Walker Percy Wednesday 80

walker percy

percycovercroppea

You should be interested! Such a quest serves God’s cause! How? Because the Good proves nothing. When everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God. If you had ten thousand Albert Schweitzers giving their lives for their fellow men, do you think anyone would have a second thought about God?

Or suppose the Lowell Professor of Religion at Harvard should actually find the Holy Grail, dig it up in an Israeli wadi, properly authenticate it, carbon date it, and present it to the Metropolitan Museum. Millions of visitors! I would be as curious as the next person and would stand in line for hours to see it. But what difference would it make in the end? People would be interested for a while, yes. This is an age of interest.

But suppose you could show me one “sin,” one pure act of malevolence. A different cup of tea! That would bring matters to a screeching halt. But we have plenty of evil around you say. What about Hitler, the gas ovens and so forth? What about them? As everyone knows and says, Hitler was a madman. And it seems nobody else was responsible. Everyone was following orders. It is even possible that there was no such order, that it was all a bureaucratic mistake.

Show me a single “sin.”

One hundred and twenty thousand dead at Hiroshima? Where was the evil of that? Was Harry Truman evil? As for the pilot and bombardier, they were by all accounts wonderful fellows, good fathers and family men.

“Evil” is surely the clue to this age, the only quest appropriate to the age. For everything and everyone’s either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil.

God may be absent, but what if one should find the devil? Do you think I wouldn’t be pleased to meet the devil? Ha, ha. I’d shake his hand like a long-lost friend.

The mark of the age is that terrible things happen but there is no “evil” involved. People are either crazy, miserable, or wonderful, so where does the “evil” come in?

There I was forty-five years old and I didn’t know whether there was “evil” in the world.

A small corollary to the above: Is evil to be sought in violence or in sexual behavior? Or is all violence bad and all sexual behavior good, or as Jacoby and Merlin would say, life-enhancing?

If one is looking for evil, why not study war or child-battering? Could anything be more evil? Yet, as everyone knows, mothers and fathers who beat and kill their children have psychological problems and are as bad off as the children. It has been proved that every battered child has battered parents, battered grandparents, and so on. No one is to blame.

As for war, the only time members of my family have ever been happy, brave, successful, was in time of war. What’s wrong with war?

Look across the street. Do you see that girl’s Volkswagen’s bumper sticker: Make Love Not War. That is certainly the motto of the age. Is anything wrong with it?

Yes. Could it be possible that since the greatest good is to be found in love, so is the greatest evil. Evil, sin, if it exists, must be incommensurate with anything else. Didn’t one of your saints say that the entire universe in all its goodness is not worth the cost of a single sin? Sin is incommensurate, right? There is only one kind of behavior which is incommensurate with anything whatever, in both its infinite good and its infinite evil. That is sexual behavior. The orgasm is the only earthly infinity. Therefore it is either an infinite good or an infinite evil.

My quest was for a true sin—was there such a thing? Sexual sin was the unholy grail I sought.

It is possible of course that there is no such thing and that a true sin, like the Grail, probably does not exist.

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Stigmergy as a Universal Coordination Mechanism II: varieties and evolution

stigmergy

Here’s an extract from the sixth and the final article from this special Human-Human Stigmergy issue. It is the second part to Francis Heylighen’s contribution.

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In a preceding paper (Heylighen, 2015), stigmergy was defined as a mechanism for the coordination of actions, in which the trace left by an action on some medium stimulates the performance of a subsequent action. This generic definition is applicable to a very broad variety of cases, including the pheromone traces used by ants to find food, the self-organization of chemical reactions, and the implicit collaboration between people via the edits they make in a shared website, such as Wikipedia.

            To bring some order to these phenomena, the present paper will develop a classification scheme for the different varieties of stigmergy. We will do this by defining fundamental dimensions or aspects, i.e. independent parameters along which stigmergic systems can vary. The fact that these aspects are continuous (“more or less”) rather than dichotomous (“present or absent”) may serve to remind us that the domain of stigmergic mechanisms is essentially connected: however different its instances may appear, it is not a collection of distinct classes, but a space of continuous variations on a single theme—the stimulation of actions by their prior results.

            This continuity will further help us to understand the evolution of stigmergic mechanisms, from rudimentary to more sophisticated applications. The paper will in particular focus on the evolution of two applications of stigmergy that are particularly important for humans, cognition and cooperation, arguing that these phenomena, which are traditionally viewed as difficult to explain via conventional evolutionary mechanisms, actually seem to emerge rather naturally via stigmergy.

