Coming out of a melancholy period [down phase]

I’m want to continue investigating my blogging pattern as I’ve discussed it in my recent 3 Quarks Daily article, Melancholy and Growth: Toward a Mindcraft for an Emerging World. This time I want to my daily activity for October and November.

This chart shows my daily posting activity during October and November. It’s been sparse during October, with many days where I didn’t post at all.

I had 30 posts in October, 15 in September, 18 in August, and 61 in July. So, I started going down in July, hit bottom in August and September, and started back up in November. Starting on the 15th I’ve posted every day – and I’m continuing to post daily in December.

That’s not all. I’ve gotten relatively little sleep for the last few days. I’d wake up during the night, start thinking, and then go to the computer and look around, maybe even write some stuff and do a post or two. Then I’d go back to bed. Maybe I’d sleep, but maybe I’d just lie in bed and think, sometimes on my back, which is not generally how I sleep.

[Note, by the way, that the practice of sleeping straight through the night is a cultural convention, not a biological necessity or preference. It’s called “segmented sleep.” I’ve got a number of posts about it.]

There’s more. During some of those night sessions I’d make a post on Facebook indicating I was awake. This started on November 22, where I posted a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial from the 1980s. This is one of those commercials featuring an owner of a Dunkin’ Donuts who awakens in the early morning, uttering “Time to make the donuts.” Here’s a list of those posts: first the time, then the date, and then the content of the post.

3:37 AM 11.22.24 – [Post a Dunkin’ Donuts TV commercial]
2:07 AM 11.24.24 – Again, I'm waking up in the middle of the night and thinking. What's next? Writing?
3:24 AM 11.24.24 – I’ve thought. Now back to sleep.
4:35 AM 11.24.24 – Back at it. More thinking.
11:31 AM 11.24.24 – I’ve spent the last two hours immersed in a remarkable line of thought. More later.
11:37 PM 11.25.24 – It’s been a productive day.
4:18 AM 12.1.24 – Awake in the middle of the night. Good thoughts. All’s well.
3:22 AM 12.2.24 – Middle of the night. Awake. Good thoughts.
4:02 AM 12.3.24 – 4:02 AM Tue 12.3.24 [I simply noted the time]
4:30 AM 12.4.24 – Just another marker.

Note that I’ve highlighted two of them. The content of the posts is like that of the other posts, but the first one went up late in the morning while the second went up late at night, after my normal bed time.I believe that first post, on the 25th, is when I began thinking about the implications for splintered career paths as AI becomes more deeply embedded in society.

The thoughts and ideas I have been having during this period are new and different. In particular this is the period where I decided, first, to write a 3QD article about my blogging habits, and second, to actually write the article. That article is a substantially new kind of intellectual activity for me.

If, as I’ve argued in my 3QD piece, those down-times are for the kind of mental reorganization that precedes a creative phase, one would expect new things to emerge [tumble out] at the start of an up-cycle.

Has this happened at the beginning of every up-cycle back to 2010, when I started blogging? I don’t know. I’ve not been keeping those kinds of records. I could go through the blog and take note of the content of every post to determine whether or not new stuff shows up immediately after every down cycle. That would take time, but I’m not going to do it now. I’ve got other things to do.

But looking at my blog posts won’t tell me anything about changes in my daily routine of the kind I’ve reported above. But I have been through this kind of thing before. It’s not new to me. It will slow down – it already is – it always does. And there are other night-notices scattered in Facebook, going a few years back. But I’m not going to look for them now.

Things to do.

More later.

The Two Voices of Scott Alexander on Rogue AI

Back at the end of February, Tyler Cowen had a post entitled, “Are nuclear weapons or Rogue AI the more dangerous risk?” He linked to a long Scott Alexander post, “Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might or Might Not Work,” which was about some recent web discourse around and about predicting the emergence of human-level AI. Then, at the very end on his long post, seemingly out of nowhere, Alexander was fretting about danger of rogue AI.

I seem to have gotten trapped in Alexander’s post. I have read it several times, even taking notes. It’s a very interesting document and merits some discussion of how it is constructed. I’m not so much concerned about whether or not Alexander’s assessment of the prospects of human level AI is valid as I am about the convoluted nature of his post.

Two voices

Alexander writes the post in two voices. While I’ve not read a lot of his material, I’ve read enough to know that he’s a careful and skilled writer. If he spoke through two voices it must be because whatever he wants to convey arises from the interaction between them and cannot be stated within a single voice.

Let’s call one of the voices the Impersonal voice. Most of the post is written in that voice, which is the voice in which he’s written most of the posts I’m familiar with. Let’s call the other voice the Personal voice. By word-count it’s by far the lesser voice, but it packs a strong rhetorical punch.

