A Better Age of Daughters

My heart was warmed recently by a surprise invitation to a gathering of young ladies I used to teach. These young ladies are now in their thirties, and still as pretty as I remember them. Yes, I said this, even though in today's climate saying that your students are pretty immediately makes people want to call the police.

The thing is that I was brought up to be honest especially in the matter of compliments, whether accepting or offering. You could stretch irony, sarcasm, self-deprecation and suchlike only so far, because it was understood that humility was right but that pretence was not. And so if you said someone was clever, you had better have meant it; and if someone said you were a well-behaved young man, you said, "At the moment."

I remember the moment of crystal clarity when I realised I was not particularly good-looking but also not particularly ugly. I sought comfort in the phrase 'pleasantly ugly'. 'Somewhat uninteresting' was my second choice.

The other thing is that my paternal grandfather in particular encouraged us to see the good in people. That extended to trying to see people in the best light not only metaphorically but aesthetically. You looked them over until you could capture the best memory of them — something which modern digital photography tends to obviate by saturation bombing.

And so, yes, the students I remember were pretty. All of them. In different ways. And they have grown up well, and I am happy for them and the surprise invitation I received.

Responses 003 (2011-2012)

Question 3 of the list says: "Using history and at least one other area of knowledge, examine the claim that it is possible to attain knowledge despite problems of bias and selection."

This is certainly one of the most straightforward of the questions in the list. All that needs to be considered is how the idea of knowledge is framed — how do you know that something is knowledge, and how do problems of bias and selection act as obstacles to attaining it?

One paradigm I've always found useful is to think of knowledge as information that has found a purpose, and information as data (singular: datum) that have found a context. If you say that Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore in 1819, that's information. If you can find a use for that, it's knowledge.

The thing is that whether you approach knowledge this way or not, it is based on the methods by which we accumulate data and the means by which we structure the data into information. When we accumulate data, we almost always carrying out filtering processes in deciding what to keep and what to ignore — that's the 'selection problem'. When we do this such that it tends to provide a specific kind of direction or answer, that's the 'bias problem'.

If either of these problems arises, in any of the many ways they can, then the information space is compromised. It may have missing pieces, irrelevant pieces, missing but relevant pieces, relevant pieces that support only one side of an argument, and so on. When we purposefully act on the information we have constructed, we create knowledge, and when our information is compromised, so is our knowledge. Compromised knowledge... is that knowledge at all?

Consider the fable of the emperor with no clothes. All the evidence provided (interviews, first-person accounts) seems to say that that emperor is wearing perfect clothing. However, once selection and bias are dealt with appropriately, it turns out that there is actually no direct evidence for such a belief. The database, so to speak, is compromised. In fact, empirical research shows the emperor has no clothes at all (or prefers walking around naked even if he has clothes).

History, in particular, has got problems with selection and bias. It is a construct made with a clear purpose in mind — to tell a story, to prove a point, based on putting together evidence for past events. To that end, we select the contents of our database based on criteria such as relevance and what the preponderance of existing evidence seems already to show. We have our own ideas of what is reasonable, what is acceptable, and so on. Then we create a narrative.

But all historians are human agents selecting from a vast graveyard of bones to build perfect skeletons. We discard splintered bones and ambiguous artifacts where it seems convenient to do so. This may indeed give us the skeletons we seek. However, are those the real skeletons? Or are they merely what we think they ought to be?

The same is true to a lesser extent for the hard sciences and to a greater extent for the social sciences and humanities. That is where the person answering this question has to examine the claim critically, pointing out the differences between methods of knowledge acquisition and criteria for defining knowledge in each discipline.

Strangely enough, the vaguer the definition of knowledge, the less impact bias has on the outcome. After all, if we don't define knowledge sharply, errors to the database are less important. Look at the range of knowledge in the aesthetic disciplines for example, ranging from the hard technical aspects to the subjective evaluation of performance and style. It's easy to say whether a candidate has knowledge of the technical aspects; it's almost definite that a candidate who has created new knowledge cannot be evaluated correctly.

Disincentivization

I amused myself this morning, to the detriment of productivity, by looking at ugly words while anticipating even uglier ones. Although there are many ugly words in circulation, and people have taken to banning what they think are the more egregious ones (like 'czar' when used to denote a multidisciplinary bureaucrat, or the equivalent), there are few that actually hurt the brain and the eyes which are the windows thereto.

One such word is the title of this post. It is aesthetically ugly. It has hidden connotations which are etymologically unsound. It has nothing to do with innocents, incense, cents, or the like. It has to be considered cautiously in order to be parsed correctly. Yes, indeed, it does refer to the practice, process or state of having incentive(s) removed.

Surely the disciples of Gowers et al can mount an effective response? If not, we are all doomed. Or at the very least, disincentivized.

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Note: Technically, it should be 'disincentivised', since the core word (incentivus, 'to strike up a tune') is Latin and shouldn't have a suffix equivalent to Greek -izein, which does have a 'z'.