Individual vs. collective stigmergy

Perhaps the most intuitive aspect along which stigmergic systems can vary is the number of agents involved. In the limit, a single agent can coordinate its different actions via stigmergic interaction with the medium in which it acts.

            An elegant example discussed by (Theraulaz and Bonabeau, 1999) is the solitary wasp Paralastor sp. building its nest in the shape of a mud funnel. The nest emerges in qualitatively different stages S1, S2, …, S5. These subsequently perceived conditions or stimuli each trigger a fitting action or response: S1 -> R1, …, S5 -> R5. Each building action Ri produces as a result a new condition Si+1 that triggers the next action Ri+1. The wasp does not need to have a plan for building such a nest, or to remember what it already did, because the present stage of the activity is directly visible in the trace left by the work already done.

            However, the underlying rule structure becomes apparent when the sequence is disturbed so that stages are mixed up. For example, the wasp’s initial building activity is triggered by the stimulus S1, a spherical hole. When at stage S5 (almost complete funnel) the observer makes such a hole on top of the funnel, the wasp “forgets” that its work is nearly finished, and starts anew from the first stage, building a second funnel on top of the first one. This little experiment shows that the activity is truly stigmergic, and can only run its course when the medium (the mud) reacts as expected to the different actions performed on it, thus registering the information needed to guide the subsequent actions.

            As (Theraulaz and Bonabeau, 1999) suggest, it is likely that collaborative stigmergy evolved from the simpler case of individual stigmergy. Imagine that a second wasp encounters the partially finished nest of the first wasp. It too will be stimulated to act by the perception of the present state of work. It does not matter that this state was achieved by another individual: the wasp anyway has no memory of previous actions—its own or someone else’s. Assume further that the resulting structure is big enough to house the two wasps. In this case, the wasps will have collaboratively built a nest for both, without need for any additional coordination between their genetically programmed building instructions. Assume that the structure is modular, like the nests of social wasps, so that an unlimited number of modules can be added. In that case, the number of wasps that may start working together simply by joining the on-going activity on an existing nest can grow without limit.

            This example illustrates how the number of agents collaborating on a stigmergic project is actually much less fundamental than it may seem. The essence of the activity is always the same. Assuming that the agents have the same skills, adding more agents merely increases manpower and therefore the size of the problem that can be tackled, the speed of advance, or the eventual magnitude of the achievement. Only when the agents are diverse can an increase in their number produce a qualitative improvement in the solution via a division of labor, where differently skilled agents contribute different solutions.

            The only complication added by increasing the number of agents is that agents may get in each other’s way, in the sense that similar individuals perceiving the same stimulus are likely to move to the same place at the same time, thus obstructing each other’s actions. This problem is easily tackled by an additional rule, which is already implicit in individual work but likely to become reinforced during collaborative work: keep a minimum distance from obstacles—including other agents. This rule is a well-known ingredient in the many successful simulations of collectively moving animals, such as flocks, schools or swarms (Okubo, 1986), allowing densely packed groups of agents to follow complex, synchronized trajectories without ever bumping into each other. In combination with the basic stimulation by the stimulus object, this leads to what may look like a carefully thought-out strategy of coordinated movement. An example are group hunting strategies, as used e.g. by lions or wolves (Parunak, 2006). Each wolf is attracted to move towards the prey (basic stimulus). On the other hand, each wolf is stimulated to stay as far away as possible from the other wolves. The result is an efficient encirclement of the prey, which is attacked simultaneously from all sides with no opening left for escape.

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Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity

freedom of speech

Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity: Confronting the Fear of Knowledge. Universities, once at the forefront of campaigns for intellectual liberty, are now bastions of conformity. This provocative book traces the demise of academic freedom within the context of changing ideas about the purpose of the university and the nature of knowledge and is a passionate call to arms for the power of academic thought today.

