sumit/blogs

Cryptolist: Rationalism, Skepticism or Forteanism?

> Basically, the inherent precept says (generally of course) that
> this law is
> immutable — or this fact is irrevocable — or this point is
> unconditional.

I’m not sure this is quite true. Any scientist worth his or her salt will readily acknowledge that any theory, model or “law” is continually subject to empirical scrutiny, and could be overthrown or succeeded at any time. But the criteria for that to happen are very precise – the nature of scientific proof has been documented extensively – and geared around replicability and continuity.

These are the very qualities that fortean phenomena lack – an anomaly is by definition irreplicable and/or paradigm-busting. I guess the question then becomes: what need is there of a discipline that studies such “outlier” phenomena? Can they be either explained away, encompassed by some modification of the scientific method, or do they require an entirely new mode of investigation? (Or to put it another way: skepticism, rationalism or forteanism?)

To wrest this discussion on-topic, the interesting thing about cryptozoology, from my rationalist-going-on-skeptical perspective, is that it does not really require any such high-level philosophical discourse. There aren’t really any “laws” that make lake monsters, mystery apes and their ilk “impossible” (although perhaps there are against, say, giant spiders), which makes it easier for me to believe that there may be a needle in the haystack somewhere. But having said that, there’s a interesting question about replicablity: how many individual eyewitness reports add up to “replicability”?

— In cryptolist@yahoogroups.com, “BJ Onley” wrote:
> Very good presentation.
>
> On the topic itself, the inate question seems to be thus:
>
> Do generally accepted scientific knowledge and theories
> give a full and accurate picture of our world?, Forteans ask.
> Or is the accepted “mainstream” scientific world-picture
> seriously flawed and incomplete? Do Fortean and paranormal
> anomalies indicate the gaps and errors in our world-picture?
>
> Though I can already foresee a flood of biblical levels of arguments for and
> against this, I personally have to throw my own two cents in (depending on
> your coinage conversion rates).
>
> As I see it, formal science follows standardized precepts. These same
> precepts are taught to continuing generations of science majors and students
> everywhere (and that’s global).
>
> Basically, the inherent precept says (generally of course) that this law is
> immutable — or this fact is irrevocable — or this point is unconditional.
>
> The teaching, study and further investigation of said science therefore only
> follows those precepts that fit the immutable, irrevocable, or unconditional
> laws or facts or conditions.
>
> Where I personally have to disagree, and this is only my opinion folks, is
> that as we have seen in the documented historical past — holy bejesus –
> the earth is NOT flat!!! or holy Newton’s law, atomic particles DO exist –
> or mother of all faux pas — there ARE more than 7 bodies in our solar
> system.
>
> The point I am making is that science will stand on the very high ledge of
> incontravertible proof until someone pushes them off it — with a very
> sudden stop at the bottom, also referred to as blunt trauma impact injury.
>
> Then, not so surprisingly, comes the NEW eternal law which conforms to the
> new dispensation. Now this law is the immutable, irrevocable, or
> unconditional.
>
> Until such time that this too becomes moot — and again as we have seen –
> often at the expense of this rediculous dogma syndrome.
>
> Basically, science does maintain a level of consistent professionalism and
> as such (so far) is the only authority we can rely on (at the moment) to
> determine these incongruous relationships.
>
> But for any one human (regardless of thesis content) to boldly stand on a
> soapbox of any common balsa wood and proclaim that we humans know everything
> there is to know and there is nothing new under the sun – is not only
> fooling themselves but also are setting themselves up for a fairly deviant
> and injurious crushing fall at the bottom of the “science” prescipice.
>
> Though personally I am not proclaiming a belief that science is totally
> flawed, I am “suggesting” that maybe science ain’t the golden BB we all want
> it to be?
>
> >~~am now gathering multiple notepad windows to copy and paste the
> >respondents. hehehe
>
> Thanks all.
>
> Next…….

