Fake It til You Make It

Bordo - Chinese Graffiti

It sounds like what they're saying here is that people don't want science, they want bad science. I should rephrase - money doesn't want good science, but people do. Social science in particular, is in a bit of a pickle these days (see the replication crisis).

This also sounds a lot like the word of the year for 2016, post-truth, related to 'truthiness' and referencing a world where emotional reaction has more traction that cold hard facts. This is something we've always known, albeit at times in our cultural unconscious. We make things that fight this, I'm sure people like Bejamin Franklin, newspaper editor, had something to say about it. But our defenses have been lacking, and could use a rethink.

Here from The Guardian:

Smaldino cites an experiment by the American psychologist Daryl Bem, who purported to show that undergraduates could predict the future and published the result in a prestigious journal.

"What he found was the equivalent of flipping a bunch of pennies, nickels, and quarters, asking students to guess heads or tails each time, and then reporting that psychic abilities exist for pennies, but not nickels and quarters, because the students were right 53% of the time for the pennies, rather than the expected 50%. It’s insane,” said Smaldino. “Bem used exactly the same standards of evidence that all social psychologists were using to evaluate their findings. And if those standards allowed this ridiculous a hypothesis to make the cut, imagine what else was getting through.”

Cut-throat academia leads to 'natural selection of bad science', claims study
The Guardian, Sep 2016
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/21/cut-throat-academia-leads-to-natural-selection-of-bad-science-claims-study

Facts vs Values in Science

Science, performing some social hygiene:
(and using what else but climate change as the primary example)

Better scientific policy decisions start with knowing facts from values
phys.org, Aug 2013

When gathering public input on policy questions, scientists can speak with authority about facts, but must remember that everyone is an expert when it comes to values.

"Using climate change as an example, a scientist could say, 'The climate is changing.' That's a fact that can be checked," said Thomas Dietz, a member of the MSU Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS) and professor of sociology, environmental science and policy, and animal studies.

"But if a scientist says, 'We need to take these actions to halt climate change because it's affecting what people care about,' that's a value. And scientists have no more authority to speak about values than anyone else. Everyone is qualified to speak about values."

Bringing values and deliberation to science communication, Thomas Dietz, 2013
This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, “The Science of Science Communication,” held May 21–22, 2012, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. The complete program and audio files of most presentations are available on the NAS Web site at www.nasonline.org/science-communication.

see also:
Anthropogenic Metadata on Climate Science
aka The Low-Hanging Fruit of Neuro-Pop in the Age of Big Datty
July 21, 2013

High-Stakes Testing as the Inverse of Morality

On this day, as

Newark teachers union approves landmark contract offering merit pay bonuses,

and

3 Newark charter school officials investigated for cheating breached test security…

I think a lot about cheating in school, and have very strong opinions about it, usually falling into the category of ‘I don’t care if people cheat, because everyone is cheating at something’. I have been thinking also of things quantum-mechanical in nature, about self-fulfilling prophecy and the like. One day I read the article below. The next day I woke up with a thought in my head that read as such:

High-Stakes Testing is the Inverse of Morality

Most assertions that come from unconsciousness are not befitting of explanation and theoretical underpinning. Once I woke up with the maxim: “The active chemical in Listerine can be found between the lips of two people kissing.” Once else, however: “Bombs don’t scare people; people scare people.” Needless to say, in light of the way things seem to be working around here (i.e. American Politics and its utter disregard for truth in favor of a simply constructed story), I really don’t feel the need to explain why this is true, just that it is. And so, once again, the third time really is the charm, according to the basic tenets of advertising, at least:

High-Stakes Testing is the Inverse of Morality

After all, truth is only a thing that has been repeated many times.

links:

Stuyvesant Students Describe the How and the Why of Cheating

Vivian Yee, September 25, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/education/stuyvesant-high-school-students-describe-rationale-for-cheating.html

Newark teachers union approves landmark contract offering merit pay bonuses

Jeanette Rundquist/The Star-Ledger, November 14, 2012

http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2012/11/newark_school_merit_pay_contra.html

3 Newark charter school officials investigated for cheating breached test security

Jessica Calefati/The Star-Ledger, November 13, 2012

http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2012/11/3_newark_charter_school_offici.html

Quantum Pedagogical Theory

http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/11/quantum-pedagogical-theory.html

Quantum Pedagogical Theory

WE BEGIN with a glimpse at the future of education:

The Global Arbitrage of Online Work

Quentin Hardy, OCTOBER 10, 2012

Recently two of the biggest online staffing companies, oDesk and Elance, have released surveys concerning the companies that hire workers over the Internet to do things like write software, and the mindset of online workers themselves.

[...]

 Education alone probably won’t help you get hired. Only 6 percent of the survey respondents rated schooling as a “very important” reason to hire someone. It was the lowest-rated reason to hire someone. Work experience was first, followed by how other people rated the contractor, pay, portfolio of work, references, and scores on skills tests that oDesk offers online.

