Gelernter’s Law (and John Brockman’s merit)
Gelernter's First Law
Computers make people stupid.
Gelernter's Second Law
One expert is worth a million intellectuals. (This law is only approximate.)
Gelernter's Third Law
Scientists know all the right answers and none of the right questions.
(David Gelernter's answer to the 2004 edition of John Brockman's Annual Question on Edge.org: What's your Law?)
Note about John Brockman:
When you first read or hear about John Brockman, you immediatly start to feel intimidated by the gravitational force he is exercising in the contemporary intellectual world of the American Intelligentsia. I don't want to forestall the adventure in scribbling a litany of things he has done and is still doing and thereby preventing you to find out yourself who he is and if he's important to you. It is enough to remark that he's one of the amazing personalities, like TED's founder Richard S. Wurman, who are the chief editors of many intellectual public debates and through their activities are multipliers of ideas and people of interest today. A suggestion from my part for the 2014 Annual Question would be: How to revitalize and strengthen Democracy in our Digital Age? Insofar: Keep it up, Mr. Brockman!
Linked – the Sociology of Networks
As Albert-László Barabási in his study about networks pointed out1, scale-free networks are one of the most fascinating things in nature. And since the invention of the ARPANET and all following LANs that created the Internet with its architectural framework usually known as the WWW and with the help of a wisely established DNS to organize machines into domains and map host names onto IPs2, a human built scale-free network of networks is shaping and making our social life.
And since then a lot of companies are in the network business. From the European perspective there is still the dominance of Facebook, defining a major part of the online social media connections that people are daily nurturing with Likes and Timeline updates. Although the universe of social media networks has very different continents and dynamics (see e. g. the panel discussion of this years DLD13 conference on "How Social Media is changing China and Asia" – they all share the same economics of the online market. As more companies are hunting for market share, the pressure on all participants, users and companies, is growing.
Since market share in the online world equals mindshare, this development poses some critical sociological questions, especially in the scope of artificial intelligence and our social competence.David Kirkpatrick in his story about Facebook3 provides a good allegory for this tension between machine intelligence and our social intelligence. He's quoting Peter Thiel, one of Facebook's board members and visionary about the company's future, and although talking about different conceptual foundation between Google and Facebook, I am tempted to read this passage more allegorically than it was probably intended. Here is the quote:
"At its core Google believes that at the end of this globalization process the world will be centered on computers, and computers will be doing everything. That is probably one of the reasons Google has missed the boat on the social networking phenomenon. I don't want to denigrate Google. The Google model is that information, organizing the world's information, is the most important thing.
The Facebook model is radically different. One of the things that is critical about good globalization in my mind is that in some sense humans maintain mastery over technology, rather than the other way around. The value of the company economically, politically, culturally – whatever – stems from the idea that people are the most important thing. Helping the world's people self-organize is the most important thing." (Chap. 17)
These are interesting insights in the epistemological backbones of two big players in the network market. Maybe we are becoming more and more artificially intelligent – and maybe our algorithms create more and more social forces than we ever imagined. We'll see…
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1. See: Linked: New Science of Networks, 2002.
2. See: Computer networks 5ed., Andrew S. Tanenbaum, David J. Wetherall, Prentice Hall, 2011, p. 54-75.
3. David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook effect: the inside story of the company that is connecting the world, Simon and Schuster, 2010, chap. 17.
Surprising dialectics in a McDonalds Burger
You always wanted Philosophy to be more practical? Well, what about spending some time of your first graduate year in one of todays many fast food restaurants? What about spending some time at McDonalds? Maria Exner, a young journalist for the German newspaper "Die Zeit", describes some epistemological lessons that can be pulled out of going once in a while to a McDonalds restaurant. Well, one has to do some contemplation there – but it's working.
There probably isn't a translation of this article, but if you have some German basics, give it a try. You'll find a wonderful example how Philosophy enters into the economic realm. For a starter have a look at this McDo marketing production and then go the article (if somebody wants to have a translation I'll try my best to do it; just leave a message!).
Behind the scenes at a McDonald's photo shoot:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8]
Article: Das also ist des Burgers Kern
Notes on Nudging
or Why the "publicity principle" is their strongest argument
Thaler and Sunstein provide an interesting thought in the concluding chapter of their book on nudges. Guided by their principles of libertarian paternalism and their ground belief in"transparency" they reflect a maybe crucial doubt of the idea to nudge people, namely if nudging isn't manipulating people in a way that subliminal advertising does its job? It's quite a quandary if they point to their good will and hoping that all's well that ends well.
