Thirty Stories Up

With yesteerday’s thoughts on reductionism in mind, let’s move forward and take a look at Quine’s paper ‘On the Nature of Moral Values’. The important thing to realize, with respect to this paper, is that Quine is essentially sympathetic to the reductionist philosophy.

This paper breaks down into an analysis of the impact of an essentially reductionist worldview on the nature of ethics. Quine begins by analyzing motivation; why is it that we, as people, perform or fail to perform actions, and what makes us pick one set of values over another? Though it’s dense reading, and Quine assumes the reader has a strong background in both logic and behavioral psychology, it’s well worth parsing this section. He first posits that we have an innate susceptability to reinforcement; that is, every person innately begins to value actions based upon their immediate consequences. The consequence of this is that learning itself is not a learned action; it is mechanical, a function of our biological construction; through inducting that similar actions will have similar consequences in the future, we begin to form the beginnings of a set of values for actions.

The consequence, he concludes, is that at least at first, we value actions based solely on the consequences we observe, and then we extrapolate further from that point, beginning to value the actions themselves rather than the consequences. This has several important ramifications, but the important one in this discussion is that the development of a scale of valuation is essentially a mechanical process that is unique to each person.

The next important part of this paper, as it relates to reductionism, is his assertion that there is a fundamental difference between a scientific observation (”The Earth revolves around the Sun”) and a moral observation (”Killing is always wrong”). The crucial difference is that, in the case of a disagreement, there is a strong scientific methodology for solving the disagreement, while morality relies upon a weaker method of conflict resolution.

The difference can be explained in looking at different types of sentences. Fundamentally, science relies upon observational sentences; that is, those sentences which all reasonable people would agree upon (for example, “This page has a sidebar on the right”). The scientific method, at its core, depends on the creation of a question that can be answered entirely in terms of sets of these observational sentences, with the consequence that all reasonable people must agree once the scientific dispute has been resolved (leaving questions of experimental quality aside). Moral observations, however, have two complications; first, moral observations require special knowledge of a situation beyond observation, and second, the most vital piece of special information (the moral code) is by nature subjective, as no two people have had the same pattern of reinforcement throughout their entire lives. What this means is that, even in the presence of the same moral act, two observers can assign different moral values.

So where does this leave morality in a reductionist world? According to Quine, it’s just about all bad news. With no access to a strong methodology for accessing moral truths, there are two equally dark possibilities. The first is that there simply is no objective moral truth (that is to say, all moral observations have a truth value of “false”). This is, of course, the popular modern position of moral nihilism. A darker possibility, and one that I feel isn’t adequately covered as a possibility by many philosophers, is that we exist in a moral state comparable to our scientific state before the scientific method was created; that is, there are as many moral truths now as there were scientific truths then, and a definite moral truth exists, but in our current state, we are conceptually unable to determine whether our idea of truth is, in fact, the objective moral truth. Simply put, perhaps there is a universal moral truth, and we as a species have no access to it whatsoever, so we make up whatever we want; perhaps our current moral codes are the equivalent of our ancestors’ mythical explanations for natural events.

In the next discussion, I’ll give some case studies to illustrate some of these points more clearly.

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Since my philosophy classes lately have been centering around W. V. Quine, and my lunchtime reading has mostly been focused on the sciences, I thought I would start to journalize some of my thoughts on the subject. I’ll start today with reductionism, which Quine hasn’t actually covered in my reading; however, I’m currently reading ‘The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory‘ by Brian Greene, which covers the subject fairly well; this particular line of thought feeds directly into the philosphy I’ll be covering in the next rumination.

Essentially, reductionism is the effort to reduce all processes to their bare smallest components and physical laws; a truly reductionist scientific solution would be able, in theory if not computational power, to calculate all the forces and effects of a tornado down to the level of the three essential building blocks of matter (up quarks, down quarks, and electrons). Reductionism is generally a good way to ignite a philosophical debate even among laymen; after all, something that breaks down everything to fundamental scientific forces would seem to leave very little room for free will, human emotion, or any of those other good things that we usually view as essential to making us human.

