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I don’t give a crap about consilience!

In the spirit of an old post, I don’t give a crap about science.

In his 1998 book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, E. O. Wilson introduced consilience like this (8-9):

The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship. The propositions of the original Enlightenment are increasingly favored by objective evidence, especially from the natural sciences.

Consilience is the key to unification. I prefer this word over "coherence" because its rarity has preserved its precision, whereas coherence has several possible meanings, only one of which is consilience. William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, was the first to speak of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. He said, “The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs.”

What’s not to like? I’m certainly in favor of “the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines.” I’ve been doing it for my entire career. While I filed my 1978 dissertation, Cognitive Science and Literary Theory, with the English Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo, much of it was technical cognitive science, with references from linguistics, psychology, computer science, primate ethology, and neuroscience along with literary criticism. I continue to utilize that range of disciplines – see, for example, my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil, which was reviewed in both Science and Nature [1], or my article, Literary Morphology [2], which is a major theoretical and methodological statement.  I’ve got a long track record of linking material across disciplines.

But I’ve not done this out of a desire to “unify” the sciences and humanities. I did it because I wanted to understand how things work. Talk of unity and consilience strikes me as a somewhat more high-minded and less useful enterprise. That’s when I get antsy.

This urge to consilience strikes closest to my own concerns in the form a co-called literary Darwinism, the attempt to ground literary criticism in evolutionary psychology. I have no intention of engaging in further criticism of that dubious enterprise – I’ve done more than a bit of that already [3]. However doubtful I am of the criticism done in the name of literary Darwinism, I would like to think that the critics have undertaken it in the desire to understand how literature works – though I can’t help but thinking that what really interests them is human behavior and they’re using literature as a means of understanding it.

To the extent, however, that they are motivated by a desire for consilience, to that extent are they awarding themselves gold stars prior to undertaking the work needed to earn them – the old cart before the horse. THAT’s the problem with consilience. Its high-mindedness distracts you from hard intellectual labor.

References

[1] Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. Basic Books Inc. 2001.
David Juritz. Notes on a cultural theme. Nature 461, 07 March 2002, p. 19.
Josef P. Rauschecker. Where Science Meets the Arts. Science 296 10 May 2002, p. 1032.

[2] Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form. PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, August 2006, Article 060608. http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/l_benzon-literary_morphology_nine_propositions_in

[3] I’ve collected a number of blog posts critical of literary Darwinism into a working paper, On the Poverty of Literary Darwinism. That includes my long essay review, “Signposts for a Naturalist Criticism,” originally published in Entelechy and my review of Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories. You might also look at a relatively recent blog post in which I take Joseph Carroll to task for his incompetent treatment of cognitive science, Tinker Bell and Fairy Dust: Joseph Carroll Doesn’t Know what He Doesn’t Know. Finally, and by way of contrast, read my review of William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (2007), which makes more interesting use of evolutionary psychology than the Darwinists do.

Collective trauma in the USofA

The NYTimes:

Last month’s presidential election has collective trauma written all over it. For working-class white people whose communities had been hollowed out by the decline of manufacturing, the rhetoric and promises of Donald J. Trump’s campaign offered a salve. He vowed to restore the world they had lost.

But those who voted for Hillary Clinton may now be experiencing collective trauma of their own. In the aftermath of the election, they have been walking around in a daze. Some of this is because forecasts based on problematic polling strongly predicted a Democratic win. Some is fear or uncertainty about the future. But there’s more to it than that: For progressives, moderates and “Never Trump” Republicans, the political order they long took for granted — defined by polarization, yes, but also by a commitment to basic principles of democracy and decency — is suddenly gone.

In recent decades, Democrats and Republicans rarely agreed on substance, but all candidates for major office were expected to adhere to fundamental ethical norms, like “don’t threaten to jail your opponent” and “don’t celebrate sexual assault.” Mr. Trump’s victory signals that that world, with the assurances it offered that there were some lines those seeking power wouldn’t cross (or that the American electorate wouldn’t let them cross), is no longer. Rightly or wrongly, memories have been activated of historical traumas linked with anti-democratic politics, such as the emergence of fascism in interwar Europe and the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

Friday Fotos: Hoboken winter, December 2010

Singing promotes cooperation in a diverse group of children.

Singing promotes cooperation in a diverse group of children.

Good, Arla; Russo, Frank A.

