Tag: philosophy

The REF Research Rating Agency

Among the many inefficiencies imposed by the hexennial ritual of centralised research evaluation in the UK is the requirement that some of the nation’s most esteemed academics (thankfully, I am not one of these) need to dial their research productivity down to nearly zero while they spend their waking hours — and some when they might otherwise be sleeping — reading and ranking hundreds of papers, and attending interminable meetings. And then, after the results are complete, the specialised skills they have developed during this sisyphean herculean task are of no use to anyone, other than helping their individual departments get a leg up on the next REF, of course. Wouldn’t it be great — and very British — to enable the researchers who have devoted so much time and effort to monetise the skills they have acquired for personal gain?

This is why I am proposing the creation of a public-private consortium (privately owned, but initially funded by the British taxpayers), to be called the REF Research Rating Agency (REFRRA). The idea is simple: One of the major outcomes of the REF is to induce British universities to hire leading researchers away from other British universities shortly before the REF census date, expecting that their 4* papers will pay their salaries for the next six years. They also hire researchers from outside the UK on 20% contracts to pop by occasionally and credit their  research output to their generous UK host. By these means, the University of Birmingham has had itself crowned the king of UK philosophy.

The problem is the amount of guesswork that goes into these hiring decisions. That is why we need the REFRRA, employing experienced former REF examiners, to provide researchers in the UK and worldwide with Audited REF Score Evaluations (ARSE). For a modest fee, academics can purchase a documented ARSE to list on their CV. This will ultimately lead, it is hoped to a complete automation of the appointments process, whereby academics can simply go to a web site of a university they would hope to work for, put in their ARSE and a few demographic details, and receive an immediate job offer or rejection, based on the calculation of whether their hiring would be a financial net gain or loss for the university.

When I told a colleague about this idea, she said that no one could trust ratings where the ones being rated are the agency’s paying customers. Too much conflict of interest. On further reflection we had a good laugh at her naïveté.

Default settings, encryption, and privacy

One essay that powerfully shaped my intellect in my impressionable youth was Douglas Hofstadter’s Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness, that appeared in the November 1982 issue of Scientific American (back when Scientific American was good), and Hofstadter’s associated satire A Person Paper on Purity in Language. Hofstadter’s point is that we are constantly filling in unknown facts about the world with default assumptions that we can’t recognise unless they happen to collide with facts that are discovered later. He illustrates this with the riddle, popular among feminists in the 1970s, that begins with the story of a man driving in a car with his young son. The car runs off the road and hits a tree, and the man is killed instantly. The boy is brought to the hospital, prepped for surgery, and then the surgeon takes one look at him and says “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.” As Hofstadter tells it, when this story was told at a party, people were able to conceive of explanations involving metempsychosis quicker than they could come to the notion that the surgeon was a woman. It’s not that they considered it impossible for a woman to be a surgeon. It’s just that you can’t think of a human being without a sex, so it gets filled in with the default sex “male”. (The joke wouldn’t really work today, I imagine. Not only are there so many women surgeons that it’s hard to have a very strong default assumption, but the boy could have two fathers. On the other hand, a “nurse” has a very strong female default, so much so that a male nurse is frequently called a “male nurse”, to avoid confusion.)

Continue reading “Default settings, encryption, and privacy”

The paradoxes of adultery, Renaissance edition

An example that is frequently cited in elementary statistics courses for the unreliability of survey data, is that when people are surveyed about their sexual history, men report more lifetime female partners on average than women report male partners. (A high-quality example is this UK survey from 1992, where men reported 9.9 female partners on average, while women averaged 3.4 male partners. It’s possible to tinker around the edges with effects of changes over time, and age differences between men and women in sexual relationships, but the contradiction is really inescapable. One thing that is quite striking in this survey is the difference between the cross-sectional and longitudinal pictures, which I’ve discussed before. For example, men’s lifetime numbers of sexual partners increase with age — as they must, longitudinally — but among the women the smallest average number of lifetime sex partners is in the oldest group.)

