Dimensions of Knowledge

What is "social contruction"? Well, take the Iowa caucuses

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 16:31:00 +0000

We often struggle to teach our students what "social construction" actually means. (For the record, I am with Woolgar and Latour for taking out "social" and just saying "construction."). Well, here is a Voxsplainer article by Andrew Prokop explaining the outsized importance of the Iowa caucuses that could serve as a great introduction to undergrads on what we STS-types actually mean by social construction. For my money, it makes the a number of points:

"Social construction" doesn't mean that something is not real.
Socially constructed things take other things for granted. These things, while real enough, tend to be also socially constructed and on and on.
Socially constructed things can be really hard to change (see point 2). They require real long-term work to create cultural change, itself a very unpredictable thing.

On the question of trusting experts

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Sat, 11 Apr 2015 22:19:00 +0000

Over the years, journalist Chris Mooney has made a name for himself as a chronicler of what he has called The Republican War on Science: the numerous battles being fought within/across America's political landscape over issues like global warming, pollution and regulation. As time has gone by, Mooney has also started to draw on social psychological and brain imaging research on political bias: how people interpret scientific findings and facts in the light of their ideological convictions, or as Mooney's article for Mother Jones was titled, "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science: How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link." From an STS perspective, these findings, even though couched in the slightly problematic scientistic idiom of social psychology, make perfect sense: they suggest that "data" is always interpreted in the light of previously held beliefs; that facts and values are not easily separable in practice. (Mooney's second book is titled "The Republican Brain" which does sound problematic. But since I haven't read it, I'm not going to comment on it. See this discussion between him and Mother Jones' Kevin Drum: here, here and here.)

In a new article in the Washington Post, Mooney reports on a recent experiment from social psychologist Dan Kahan to argue that you should, yes, trust experts more than ordinary people. Kahan and his collaborators asked the subjects in their pool (judges, lawyers, lawyers-in-training and laypeople, statistically representative of Americans) to interpret whether a given law was applicable to a hypothetical incident; the question was: would they apply the rules of statutory interpretation correctly? So first, they were informed about the law that bans littering in a wildlife preserve. Next they were told that a group of people had left litter behind, in this case, reusable water containers. But there was a catch: some were told that these were left behind by immigration workers helping illegal immigrants cross over the US-Mexico border safely. Others were told that the litter belonged to a construction crew building a border fence. All were polled to understand their political and ideological affiliations. Predictably, depending on their ideological beliefs, people came down on different sides of the issue: Republicans tended to be more forgiving of the construction workers, etc. What was different was that judges and trained lawyers tended, more than laypeople, to avoid this bias. They interpreted the law correctly (the correct answer here was that it didn't constitute littering because the water bottles were reusable) despite their ideological convictions. Well, so far so good. As an anthropologist, I interpret the experiment to be saying that lawyers are subjected to special institutional training, unlike the rest of us, and that this habitus lets them reach the "correct" result far more than us. Experts are different from the rest of us, in some way.

But what's interesting is the conclusion that Mooney draws from this experiment: that while experts are biased, they are less biased than the rest of us, and that therefore, experts should be trusted more often than not. Well. Scientific American's John Horgan has a pragmatic take on this: that this, of course, leaves open the question of which experts to trust, and scientists, like other experts, have been known to be wrong many many many times. To trust experts because they are experts, seems, well, against the spirit of a democratic society. (Another Horgan reponse to Mooney here.)

But I think there's something here about the particular result that Mooney is using to make his point. Something that I can think can help to show that yes, experts matter, but no, that doesn't mean that there's a blanket case for trusting experts more than others. Lawyers and judges do come to different conclusions than the rest of us when it comes to statutory interpretation. But there is one huge elephant in the room: the US Supreme Court, at this very moment we speak, is considering King vs. Burwell, a challenge to the Affordable Care Act that hinges precisely on questions of statutory interpretation. How do you interpret a law that says that the federal government will provide subsidies to insurance exchanges created by "States"? Does "States" mean the states that constitute the United States or does it mean state, in the abstract, whether it's the federal government or the states? How difficult can that be? It seemed very clear in the long battle over the ACA that the subsidies were meant for everyone. But no, the question was contentious enough that that courts disagreed with each other and the Supreme Court took it up. With a good chance that they might rule in a way that destroys the very foundations of the Affordable Care Act.

How might one reconcile the findings of the Kahan study with what's happening with the Supreme Court? The Supreme Court judges are certainly experts, elite, well-trained, and at the top of their respective games. And yet, here they are, right at the center of a storm over what journalist David Leonhardt has called the "federal government's biggest attack on inequality." I think there's a way. Experts are conditioned to think in certain ways, by virtue of their institutional training and practice, and when stakes are fairly low, they do. But once stakes are high enough, things change. What might seem like a fairly regular problem in ordinary times, a mere question of technicality, may not look like one in times of crisis. At this point, regular expert-thinking breaks down and things become a little more contested.

And we do live in a polarized time. As political scientists have shown time and time again, the polity of the United States experienced a realignment after the Civil Rights movement. The two major parties had substantial overlaps before but now they don't. They cater to entirely different constituencies: the Republicans being the party of managers, evangelicals and the white working class, the Democrats being the party of organized labor, affluent professionals and minorities. Political polarization has meant that even institutions which are supposed to be non-political (but really have never been so) start to look more and more political, because there are basic questions of disagreement over things that may have seemed really simple and technical. This explains the spate of decisions from the Supreme Court where the conservatives and liberals on the bench have split neatly along ideological lines.

But does that mean that judges are just politicians in robes? (Which is the thesis that Dan Kahan and others set out to debunk.) Not really. The US Supreme Court actually resolves many many cases with fairly clear majorities; more than a third of them through unanimous decisions. These cases hardly ever make it into the public eye, and they involve, to us at least, what seem like arcane questions of regulation and jurisdiction. Another way to interpret this is to say that these cases are "technical" because they are not in the public eye, no great "stakes" attach to these decisions, unless it's to the parties in question. When stakes are high -- Obamacare, campaign finance funding, abortion, gay marriage -- the Supreme Court, just like the rest of the country, is hopelessly polarized. And a good thing too because fundamental crises in values are best addressed through Politics (with a capital P) rather than leaving them to bodies of experts.

Does this sound at all familiar to you? STS has come a long way since The Structure of Scientific Revolutions but this is not unfamiliar to what Kuhn calls a time of crisis. Scientists and others have (often in self-serving ways) taken up the message of the book to be that science moves in cycles of innovation: a time of normal science, and then a time of revolutionary science (ergo, starting a new paradigm is the best way to do science). But really, the point of the book that's missed is that the crises that Kuhn talks about (that happen through a buildup of anomalies) are organizational crises; at such times, fundamentally taken-for-granted understandings of what is right and wrong break down. New taken-for-granted understandings emerge, but they emerge along-side a different organizational order.

Social psychological experiments on political bias in the "public understanding of science" need to be understood not as grand truths about how people interpret, but as historically contingent findings. Yes, judges will vote more "correctly" than laypeople, but a toy case presented as part of a social psychological study is not the same as an actual case. Real cases have audiences, as do the judges and the lawyers. I remember when the first original challenge to Obamacare was floated, many liberals (including me) found the question of the constitutionality of the individual mandate ridiculous. Of course, the federal government could mandate that everyone needed to purchase health insurance, that's what governments do! (Not to mention that it provided subsidies to those who couldn't afford it, so it was hardly unjust.) But the case just about squeaked through the Supreme Court in our favor and it could have well gone the other way. Burrell vs King is, if anything, an even sillier case, but no one is underestimating it anymore.

It seems like social psychological studies of "bias" might be doing in this day and age what the social studies of scientific expertise did many years ago. Although Mooney seems to misunderstand the point of science studies. These studies weren't meant to show that experts are "biased." They were meant to show that that expert practices and discourse are designed to construct certain questions as "technical." This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does, at certain points, drown out other voices who disagree with the experts' conclusion (again, this is true of all political choices, usually). What is more, once experts are framed as objective and arguing only from facts rather than values, opposing voices, who have no recourse to the language of facts, get delegitimized even further. STS recommendations were not that you need to trust experts more or less, but that questions about competing values needed to be brought to the fore in public debates that involved science and technology (along with technical expertise, of course). And while scientific and legal experts work in different institutional ecologies, all experts work within institutional ecologies, which means their work is shaped by their collective understandings of what is technical and what is not. The solution is not to trust experts more but to find better ways to debate differences in fundamental values, while still using what we can from experts.

New blog-posts around the web: Crowdsourcing and Alan Turing

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 14:39:00 +0000

This blog has been quiet for a while but I had two posts at the CASTAC blog in the past two months.

The first one, titled Crowdsourcing the Expert, points out that computer scientists have now turned their attention to more sophisticated forms of crowdsourcing: not just crowds of uniform homogeneous click-workers, but also crowds of experts. The crowdsourcing platform is now seen as a manager, not just for the unskilled worker, but also for the creative classes? And what about the expertise of computer scientists themselves which is left fairly undefined? Anyway, read the whole thing if it strikes your interest.

The second one is about Alan Turing. I summarize some recent articles on Alan Turing and computer science published by historians Thomas Haigh and Edgar Daylight, where they suggest that some of the recent commemorations of Alan Turing are not quite historically accurate. But fascinating nonetheless because they show us how computer science, as a discipline, was constituted.

Speed-bump, meet Knee Defender

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 15:28:00 +0000

I wrote up a post for the CASTAC blog suggesting that the recent debates about airline seat space (do we have a right to recline? do we have a right to have more knee-space?) might be good fodder for teaching undergraduates about the relationship between technology and politics. Particularly, the device known as the Knee Defender.

I submit that the Knee Defender might be a great test-case for an introductory STS class (right there with the speed-bump) to teach undergraduates about the relationship between technology and politics. Three reasons: there is a big-picture story about the air-line industry that undergraduates might enjoy parsing; there is a concrete material environment–the inside of an aircraft–that the Knee Defender operates in; and finally, debates over this device can be a great introduction to the vexed concept of ideology.

You can read the whole thing here.

Science vs. Politics: A pragmatic argument for why this distinction doesn't work

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 03:40:00 +0000

[X-posted on the HASTS blog.]

Recently, I talked to a doctor and public health professional about the relationship between science and policy; he told me, in a vivid metaphor, of how things work, and should work, in the regulatory process. The science produces the facts, which then get funneled through our values through the process of politics. What comes out of this machine, he said, are policies.

It was quite a beguiling vision, but as an STS person, I couldn't help asking: did he really believe in it? Yes, he said. I pressed on. How, I asked, would he explain the controversy over global warming? Why was it difficult to implement policy when the scientists had a decent agreement over the facts? His answer was that it was Fox News, fed by the big bad industry, which had fooled certain people into not believing the scientists. I asked if it might not be more useful to wonder whether this disagreement over what to do about climate change (or about whether anthropogenic climate change even exists) might be an indication of something deeper: perhaps a reflection on the particular ways in which American society is now polarized rather than about Fox News brainwashing susceptible viewers. He didn't think so, he said. (He objected strenuously to my use of the word "brainwashing"; I took it back, but I maintain that it was an accurate descriptor of what he was saying.) I asked at the end what he thought should be done about all of this. He said it was a long-term project; but it began with education; scientific literacy had to begin at a very early age. Only then would people stop listening to Fox News. At that point, I gave up.

I admit that there is something really alluring about this picture of a science that produces facts which are then funneled through our values by the process of politics, all of which combines to produce rational public policy. Even if we admit that this isn't really how it works in practice, perhaps this is how it should work.

But even holding on to this vision as a normative ideal may not be in our best interests. As Sheila Jasanoff and Bryan Wynne have shown, this is because the process of science is shot through and through with values. Wynne suggests that scientific models to measure risk (e.g. risk analysis, cost-benefit calculations) often contain hidden assumptions and prescriptions: about what it means to be social and human, and what an ideal social order should be. These visions of the human and the social are often found wanting by different publics. E.g., the language of risk analysis comes coded with what a risk is or is not, and what things humans should worry about, points about which different publics disagreed but a) did not have the tools to express their disagreement, and b) were not taken seriously by experts and understood as only lacking an understanding of the science. One of Jasanoff's suggestions is that rather than trying to cure science of its values, or create a politics that is based on "facts," we accept the value-riddenness of science and use that to think about how expert advice fits into the political process. (Needless to say, I agree.)

All of which brings me the real reason why I'm writing this: this Scientific American blog-post which the worst combination, in my mind, of two overlapping tendencies: the plague-on-both-houses bipartisan strategy of journalism (something that journalist James Fallows calls "false equivalence"), and the dichotomous conception of "science" and "politics" as two mutually opposing entities.

The post details the ways in which the EPA's efforts to establish a new regulatory standard for drinking water, with an even smaller permitted amount of arsenic in it, were stymied by a Republican Congress. The contours of the story itself will not surprise anyone. Surveying some of the research that had been conducted, the EPA was on the verge of making official its stance that arsenic was a more dangerous carcinogen than it had originally thought. This would be a prelude to a tougher drinking water standard. Naturally, this meant that corporations that produced arsenic or used arsenic in their products lobbied hard to make sure this didn't happen. In these polarized days of American politics, it made sense to turn to the Republican party. And the Republicans delivered by delaying the process. Essentially, they got the the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) do an independent review. Read the whole piece; it's detailed and precise to the point where it can exhaust the reader.

And here my problems begin. Take the headline:

Politics Derail Science on Arsenic, Endangering Public Health

Why "Politics" and "Science"? Why not say "Republicans Derail Science on Arsenic"? Or even better and my personal preference: "Republicans derail EPA on Arsenic"?

Then take the leading line after the headline:

A ban on arsenic-containing pesticides was lifted after a lawmaker disrupted a scientific assessment by the EPA.

Again, why this coyness about the identity of this "lawmaker"? Why not mention upfront that that this is a Republican congressman? Why does it take until well into half-way into the article to identify the offending Congressman: Mike Simpson of Idaho?

Why, for example, is this sentence worded in this particular way when we know we're talking about the Bush White House?

The White House at that point had become a nemesis of EPA scientists, requiring them to clear their science through OMB starting in 2004.

The piece, for all its commendable whistle-blower reporting, contains the worst tendencies of what journalist James Fallows has called "false equivalence" in journalism, which is the plague-on-both-houses stance (see Fallows' copious collection of examples). Essentially, newspaper reporting has a tendency to blame both political parties, or politics in the abstract, when things reach a bad state. Here the newspaper is seen as above politics, which is what grubby politicians do. And therefore the contrast between the policy that the newspaper is advocating (which is not politics but merely good moral sensible stuff), and that what the politicians are doing, which is bad, i.e. politics. E.g., the tendency to see the US Congress itself as dysfunctional, rather than the threats of the Republican Congressmen to filibuster pretty much any legislation.