The Death and Life of Great Italian Cities

Jane Jacobs

Abstract: The Death and Life of Great American Cities was written in 1961 and is now one of the most influential book in city planning. In it, Jane Jacobs proposed four conditions that promote life in a city. However, these conditions have not been empirically tested until recently. This is mainly because it is hard to collect data about “city life”. The city of Seoul recently collected pedestrian activity through surveys at an unprecedented scale, with an effort spanning more than a decade, allowing researchers to conduct the first study successfully testing Jacobs’s conditions. In this paper, we identify a valuable alternative to the lengthy and costly collection of activity survey data: mobile phone data. We extract human activity from such data, collect land use and socio-demographic information from the Italian Census and Open Street Map, and test the four conditions in six Italian cities. Although these cities are very different from the places for which Jacobs’s conditions were spelled out (i.e., great American cities) and from the places in which they were recently tested (i.e., the Asian city of Seoul), we find those conditions to be indeed associated with urban life in Italy as well. Our methodology promises to have a great impact on urban studies, not least because, if replicated, it will make it possible to test Jacobs’s theories at scale. — Proceedings of the 26th International ACM Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 2016

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Tony Visconti

music

Tony Visconti really was the natural heir to George Martin. Check out Tony’s thoughts on the state of the music industry — there is no-one as distinguished and so able to offer the ultimate insider’s diagnosis on the malaise of creativity that we know has well and truly flattened the creative landscape over the past 20 years at least — as has happened to all other realms of artistic endeavor. This is not to say that there is not superb talent out there — it’s just that one has to dig much deeper to find it, and shovel away the “fame” pap that is the prevailing driver. Tony knows every gratuitous technological trick in the recording book so he can quickly see through to the talentless underlayer.

Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology

psychology

Freely available from Psychological Inquiry: An International Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory — by Nick Haslam.

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From Bounded Rationality to Expertise

Herbert Simon

The ninth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon.

Fernand Gobet

Introduction

Historically, a pervasive assumption in the social sciences, in particular economics, is that humans are perfect rational agents. Having full access to information and enjoying unlimited computational resources, they maximise utility when making decisions. As is well known, Herbert A. Simon rejected this assumption, calling it a “fantasy”, for two main reasons. First, the complexity of the environment makes it impossible for humans to have full access to information. Second, a number of important restrictions impede the human cognitive system, such as limited attention and slow learning rates. Therefore, humans display only a bounded rationality and must satisfice – i.e. make decisions that are good enough, but not necessarily optimal.

Research into expertise has contributed to the question of rationality in two important ways. First, to what extent can some of the very best amongst us – super experts – approximate full rationality? Second, by what means do experts, at least in part, circumvent the constraints imposed by bounded rationality?

This chapter takes the shape of a fugue, with the themes of bounded rationality and expertise first played in the background of personal recollections, and then elaborated with a more formal survey of Simon’s research into expertise. The themes are played a third and final time with a discussion of the heuristics (rules of thumb) proposed by Simon for having a successful career in science.

Becoming an expert: A personal recollection

My collaboration with Herbert A. Simon lasted over 10 years, including 6 years spent at Carnegie Mellon. While I was working on my PhD thesis on chess players’ memory, I secured a research fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation to work with him. The qualifications I listed in my introductory letter to Simon were rather limited: a first degree in psychology and the title of International Chess Master. Simon, who probably saw an opportunity to reactivate research he carried out on chess expertise in the sixties and seventies (see below), but which had been dormant since, accepted to host me.

Meeting the man

I can still recall our first meeting on a beautiful morning in January 1990. His office was welcoming, but also rather disorganised, with stacks of papers and books hiding his desk. The meeting was short but cordial, and Simon gave me advice about life and housing in Pittsburgh, and briefly talked about the projects he was currently involved in.

The second meeting was my first real scientific discussion with Simon. It was actually a shock. In a polite and friendly way, Simon demolished the research line I had in mind for my PhD. The idea was to elicit a chess grandmaster’s knowledge about a small and specific domain (Rook + pawn endgames), and to build a program implementing this knowledge. The aim, inspired by research on expert systems, was to compare the amount of procedural (knowing how) and declarative knowledge (knowing what). Simon found that the project was not realistic enough (“A player like Kasparov will give you lectures on Rook endgames for several days; what are you going to do with all these data?”). In addition, he thought that the project would dovetail better with the research of his colleague John Anderson. I can still feel the panic that invaded me when he told me this, as it was an invitation to sever collaboration before the end of the first meeting! In the discussion that followed, he made it clear that he would prefer a project directly linked to the “chunking theory” he had developed with Chase in the seventies to account for chess expertise. This influential theory, and in particular the computer model MAPP (Memory-Aided Pattern Perceiver) that implemented it in part, had been severely criticised, and Simon wanted to improve on it. Thus my first lesson was that Simon, while open to other ideas, was very selective about the research lines he invested time in, and made sure that they addressed his central interests.