In any case, I was reminded of this when reading Stephen Greenblatt’s popular book on the rediscovery of De rerum naturae in the early 15th century by the apostolic secretary Poggio Bracciolini, and the return of Epicurean philosophy more generally into European thought. He cites a story from Poggio’s Liber Facetiarum a sort of jokebook based on his experiences in the papal court, about

dumb priests, who baffled by the fact that nearly all the women in confession say that they have been faithful in matrimony, and nearly all the men confess to extramarital affairs, cannot for the life of them figure out who the women are with whom the men have sinned.

Frege and sexual abuse

Slate’s Amanda Hess has written about the case of Retaeh Parsons, a Nova Scotia girl who committed suicide last year, four years after being the victim of bullying over a photograph of her being sexually assaulted. She became famous across Canada after the police originally refused to prosecute those who assaulted her. The national, and then international, outcry, inspired some creativity among the reluctant police, who have now successfully prosecuted one of the perpetrators for child pornography.

The main point of the article was to comment on how

the judge in the case has barred Canadian journalists and everyday citizens from repeating the girl’s name in newspapers, on television, over the radio, and on social media. He cited a portion of Canadian criminal code that bans the publication of a child pornography victim’s name in connection to any legal proceeding connected to that alleged crime.

She quotes a Halifax reporter Ryan Van Horne on the perverse effect:

If you say the name “Rehtaeh” in Nova Scotia… you’ll be met with “instant recognition” of the case and all of the issues it represents. But when Van Horne asks locals, “You know that victim in that high-profile child pornography case?” he draws blanks. The famous circumstances surrounding Rehtaeh Parsons’ bullying and death don’t fit the traditional conception of a child pornography case, which makes linking the two difficult if reporters aren’t allowed to use her name and photograph.

This sounds like a horrible version of Frege’s Morning-Star/Evening-Star puzzle: News media (including social media) are allowed to talk about Retaeh Parsons (the famous child victim of sexual abuse and online harassment); and they are allowed to talk about the victim in that high-profile child pornography case. But they are barred from talking about Retaeh Parsons as the victim in that child pornography case. In Fregian terms, it’s as though we banned any reference to the “morning star”, but were still allowed to talk about the evening star.

Of course, there’s nothing terribly unusual here: Often important privacy concerns turn on concealing the identity of what appear to be two different individuals. It only seems so perverse here because the person whose privacy would implicitly be protected is 1) famous for her role in this case; and 2) deceased, which means that the only people whose privacy is being protected are the police officials who screwed up so badly in the first place.

“Buyer’s market”

When did the values of the market become a substitute for ethical standards? I found myself wondering this in reading this article in Inside Higher Education about a young philosophy PhD who was offered a tenure-track job at Nazareth College in New York, replied with an enthusiastic email attempting to start a negotiation about starting salary, sabbatical, maternity leave, and limited teaching in her first year. Although she made clear that she didn’t expect all of her requests to be possible, the university responded with a brusque retraction of the job offer. Now, the misogyny of philosophy departments is by now well established, but this smackdown of a young colleague who has just been selected as the best available for a job in your department, merely for making some requests, seemed shocking to me. Not to the commenters on the IHE blog, though, who may be supposed to be mainly higher education professionals. Some sample comments:

She has too many requests and this is always a sign that a person is going to be a pain in the *&*%. Her requests on balance are not unreasonable but she is in no position to ask for all of this — it is a buyer’s market. … Lots of great people to choose from so why saddle yourself with someone who is challenged right off the bat.

several substantial requests, the sum of which went beyond the pale for hat-in-hand applicants.

You just spent a semester narrowing hundreds (or more) candidates and arguing for this ONE person… only to have them forward THAT? Not exactly who I want to spend the rest of my career with (not to mention that the person clearly felt they were ‘playing with house money’ and could afford to lose the job offer… someone who REALLY wants the job wouldn’t risk that message).