The same forces are at work in the Scientific American piece. Notice that the piece is not explicitly portrayed as a Republicans vs. the EPA piece but rather as a Politics vs. Science piece. If I had to caricature it, the main point is: science good, politics bad. The problem is that this often serves to paint politics itself as grubby and well, dishonest.

This also leads to a manifest lack of curiosity about certain topics. You might wonder why the makers of the arsenic-containing herbicide choose to work through the Republican Party and not the Democratic Party. There's no way you could answer this question without looking at the broader trends in American politics over the last 50 years. The two parties now occupy non-overlapping spaces on the political spectrum: the Democrats are a hodge-podge of interest groups: minorities, relatively affluent social liberals, unions, etc; the Republicans, on the other hand, have only two constituencies: evangelicals and big business. Perhaps, 50 years ago, a business that wanted to fight a piece of regulation, would have had to think harder before deciding which political channel to use; today, it doesn't take more than a minute to decide what to do.

I understand that this is perhaps unfair criticism. The piece is long enough, and talking about the realignment of American politics will only make it longer. But that's exactly the point: if you black-box both science and politics, and paint the regulatory battle in question as a contest between them, then you don't need to think deeply about either. Framing the article as the Republicans' battle against the EPA would have required the writers to ask the question of why these two actors are arrayed against each other. Editorial choices matter.

But the worst thing about the article is what's NOT even in it. What, one would wonder, is a citizen to do after reading it? The article doesn't say but I have an answer: call or write to your Congressman (especially the Republican ones but it doesn't really matter). Tell him or her that you think the gutting of the EPA's power is something you don't agree with. That you believe in a robust regulatory structure with teeth. That perhaps you believe in a more take-precautions-first European style of regulation rather than a do-it-first-deal-with-consequences-later American style of regulation. Why couldn't the SciAm article include a link for us to call or email our Congressmen? Because that would have been too political, that's why. And why should we bother with grubby politics when the science is in our favor?

One of the recent revelations for me has been how easy the Web can make it for us to call or email our legislators to inform them about our opinions on particular issues. The techies did it really effectively with their "blackout" in protest of SOPA and PIPA. Recently, in protest against the FCC's proposal to gut net neutrality, we were able to flood the FCC's comment-solicitation notice board with some good arguments for net neutrality. At heart, this is just good old-fashioned politics, trying to convince our fellow-citizens about the rightness and wrongness of certain causes, sometimes celebrating victory, at other times, accepting defeat and vowing to fight another day [1].

Now I understand that explicitly political action might not be feasible for certain organizations responsible for the article, a collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, both of which may have explicit prohibitions (because of their funding model, for e.g.) against participating explicitly in politics. But that's part of what's got to change because that's the most important shortcoming of the science-vs.-politics narrative. It precludes avenues of action for citizens. What do you do? Trust science, which is what the SciAm investigative piece seems to suggest? Despair that your representatives are morally and politically corrupt [2]? Or do the hard work of politics and convince your fellow-citizens that they're better off having a robust EPA? I vote for the latter.

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Notes
[1] Certainly, citizens are starting to participate in science-politics in other ways, most importantly, through the practices of citizen science. Citizen science is perhaps the most interesting way of making science "impure." But making phone-calls to your legislators, voting, giving money to causes you deem fit, are also equally good ways of participating in the political process.

[2] And that, perhaps, explains why the show of our times is Netflix's House of Cards. More on that another time.

Recent blog-posts around the Web

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Sun, 13 Jul 2014 19:56:00 +0000

In the past few months, I've been blogging at multiple places and as a result, have completely neglected this blog. In the future, when I post somewhere else, I will cross-post it here, or at least, post a link. In the meantime, though, here are some of the posts I wrote recently:

For the CASTAC blog, a post on the history of artificial intelligence and the new field of machine learning.

Also, for the CASTAC blog, a revised post on the phenomenon called "data science" where I speculate that the proliferation of claims about "big data" is more about a crisis in professional identities (who has the expertise to work on particular problems: those with domain knowledge or those with data manipulation skills?) rather than an epistemological crisis (can we analyze phenomena without pre-existing theory?).

Finally, a post on the HASTS blog about how one might use the game of tennis as a way of understanding what the history of technology is all about.

I've also started posting interesting articles I see to my Tumblr.

Big Data, Boundary Work and Computer Science

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 14:00:00 +0000

A Google Data Center. Image taken from here.

The Annual Meeting of the Society of the Social Studies of Science this year (i.e. 4S 2013) was full of "big data" panels (Tom Boellstorff has convinced me to not capitalize the term). Many of these talks were critiques; the authors saw big data as a new form of positivism, and the rhetoric of big data as a sort of false consciousness that was sweeping the sciences*.

But what do scientists think of big data?

In a blog-post titled "The Big Data Brain Drain: Why Science is in Trouble," physicist Jake VanderPlas (his CV lists his interests as "Astronomy" and "Machine Learning") makes the argument that the real reason big data is dangerous because it moves scientists from the academy to corporations.

But where scientific research is concerned, this recently accelerated shift to data-centric science has a dark side, which boils down to this: the skills required to be a successful scientific researcher are increasingly indistinguishable from the skills required to be successful in industry. While academia, with typical inertia, gradually shifts to accommodate this, the rest of the world has already begun to embrace and reward these skills to a much greater degree. The unfortunate result is that some of the most promising upcoming researchers are finding no place for themselves in the academic community, while the for-profit world of industry stands by with deep pockets and open arms. [all emphasis in the original]

His argument proceeds in three steps: first, he argues that yes, new data is indeed being produced, and in stupendously large quantities. Second, processing this data (whether it's in biology or physics) requires a certain kind of scientist who is both skilled in statistics and software. Third, because of this, "scientific software" which can be used to clean, process, and visualize data becomes a key part of the research process. And finally, this scientific software needs to be built and maintained, and because the academy evaluates its scientists not for the software they build but for the papers they publish, all of these talented scientists are now moving to doing corporate research jobs (where they are appreciated not just for their results but also for their software). That, the author argues, is not good for science.

Clearly, to those familiar with the history of 20th century science, this argument has the ring of deja vu. In The Scientific Life, for example, Steven Shapin argued that the fear that corporate research labs would cause a tear in the prevailing (Mertonian) norms of science, by attracting the best scientists away from the academy, was a big part of the scientific (and social scientific) landscape of the middle of the 20th century. And these fears were largely unfounded (partly, because they were largely based on a picture of science that never existed, and partly because, as Shapin finds, scientific virtue remained nearly intact in its move from the academy to the corporate research lab.) [And indeed, Lee Vinsel makes a similar point in his comment on a Scientific American blog-post that links to VanderPlas' post.]

But there's more here, I think, for STS to think about. First, notice the description of the new scientist in the world of big data:

In short, the new breed of scientist must be a broadly-trained expert in statistics, in computing, in algorithm-building, in software design, and (perhaps as an afterthought) in domain knowledge as well. [emphasis in the original].

This is an interesting description on so many levels. But the reason it's most interesting to me is that it fits exactly with the description of what a computer scientist does. I admit this is a bit of a speculation, so feel free to disagree. But in the last few years, computer scientists have increasingly turned their attention to a variety of domains: for example, biology, romance, learning. And in each of these cases, their work looks exactly like the work that VanderPlas' "new breed of scientist" does. [Exactly? Probably not. But you get the idea.] Some of the computer scientists I observe who design software to help students learn work exactly in this way: they need some domain knowledge, but mostly they need the ability to code, and they need to know statistics both, in order to create, machine learning algorithms, as well as to validate their argument to other practitioners.

In other words, what VanderPlas is saying that practitioners of the sciences are starting to look more and more like computer scientists. His own CV, which I alluded to above, is a case in point: he lists his interests as both astronomy and machine learning. [Again, my point is not so much to argue that he is right or wrong, but that his blog-post is an indication of changes that are afoot.]

His solution to solving the "brain drain" is even more interesting, from an STS perspective. He suggests that the institutional structure of science should recognize and reward software-building so that the most talented people stay in academia and do not migrate to industry. In other words, become even more like computer science institutionally so that the best people stay in academia. Interesting, no?

Computer science is an interesting field. The digital computer's development went hand-in-hand with the development of cybernetics and “systems theory”—theories that saw themselves as generalizable to any kind of human activity. Not surprisingly, the emerging discipline of computer science made it clear that it was not about computers per se; rather, computers were the tools that it would use to understand computation—which potentially applied to any kind of intelligent human activity that could be described as symbol processing e.g. see Artificial Intelligence pioneers Newell and Simon’s Turing award speech. This has meant that computer science has had a wayward existence: it has typically flowed where the wind (meaning funding!) took it. In that sense, its path has been the polar opposite to that of mathematics, whose practitioners, as Alma's dissertation shows, have consciously policed the boundaries of mathematics. (Proving theorems was seen to be the essence of math; anything else was moved to adjoining disciplines.)

X-posted on Tumblr and the HASTS blog.

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*The only exception to this that I found was Stuart Geiger's talk which was titled "Hadoop as Grounded Theory: Is an STS Approach to Big Data Possible?," the abstract of which is worth citing in full:

In this paper, I challenge the monolithic critical narratives which have emerged in response to “big data,” particularly from STS scholars. I argue that in critiquing “big data” as if it was a stable entity capable of being discussed in the abstract, we are at risk of reifying the very phenomenon we seek to interrogate. There are instead many approaches to the study of large data sets, some quite deserving of critique, but others which deserve a different response from STS. Based on participant-observation with one data science team and case studies of other data science projects, I relate the many ways in which data science is practiced on the ground. There are a diverse array of approaches to the study of large data sets, some of which are implicitly based on the same kinds of iterative, inductive, non-positivist, relational, and theory building (versus theory testing) principles that guide ethnography, grounded theory, and other methodologies used in STS. Furthermore, I argue that many of the software packages most closely associated with the big data movement, like Hadoop, are built in a way that affords many “qualitative” ontological practices. These emergent practices in the fields around data science lead us towards a much different vision of “big data” than what has been imagined by proponents and critics alike. I conclude by introducing an STS manifesto to the study of large data sets, based on cases of successful collaborations between groups who are often improperly referred to as quantitative and qualitative researchers.

The Breaking Bad finale was ...

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 03:18:00 +0000

...unseemly.

Frankly, that's the only word that I can think of. [****SPOILERS FOLLOW****]. The show ended with what can only be called a bang for Walt. He found a way to give his family his money without them knowing, found a way to see them, he killed the evil Nazis, he set Jesse free and then, well, and then he died. Or something. The whole thing was a wish-fulfillment fantasy from start to finish.

Why do I care? Not so much because I think that characters that are bad need to be punished. But because there is a coherence and an atmosphere to any show or a movie and this finale violated every one of them.

Take Elliott and Gretchen for instance. Breaking Bad has been very coy about what exactly transpired between Walt and the Schwartzes or why he and Gretchen broke up. But the show took the characters seriously. It made it seem as if the story behind Grey Matter Inc. had substance. Walt and Skyler's visit to Elliott's birthday party had a pathos to it, and Walt's last confrontation with Gretchen had bite.

None of that mattered yesterday. The Schwartzes were completely transformed--they were cartoons; rich and pampered people who had robbed Walt of what was rightfully his. I laughed when Gretchen screamed as Walt did his "Boo" thing to them. But it only subtracted from what the show has spent the last 6 seasons doing: carefully, assiduously, building even its peripheral characters.

And my beef isn't that the episode was wildly unrealistic and implausible. (Walt not only gets out of New Hampshire, but manages to drive all the way to New Mexico, threaten Elliott and Gretchen, talk to Skyler (slipping through a police dragnet) and then kill all the villains.) No. For all its virtues, Breaking Bad has never been what one might call a "realistic" show. In a sense, the Season 5 finale was similar to the Season 4 finale where Walt, improbably, vanquishes Gus Fring, the drug king ("I won," he declares at the end of that season). I should confess that I enjoyed that ending (and I wish that the show that ended without a fifth season). But the show's tone was different then. It was unquestionably a thriller, even as its characters suffered and made ambiguous choices. In the second half of Season 5, it had tipped from being a thriller into full-fledged tragedy. Jesse and Walt were irrevocably estranged, as were Walt and Hank Schraeder, Hank is killed and Jesse had probably been subjected to every humiliating situation one could think of (meth slavery seemed like a fitting climax). In the face of such tragedy (Hank dies in "Ozymandias," and Jesse's ex-girlfriend Andrea is brutally executed in "Granite State"), the last episode's almost upbeat tone came as a bit of a shock. This is how thrillers end, and not tragedies, and at this point, I don't think Breaking Bad was a thriller. I confess I have no idea how the show should have ended -- but this particular ending was, just, unseemly.

N+1 is wrong about sociology

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Sat, 22 Jun 2013 14:38:00 +0000

The hoity-toity magazine N+1 has a long, rambling editorial about sociology [1]. The editorial is long -- far too long -- and I'm inclined to think that it is facetious and tongue-in-cheek. Still, I think it contains within it an important misconception about what sociology is and does.

The argument, if I have it right, goes something like this: sociology, the Editors think, has gone too far in taking a calculative, demystifying stance on human affairs. And as sociology never stays within the academy but leaks out, this has made the public (or at least the public that the N+1 editors have dinner parties with) far too calculative as well.

Naturally, the Editors aren't really worried about other things that sociology has demystified, say, religion or technology. They are mostly concerned about art and the novel. They worry that far too many works of art are discussed in terms of the gain and loss of cultural capital by the artist. People interpret various moves that artists make as merely strategies or positioning. We are not earnest anymore, not passionate; we are merely cold and calculating analysts, never more so than with respect to art. Sociology's analysis of art -- the works of Bourdieu or Becker, say, and many others -- often makes it seem as if "art mostly expresses class and status hierarchies, and only secondarily might have snippets of aesthetic value." The Editors are worried about aesthetics. "There is still," they suggest, "a space where the aesthetic may be encountered immediately and give pleasure and joy uninhibited by surrounding frameworks and networks of rules and class habits."

I get the argument, as far as it goes [2]. And let's also grant that in certain circles frequented by the Editors, this does happen. There's far too much sociologizing, far too much analyzing of the moves that people make as an expression of their effort to conserve their cultural position, and far too little discussion of aesthetics. How new is this? And how much should we blame cultural sociology for this, especially the post-structuralist variety?