Social Psychology, Vol 47(6), 2016, 340-344. http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000282

Abstract

Previous research involving preschool children and adults suggests that moving in synchrony with others can foster cooperation. Song provides a rich oscillatory framework that supports synchronous movement and may thus be considered a powerful agent of positive social relations. In the current study, we assessed this hypothesis in a group of primary-school aged children with diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Children participated in one of three activity conditions: group singing, group art, or competitive games. They were then asked to play a prisoner’s dilemma game as a measure of cooperation. Results showed that children who engaged in group singing were more cooperative than children who engaged in group art or competitive games. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Darwin was an exploratory forager: Topic modeling our way through his notebooks and the books he mentions there

Cognition. 2016 Dec 8;159:117-126. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.11.012. [Epub ahead of print]

Exploration and exploitation of Victorian science in Darwin's reading notebooks.

Murdock J1, Allen C2, DeDeo S3.

Author information

Abstract

Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between reading in depth and studying new domains. To study this decision-making process, we examine the reading choices made by one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern era: Charles Darwin. From the full-text of books listed in his chronologically-organized reading journals, we generate topic models to quantify his local (text-to-text) and global (text-to-past) reading decisions using Kullback-Liebler Divergence, a cognitively-validated, information-theoretic measure of relative surprise. Rather than a pattern of surprise-minimization, corresponding to a pure exploitation strategy, Darwin's behavior shifts from early exploitation to later exploration, seeking unusually high levels of cognitive surprise relative to previous eras. These shifts, detected by an unsupervised Bayesian model, correlate with major intellectual epochs of his career as identified both by qualitative scholarship and Darwin's own self-commentary. Our methods allow us to compare his consumption of texts with their publication order. We find Darwin's consumption more exploratory than the culture's production, suggesting that underneath gradual societal changes are the explorations of individual synthesis and discovery. Our quantitative methods advance the study of cognitive search through a framework for testing interactions between individual and collective behavior and between short- and long-term consumption choices. This novel application of topic modeling to characterize individual reading complements widespread studies of collective scientific behavior.

Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

KEYWORDS: 

Cognitive search; Exploration-exploitation; History of science; Information foraging; Scientific discovery; Topic modeling

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Another hit of the old RGB

At the core of statistical machine translation, and other things (Google)

NYTimes Magazine, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The Great A.I. Awakening:

When you summarize images, you can divine a picture of what each stage of the summary looks like — an edge, a circle, etc. When you summarize language in a similar way, you essentially produce multidimensional maps of the distances, based on common usage, between one word and every single other word in the language. The machine is not “analyzing” the data the way that we might, with linguistic rules that identify some of them as nouns and others as verbs. Instead, it is shifting and twisting and warping the words around in the map. In two dimensions, you cannot make this map useful. You want, for example, “cat” to be in the rough vicinity of “dog,” but you also want “cat” to be near “tail” and near “supercilious” and near “meme,” because you want to try to capture all of the different relationships — both strong and weak — that the word “cat” has to other words. It can be related to all these other words simultaneously only if it is related to each of them in a different dimension. You can’t easily make a 160,000-dimensional map, but it turns out you can represent a language pretty well in a mere thousand or so dimensions — in other words, a universe in which each word is designated by a list of a thousand numbers. Le gave me a good-natured hard time for my continual requests for a mental picture of these maps. “Gideon,” he would say, with the blunt regular demurral of Bartleby, “I do not generally like trying to visualize thousand-dimensional vectors in three-dimensional space.”

Still, certain dimensions in the space, it turned out, did seem to represent legible human categories, like gender or relative size. If you took the thousand numbers that meant “king” and literally just subtracted the thousand numbers that meant “queen,” you got the same numerical result as if you subtracted the numbers for “woman” from the numbers for “man.” And if you took the entire space of the English language and the entire space of French, you could, at least in theory, train a network to learn how to take a sentence in one space and propose an equivalent in the other. You just had to give it millions and millions of English sentences as inputs on one side and their desired French outputs on the other, and over time it would recognize the relevant patterns in words the way that an image classifier recognized the relevant patterns in pixels. You could then give it a sentence in English and ask it to predict the best French analogue.

There's much more to the article, which is well worth reading. But those two paragraphs seem to be the conceptual heart. The rest if a matter of figuring out how to turn that conception into a practical system.

Joseph Henrich on cultural evolution, WEIRD societies, and life among two strange tribes

Just around the corner, HERE.

On collective thinking:

COWEN: Now, another feature of your model, if I understand it correctly, is that you get more rapid or more complex or more interesting cultural evolution when you have a larger number of moving parts: more people, or more wealth, or more complexity. Is it kind of increasing returns to scale to cultural evolution? Is that fair to say?

