| Muck and Mystery Loitering With Intent |
blog - at - crumbtrail.org |
I seem to do a bit of review at the end of the year, toting up pluses and minuses, noting trends and patterns - soul searching I suppose though it has more to do with mind than soul for me. I'm hardly unique in this, and the pattern that emerges seems to be that it is the urges of others to do this sort of thing that infects me with something analogous.
This year's trigger is Chris Anderson's Q and A - The Probabilistic Age. [via Tyler]
Q: Why are people so uncomfortable with Wikipedia? And Google? And, well, that whole blog thing?What doesn't work on the logic of probabilistic statistics? Why is this considered alien? My theory is that it is only considered alien by those still mired in Fordist thinking. As Timothy Burke put it once:A: Because these systems operate on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale.
Q: Huh?
A: Exactly. Our brains aren't wired to think in terms of statistics and probability. We want to know whether an encyclopedia entry is right or wrong. We want to know that there's a wise hand (ideally human) guiding Google's results. We want to trust what we read.
We will have to unlearn assumptions about scarcity. At the scale of living things, making more copies of living things may be thermodynamically incredibly cheap. At the scale of post-Fordist mass production, making more material wealth may be much cheaper than we tend to assume. We will have to root out our presumptions about efficiency and optimality and recognize that many real-world systems whose results we depend upon, from the immune system to the brain to capitalist economics, depend upon inefficient effectiveness (productive non-optimality, wasteful utility).I like that since it draws insights from natural systems - which obviously follow the logic of probabilistic statistics - and relates them to, er, natural systems such as economies. hmmm. Alien?
Just for grins I googled this site for the word optimal and found forgotten posts with intriguing titles:
That isn't an exhaustive list, and there are many others that noodle around with the ideas even if they don't use the word "optimal". Each is a clumsy, or at least informal, application of ideas that might well be described as the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, but they aren't alien to me. A corollary to the theory that "it is only considered alien by those still mired in Fordist thinking", is that those who are intimately involved with biological systems are immune to Fordism. If your boots are on the ground (as opposed to having your butt in a seat) it is very difficult to harbor Fordist fantasies. It is suited to abstraction but not mucky encounters with reality.Difficult but not impossible. For the past 12 years I've been advising locals to rethink the stuff they learned in ag school, and heard from extension agents, and read in trade magazines, and absorbed osmotically from a Fordist society, and largely failing to impress them even though they struggle to survive using that stuff. The problem is encapsulated by Paul Graham:
The Web naturally has a certain grain, and Google is aligned with it. That's why their success seems so effortless. They're sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels. Google doesn't try to force things to happen their way. They try to figure out what's going to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does.It isn't just the web of course, but that's a subject that is likely more familiar to those who might read this. But it's way bigger than that:
These probabilistic systems aren't perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers. They're designed to scale, and to improve with size. And a little slop at the microscale is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.Good stuff, but a bit off I think. Probabilistic systems are not counterintuitive to our mammalian brains. We are evolved to grasp them. But we've had an overlay of culture for a couple of hundred years, an eye blink on the timeline, and most all living people have had some indoctrination. It really shouldn't be very hard to shrug it off since it will feel comfortable to shed the alien overlay and go with the flow as our instincts and intuitions urge us to do.But how can that be right when it feels so wrong?
There's the rub. This tradeoff is just hard for people to wrap their heads around. There's a reason why we're still debating Darwin. And why Jim Suroweicki's book on Adam Smith's invisible hand is still surprising (and still needed to be written) more than 200 years after the great Scotsman's death. Both market economics and evolution are probabilistic systems, which are simply counterintuitive to our mammalian brains. The fact that a few smart humans figured this out and used that insight to build the foundations of our modern economy, from the stock market to Google, is just evidence that our mental software has evolved faster than our hardware.
It will take time of course - progress is made funeral by funeral in these things - but my expectation is that those who are growing to adulthood now will wonder what all the fuss was about.