Let's take one example that the editorial cites, the case of Jeff Bezos:

We’ve reached the point at which the CEO of Amazon, a giant corporation, in his attempt to integrate bookselling and book production, has perfectly adapted the language of a critique of the cultural sphere that views any claim to “expertise” as a mere mask of prejudice, class, and cultural privilege. Writing in praise of his self-publishing initiative, Jeff Bezos notes that “even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. . . . Authors that might have been rejected by establishment publishing channels now get their chance in the marketplace. Take a look at the Kindle bestseller list and compare it to the New York Times bestseller list — which is more diverse?” Bezos isn’t talking about Samuel Delany; he’s adopting the sociological analysis of cultural capital and appeals to diversity to validate the commercial success of books like Fifty Shades of Grey, a badly written fantasy of a young woman liberated from her modern freedom through erotic domination by a rich, powerful male. Publishers have responded by reducing the number of their own “well-meaning gatekeepers,” actual editors actually editing books, since quality or standards are deemed less important than a work’s potential appeal to various communities of readers. [my emphasis.]

The Editors seem to imply that Bezos read Bourdieu and then came up with his strategy of how to attack those who opposed Amazon's self-publishing initiatives on aesthetic grounds (exhibit one: the N+1 Editors themselves) i.e. characterize them as gatekeepers trying to protect their fiefdom.

How true is this? My guess is not at all. Bezos may well have read Bourdieu but there is nothing new whatsoever about his strategy; it's hundreds of years old and definitely older than when the word "cultural capital" was invented. Take a look, for example, at Andrew Abbott's brilliant sociological history of the professions. When different groups warred over a task (doctors and nurses over medical care, accountants and lawyers over certain kinds of corporate money management, psychiatrists and psychologists over how mental problems should be treated), they have always resorted to some version of this language of gate-keeping to characterize the other side. As Wendy Espeland says: "our tendency [is] to see others as having interests where we have commitments." Sociologists have often taken this as their fundamental problem asking: how does this come to be? What does this say about the production of the social order? And so on.

In other words, sociologists did NOT invent demystification in the academy from where it supposedly diffused across society so that now even Jeff Bezos adopts the language of cultural capital, interests and gate-keeping. It was already there, has always been there, and usually comes to the fore when controversies arise [3].

Take the passing of the Affordable Care Act, for instance. Throughout the debate, Republicans alleged that the ACA was a thinly veiled attempt at the redistribution of income, and an effort to take control (of medical decisions) away from families and into the hands of the federal government. They portrayed themselves as standing for seniors, and Obama as a socialist. Democrats, for their part, suggested that Republicans did not care about the uninsured, and only cared about protecting the interests of the insurance companies. Insurance companies, often working behind the scenes, were demonized by everyone but doctors were usually not. Seniors were quite sure that the ACA was an effort to take away the health-care that they rightfully deserved. Throughout the debate, you saw actors imputing tawdry "interests" to their opponents and portraying themselves as being committed to certain values. You might say that they had all gone and read Bourdieu. Or you might say that this is how social controversies are fought and settled.

Or, take MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses, for those who haven't heard of them), for instance. MOOCs have been the topic of great dispute in the public sphere. And in the debate, you see the same confluence of imputed interests and personal commitments. The much-famous open letter that the philosophy faculty at San Jose State University wrote to Michael Sandel suggested that MOOCs might be part of a neoliberal transformation of the university and an ongoing commodification of education (classes produced at a factory at Harvard, then distributed to community colleges and state universities, which then only need to hire TAs, and so on), and not so much about improving access for students. On the other hand, MOOC inventor Sebastian Thrun emphasizes the kind of easy acccess that made his Artificial Intelligence course at Stanford so famous:

Yet there is one project he's happy to talk about. Frustrated that his (and fellow Googler Peter Norvig's) Stanford artificial intelligence class only reached 200 students, they put up a website offering an online version. They got few takers. Then he mentioned the online course at a conference with 80 attendees and 80 people signed up. On a Friday, he sent an offer to the mailing list of a top AI association. On Saturday morning he had 3,000 sign-ups—by Monday morning, 14,000.

In the midst of this, there was a slight hitch, Mr. Thrun says. "I had forgotten to tell Stanford about it. There was my authority problem. Stanford said 'If you give the same exams and the same certificate of completion [as Stanford does], then you are really messing with what certificates really are. People are going to go out with the certificates and ask for admission [at the university] and how do we even know who they really are?' And I said: I. Don't. Care."

Aaron Bady, a graduate student at Berkeley and one of the hottest voices in the blogosphere says: "not so fast!" Bady plays up Thrun's tenure at Google, suggests that Thrun is interested not so much in improving access as much as increasing Google's bottom line:

The MOOC that debuted in IHE in December 2011 was Sebastian Thrun’s “Artificial Intelligence” MOOC, a course that was offered at Stanford but opened up to anyone with a broadband. The way this story is usually told is that his incredible success—160,000 students, from 190 countries—encouraged Thrun to leave Stanford to try the new mode of pedagogy that he had stumbled upon. He had seen a TED talk given by Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, and when he decided to give it a whirl and it was a huge success, the rest is history. In January, 2012, he would found the startup Udacity.

However, another way to tell the story would be that Thrun was a Google executive—who was already well known for his work on Google’s driverless car project—and that he had already resigned his tenure at Stanford in April 2011, before he even offered that Artifical Intelligence class. Ending his affiliation with Stanford could be described as completing his transition to Silicon Valley proper. In fact, despite IHE’s singular “a Stanford University professor,” Thrun co-taught the famous course with Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig.

It’s important to tell the story this way, too, because the first story makes us imagine a groundswell of market forces and unmet need, a world of students begging to be taught by a Stanford professor and Google, and the technological marvels that suddenly make it possible. But it’s not education that’s driving this shifting conversation; as the MOOC became something very different in migrating to Silicon Valley, it’s in stories told by the New York Times, the WSJ, and TIME magazine that the MOOC comes to seem like an immanent revolution, whose pace is set by necessity and inevitability.

You might say that this actually proves the Editors' point because Bady is a graduate student and has definitely read his Bourdieu. I would suggest that that would be missing the big picture. The point is: this kind of debate, with imputations of nefarious interests and declarations of personal commitment, are routine, especially in the midst of social controversies. Blaming cultural sociology for this is giving academics too much credit [4].

In fact, sociologists (and historians, and anthropologists, and literary studies scholars, and most scholars of the humanities) have always grappled with a strange paradox. Sociologist study "society"--an object that is itself a can of worms. Society is more than the sum of the people who constitute it. Yet, when one starts investigating the social world, one discovers that most people are themselves lay-sociologists. Or to put it in a different way, sociologists themselves are trying to come up with a more systematic version of what people do routinely in their life. They analyze their own social world, their "society" and strategize. Parents spend a great deal of time managing their children's spare time because they know this will serve the child well later on in life. Teenagers routinely think about what they want to do for a living; they know that going to a good college is a big part of achieving it. People spend a great deal of time picking spouses and friends. They may not always succeed in getting what they want, but they think about it nevertheless.

Academic sociology then is built on the foundation of everyday reasoning [this, in fact, is the central insight of Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology]. All sociological concepts--power, prestige, cultural capital, class, race, gender--are based on everyday versions of these categories. And in fact, one of the divides in sociology--between qualitative and quantitative sociologists--is based precisely on different understandings of this relationship between this scholarly and lay sociology. At the risk of over-simplifying, most quantitative sociologists will acknowledge this relationship but suggest that a reliance on large numbers, aggregates and the methods of statistics can be a useful way of differentiating specialist sociology from its lay variant. And qualitative sociologists believe that because actors are always theorizing about their own circumstances, this understanding needs to be part of any theory about society.

Let me end on a tongue-in-cheek note (which will probably drive the Editors up a wall). A while ago, A. O. Scott wrote on an essay on a number of smart young men and women who had all teamed up to start two little magazines.

"You'd better mean something enough to live by it," Kunkel told me, echoing both his fictional creation and, as it happens, one of his comrades in another literary enterprise. On the last page of the first issue of n+1, a little magazine that made its debut last year, the reader learns that "it is time to say what you mean." The author of that declaration, a forceful variation on some of Dwight Wilmerding's more tentative complaints, is Keith Gessen, who edits n+1 along with Kunkel, Mark Greif and Marco Roth. All four editors are around Dwight's age - he's 28 when the main action in the book takes place; they're 30 or a little older. Like him, they often glance anxiously and a bit nostalgically backward to a pre-9/11, pre-Florida-recount moment that seems freer and more irresponsible than the present. You wouldn't, however, call any of them any kind of idiot. Nor, based on their pointed, closely argued and often brilliantly original critiques of contemporary life and letters, would you accuse them of indecision, though they do sometimes display a certain pained 21st-century ambivalence about the culture they inhabit.

N+1 is not the first small magazine to come out of this ambivalence or the first to have its mission encapsulated by a memoiristic account of the attempt to figure out one's life. Consider the following scrap of dialogue from Dave Eggers's "Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," famously hailed as the manifesto of a slightly earlier generational moment:

"And how will you do this?" she wants to know. "A political party? A march? A revolution? A coup?"

"A magazine."

Eggers is talking about an old (in fact, a defunct) magazine called Might, but never mind. Even with a bit of historical distance - five years after the book's publication, a decade and more after the events it describes - these lines capture both a moment and the general spirit of the magazine-starting enterprise. A bunch of ambitious, like-minded young friends get together to assemble pictures and words into a sensibility - a voice, a look, an attitude - that they hope will resonate beyond their immediate circle.

And yet, look at how these nice young men met:

The four editors of n+1 are also connected by shared sensibilities and school ties. Kunkel, who grew up in Colorado, went from Deep Springs College, a tiny, all-male school in the California desert devoted to the classical ideal of rigorous study in a pastoral setting, to Harvard, where he met Greif, though not Gessen, who was also there at the time. (Actually, they later discovered that they did have one brief encounter as undergraduates, about which Kunkel would say only that at least one of them was drunk and that one suggested the other should get a lobotomy.) Gessen, who lived in the Soviet Union until he was 6, was a football player at Harvard and went on to get an M.F.A. in fiction from Syracuse. Greif entered the Ph.D. program in American studies at Yale, where he met Roth, who had arrived via Oberlin and Columbia to pursue his doctorate in comparative literature. After talking about it for years - another friend from Harvard, Chad Harbach, who edits the n+1 Web site, thought of the name back in 1998 - they decided the moment was right to put their ideas and aspirations into print.

Harvard and Yale. Hmmm. I'm dying to use the term "cultural privilege" but I won't.

I don't mean to doubt the Editors' sincerity or commitment to producing a certain kind of literature. But the fact remains that in order to fulfill any high-minded goals, you need to descend to the ground, to use existing resources. The Editors all meant through social networks that were spawned by attending elite universities. They decided to start a magazine--not a blog, and not an only-online publication. They made -- or were constrained to make -- certain kinds of choices to reach their goals. And finally, they were the object of a piece in --of all places! -- the New York Times Magazine that vastly improved their magazine's visibility (I, certainly, had not heard of N+1 until I read Scott's piece). In Scott's article, the Editors go out of their way to assert what makes their magazine different, their commitment to a certain style of writing, of seeing the world. Other magazines, they suggest, are moribund, caught up in a rut; N+1 is fresh and young.

To me, what the Editors are doing in that piece is a version of the "impute interests to others, values to self" rhetoric that they then criticize in an editorial published many years later and blame on academic cultural sociology. Which only goes to show that the phenomenon itself has been around a long long time.

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Endnotes:

[1] And of course, written in its characteristic style with the imperial "we," that, to me at least, often feels like a reference to the small segment of the cultural elite they feel an ineffable bond with.

[2] I am not sure who these people are who analyze art at dinner parties using cultural sociology. In the circles I hang out with, art is still discussed with reference to aesthetics. And nothing that I read in high culture magazines like the New York Review of Books or the New Republic convinces me that we now discuss art in terms of art-makers managing cultural capital rather than its deep aesthetic value.

[3] "Always" may be an overstatement. But certainly one sees examples of this from the early modern period.

[4] That said, it's always flattering when someone credits the humanities with that much influence.

Postcolonial Theory and Its Discontents

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Tue, 28 May 2013 15:24:00 +0000

Ian Hacking, in one his articles, praises the uniquely French form of the interview as a great way to understand the author's thoughts. He's talking about Foucault--and indeed, some of Foucault's interviews are far easier to understand than his books. In that same spirit--i.e. it lays out the lay of the land on which these debates are staged--I liked this interview with Vivek Chibber in Jacobin on his new book "Post Colonial Theory and the Specter of Capital," which criticizes post-colonial theory and urges a return to good old-fashioned Marxism.

The argument goes like this: the universalizing categories associated with Enlightenment thought are only as legitimate as the universalizing tendency of capital. And postcolonial theorists deny that capital has in fact universalized — or more importantly, that it ever could universalize around the globe. Since capitalism has not and cannot universalize, the categories that people like Marx developed for understanding capitalism also cannot be universalized.
What this means for postcolonial theory is that the parts of the globe where the universalization of capital has failed need to generate their own local categories. And more importantly, it means that theories like Marxism, which try to utilize the categories of political economy, are not only wrong, but they’re Eurocentric, and not only Eurocentric, but they’re part of the colonial and imperial drive of the West. And so they’re implicated in imperialism. Again, this is a pretty novel argument on the Left.

This is probably cartoonish--as is probably the rest of the interview--but if I was teaching a class, I'd use it as a text for setting out the background arguments.

A much more rigorous response to Chibber's book by Chris Taylor is also great--although far more abstract.

It’s kind of hard to say. Chibber does not expend anything like the same amount of time unpacking—much less justifying—his own Marxist normative and epistemological presuppositions as he does in showing that Guha, Chatterjee, and Chakrabarty are anti-Marxist. In broad outlines, Chibber’s Marxism depends on “a defense of two universalisms, one pertaining to capital and the other to labor.” More specifically, Chibber’s Marxism is bound to the idea that ”the modern epoch is driven by the twin forces of, on the one side, capital’s unrelenting drive to expand, to conquer new markets, and to impose its domination on the laboring classes [the first universalism], and, on the other side, the unceasing struggle by these classes to defend themselves, their well-being, against this onslaught [the second universalism] (208).” So far, nothing objectionable: welcome to the Communist Manifesto. The problem emerges, however, when Chibber attempts moving from the universal to the particular, from the universality of capitalism’s antagonism to the particular social zoning of its enactment. If postcolonial theorists want to hold onto the particularity of the particular, and engage the universal through it, Chibber uses these “two universalisms” to denude the particular, to remove the peculiarity of the particular in order to reduce it to the universal. Methodologically, Chibber’s Marxism is pre-Hegelian. Indeed, his Marxism is the kind of “monochrome formalism” derided by Hegel, an epistemology for which the universal dominates the particular, one through which “the living essence of the matter [is] stripped away or boxed up dead.”

