Hayek Interview
Here is a transcript of a 15.25-hour interview completed under the auspices of the UCLA Oral History Program and the Pacific Academy of Advanced Studies. I haven’t read the piece so I can’t vouch for its quality (I don’t recognise the interviewers). Anyway, one would hope that there will be some interest within the 1,046 pages. Download here (pdf: 19.73 MB).
Limits on the Communication of Knowledge in Human Organisations
I want to bring your attention to this superb paper by Jacky Mallett (one of the sharpest minds around) published in Studies in Emergent Order, Spring 2009, Vol. 2.
Oakeshott, Buddhist?
See Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Elizabeth Corey’s book that Andrew so highly praises features heavily in the Oakeshott symposium for Zygon.
Neuroscience and Politics
Over the last few years there has been a rash of articles concerning the relationship of neuroscience to politics – Wired – BoingBoing – Crooked Timber. On this topic, here’s a recent posting from the ever-thoughtful Corey Abel. Update: assimilating this paper.
Friedrich A. Hayek: His Life and Work
Here is a lecture on Hayek by disciple Kurt Leube, someone I have had a brief correspondence with. Not deep stuff but I suppose a decent introduction. Interestingly enough he touches upon The Sensory Order though Leube’s enthusiasm for/assessment of this work is way over the top: “TSO is one of the most celebrated books ever penned in the last century . . . ” While certainly a fascinating and deep work, it is hardly the case that it corresponds to the superlatives Leube confers upon it. My take on TSO is forthcoming.
Connected
Yet another “popular” book on, as I term it, social connectionism – Connected – see New Scientist review. Shame about the dreadful dust jacket hype on Amazon.com.
Hubert Dreyfus on Husserl and Heidegger
From Brian Magee’s marvelous series (and accompanying book) The Great Philosophers from about ’87 with top-draw commentators on each major thinker.
Pt. 1
Pt. 2
Pt. 3
Pt. 4
Pt. 5
Online Oakeshottiana
Some Oakeshottiana can be found online available for download.
Oakeshott’s Introduction to Hobbes
A fragment from a Spanish version of the Voice of Liberal Learning
Happy birthday Google
Brin and Page:
We assume page A has pages T1, . . ., Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85, . . ., C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Google’s search algorithm is a refinement of degree centrality, namely eigenvector centrality, where degree centrality is something we touched upon in the last section when discussing testimony, trust and authority. Eigenvector centrality gives credence to the idea that not all connections should be equally weighted. Google’s Page-Rank (PR) is a star example of eigenvector centrality, and is a direct descendant of the citation system used in traditional librarian science, the most familiar being journal rankings. The more citations other documents make to a particular document, the more ‘‘important’’ a given document is and the more status accorded to a journal through aggregation techniques. In much the same way, Google’s PR algorithm assesses the importance or relevance of a Web page. Search engines are, as Christophe Heintz puts it, ‘‘reputation systems’’ (EigenTrust algorithms) in that they ostensibly promote epistemic and cognitive worth (Heintz, 2006). PR’s power lies in its ability to solve an equation with over 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Its simplicity lies in its assessing a page’s importance by counting backlinks as a traditional technique of library science objectivity.
Brin, S. & Page, L. (1997). The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine.
Heintz, C. (2006). Web search engines and distributed assessment systems. In S. Harnad, I. Dror (Eds.), Distributed cognition: Special issue of pragmatics & cognition (Vol. 14)(2), (pp. 287–409).
