Bibs & bobs #8

 Bibs and bobs #8

Literature and research

A post derived from a paper the author wrote about the role of literature in AI research brought to mind an idea I have been clumsily wrangling with, of what I have called intellectual path dependence. Path dependence is a well established idea that articulates with my ongoing interest in material semiotics. One of the more famous and colourful instances of path dependence is retold by Kevin Kelly [1]:

There’s an old story about the long reach of early choices that is basically true: Ordinary Roman carts were constructed to match the width of imperial Roman war chariots because it was eas­ier to follow the ruts in the road left by the war chariots. The chariots were sized to accommodate the width of two large warhorses, which translates into our English measurement of 4' 8.5". Roads throughout the vast Roman Empire were built to this specification. When the le­gions of Rome marched into Britain, they constructed long-distance imperial roads 4' 8.5" wide. When the English started building tram­ ways, they used the same width so the same horse carriages could be used. And when they started building railways with horseless carriages, naturally the rails were 4' 8.5" wide. Imported laborers from the British Isles built the first railways in the Americas using the same tools and jigs they were used to. Fast-forward to the U.S. space shuttle, which is built in parts around the country and assembled in Florida. Because the two large solid-fuel rocket engines on the side of the launch shuttle were sent by railroad from Utah, and that line traversed a tunnel not much wider than the standard track, the rockets themselves could not be much wider in diameter than 4' 8.5". As one wag concluded: “So, a major de­sign feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transporta­tion system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of two horses’ arse.” More or less, this is how technology constrains it­ self over time. 

Academic publishing is, of course, an exercise in demonstrating path dependence, i.e. that research builds on or adds to the research work of others. The standard practice is to make a statement and support it by citing one or more sources that you imply support the statement. I sometimes find it amusing to see how others have bent the arguments of my research to best suit their purpose. This is a phenomenon more common in the sciences of the social. There is much to say about the citation game but for another time.

What I puzzle about are the dots that have been well connected and reinforced over time in brain-1 [2], think the width of Roman war chariots. Those connections are further reinforced in brain-2 [3] which has links that don’t fade over time. 

I guess it is the last point in the Kelly quote that bothers me, how my thinking gets constrained over time as I join more dots and particularly those that are already a dense set of connections.

I suppose this kind of assembling of stuff around core ideas is what the species does, pattern matching, which relates to what Leonard Mlodinow draws attention to in his book Subliminal [4]:

As it turns out, the brain is a decent scientist but an absolutely outstanding lawyer. The result is that in the struggle to fashion a coherent, convincing view of ourselves and the rest of the world, it is the impassioned advocate that usually wins over the truth seeker. We’ve seen in earlier chapters how the unconscious mind is a master at using limited data to construct a version of the world that appears realistic and complete to its partner, the conscious mind.

Protecting one’s butt is a good thing I suppose but perhaps not when it goes to the lengths that Mlodinow illustrates with this example:

For example, in the 1950s and ’60s a debate raged about whether the universe had had a beginning or whether it had always been in existence. One camp supported the big bang theory, which said that the cosmos began in a manner indicated by the theory’s name. The other camp believed in the steady state theory, the idea that the universe had always been around, in more or less the same state that it is in today. In the end, to any disinterested party, the evidence landed squarely in support of the big bang theory, especially after 1964, when the afterglow of the big bang was serendipitously detected by a pair of satellite communications researchers at Bell Labs. That discovery made the front page of the New York Times, which proclaimed that the big bang had won out. What did the steady state researchers proclaim? After three years, one proponent finally accepted it with the words “The universe is in fact a botched job, but I suppose we shall have to make the best of it.” Thirty years later, another leading steady state theorist, by then old and silver-haired, still believed in a modified version of his theory.

I guess this is why science can sometimes appear to move ahead one burial at a time.

And, while I’m joining dots, the two hemisphere hypothesis popularised by Iain McGilchrist [5] adds beautifully to my puzzling:

The brain is, importantly, divided into two hemispheres: you could say, to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it – see it all for what it is. The problem is that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it. Meanwhile, compounding the problem, we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it.

If your head does not hurt by now, the drugs are likely working.

Research in education: delegating work to machines

I gave a short, intentionally provocative presentation at an internal education research conference recently which I plan to turn into a short working paper [6]. I was trying to point to the insular nature of much of educational research. I made the analogy with a surfer that only goes to one beach to surf, compared to surfers who go to a variety of beaches. The beaches were crude analogies for intellectual fields in education, e.g. critical sociology, developmental psychology, poststructural feminism etc.  

Being good at surfing at a particular beach has its advantages. It helps progress an academic career but if all you do is work the one beach you miss all of the different opportunities that appear on different beaches, i.e. you more or less insulate yourself from the hummingbird effect via the always interesting and prolific Steven Johnson [7]. 

In the brief conversation that followed my pitch, another Steven, Hodge, offered another view of education’s silo positioning. It was that, very crudely paraphrasing, other fields did not value what education had to offer. Much more to say about that.