It’s widely regarded as a rather bleak view, but I think that’s an unfair portrayal. Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate, is quoted by Greene as saying “[Reductionism] has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because it’s the way the world works.” Yes, a fully scientific view, breaking everything down to the smallest level, doesn’t exactly leave room for free will or the mysterious soul to guide us; however, I think a deeper look at the notion that “it’s just the way the world works” brightens up the philosophy a fair bit. After all, most of us believe we have free will, at least enough to express the thought, and most of us seem to be pretty happy with our lot in life as is; it is, as said, the way things work. Should knowing that we have a built-in predilection towards believing in free will matter, when we’ve always been happy with the state of affairs before we studied science?

Personally, I think it’s good enough; in fact, I dare say I have faith that it’s good enough. Yes, it’s not a conventional concept of faith, but it’s a good enough belief system. I have faith that if I attach an axe blade to a pendulum, pull it almost back to my face, and let go, that the blade won’t have enough momentum to hit my face on the backswing. I have faith that, regardless of whether I have free will or not, I’ll continue to make mostly good decisions day in and day out because that’s the way I’m wired. I have faith that a patent clerk with a penchant for forgetting his socks wasn’t deluding himself when he figured out, by and large, the way things work. And finally, I have faith that, no matter what I convince myself to believe, things will always work the same, because the world works the way it works regardless of what any individual person convinces themself of.

This is why, as worried as I sometimes am about the political future of the country in the hands of the religious right and the zany left, their actions don’t worry me much in the long term. They can try to legislate away sin on the right, injustice on the left, and controversy all around, but no matter how much legislation they pass or how much of our private lives they try to take control of, the world will continue to work the way it does. Legislating that your ideas be taught doesn’t make the world work differently; in fact, nothing does.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at how ethical issues work into this reductionist space.

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I know, I know… the irony is overwhelming.

But I’m back, thanks in no small part to the fact that, much to my amazement, people actually lamented my absence (perhaps ‘lamented’ is too strong a word… mocked might be more appropriate).

So to what can we attribute my unplanned, unscheduled, ill-advised hiatus? Most likely a combination of the things that overwhelm all college students, chiefly time management. When I was working a steady schedule, it was easy to keep the blog part of my daily routine; I come home and blog, and get the draft ready to post in the morning. Now, however, with the ever-shifting college schedule, and the lack of a steady ‘daily’ routine, it’s become much more difficult for me to sit down at any given point and say, “You know, I really do have to write right now.”

Time management, of course, is the Beast to the modern college student. Yes, the 15 credit-hours of classwork pales in comparison to the 40 or so one spends at a full-time job each week. However, once you factor in meetings, studying, class preparation, meals, the constant distractions of living with roommates and suitemates, and the temptation to spend all of one’s time in the Commons along with one’s friends, there’s precious little uninterrupted time left to actually, you know. do things. Expand your free time enough, but evenly spread distractions along that expanded time, and you end up with plenty more downtime, with exactly the minimum possible productive time.

I’m not sure why it hit me so hard this year; perhaps because I went straight from a productive 40-hour work week to the college life, the transition was more abrupt.

I’m going to try updating directly after my first class for the next week or so and see how that goes in terms of getting me back into a writing routine.

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Once again, I was struck by the inspiration to write while reading The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. This time, Friedman discusses the free-distribution approach taken by Netscape in the early days of the Internet, where the important thing wasn’t so much selling software as it was getting people invested into the idea of the Internet; the reasoning goes, roughly, that more money was made selling picks and shovels to miners during the Gold Rush than was actually pulled from the hills in gold, and that the real lasting economic benefit was from all the infrastructure development that went on to support the gold rush.

In a way, professional blogging is in the same state of affairs right now. Yes, I’ll go out on a limb for a moment and say that blogging can be a profession, albeit a largely speculative one. Either you have a good claim or you don’t, and if your objective is money, you’re probably going to waste a lot of time on bad claims before you find a lot of lucrative ones. Still, stories of bloggers making six figures a year are more than enough to attract a steady stream of new prospectors, chipping out their own little claims in the blogosphere, and largely coming up with nothing to show for it except a lot of unread content.