Cryptolist: Rationalism, Skepticism or Forteanism?

on 4 July 2004 by Sumit

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Technovia: Movable Type 3 – the horror, the horror!

Six Apart is a business? Fine. So what does that imply? For me, and I think, a great many others, price is not the issue. I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford any of the licenses on offer, whether as an individual or as a commercial user. And I’m also happy to pay even the high-end license fees. But there is in fact now no license available that even caters for my requirements, whether as an individual or as a commercial user. That smacks of poor market research.

The product released is also not what Six Apart previously announced, and on which my “buying decision” to use MT for both work and play was predictated. Having said explicitly that there would be a pay product – MT Pro – and a free upgrade to the existing product that would fix a number of known issues – MT 3.0 – they have now effectively announced that MT Pro is vapourware, that MT 3.0 is a pay product with no new features, and that they are ‘committed’ to a free version that is substantially less useful than the existing one. That’s terrible customer relations and product management, for all that it runs rampant in certain sectors of the business world.

Bottom line: I have no problem with Six Apart acting like a real business. But that means I’ll treat them like one, and that includes telling them about the level of my dissatisfaction. Their lousy business practices have succeeded in turning this formerly enthusiastic customer into someone who is, quite simply, going to take his custom elsewhere unless they fix things fast. Just as I would any other business.

Posted by: Sumit | May 15, 2004 09:44 AM

On MT 3

on 15 May 2004 by Sumit

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On constellations

on 5 May 2004 by Sumit

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“At the very least get yourself some new arguments, these were old even the last time i was here”

I, too, have been worried that Carl might be running out of steam and (terrible though it is to contemplate) that he might be cancelled. As far as I’m concerned, things have been going downhill for a while:

TOS: Admittedly, Carl:TOS wasn’t really any better than the newer incarnations, but thanks to nostalgia looks amusingly quaint. Got pretty much everything wrong, although it meant well. But oh dear, doesn’t it look dated now!

TNG: A bold attempt to revitalise the franchise, Carl:TNG was probably the strongest incarnation. Slightly better thought out than TOS, taking account of the very latest cutting-edge thinking (the Radio Times Guide to SF, for example); still not what you’d call state-of-the-art, but it was trying.

DS9: Darker, grittier and more contentious than its predecessors, Carl:DS9 divided the audience. Some found this new, harder-edged approach irritating; others found it endlessly entertaining. Not afraid to tackle serious issues, albeit in a stupid way.

VOY: Initially promising, Carl:VOY quickly veered into “seen it all before” territory, with fixation on a handful of themes (Read The Banner) leading to a strong feeling of repetition and deja vu. Wasn’t helped by tendency to take liberties with continuity, logic and plain common sense, as well lack of likeable central character.

ENT: Carl: ENT was supposed to be a bold step forward, but, alas, seems to have degenerated into an embarrassing rehash of all that has gone before, but without even a modicum of charm, grace or wit. How much longer can the audience’s patience hold out?

Carl Trek

on 27 April 2004 by Sumit

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I am Belle de Jour

We are all Belle de Jour now.
Posted by “The Internet”

Are you Belle de Jour?

on 17 March 2004 by Sumit

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On the BBC Trek board:

As John said, you’re rebutting an argument that no-one is making. Of course science fiction makes predictions that come true. In some cases it makes self-fulfilling prophecies. That doesn’t mean, however, that all science fiction is intended purely or even primarily as a medium for prediction.

On the appeal to authority point, I also agree with John that you exhibit all the symptoms. It’s particularly interesting that you would take this approach on an essentially anonymous message board. You have no idea whether any of the people you’re corresponding with “have written s.f., some are paid to criticise”. Ideas stand or fall on their own merits in this medium, which is why appeals to authority have such little potency.