HENRICH: Yeah. There’s a couple of different ways that that comes out. I think the simplest and clearest one is this idea that I call the collective brain. This is simply the idea because we’re so dependent on learning from each other in order to do innovations and to construct increasingly fancy technologies, larger and more interconnected populations tend to have fancier tools and technologies.

Humans really don’t think as individuals. We don’t innovate as individuals. We innovate as groups. Groups that, for whatever reason, are able to create more social interconnections produce fancier tools and technology, and they’re able to maintain larger bodies of know-how.

There are these great cases in the ethnohistorical record of groups like the Polar Inuit who get cut off from the rest of the Inuit population. Then they begin to lose valuable tools and technology because their own brains remain the same size, but their collective brain became severed. They’re not able to maintain as much know-how in the population.

COWEN: That connection between size and speed of cultural evolution, that’s true at most margins? Say, India evolves culturally more rapidly than Denmark because it’s larger?

HENRICH: There’s lots of pieces to this puzzle. The key is to create interconnectedness. To explain the difference between Denmark and India: of course, Denmark is interconnected with many other populations, but the flow of information is much less constricted.

What happened in the scaling up of human societies in many places is societies get built on complex kinship structures in which you don’t have very much relations between different families and between different tribes. That constrains the flow of social information among these groups.

The trick the West pulled off is to manage to make individuals so that information could freely flow among individuals.

How people move in cities can be investigated by examining geo-tags on photographs

Uncovering Urban Temporal Patterns from Geo-Tagged Photography

Silvia Paldino, Dániel Kondor, Iva Bojic, Stanislav Sobolevsky, Marta C. González, Carlo Ratti
Published: December 9, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0165753

Abstract

We live in a world where digital trails of different forms of human activities compose big urban data, allowing us to detect many aspects of how people experience the city in which they live or come to visit. In this study we propose to enhance urban planning by taking into a consideration individual preferences using information from an unconventional big data source: dataset of geo-tagged photographs that people take in cities which we then use as a measure of urban attractiveness. We discover and compare a temporal behavior of residents and visitors in ten most photographed cities in the world. Looking at the periodicity in urban attractiveness, the results show that the strongest periodic patterns for visitors are usually weekly or monthly. Moreover, by dividing cities into two groups based on which continent they belong to (i.e., North America or Europe), it can be concluded that unlike European cities, behavior of visitors in the US cities in general is similar to the behavior of their residents. Finally, we apply two indices, called “dilatation attractiveness index” and “dilatation index”, to our dataset which tell us the spatial and temporal attractiveness pulsations in the city. The proposed methodology is not only important for urban planning, but also does support various business and public stakeholder decision processes, concentrated for example around the question how to attract more visitors to the city or estimate the impact of special events organized there.

Dueling Birches

Tyler Cowen on Trump the Deal-Maker as President

Writing in Bloomberg View, Cowen explains:

One common feature of many real estate deals is that they are based on selling to different groups of people at different prices, but in sequence. Say a developer has produced a series of office buildings, condominiums and town homes to be sold, or hotel rooms to be rented out. It is common practice to sell (or rent) the more desirable units first at relatively high prices. As units leave the market, new lower-valuation buyers are recruited for cheaper and lower-quality units. Finally, as the process nears its end, there may be a kind of fire sale to clear out the remaining items and finish up the project. If pulled off successfully, this will yield a lot of profit for the developer.

So, Trump has the ability to approve (or veto) tax cuts, and the Republicans really want tax cuts:

So Trump might “sell” this asset to congressional Republicans for a high price, for instance support for infrastructure spending, approval of his appointments and an acceptable compromise on international trade and foreign affairs.

And so on through a variety of "high value" programs where Trump "probably doesn’t have strong, detailed preferences over how exactly to govern." Cowen figures Trump cuts deals like these in the first year or two – "while the Republican majority remains secure" – and then approaches the Democrats to "offer them some lesser deals at lower prices." So:

If Trump, perhaps working with his daughter Ivanka, crafted a reasonable federal child-care or preschool policy, many Democrats would jump on board. They wouldn’t become Trump supporters in return, but they would moderate their criticism, as they would have a victory to take home to their voters.

In short, the second half of the Trump administration might consist of Trump offering a series of smaller but still significant trades to Democrats, taking care to bring along some Republican votes as well.

Cowen then imagines a fourth year in which Trump deals "climate change legislation and a higher federal minimum wage to Democrats and a smattering of swing-district Republicans".

Could it happen? Who knows?

