for a bigger response.  Rushkoff is a neat dude producing lots of cool stuff so this statement isn’t indicative of his quality of thinking.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/christakis08/christakis08_index.html#dr

I have another pretty detailed presentation from my pal, Dan Goldstein (www.decisionsciencenews.com) from the London School of Business that is tangential to all of this (I will post with permission soon).  A lot of the vocabulary is the same and the data is impressive.  It’s missing a key part too!  WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON AT THE ENTITY (PEOPLE) LEVEL? Dr. Goldstein and Dr. Christakis agree that the topology of the network is hugely important to understanding how fast, when, what, who spreads ideas, data, values, norms (whatever you want to call it!).  However, there’s no WHY inherent in the network makeup.  What is reinforcing to social network participants?  How does reinforcement work?  What behaviors can we reliably measure on the social networks?  What data should we ignore?  How is behavior reinforced on the network?  How we tie online and offline behavior together?

That’s my task.  Filling that in is my contribution.

~R

I’m not a great one for new year resolutions. I prefer to set goals at odd times of the year and maybe recommit or check my progress at this time when so many will set new resolutions that may fall by the wayside. I do like to reassess though what I think I’m doing and re check the things that I believe.

So I’ve been quite absorbed by various individual essays over at edge.org concerning the question: what have you changed your mind about and why? which makes a fascinating read and is still being added to.

Alan Alda states that he’s changed his mind about God twice, whilst Brian Eno has lost faith in the old notion of ideology politics and revolution and now sees political change occurring in very small evolutionary steps.

I was also interested in Esther Dyson’s change of mind over on-line privacy and Tim O’Reilly getting over his skepticism of social networking software and Douglas Rushkoff’s disappointment over the Internet.

Often a change of mind happens very slowly as experience (or even ill interpreted prejudice) informs you and contributes to your own belief systems.

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