As for Trek making successful predictions … well, it certainly does get a lot of coverage. But I’m more inclined to dismiss those as over-enthusiastic scientists “selling” stories to lazy hacks. Few such claims bear much scrutiny. Reproducing the spin state of an electron through quantum entanglement really has very little to do with teleportation in the Trek sense. Miguel Alcubierre’s “warp drive” doesn’t bear much comparison to what we know of Trek physics. Three-dimensional powder-jet printers don’t really stack up compared with replicators. Comparisons are always made with the myth of the day: in another era those headlines might just as well talk about the invention of seven-league boots, rainbow bridges and magic cauldrons.

Most of Trek’s big inventions – teleportation, FTL travel, replication, holodecks – are basically just McGuffins to (a) keep the plot moving (b) keep budgets down. The social consequences of these inventions are hardly ever really explored in any depth, at least in series after TNG. Less forgivably (from a predictive standpoint), Trek actually writes things out that would make for decent storylines. Genetic engineering, for example, is simply dismissed as a corrupting and hence forbidden technology. I can’t help but feel that forgoes narrative innovation in favour of continuity.

And Trek’s much-vaunted social predictions don’t stand up much either. To be fair, TOS carried a moderately radical message for its day – that a diverse crew of pseudo-Americans could live and work together in harmony. But the rest is simply presented as a fait accompli, without context, explanation or rationalisation and thus has virtually no predictive quotient. We’re told, for example, that there’s no money in the Trek future (at least among humans). But there clearly are stores of value and mediums of exchange – in other words, money. Isn’t energy a valued commodity? What about dilithium crystals? (Not to say anything of latinum, obviously). How does this society actually work? How is energy apportioned?

You can ask similar questions about other aspects of the Trek (or Starfleet) future. That’s not to criticise Trek, really: I don’t view its mission statement as the creation of an internally-consistent, hard SF vision of our future. I think it’s a vehicle to tell interesting stories about engaging characters via pseudo-scientific tropes, which it’s done with intermittent success. But I think it’s telling that its peak (to my mind) came when it threw away much of its message-laden “vision” in DS9 – and that much of the disenchantment with subsequent series can be traced to the producers’ inability to capture the dramatic potential inherent in the formula-busting locales of Voyager and Enterprise.

And don’t tell me about communicators. A reinvention of the walky-talky, not a prediction of the mobile ‘phone.

On the predictive power of Trek

on 7 March 2004 by Sumit

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If I was doing a hard news story, it’d be what, when, where, who & all that, followed by layers of decreasing importance (the classic pyramid structure); if I was doing a soft news story, I’d build a hook into the first two pars – this is what you refer to below – before going into a more linear narrative for the main story. As it happens, I do occasionally worry what would happen to my professional image if this site became public knowledge, since the writing on it doesn’t conform to standard journalistic styles.

I think you have to remember that this is effectively a private journal that’s publicly accessible – that’s the interesting thing about the blog format. The entries are mostly my stream-of-consciousness, although I obviously do try to make them a bit more coherent and entertaining than if I just wrote off the top of my head. In the case of this one, it was really:

- Look at the TV listings, think, “God what a bunch of crap, why do they foist this on us?”
- Think, “but actually the Yes Minister one was quite good”
- Think, “because it Iannucci made such a good job of tying it to the public sense that British democracy is a failure”
- Think “as evidenced by current events”

& hey presto, blog post. What’s confused matters a bit is that I’m finishing off old entries at the moment, so the final post is actually me trying two weeks later to work out from my notes what I was trying to say. The Yes Minister piece is consequently not quite as polished as I would have liked, but probably would never have been posted otherwise.

and yes, once i’ve got through these (two more in hand) I’ll be onto the comedy stuff.
Also building a book site for someone at the moment, besides work stuff, so things a bit rammed at the mo.

