TheBigUpshot

“A Culture of Conspiracy” by Michael Barkun is by far the most coherent, scholarly material I have ever read on the contentious issue of “stigmatized knowledge.”

It is not a book written to “expose of the TRUTH” about the hidden reality of… whatever. It is also not a debunking of the conspiracy theories that abound about everything. The problem with the fringe, as I have said, is that the stuff out there is contradictory, so at best one of the competing voices is right… and it’s a lot easier to generate that crap than it is to debunk it. A definitive volume that debunks every conspiracy theory would be impossible. And the people to whom it would be the most use would denounce it as more propaganda from the conspirators anyway.

Barkun’s book is a sort-of natural history of crazy memes. The results are fascinating. The world views that people hold are… amazing, really. There are people in our midst battling literal demons in the moments leading up to the end of the world. That’s right now. Not fiction. They are living it. And it feels important to them.

Barkun sums up nicely: “A growing number of people believe that a super-conspiracy commonly referred to as the New World Order is on the verge of consolidating world domination, possibly in collaboration with malevolent aliens.” Or, I would add, in collaboration with the Devil. “The conspirators allegedly operate through so wide ranging a network of confederates that they have co-opted authority figures in every sector of life. Through this control, in turn, they shape the information available to the general public and thus conceal the conspiracy’s existence and activities.”

Well, that presents some epistemological/metaphysical problems for the rest of us.

Dean argues that there is no longer a “consensus reality” according to which contested questions of fact can be resolved.  She suggests that on such subjects as alien abduction and political conspiracies, there are multiple contending realities, which keep contested issues from being decided…Dean’s position, while extreme in its suggestion of epistemological anarchy, is sufficiently reflective of the material considered here that it must be taken seriously.

So, can we all live in radically different parallel realities? Do we need a consensus reality? Who would get to enforce it if we do need it?

That’s the real philosophical question at the heart of this strange stuff. It underlies the “culture wars” and C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures. I think it’s an issue we’re going to be dealing with a lot over the next century. What I’m afraid of is that the conspiracists and the orthodoxists (I just made up a word!) will get the limited attention of the intelligentsia and the fundamental issue will get overlooked. Or, worse, The Jester is right and nobody cares at all.

-Peter

Tags: Philosophy by Peter
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I just went looking for a story I heard about years ago.  Some tribes don’t have words for all of the colors that have names in the English language.  The upshot was that, as a consequence, they are unable to discriminate between the two colors that are lumped into the same linguistic category.  Blue and Green share the same word, and so they look the same.

I think this is the person who found that data (from the American Psychological Association):

University of Essex psychologist Debi Roberson, PhD, and others … have found results that … suggest that there are differences–small but nonetheless significant–in the color perception of speakers of different languages.

“These kinds of categorical perception effects seem to be language-dependent,” says Davies, who has collaborated with Roberson on some of those studies. “If an African language doesn’t mark a blue-green boundary, then adult speakers don’t seem to show categorical perception across that boundary, whereas English speakers do.”

I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt that they controlled for genetic effects. Obviously, if this tribe happens to have a high incidence of inherited color-blindness, then they would lack words in their language for colors they can’t see.

But I think it’s really an interesting thing to consider.  Could we see more colors if we invented names for them? Would that enrich our lives?

Using color-language as a metaphor, how much could our world-view change just by modifying our “mental vocabulary”?

-Peter

Tags: Philosophy, Science by Peter
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The system in which a person is enmeshed can inspire evil.

Zimbardo’s Ted Talk

This guy studied the Milgram Electro-learning experiments. He worked on the Stanford Prison Study. He has created evil in a jar. I suspect that most people think that evil can’t infect them, but Zimbardo proved that it can. He spells out how it is that Abu Ghraib can happen.

Here is the recipe for evil: Give people a goal, add authority, defer responsibility, remove dissenters, and you can create hell.