Let’s look at the two strongest statements from the Personal voice. The first, and I believe longest, section of the report is Alexander’s account of Ajeya Cotra’s long report, Forecasting TAI with biological anchors, which I’ve not read (though I’ve read some of what Holden Karnofsky says about it). Very near the end of this section the Personal voice makes a strong statement (though this is not the first appearance of this voice):

One more question: what if this is all bullshit? What if it’s an utterly useless total garbage steaming pile of grade A crap?

Our second example comes near the end of the post, when Alexander begins his own assessment of things:

Oh God, I have to write some kind of conclusion to this post, in some way that suggests I have an opinion, or that I’m at all qualified to assess this kind of research. Oh God oh God.

Phrases like “total garbage,” “grade A crap” and “Oh God” are not appropriate to the work Alexander is doing through his (standard and) Impersonal voice. They signal us that we are listening to a different voice. This voice expresses a merely personal attitude and is quite different from the objectivity sought in the Impersonal voice.

Taken at face value the second quoted statement says Alexander doesn’t feel (technically) qualified to judge this material. As such, it also tells us why he’d made that first statement and in that voice. That first statement places the assertion, Cotra’s report is nonsense, into the record. By couching that assertion in the words and manner of the Personal voice Alexander separates it from his Impersonal summary of the report. In effect, The guy who summarized the report is not the guy who thinks it’s nonsense. The guy who summarized the report doesn’t feel competent to assess it, but happens to be closely coupled to the guy who has deep doubts.

From parody to grudging affirmation to confusion

So, Alexander has gotten a statement of deep doubt into the record. What happens next? He goes back into the Impersonal voice and invites us to

Imagine a scientist in Victorian Britain, speculating on when humankind might invent ships that travel through space. He finds a natural anchor: the moon travels through space! He can observe things about the moon: for example, it is 220 miles in diameter (give or take an order of magnitude). So when humankind invents ships that are 220 miles in diameter, they can travel through space!

He then spins out that tale and includes a helpful chart and a picture. It’s absurd – he does slip in a wink or two. It’s a parody of the methodology in Cotra’s report. A parody is not an argument, but it clarifies Alexander’s fears about the report.

Then he goes into his second major section, an account of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s critique, which takes the form of a long post in dialogue form. I’ve taken a look at the post, but haven’t read the whole thing. Alexander’s opens this section by asserting, “Eliezer Yudkowsky presents a more subtle version of these kinds of objection in an essay…” I won’t bother to say anything about that beyond noting the Yudkowsky thinks Cotra’s method is useless for estimating the arrival of Transformative AI. Alexander may not feel qualified to critique Cotra’s work, but Yudkowsky certainly does. And why not? As Alexander notes: “...he did found the field [AI alignment], so I guess everyone has to listen to him.”[1]

When he’s finished with Yudkowsky, Alexander discusses comments from other places (LessWrong, AI Impacts, and OpenPhil) and finally offers his own evaluation, which he opens with the “Oh God” statement I’ve already quoted. He says a thing or two and arrives at this:

Given these two assumptions - that natural artifacts usually have efficiencies within a few OOM [orders of magnitude] of artificial ones, and that compute drives progress pretty reliably - I am proud to be able to give Ajeya’s report the coveted honor of “I do not make an update of literally zero upon reading it”.

That still leaves the question of “how much of an update do I make?” Also “what are we even doing here?”

I take it that the passages he puts in quotes are being spoken though the Personal voice.

Let’s look at the first one. It’s stated in informal Baysian terms. It also feels arch and indirect. “I do not make an update of literally zero”? What’s that? He’s refrained from writing “0” in a ledger somewhere? Whereas if the report had been less convincing, he’d have

• opened up that ledger,
• added a line,
• placed “Ajeya’s report” in the Argument column, and
• written “0” in the Effect on Me column.

On the contrary, the report has had some non-zero effect on him. But then he attempts to run away: “what are we even doing here?”

A couple paragraphs later: “This report was insufficiently different from what I already believed for me to need to worry about updating from one to the other.” I’m not sure what to make of this. If his prior belief had been quite different from the report’s conclusion, then a decision to stick with that prior belief would represent lack of faith in the report (which he doesn’t feel competent to judge). In contrast, a decision to revise his belief in the direction indicated by the report would represent faith in Cotra (and her colleagues) despite his lack of (technical) qualifications for judging the report. So, he can’t judge the report, doesn’t think it’s wrong, but doesn’t think it’s right enough to lead him to change his mind.