s

> —–Original Message—–
> From: Richard Wigley [mailto:richardwigley@hotmail.com]
> Sent: 28 February 2004 12:17
> To: sumit@sumitsays.com
> Subject: Question
>
>
> I liked todays piece on Government machinations…. I was just thinking
> about how you approached the piece…. Titled “I want to know the
> truth”….. it starts with the BBC and it’s cheap way of producing
> programs… so I think… oh this is something about BBC…. but then it
> switches to campaign programming… so I think… No this is
> something about
> a style of programs done by the BBC…. but it then switches to
> Yes Minister
> before making the easy switch to politics and continues on a polictical
> theme.
>
> When I read the Guardian (when I had a job and a commute) the
> piecies often
> had an introductionary bit before moving onto the main subject but don’t
> remember them following such a swerve diving route which I can
> find fun but
> confusing until I get my bearing in the final half. Now I am not
> in anyway
> saying what or how you should write…. God knows writing is one of many
> subject I know less about than you…. but I would be interested
> on why you
> choose these routes over say …. starting with say “Watching Sitcom…..
> Yes Minsiter… Politics…..” Did you for example have 2 ideas
> but one on
> BBC and one on politics and they became merged?
>
> rich

Blogging style

on 29 February 2004 by Sumit

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Erik Benson: weak-willed Archives

I don’t think yours is an uncommon experience, at least among my peer group. It’s certainly one that I’ve shared, and I wouldn’t view myself as being weak-willed. Nor do you come across that way.

If you wanted to add a biologically-determinist gloss to the transactional piece of your argument, you could argue that our primate heritage makes women more interested in achieving consensus and men more interested in keeping their mates satisfied.

Those are gross stereotypes, obviously, but might help to resolve some of the contradiction between being ordinarily strong-willed (or opinionated, perhaps) and yet hopelessly indifferent to, say, the flavour of ice cream.

Comment on weak will, at Erikbenson.com

on 24 February 2004 by Sumit

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BBC – Radio 3 Message Board – Messages

Downloadable music Online Persona – 5th post – 9 Feb 2004 09:37
I read today (but could not independently confirm) that a major high street retailer will no longer stock classical music. I’m not a classical enthusiast, but this further evidence of the narrowing cultural spectrum saddened me. On further thought, it occurred to me that one “solution” would be for greater access to downloadable classical music.

As some of you may be aware, Warp Records (a specialist electronica label featuring the Aphex Twin and a few other crossover types) recently opened an online store to great acclaim, offering high-quality, copyright-free MP3 downloads of individual tracks, with entire albums still available as mail-order CDs. This has the effect of unlocking a new market for back catalogue work that would otherwise be unavailable to the vast majority of prospective listeners.

It strikes me that electronica and classical music share some of the same features, in marketing terms: for example, a relatively limited audience and the availability of multiple interpretations of the same piece of music that are sometimes difficult to find. So my question: If a similar store existed (Call for classical music, would you use it? If not, why not? Musical fidelity? Concerns for musicians’ livelihoods? Lack of faith in the technology

Downloadable classical music

on 9 February 2004 by Sumit

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Mr Tricks: I’ve always understood copywrite protection to come into effect only after a created piece of work is displayed to the public with the date and the ”

On Copyright (2)

on 5 February 2004 by Sumit

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On Copyright in Webzines

It depends slightly on where you are, but in the US and UK you automatically have copyright in anything you’ve authored – even if it’s unpublished. You have to explicitly transfer it (and even then, it’s usually a right of reuse, not the copyright itself) – just because someone’s published it and slapped a copyright mark on it doesn’t mean anything.

More generally, if there’s no written documentation, then no-one can plausibly claim to have acquired the copyright from you. I’d say you’re well within your rights to do whatever you want with your stuff, and to demand that they take down anything you want unless they can produce something proving their right to keep it.

The only substantive exception (I think) is if you had an employment contract, in which case your employer could argue that your products were works made for hire. But that doesn’t sound like it really applies here if there was no legal entity, and would be hard to argue if you don’t have an employment contract that makes your status clear. More information here.

Mr Tricks: In the most technical sence “they” do own the copywrites to anything they “publish” with the statement “copywrite 2000(or whatever year)” etc…

I’m pretty sure this isn’t true, except insofar as they own the design or layout of the website in general.