-Peter

Tags: Philosophy, Science by Peter
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There’s a book by Orson Scott Card called “Folk of the Fringe.” It’s one of his lesser known works. I liked the symbolism. In the post-apocalyptic future, a group of people are terraforming the Utah desert into arable land. In the story, there’s a sequence of plants (engineered and natural) that need to grow on the land before it’s ready for crops. This sequence is planted as ever-expanding rings out from Salt Lake City (O.S.C is a Mormon).

Out at the newly planted regions, the fringe, people live far away from mainstream society. They ride in long circles, tending to the ever expanding ring of habitable territory. The symbolism is obvious. People who are on the edges of social acceptability are actually making more conceptual and social “space” available to the rest of us.
There’s a bit of a parallel in the sciences. Truth to tell, most “kooks” don’t have anything fundamentally interesting. But occasionally, a kook will strike gold out in the frontier and inspire a new rush of activity.

I don’t know how kooky the subject is of “Binaural auditory beats.” The fact that I first heard about it through the “alternative” sources suggests that it’s pretty kooky. But that’s irrelevant in the end. This study looks like it’s bringing the subject into the more respectable realm of controlled experiments:

Binaural auditory beats affect vigilance performance and mood.
Lane JD, Kasian SJ, Owens JE, Marsh GR.

Department of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, USA

When two tones of slightly different frequency are presented separately to the left and right ears the listener perceives a single tone that varies in amplitude at a frequency equal to the frequency difference between the two tones, a perceptual phenomenon known as the binaural auditory beat. Anecdotal reports suggest that binaural auditory beats within the electroencephalograph frequency range can entrain EEG activity and may affect states of consciousness, although few scientific studies have been published. This study compared the effects of binaural auditory beats in the EEG beta and EEG theta/delta frequency ranges on mood and on performance of a vigilance task to investigate their effects on subjective and objective measures of arousal…

In any case, I’m not surprised that there are external stimuli that can have odd effects on our brain and consciousness. In fact, I would be surprised if there were not. This is the fringe, ladies and gentlemen. This is where fertile ground will be made from desert. Binaural beat stimulation is a crude probe compared to that which we are capable of designing. The last question is: what will we plant in this new ground made whole by our efforts?

Cheers,
Peter

Tags: Philosophy, Science by Peter
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Tycho and Gabe over at the Penny Arcade had a guest write their blog posts for a week . The topic was Digital Rights Management in videogames. DRM is the technological scheme by which a company tries to encourage buying instead of “sharing” of games, songs or movies. The fact that these products are now very long strings of Zeros and Ones has a fun consequence that the plebs else can copy it faster and cheaper than the original producer can.

Effectively, the previous bottleneck upon which the toll booth sat, distribution, is no longer optimally positioned. Everyone is still trying to cope. To thwart the “hackerz,” and keep people coming through the booth, companies have DRM.  It takes any of a number of forms. They all keep track of their product to make sure that people who use it are actually paying for it. I talked about this a while back, too.

So, we have two incommensurable agendas: consumers want to pay less; producers want to recoup their costs. Also, they would like to turn a massive, monopolistic profit. Did you know that RIAA settled over a price-fixing lawsuit?. Where should the law come down? Should it support the good of the people (see Canada) or the “greater good” that comes into play in economics? There is a case to be made: if people can’t protect their investment, why invest? Without investment, we presume, creativity and innovation stall. Or so we are led to believe.

There is a parallel case in the sciences. Upstream of patent and IP law, ‘innovation policy’ comes to play. Where and when should the public’s dollar be spent on science and (by extension) other great human pursuits? A recent article went up about this question at nature.com. The question posed therein can be generalized. Science, art, literature all can be equally described by this statement:

“Research [and art, literature] occasionally generates radical changes that are unpredictable and often not associated with those pre-defined social goals. Nations invest in research for social purposes that are often thwarted by the nature of the research process itself.”

A society can invest, but it may not reap what it thinks it is sowing. The law of unintended consequences. DRM is similar: as people are thwarted in their attempts to access their legally purchased product, they turn to illegally acquired product. And so the software (and laws and business practices) designed to keep consumers buying turn them into thieves.

Cheers,

Peter

P.S.: XKCD spells it out for the RIAA:

Tags: Humor, Philosophy by Peter
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