Delegating research work to a machine

I’ll try and put together a useful list of apps that might be used to support research tasks. In the interim, Azeem Azhar has a brief commentary on Metaphor and Elicit both of which I have been playing with for some time.

What does AI think of humans?

A fun post by Alberto Romero about a wee experiment he did, having two AIs have a conversation about humans. 

There is quite a bit of fun to be had with large language models as Janelle Shane has shown with many examples.

Along similar lines, a fun bit of GPT-3 wrangling:  A conversation in which I teach GPT-3 to read a book by Henrik Karlsson.

                                                                                                    

[1]  Kelly, K. (2010). What Technology Wants. Penguin, pp 180-181.

[2] The meat computer that sits on my shoulders.

[3] I keep my zettelkasten in an app called DEVONthink (OSX only).

[4] Mlodinow, L. (2012). Subliminal : the revolution of the new unconscious and what it teaches us about ourselves (1st ed.). Allen Lane.  

[5] McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.  

[6] Don’t hold you breath.

[7] Johnson, S. (2014). How we got to now : six innovations that made the modern world. Riverhead Books.  

Bibs & bobs #7

 Change

I’ve been interested in change for a long time, particularly change in education. I have found that the way change is framed in education is often unhelpful. Typically it is some version of Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations. The use of terms like change agent, early adopter etc are always telltale signs that you are in diffusion land [1].

Education has a long history of reforms of various sorts that have all ended up in the dust bin which, I’d suggest is due to relying on unhelpful ideas about change. There is a lot of work, other than “rolling it out” or mandating it that needs to occur. One aspect of a key part of that work was recently written about by Steven Johnson. 

Steven Johnson is one of the more interesting thinkers who shares his work online. He recently posted a piece on popularisers. Johnson wrote about the significant popularisers play in advances in medical practices, i.e. a new approach is developed that is shown to be a good solution to a medical problem. It does not automatically mean that word simply spreads from these initial experiments. It needs one or more folk to make the practice well known. He writes:

The key point here is that when we talk about the history of innovation, we often over-index on the inventors and underplay the critical role of popularizers, the people who are unusually gifted at making the case for adopting a new innovation, or who have a platform that gives them an unusual amount of influence

The notion reminded me of the three kinds of people that can produce large effects described in Malcom Gladwell’s book Tipping Point. He called them connectors, mavens and salesmen. 

In the academic world it might be assumed that getting published or even posting in a blog is sufficient to selling an idea. If the idea is any good, Gladwell would suggest you need folk to make connections, dot joiners, who together with salesmen can spread the idea or new way of doing things.

Whatever label is used, it is an important idea for all the would-be/wannabe reformers or changers of things in education. The wee actor-network daemon that sits on my shoulder reminds me of the quote from Grint and Woolgar’s, The Machine at Work: 

If Foucault is right that truth and power are intimately intertwined, those seeking to change the world might try strategies to recruit powerful allies rather than assuming that the quest for the truth will, in and of itself, lead to dramatic changes in levels and forms of social inequality. p. 168

And then as the daemon nudges me, you need to police the new arrangement, to keep all the things that have gone into a new way of doing something, in place. All too often, education reforms resemble a hit and run approach. Dump the innovation in a site, hold participants hands for a short time, get it working and then leave. 

The discovery ecosystem

Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu have written an important piece titled, A Vision of Metascience: An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science. They ask the intriguing question:

how well does the discovery ecosystem learn, and can we improve the way it learns?

They begin with the fun alien approach which simply put is if you had to invent a system for discovery from scratch would it look like what we have today? The same question can be asked of most of the creaking, ancient systems that operate today (think your favourite research funding agency, universities, schools etc), all glossed with digital glitter but steadfastly holding the line against any significant attempts to change them. Robert Pirsig [2] captures it well in this long quote:

To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as “the system” is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There's no villain, no “mean guy” who wants them to live meaningless lives, it's just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

So, it’s not just a matter of tearing down silly structures and pointless measures, you’d have to do a memory wipe of everyone to be sure they structures and measures did not reappear in a different guise. 

The difficulty of all the silliness is well captured in a conversation Clay Shirky had with Daniel Pink:

Pink: You say something else about organizations that I found especially compelling—about their instinct for self-perpetuation.

Shirky: Well, organizations that are founded to solve problems end up committed to the preservation of the problems. So Trentway-Wagar, an Ontario-based bus company, sues PickupPal, an online ride-sharing service, because T-W isn’t committed to solving transportation problems. It’s committed to solving transportation problems with buses. In the media world, Britannica is now committed to making reference works that can’t easily be referred to, and the music industry is now distributing music that can’t easily be shared because new ways of distributing music undermine the old business model. [3]

Change, as I have been trying to suggest in this wee blog post, ain’t a simple matter.

The local

There has been a good deal of commentary about the effects of embracing globalisation as the solution to the world’s economic problems. The push back as supply chains have been seriously disrupted, something we are likely to be living with on a semi-permanent basis, thoughts turn to the local and its geography economics and politics among other things. 