On Copyright in Webzines

on 5 February 2004 by Sumit

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This Is Broken: Comment on New Nokia phones

Wouldn’t you feel stupid holding one of these things up to your head? Yes, as www.sidetalking.com illustrates amusingly. But I think Nokia is banking on phones turning into “mobile appliances” and headsets replacing keypads. That doesn’t excuse them introducing these models considerably ahead of the customer acceptance curve, though.

On Nokia’s new phone designs

on 14 January 2004 by Sumit

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On Paul Gambacinni the letterhack

on 13 January 2004 by Sumit

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http://www.benhammersley.com/dparchives/007960.html#comments

Somehow I?ve gone through my journalistic career entirely unaware of the visa waiver restriction – and have never had any problems entering the US whatsoever, even after the usual questions about occupation and purpose of visit. Go figure.

Journalists’ US visa requirements

on 6 January 2004 by Sumit

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meish.org : mayfly project 2003

sumit
london, england
One long powerslide out of 2002. Hope I make the hairpin bend into 2004.

Mayfly 2003

on 5 January 2004 by Sumit

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This gives a bit of additional detail, particularly about the various components of a flame.

What is fire made of?

on 27 December 2003 by Sumit

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Doom Force came out right when DP was in serious danger of cancellation and GM was catching flak about its “weirdness” – I’ve always thought it was his way of saying “is this what you really want me to do for the sales?”

On Doom Force

on 17 December 2003 by Sumit

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Never seen it, but I remember the radio ads on offshore pirate station Laser 558 fondly. Laser had roughly two advertisers, the other being USA Today, so the Red Dawn spot got played about fifteen times an hour.
Concluded with a smirking voice saying “not bad for a bunch of kids, huh?” Indeed.

On Red Dawn: the movie that defeated Russia and captured Saddam

on 15 December 2003 by Sumit

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Long post and maybe the conversation has moved on. If so, apologies.

I had my house rabbit spayed a couple of weeks ago, for two main reasons. The first was essentially convenience. Unspayed rabbits tend to be frustrated and destructive. The second was health. Unspayed does are extremely prone to uterine and ovarian cancers, which shorten their expected lifespans by a factor of five. I have largely convinced myself that the spaying was justified by concern for her health, rather than my convenience. Had she in fact been a male, I’m not sure I would have done it.

But it wasn’t a two-dimensional choice. Domestic rabbits are frustrated and destructive because they are typically denied companionship by human choice. They are prone to cancer because they were bred to mate constantly by the Romans, who introduced them to the UK as food animals. So my duty of care, if it can be called that, is shaped not only by my decision to keep my rabbit as a pet (and thus deny her a “natural” life) but by human actions stretching back hundreds of years. And it’s easy to pursue the “if she was wild …” alternatives through many more iterations.

I offer this example because I think Tom is right to say that the principles of this argument are difficult to frame in the absence of an externally-imposed moral framework. The whole issue is compromised by millennia of animal-human interaction that make it difficult to achieve moral clarity even in the atomic system of one owner and one pet. I hadn’t imagined, when I got my rabbit, that I’d feel so conflicted about the choices I make on her behalf, or that I wouldn’t be able to resolve my doubts relatively quickly.

So while I somewhat share Loomis’ frustration I’m not sure it’s the board’s reponse that’s lacking, but rather that the issue is intractably complex already. Loomis says there’s something ethically wrong with genetically modifying animals for our own pleasure. That may be true, but I’m not sure that this is a major issue today (as distinct from modifying animals for agricultural purposes, which obviously is). Or to put it another way, that perhaps the morality of pet ownership can fairly be discussed independently of the morality of domestication.

“Pet” or “livestock” seem, to me, to be labels whose definition inherently implies a level of animal-human symbiosis and are both exclusive and well-defined categories that resist significant changes. Exotics and show breeds notwithstanding, parameter changes in the terms of our relationships with animals – a tiger in a New York apartment, say, or dogs fattened up for the pot – are generally viewed unforgivingly. How many people thought that Roy was probably asking for it when Montecore jumped him?