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Conceptions of Reinhart Koselleck’s Theory of Historical Time in the Thinking of Michael Oakeshott

michael oakeshott

New article in the History of European Ideas

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Walker Percy Wednesday 79

walker percy

percycovercroppea

At least in Louisiana we knew how to take things easy. We could always drink.

*****

Then I realized why I drank and smoked. It was a way of dealing with time. What to do with time? A fearful thing: a human body of ten billion cells ready to do any one of ten billion things. But what to do?

The empty tape was spinning past the tape head.

*****

Christ, here’s my discovery. You have got hold of the wrong absolutes and infinities. God as absolute? God as infinity? I don’t even understand the words. I’ll tell you what’s absolute and infinite. Loving a woman. But how would you know? You see, your church knows what it’s doing: rule out one absolute so you have to look for another.

Do you know what it’s like to be a self-centered not unhappy man who leads a tolerable finite life, works, eats, drinks, hunts, sleeps, then one fine day discovers that the great starry heavens have opened to him and that his heart is bursting with it. It? She. Her. Woman. Not a category, not a sex, not one of two sexes, a human female creature, but an infinity. What else is infinity but a woman become meat and drink to you, life and your heart’s own music, the air you breathe? Just to be near her is to live and have your soul’s own self. Just to open your mouth on the skin of her back. What joy just to wake up with her beside you in the morning. I didn’t know there was such happiness.

*****

Yes, but at midnight all cats are black, so what difference does anything make? It does make a difference? What? You opened your mouth and then thought better of it—

But don’t you see. I had to find out. There I was in early middle age and I couldn’t answer the most fundamental question of all. What question? This: Are people as nice as they make out and in fact appear to be, or is it all buggery once the door is closed?

So I meant to find out once and for all. There is something worse than knowing the worst. It is not knowing.

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Social Cognition, Artefacts, and Stigmergy Revisited: Concepts of Coordination

stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy

Here’s an extract from the fifth article by Tarja Susi from this special Human-Human Stigmergy issue

Some years ago Susi and Ziemke (2001) made a comparative analysis of social/situated theories of cognition (activity theory, situated action, and distributed cognition) and stigmergy, discussing the coordination paradox, visible in both social insects and human activities. The key elements compared were agents, environment, and artefacts, and the collaborative activity emerging from their interaction. The conclusion made back then was that the considered theories and stigmergy do have some similarities, and that stigmergy could be a common denominator. However, while stigmergy, as a general principle, provides a valuable explanation to the coordination paradox (Theraulaz and Bonabeau, 1999), it may be limited in providing rich descriptions of how seemingly individual activities sum up to coordinated human activity. Hence, the aim of this paper is to discuss some concepts of coordination originating from different areas, and to relate them to stigmergy, which are discussed in the context of a case study at a workplace where most tasks are distributed and individually performed, but result in well organised and coordinated activities at the collective level.

Regarding the issue of defining stigmergy, many definitions are considered vague and too general and many papers on stigmergy are criticised for leading their readers to “believe that it is a simple phenomenon that can be easily dismissed as an environment mediated, and indirect communication mechanism” (Dipple, Raymond and Docherty, 2014, 2014, p. 90; see also, e.g., Heylighen, 2011-12; Huang, Ren and Jin, 2008). However, considering, e.g., Dipple et al.’s (2014) general theory of stigmergy, the concept of stigmergy is anything but simple; based on a thorough review of previous research, and by addressing the “what, how, why, where and when” of stigmergy, they constructed a holistic, macro-level general model thereof. Another example is Huang et al. (2008) who constructed a sign-based model of stigmergy (SBMS), a unified model that places “sign” at its core. The view on stigmergy adopted here is based on these two theories. Dipple et al. (2014) consider different concepts of stigmergy, which includes mechanisms (qualitative/quantitative) distinctions (marker-based/sematectonic), and varieties (four possible combinations of qualitative/quantitative and marker-based/sematectonic). The variety considered here is qualitative marker-based, according to which “the intentional marker is a sign left as a signal that means something to others in its single form […] that facilitates coordination” (Dipple et al., 2014, p. 13). Huang et al. (2008) provide an elaborated description of sign, which is considered to have a content that is an agent’s behaviour or the product of an agent’s activities, is carried by the environment, and can be sensed or observed, and interpreted by other agents. Importantly, these theories consider stigmergy in human activities, which allows us to include a cognitive perspective on agents.