It's as though he’s playing the role of Penelope in Odyssey. She tells her suitors she’ll pick one when she’s done weaving a burial shroud for Laertes. They see her diligently weaving during the day. But then at night, what does she do? She undoes the weaving she’d done during the day so that she can put off the day she has to pick one.

“I’m already scared”

And now, at long last, Alexander gets around to what was obviously on his mind from the very beginning, fear of a rogue AI. He‘s very little that up to this point, which is strange in itself, but now he comes out with it.

Alexander circles back to Yudkowsky: “The more interesting question, then, is whether I should update towards Eliezer’s slightly different distribution, which places more probability mass on earlier decades.” Yudkowsky, however, refuses to give dates: “I consider naming particular years to be a cognitively harmful sort of activity...” Incidentally, sounds like self-regarding grandstanding from Yudkowsky. Perhaps, as people surround him asking for the date, he passes out gilded fortune cookies as souvenirs.

Alexander:

So, should I update from my current distribution towards a black box with “EARLY” scrawled on it?

What would change if I did? I’d get scared? I’m already scared. I’d get even more scared? Seems bad.

That’s not the end. We’ve got two or three more paragraphs. But those paragraphs don’t change the fact that Alexander is scared. They just mix a bit of wit into the contemplation of doom.

Alexander and his community

What are we to make of all this?

I don’t quite know. But then neither does Alexander.

I note, however, that he wrote that post for a community he’s been cultivating for almost a decade. He’s written on a wide variety of topics. He’s conducted surveys, had book review contests, and interacted with that community in various says. That long ambivalent post, spoken through two voices, that’s the post he felt he owed that community. To what extent is Alexander’s ambivalence a reflection of attitudes in that community?

On the one hand there’s the apparent assumption that Transformative AI is on the way come hell and high water. That is coupled with interest in the arcane technical minutiae and leaps of epistemic faith required to issue a long report predicting that arrival by comparison with biological information processing in 1) the human brain, 2) a human life, 3) the evolution of life on earth, and 4) the genome, all measured in FLOPS (floating-point operations per second).[2] That’s one thing.

And there there’s the correlative assumption, perhaps not shared by all, but nonetheless widespread, that the arrival of Transformative AI brings with it the danger that that AI will turn against humanity and transform the earth into a paperclip factory, metaphorically speaking. To the extent that the rhetorical structure of his post is responding to what? a facture, ambivalence? in his audience, why does Alexander hold it in reserve until the end, like it is a shameful secret?

Notes

[1] That depends on what one thinks of the field of AI alignment. Color me skeptical. The idea that we are under not-so-distant threat from an AI hell-bent on our destruction strikes me as conspiracy theorizing directed at technology no one knows how to build.

[2] In his history of technology, David Hays tells us that

... the wheel was used for ritual over many years before it was put to use in war and, still later, work. The motivation for improvement of astronomical instruments in the late Middle Ages was to obtain measurements accurate enough for astrology. Critics wrote that even if the dubious doctrines of astrology were valid, the measurements were not close enough for their predictions to be meaningful. So they set out to make their instruments better, and all kinds of instrumentation followed from this beginning.

I feel a bit like that about the topics of Ajeya Cotra’s report. They are interesting and important in themselves for what they tell us about the world. The need not be yoked to the task of predicting future technology.

Link rot is a pain in the ass, and that's not the only problem [plagues the NYTimes too]

https://t.co/KDN5ag5FfV

— Jonathan Zittrain (@zittrain) May 21, 2021

Powers of Ten [A Blast from the Bast]

If you've not seen this little gem, you should. It's marvelous. Note that that the most interesting and complex visual action centers of human-scale phenomena, a bit larger, at bit smaller, but human scale. At large and small scales the phenomena of the cosmos appear much alike. I've appended a note about that. (Originally posted in June 2011)

Some years ago I was rummaging through stacks in a used-book store in Troy, New York, when I came upon Powers of Ten: About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe. I smiled from ear to ear and bought it. I’d heard about he film for years, but never seen it, and I don’t recall whether I’d even known there was a book. But here it was in my hands, a book called Powers of Ten and it clearly was based on the movie.

What, you ask, is this marvelous movie/book about?

It’s about the whole universe. Let the Wikipedia explain:

Powers of Ten is a 1968 American documentary short film written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames, rereleased in 1977. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten (see also logarithmic scale and order of magnitude). The film is an adaptation of the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, and more recently is the basis of a new book version. Both adaptations, film and book, follow the form of the Boeke original, adding color and photography to the black and white drawings employed by Boeke in his seminal work.