That said, I find it disturbing that I can’t find any moral clarity when it comes to my pet, or to the general phenomenon of pet ownership. As Quantum said, rights correspond to duties. My bottom-line morality is that I believe I have a duty to do no harm to anyone (or thing) without its informed consent, but how to judge “harm” or “consent” in the case of an animal that can’t reliably communicate with me on either topic?

Mr Tricks asked if slavery would be less cruel if the slave could neither imagine a state of freedom nor a time in the future where one could or would be free. The assumption is that animals do not have such imaginings. Certainly, my rabbit can’t articulate her desire for freedom as I can. But perhaps her programmatic urge to reproduce is just as meaningful as a slave’s despair at hir captivity. It’s certainly powerful enough to make her destroy large chunks of my carpet in a futile attempt at – at what? I can speculate, but I don’t really know. Is it a protest? An escape attempt? An error of judgment?

Despite our tendency to adopt anthromorphic interpretations of our pets’ behaviour, I think the internal lives of animals are almost completely alien to us. In the absence of any real idea about an animal’s internal response to domestication – of how the slave feels about captivity – the muddled middle ground is the only real option for those who don’t wish to adopt one of the polar stances on animal rights:

On the one hand, our “top predator” status suggests that it’s only natural that we do whatever we like with other animals, as codified into dogma, theological or otherwise, that postulates mankind as a separate or higher creation, charged with both ownership of and responsibility for other lesser species. Many of us no longer believe that this privileged position really exists, or that it equates to “do whatever you like”.

On the other hand, we have sentimental arguments that the wants and needs of animals can be simply equated to those of people. As Tom pointed out, a similarity in two situations does not equate to a similarity in rights. I would add that it isn’t clear that there’s a similarity in situations in the first place. We have no real way of knowing how an animal interprets any but the most obviously distressing of situations. Perhaps not even those.

Pet ownership seems to fall somewhere between the two. We assume, to paraphrase Haus, that we, as reasoning beings, are better equipped to make decisions for our pets than they are themselves. But we also believe that our pets appreciate and respond to many of the same stimuli as humans. I believe that my spayed rabbit would prefer a longer, more sedate life over a shorter and more sexually-crazed one. But I can’t really tell.

To loop back to slavery: I think it’s interesting that the “top predator” argument could equally be applied (with the relevant changes in wording) to the invidious rationalisations given for slavery, indentured labour and servitude in general. Animals today are the Other, just as Africans, Orientals, Indians, women, the working classes … have been to various people at various times. Servitude has often been “justified” by theories of manifest destiny, evolutionary or social superiority.

The challenge confronting animal liberationists – or those trying to answer the initial post in this thread – is how to create an alternative perspective without lapsing into anthromorphism. Or one that argues that they have rights despite their inability to enter into social contracts – in which case it seems inevitable that the default position shifts back to “we know best”, as it does for the severely learning-disabled. Otherwise, it seems to me, we’re stuck with messy compromise, perhaps for ever – or at least until my rabbit learns to pass the Turing test.

And on the subject of the Turing test, we could extend the debate by asking: what should the rights of enslaved robots be? It’s become a techo-utopian axiom that robots will one day take over most drudge-work, and an equally hackneyed science fiction theme that they will in turn rise up and throw off their shackles. Do workers that have explicitly been created to serve have rights, or do we have duties towards them? Does it make a difference if they are dumb droids or brilliant machines? Would it be right or wrong for us to keep them as slaves?

On Slavery and Owning Animals

on 8 December 2003 by Sumit

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oneword.: appearance

appearance or disappearance, it’s all the same in the end, if you disappear here you appear there or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work i guess sometimes you just plain disappear actually there are lots of mysterious disappearances but only a few mysterious appearances

oneword: appearance

on 8 December 2002 by Sumit

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