And then later:

In part, I think that “Marxism versus postcolonial theory” is simply running interference for a set of disciplinary battles over methodological and theoretical orientation. The antinomy that Chibber continually establishes is one between a realist sociology (with an investment in abstract structures that prime and cause human action) and hermeneutically inclined fields of anthropology, history, and literary studies. (Don’t mention literary studies to Chibber. He doesn’t seem to like it very much.) In each of Chibber’s chapters, the explanatory triumph of universalist accounts over particularist accounts can be read as the triumph of a certain form of sociological reason over its others.

More importantly, I think that Chibber is desperate for the resurgence of a particular kind of Marxism, one that was displaced not by postcolonial theorists but by anticolonial Marxists like Fanon, James, and so on. That’s why he can’t incorporate them into his account of postcolonial theory: they are Marxists who mount critiques of formalist universalisms by keeping close to the particular, by maintaining the tension that obtains between economic structure and lived phenomenology, between structuralist accounts of the world and hermeneutic investigations into worlds. I have no idea why one would wish to return to the days of CP sloganeering. (I can’t be the only one who heard echoes of “black and white, unite and fight!” in his book.) But the desire is there, and it shapes the way he constructs postcolonial theory. Chibber’s fantasy that an anti-Marxist postcolonial theory reigns hegemonic in the academy enables him to maintain the fantasy that the once and future king of Marxism might some day be restored to rule. But, in order to elaborate this fantasy, he needs to transform a tension internal to postcolonial theory (between Marxist accounts of structure and hermeneutic approaches to the particular—which can still be, of course, Marxist) into a struggle exterior to it.

The Construction of Disability

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Everyone should all listen to this latest This American Life episode on what the reporter of the piece, Chana Joffe-Walt, calls the "disability industrial complex." The simple factoid with which it begins? The rise in the number of people all over America on disability. Joffe-Walt starts with this and starts to burrow in deeper. She finds that disability is a slippery concept: how does it get defined in practice? When she meets the doctor in Hale County, Alabama where 1 out of every 4 people is on disability (and he's responsible for many of these diagnoses), he tells her some of the criteria he uses. One among them is education level. Why, she wonders, is education level a criterion for disability? The answer is, of course, that he's trying to think about the kinds of jobs they will be working in, and if he estimates that they can't work those jobs successfully, well, then for all practical purposes, they are disabled. (See transcript.)

But Joffe-Walt doesn't stop there. She wants to explore this whole ecosystem of disability. So she looks at lawyers. What role have lawyers played in getting people on disability? (And lawyers here come off surprisingly well, I think--crass, yes, money-minded, definitely, but also fulfilling a deep need.) The answer: a lot. And what of the political economy? Aside from the problem of inequality--that the number of good jobs that don't require college degrees is steadily decreasing--she also points to federal and state regulations. States, she finds, have an active interest in moving off people from their welfare rolls onto the federally funded disability program. This work, naturally, is done by consultants who charge a fee for every successful transfer.

It's all deeply fascinating stuff that moves fluidly on a number of different levels. Sometimes Joffe-Walt is down on the ground, talking to people, seeking their opinions, wondering what they think. At other times, she is taking an eagle-eyed view of the scene, talking to economists, and regulators. [The web-site has a number of interesting graphs that are worth checking out.]

The Problem with Critique: On Evgeny Morozov's new book

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 13:00:00 +0000

[Update: Okay, perhaps I should say this upfront. This is not a review of Morozov's book; rather it's a set of reflections on what we do as STS scholars based on two really outstanding reviews of Morozov's book. I've made some minor changes to reflect this.]

Evgeny Morozov's new book, "To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism" is out. There's a bunch of reviews out there and out of those I'd suggest two: Tom Slee's on his eponymous website, and Alexis Madrigal's at The Atlantic. They're both very different in tone and content, yet I think they capture the essence of Morozov's argument (I haven't read the book yet!), both in terms of its strengths and its problems.**

Reflecting on what Slee and Madrigal say about the book, I found myself thinking about STS scholarship in general. Morozov is particularly against Internet-centric solutionism which usually ends up using an approach that, as Slee rightly observes is often an application of "engineering, neuroscience, [and] an understanding of incentives (in the narrowly utilitarian sense)." But what ends up happening though in this criticism of solutionism is that, as both Slee and Madrigal point out, Morozov ends up using tropes that are usually used by conservatives--and worse, by reactionaries.

And then there is the idea of critique itself. It was illuminating to read that Morozov is actually inspired by what historians of science have done to their topic, that he wants to destroy "the Internet" the same way STS scholars have destroyed "science" as a natural category. As Madrigal (using Paul Rabinow) rightly points out, this destruction of science is all but unnoticed outside the human sciences. Actual working scientists are hardly aware of it, and if they were, they would just shrug and carry on with their work. It isn't that science studies hasn't been revolutionary--but it has been revolutionary within the humanities and social sciences. It's almost as if freed from the cultural authority that science enjoyed, we, the human sciences--sociology, history, anthropology, literary studies--can now discover, analyze, and understand, on our own terms. But their influence on science itself and even more importantly, on public life, has been minimal.

And I'm afraid something similar might happen with Morozov. Some people will read Morozov's book, it might even change some people's minds but Silicon Valley solutionism will carry on as it did before.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the late Richard Rorty had it right. He consistently upheld the poet, the novelist, and the politician as roles that are higher than a philosopher–higher he said, because they are the ones who expand or change ideas about humanness. The problem with Morozov (and with science studies) is that they are stuck at the level of philosophy or critique. Critique is good, but critique is not the same as doing things. Even Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, though dated as a science studies text, points out that a scientific paradigm is never discarded unless an option is available; old paradigms fall only because new ones appear and until a new one does appear, an old paradigm can carry on with infinite ad-hoc additions to itself. Morozov doesn't provide that paradigm; even if he does, he provides it in the spirit of critique and that may not work because the people he is arguing with are not in the business of critique. They are in the business of doing things and while it may be a Silicon-Valley-corporate-profit-driven thing, it still manages to shift people's ideas and experiences in the way that critique does not. STS scholarship has the same problem.

Can critique change things? Again, it's useful to go back to Rorty who points out that certainly something came of the attack on the canon in the 60s and 70s. Attuned to ideas about race, class and gender, literary theorists went back into the past and re-discovered books that had been neglected because they had not been written by dead white men. Today, these books, like Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God are no longer just texts in graduate seminars; they are now on school syllabi and increasingly read by school-children. In that sense, the critique of the canon has indeed borne fruit. Will critiques like Morozov's and other STS-type critiques yield something similar in the future? And what will that be? Only time will tell.

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End-Notes:

**Slee is good at describing the intellectual moves Morozov makes in his effort to take down Internet Triumphalism.

Morozov undertakes two projects, one successfully and one less so. The first is to provide a framework in which to think about the new inventions that are being sold to us, and the patterns of thought behind them. [...] Morozov identifies a twin-tracked ideology behind the inventions and inventiveness of the digital world. One track is “Internet-centrism” – the practice of “taking a model of how the Internet works and applying it to other endeavours”. Writers have imbued the Internet with “a way of working”; it has a “grain” to which we must adapt; it has a culture, a “way it is meant to be used”, and it comes with a mythology in which iTunes and Wikipedia become models to think about the future of politics, and Zynga is a model for civic engagement (15). The second track is “solutionism”: the recasting of social situations as problems with definite solutions; processes to be optimized (23).

Morozov does a fine job of articulating Internet-centrism and solutionism as two facets of a single Silicon Valley ideology, [...] The common assumptions, shared biases, and individualistic predilictions give a cohesiveness and homogeneity to the new ideas and inventions, actively constructing and shaping the digital environment from which they claim to draw their inspiration. The insistence on “disrupting” our social and environmental lives; the idea that the solutions inspired by and enabled by the Internet mark a clean break from historical patterns, a never-before-seen opportunity – these mean that the only lessons to learn from history are those of previous technological disruptions. The view of society as an institution-free network of autonomous individuals practicing free exchange makes the social sciences, with the exception of economics, irrelevant. What’s left is engineering, neuroscience, an understanding of incentives (in the narrowly utilitarian sense): just right for those whose intellectual predispositions are to algorithms, design, and data structures.

Slee thinks that Morozov's analysis of the "solutionism" that he sees coming from the Valley is less satisfying,.

Morozov’s approach to unpicking the hidden assumptions of solutionism, and the unpalatable consequences of its application, is impressive but less successful. In order to avoid a blanket technopessimism he makes two moves. The first is to adopt a broadly social constructionist approach to the world of digital technologies. The Internet does not shape us, it is shaped by the society in which it is growing. He is with Raymond Williams, against Marshall McLuhan. His stance here is blunt: he refuses to see “the Internet” as an agent of change, for good or bad. “The Internet” is not a cause; it does not explain things, it is the thing that needs to be explained. Chapter 2 is titled The Internet Tells Us Nothing (Because It Doesn’t Actually Exist).

The second, more surprising move, is to adopt a critique that was first described in a pejorative sense by Albert Hirschmann. “In his influential book The Rhetoric of Reaction, Hirschmann argued that all progressive reforms usually attract conservative criticisms that build on one of the following three themes: perversity (whereby the proposed intervention only worsens the problem at hand), futility (whereby the intervention yields no results whatsoever), and jeopardy (whereby the intervention threatens to undermine some previous, hard-earned accomplishment)” (6). Morozov does not see himself as a conservative, but instead places himself in the tradition of other thinkers who have stood against programs of organized efficiency; “Jane Jacobs... Michael Oakeshott [and] ... James Scott "

Madrigal in his Atlantic review does a great close-reading of passages of the book to show that Morozov arguments are often high-ideology. Which means that he often counters the ideological set-pieces that Silicon Valley types routinely use--visions of a future where a certain technology seems to solve all our problems--with one of his own that paints a completely opposite picture. And as Madrigal goes on to note, he's really good at it except that at some point, he loses sight of real people doing real things. This analysis is worth quoting because it is an example of how one can write a fine, principled, rigorous piece of criticism while still basically agreeing with the author on the important things:

Morozov's book is an innovation- and product-centered account of the deployment of technology. It focuses on marketing rhetoric, on the stories Silicon Valley tells about itself. And it refutes these stories with all the withering contempt that a brilliant person can muster over the course of a few years of dedicated reading and writing. But it does not devote any time to the stories the bulk of technology users tell themselves. It relies on wild anecdotes from newspaper accounts as if they were an adequate representation of the user base of these technologies. In fact, the sample is obviously biased by reporters writing about the people who sound the most out there.

"Celebrating quantification in the abstract, away from the context of its use, is a pointless exercise," Morozov writes, and yet he ends up doing excoriating quantification in the abstract. When he does apply his thinking to the specific case of nutrition aids, it is with some serious handwaving. Calories are not an adequate measure of overall nutrition content, he writes, and thinking narrowly about nutritional content is a boon for food companies, and maybe calories aren't even really the problem. All fine and valid ideas, but knowing how many calories you eat is a good starting point for good health, no? This has been well-established by the medical and public-health literature. And, in any case, tracking one's caloric intake is not a search for a "core and stable self." And if your calorie counter doesn't share your data, it could be a private practice. What if you write it in a book as has been done for decades, or in the iPhone's notes, rather than an official app? Is that OK? What about non-tweeting scales, are those anathema as well? Should the ethical concerns Morozov presents really prevent actual human beings from trying to understand the basics of their food intake?

Or take the use of pedometers, gussied up into packages like the Nike Fuel Band, Jawbone Up, or Fitbit. There are literally hundreds of thousands of pedometers and other activity monitors out there in America, but Morozov does not try to investigate how such devices are used. Are the people buying FitBits and Nike Fuel Bands trying to reveal deep inner truths about themselves? Are they sharing every bit and bite with friends? Or are they trying to lose a few pounds in private?

Look at what Amazon can tell you about the market for these devices: people who bought FitBits recently also bought diet books, scales, and multivitamins. While Morozov locates self-tracking "against the modern narcissistic quest for uniqueness and exceptionalism," it strikes me that I've yet to meet someone wearing a fitness tracker who wasn't engaged in that least unique American activity: weight management.

A Theory of Key Points: What tennis can tell us about technological change

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Coming into the 2011 US Open with a track record of winning all but one of the Grand Slam matches that he played that year, Novak Djokovic was facing Roger Federer in the semi-finals, the very man who had beaten him in his only Grand Slam loss of 2011. And ominously, he lost the first two sets, 6-7(7), 4-6 before rallying to take the next two 6-3, 6-2. It was now the final set and Federer, having just broken Djokovic's serve in the final set to go up 5-3, was serving at 40-15, with two match-points on his own serve. Upset at the crowd which was cheering Federer on wildly, Djokovic seemed out of sorts, angry at himself, perhaps, for being in this position despite playing a flawless third and fourth set.

[See the video from the first minute.] The interpretation of what happened next remains a matter of dispute, hotly debated in tennis forums, YouTube comments, and the blogosphere. Serving from the ad-court, Federer served out wide to Djokovic's forehand. It was not a bad serve, but Djokovic swung at it hard, and literally smashed it cross-court for a clean winner. There was shocked silence for a second before cheering erupted. Djokovic walked to the other side of the court, raised his hands and looked at the crowd. Appreciate me, he seemed to be saying. The crowd obliged even as a bemused Federer stood waiting to serve on the other side of the court.

It was still match-point. Federer threw a good serve straight at Djokovic's body, and a rally ensued, which ended, heartbreakingly for Federer, with his shot striking the net-chord and then dropping back on his own side. Deuce. Djokovic went on to win the game breaking Federer in the process. He then won the next three games as well, winning the final set 7-5 to defeat Federer and reach the final.

What was going on in Djokovic's mind when he hit that screaming forehand winner off Federer's serve? Was it hit in anger or was it a calculated risk? How much did Djokovic's gamesmanship – seeking the crowd’s approval – affect Federer on his next serve? Tennis fans and analysts continue to debate this. My own thought, as I was watching the match, was that Djokovic, who can often be peevish and irritable on court, was angry with himself and swung at the ball, more out of pique than anything else. But the shot went in, and Djokovic used it to rally the crowd to his own side. On the other side of the net, Federer suffered a dent in his own confidence, and this allowed Djokovic (who is undoubtedly the best and fittest player on the tour today) to put himself back into the match.