So, two days ago I googled “powers of ten”, figuring that I’d come up with an online version of the movie somewhere. Well, I did better than that. The Eames Office has a website about the project. The website includes the film, but also photos and illustrations (including the originals from the book) and a blog. Lots of stuff there. Have fun.

* * * * *

This is a passage from William Benzon and David Hays, A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity (Journal of Social and Biological Structures 13: 33-40, 1990):

Prigogine, who won the Nobel prize for demonstrating that order can arise by accident (Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Prigogine 1980; Nicolis and Prigogine 1977). He showed that when certain kinds of thermodynamic systems get far from equilibrium order can arise spontaneously. These systems include, but are not limited to, living systems. In general, so-called dissipative systems are such that small fluctuations can be amplified to the point where they change the behavior of the system. These systems have very large numbers of parts and the spontaneous order they exhibit arises on the macroscopic temporal and spatial scales of the whole system rather than on the microscopic temporal and spatial scales of its very many component parts. Further, since these processes are irreversible, it follows that time is not simply an empty vessel in which things just happen. The passage of time, rather, is intrinsic to physical process.

We live in a world in which “evolutionary processes leading to diversification and increasing complexity” are intrinsic to the inanimate as well as the animate world (Nicolis and Prigogine 1977: 1; see also Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 297-298). That this complexity is a complexity inherent in the fabric of the universe is indicated in a passage where Prigogine (1980: xv) asserts “that living systems are far-from-equilibrium objects separated by instabilities from the world of equilibrium and that living organisms are necessarily ‘large,’ macroscopic objects requiring a coherent state of matter in order to produce the complex biomolecules that make the perpetuation of life possible.” Here Prigogine asserts that organisms are macroscopic objects, implicitly contrasting them with microscopic objects.

Prigogine has noted that the twentieth century introduction of physical constants such as the speed of light and Planck's constant has given an absolute magnitude to physical events (Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 217-218). If the world were entirely Newtonian, then a velocity of 400,000 meters per second would be essentially the same as a velocity of 200,000 meters per second. That is not the universe in which we live. Similarly, a Newtonian atom would be a miniature solar system; but a real atom is quite different from a miniature solar system.

Physical scale makes a difference. The physical laws which apply at the atomic scale, and smaller, are not the same as those which apply to relatively large objects. That the pattern of physical law should change with scale, that is a complexity inherent in the fabric of the universe, that is a complexity which does not exist in a Newtonian universe. At the molecular level life is subject to the quantum mechanical laws of the micro-universe. But multi-celled organisms are large enough that, considered as homogeneous physical bodies, they exist in the macroscopic world of Newtonian mechanics. Life thus straddles a complexity which inheres in the very structure of the universe.

You can download the full article: Academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/8488872/A_Note_on_Why_Natural_Selection_Leads_to_Complexity; SSRN, https://ssrn.com/abstract=1591788.

"Lawfare" comes of age [@lawfareblog]

I first became aware of Lawfare through a wonderful March 3 post by Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic, What Happens When We Don’t Believe the President’s Oath? It seems that a lot of people discovered Lawfare about the same time and its readership has blossomed until

Today is the day and this morning is the morning during which @lawfareblog's 2017 traffic will pass that of the site's whole prior history. pic.twitter.com/cq2cAflZd3

— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) July 14, 2017

Obviously it is the Presidency of Donald Trump that made Lawfare's commentary so salient. Trump's bull-in-a-china-shop style begged for informed legal analysis, and Lawfare was there to provide it.

Congratulations Ben Wittes, Robert Chesney, Jack Goldsmith and the rest of the team!

On Discussion and Debate in the Blogosphere: Some reflections on a recent example

Not so long ago I got caught up in a long and somewhat contentious discussion at Crooked Timber. It’s one of my regular sites; I’ve been following it for years. I comment there often enough, but there are others who comment more, and much more, than I do.

This particular post was by John Holbo, and had the (ironic) title, Hazards of Evolutionary Psychology, Royalty Edition (“royalty” plus “edition” is the tip-off). It was a slight post, a quick juxtaposition of two passages from Baboon Metaphysics, an excellent book about the mentality of baboons in the wild. It didn’t seem to call for much discussion, but then it just took off. “Evolutionary psychology,” after all, can be a polarizing subject and so it proved here.

I’m not interested in the pros and cons of the discussion, but simply that it kept teetering on the edge – comment moderation is now in place there, so it never erupted into a full-out flame war. First, then, I discuss the conduct of an online conversation, such as this one, where the discussants don’t know one another, some are posting anonymously, we have widely varying levels of expertise in the topic at hand, and the topic is controversial. Then I present a brief account of a research group I’d been in while in graduate school; that was hands-down the best intellectual venue I’ve ever experienced. The comparison is unfair – how can asynchronous online interaction among all-but strangers compare with week-by-week face-to-face conversation among people who’ve come to know one another’s minds quite well? – but it’s unfair in a useful direction.