Cloudy Skies

King Trump Assembles His Court

I was struck by a passage in a NYTimes editorial for 12.12.16, “Flawed Choices for the State Department”. It was primarily about the choice of Exxon Mobile CEO for secretary of state (and secondarily about John Bolton as deputy), noting that he “knows scores of world leaders”. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

Steve Coll, author of “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power,” wrote in The New Yorker that in nominating Mr. Tillerson, Mr. Trump would be “handing the State Department to a man who has worked his whole life running a parallel quasi state, for the benefit of shareholders, fashioning relationships with foreign leaders that may or may not conform to the interests of the United States government.” He added that “the goal of Exxon Mobil’s independent foreign policy has been to promote a world that is good for oil and gas production.”

I was particularly struck by the phrases “parallel quasi state” and “Exxon Mobil’s independent foreign policy”, for they reminded me of the concept of virtual feudalism that my friend and colleague Abbe Mowshowitz developed back in the 1990s.

He wrote a book about it, Virtual Organization: Toward a Theory of Societal Transformation Stimulated by Information Technology (PDF); here’s a passage from the publisher’s blurb:

Computers mediate between individuals by providing channels of communication in the form of messaging systems; they act as brokers in matching buyers and sellers, employees and employers, resources and work processes, and so on. The social significance of computers as mediators and brokers has tremendous political and economic consequences. For managers, these consequences manifest themselves most clearly in the virtual organization, which is founded on the separation of requirements, for example, inputs such as components, from the ways in which requirements are met, or satisfiers, for example, suppliers and distribution networks. Separating these elements allows managers to switch easily from one way of meeting a requirement to another. Used systematically, switching brings huge increases in productivity but it also weakens traditional loyalties. Absent a sense of loyalty to persons or places, virtual organizations distance themselves from the regions and countries in which they operate. This process is undermining the nation-state, which cannot continue indefinitely to control virtual organizations. A new feudal system is in the making, in which power and authority are vested in private hands but which is based on globally distributed resources rather than on the possession of land. The evolution of this new political economy will determine how we do business in the future.

The result, Abbe argued, is that the world will evolve to a condition where nation-states are gravely weakened relative to the power of large transnational corporations. The result will be a neo-feudal world ruled by a global oligarchy of business elites and their government cronies at the expense of an immiseration global peasantry, many of whom are desperately trying to cling to illusions of middle class life.

Is President-Elect Donald Trump now in the process of using cabinet appointments as a ruse to assemble the Lords and Ladies to the court of His Royal Highness, King Donald, First Emperor of the World?

While other rich men have been elected President (e.g. Franklin D. Roosevelt) none have had the wealth or worldwide business interests that Trump has. How will he separate his foreign policy from his business interests? As a preface to an enumeration of these business interests, Libby Nelson of Vox notes:

The most positive outcome of these entanglements could be that Trump pursues win-win deals that enrich both the country and himself. But these same relationships could lead him to act and react in ways that distort the economy, tilting it in favor of his own interests, and changing the United States’ foreign policy to benefit him rather than the country. It could also distort the economy, rewarding allies at the expense of other companies, stifling growth.

Even if the worst-case scenario doesn’t come true, Trump has clearly demonstrated he has little interest in meaningfully separating his businesses from his presidency. Because many Trump businesses bear the Trump name, the president-elect will be aware of where his interests are even if he hands the reins of the business to his adult children, as he’s said he will do.

Has he in effect chosen Tillerson as his Baron of Oil and Fossil Fuels? His cabinet is fast filling up with business executives and business-friendly politicians. In addition to Tillerson we’ve got the following executives:

• Andrew F. Puzder, CKE Restaurants, Secretary of Labor
• Linda McMahon, World Wrestling Entertainment, Small Business Administration
• Steven Mnuchin, Goldman Sachs, Treasury Secretary
• Wilbur Ross, WL Ross & Co., Commerce Secretary
• Betsy DeVos, Windquest Group, Secretary of Education

How will these people address one another in meetings of the Cabinet Court? Lord Andrew? Dame Linda? Sir Steven? Your Highness?

Who is going to be Court Jester?

* * * * *

Before Abbe wrote his book he asked me to ghostwrite an article about virtual feudalism. He was unable to find a publisher for it, so I’ve reprinted it at New Savanna. I organize it around capsule accounts of the lives of three people and accompanying commentary, Molly Mckenna: The Corporate Lord and the Impoverished State, Robert Wong: New Loyalties and Citizen Action, and Jarvis Roosevelt: Whither Liberty and Justice for All?

Nature and Culture in Shades of Gray