Both players themselves offered contradictory interpretations of the return. “It’s a risk you have to take,” Djokovic told Mary- Joe Fernandez in the on-court interview. “It’s in, you have a second chance. If it’s out, you are gone. So it’s a little bit of gambling.” Federer, on the other hand, was having none of it. “Confidence, are you kidding me?” he scoffed in his post-match interview. “I never played that way. For me, this is very hard to understand how you can play a shot like that on match point.” Djokovic acknowledged that he needed to "get some energy from the crowd." “Look, I was a little bit lucky in that moment because he was playing tremendously well with the inside-out forehand throughout the whole match. This is what happens at this level. You know, a couple of points can really decide the winner.”

The Federer-Djokovic first match point is often what both tennis players and tennis analysts refer to as a "key point." These key points, as Djokovic points out in his post-match interview, are often the ones that "decide the winner." In the rest of this essay, I hope to show that this idea of "key points" as relevant to the outcome of a tennis match is possibly of interest to historians of technology.

What is a "key point"? A key point is a point (possibly among a set of points) which can be seen to have determined the outcome of the match, as seen by the players or the analysts (or both). Players often sense that a point will be key during the match itself and go all out in their effort to win it, perhaps by hitting extra hard, taking a risk, or by running down a ball they would rather have left alone to conserve their energy. Analysts too, as interested observers of a match, can sense whether a point will be key to the outcome, although they have no agency when compared to the players themselves.

But while an upcoming key point can be sensed by the players and the spectators, key points can be definitively identified only after the match is over. In other words, the identification of key points is contingent on the outcome. In the Federer-Djokovic match we saw above, the courageous (or reckless) Djokovic return at 15-40 is a key point only because Djokovic won the next four games to win the match. If Djokovic had lost the next match-point, this point would no longer be talked about as a key point but as a fluke. Instead the game in which Federer broke Djokovic at 4-3 in the final set would have turned out to be the key to the outcome of the match. To restate this point, the key to winning a match is to win the key points, but the points that are key to winning a match can only be determined after the match is won (or lost).

It is worth discussing an alternative explanation of match outcomes: that the more talented, or better, player wins the match. I quoted a part of Djokovic's post-match interview above. On actually watching the interview, it turned out that the quote left out a crucial part. Djokovic actually said: "This is what happens at this level – when two top players meet. You know, a couple of points can really decide the winner." [Italics mine.] The implication here is that it is only when players are evenly matched in terms of "talent" that the outcome hinges on a few key points. When players have wildly different talents, the outcome hinges on, say, the "talent" they possess (which will not be the same) and not on the key points.

How might the key point analytic relate to what historians – especially historians of technology – do to understand the past? As I see it, the topic of historians of technology is technological change. Our aim is to understand the past and to answer the question: why do certain things change while others remain the same? One might see this question as similar to those that tennis analysts pose to themselves: why did player X win against player Y? Why has player X consistently beaten player Y in their previous 5 matches?

Somewhat analogous to the two theories to explain the outcome of a tennis match – the "key point" theory vs. the "more talent" theory – one could oversimplify theories about technological change into two kinds. One theory might be that technological change happens because a certain technology is better at producing certain desirable outcomes (more profits, more efficiency, better living conditions, progress and so on). This theory would go under the name of "technological determinism" and would be similar to the "more talent" theory of tennis match outcomes. The other theory would postulate that technological change happens because certain groups of people – I will call them “interest groups” – are able to defeat, or persuade, their opponents through the channels available to them at certain crucial junctures. This theory would be similar to the "key point" theory.

How would the "key point" theory of technological change help avoid the pitfalls of technological determinism? As I see it, the main dilemma of any social science is the issue of predictability. Unlike the natural sciences which can predict the future behavior of their "actors" (the trajectory of a missile, the motion of the planets, the quantum states of atoms), the social sciences cannot (and with good reason) predict the changes of the future. They cannot because assemblages of human actors are unpredictable. They have agency. Harry Collins has shown how even the behavior of natural scientists – who produce natural science, the most “rational” of all the disciplines – is still unpredictable, and is better understood as the application of certain tacit skills, than as the brute application of some rule-bound "scientific method."

The social sciences thus face two different questions. On the one hand, social scientists need to account for the sense of contingency and unpredictability that their actors often feel while thinking about the future. They also need to account for why their actors feel that certain actions are the key to changing the future. On the other hand, they (and here I speak of historians in particular) need to account for why the events of the past seem so inevitable, the way they seem to lead to the present so unproblematically. Clearly actors in the past who experienced these "same" events did not know how things would turn out. How can historians account for the inevitability of the past for us and its contingency for the actors experiencing the past?

A theory of technological change that looked at "key points" as determining certain (technological/social) outcomes could be one solution to this. Key points in history would need to have the following characteristics. First, historical actors themselves should have some dim awareness that something important was happening and that different visions of the future are at stake. Second, the outcomes of these key points should result in the victory of one set of interest group over others, thereby setting in motion a certain kind of future. Third, these key points can only be determined retrospectively once the outcome is known (as historians always do). Fourth, key points preserve the agency of historical actors. Finally, key points in history can change as newer and newer outcomes arise. For example, historians now agree that Barry Goldwater's defeat by Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election, and the subsequent rise of grass-rootsconservatism, is a key to understanding American politics today, even if no one seemed to be paying attention to it back then. It was a key point for certain actors who were mobilizing to achieve their vision of the future, even if their ideological opponents were largely unaware of them.

Tennis key points are heuristics, of course. And they have their limitations, even in sports. For instance, it is much more difficult to locate key points in soccer, for instance, where the notion of discrete points does not exist. Soccer is, for lack of a better word, continuous, while tennis is more discrete, with precisely demarcated "points." And even in tennis, determining key points is difficult. Because one point seemingly leads to the next: if the Djokovic screaming forehand winner was a key point, what about the points before that one? What about those that decided the first four sets? Would it have mattered if Djokovic had won the first set--which he lost narrowly in a tie-breaker (9-7)?

But I do think that determining the key points of a tennis match is like doing history. The boiling down of a match outcome to a series of key points shows us how contingent events are. And at the end of the day, match outcomes are predictable to some extent: a match between Federer and David Ferrer is far likely to lead to a Federer victory (although not always). Those are the kinds of explanations/narratives of technological change that the key point theory would ask us to look for: highly contingent, built out of specific events, but with specific patterns that are by no means law-like.

Algorithms and Rape T-shirts

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Startled by the title? You should definitely go read this blog-post.

Long story short: there was a Twitter-storm over some offensive T-shirts sold by a vendor on Amazon.com that seemed to encourage rape ("Keep Calm and Rape A Lot" went one, etc.). Well--it then turns out that the T-shirts don't exist. Or rather, these T-shirts are made on the fly when someone orders them. So how did they come to be on Amazon? This is the fun part--they were generated by algorithms. An algorithm that probably looked at the most popular Google Searches online and then arranged the search words in a template, made an image out of them, and put them up on Amazon. If someone buys it, the shirt gets made (literally printed out), and sent.

Exciting, isn't it?

Henry Farrell on Crooked Timber compares the scenario to the singularity science fiction of Charlie Stross**. And quotes this great line:

Amazon isn’t a store, not really. Not in any sense that we can regularly think about stores. It’s a strange pulsing network of potential goods, global supply chains, and alien associative algorithms with the skin of a store stretched over it, so we don’t lose our minds.

I think we're entering a brave new world of content farms and search engine optimization. Exciting times, I think.

** Charlie Stross is one of those science fiction writers who gets raved over at Crooked Timber whose writing style just doesn't work for me. I did get through three-and-a-half of his Merchant Princes books before giving up. Even worse was Accelerando (ebook available for free), his singularity book, which I gave up on after a few pages--again, the writing was just not to my taste, which meant that all the rich ideas in there were inaccessible to me. But I still hope to read him sometime.

"Good Smart" and "bad Smart": What Smart Technologies Do and Don't

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 16:36:00 +0000

Everyone should read Evgeny Morozov's latest op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (via Alan Jacobs). Morozov elaborates on the latest smart social technologies and gadgets; technologies that by virtue of the cheap price of hardware, AI or crowd-sourced pattern recognition, and the possibility of making your activity visible to your friends and acquaintances, serves to change your behavior in some personally or socially optimal way. Examples: going regularly to the gym, eating healthier foods, or even (which is his chosen example) recycling the waste generated by a household.

Morozov, of course, as one might expect, is not happy with this. He suggests an analytic distinction: "good smart" and "bad smart" technologies, which I think is really useful in thinking about the recent spate of products that use ubiquitous computing paradigm for social ends.

How can we avoid completely surrendering to the new technology? The key is learning to differentiate between "good smart" and "bad smart."

Devices that are "good smart" leave us in complete control of the situation and seek to enhance our decision-making by providing more information. For example: An Internet-jacked kettle that alerts us when the national power grid is overloaded (a prototype has been developed by U.K. engineer Chris Adams) doesn't prevent us from boiling yet another cup of tea, but it does add an extra ethical dimension to that choice. Likewise, a grocery cart that can scan the bar codes of products we put into it, informing us of their nutritional benefits and country of origin, enhances—rather than impoverishes—our autonomy (a prototype has been developed by a group of designers at the Open University, also in the U.K.).

Technologies that are "bad smart," by contrast, make certain choices and behaviors impossible. Smart gadgets in the latest generation of cars—breathalyzers that can check if we are sober, steering sensors that verify if we are drowsy, facial recognition technologies that confirm we are who we say we are—seek to limit, not to expand, what we can do. This may be an acceptable price to pay in situations where lives are at stake, such as driving, but we must resist any attempt to universalize this logic. The "smart bench"—an art project by designers JooYoun Paek and David Jimison that aims to illustrate the dangers of living in a city that is too smart—cleverly makes this point. Equipped with a timer and sensors, the bench starts tilting after a set time, creating an incline that eventually dumps its occupant. This might appeal to some American mayors, but it is the kind of smart technology that degrades the culture of urbanism—and our dignity.

Image taken from here. It shows the wired trash bin with the camera attached to its lid.

What about BinCam, the product he opens his essay with? BinCam is a trash bin whose lid comes attached with a camera. It takes a picture of the bin's contents when the lid is shut, uploads it to Amazon Mechanical Turk, where some Turker determines whether you've been putting recyclables into your trash, then publishes the photo along with the Turk assessment to the user's Facebook or Twitter profiles. The idea is that peer pressure and perhaps some mild social censure will make you better behaved -- "better" in the sense of being socially and ecologically optimal.

You would think BinCam falls into the "good smart" category but no; Morozov says that it falls "somewhere between good smart and bad smart."

The bin doesn't force us to recycle, but by appealing to our base instincts—Must earn gold bars and rewards! Must compete with other households! Must win and impress friends!—it fails to treat us as autonomous human beings, capable of weighing the options by ourselves. It allows the Mechanical Turk or Facebook to do our thinking for us.

I think Morozov's concerns about surveillance are really useful. But he lost me with this paragraph. Since when did it become a "base instinct" to win and impress friends? If someone buys BinCam with the intention of helping him or her adhere to certain recycling conventions, how is it different from someone who uses her friends to police her diet? I think the key to understanding the paragraph is the reference to Facebook and Mechanical Turk; those are the two technologies that make Morozov uncomfortable. And there is the fact that the behavior in question here is less useful individually, than collectively. Whether I recycle my trash or not has less consequences for me than it does for the society I live in (unlike, say, dieting or exercise, although one might argue that even these two activities have a "social" dimension; they will help bring down the high cost of health care). But recycling also has another aspect: more so, than dieting: it is a behavior whose template is created by experts. And it is precisely this: aligning my behavior into a template decreed by experts, and monitored by my friends, is for Morozov, an unacceptable loss of autonomy.

I am not sure I buy this. And it highlights, I think, one of the interesting points of similarity between critics like Morozov and Nicholas Carr: the normative use of the Cartesian subject. For Carr, humans have a deep need for solitude; in fact, solitary reflection (exemplified by deep reading) is what makes us most deeply human. And the Web, by its very constitution, forces us away from this; it forces us into multi-tasking, into skimming, and into a form of constant sociality though Facebook and Twitter.

Morozov's concerns are different, and I think far more politically salient, than Carr's. But for him too, the most deeply human thing about us is our freedom and our autonomy--not just from state surveillance (a form of "negative liberty"), but also from certain forms of "base" socialities. And so, while I find the "good smart" and "bad smart" distinction really really useful, I suspect the devil is in the details.

Paragraph of the day!

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: PC Museum

Complementers, however, always run the risk that Microsoft will incorporate the unctions contained in their software into its own products, either by internal development or by acquiring the technology in a takeover. Merger talks between Novell and Microsoft in 1990 fell through. Microsoft subsequently introduced networking capabilities into its operating systems in the early 990s, thereby entering into intense competition with Novell. On the other hand, in the case of Norton Utilities, Microsoft has shown the tolerance of an elephant for the tikka bird on its back, allowing Peter Norton Computing "deep into the innards of the operating system" and fostering "tremendous personal relationships between their development teams." This is probably because Norton Utilities complement Microsoft's operation g systems, adding to their value--by providing anti-virus facilities, for example--in a way that Microsoft's relatively bureaucratic development processes would find difficult or uneconomical.

--Martin Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (pg 260).

Integrated Circuits, City Planning and Book Printing

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 12:18:00 +0000

CC Image courtesy of james4765 on Flickr.

Modern integrated circuits, when examined under a microscope, look like the plan of a large, futuristic metropolis. The analogy with architectural design or city planning is appropriate when describing chip design and layout. Chips manage the flow of power, signals and heat just as cities handle the flow of people, goods, and energy. A more illuminating analogy is with printing, especially printing by photographic methods. Modern integrated circuits are inexpensive for the same reason that a paperback book is inexpensive--the material is cheap and they can be mass produced. They store a lot of information in a small volume just as microfilm does. Historically, the relationship between printing, photography and microelectronics has been a close one.

Paul Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing

Policy vs. Politics: A Close Reading of Timothy Geithner's tightrope walking exit interview as a case of "boundary work"

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 19:30:00 +0000

In Science and Technology Studies (STS), the sociologist Thomas Gieryn has a concept that he calls boundary work. Boundary work is the work of defining what constitutes science, of deciding on the boundary between science and pseudo-science (or non-science), or that between science and politics, or between science and religion, among others. This work is done not in laboratories but in public debates, and often not by scientists, but by others: "journalists, bureaucrats and lawyers" (not to mention philosophers!). In other words, boundary work is about the consumption and circulation of science. Gieryn's is explicitly a constructivist stance. He takes for granted that the boundary between science and non-science is made rather than found; is pragmatic rather than conceptual; and takes a good deal of work to police and maintain--a stance that is the foundation of STS.