(To be fair, some comments are supportive of the candidate, and others take on other issues.) What fascinate me in these responses are these references to a “buyer’s market” to which the presumably arrogant candidate should have meekly submitted, with the clear presumption that the logic of the market is proper and just. If you are in a powerful position, where you can take advantage of those unfortunate enough to have qualifications that are in high supply and low demand, then of course you should, and no one could be surprised if you do. It’s an argument that is rarely applied to those who are robbed at knifepoint by those stronger or more ruthless than themselves, but it does show up in certain comments on rape and on international relations. It’s the belief that power creates its own justification.

I am frequently reminded of Nietzsche’s remarks on markets in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science):

Kaufen und verkaufen gilt jetzt als gemein, wie die Kunst des Lesens und Schreibens; Jeder ist jetzt darin eingeübt, selbst wenn er kein Handelsmann ist, und übt sich noch an jedem Tage in dieser Technik: ganz wie ehemals, im Zeitalter der wilderen Menschheit, Jedermann Jäger war und sich Tag für Tag in der Technik der Jagd übte.

Buying and selling are common skills nowadays, like the art of reading and writing: Everyone is accomplished in it, even if he’s not a businessman, and practices every day, just as in earlier times, in the days of primitive man, everyone was a hunter, and practiced that skill every day.

One last point: The largest number of commenters fault the young scholar for her “tone”. Everyone knows, apparently, that you don’t put this sort of thing so baldly in an email, for God’s sake! Obviously they had no choice but to rescind the offer when she attacked them with an EMAIL that clearly laid out what she would like. This is pretty hilarious, given how much philosophers pride themselves on their ruthlessly direct style of academic disputation, with some of them arguing that the would-be philosophers with excessive numbers of X chromosomes can’t hack it.

King Camerute, holding back the waves

“Prime minister seeks to assert his authority over natural disaster”

Canute: “But it’s not a blank cheque…”

This was a sub-headline in The Guardian. He has pledged unlimited funds to the flood control effort:

My message to the country today is this. Money is no object in this relief effort, whatever money is needed for it will be spent. We will take whatever steps are necessary

However, before he can control the storms, the PM needs to assert his authority over his cabinet, since today the transport secretary said “I don’t think it’s a blank cheque.”

Of course not. Philosopher King Camerute was simply asserting the Buberian I-Thou relationship of the government to money. Money is not an object, it is a subject, and we must respect its concerns. The people whose homes are under water may feel that certain steps are necessary, but the money may have different feelings, and not wish to be instrumentalised in that way.

Hippie science

There are two books I’ve read sort of recently, From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner and How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser, that supplement each other as a picture of how antimaterialistic culture of the SF Bay area in the late 1960s through mid-1970s produced a lot of nonsense, but also hugely important new impulses in hard technical fields. Silicon Valley grew out of an ethos of DIY back-to-the-earth-ism (hence the “Homebrew Computer Club”), while the Fundamental Fysiks Group at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, took the energy of enthusiasm for parapsychology and mysticism, and channeled it into revival of an inquisitive style of physics that rediscovered entanglement and Bell’s Theorem, and laid the groundwork for quantum cryptography and quantum information science.

Einstein and the Quantum

I just saw an ad (in Blackwell’s Books) for a book titled Einstein and the Quantum, with a text that began

Einstein himself famously rejected quantum mechanics with his God does not play dice theory…

Putting aside the fact that “God does not play dice with the universe” is a quip, not a theory, I’m fascinated by this extreme statement of a calumny on Einstein that I knew as standard when I first learned about quantum mechanics from popular science in the 1970s, that the old man, despite his revolutionary past (and he was only in his late 40s) simply lacked the intellectual flexibility to keep up, rejected the new science, and was proved wrong by the march of progress.