In the future, having a degree may be helpful, but having a reputation will be even better.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/the-global-arbitrage-of-online-work/

NOW for the real subject at hand:

It’s Not Me, It’s You [aka "conditional stupidity"]

Annie Murphy Paul, October 6, 2012

Experiments show that when people report feeling comfortable with a conversational partner, they are judged by those partners and by observers as actually being more witty.

It’s just one example of the powerful influence that social factors can have on intelligence. As parents, teachers and students settle into the school year, this work should prompt us to think about intelligence not as a “lump of something that’s in our heads,” as the psychologist Joshua Aronson puts it, but as “a transaction among people.”

-truth, people, social dynamics, reality, the construction of reality, ‘quantum’

-truth becomes irrelevant. you tell them they are smart, and they become smart

-ignore the truth, make shit up, and watch it become reality

"Mr. Aronson, an associate professor at New York University, has been a leader in investigating the effects of social forces on academic achievement. Along with the psychologist Claude Steele, he identified the phenomenon known as “stereotype threat.” Members of groups believed to be academically inferior — African-American and Latino students enrolled in college, or female students in math and science courses — score much lower on tests when reminded beforehand of their race or gender."

-if you believe you are inferior, you will score lower on tests.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/opinion/sunday/intelligence-and-the-stereotype-threat.html?_r=0

please follow to the next logical extension:

High-Stakes Testing as the Inverse of Morality

http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/11/high-stakes-testing-as-inverse-of.html

Truth, Belief and Society

Truth butters no parsnips and legitimates no social arrangements. There are at least 2 reasons for this. One is the failure of genuine knowledge to be subservient. The second is that publicly accessible truth fails to separate members of a community from non-members. (p272)

Plough, Sword and Book
Ernest Gellner
U. of Chicago Press
1988

New and Improved

“It’s not reality, but it works better…”,

Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Mind, RSA, TED, 2011

And so we must ask, in essence, are not things seen in terms of their usefulness as opposed to whether they are true or false?

Virus of the Mind

Richard Brodie, 1996

Introduction: Crisis of the Mind

-Viruses of the mind, and the whole science of memetics, represent a major paradigm shift in the science of the mind (p15).

-Once created, a virus of the mind gains a life independent of its creator and evolves quickly to infect as many people as possible (p17).

-Even mindless stubbornness is immunity against only some kinds of mind viruses.

“Birth of a New Paradigm”

1.Complacency/Marginalization [Indifference]

2.Ridicule

3.Criticism

4.Acceptance

GENE – basic building block of LIFE – biological programming/bio-replicator – body/physical/natural

MEME – basic building block of CULTURE – mental programming/psycho-replicator – mind/non-physical/artificial

Chapter 1: Memes

[The science of memetics is the mind-universe’s analogue to Genetics, which studies the same thing about genes in the Biological Universe.]

Dawkins’ BIOLOGICAL Definition:

The meme is the basic unit of cultural transmission, or imitation

Plotkins’ PSYCHOLOGICAL Definition:

The meme is the basic unit of cultural heredity analogous to the gene. It is the internal [artificial, mindspace] representation of knowledge

Dennet’s COGNITIVE Definition:

The meme is an idea, the kind of complex idea that forms itself into a distinct memorable [memory…] unit. It is spread by vehicles that are physical manifestations of the meme.

Brodie’s WORKING Definition:

The meme is a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds.

MEME:

An attitude, idea or belief (p48)

On Plotkin:

Under this definition, memes are to a human’s behavior what our genes are to your bodies: internal representations of knowledge that result in outward effects on the world [Dawkins Extended Phenotype].

Genes are hidden, internal pieces of information stored in an embryo that result, with the influence of its environment, in the flesh and blood of the developed organism. Memes are hidden, internal representations of knowledge that result, again along with environmental influence, in external behavior and the production of cultural artifacts such as skirts and bridges. If I look around and see short skirts, that might cause the predication of a meme in my mind that short skirts are in fashion. But the meme is in my mind, not on [Megan Fox’s] body [that would be instead the extended phenotype of the meme] (p29).

[Controlling the mind is the best way to control behavior (not just controlling the body, as genes do) and since the ability to emulate and imitate (and with the advent of consciousness, to empathize) is unique to humans (at least in the capacity that we hold). Controlling the behavior, via the mind, is the best way to manipulate other humans]. (captain obvious?)

Chapter 2: Mind and Behavior

“Peer Pressure”

When people get immersed in a culture (like any company or job or high school) with strong memes it tends to be a sink or swim proposition. Either you change your mind, succumbing to peer pressure and adopting the new memes as your own, or you struggle with the extremely uncomfortable feeling of being surrounded by people who think you’re crazy or inadequate (p48). [I like how crazy is the inverse of inadequate.]

-“distinction memes” form a perceptual filter

-Mind viruses thrive on your belief that its memes are true (p53).