Geography matters, as Tomas Pueyo keeps wonderfully demonstrating over and over. 

I prompted Metaphor (mentioned below but imply is “you want links, I can find them for you”) with:

There is a growing unease about globalisation

It produced over one hundred links, many of which were particularly useful: links to books, papers, blog posts etc. Sure there is work to do to sift them a task also likely for AI down the track. 

This snippet is a place holder for me. it may be that we are living through a correction to globalise anything that moves to one where the local is noticed for its importance.

Mind blowing

I have been watching The Peripheral, streaming on Prime weekly. It’s based on William Gibson’s book of the same title. Crudely, it is about humans “inhabiting” nonhuman avatars across time. Maybe it is another instance of science beginning to ape science fiction as this paper points precisely in that direction, without the time travel and with no mention of Gibson.   

Delegating work to a machine

Another open access bit of AI. Metaphor:

Metaphor is a search engine that’s trained for link prediction. This means that given some context, it tries to predict the link that would most likely follow that text. You interact with Metaphor search by writing prompts: these are snippets of text that could precede a link.

You need a Discord account (easily done) to access the app. I have only tried it on a few ideas and it was more than useful.  I tried it on the Mind Blowing paragraph about. Heck of a set of links were generated.

This app is mentioned in an excellent post by Rodolfo Rosini: The next Google search engine will be Generative AI. 

I expect more and more of these apps which likely already have found their way into current standard research practices for folk who are not asleep at the wheel. It’s only a matter of time before grant writing apps begin to appear which will of course be met be grant assessing apps. The beat goes on as Sapiens continues to shrink. 

                                                                                                    

[1] If you are interested, I wrote about this a long time ago: Bigum, C. (2000). Actor-network theory and online university teaching: translation versus diffusion. In B. A. Knight & L. Rowan (Eds.), Researching Futures Oriented Pedagogies (pp. 7-22). PostPressed.  Download

[2] Pirsig, R. M. (1974). Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: an inquiry into values. Morrow.  

[3] Shirky, C., & Pink, D. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution. Wired (June), np. https://www.wired.com/2010/05/ff-pink-shirky/ 

Bibs & bobs #6

 Delegating work to nonhumans

A good deal of academic and student work involves coming to terms with publications which can prove tricky and time consuming if you are unfamiliar with the genre and or content. This online app does a fair job “explaining” chunks of text from any paper you submit to it.

And for the music oriented folk, an app for forming musical ideas: Note. 

This post by Stripe Partners opens the delegation issue further. Specifically it explores the shift of humans as craft people to expert technicians and then, with the advent of AI, to users. Having machines do all the heavy lifting involved in a task that once required significant technical skill results in non-expert users “self-serve”. The shift is represented thus:

It’s an important framing of what we are going through re all the AI apps that have  appeared. What keeps nagging at me though is the observation that E. O. Wilson made as reported in an opinion piece in the NY Times by Tristan Harris:

A decade ago, Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard professor and renowned father of sociobiology, was asked whether humans would be able to solve the crises that would confront them over the next 100 years.

“Yes, if we are honest and smart,” he replied. “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.”

Bruno Latour

If you had not already joined the dots, a big influence, probably the biggest in my puzzling about the delegation of work to nonhumans is Bruno Latour who sadly passed away recently. There have been a number of tributes about Latour’s work and contribution to intellectual life but I think Stephen Muecke’s post on Aeon recently has been one of the better ones I have come across. 

Educating at scale, tutoring and the digital 

I’ve been participating in a local biweekly conversation based at Griffith, the curriculum collective, convened by the always thoughtful Steven Hodge. The group as been working through what might thought of a recent collection of publications in and around theorising curriculum.  

The problem of how to pass on what might be judged to be good, useful, valuable, important or just interesting to the next generation is something the species has muddled through since it emerged on the planet. That we are able to do so has meant that Homo Sapiens and not cephalopods run things. 

Over time circumstances have determined that humans have used, and at a times experimented with, a variety of formal and informal modes of educating the young while at the same time mulling the bigger questions of why, what and how.

We now live in an era dominated, at least in terms of student numbers, by what is sometimes called mass schooling. Mass schooling requires a crude application of a one size fits all logic. It is in play in many parts of formal education, e.g. age-based schooling, special needs schooling, year level teaching of a discipline in universities etc. 

Two posts helped to open up the curriculum question for me. Erik Hoel writing about how geniuses used to be raised and Henrik Karlsson musing about GPT-3 augmenting human intelligence.  There is much to be said here. The connection between a history of curriculum and the emergence of mass communication comes into view. The emergence of AI systems that support a notion of curriculum that begins to resemble some aristocratic tutoring is, to say the least, intriguing. 

I’m not holding my breath in this respect given the massive investment in systems of mass schooling, the conservative nature of formal education systems and the sorry history of curriculum reform. Nevertheless, it’s a possibility that is worth keeping an eye on.