The Rules of the Game and a Contentious Discussion

I’d been going back and forth with Z, some good, some bad, whatever. It got to the point where he felt he needed to school me on the etiquette of such things (comment #216):

I am commenting in a blog, Buss [a prominent evolutionary psychologist] is writing a research article. “Not much worse than the typical blog comment” is not the standard we want in a scholarly publication so I am entitled to be maximally intellectually critical of Buss while you have to be maximally charitable in the interpretation of the criticism, those are the rules of the games.

My initial reaction was, on the face of it, sensible enough. Blog commenting is relatively casual; trivial mistakes are common (spelling, punctuation, grammar) and casual formulations and sketchy reasoning is all but a necessity. Unlike preparing a comment for publication in, e.g. Behavioral and Brain Science, one does not expect blog comments, even in the academic blogosphere, to meet peer-review standards (whatever they are).

But, if I may put my Kantian hat on, how does Z’s comment generalize? I’d criticized a comment he’d made about Buss’s article and he’s telling me that I should have been more charitable in my remarks. Perhaps, if I’d done so, I wouldn’t have made those remarks. Who knows, I might even have agreed that, of course, Z, you are correct. So he reminds of the informal rules of the game.

But might I not turn around and suggest that, by the rules of the game, he’s obliged to cut me some slack in my criticism of him? If he’s not obligated to be careful and meticulous in his criticism of Buss, why should I be careful and meticulous in my criticism of him? Is he in effect asserting that he should be exempt from the rules when criticizing me? That hardly seems fair.

Hello, Connected Courses!

My name’s Bill Benzon and I’m an independent scholar. I’ve decided to get back into teaching with a course/workshop on graffiti which I’m tentatively calling The Academy of the Wall.

I’ve been online since before the web and have developed a fairly sophisticated online ecosystem. Oh, the technology is all OTS (off the shelf), nothing fancy. But I’ve been working it for a while and have a feel for how things flow. When there’s a disturbance in the force, I feel it–; everyone does, but not every one is mindful of what they sense.

I’ve been blogging here at New Savanna since April of 2010 and hit my 2500th post on 14 July, when I posted a rough guide to New Savanna. I’ve also made it more directly accessible as a page linked at the top of the blog.

You might be particularly interested in two posts in which I tell about my publishing history:

• Academic Publishing, A Personal History, Part 1: An Outside Move
• Academic Publishing, A Personal History, Part 2: To the Blogosphere and Beyond

The first starts back in the previous millennium with my first academic publications, runs though an experiment in microfiche publication undertaken by the Association for Computational Linguistics, and ends up with a refereed journal started online, PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, where I’ve published a number of papers. The second is about listserves and the blogosphere.

My experience at The Valve was crucial. Though it’s still online, it’s no longer functioning; it’s simply a repository. The Valve was a group blog that centered on literature and literary culture. There were a dozen or so writers with publication privileges at any one time, though the roster changed from time to time. Some of the discussions got quite lively, and some of those fell into hopeless dispute. On the whole it was a floating seminar in literature and culture studies with a wide variety of participants of varying backgrounds.

Here’s a passage about those conversations that’s worth keeping in mind:

...much of the discussion took place between people of very different intellectual backgrounds and experience, with only a few of us being card-carrying academics—and, of course, though I may carry a card, I do so only as an independent scholar not as a member of this or that faculty. That makes for an interesting and often challenging environment, as it’s very difficult to carry the day by pulling rank. In that environment the only rank you have is what people give you. Institutions don’t much matter, unless of course, you grant them status.

I look forward to chatting and learning with you in the next few months.

After Nature: After Speculative Realism: On online philosophy, a...

After Nature: After Speculative Realism: On online philosophy, a...: Bill Benzon at New Savanna blog has a write up HERE on how he perceives the academy to be changing - specifically the academy understood a…

And Leon goes on from there to offer a sometimes thoughtful sometimes formulaic response to my post.

First, Leon reads me rather too strongly. That post was a quicky when originally put up and so was the repost, perhaps rather too much so. One thing he says that I find, shall we say, irritating is "Benzon believes that as the economy changes learning will too." I said that? It's the word "economy" that I find bothersome, not a word I used nor even implied. What I talked of was a "society-wide shift" that's been going on for the past 50 years. I said nothing about the economic sector specifically and for good reason: I don't believe that the economy is in the institutional driver's seat. I'm not sure that any one sector enjoys that status.