[How does this relate to 'realism' in art or via Kahler’s Narrative, the tendency of the author to try and make their work as ‘believable’ as possible? And see below on Ch.4Evolution…]

Chapter 3: Viruses

-One reason to take viruses seriously is that making copies of yourself is the most powerful force in the universe (p58).

-Anywhere there is copying machinery; there can be viruses (p59).

-For billions of years it was DNA that was being copied (p60-61).

Viral Workflow (p63):

1. Viruses penetrate our minds because we are so good at learning new ideas and information.

2. They are copied by us communicating with each other, something we are getting better and better at [though I would ask what parameters measure this progress].

3. Viruses issue instructions by programming us with new memes that affect our behavior.

4. They spread when the chain of events stemming from the new behavior reaches an uninfected mind.

5. Repeat.

Cultural Viruses

Natural

Unintentional

Spontaneous

Random

Unconscious

Designer Viruses

Artificial

Human-generated intent

Conscious

Development of Culture

--sequence of ideas and discoveries that build upon one another

--a meme pool where the ideas in our heads are shaped and transported by various forces including mind viruses.

Chapter 4: Evolution

Evolution – complexity

Entropy – simplicity

[These two forces operate in both universes.]

-Is the replicator being copied (passive) or is it making copies of itself (active) (p67)?

-In copying/replicating for evolution, error is essential, but in the right amounts: too high, nothing changes; too low, the quality that made it good for replicating changes, is lost (like an office document photocopied over and over) (p67).

-Evolution requires a certain amount of both fidelity and infidelity [and this can also be related to the ‘believability’ of artists?] (p68).

Fitness in Evolution: the likelihood of being copied (p68)

-Darwin didn’t know what DNA was (p69).

An individual of a species doesn’t replicate itself, but its genes. From the selfish gene point-of-view, a human is just another way of making genes, and evolution revolves around their well being, not ours.

-We are in the end of the DNA era (almost) (p79).

-Almost all the information stored on earth was stored in DNA until ~3000 years ago (p79).

[What is information?]

Chapter 5: The Evolution of Memes

“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.” – Victor Hugo

“mental-pretzeling” – Richard Brodie

The Telephone Game is a meme-evolution in a microcosm.

Advanced cultures have smaller population growth, but the most effective cultural imperialism, spreading memes, not genes (p99).

Chapter 6: Sex: The Root of All Evolution

You are the result of an unbroken chain spanning thousands of generations of males and females who were all successful at finding a mate (p104).

Chapter 8: How We Get Programmed

The “Trojan horse” of memetic programming is characterized by the memes’ decreasing order of believability:

-We all want freedom! (credible, agreeable)

--We all want democracy to work for everyone! (less so)

---We all want every American to have the opportunity to pursue the American Dream! (even less…)

----And we all want a health care system that makes that possible!

The more questionable memes ride right in on the initial, acceptable ones (p144).

Chapter 9: Cultural Viruses

All cultural institutions, regardless of their initial design or intention (if any), evolve to have but one goal: to perpetuate themselves (p158).

On Art and Such:

When the Wizard of Oz is colored [from black and white], it changes the thing, not for the sake of its artistic expression (which ‘is’ what it is, so it’s not for the sake of the thing) but for the sake of its spreadability, or for the sake of its viewership. (The viewers prefer color…) [loosely referencing p167]

Making sense is a strong selector for memes; truth is not (p168).

[The Heliocentric Theory made no sense at all initially, but alas, over time, all the conflicting memes fell away, so far way, that we have completely forgotten our once firmly-held belief that angels and demons pushed and pulled the celestial bodies.]

News is biased, but only towards strong meme-selectors. There is no morality, no politics, no truth … no conspiracies either, just super-complex, klugey evolution (~p170).

Power Shifts in Politics

The shift of power always seems to be for a good reason at first [or else it wouldn’t be selected]. While the short-term results appeal to the majority of voters, the long-term increases in government control over yet another aspect of life is not so appealing (p182).

Chapter 10: Religion

The Religiosity Spectrum:

Vehement disbelief à useful allegory à word-of-God fundamentalism

We have an enormous hunger to understand the world around us, which was extremely useful when the world was simple and mostly consisted of physical rewards and dangers. In the society of memes, however, we are constantly trying to make sense of things that simply have no sense. …We think they make sense, because our brains haven’t had much of a chance to evolve from the time when these cultural, psychological landscapes simply didn’t exist. Se we devote huge amounts of time, money and energy trying to understand and solve meaningless problems (p191). [This is the ‘self-helper’ Brodie.]

Religious Memes and Making Sense:

Religions that have clear, handy explanations for those tough questions are much more popular than those that challenge people to think for themselves, such as Zen. The answers don’t have to be true, just easy to understand (p193)

Delusion and Self Deceit: You Are Not Immune

We all live with a certain amount of delusion and self-deceit. Maybe it’s just a matter of consciously picking the right set of delusions to point us in the direction we want to go (p107-198).