In fact, that famous remark (from a 1926 letter to Max Born) acknowledged up front that the emerging probabilistic view of quantum mechanics was proving very useful. He simply rejected the willingness to deny a micro-level interpretation. (And the so-called Copenhagen “Interpretation” of quantum mechanics is really an anti-interpretation, a programmatic refusal to interpret. For more comments on the pedagogical function, see here.) The fact that this approach went from strength to strength as a calculating tool does not mean that its interpretive framework, the one that said that probabilities are the fundamental objects and there is no use going deeper, has been proved, any more than the success of Maxwell’s equations proved the existence of molecular vortices in the luminiferous aether. In particular, proponents of the Copenhagen Interpretation have tended to ignore the fact that they are helping themselves to a supposedly primitive concept, probability, that is actually complex, strange, and sorely in need of physical foundations.

Certainly one powerful strain of modern work on the foundations of physics — in particular, the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics (cf. David Wallace’s The Emergent Multiverse) also rejects the notion that there is some randomness at the core of quantum mechanics, and takes as a point of departure the entanglement theory first proposed in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment.

* Einstein wrote, “Die Theorie liefert viel, aber dem Geheimnis des Alten bringt sie uns kaum näher. Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, daß der nicht würfelt.“ Literally: “The theory gives us much, but it hardly brings us nearer to the Ancient One’s secret. In any case, I am convinced that he does not throw dice.”

Sex education and the multiverse

I recently read and enjoyed David Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity, a tour d’horizon of quantum physics and philosophy of science, brewed up with a remarkably persuasive idiosyncratic worldview, even if it does descend into a slightly cranky and increasingly ignorant rant on politics and economics by the end. This was my first introduction to the “multiverse”, which seems to be the modern version of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I was impressed at how cogent this picture has become since I last interested myself for quantum mechanics and its philosophical interpretations in my teens.

It might not be right, but it does lay down a marker against the Copenhagen interpretation — position and path don’t exist except when measured,  wave-particle “duality”, etc. — which in comparison seems more like a counsel of despair than a physical theory in any meaningful sense.

In thinking about it, I realised that I’ve long had the feeling that the Copenhagen interpretation was more than anything the physics educator’s version of chastity education: not a real solution, but mainly a way to avoid dealing with parents yelling “Your teacher told you what?!”

Post-Newtonian politics, or, Psychopathology and national security

A short addendum to the comment about the seemingly counter-productive tactics of the US and European security apparatus in its attack on everyone involved in the Snowden NSA-document affair. Inspired by remarks of John Quiggin, I observed that we can’t understand what is happening when we view the state as a unitary goal-directed entity. Much of what is going on now can only be interpreted as eruptions of an internal power struggle, where the security services feel threatened, and are throwing their weight around.

Talking about throwing weight around puts one in mind of celestial mechanics. Under most circumstances we can consider planets as being simple objects, a mass located at a single point, the so-called centre of mass, whose motion is defined by a single momentum vector. It is only when we look at the fine structure, long-term behaviour, or extreme events that we need to consider the internal disposition of the mass. So it is with governments, that we may incline to see as unitary objects moved by the single will of the president or prime minister. Of course, political theorists and historians know that even the most extreme dictatorship has factions and power structures that shape the master’s will.

The analogy has been applied to the philosophy of mind. Two decades ago Philosopher Daniel Dennett introduced the definition of the self as a “center of narrative gravity”. We have intuitive models of human psychology that work, like Newton’s Laws, to predict people’s behaviour without reference to their complex inner life. Thus, if I arrange to meet you at a restaurant at 6, it suffices for me to have a few high-level beliefs about you — you want to see me, you know where the restaurant is, you have a watch — to predict that you will be there at about 6. I don’t need to concern myself with your inner life, and, in fact, for me to do so would be intrusive. It is only when behaviour becomes pathological that the unitary self loses traction.

Similarly, the pathological outbursts of the security apparatus (calling them “services” suggest that they are serving someone other than themselves, which is doubtful) force us to consider the complex power relations between government institutions.

We need to turn to some unemployed old kremlinologists to understand our own governments.