So one who follows blogging with a skeptical but encouraged eye, such as myself, can ask the question of where that leaves the blogging economy. Most of the miners during the Gold Rush died poor or returned home broken and with nothing to show for their years except a lot of backbreaking effort and a few years gone by; does that mean that the Gold Rush wasn’t worth it, or that we’d be better off if it hadn’t happened? I don’t think so. As Friedman points out, the true benefit of that particular period wasn’t the gold pulled from the hills, it was the infrastructure built for people who wanted to try their hand at it. I’ll be honest and say that I don’t see many new chances to make money from blogs; the really profitable niches are well-filled now, new niches are rapidly being snapped up by people who have already gotten with the program and are eyeing new opportunities, and non-targeted blogs are just difficult to make a significant amount of money from. However, I think there’s plenty of money to be made yet in selling ‘picks and shovels’; blog services and hosting marketed towards would-be professional bloggers. You’re starting to see the leading edge of the community picking up on this already; Darren Rowse of Problogger has just launched Six Figure Blogging, and I expect that’s only the opening salvo in the barrage of recordings, books, white papers, and seminars yet to come on blogging best practices and how to monetize your blog. If there’s a serious future to blog economics, it’s in telling people how to blog, not in doing it yourself.

I’m sure I’ve already got a few discouraged probloggers out there throwing up their hands and asking what good blogs are anyway. It’s a good question, and one I think you can easily find the answer to for yourself by stepping back from the moneymaking perspective for a moment. There are as many answers as there are bloggers, I’m sure, but in short, it’s good to write. It’s good to create content, it’s good to share your thoughts, it’s good to network with both diverse and like-minded people, and it’s good to market ideas freely. If you can’t see that, then maybe it’s time to step back, take your hands off that demanding ‘Publish’ button on your own blog, and ask why you’re spending time and money on professional blogging services anyway. Are you buying something that’s going to help you build a career or some supplemental income? Quite possibly. Are you buying the rope to hang yourself with? Equally likely.

As I’ve said before multiple times, I think there’s good in blogging, and I don’t think making money (if you can) with blogging is a bad thing. Still, the more I read about aspiring bloggers and about the economics of blogging, the more I think I’m glad I’m here because I like the scenery and get along with the people, not because of the money.

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It’s nice to sometimes know that you’re never too old to enjoy the simpler pleasures in life. Someone in the dorm got their copy of Gargoyles - The Complete First Season (Special 10th Anniversary Edition) yesterday, and handed it to me to play (since at the moment, I have the best monitor for playing DVDs in the suite). About five minutes into the first episode, a small crowd had gathered around in my room to watch cartoon gargoyles take on the Forces of Evil ™, starting with intolerance, and also mean people with maces (the two of which are pretty much equivalent, in the world of Gargoyles). Of course, the cartoon had a bit of a cult following here in NYC anyway, since after the first few episodes, it becomes the classic self-absorbed NYC cartoon in which there’s not really any point to the world outside the boroughs.

Still, I have to say, it was more fun than I expected to get a big group of people together and watch something as simple as a cartoon; and to be quite honest, it was a lot better than I remember it being. The characters aren’t too oversimplified, the plots aren’t too cookie-cutter, and surprisingly for a cartoon, people’s actions often have unintended consequences. I like how there is an acute sense of consequence for what people do, instead of the usual deus ex machina.

Anyway, if you’re in the mood for a dose of kids’ cartoon nostalgia, I highly recommend it.

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I had an interesting thought occur to me today while reading Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. In it, he talks about how communication has ‘flattened’ the Earth, allowing jobs, money, and information to be ’sourced’ anywhere in the world easily, whether it be to an employee’s home or to a call center in Bangalore.

As much as I respect Friedman, however, I think he misreads the situation. The economic impact of sourcing is one thing, but in his effort to pigeonhole the world into categories for a catchy book-selling buzzword (Globalization 3.0), he dismisses a phenomenon that I think contributes much more heavily to the current state of the world’s technology, and especially to the citizen journalism that blogging enables.