In Susi and Ziemke (2001) it was argued that despite the difference in complexity between social insects and humans, the principles of coordination by use of artefacts can be applied to human activity in order to explain and understand the coordination paradox. Whether stigmergy in fact is applicable on human activity or not, has already been discussed in many papers (e.g., Christensen, 2013; Parunak, 2006; Dipple, Raymond and Docherty, 2014) and the issue will not be re-iterated here. Instead it is assumed that a lot of human activities are stigmergic. After all, as Parunak (2006) states, stigmergy is ubiquitous in human interactions and it “would be more difficult to show a functioning human institution that is not stigmergic, than it is to find examples of human stigmergy” (ibid.). While stigmergy previously has attracted perhaps most interest in areas like Artificial Life (Bonabeau, 1999) and Multi-Agent Systems (Omicini, Ricci and Viroli, 2008), it has also been applied on animals with known cognitive capacities and it is argued to provide a powerful metaphor for human interactions (Marsh and Onof, 2008; Parunak, 2006). Furthermore, to overcome the limitation of ant-like stigmergy, and to include cognizant agents, the concept of stigmergy has also been expanded to explicitly encompass a cognitively oriented perspective, as seen, e.g., in frameworks on stigmergic cognition (Marsh and Onof, 2008) and cognitive stigmergy (Lewis, 2013; Ricci, Omicini, Viroli, Gardelli and Oliva, 2007).

Cognitive stigmergy is said to preserve the benefits of “ant-biased” stigmergy of the multi-agent systems field, but also to “promote the full exploitation of the cognitive abilities of agents and of the environment articulation in artifacts in the stigmergic process” (Ricci et al., 2007, p. 138). Another example is Parunak’s (2006) schema for analysis of human-human stigmergy, which includes four varieties of stigmergy based on a binary distinction between marker-based/sematectonic stigmergy, and qualitative/quantitative stigmergy. The schema is then applied to a number of common human activities which demonstrates their stigmergic nature. Stigmergy is also being increasingly applied in various domains concerned with human activities. Some examples are team cognition (Espinosa, Lerch and Kraut, 2002), team work practices (Christensen, 2013), embodied cognition (Dawson, 2014), information systems and open source software development (Bolici, Howison and Crowston, 2009; Howison, Østerlund, Crowston and Bolici, 2012; Marsden, 2013), online creative communities (Secretan, 2013), and systems security (Lugosky and Dove, 2011).

There is vast number of studies on collaboration, cooperation, and coordination of human activities, but few of them have embraced stigmergy as an explanatory concept. Besides stigmergy there are also other concepts and mechanisms for explaining coordination of human activities, but comparisons are scarce. An exception is Christensen (2013) who compared stigmergy, articulation work, awareness, and feedthrough. In his conclusion none of the mentioned concepts are interchangeable with stigmergy, but that they complement each other. Another analysis was made by Bolici et al. (2009), who compared stigmergy, boundary objects, field of work, trading zones, and community of practice. Some of the concepts are similar or clearly related to each other, but as noted by Howison, Østerlund, Crowston and Bolici (2012), “they don’t take each other’s contribution into account” (referring to implicit coordination and stigmergy). The focus of this paper is stigmergy and a few concepts that are, or can be, related to coordination in human activities, used foremost in cognitive science, human-computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work. The concepts discussed here are articulation work and coordination mechanisms (Schmidt and Simone, 1996), triggers and placeholders (Dix et al., 2004, and entry points (Kirsh, 2001) (concepts like boundary objects and trading zones, which were compared by Bolici et al., 2009, are not included since they concern structures for coordination between different communities, while the discussion here considers coordination within a community). These concepts do not seem to have been previously compared and related to stigmergy, although three of the concepts (triggers, placeholders, entry points) have been combined as a means for understanding the role of artefacts in social interactions (Susi, 2005). Some of the concepts were originally formulated with regard to individual activities, but the discussion will consider their possible role in coordinating activities on a collective level. For the sake of clarity, the term coordination mechanism, as used in the field of computer-supported cooperative work, will be denoted “coordination mechanisms (CMs)” to distinguish it from stigmergic coordination mechanisms.

The rest of this paper is organised as follows. The next section describes a case study in a work place, which is then used through out the paper to exemplify different concepts, and discusses articulation work and coordination mechanisms. Section three discusses the role of environmental resources in coordination, as seen in the concepts of triggers, placeholders, and entry points. The discussion in these sections is also related to stigmergy. Section four provides an overview of the coordination concepts discussed in previous sections and considers whether the work place indeed is a stigmergic systems. The last section provides a summary and conclusions.

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