Category Archives: Sociology

Futile Railing against Machiavelli

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I’m beginning to wonder how can I honestly continue to claim that following a moral path has its own rewards and that the ends do not justify the means when the successful almost invariably tend to succeed on their loose morals – they believe that it’s ok to deceive, cheat, subvert, or even outright steal so long as they aren’t caught. When they’re caught, they then bemoan their fate, not because they were doing something wrong, but because they believe they were not clever enough to avoid capture. To state it bluntly, they have no independent moral system in place; it is tied up completely within society’s reaction to their behavior. Because they imagine that their behavior is common and because they have not been caught for all of it, they still believe themselves good people.

I know that Machiavelli observed that this is the route to power, but one of my great quests in life has been searching for ways to obtain success without compromising moral integrity – in essence, to know what Machiavelli said, but to either reconcile his advice with my morals or distance myself from it entirely. I’ve been doing it for 11 years now and I still haven’t found a satisfactory answer.

I know for a fact that my adherence to integrity limits me, but I will not deviate from my personal values for the sake of a society that will not accept them. Regardless of the rejection I’ve found (and the inevitable future rejection I will find) because I refuse to press myself into the molds people expect me to fill, I do not regret this decision any longer. No rejection can compare to what happened to me two years ago, when I was summarily shut out from my desired field and barred from what I then saw as the meaning of my life because I was very much unlike a traditional graduate student (actually, I’d argue that the difference makes me more effective, since typical graduate students have not impressed me, though on the other hand, I’ll never have anyone to exchange complex ideas with and must consequently operate in isolation), and by this time I’ve transcended that rejection sufficiently to realize that if I discard the intrinsic suffering of rejection, no further consequent suffering will touch me. I merely grieve for society itself, that it elevates such people to power!

Here's another example

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Quoth the New York Times on both perfectly valid research being ignored and how a field becomes “hot”.

The usual pattern is taking place here: first, someone comes up with new results which the scientific community either ignores or rushes to discredit because they’ve somehow got the idea that skepticism (essentially making themselves unreceptive to ideas that don’t fit with their dogma) is the best way to evaluate scientific discoveries:

“But when those tools emerged in the early 1990s, Dr. Dick found stem cells in acute myelogenous leukemia, a blood cancer. He reported that such cells made up just 1 percent of the leukemia cells and that those were the only ones that could form tumors in mice.

Yet Dr. Dick’s research, Dr. Wicha said, “was pretty much ignored.” Cancer researchers, he said, were not persuaded — and even if they had accepted the research — doubted that the results would hold for solid tumors, like those of the breast, colon, prostate or brain.”

Potential avenue that opens up all sorts of treatment possibilities presented, but they “weren’t persuaded”. Nice.

Now, wait for it…

“That changed in 1994, when Dr. Wicha and a colleague, Dr. Michael Clarke, who is now at Stanford, reported finding cancerous stem cells in breast cancer patients.

“The paper hit me like a bombshell,” said Robert Weinberg, a professor of biology at M.I.T. and a leader in cancer research. “To my mind, that is conceptually the most important paper in cancer over the past decade.””

Ah, so you “weren’t persuaded” when one person found it in AML, but if it’s in breasts, well, that’s a whole different story! Now it’s the most important paper in the past decade! After all, even if stem cells may not form in solid tumors, there must be no value in treating what is probably the most virulent form of leukemia, right? (I had described this exact sociological phenomenon of violent swings in opinion with new presentations just yesterday on a Slashdot discussion thread – also, why the disporportional emphasis on breast cancer? There are other cancers that kill many more people, have much higher fatality rates, and strike both sexes equally).

Now we see an idea becoming “hot”:

“Dr. Weinberg and others began pursuing the stem-cell hypothesis, and researchers now say they have found cancerous stem cells in cancers of the colon, head and neck, lung, prostate, brain, and pancreas.

Symposiums were held. Leading journals published paper after paper.”

Etc.

It’s a good thing they’re taking this theory seriously. It’s a bad thing that they ignored it for as long as they did because they were too convinced that they already knew everything to take a valuable hypothesis seriously. Sure, demand proof if you’d like. But don’t take absence of it or a perceived lack of quality as evidence that the hypothesis is wrong. Science is not law; the burden of proof can be taken up by others if they are not satisfied with the evidence because ultimately, we are all in this together.

Here’s another interesting tidbit from a linked article, which in my mind supports my theory that one tumor could supplant another if injected into the same site:

“They then injected laboratory-grown cancer cells into the benign tumors, which spread swiftly throughout the teratoma clusters. The result, they believe, is an ideal test bed for anticancer agents.”

This in turn supports my idea that it is possible to alter the characteristics of a tumor by harvesting and injecting particular cells. Selecting the weak in this manner can possibly make tumors more sensitive to treatment.

