This is the biggest blog post ever

Liam recently blogged about epistemic isolation, a propos blatant lies of the nascent Trump administration. Trump continues to insist that the audience at his inauguration was the biggest ever. Liam wonders why one would spend so much time making trivial claims that are easily checked and which are egregiously false.

Liam’s hypothesis, which he elaborates by name dropping Kevin Zollman and  Han Fei, is that the strategy epistemically quarantines Trump’s core supporters. Perhaps more accurately, it provides an instrument by which they can quarantine themselves. The crazy lies provide a kind of litmus test by which core supporters can guide their belief formation, to rely on sources offering the alternative facts favored by their sect and avoid sources promulgating actual facts.

Charles Sanders Peirce, in The Fixation of Belief, describes this as part of the method of authority:

“If the power to [kill everyone who disagrees] be wanting, let a list of opinions be drawn up, to which no man of the least independence of thought can assent, and let the faithful be required to accept all these propositions, in order to segregate them as radically as possible from the influence of the rest of the world.”

Another possibility is that the persistent lying is just a kind of smokescreen, a distraction from other things that the administration is doing. Trump’s many executive orders receive some media attention, but not as much as they would receive if he and his proxies weren’t spending so much time lying about trivial issues.

Yet another possibility is that this is no strategy at all, that Trump is simply so vain that he cannot accept the possibility that his inauguration was not the most well-attended of all time or that a majority of voting Americans voted against him.

I do not have any way of knowing what actually motivates the current regime. As Peirce discusses it, however, the move doesn’t need to be a self-conscious strategy. Groups operating by the method of authority are unconcerned with even the concept of truth. The formation and maintenance of such groups might typically involve epistemic quarantine, because without it such groups wouldn’t form and persist. No explicit planning or strategy is required.

Self promotion

I got news today that my promotion from Associate Professor to full Professor has been approved by the university president and will be effective with the start of the Spring semester.

This is a difference that means nothing to people outside academia. It doesn’t really change my job any, because I was already department chair and already had tenure. I didn’t even put any thought into the prospect myself until I was pretty far along as an Assistant Professor.

There’s a raise in pay, but not enough that it changes the integer number of yachts I can afford to own. For those graphing yacht buying-power over time: Still zero.

Even so, colour me chuffed.

Bat speak

Some friends pointed me to a Smithsonian article about recent research on fruitbat vocalizations. The upshot is that fruitbats gripe at each other in lots of different ways.

[N]early all of the communication calls of the Egyptian fruit bat in the roost are emitted during aggressive pairwise interactions, involving squabbling over food or perching locations and protesting against mating attempt.

Using algorithms, researchers were able to discern differences in bat griping depending both on who the target bat was (who was being griped with) and the context (what the griping was about).

I have argued that, for a domain of enquiry that includes meerkats in their natural environment, different meerkat alarm calls and the classes of threats which elicit them comprise natural kinds (see ch4). That admits six kinds, because there are three different calls and three corresponding classes of threats.

There’s no reason why the argument doesn’t generalize. For fruit bat groups in their environment, there may well be natural kinds corresponding to distinct classes of vocalizations and to the classes of objects picked out by those vocalizations. But what if it turns out that bat reference to individual other bats uses sounds functioning in the fashion of proper names? Suppose there’s an individual bat that the other bats pick out with a specific squeeky sound, something like “leeko leeko leeko”. Does that individual bat count as a natural kind?

One might think the answer has to be no, because kinds and individuals are different ontological categories. I’m not tempted by that, however. As I argue, species might turn out to be continuous individuals (in their fundamental ontology) but still count as natural kinds (see ch6).

Nevertheless, the category for the specific bat leeko could only be a natural kind for the domain including that specific bat population. And it might lack enough general importance to be a natural kind for a domain that includes all the Egyptian fruit bat populations across both space and time. So my account doesn’t require the answer to be yes.

Moreover, it’s not clear to me from the recent report whether the distinctions between bat vocalizations are clear and sharp enough to count as natural kinds. As always, the answer will depend on the details.

The value in the algorithm

The LA Times has an interesting interview with self-described “data skeptic” Cathy O’Neil, the author of Weapons of Math Destruction. Although the Times puts her skepticism in terms of big data, her concerns are really about values in science. Algorithms, she suggests, have a veneer of objectivity but always reflect choices and valuations. When the algorithms are secret, then the values incorporated in them aren’t open to scrutiny. She says:

I want to separate the moral conversations from the implementation of the data model that formalizes those decisions. I want to see algorithms as formal versions of conversations that have already taken place.

She also makes a point about how polling isn’t just objectively reporting on the state of the electorate, something I would probably have mused about if I’d written the post about the election that I never quite wrote:

[P]olitical polls are actually weapons of math destruction. They’re very influential; people spend enormous amounts of time on them. They’re relatively opaque. But most importantly, they’re destructive in various ways. In particular, they actually affect people’s voting patterns. … Polls can change people’s actual behavior, which disrupts democracy in a direct way.

I’ve ordered a copy of her book, and when it arrives I will put it on top of the stack of books I regret not having read.