He tells a vignette about a blogger who, waiting outside the CBS news studio, pulls an MP3 player and cellphone camera to interview Bob Schieffer, has it blogged hours later, and has thousands of visits and 300 comments on his article. I think that, much more than the flattening of the world that Friedman thinks it illustrates, this scenario shows that we’ve moved beyond the ‘Information Age’ to something fundamentally different and empowering, and I think blogging, as a social phenomenon, is a natural byproduct of this change.

When I was in middle school and high school, the social change most bandied about by pundits and talking heads was that we were in a wonderful new ‘Information Age’. I think, in retrospect, that by the time we recognized that there had been an information age, we were already through it and on to something else. By 1995, personal computers were everywhere, the Internet was just starting to take hold, and hardware had reached a point of standardization where mass-production of single-purpose devices like handheld GPS and digital audio recording were just starting. 1995, to me, marks the moment when computers were suddenly ubiquitous in a true cultural sense; experts in many fields suddenly found themselves faced with storing and accessing most of their records through here, writers were experimenting with research through online resources, and students could access a wealth of information, educational and otherwise, by knowing how to look.

The reason it was such a revolution, why AOL and CompuServe took off, wasn’t that we were suddenly in an Information Age, where everything was being ported to electronic form. The reason is that, over the previous decades, the information age was already happening in full stride, and the sudden ubiquity of resources online marked the end of that age and the beginning of another, one I like to think of as the Communication Age. By the late 1990s, information was everywhere, and this priceless resource of the Internet suddenly became less and less used for archiving academic information and more and more used for chat, e-mail, forums, and other such methods of communication. The trick to effectively using the Internet was no longer effectively storing information as a provider; the burden was suddenly on users to filter the noise from the signal, to recognize what was valuable and what was useless. This has expanded over the last decade with the growth of IM and software to host forums and blogs, to the point where we spend more time talking about information than actually gathering it.

This is where the blogosphere comes in. Blogging is suddenly no longer a fringe topic anymore; it’s being used for something socially better than just linking to news stories and adding a line or two of opinion. Blogging is no longer a Babel of different voices all talking about the same thing with nobody listening; a few voices cut through the murmur now and again, and prove that more is possible from the medium. The well-written in the blogosphere that find themselves on the cutting edge of current events are now the most trusted primary sources; the news media is regarded as lagging behind. I think that in retrospect, the breakthrough moment for many, when they realize that blogging has come full circle from talking about information to providing it, will be the DirectNIC blog from New Orleans, in which a DirectNIC crisis manager covers the unfolding story live as he tries to keep his building secure and his company’s service running.

If I may allow myself another Dvorak-esque moment of unfounded speculation, I think that this change back to providing useful information, to the mainstream news media suddenly becoming a forum of communication about other people’s information instead of a source of useful information itself, is foreshadowing another sea change in the fabric of society. I think we’re going to find ourselves soon past even the communication age, and into something new, in which Google and its successors (if there should be any) are going to use projects like Google Maps to take this diaspora of information and pull it all together again into formats that ordinary people can comprehend, to pull this Babel of communication that is the blogosphere into a comprehensible form that could actually be comprehensively followed. I’m not sure how, but then, five years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that Google could put together free maps that anyone could compile all their own geographic information on.

For all the cynicism and negativity lately, I still think the future is bright. Blogging is slowly pulling article-based writing into a comprehensible mass, podcasting is doing the same for episode-based audio. What’s the revolution that’s going to throw image, video, GPS, and good old-fashioned talk together and filter it all for us?

From five stories up in Jamaica, NY, this is Kurt.

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Hey, everyone. Sorry for the hiatus, but the DNS servers on campus were being cranky and not letting me into my own web page. Should be all better now.