In this blog-post, I am interested in a similar kind of boundary work w.r.t. "politics" that happens in American public culture (which builds on the pre-existing boundary work w.r.t. science). The boundary work in public life then consists of establishing that something--a course of action, a guiding principle--is "policy" and not just "politics." "Policy," here, is seen as the opposite of politics: a rational technocratic exercise where a group of skilled people sit down and solve problems. Policy-making obviously gains its legitimacy from its similarity to doing science and from science's cultural authority, in particular, its image as rational, skeptical, and as being about facts rather than values. Since it is governments that do policy, and governments are almost always seen as political, how might one separate policy from politics--and that too, using the cultural authority of science? I would say that it is done by seeing policy-making as "solving problems" rather than, say, resolving conflicts between opposing interest-groups.

An almost perfect illustration of this is Timothy Geithner's "exit" interview with the New Republic's Liaquat Ahamed. Like everyone else, I was excited to read it. What would Geithner say about the financial crisis which he inherited from Hank Paulson (although he was already a player in it as the head of the New York Fed), and which he--at least in some sense--brought to a close? That he chose not to talk about the juicy times of his tenure will surprise no one [1]. What was interesting about the interview though was the way he used the occasion to perform boundary work.: his own work, he insisted, was about policy-making, not "politics"; his job was to "fix the problem" at hand (the financial crisis, that is). He was lucky, he claims, that President Obama is also a policy-maker President, who sees his advisers as offering policy advice that is not based on political expediency.

In the next few paragraphs, I'm going to do a Wittgenstenian analysis of how Geithner uses the terms "policy" and "politics" respectively to show the kind of boundary work that is being done. In response to a question from Ahamed on whether he "saved the economy, [and] lost the public," Geithner says:

I think that’s a great question. I think it’s hard for any of us to know. My own view was that it was going to be very hard, if not impossible to design a financial rescue that was going to be effective in protecting all the innocent victims hit by the crisis and still satisfy the completely understandable public desire for justice and accountability. Those things were in direct and tragic tension, never resolvable at that time. I always felt that the only preoccupation for people in policy at the time should be to fix the problem as quickly as we could, as effectively as we could, and only after that would other things be possible, including how to figure out not just how to clean up the mess, but reform the financial system. [my emphasis.]

Public desire for justice and accountability is "understandable," says Geithner, but "the only preoccupation for people in policy at the time should be to fix the problem as quickly as we could." Immediately, a distinction is made between "people in policy" whose task is seen as "fix[ing] problem[s]," and the "public" that wants "accountability."

In answering the next question, which was about his working relationship with President Obama, Geithner makes his point even more explicitly. The President, he says approvingly, is interested in policy, not politics.

I always had the sense that he was going to put policy ahead of politics. And he always made it clear to people working for him that our job was to inform him of what the relative merits were of the policy choices, not to try to do the politics for him, or to limit our prescriptions by what was politically expedient. I think the country was very lucky because as you know, there have been lots of other examples in other countries, and certainly in our history, where the leaders of the country were much more reluctant to put politics aside and take the sting of a more decisive resolution. I’ve talked about this before, but I think that what really distinguishes countries in crisis are those that are lucky enough to have political leaders who are willing to take the brutal political cost of doing what’s necessary and those countries that waited and let the populist fires burn, or decided they were going to try to teach people a lesson and put populism ahead of other things. Those countries had far worse experiences in crisis than we had. [my emphasis].

Politics here is identified with the messy, grubby business of getting votes. And political costs are just that: electoral defeats. Good "policy" can lead to electoral defeats, and President Obama, Geithner says, did not put politics first (meaning electoral victory), unlike a lot of other world leaders. Or, to put it in a rather crude pictorial version:

The interview moves on to other things. When asked what the most frustrating part of being the Treasury Secretary presiding over the financial crisis, Geithner says:

The most frustrating part of this work, but in some ways it’s the most consequential, is how effective you can be in relaxing the political constraints that exist on policy. You can see that most compellingly now in the fiscal debate. Paulson before us and the President were very successful during the crisis in getting a very substantial amount of essential authority essential to resolving the crisis. But it has been very hard since then to get out of the American political system more room for maneuver both on near-term support for the economy, as well as reforms that would lock in a sustainable fiscal path. That is the most frustrating thing, to get the political system to embrace better policies for the country. [my emphasis].

On close analysis, we see that the politics/policy distinction is now no longer about winning elections versus crafting solutions. The "fiscal debate" is about whether the Federal Government needs to boost spending in order to counteract the effects of the recession and boost employment. But funding appropriations are done through Congress which has no stomach for more spending (preferring instead to concentrate on deficits). Politics and policy now become separated by the different arms of government. Congress, playing "politics,"--that is, concerned with re-election--denies the President the policy levers (fiscal stimulus, monetary expansion) that he can use to combat the recession.

This is only bolstered when Geithner includes President Bush's team as part of an all-inclusive "we" who dealt with the crisis as policy-makers should. As opposed to Congress, that is, which is clearly not part of the "we." This also helps Geithner use the word "bipartisan"--which carries great currency in American political debate today.

I really believe that given the choices we had at the time, with the authority we had and the options available to us, that we did a very effective job. And by “we,” I mean in many ways this was a bipartisan response across two administrations that will look good against the comparison of what we know about other crises of this magnitude.

Then things get interesting. Ahamed asks Geithner what his views on austerity are; was he, Geithner, responsible for the shift in the President's focus from fiscal stimulus to debt reduction?

TG: It was definitely my view, and it still is, that our ability to get more growth-promoting policies out of the Congress is contingent on our ability to put in place long-term fiscal reforms that restore sustainability. That’s true for lots of different reasons. It’s true not just because, without action, the natural dynamics of demography and healthcare costs would crowd out a whole range of investments over time. But it’s also true the average person, facing deficits this large, is just uneasy supporting substantial additional growth-relevant fiscal policy without that framework. So that’s the main reason why I was a supporter of trying to make a more credible commitment to some gradually phased-in, sensibly designed restraints over time. I think without that, there was no way we were going to be able to make the case for a big long-term infrastructure program. [my emphasis.]

And then, suddenly, everything gets unscrambled here (on close reading, that is). The President's policy-making--his ability to bring the economy back from high unemployment and low growth--is seen as constrained, not just because Congress is a grubby, political machine, intent on re-election, but because Congress needs to be convinced of "our ability to put in place long-term fiscal reforms that restore sustainability." And then, that staple of politics proper is brought in: "the average person." "It’s also true," says Geithner, that "the average person, facing deficits this large, is just uneasy supporting substantial additional growth-relevant fiscal policy without that framework." Who is this average person? Does he stand for a member of the Congress? Or does he stand for the public that each Congressman acts as a spokesman for?

It's unclear, which, I think, is the point. And note that the word "politics" doesn't appear at all in this quote, precisely (I think) because Geithner is talking about politics. Not politics as grubby vote-getting, but rather, politics, as a mechanism of reconciling different sets of values and priorities. And while that idea is present in his remarks ("without that ... no way we were ... able to make the case for"), he does not call it politics. With his references to the "average person," Geithner brings in the imagined public in whose name the US Government acts. And he suggests that policies of fiscal expansion need their stamp of approval from this public, and setting out a plan for the deficit is one way of securing this. The refusal to use the word "politics" to describe this, and the use of the imagined public of "average person(s)" to legitimate his own policy, suggests, again, that this is an instance of boundary work.

Why is this at all important? As I suggested before, in public life, it is often easier to argue over facts, rather than values. The use of numbers--risk analysis, what have you--in public life, as Theodore Porter suggests, accomplishes precisely this purpose. The US Army engineers used the language of cost-benefit analysis (of public projects) to make their decisions seem more rational, and less political. And while it has its advantages, and permits a certain kind of discussion, the use of mathematical cost-benefit analysis doesn't make a political decision less political; it simply puts the values into the background.

Sometimes--many times--it's useful to put values in the background and talk about facts and methods. At others--and the financial crisis, it seems to me, is a key candidate for this--it's probably better to bring the values into the foreground, with the facts and the methods. And that's why Tim Geithner's boundary work is important.

------

[1] The interview itself was guarded. Geithner didn't say much about the conflicts within the Administration over the appropriate response to the Great Recession (fiscal stimulus vs. austerity? bank nationalization vs. capitalization? and so on). He seemed to indicate that the route the Administration had taken--TARP, recapitalization, Fed lending, stress tests--had worked pretty well, under the circumstances. And he ended on this chilling (but quite appropriate, I should think, for a regulator) about the inevitability of financial crises:

I think there’s something about human beings, and something about financial systems, where people tend to give less weight to the risk of an extreme event. So after a long period of relative stability, like we had in the U.S. and the world economy in the decade before this, that leads people to take on more risk than they should, borrow more than they should, and that’s what creates the vulnerability to crisis.

The things we did in this crisis, and certainly the things we did in financial reform, will significantly reduce the probability and the intensity of crises for a long period of time. Because there’s much more capital in the financial system. We did a pretty brutal restructuring of our financial system as a part of the crisis response. I know that markets over time will find their way around those things, and memories will fade. But if we’re lucky that will take a long time.

And Geithner appears surprised at the finance community's rather fierce response to the teeny-weeny bit of class war rhetoric that President Obama used in his public addresses.

I’m biased but I felt that in the basic strategy that the President embraced and that we put into effect, we did something that was incredibly effective for the broad interest of the economy and the financial system. I feel the President’s rhetoric over that period of time was very moderate relative to the populist rage sweeping across the country. And I never quite understood why the financial community took such offense at what was such moderate rhetoric relative to what we have seen in other periods in history.

Things I learnt from Thomas Laqueur's long essay on the Titanic

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 03:53:00 +0000

Things I learnt from Thomas Laqueur's long essay on the Titanic in the London Review of Books.

(a) Harvard's massive, massive, Wiedner library owes its existence to the sinking of the Titanic.

Bernard Quaritch Ltd, the rare book dealers, underwrote the publication of Titanic Calling, because they too had a connection with the ship. The American bookseller A.S.W. Rosenbach had sent a message to the son of the firm’s founder within days of the sinking, informing him that one of their best customers, Harry Elkins Widener, had died: ‘Harry Widener and Father Lost, Titanic. Mrs Saved.’ Quaritch posthumously purchased 18 lots on Harry’s behalf in 1912 and his mother continued to buy books from both firms to build up her dead son’s collections. They in turn became the nidus of the great Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library at Harvard, which she endowed in honour of her dead son. Harry died clutching a 1598 copy of Francis Bacon’s Essaies that he had loved too much to trust to the post and took with him on the boat.

(b) The Titanic's second and third-class sections were not that bad.

What the White Star Line lost in speed it made up in amenities. If First Class was the Ritz, Second Class was a Lyons Corner House: warm, comfortable, solidly bourgeois, at the higher end not much less expensive than modest First Class. And Third Class was more than fine. It was spread over four decks and not, as was usual, confined to the waterline. The public rooms were whitewashed pine; sofas were teak. There was a bunkroom for the lowest-paying passengers but there were two and three-berth cabins for those paying a bit more; there were showers for everyone, almost unheard of on other ships. There were lavatories, not open trenches. The dining room had chairs instead of benches. Food was good and plentiful, kosher for Jewish customers. The most expensive suite (£512) cost almost eighty times more than the lowest third-class ticket, but the median first-class fare was only eight times the median fare in third, smaller than the difference between a first and an economy air ticket from London to New York today.

(c) The fact that many more women survived the disaster than men (because of the "women and children first" rule) was often used to discredit the suffragist movement.

The reason for gender disparities is clear. Broadly speaking, men died in disproportionate numbers as the price of patriarchy. Their chivalry, their adherence to a masculine code of honour, demonstrated to the establishment on both sides of the Atlantic how deeply in error feminism and particularly the women’s suffrage movement really was.

Davenport-Hines quotes Churchill’s letter to his wife: ‘The strict observance of the great traditions of the sea towards women and children reflects nothing but honour upon our civilisation.’ And he hoped it would set right ‘some of the young unmarried lady teachers’ – aka suffragettes – ‘who are so bitter in their sex antagonism and think men so base and vile’. That view was widespread. ‘When a woman talks women’s rights, she should be answered with the word Titanic, nothing more – just Titanic,’ a correspondent in the St Louis Post-Dispatch observed. Emma Goldman thought suffrage had been dealt a blow by the Titanic: woman ‘continues to be as weak and dependent, as ready to accept man’s tribute in time of safety and his sacrifice in time of danger, as if she were still in her baby age’. She praised the toilers and drones of the ship, its crew, braver than soldiers on the battlefield. But even among them gender played its part: 87 per cent of women crew members survived, 22 per cent of men. Emmeline Pankhurst claimed that ‘women and children first’ was simply a rule and that the sinking of the Titanic proved nothing about chivalry or suffrage.

On board the ship Edwardian codes of masculinity were on occasion enforced with insane zealotry. Second Officer Charles Lightoller, the most senior survivor of the crew, interpreted the captain’s orders, ‘women and children first’, to mean women and children first and only. No men. He forced boys as young as 11 out of boats. (Lightoller ended up in the freezing water and was miraculously rescued by a last blast of hot air from an air shaft, which put him near a boat that rescued him.) He told an inquiry that he was defending what he took to be a law of nature, that men deferred to women at times of supreme danger. Nothing impressed one correspondent more ‘than the admiration expressed by the women for the men who sacrificed their lives in order that the women might escape’. Men on the starboard side fared better because First Officer William Murdoch interpreted the order to mean that men could board if no women and children were waiting for a place. And some men – most important, some lowly crew members and strong labourers among the passengers – sneaked onto boats on the port side when Lightoller was turned away. This was a good thing, because they were able to row the boats away from the sinking ship.

(d) The statistical open-source software package R comes with an exhaustive Titanic data set.

Immigration, economic numbers and the politics of culture

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 04:43:00 +0000

I usually don't write about US politics on this blog but sometimes it helps illustrate some interesting points about the role of science in public life.

Immigration reform is now on the agenda of the US Congress. In response, Matt Yglesias (using a chart that illutrates the results of two econometric analyses, see above) writes today that:

Unfortunately, immigration scolds seem to be excessively afraid to voice their real concerns about this, which makes it difficult to address them with either evidence or policy concessions. Instead, we're stuck in a mostly phony argument about wages that does nothing to ease people's real fears about nationalism and identity.

A set of interesting claims is being put forward here, and if I understand it right, a rather strange use of Marx's ideas about the base and superstructure. For Marx, the base was economic relations and the relationship of the different groups of people to the means of production. The superstructure was culture; this was seen as deriving from the economic structure, and often served to reproduce this base (through what Marx called false consciousness and ideology). Implicit in Yglesias' assertion is that the effect of immigration on wages uncovered by econometricians corresponds in some sense to what a certain set of Americans feels. A cumulatively economic effect of immigration on wages that can be uncovered only through the efforts of econometricians is seen as an objective measure (in Theodore Porter's sense) that maps onto the subjective states of people who oppose immigration. Unfortunately, the econometricians find low or negligible effect, therefore people who oppose immigration must be lying: their reasons are cultural--about nationalism and identity--rather than economic. We would have a better, more honest discussion, he suggests, if this sham of economic impact (expressed through numbers) was let go of and concentrated on the cultural fears.