Modeling The World: Part III

After looking at the hypothetical-predictive and historical-legal models of the world, it would seem that we should stop there. This is because these models of the world are eminently reasonable; they correspond to our experience and there is no aspect of our experience that cannot be brutalised into submission by one of these models until it fits nicely.

That said, some aspects of our experience have proven rather resistant to brutalisation, and in some cases have given as good as they got. I tend to lump them together, for the purposes of discussion and not out of personal belief or bias, into a single model which I call the aesthetic-religious model. The key point of this kind of model is that it looks at the world and fills in the blanks.

"What blanks?" the skeptic from another model's perspective would ask. "After all, we can either research the blank till it is not blank anymore, or we can dig into our experience until we fill it in."

The problem with that, of course, is that it would involve extrapolation or interpolation; in other words, whatever we fill the blanks with, it must be something we already know something about. This leaves little space for pure intuition, inspiration or invention. The third kind of model supplies all three; such a model shows the world as we would instinctively want it to be — in terms of meaning, structure, and belief.

The aforementioned skeptic will scoff. To such a person, intuition is only subconscious correlation of known material, inspiration is the same but with religious taint, and invention is the creative engineering outcome of interpolation/extrapolation. But the fact is that everything we say is 'subconscious' or 'religious' or 'creative' has no known basis in either model. We are asked to assume that they do, but we cannot prove it under the terms of either model.

Look at art, music, religion and dozens of other disciplines and ideas which spring from the human psyche. There have been multitudinous attempts to relate them to brain function, neurobiology, genetic tendency, social behaviour, economic reward, mathematical strange attractors and other chunks of the other two models. Yet the attempt to relate and correlate without actual proof of complete relationship is egregiously flawed.

For a start, it assumes that either of the first two models is already a successful model. Hence it must be true that the third model is redundant. Since the third model does not aim to predict, interpolate or extrapolate from 'known fact', it must be inferior since it cannot be tested in that way. And if you test it by human 'feeling' then it must be an artifact of neurochemistry. And so on. In other words, the third model is constantly being derided and denigrated simply because it isn't susceptible to the kind of proving or testing associated with the first two.

The second problem is that this aesthetic-religious kind of model is not consistent. If it were consistent, it would be a subset of one of the other models. But true creativity, inspiration, or intuition can only be justified in terms of the other two models retrospectively. You cannot use the other two models to 'make' creativity, inspiration or intuition — by their own definition, you cannot predict such things, and if they were predictable or patternable, they'd not be what they are.

The third problem is one used by many skeptics; it isn't really a problem, it's more of an ad hominem attack. It follows this line, more or less: "What has your aesthetic-religious model done for mankind? In fact, it seems to have made matters worse, or not improved things at best." That's a silly argument. It isn't particularly scientific or historical, since it all boils down to human behaviour. The human history of warfare shows the first two models at their worst. It is hard to say whether religion or art makes the human experience feel better, but it seems to work.

In the long run, for better or worse, we look at the world through these three lenses. They are all incomplete despite having strong advantages of their own. It is perhaps better to use all three in different proportions to see how we can make the world a better place. And if that sounds weak, consider what happens if we were to stick to only one model and follow it headlong to its obvious denouement.

Annular Inspection

The Latin word annulus means 'ring'. This was one of the many fascinating facts that bubbled to the surface in a virtual chat with my fellow Family assassin and healthcare hotshot, the Hobbit. Actually, the Hobbit was fulminating in his dry, wry, and painfully humorous witty way about 'aesthetic haemorrhoidectomies'.

To spare you a long trawl with many misspellings through a Google search, here is a link which may have relevance. You will get the point if you think about it (or around it) carefully.

In a nutshell (haha), the Hobbit was complaining about how people were doing certain procedures just to make themselves more appealing in rather outré ways. I cut off his fulminations by asking, "So you mean that people actually cut out their you-know-whats in order to..."

He cut back in. "Yes, to make themselves perfect *******s." Ho ho.

Visual Acuity

There are many ways to see things. This makes some people see things that are not there. It even makes people see things that are there, but ought not to be - and of course, see things that are not, but should be. This is what beauty is all about.

There are too many plain girls and ugly guys simply because they cannot see that grace and chivalry outweigh fluff and prettiness. Yes, blondes have more fun; yes, men sometimes "don't make passes / at girls who wear glasses." But for a species whose visual acuity can detect the change of a single photon, and whose imagination populates a universe with endless ghosts and tortured ambitions, we can be pretty silly about deciding when not to see beauty - even when we can choose to see it.

Here I stand, a pleasantly ugly fellow of no great prospect and no high ambition. But God made me, and empowered me with the divine and controversial spark, a spark that defies the material and mundane and ignites high and peculiar creativity at will. And each of these - my brethren, my sisters - are likewise empowered, likewise able to be filled of an essence which can rewrite the meaning of life in a flash.

O take heart, my brothers and sisters; lift up your eyes! Raise the weak things of the earth against the great, shape the foolish things as weapons against the wise, celebrate the day of small things. The little instruments of profession and craft, given unto our willing hands, can make sanctuaries and citadels in a world which prefers to tear down and destroy. Go, go and read about Zerubbabel. And see, with blinding sight.