But that's not a discussion I want to enter into here.

And while I certainly did point to philosophical events then taking place in the blogosphere concerning Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology, I certainly didn't say that all the action's shifted to the blogosphere. With respect to the blogosphere my point was more modest: interesting things are happening here. I specifically mentioned Graham Harman, not simply because he is a devotee of OOO, but even more so because he's based at American University in Cairo, which is nowhere near the center of the academic world. I was implying the notion that change sometimes/often comes from the periphery: the blogosphere, Cairo. I suppose the American University of Beirut is as peripheral.

Wither Academia: Is a new academy being born?

This is slightly revised from some remarks I made at Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms community.

An observation. A thousand years ago the Christian church was the institutional center of intellectual life in the West. Then a culture-wide shift in ideas and values (& info tech, the printing press) took place, the so-called Renaissance. In the wake of those institutional changes, the church no longer served to ANCHOR intellectual life. That function shifted to largely secular colleges and universities.

Well, we've been undergoing a similar society-wide shift for, say, the past 50 years. In this context, the university system is in the anchor position that the church was in then. What's going to push the university system to the side?

It's a tricky question. Many disciplines, for example, require heavy capital investment in equipment and facilities (scientific and engineering labs, etc.). I don't see other institutions emerging to take over there, at least not across the board. In some fields, computer engineering for example, yes, the industrial investment is large and much cutting edge research takes place there (think of IBM). Maybe in these capital-heavy fields the universities will become custodians of equipment, but the real thinking will take place elsewhere.

And it’s the thinking that matters. Who does it, where are the based, how do they interact?

Right now there’s a revolution taking place in continental philosophy around some ideas flying under the flags of Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. The blogosphere is critical to these people. Some of the primary discussions are taking place on and between blogs which also, of course, reference discussions written up in more traditional forums. One of the central figures in this movement is Graham Harman. He’s located at American University in Cairo, which is not exactly the geographical center of the elite university world.

One of the most vigorous and productive of these bloggers is Timothy Morton, professor of literature and ecology (or environment, I forget which), at UCal Davis. He posts prolifically to his blog, live-blogs conference presentations, and posts streaming video of conferences. Here’s his blog, Ecology without Nature.

No, the old university system, the one in which we got trained, that’s dead. It doesn’t know it yet; it just feels ill. But it’s dead. It’ll take awhile for that to become fully apparent and awhile to make funeral arrangements and construct memorials. But that’s what will happen over the next two or three intellectual generations.

More on Blogging in the Academic Blogosphere: The Birth and Development of Object-Oriented Ontology

Much of the work on OOO (object-oriented ontology) was developed (and critiqued) in the blogosphere. Part of the critique was that you cannot properly do philosophy in the blogosphere. There’s an interesting and important article in this for some webwise graduate student.

The four thinkers most commonly associated with OOO maintain blogs (alphabetically): Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant, Graham Harman, and Tim Morton. Bogost blogs the least of the four, and has posted on the limitations of blogging for philosophy (“less blogging, more working”). Morton has cut way back on long-form posts in the last two years or so, but his early development of hyperobjects took place in the blogosphere. I believe that Harman drafted The Quadruple Object in a seris of blog posts, though I can’t provide citations, and has blogged about the importance of blogging to the movement, again, no specific links ready to hand.

Oppostion, often quite fierce, came from many quarters. But I’ll cite only two. There’s Agent Swarm, the blog of Terrence Blake, an independent scholar trained as a philosopher in Australia but who moved to France to attend seminars by Beleuze and Lyotard. An Und Für Sich is a theology-oriented group blog that hosted two very critical posts by Alexander Galloway; these posts generated fierce multifaced debate and are much referenced in the blogosphere. At various times and places you’ll find posts attempting to keep track of the current state of the debate by providing lots of links to recent posts.

The Value of Blogging and Social Media for Academics

I absolutely believe – see Alan Liu tweets below – that blogging and other social media can be invaluable for academics and, in particular, are central to the long-term revitalization of the interchange between the (humanities) academy and the public at large. (See my post, Alan Liu: Reengaging the Humanities.) For example, literature scholars could conduct reading groups for specific texts where the groups could be drawn from both "civilians" and academics from anywhere and everywhere.

I've been arguing that literary scholars need better descriptions (far more detail) of the texts we deal with. We need these descriptions for all the canonical texts and for a useful sample of the others. (See the crowd sourcing section at the end of my post, Some example descriptions: two poems, a novella, two manga texts, and two films; also, various posts on citizen science.)

Can't We All Get Along?