Something similar happened a few days ago but in a different context. Blogger wunderkind Ross Douthat wrote an op-ed in the Times arguing that that the United States had low fertility rates, which he argued was a problem that the Government needed to think about and perhaps mitigate using policy measures (primarily by creating a "more secure economic foundation" for working-class Americans). He concluded--omniously--by saying that policy measures could only be effective to a point; low fertility rates were a symptom of "decadence":

The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.

To which Matt responded, (calling this last paragraph "nutty")

It'd be a much better country if social conservatives would stop writing things like that second paragraph and focus instead on what's in the first paragraph.

There was some predictable back-and-forth (see also this). But his point was clear: it was far better to talk about policy levers--about which a debate can be had--than about notions of "decadence" about which debates are never possible, particularly if you don't subscribe to such notions.

All of which makes me thing that Porter is right on this. Numbers are indeed "technologies of trust." At least in the American context, they allow arguments about public life to be made; they make possible arguments that are about objective "facts" rather than subjective "values." Not that arguments about facts are guaranteed to be settled, but arguments can indeed be made. Whereas arguments over whether the late modern age is "decadent" or not, between people with incommensurate values, are guaranteed to go nowhere.

Which brings me back to the original post I began this discussion with where Yglesias suggests that it is better to have a national American conversation about the cultural anxieties of immigration (I suspect it would turn out to be equally "nutty"). Kevin Drum responds:

Cultural insecurity and language angst are the key issues here. It doesn't matter if they're rational or not. Anything we can do to relieve those anxieties helps the cause of comprehensive immigration reform.

A public conversation to relieve cultural anxieties--would it have to take the form of numbers? What other forms could it take--and where would it lead?

Gillian Tett, Meet William Cronon

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 11:44:00 +0000

On my way back from India, I read Gillian Tett's "Fool's Gold: The Inside Story of J.P. Morgan and How Wall St Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe." [The book's changing subtitles is a topic in itself!] That awkward subtitle is perfect for the book's quite strange structure. Tett wants to tell the story of how credit derivatives began (with J.P. Morgan's invention of the BISTRO instrument) but that's not the story her readers will be mostly interested in (that would be the financial crisis). So she tells the story of the invention of credit derivatives, and then quickly segues into the story of the financial crisis, the prime culprit of which was the use of credit derivative instruments to home mortgages. The problem is that J.P. Morgan was not a part of this second trend; other banks, however, plunged in with relish, with consequences that we all know about. Which puts Tett in the strange position that she tells the story from J.P. Morgan's point of view, when all the real action was happening somewhere else.

But no matter. All that said, Fool's Gold is the best book I've read about the crisis. (To be fair, I've only read three others.) First, it's about the invention of credit default swaps (CDS), rather than simply mortgage-backed securities (which, if I understand Tett right, were benign instruments dating back to the 1970s). Second, she gives a really good account of why credit derivatives were invented, and consequently what the "shadow banking" sector is all about. Moreover, her account convinced me that contrary to what the J.P. Morgan bankers say, the invention of the credit derivative was the key to the financial crisis, not so much because of the instrument itself, but for the reasons for which it was invented.

Let me explain. Essentially, the J.P. Morgan bankers invented the CDS to circumvent Basel regulations about capital requirements. Basel rules required that banks keep a certain amount of liquidity to insulate them from bank runs in the case that their clients default on their loans; this liquidity requirement is in direct proportion to the "risk" that the bank has taken on. J.P. Morgan's clients tended to be blue-chip corporations, and the risk of default was therefore minimal. Basel regulations were hindrances that prevented Morgan from making more profits; therefore they had to be subverted. Morgan accomplished this by creating the swap, it insured the riskiest part of its loans, and thereby shifted the risk off its books. This meant they required lower liquidity, and could invest the money into higher profits. (A CDS is a contract the bank makes with another party: the bank pays the party a steady fee in return for which the party agrees to insure the bank in the case of default.)

Morgan's key innovation, as Tett documents, was that it was able to standardize the credit default swap. Rather than the slow process whereby the two parties for a CDS contract needed to be found, the Morgan bankers found a way to mass-produce these instruments: their solution was "tranching." All the loans on the books were bundled together, and separated into portions with different risks. A key part of this was that the amount of risk needed to be standardized so that the parties to the CDS contract would know exactly the kind of debt that was being insured. Enter the ratings agencies which were only too happy to do this: for a nice juicy fee, they looked at the debt, applied their models to it and estimated the amount of risk, which they then standardized into levels or tranches. AAA was the least likely to default, BB was a little more likely and so on. This worked out well for corporate loans, which could be diversified, but not so well for home mortgages.

Reading Tett's account of the invention of BISTRO took me back to William Cronon's story of the grain trade in Nature's Metropolis. Cronon begins by describing how the grain trade worked prior to the railroads. The grain would be stored in sacks, and transported manually (across the river and across Lake Michigan) by the traders (who were usually small shop-keepers), who would then sell it in other cities. The sack in which the grain was stored was crucial to its transportation: it changed boats multiple times during its journey and the sacks of each seller were kept separate. It was also the key to its exchange value: the grain was examined by a buyer, a mutual price decided on based on the quality of the grain, and then sold.

The building of the railroads changed this. Because railroads were built privately, and had a great capital cost, they concentrated on maximizing the shipment of goods from the hinterland to the city (and they could even operate in the winter!). This meant a rapid turnover – quickly emptying a carriage so that it could be used again for a different trip – and the sack of grains became an obstacle to this. The railroads solved it by the invention of the steam-powered grain elevator which made the loading of grains from warehouses into the railway cars easy and efficient. The problem was that there was no room for sacks of grain in this scheme; to maximize profit, all the bins in the elevator needed to be filled with grain, therefore grain from different farmers had to be mixed. Thus the first step in the chain of standardization took place: the local merchant (or even farmer) was separated from the grain he produced.

Yet, mixing the grains from different farmers together needed one further step: the creation of different "grades" of grain so that even if mixed together, its price could still be determined. The Chicago Board of Trade, formed in 1848 and whose membership consisted of Chicago grain traders came up with such a classification and over time, this classification started to be widely used. Thus a further distancing of the grain from its trade took place. Traders no longer had to sell grains physically. Instead an elevator receipt – which showed that a certain quantity of a certain kind of grain had been sold – could itself be traded amongst traders. The receipt could be used to buy grain from a warehouse but this was not the grain that was actually sold; instead, it was a functionally equivalent substitute.

A final step was the role of the telegraph in setting the prices of grain. The telegraph allowed communication between, say, Chicago and New York markets, which meant that the price of grain in New York markets could affect Chicago's. The standardization of the grain also helped here: it was no longer necessary for a buyer in New York to manually inspect the grain that he was being sold; instead he would know of its quality because it had been "rated" as being of a certain category.

All of these trends – the standardization of the grain into grades, its effective separation from the particulars of its production i.e. its commoditization, and the fact that it was now easy for buyers and sellers to make contracts over long distances – culminated in large volumes in futures trades of grains and sometimes led to “Corners,” artificial shortages created by speculators. Cronon sees the increase in the grain trade due to standardization as responsible for the change in the landscape around Chicago.

I will stop here, but the parallels between the grain trade and the derivatives trade are clear. Just as the grain becomes effectively separated from its producer, the loan issued by the bank became separated from the party that the loan was given to. And just as the grains of farmers were now mixed together in standardized bins of different "grades" of grain, so also debt from different parties was mixed together and labeled along a standardized spectrum of risks. And this standardization helped along a further trade in these instruments themselves... Cronon calls this the "logic of capital." And so it is. But the commoditization of the grain trade grew from the railroads' insistence on maximizing turnover: this was the only way they saw of making profits to offset their high capital costs. The banks too wanted higher profits, but their obstacle was not the movement of goods but capital regulations. Credit derivatives, it is very clear from Tett's story, were created to make a run around regulations.

All of which is not to say that standardization is a bad thing, per se. But rather to say that standards need regulators. When the standardization doesn't work, when the standards stop reflecting what's "inside," then we all pay a price.

Is the neo-Darwinian synthesis intuitive?

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 19:52:00 +0000

In a sober [1], concise, careful and clear review of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, H. Allen Orr quotes a lengthy passage from the book which serves to ground Nagel's subsequent arguments against neo-Darwinism in favor of a "teleological" model:

I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life. It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are expected to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true. There are two questions. First, given what is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry? The second question is about the sources of variation in the evolutionary process that was set in motion once life began: In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist? [my emphasis].

I think there is something to this. Not because I think Nagel's right; Orr's review disposes off his objections quite convincingly. But there is something non-intuitive about the neo-Darwinist synthesis. A simple mixture of random mutations and natural selection that leads to mammals? Creatures with complicated mechanisms like eyes, an immune system, a circulatory system (and elaborate processes of clotting and repair!) and on and on -- how on earth could all of that arise randomly?

I felt like this for a while. Obviously not badly enough that I became a creationist or anything. But it was puzzling. What solved it for me was reading the first few chapters of Daniel Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. Dennett thinks that natural selection is actually (or like, sometimes the distinction is unclear) an algorithm. "Darwin had discovered the power of the algorithm" (p. 50). Evolution was not designed to produce us per se, he says, but there's no reason to believe that it is an algorithmic process that has in fact ended up producing us.

To illustrate his point, Dennett gives us this nifty little diagram. Think of what natural selection does, he says, as an example of a tennis tournament draw. Whatever happens, a tournament has to have a winner! And natural selection picks winners; there is nothing inevitable about these winners -- they are contingent -- but the process of picking winners is inexorable. And this happens over long, long, periods of time -- millions and millions of years.

So first, you have an algorithm that picks a winner. And then you have an algorithm that picks winners over large time-scales. That nailed it for me. As a programmer, you are constantly faced with time and space constraints when you program. Think about writing a program to play chess where the program essentially tries to look as far ahead as it can. How far down the tree of moves should the computer look? Ideally -- all the way down! But wait - then it'll take forever for the program to make the next move, so we need to compromise. Or maybe we can store everything in the memory all at once so that it won't take forever? No luck again because memory is limited.

When you work with programs, the power of algorithms is evident. And the constraints on algorithms are all too visible. Evolution then is like an algorithm with no constraints; it gets infinite time and infinite space to do its work. And for something like that, anything is possible -- mammals, conscious mammals, insects, plants, whatever. It doesn't seem non-intuitive at all.

Now obviously, there's a lot of flimflammery to Dennett's thesis. Is evolution actually an algorithm? Or is it l ike an algorithm? And Dennett clearly has a lot more up his sleeve: his point is not to make evolution intuitive (that was a byproduct for me; not everyone works with algorithms), but rather to show that evolution is indeed something like "universal acid" -- a concept that can explain the deepest philosophical mysteries: the mind-body problem, consciousness and so on. Critics, quite rightly, beg to differ.

No matter. My point was to show that there are ways in which natural selection's workings can be made to seem entirely intuitively. The trick is to find the metaphor that works for you.

________________________
Endnotes:

I use the word sober for a special reason. You would think Orr would have more in common with Daniel Dennett who at least is not rejecting the neo-Darwinian synthesis like Nagel is (by starting with doubts from intuition). (In fact, one might argue that Dennett assigns it far too much significance.) But while Orr's review of Nagel is scrupulously respectful, his review of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, the book that's the subject of this blog-post, is quite scathing. His correspondence with Dennett is even more so. (Dennett doesn't get much love at the New York Review of Books.)

Market Socialism Vs. Market Capitalism (and the Centrally Planned Economy)

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 12:45:00 +0000

Seth Ackerman’s Jacobin essay (via Yglesias) is well worth your time, although I have to say that I don’t buy it at all as a wholesale alternative to our current system; it seems to me though that this could well be a model for certain parts of our system. Ackerman starts off by suggesting that the problems of Communist or centrally planned economies was not that they were inefficient (by standard economics measures of efficiency/equilibrium) but their firms lacked autonomy. He suggests instead a system where the management of firms is autonomous but the financial system is socialized, and therefore the “public” owns the firms collectively but does not really manage them. He suggests that (a) this system is superior to the traditional social democratic apparatus where the role of Government is seen to be regulatory i.e. erecting checks and balances to the system of capitalist profit-seeking while still seeing profit-seeking as the engine of development and innovation. He suggests that this system is never really sustainable because it ignores politics and the relative power of capital. And (b) that this is the system we’ve been moving to all along. Capitalism started off from a place where the management of the firm and the owners of capital were the same, to one where the two were different (a.k.a. the managerial corporation). The logical outcome, he suggests, is one where the shareholders themselves are the “public” and are publicly accountable. His “market socialism” is thus a logical culmination of capitalism itself (a la Marx).

What is needed is a structure that allows autonomous firms to produce and trade goods for the market, aiming to generate a surplus of output over input — while keeping those firms public and preventing their surplus from being appropriated by a narrow class of capitalists. Under this type of system, workers can assume any degree of control they like over the management of their firms, and any “profits” can be socialized– that is, they can truly function as a signal, rather than as a motive force. But the precondition of such a system is the socialization of the means of production — structured in a way that preserves the existence of a capital market. How can all this be done?

Start with the basics. Private control over society’s productive infrastructure is ultimately a financial phenomenon. It is by financing the means of production that capitalists exercise control, as a class or as individuals. What’s needed, then, is a socialization of finance — that is, a system of common, collective financing of the means of production and credit. But what does that mean in practice?

You should all just read the whole thing. But let me just point out what I think is the main flaw in this model (although admittedly the devil is always in the details). His proposal is essentially one where the economy consists of a huge, dominant public sector, but where the management of the public sector is radically separated from ownership (which is “public”). I think this is not as easy as he thinks it is. In particular, the relationship between the management (and workers) and the shareholders (the public) will now be mediated through the political process. Ackerman thinks that by eliminating the profit-mechanism, his system will make the prices more rational or efficient, but I suspect that the political process will step in and provide its own irrationality. In other words, Ackerman’s system, which he thinks is the golden middle between profit-seeking capitalism and centrally planned socialism may actually end up looking like one or the other eventually.

Performativity, Realism and Social Construction

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 09:15:00 +0000

[This post is going to be a little abstract but I hope, not too jargon-ridden. I wrote it mostly to clear my own head. But hopefully, it's useful to others too.]