Still waiting on the equipment and training – or collaboration with someone who has such equipment and training – to actually test that one 🙂

More on the "Knol" thing

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Knol is that Google Wikipedia spinoff that I had foreseen about a day before it went public.

Because the site is designed essentially as a “Wikipedia with attribution”, what is going to end up happening in all likelihood is that the people who are credited with the page’s content will actually end up writing fairly little of it. It will fall to others – those working for the expert, if not the general public – to maintain these pages. If Knol becomes sufficiently popular, maintaining a Knol page will become a sort of resume-worthy badge of honor. Because this will help people’s careers, it will become another sort of paper-mill.

Of course, this is precisely the sort of result I’d expect, given the homogeneity I thought existed in Google when I visited. What we’re seeing here is likely the product of a bunch of academics attempting to apply existing concepts in scientific publishing to an online encyclopedia, probably in their 20% time. Unfortunately, as I’ve repetitively stressed, there are many significant problems in the way scientific publishing is conducted, not the least that attribution and work put into the project are often unlinked.

It’s a good idea in theory, but an awful one in practice, not to mention that fragmenting the world’s knowledge is not a good thing. Better to concentrate the efforts of an encyclopedia in one place.

More evidence for my Theory of Synchronized Spontaneity – 2008

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It’s about a month early this year, but all of the freelance requests are hitting me all at once again. It’s interesting to watch the patterns, because my (passive) freelance search is generally sparse throughout most of the year (which is fine because I usually have lots of other things to do, some of which already pay me), but becomes very active for about 3 months in the year – usually January/February, May, and July. It’s very clumpy.

Also, two more recruiters contacted me. That is right on schedule this year; November-December is when it usually begins 🙂

I wonder whether there’s some underlying subconscious cue that causes particular behavior, or if there’s just a periodic need that I’m not aware of. Nonetheless, I find it extremely interesting that society has a circadian rhythm (although I’ve always personified it in every other way, I’ve never ascribed physiological characteristics to it). Seriously. This sort of stuff makes me want to become a sociologist.

This is something I formulated a few years/iterations ago called the Theory of Synchronized Spontaneity. It was also the basis for my 11th Psychological Postulate (which is a few years old by this point): “Given the choice, people tend to perform similar tasks at similar times.”

Ideas – Basis, Rank, Power, and Community

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I began thinking about the selective nature of certain communities in terms of my “panidealist” philosophy this morning, only to come to a shocking conclusion:

Any community that enforces a single set of common beliefs through selection or coercion reduces itself to the strength of a single free-thinking individual.

Recall that my philosophy states that reality is itself an expression of various combinations of ideas. Mathematically, it is the image of a basis of ideas represented as a matrix. I’ve been told that this aspect of my philosophy is also the philosophical view of Bertrand Russel (though I’ve never read his philosophy and don’t really read philosophy in general, preferring to keep my own worldview untainted by the philosophies of others). However, what I am about to propose extends beyond his philosophy.

We can define the rank of a matrix as the number of linearly independent columns. Because the ideas underlying reality form a basis, they are, by definition, full rank. Their expression is the image of this basis, thus it is not full-rank. In other words, redundant ideas are expressed in various facets of reality (which is fine; the idea of sentience is not independent from the idea of humanity, for example).

Now let us take a community that selects for a shared set of ideas. Such selections include “fit”, personality, interests, etc.

Because all members of this community share these ideas in common, the size (and thus rank) of the basis is reduced. The more ideas are shared, the more the community’s basis approaches the size of a single individual.

Now it gets interesting: what if we define intelligence, or “cognitive power” (to differentiate it from the psychometric concept of intelligence), as the number of ideas one is simultaneously capable of expressing or creating?

We discover that an community consisting entirely of shared values is as intelligent as a single person. A community with completely independent ideas or values (deliberately selecting for people who do not match the existing basis would be the only way I can see of approaching one; actually attaining this is impossible) is full rank, and operates optimally save for the fact that any individual idea may not have enough momentum within the community to become fully expressed (a major problem). As this community introduces more redundancy, the size of the basis does not scale with the number of members, and the rank of the community remains the same despite an increasing size. Thus the average cognitive power of the community drops despite increasing membership. Negative returns.

This results in the satisfying conclusion (if the premises are correct, which is a philosophical matter) that any society that continuously expands its membership while selecting for particular ideas will ultimately run itself into the ground, possibly to be overcome by the thought of a single individual.

As Ayn Rand puts it at the end of Anthem, “For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.”

Social Aggregate Optimization – Society as a Neural Net

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In general, individuals can be seen as optimizing a specific (very complicated) constraint function. That is, people in general desire security, health, wealth, fame, etc. and will actively work towards these goals. Now, this is interesting because not everyone is optimizing on the same constraint; however, there are a set of common traits that will on average always factor into the optimization. At the level of an individual, aspects of the constraint that do not fall within this average area are noise, and will have little or no significant impact on the overall optimization.

So we have a bunch of people essentially performing regression on some unknown but deterministic constraint. What happens when we connect them (a “social network” formed by interaction with others)?

We get a neural network, of course! Thus society is, in a very strong sense (because humans are so much better at intelligent behavior than computers are at the moment), intelligent.

Treating society as a neural net, we can extend some properties of neural nets formally to society:

1. The “Social Limit Theorem” – as more people interact and participate in a society, the society becomes capable of modeling more and more complex problems; its appearance becomes more “intelligent”. It’s merely an extension of a well-known property of a neural network, but can be rigorously proven with bias-variance decomposition. The consequence of this is overfitting and “brittle” behavior, as in a traditional neural net; the society becomes unable to adapt to new situations / patterns easily. This leads to the rather pervasive and positively deplorable social inertia that we are unfortunately exposed to on a daily basis. It is the reason an entrenched sociological philosophy, of any sort (political, economic, ethical, environmental, etc.) cannot easily change. It also explains why the ideals of one society (in effect, the pattern it has learned) do not necessarily work as well in other societies; the model does not generalize well to new problems due to the complexity of the fit.

2. Formalization of the “linking postulate” (and others among my sociological postulates) – There is a clear dependency between the overall behavior of society and the behavior of the individual nodes with high weights (influential people) because the individual variance of the optimization will be more clearly expressed as the node’s weight factors more into the overall decision of the network. This has the same type of effect on overall weight propagation as changing an influential node in an abstract neural network from linear to sigmoid would, for example.

3. If the constraint can be discovered, the overall behavior of the society could conceivably be represented as an abstract neural network (with a degree of error proportional to the overall variance from the mean, probably modeled by a normal distribution), though this may be computationally intractable due to the sheer size, number of interactions, and overall complexity of the optimization. Still, it may be possible to obtain a practical approximation.

4. This answers my previous question of how a society composed of primarily individualistic members could exhibit a fairly optimal behavior on the scale of the entire society while simultaneously fulfilling the individuals’ goals fairly well. The weights are modified as necessary for the optimization of the entire network; this optimization is performed by the individuals attempting to optimize their own goals. For example, people going to work do so to achieve financial stability and monetary gain. However, the amount of pay they receive depends on their benefit to their employer, which itself depends on the profitability of the organization, which depends on the organization’s benefit to the society. Thus, so long as society’s constraint ties local optimization to global optimization, the society will continue to progress.

There are some other consequences of this as well, but I have to get back to my dissertation.

Content lock-in is becoming ridiculous

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So apparently I now need to hack my phone in order to transfer ringtones of my own songs that I performed to my own phone.

Verizon claims that copying ringtones on the SD card is not permitted because it would violate artists’ rights.

What artists? What rights?

I’m thinking of returning the phone.

Update: BitPim to the rescue!

"Fit", "Broader Impacts"

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The world would be a much better place if everyone stopped worrying about whether ideas “fit” the purposes of their specific organization / community and simply accepted them on their perceived merit (again, my philosophy holds that the absolute merit of an idea is inestimable).

And I’d love it if I could stop having to explain how my theoretical computer science research helps every minority under the sun (but not white males; that’s taboo). First of all, it’s very difficult to explain how developing a streaming kernel PCA algorithm helps starving children in Africa. Second, my research ultimately helps everyone (by adding to knowledge, which can then be used in all sorts of ways) or no one (if nothing is ever developed on them). Which is the case depends entirely on how these ideas are used.

If these things are more important than the quality of the research, it’s no wonder the USA is losing its technical edge!

The first online election will be the end of democracy

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Politicians are already up to some dirty tricks online, including phishing, spam mail with misleading information, and Joe jobs. This indicates to me that the first online election (and one will have to happen sooner or later) will be the end of democracy in this country, to be replaced by a society in which the person most able to hack the election wins.

In effect, a technocracy.

20th Psychological Postulate

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“Trends begin when someone does the impossible”.

In other words, you gain a following when you do something that no one else had even considered doing previously, either because it was too much effort, was seen as intractable, or just didn’t make sense to anyone before it was done.

I was looking for the reason trends began in the sciences; what finally allowed me to come to this realization wasn’t science at all, but was watching difficult problem solving trends among players in a game that I run. One player is invariably required to prove that solving a puzzle is possible at all, then the rest follow.

It’s a useful microcosm, and an example of what I like to call the principle of universality: you can derive nearly any idea from any area you choose, so long as you keep an open mind.