Eileen Joy has made a plea for more generosity in (academic) conversations: This is Not My (or, Our) Time, so Please Take Ecstasy With Me: The Necessity of Generous Reading. Here's a comment I made:

Hmmm…. Though I forget the thinker's name, there is a classic line of thought in the sociology of knowledge dating from the first half of the 20th Century concerning the conditions under which ad hominem arguments become prominent. As I recall, the notion was that such arguments become prevalent when the overall field of discourse has become uncertain. So, people have differences, but it's not at all clear how one articulates and adjudicates those differences, so you attack someone's motives rather than their positions.

I'm wondering if we're not in a similar state now? Were people making calls for generosity and charity even ten years ago? I entered the blogosphere in the middle of 2005 (though I'd been online for a decade by the time), making comments at The Valve – to posts in the symposium on Theory's Empire. There may have been some talk of charitable readings back then, but there seems to have been an upswing since then.

In fact, I almost wonder if the (academic) blogosphere is partly responsible for creating the conditions under which calls for generosity seem necessary. Discourse can "flow" at a more rapid pace than was possible in the print world and yet it retains that impersonality, which disappears in face-to-face conversation at conferences and seminars.

And then there's this very particular conversation over at Crooked Timber about aggressive argumentation and gender within the discipline of philosophy: Speech-and-Debate vs. The Agon of Authenticity: How Least Badly To Fight, in Philosophy?

Also, this post: To Jeff Turpin: Stop Whacking the Post-Struturalists, They're NOT the Problem.

What’s Popular, and Why 2

The first time I blogged about this topic, back in April of 2011, “Sex, Power, and Purity in Kawajiri's Ninja Scroll” was the most popular post on the blog, with 3,476 page views. It’s still the most popular, only now it has 27,338 hits. “Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed” is now the second most popular, with 11,428; back then it was third at 1419 hits. With 6589 hits “Two Rings in Fantasia: Nutcracker and Apprentice” is third; it was sixth two years ago (for some reason I didn’t record the number of hits).

The most interesting change is that the second-place post from two years ago, “Naked Flicker Sex Erotic Bodies” at 1,464 hits has now dropped to sixth place, with only 4302 hits. What’s Popular, and Why is in fourth place with 4,814 hits. It didn’t even show in the rankings last time, of course, because it WAS the post. Truth be told, the popularity of that post is one reason I decided to revisit the topic.

These are the only two posts in the top ten that ARE NOT about animation (see list below). Four of the eight animation posts are about Disney features; three are about anime; and the last is about a Warner Brothers cartoon. That more or less tracks my interest levels in animation.

Twenty-three (23) of the top thirty-five (35) posts are about animation and other one uses a Road Runner cartoon to make a point about current affairs. Judging from those numbers you’d almost think that this is an animation blog. To be sure, I’ve written a good many posts about animation – I’ve tagged 148 posts with “animation” – but I’ve put-up over 1900 posts.

Hiatus

I'm going to be on break for a few days. On the one hand I'm going out of town to visit my sister. On the other hand, my computer died so I'm limping along on crutches.

Academic Publishing, A Personal History, Part 2: To the Blogosphere and Beyond

Rather than pick up the story of my involvement in academic publishing where I left off in the first post, in 2006 or so after having published several long articles in PsyArt, I want to go back to the 1990s and pick up some email action. That was quite important, both for the conversations, and the people I met through those conversations. It remains an important part of my digital mix, though not so important in the overall flow of things.

Listserves: Memetics and Evolutionary Psych

Judging from the email I’ve got stashed on my computer, I joined a memetics listserve in the middle of 1997. As you may know memetics is the study of memes. I don’t know who coined the term “memetics” but Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” as the cultural analogy to the biological gene. As I was and remain very interested in cultural evolution it was natural that I join that listserve.

An email list is not, of course, a formal means of academic publication nor is it even informal publication comparable to blogging. It’s a conversation, or can be, but not like face-to-face or telephone. On a listserve you typically have many people who receive messages but do not themselves make comments. And that means that, when you do make a comment to the list, you have no idea what most of your audience is thinking—which, of course, is just like ordinary print publication or, for that matter, digital publication as well. But the overall dynamic is one of interaction, so you and your interlocutors are, in effect, putting on a show for an undisclosed population of lurkers. Listserve conversation are also notorious for degenerating into flame wars, but that’s neither here nor there for the purposes of this post. It’s just something that happens.

But you can also have useful conversations. The memetics list gave me a good sense of the state of play in the memetics world, which is a peculiar one. Though the idea was hatched by a card-carrying academic of high order, Richard Dawkins, and has a small following in the academy (e.g. Daniel Dennett among others), it hadn’t gained traction in the academy back then—the late 1990s—and still hasn’t. Perhaps it’s a superb idea that’s just too “out there” for hide-bound academics, or perhaps it’s not such a good idea. Myself, I’m somewhere between those two views.