A largely problematic concept in contemporary Science and Technology Studies (STS) is the issue of performativity. Performativity was explored first by Robert Merton in his discussion of what is sometimes called a "self-fulfilling prophecy." The classic example is bank-runs. A line forms outside the bank of people who think that the bank is going bust and who'd like their money back. These people are seen by others who join the queue, and so on and on until the bank actually goes bankrupt because all its depositors demand their money back. Whether the bank was really going to go bankrupt before that initial group of people queued up to demand their money is largely beside the point. A bank run is a self-fulfilling prophecy: a belief that brings its referent into existence.

Merton used the word "self-fulfilling prophecy" when the prophecy itself was false. And self-fulfilling prophecies are considered, on the whole, to be bad science, at least according to normative theories of science like Karl Popper's. Take, for instance, Popper's notion of falsifiability as being the key idea that distinguishes science from mere pseudo-science. Psychoanalysis was, according to Popper, a pseudo-science because it was not falsifiable. Thus, the analyst could diagnose his patient as suffering from a certain psycho-sexual malaise; if the patient denied that he suffered this way, the analyst could attribute that to denial. Thus there was no way in psychoanalysis to prove the analyst wrong. Here, the psychoanalyst’s diagnosis is a self-fulfilling prophecy; by denying what the analyst has posited, I am indirectly confirming his hypothesis. Marxism too, Popper thought, was something similar, despite its pronouncements about being scientific. Instead of denial, Marxism used the trope of ideology and false consciousness to refute its detractors - thereby rendering itself impervious to falsification.

Self-fulfilling prophecies, then, are considered to be bad science, by Popperian standards. Or at least, they are not science. Are scientific theories self-fulfilling prophecies? This is an interesting question, philosophically speaking, but not a very interesting one [1]. [These numbers stand for the end-notes at the end of this post.] It is in the social sciences like economics that ideas about performativity (which is understood as a self-fulfilling theory performing itself into existence) start to become really interesting. An interesting issue explored by economic sociologists is performativity of prices. Are prices "real"? Is there something out there in the world that prices correspond to -- stable, unchanging features that are outside human intervention? Or are prices self-fulfilling prophecies? If prices are self-fulfilling prophecies, how do we know that "bubbles" -- which are scenarios where prices have shot through the roof and are clearly out of sync with "fundamentals" -- exist? As the title of Donald Mackenzie's famous book suggests, financial models are "an engine, not a camera." That is, financial models are self-fulfilling prophecies; they bring the realities they describe into existence.

In a long, thoughtful, meditative blog-post, Kieran Healy points out the different senses in which the word performativity is used, and in particular, how one can understand the word in order to make sense of Mackenzie's argument -- without understanding financial models are complete hoaxes. Because, clearly, one could interpret performativity trivially -- this is that economic models have no correspondence with reality. (Which would mean that economists are fraudsters and economic models are a hoax.) This is clearly a possibility but only turns out to be the start of the problem. For, if economic models have no correspondence with reality, whatever that is, then what really constrains these models? Could it be that economists could just say whatever they like, and their scholarly ideas would just perform the economy into existence? Just intuitively, this seems untenable. It is not so easy to change the world. I may have any number of ideas about how to do things -- but there is no way for me to just "perform" them into existence. Changing the world is hard and difficult.

In what sense then can economic models be said to perform, or enact, economic realities? Here, Healy draws on Wittgenstein's ideas about rules, languages games and forms of life. Briefly, in his analysis of rules, Wittgenstein shows that rules only make sense when considered against a form of life. That is, rules take for granted a certain social form. The rule "if the light is green, then start driving the car" can only be understood in a world of cars, traffic lights, roads and junctions. One could modify the rule to say "if the light is green but there is a car at the intersection, start driving only after that car has left the intersection," or "if the light has just turned green, then decide depending on the traffic on the road if you can just stay at the intersection for a bit to decide which is the right way to go." And so on. IN ordinary life, these are routinely ways in which this rule is "followed" and there could be infinite variations on this. Social life needs to be understood not as a following of rules; rather, rules need to be understood as the reifying of conventions that draw on the largely taken-for-granted background of social life.

A further distinction made by analytic philosophers is the notion of regulative rules versus constitutive rules. Regulative rules are rules like the ones I used as examples in the last paragraph: "if the light turns red, stop the car" or "if the light turns green, start driving." These rules are supposed to regulate activities. Constitutive rules, on the other hand, do not merely regulate, but constitute activities. Thus the rules of chess, for e.g., "the bishop only moves diagonally," "the rook moves in straight lines," actually make up the game of chess. [A rule like "if the player's hand is on the chess-piece, then he has not yet completed the move" can be seen to be a regulative rule.] What Wittgenstein shows is that the difference between regulative and constitutive rules is a difference in degree, not in kind. All rules are at heart constitutive rules. They constitute a form of life, and the form of life constitutes them.

Healy explains the performativity of economic models in the sense of being transformative rules. In this case, some rules merely constitute a form of life -- but other rules, game-changing ones, can actually transform the form of life itself radically. This is like the notion of finding a "trick," say, in a card game. If the trick is trivial, then the game remains the same. If the trick is truly radical, then others start imitating it, and in time, it transforms the card game completely.

Economic models (like the Black-Scholes formula) are like truly game-changing tricks (or rules). They are performative in the sense that as they are increasingly adopted (primarily because they seem to confer an advantage on those who use them), they change the game itself -- in this case, finance. And it is that sense that financial models *have* truly been transformative: an engine, not a camera.

Is Healy's argument a form of social construction, or is it not? I think it is, although arguments about whether a theory is constructionist or realist are often debates over values and postures that theory-makers should adopt. Because, Wittgenstein, as I see him, was a social constructionist: he argued that all rules ground themselves in social conventions; that, at bottom, most structured activities are a matter of how we agree or disagree with each other. Our methods for agreeing or disagreeing with each other, of checking up to see if we believe an assertion or don't, are all different in different fields of activity. The BSM formula, in Mackenzie's case, "worked," in some sense -- and the fact of its working was what allowed it to be a game-changer, performing a different kind of economic reality into existence.

Orgtheory had a separate post (part 1, part 2) from Ezra Zuckerman who argued against "pure" social construction. Again, his blog-posts are about the performativity of prices: how are prices constrained by more than just the beliefs of market participants? Zuckerman suggests that a sociological theory about prices must take insights from both, a realist, and a constructivist perspective. The constructivist perspective, he argues, has taught us that beliefs play an important role in price determination (why else would people talk about a "bubble"?). But they make it seem as if prices are only constrained by what he thinks are "subjective" factors. He argues that there are "objective" factors that also determine/constrain prices -- and it is not enough here to say that prices are conventions, although not easily changeable. Rather, a theory must specify what factors constrain prices -- and the list of these factors must include both subjective and objective ones.

However, his definition of "objective" is cultural. Objective factors are those, he suggests, drawing on Andrew Abbot's work, that resist and cannot be changed by short-term cultural work. Thus our beliefs about the price of Manhattan apartments and GE stocks as being worthwhile investments are objective; because short of an earthquake destroying both Manhattan and all GE plants, this is a reality that is not going to change soon. (One could probably undertake a long-term project, a social movement, to change Manhattan's status, but that might take hundreds of years, if not more.) Prices, he therefore argues, have lower bounds (say for an apartment in Manhattan) that are not amenable to short-term cultural work. So there are objective features that determine/constrain prices.

This also explains, for Zuckerman, why bubbles exist and proliferate despite the existence of skeptics who warn that a bubble is occurring. However, these skeptics were not able to express themselves in practice -- which is why the prices of homes rose and rose (until they fell, in his view, because they violated the objective constraints). This explains bubbles: a bubble happens because of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that violates the objective reality (which is not amenable to short-term cultural work). It also explains the presence of skeptics who doubt the bubble -- but who are unable to do anything about it in substantive terms. It explains why a bubble happens even when so many people think that there is a bubble.

I find Zuckerman's analysis largely persuasive [2]. But here's the rub: he would argue that it is a realist (or at least, semi-realist) account while I think it is a through-and-through constructionist account. Why is this? Does this difference between what I see as social construction and what he sees as a form of realism tell us something about how these terms are used - and where the substantive difference between them is? I think so -- more on this below.

First, I think the really real realists would disagree with Zuckerman over his definition of objective factors as those that are not amenable to short-term cultural work. This suggests that objective factors are amenable to long-term cultural work (even if the possibility that this cultural work will be successful can never be predicted), something that true realists will disagree. The truly objective never changes; it is timeless.

But I think there is a second, and perhaps, an even more important point where even semi-realists like Zuckerman would differ from social constructionists like me. That point, I think, is about the variability of social worlds. Let me explain.

Let's take the lower-bound on the price of a Manhattan apartment as an example (Zuckerman's objective factor). Let's say I am able to wind the clock back two thousand years and start again. Or to put it differently, assume the world is a video cassette, which I rewind back 2000 years, and then play again. Will we reach the same place we are in today? In particular, in this alternate world, will a Manhattan apartment still have that lower bound? Will Manhattan still be Manhattan?

I suspect that the answer to this question will separate the realists from the constructivists [3]. A committed realist would argue that this alternate world will not be that significantly different from the world today; because the world is full of objective, unchanging, and timeless factors. As a constructivist, I would argue that there is a large chance that this alternate world will be significantly different because the world is shaped by human actions and social institutions, just as much as it is shaped by objective realities. And the social world is, as Barry Barnes has argued, largely a self-fulfilling prophecy, as actors act based on how they are expected to act, thereby reinforcing those very expectations. If the world is shaped by actions and the expectations of actions (i.e. beliefs about those actions) then an alternate world that is produced by my video-cassette time-machine would be, quite possibly, a very different one.

But a semi-realist might say: that even if Manhattan is not Manhattan, there would still be lower bounds on prices. The real lower bound would be Chicago real-estate prices. There would still be lower-bounds on some prices, and there would still be objective factors (in Abbott's sense) that constrain prices. I agree. The difference though is that as a social constructionist, I can offer no predictions on how this world will look like. The so-called objective factors in this alternate world will be different -- but the beliefs of market participants (the subjective factors) will still influence the prices. Once we see that the objective factors are not predictable in this alternate world, the subjective factors (people's beliefs, the way they act on those beliefs and so on) start to seem more fundamental.

To put in yet another way, the difference between constructivists and realists is over the issue of prediction, and in particular over the issue of long-term prediction. Short-term predictions are possible for both the realist and the constructivist. But long-term predictions, say, about housing prices or computer prices 50 years from now, will be more difficult for constructivists to make than realists. It is difficult only because even objective factors that determine prices can be changed by long-term cultural work; and this cultural work is impossible to predict. The more confident you are about prediction, you shift to the realism side of the spectrum. The less confident about prediction you are, will make you more of a constructivist.

And this explains, finally, some of the arguments that have been happening in the Orgtheory comment threads. Would you like your regulator to be a realist or a constructivist? Realists argue that even the existence of regulators is premised on realism; for if there were no objective factors constraining social facts (like prices) then how would one even begin to regulate something in the first place? I would disagree. I think it depends on the time-frame that the regulator is supposed to regulate. A regulator who is thinking about the future 50 years from now is simply deceiving himself or herself. For a regulator who is thinking 5 or 10 years down the line: it simply doesn't matter whether he is a realist or a constructivist.

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Endnotes:

1. Clearly, in one key sense, they are not. Because one is able to do things with scientific theories: predict the behavior of projectiles with reasonable accuracy, build rockets, make aeroplanes fly, manufacture cars and plastics and so on. But in another, perhaps minor, sense they are. A theory is a piece of representation that can "fit" many different worlds and situations. I put fit in quotes because the process of "fitting" takes a lot of work and labor (until it gets routinized when that labor simply becomes taken-for-granted). Galileo's key insight is said to be that he saw the motion of a body on an inclined plane as similar to the motion of an oscillating pendulum. When students learn mechanics in high school and early college, they are taught to see (to "apply") the problem-sets as examples of the canonical practice problems that they study (Kuhn 1969). In this way, one might say, is a self-fulfilling prophecy: more and more things can be seen as examples of the theory; the theory essentially fulfills itself.

Naturally, the skeptic might ask: well, the theory actually works. In some sense or the other, one can verify or check up whether it works. This is true. But with one qualification, which is of course, how the word "works" is understood. The sense in which the theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy, however, is that there might be some alternate theory that "works better." Or "works," but in a different sense. And a dominant theory, by working reasonably enough, might be letting us overlook other possible theories, because we only care about a theory "working," in one particular sense. As long as there is only one sense of "working" that we are preoccupied with, then that one dominant theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

All that said, the performativity of scientific theories is not really an interesting issue. [Because the way a theory is taken to "work" is a pretty much unproblematically taken for granted notion in science. Unless, in Kuhnian terms, there's a scientific revolution brewing, in which case, this becomes a fiercely debated issue.]

2. There's also an element of cheating in Zuckerman's model. It is easy to see that there is a lower bound for Manhattan real estate prices. Could one think of a lower bound for, say, Phoenix real estate?

3. For another take on this, see Chapter 3 of Ian Hacking's "TheSocial Construction of What," titled "What about NaturalScience?" where Hacking offers three factors that separate realists from constructivists: the contingency of scientific theories (or in our case, social facts like prices), the nominalism of the analyst, and explanations of the staying power of theories and social facts.

Links for the Week [March 26 - April 1 2012]

noreply@blogger.com (scritic) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:36:00 +0000

Most of my reading this week was health-care. Obviously, the Supreme Court's hostile questioning of the Obama Administration's signature legislation was a big shock. Still, it was useful to see the ACA defended in ways that the Administration wasn't able to before the Supreme Court. Here's a Tumblr summary of some of the arguments I found interesting.

About a "creepy" application called "Girls Around You" and what it says about social networking, data and privacy.

John Lancaster on Marx in the London Review of Books. A wonderful piece on what Marx means to us today -- and what he was right about.

Dahlia Lithwick on the twisted idea of "liberty" that the conservative wing of the Supreme Court has. I usually find Lithwick's prose a bit too hectoring but I agree with every point she makes here.

How to be an Academic Failure: A Guide for Beginners. The title says it all.

When writers have as much power as J. K. Rowling, they can transform the publishing industry single-handedly. More seriously, the Web has given writers more bargaining power w.r.t. publishers and distributors.

How much work is it to teach at a community college? Probably a lot. Henry Farrell comments.

I am very late to this really really good Ethan Zuckerman post on the blurring lines between advocacy and journalism. The Passion of Mike Daisey: Journalism, Storytelling and the Ethics of Attention, by Ethan Zuckerman.

And finally, a dense philosophical meditation on computation. Ian Horswill: What is Computation? Crossroads Magazine, March 2012, ACM