I'll quote from their defence that motivates a lot of thought in their book:
“Our own libertarian condition, requiring low-cost opt-out rights, reduces the steepness of the ostensibly slippery slope. Our proposals are emphatically designed to retain freedom of choice. In many domains, from education to environmental protection to medical malpractice to marriage, we would create such freedom where it does not now exist. So long as paternalistic interventions can be easily avoided by those who seek to adopt a course of their own, the risks decried by antipaternalists are modest. Slippery-slope arguments are most convincing when it is not possible to distinguish the proposed course of action from abhorrent, unacceptable, or scary courses of action. Because libertarian paternalists retain freedom of choice, we can say, with conviction, that our own approach opposes the most objectionable kinds of government intervention.[…] In many cases, some kind of nudge is inevitable, and so it is pointless to ask government simply to stand aside. Choice architects, whether private or public, must do something. If the government is going to adopt a prescription drug plan, some sort of choice architecture must be put in place. With respect to pollution, rules have to be established, even if only to say that polluters face no liability and may pollute with impunity. Even if states dispensed with both marriage and civil unions, contract law would have to be available to say what disbanding couples owe each other (if anything).Often life turns up problems that people did not anticipate. Both private and public institutions need rules to determine how such situations are handled. When those rules seem invisible, it is because people find them so obvious and so sensible that they do not see them as rules at all. But the rules are nonetheless there, and sometimes they are not so sensible.” (Thaler and Sunstein, p. 237)
The flipside of this sometimes "invisible" nature of choice architecture makes it prone to critic. Here is where the authors see the problem, when they are asking themselves:
"So do we embrace subliminal advertising—so long as it is in the interest of desirable ends? What limits should be placed on private or public manipulation as such? A general objection to libertarian paternalism, and to certain kinds of nudges, might be that they are insidious—that they empower government to maneuver people in its preferred directions, and at the same time provide officials with excellent tools by which to accomplish that task. Compare subliminal advertising to something just as cunning. If you want people to lose weight, one effective strategy is to put mirrors in the cafeteria. When people see themselves in the mirror, they may eat less if they are chubby. Is this okay? And if mirrors are acceptable, what about mirrors that are intentionally unflattering? (We seem to run into more of those every year.) Are such mirrors an acceptable strategy for our friend Carolyn in the cafeteria? If so, what should we think about flattering mirrors in a fast food restaurant?" (p. 244)
The good news are that besides their doubts they opt for a strategy which they name after a concept of John Rawls "publicity principle", that is exposing and defending publicly their proposals, which honors them not only as good scientist.
In the end there remain two convictions: 1. "understanding of choice architecture, and the power of nudges, will lead others to think of creative ways to improve human lives" (p. 252) and 2."nudging" is worth a continuous research! (Follow their blog under: http://nudges.org)
David Foster Wallace: ‘A voyage into our economic realm’ or ‘How to understand Business through Fiction’
Once you listened to D.F.W.'s reflections in his essays and arguments you come to understand step by step the realistic force of a fictional style today. D.F.W.' writing responds to specific features of our "lifeworld", often comes as a kind of voyage into the economic realm of the American Society of the 90' and thereby reconfigures and shake the cultural self awareness of his readers. The prominent staging of media-topics in his work is more than affirmative or a neo-postmodern technique. Imaging the televisual realm is a response, "an effort to impose some sort of accountability on the state of affairs in which more Americans get their news from television than from newspapers and in which more Americans every evening watch Wheel of Fortune than all three network news programs combined."1
The disfiguration and adaption of many televisual aspects in his works is part of a fictional technique that is more powerful than a brute realistic try to collect data of what people do today. What D.F.W. calls Image-Fiction has a reflective surplus, that takes into account a state of affairs of our cultural realm, that already blinds us and leaves us with a naïve realism. Let's listen to D.F.W. himself.
"Image-Fiction is a natural adaptation of the hoary techniques of literary Realism to a '90s world whose defining boundaries have been deformed by electric signal. For one of realistic fiction's big jobs used to be to afford easements across borders, to help readers leap over the walls of self and locale and show us unseen or -dreamed-of people and cultures and ways to be. Realism made the strange familiar. Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Walls fall-i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar-it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious Realist fiction is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in demanding fictional access behind lenses and screens and headlines and reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, Image-Fiction is paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for "real" to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights."2
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1. David Foster Wallace, A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again, Abacus 2009 (reprint), p. 51
2. p. 51-52