Pluralism: Terence Blake and Agent Swarm

Just (re-)discovered Terrence blake and his blog, Agent Swarm. Been reading around here and there. There's a nice series of posts on Paul Feyerabend. Try the fifth, Ontological Pluralism vs Constructivism. Here's an interesting one on Harman and Eddington's tables (one of several): PLURALIST ONTOLOGY: Let a Thousand Tables Bloom! A couple others: Multiple Worlds and Post-Identity, Friendship and Multiple Worlds: Kindness and Wariness, and Abundance vs Withdrawal: The real does not withdraw, it abounds.

Abundance is, I believe, very important. My teacher and colleague, the late David Hays, used to say the world was fecund, a kindred notion, I believe.

Network Awesome Features Sita Sings the Blues

On Monday 12 September 2011 Network Awesome will feature Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues.

Network Awesome? Never heard of it.

You’ve never heard of Network Awesome!#? What rock have you been sleeping under?

No rock, sheesh! Don’t get cranky on me. It’s a big world, you know, awesome. I’m busy, already flying on information overload. So chill out.

Well, to be honest, I didn’t know about Network Awesome ‘till about a month ago, when Michael Sporn hipped me to it. Well, not just me, but anyone who read his blog. Newtwork Awesome had programmed some classic Japanese animation, which interested him because he’s an animator—and, incidentally, runs one of the best animation blogs in Greater Blogistan. And it interests me because I’m interested in Japanese animation.

So I virtually hauled my virtual ass over there and took a look. Yep, there they were, old Japanese cartoons. Even better, interesting commentary, such as this piece by Cory Gross about Mitsuyeo Seo’s Divine Sea Warriors, which was Japan’s first feature-length animated film, and also war propaganda.

That’s the formula, interesting material intelligently curated coupled with compelling commentary. Where else can you find that?

Awesome!

See, I told you.

Network Awesome was founded in January of 2011 by Jason Forrest, an electronic musician and entrepreneur, who wants to make the best of an almost forgotten past available to us now and for the future. That is to say, he wants to keep culture alive, a mission that is particularly important as we face the daunting task of creating a new ways of living on this planet, not to mention an outpost on Mars one of these days.

Academic Blogging

Natalia Cecire has a good post on academic blogging over at Arcade. Tne ensuing discussion is excellent.

Here's what I posted to the discussion:

WikiLeaks, a distraction?

Aaron Bady (zunguzungu) on why WikiLeaks is getting so much press:

Which is why I want to say this, as clearly as I can: it’s exactly because Assange and Wikileaks are relatively unimportant (compared to the gigantic scandal of the anti-democratic security state in which we now live) that the media has made him into a superstar, has tried to make the entire story about Wikileaks and a single eccentric and interesting character, rather than about the United States government’s actions as a system. The more we focus on him – and I’ve contributed to that, which is why I particularly want to write this post — the more we take attention away from the real story, the substance of the things Wikileaks has revealed.

It tells you a great deal about how our media works, after all, that so very many of the people pronouncing moralistically on Wikileaks and Assange — either pro- or con- — seem more or less completely unblemished by more than a casual familiarity with the most sketchy and incomplete details of the case or the cabledump. .... Wikileaks has done a great deal to illuminate what our government actually does, but as Glenn Greenwald is absolutely right to point out, by far the most immediately revelatory effect of the Wikileaks dump was not in the cables, but in our government’s reaction to them.

By way of qualification, I note that it is not simply governmental secrecy that's at issue. WikiLeaks has promised leaks from a major bank. Banks, of course, are private enterprises and so do not do business in the name of the citizenry. Major banks are also international in scope. But how do they manipulate opportunities afforded them by nations?

TheAtlantic.com on Aaron Bady.

WikiLeaks: Is the genie out of the bottle forever?

Forbes reports:

Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

It seems that half the material now in WikiLeaks’ possession is about private corporations, not governments.

The question, then, becomes: Is anything secret? Even as private individuals worry about Facebook providing their information to advertisers and about Google tracking their moves, employees of governments and corporations are sending information to WikiLeaks. Perhaps Julian Assange will be arrested somewhere and extradited to Sweden. Perhaps not. If so, will WikiLeaks survive? If not, does that really matter? Will some other organization emerge from the web as a distribution point?

Can the genie be put back in the bottle?

Here’s the conclusion of an essay by Aaron Bady that’s been getting a bit of buzz recently:

According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary.