Thursday, September 20, 2012

Ecological consequences of economic pressures

Human society is a complex system that consists not only of the cognitive structures we all share, but the biological substrate it runs on - biological and ecological systems are, of course, just as complex (maybe more so) than the politics and propaganda this blog is nominally about.

So ... that's a long way to say that biology is going into this blog, too.  Really, it's "complex systems" I'm looking at.

But this post is about the ecological consequences of economic pressures.  Specifically, Colony Collapse Disorder, the disappearance of about a third of the commercially operated beehives in the States over the past few years which, new studies seem to imply, looks very much due to neonicotinoids, a class of pesticide sold by Bayer.

As usual, I don't have time to do this justice.  It's been a busy week at home and I'm behind deadline on the paying work.  So ... TODO: patch this up.  The interlocking complexities are fascinating.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Look who parks their cash at Bain

OK, here's an op-ed from the NY Post that a friend posted to Facebook.  It lists organizations who invest in Bain Capital - as evidence of the hypocrisy of liberals.

This post will change as time goes on, because I want to try to dissect every meaning I can find in this article - even, and especially, things that aren't stated directly but rather implied.  This is a sort of a test run.  Later I can attempt to derive a systematic approach; this one is just going to be informal.  And today, of course, it's just a placemarker anyway.  It's midnight here in Budapest and I've had a long day.

It's just 585 words, 130 of which are a list of organizations (i.e. data).  That leaves us only 455 words of politically charged text to dissect, plus the seven-word title.  You'd think that would be short, but I'm guessing it won't be, once we really tear it open.  Political text is fractal in nature.

I plan to run this by some other people later.  Especially if you're conservative, if you're reading this, your input will be extremely valuable.  Since I'm not conservative (well - that's complicated), there will be things I miss.

In the end, I very much doubt that a blog will be the right place to do this kind of analysis.  This is more of a semantic database thing - unfortunately, the only common tool I know of that meets that description is a Wiki, which I suspect is too coarse-grained for this purpose.  So I'll probably end up having to write one.

A short note on "implied meaning", which I slid right past up there.  Language consists of two sets of "propositions" (logical jargon that mostly means "statements").  Well, that's oversimplifying.  But by and large, there are the statements on the surface (in the article, "Democrats convened in Charlotte" is a phrase that states a fact - the Democrats demonstrably convened in Charlotte and the vast majority of people are probably not going to dispute that), and the implied statements.  An implication in this article might be "will double down on their claim", which means a couple of things: 1. They claim a state of affairs that the author implies is not true (otherwise it wouldn't be a "claim", it would be an insight, maybe, or their knowledge), and 2. they are playing it like a game, "doubling down" meaning not only the gamesmanship, but also the fact that they are embattled with this claim (implying the Forces of Good who are successfully showing their claim to be false) but stubbornly pushing it through because it's all they got, thin reed that it is.

That's 85 words I just wrote about 6 words of the article, and it's not even all I can pick out of it.  But my point here is not that the implied meaning is voluminous - but that it is by its very nature controversial.  Other people will see other implications (I think - maybe not here, but they certainly must elsewhere).  So really, there should be a way to indicate who drew a particular implication and what that shows about the lens that person is reading through.

It's probably not even doable, is it?

A pause for breath

OK, so that's the list of links that have been piling up lately with nowhere to post them.  And I appear to have just outlined about four research programs that could each consume a lifetime, to wit:
  • Semantic analysis of political writings using an as-yet-unwritten NLP tool
  • A catalog of ideas permeating our present-day society: what are they, where do they come from, who believes them, who denies them?  Along with a catalog of organizations (formal or not) and pundits, I suppose.
  • Menagerie and simulation of alternative economic systems
  • Declarative description of organizations, including business models
And that's just the academic research - it entirely leaves out the construction of a new political movement based on improving the world by rejuvenating democracy and a sense of community!

So I leave you on that note, and get back to work.

Distributism

Distributism ... hm.  How to put this?  As economic/social theory, distributism ain't half bad.  Distributism, and I quote Wikipedia here, posits that "property ownership is a fundamental right and the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism) or by an elite of wealthy property owners (laissez-faire capitalism)."

The only problem is that existing distributists appear to be crazy people, judging by the first few Google results.  But an examination of possible alternative economic systems would be an interesting thing to contemplate, wouldn't it?

Open-source tools for government

More of our existing, offline social mechanisms are being reflected in software, some open-source.  That has some relevance for this blog as well.  Madison is a collaborative document-preparation tool that can be used to agree on a statement or law in a decentralized fashion; it remains to be seen how helpful it will be in fomenting democracy, but I've long thought this was a good place to start.

Open-source governance tools are another overlap with the programming blog, of course, under open government (but the tag is relatively new).  The recent SOPA episode galvanized a lot of people in the open-source community to pay attention to government.

Zynga

And then there's Farmville, or Scamville, as Michael Arrington called it in 2009.  He sketched out an entire ecosystem of empty gamification on Facebook, most of which is still happily chugging along as I write this - although this particular form seems possibly to have run its course with Zynga's troubles on the stock market.  (But here's another article just this week describing Farmville as a game that has simply dispensed with gamification in favor of simply being a straight-up virus.)

The point of including all that is that Zynga is exploiting systems that come perilously close to ... well, society.  And their social games do, in fact, act like biological and metaphorical viruses.  They're a pure form of simple meme. The fact that they made Zynga boatloads of money is what drew my attention (along with the entire industry, giving rise to the term "gamification" in the first place), but the phenomenon is in itself interesting.

A GOP operative who left the cult

Oy.  What a title - that's Truthout for you.

The article, though, is seminal.  Again, no time to do it even cursory justice; I'll come back to it later.

Joining the reality-based community

Back to politics per se for a bit.

Back in the Bush days, a Bush functionary famously denigrated liberals as the "reality-based community" ([wikipedia], and it turns out this was later attributed to none other than Karl Rove).  His meaning was that he perceived Democrats as looking around, discovering the facts, and adjusting their actions accordingly, while the (to him heroic) Republicans instead defined their own reality and took actions in accordance with that reality, thereby making that reality ... reality.

In retrospect - and this is referenced in the article I'm linking here - this didn't work out well, which is why it's generally considered saner to, you know, stay within reality to start with.  Forging reality de novo turned out simply to result in a lot of organizational incompetence.

This article on HuffPo is one man's journey from Chicagoland Lugar-like Republicanism to the realization that the GOP has gone off the deep end.  It's worth reading and re-reading.

Bubbles on the Internet

"The Internet is not free." Eli Pariser talks about the fact that Google's search results are increasingly targeted to what Google thinks you want to see.  Similarly, our blogrolls all point to places we feel more comfortable.

Instead of being exposed to the views of random strangers on the street simply by virtue of the fact that we all share a common physical space, the Internet is increasingly making it possible for us simply to listen only to those people we already agree with.

That's a bubble.  And that belongs in this blog.

Business models

Business models already have a posting home in my programming blog (I suppose because I tend to read things about programming in the context of startup culture), but they are certainly welcome here as well.  A business model is a declarative description of an organization and how it fits into its social and economic context.  So business models are kind of a subset of a more general organizational descriptive mechanism that I'd like to explore.

In the programming blog, business model things are filed under Startup::Declarative.

Austerity versus stimulus: procyclicalism

Then there's economics.  I keep running across economics posts like this one revealing that America always seems to be pulling the wrong direction when it comes to austerity versus profligacy - and somehow they need to go into the pot as well.

Economics has the advantage of having obvious ways to draw graphs.  This makes it easier to follow, when it's not trying to be obscure.

Pedestrianism

I'm not even sure this one belongs here.  It's the story of Edward Payson Weston, once America's most famous pedestrian.  Pedestrianism, you see, was a public sport in 1890 in much the same way marathons or basketball are today.  And that's weird.

It's partly germane here because it demonstrates that societies can change significantly over time, and yet that the same sort of mechanisms are always at work (the fad, or something).  This is surely not a groundbreaking insight, but ... well, it goes into the broth.

Second recent link: the death of the American university

I'd like to come back to some of these articles and think about them in greater depth, but here's a good one about how to destroy the American university system in five (completed) steps.  ([academeblog]) Those steps are: 1. Defund public education; 2. Deprofessionalize and impoverish professors; 3. Move in a managerial/administrative class who take over governance; 4. Move in corporate culture and corporate money; 5. Destroy the students.

Mission accomplished!

There's a lot of thought in that post.  I'm not accustomed to analyzing things like this and then writing meaningful things about them, so I'm going to have to ease into it.  But I can say a few reasons (beyond the personal) that it caught my attention.

First, it addresses what amounts to a conspiracy at the highest levels of government and society.  That's interesting.  What evidence can we trace?  What meaning has this group injected into the meme pool of America?  We know some of it: it ties into universities being "liberal" in the sense of "dangerous".  These are the things I'd like to explore, in short words and simple statements.  I can almost envision a kind of database or Lexicon of .. terms?  Concepts?  Memes that aren't just pictures of cats with captions on them?

What popular opinions and statements can track the changes?  We can also model the effects economically and sociologically.  People have to have standard tools for this kind of modeling that I should learn about.

Incidentally, Al Jazeera has another short piece on the plight of the adjunct - not only are they cut out of life benefits like health care, job security, and pensions, but also from professional benefits such as conference participation that is essential to their continued existence as academics.  None of these facts are in dispute, yet drawing attention to them brands you an Unserious Thinker.  Why is that?  Why can such a cutting indictment of American life only appear in Al Jazeera?

Again - what I would like to do with this article, like others, is to analyze it thoroughly at a semantic level.  Map out precisely all the facts and assertations, and group them into politically salient ones, and politically irrelevant ones.  (I'm not terribly interested in the fact that an anthropological association met in Quebec, for example - but it's an assertion in the document and so it should appear in the analysis.)

This part of The Plan, insofar as there is a Plan, is a pretty straightforward, if ambitious, NLP task.  It is amenable in part to automation, and that is certainly one thing I hope to explore going forward.

With that, I leave the topic of academia for the time being.  I'll be coming back to it.

Politics as psychopathology

Here's a different take ([n+1 magazine]:
If once upon a time people imagined a public sphere of more or less reasonable and honorable people leading one another toward ever greater reasonableness, this entailed a tacit anthropological specification: namely, that the citizens of a liberal democracy belong, as it were, to the same tribe or people. Not so today, when the object of politics is to place your opponent in another and non-American tribe entirely, defined by its repugnant customs and insane beliefs.
That hits home.

Politics and propaganda

The purpose of this blog is to aggregate the articles and thoughts I've been finding/having related to ... I'm not entirely sure yet.  The behavior of humans in large groups, I think.  Or small groups.  Sociology, politics, economics, propaganda, organizational management, anthropology.  Even biology, evolution, and systems thinking in general.

All these things fascinate me, but I haven't had a good place to blog about them, and today I had the epiphany that really, all of my academic interests have some ineffable core in common.  Programming, NLP, and machine learning (at my semantic programming blog), human language, and ... all this stuff here.  It's all the same thing: intelligent or adaptive systems, or something along those lines.

But then there's the macro end.  It's an election year.  Americans are at one another's throats in an election year in the best of times, but these are not the best of times.  We are fragmented, isolated - divided.  This benefits certain elements of society, and that benefit can be documented.  The ways in which we fool ourselves about their - and our - complicity can be understood.

I remain convinced that we can design a better world - by understanding the world we live in.  That, under some weird American calculus, makes me a liberal.  Unfortunately, the most vocal and influential Americans aren't.  The people I grew up with aren't.  Large parts of my family aren't.  And many of my friends aren't.

One friend in particular accused me of hit-and-running in political debates on Facebook. And you know, she's 100% right - I am so programmed to assume I should keep quiet about my political and religious views that I simply engage in drive-by propaganda, then leave a thread, never to return lest I get too angry at the responses.

That's stupid - so I started thinking about the meaning of political speech.  About the propaganda that permeates current American "discourse", as though what we have were some kind of real discourse instead of a degenerate shouting match of empty slogans and dog whistles.  It all has meaning, though, buried though it may be.  And I'm running into some interesting thinking about it.

I have been convinced for many years that understanding the propaganda (and by "propaganda" I don't actually mean the pejorative intentional kind that is the actual meaning of the word, but rather the deliberate or random mutation of the semantics of words) within our political discourse would result in the ability to change it, or at least to deflect it.  So that's one thing I hope to explore in this blog, starting with the dump of a few links, followed probably by a long dry spell.  We'll see.