Anyway, inspired by a recent thread on a forum I follow, I’ve been setting up my own disaster preparedness plan. Last year, at the urging of a brief and ill-fated series of New York City PSAs, I put together a ‘go bag’ just in case I had to get out of NYC quickly. It had two bottles of water, some Powerbars, a couple of basic first aid items, and a change of basic clothes, plus enough cash to catch a taxi or hire a car (like there would be any for hire in an emergency, but it was a good idea nevertheless). In the process of my last couple of moves, I realized that not only had I dismantled that kit, I didn’t even really have a well-defined plan for getting out of here.

So, both for fostering discussion and for the sake of having it here in case it’s needed, here’s the official Thirty Stories Up Disaster Response Plan.

The Go-Bag

This should contain the essentials for at least 36 hours of being on the move, and be in the most portable backpack possible. Included should be:

I see a lot of advice out there on keeping a much larger kit at home, but being in a small dorm in NYC precludes that. The go-bag is what I know I’ll need if I turn on the TV or radio and see something that makes me think ‘I have to get out of here in the next three minutes’, which would apply to pretty much any major emergency (I don’t have a home here to protect, so evacuation would be my top priority).

Speaking of priorities, getting these in order is far more important than having some stuff in hand (although the stuff will help matters immensely). Any flooding disaster I’d be well-prepared to ride out; my campus is at the highest elevation point on Long Island, so unless there are catastrophic predictions of doom-like storm surges, I’d be set on the 5th floor of my dorm. Riding it out would also be safest for any ’small-scale’ attack on a single site.

The real concern would be a spreading danger of the chemical or biological variety, in which case, my evac plan kicks in. Unfortunately, not having a car, my options in NYC are severely limited; the best fall-back plan I have is attempting to get a ride from Jamaica Station to outer LI if that’s far enough. If it’s not, I’d just have to try and find a way to get across the river to New Jersey (a much more dicey proposition, involving catching transfers on inevitably packed trains), in which case I’d get to either Marcus Hook or Newtown Square, PA, and wait for family to get me or find a place to take shelter for a few days.

I realize that this is a terribly depressing, doom-and-gloom subject, but with the recent events weighing heavily on everyone, I think we can all agree that having a plan surely trumps not having one, especially since I fall into the no-car, city-bound demographic that’s most likely to be caught unprepared by any event of a large magnitude. If you’re in an area that you’d have to evacuate quickly in the event of a disaster, I urge you to put together your own go-bag and disaster plan; your family should know at least that you’ve thought about it, and it’s a huge plus if you can set yourself a rally point that everyone in your family knows about so that if there is an event of that magnitude, they know where to start looking for you.

As always, comments and thoughts are appreciated.

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I made a decision when I started this blog that I’d try to keep from delving into politics or trying to make sense of current world events, which I fully admit I’m underqualified to comment on. That said, I think what’s happening in New Orleans tonight transcends any of that.

I used to have a positive, if cynical, view of humanity. However, the last few days have made me seriously doubt that. Here was the perfect opportunity to prove that we as human beings and Americans can pull together in a crisis, weather it, and come out okay on the other side; and indeed, the first 24 hours after Katrina were encouraging, as most of the people I have contact with from around the Big Easy were okay, moved to Baton Rouge or other surrounding areas, but still with their health and their families.

Then you look at the people who stayed, and the developing situation over the past 48 hours. I don’t think any reasonable person can help but despair for the state of human affairs when all it takes for a modern, sophisticated city to descend into a state not unlike Mogadishu in 1992 is missing a couple of meals. I know people are angry, tired, hungry, thirsty, and sick. I can even understand the initial looting. Sure, you have a big-screen TV now; where are you going to plug it in, and what are you going to do when your kids get cholera from lugging it through the toxic water that’s waist-deep in most of New Orleans? It offers no benefit to the looters, but no danger to legitmate citizens. But when you start shooting at rescue choppers and boats, when you start assaulting women and firing on U.S. troops in cold blood… honestly, it boggles the mind that 5 days separates sophistication from savagery.

Listening to the Louisiana National Guard comm frequencies today, I heard about several shootings of rescue personnel. My thoughts go out to their families, and my condolences go out to those who lost everything. I’ll work on saving my contempt for the ones taking advantage of the situation to prove that there’s still pure evil somewhere within the human soul.

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