Category Archives: Philosophy

Screen tests and the uncanny

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Screen tests are fun to look at, letting you peek before the actors peak, as it were (or crash). There must be some good philosophy to be written about the uncanny. (Hasn’t Susan Sontag written something on this?)

[On checking, it turns out that Sigmund "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" Freud is the great theorist of the uncanny and Susan Sontag hasn't come up with anything that turns up with any prominence in Google. Nothing like a bit of raw ignorance to begin a post with.]

In any event I love the uncanny – and thinking about what’s comic about impersonators – both those that strive for verisimilitude like Max Giles and those that don’t – like John Clarke. All this humour works at the level of the uncanny it seems to me – surprising us by showing us what is familiar and how it is familiar – because we can see something just like it which is clearly not it. It surprises and delights us with what we take for granted and what we cognise as we see it.

And speaking of the uncanny, check out the screen test for the three great actorlets in Harry Potter. It’s a great risk casting someone when they did who will pupate while you make the films. I think that in the movies they were pretty much all at their best in the first movie. Hermoine was simply wonderful, Ron was great and Harry – though blander than the others – was excellent. They all remained good of course, but Hermoine was never as good as the first film – which is more an observation of how totally wonderful she was in the first film. Ron stayed as good as he was and Harry pupated rather badly – and ended up a bit wooden and somehow ended up with a bit of a macho stance – with his arms hanging wide around his hips a little like a gunslinger.

Anyway in the screen test, Hermione isn’t nearly as good as in the first movie (though she’s good) – so they worked on her and did great things for it. Ron is the great same old same old – good in his test and in all the movies.

But Harry is the big surprise. Daniel Radcliffe is quite lovely in the screentest and has a kind of pellucid quality – I don’t know if I’ve got the right word, but there’s some youthful freshness that shines through in an extraordinary way.

In a previous post I made this comment:

One of the things that intrigues me about the world is that acting is never ‘realistic’.  For instance whenever you listen to a documentary and some scene is ‘reconstructed by actors’, you can always tell that they’re actors.  They say their lines like they’re in a play or a movie, yet they’re acting real life. Strange isn’t it? They’re professionals at feigning life, and yet, when their only job is to feign life, not to ‘put on a play’ which is understandably a kind of hyper-real-life, they can’t do it. I’d like to understand why this is so. I’m sure it’s not a reflection on actors that their acting is not fully ‘realistic’, just as a TV presenters speech to camera is not like they speak normally, and just as when we give a speech to a group it’s not the same voice we use to speak to each other. Still I think it is a very telling reflection on actors that they show little sign of doing something completely realistic on the rare occasions when it’s called for.

But in a way that’s very rare for an actor, indeed, I guess this is because it is before Radcliffe became an actor you can’t quite tell that he’s acting. He’s got an awkward kind of smile on his face which makes you think he’s not really doing the screen test, but it turns out he is – and doing a quite extraordinary job of it.

Complexity, context dependency and the (difficult) ascent of man

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I read an article with an attractive title recently. “Complexity and Context-Dependency“.  It’s not very good, but it raises an important point that is important to what I call the psycho-pathology of disciplines and it puts me in mind of something I’ve thought for a long time about policy and politics. I don’t have time to do this subject justice in this post, but thought I’d try to put down a marker.

The paper argues this.

We may look down on other animals, perceiving that they have a biased and limited understanding of the world, but somehow assume that we don’t have analogous biases or limitations that we cannot somehow overcome. Surely this is merely another example of anthropocentric arrogance. That we have had some notable successes at understanding our world and even a systematic set of approaches that has been shown to be useful is not sufficient evidence to assume a lack of limitations and biases.

This astonishing assumption takes many forms in philosophy and discussions about the scientific method. One such is that somehow simplicity is a guide to truth. That is, that simplicity in a model or theory has advantages other than the obvious pragmatic ones (pragmatic virtues are such as: being able to analyze/solve it; being able to have good analogies with which to think about it; needing less data in order to parameterize it; and being able to compute it).

Another version is that everything somehow must be simple if only we can find the right way of looking at it, or formalizing it. It is true that frameworks such as Newtonian Physics are relatively simple (though I doubt many in Newton’s time would have thought so), and using this, many useful models and reliable predictions can be obtained. . . .

I am not going to spend time arguing the above points here. Rather I will consider the case under the anti-anthropocentric assumption, that much of the world around us is organized in a way that is beyond adequate modeling in a sufficiently simple and general manner for us to cope with. . . . Under this, admittedly pessimistic, view the phenomena that are simple enough for us to understand in a scientific manner are the exception – the exception to be sought and struggled for. Under this view, we should make the greatest use of the strengths we have, and seek to acknowledge and mitigate our limitations. Under this view a “Science of Complexity” makes no more sense than a “Science of Non-Red Things”, since both red objects and simple systems are the exception rather than the rule.

Why is it that we can see political benefits from the hyper-connected world produced by Web 2.0 in undemocratic countries but no big apparent improvements in democratic countries? Continue reading →

Designing better lives: An economist’s appreciation of design

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Herewith an paper about my encounter with design, on taking up the Chairmanship of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and encountering the Family by Family program.  The site where it’s been published doesn’t have any comments facility, so I’m opening up discussion here should anyone wish.

And I read today a quote that might have been a good complement to the quote appearing at the head of the article – immediately below.

Not only was he [Edward Land - inventor of 'instant cameras' and founder of Polaroid] one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that.

Designing better lives: An economist’s appreciation of design

Design is often described as making things not only useable but useful and desirable/delightful. We’d agree this is important – but what is even more fundamental (and rare) is making things that prompt change. – Sarah Schulman and Chris Vanstone [2]

       I.

Design is on the march. Apple teeters on being the most highly valued company in the world – its core competitive strength lying in design and systems integration, not technology. ‘Design thinking’ is becoming increasingly prominent not only in the development of products and processes, but also in the delivery of services. So much so that Deloitte has recently begun investing heavily in its own ability to provide its clients with design knowhow as a crucial engine of its innovation and competitiveness. As I write this, a prominent article on Australia’s Deloitte Online’s homepage [3] is titled “Design thinking demystified”. So what is the core contribution of design and what is behind its rise?

Adam Smith’s invocation of the benefits of self-interest – or as he called it self-love – is famously encapsulated in this aphorism:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Smith’s point is not that self-interest is good in itself, but that the self-interest of one person in a market brings them into relation with others’ self-interest. Note that Smith’s injunction (implicitly to both parties) is for each to seek their own interest by addressing themselves to the other’sinterest. Since Smith founded it, the discipline of economics has focused on the incentives facing each of the parties to a bargain and on their relative bargaining strength.

But there are more things in heaven and earth. For the butchers, bakers and brewers of Smith’s time there was no great mystery as to what constituted the customer’s wants or needs. Today’s world is much more complex. If you’re making computers or even cars, customers have specific wants that are not so easily divined by producers. Thus, part of Japan’s auto-producers’ recipe for competitive success was meticulous attention to consumer needs.[4]

This process has now gone much further. A great transformation occurred at the outset of the personal computer era when the Apple Macintosh showed that consumers didn’t just want more technical capability from their software and hardware – something that could be captured well enough in standard disclosures of those technical capabilities. They wanted user-friendliness – a very different thing and something inherently difficult to ‘disclose’ in specifications.

It turns out you can’t really make a car or a computer useable without a lot of work, almost invariably involving the users themselves. And indeed there is a discipline that has grown up under our noses which has been all but ignored by economists and policy makers but which nevertheless addresses itself to this issue. That discipline is design. Continue reading →

What is wrong with me? Are values really like this?

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I am just no good at those ‘values’ questionnaires. Whenever I’m asked a question about values my only answer is “it depends”. I don’t think this is very clever, but there you go.

Here is the first page of 120 questions in a questionnaire I’m supposed to fill out about an organisation I’m involved with.

In your preferred culture, to what extent should people be expected to…?
Not at all To a slight extent To a moderate extent To a great extent To a very great extent
point out flaws
show concern for the needs of others
involve others in decisions affecting them
resolve conflicts constructively
be supportive of others
stay on people’s good side
be a “nice guy”
do things for the approval of others
“go along” with others
win against others
work to achieve self-set goals
accept goals without questioning them
be predictable
never challenge superiors
do what is expected
stay detached and perfectly objective
oppose new ideas
help others to grow and develop
be a good listener
give positive rewards to others

But in each and every case the only answer is not ‘more or less’ but in some circumstances more, in some less. I expect these kinds of questionnaires can do more good than harm. But I’m no good at them.

What thinkest thou Oh Troppodillians? (I wonder why my spellcheck doth say that ‘thinkest’ is not a word?)

In conclusion, please tell me whether values are really like this? (And where is Dr Troppo when you need him?)

Not at all To a slight extent To a moderate extent To a great extent To a very great extent

The Herald/Age Lateral Economics Index of Wellbeing

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Herewith my op ed from the Herald and Age today.

What is the good life and are we living it?

Assessing and measuring wellbeing has vexed us since ancient times. But a funny thing happened on the modern world’s way to the answer. The metric that economists used to dampen down the business cycle – Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – received such prominence that it ‘went viral’ as we say these days. It became the default measure of national progress.

But there’s lots wrong with GDP as a measure of economic wellbeing let alone more general wellbeing. Measuring gross activity, it ignores the growth and depreciation of assets – such as buildings, equipment, natural resources like farmland and mineral deposits, biodiversity and clean air. And that’s not to mention the greatest asset of all – our knowhow.

Moreover GDP is measured by money changing hands. So converting bread, mince and salad into a hamburger increases GDP in McDonalds but not at home. More starkly, an evening of passion and pleasure only adds to wellbeing as measured by GDP if it happens in a bordello! More broadly still, GDP takes no account of the distribution of income or of our physical or social wellbeing.

But considering how different all these phenomena are, how can we possibly measure their sum impact on national wellbeing in a single number? Because it would ‘dumb down’ complex issues, economics Nobel Laureate Amatya Sen initially refused to participate in the construction of a single index of human development to help guide development in poorer countries. But he relented because he appreciated that, however unsatisfactory a single wellbeing index might be, it was better than the alternative. Given the thirst for simple answers, the alternative is even more dumbing down as would occur if GDP yet again filled the vacuum. Continue reading →

Economists as engineers and humbler, better scientists

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Here’s a paragraph I wrote about fifteen years ago.

The culture of economic expertise places inadequate weight on integrating insights from multiple perspectives, that it frequently places an unreasonably high ‘burden of proof’ on heterodox views, and that it has a penchant for spelling out the normative implications of its analysis by way of ‘peremptory rules’ which narrow the scope for dialogue.

This is just a sketch of a post, because I don’t have time for more, but for some time I’ve wanted to put down a marker about one of the ways in which results from Kaggle are instructive. The winners of Kaggle competitions often win not by trying to build the One True Model of the phenomena they’re trying to model, but rather by building a large number of models all of which have some explanatory power and which are independent of each other and then aggregating their insights. Random forests approaches often perform very well. One might call it a ‘wisdom of algorithmic crowds’ approach.

In any event, this is the antithesis of much economic modelling which involves reaching for the One True Model and then parameterising it.

I was reminded of this by David Colander’s latest piece urging humility on economists (pdf). His proposal? That instead of thinking of themselves as analogous to dentists (which Keynes suggested) economists should think of themselves as engineers:

An engineer’s approach to modeling such a complex system as the macro economy would likely focus much more on statistical models and methods of pulling patterns out of the data. It would explore a wide variety of formal models to gain analytic insight, and then would integrate the many variety of models with the statistical models to interpret the patterns. That would involve a fundamentally different way of doing macro and of thinking about macro problems. Similarly, with micro. Economists focus much of their applied micro policy discussion on Pareto optimal solutions even though we know that all actual policies will violate Pareto optimality. We can contort our micro policy models designed to provide Pareto optimal solutions to provide insight into non-Pareto optimal solutions, but, generally, that contortion comes at a cost. It means that we spend less time discussing other models that betting fit not Pareto optimal solutions, but “reasonable person solutions” that more closely reflect society’s value judgments. An engineering applied microeconomics would likely have an entire branch devoted to measuring society’s value judgments and integrating those judgments into applied policy instruments. Our scientific applied micro leaves the topic almost totally undiscussed.

Quite.

Other required reading on the point is this paper entitled “Identification Problems in the Social Sciences and Life”.

I made the latter point in a discussion of discursive collapse a while back.

 

The theory of deceptive sentiments

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The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life by Robert Trivers: Book CoverThe latest psychology bestseller The Folly of Fools is on the triumph of deceit. It looks quite interesting. Anyway, it looked a bit too focused on the bestseller formula – which is often the book of the article formula for me to want to read it all. But I’ve downloaded my Kindle sample and will see how it goes. In the interim I hunted down a few reviews. And an interview at Salon here. The author had a blinding flash of insight.

Working on parent-offspring conflict, I suddenly had this flash of insight: “Ah! If self-deception improves your ability to deceive others, then you would have a strong selective force to get it into your consciousness.”

Well, on inspection it may not have been blinding, but we have it on the author’s authority that it was an insight.

In any event it struck me that it was an inversion of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. In that book, as the child grows conscience begins as an H.L. Mencken conscience. H.L. Mencken said that conscience is that little voice inside us that tells us that someone might be watching. But over time the child internalises the idea and comes to acquire an impartial spectator, a ‘man within the breast’ whose approbation he craves. I had my own insight which is that the new bestselling insight is the inverse of Smith’s insight about how good can come from internalising things. Smiths’ insight is an insight into humans as rhetorical creatures (Smith’s first academic job was as a teacher of rhetoric and belles lettres). Alas this insight is less visible to us now than it was to him.

Then rhetoric was the study of communication and persuasion. Today it is rhetoric as in ‘mere’ rhetoric.

The rift which occured between the view of rhetoric as a central aspect of intellectual endeavour and our own conception of rhetoric as essentially cosmetic is captured comically in this passage by Howell.

The chasm which yawned between the elocutionists, on the one hand , and the traditional or new rhetoricians of the eighteenth century [Smith was one of the finest of the new rhetoricians.], was very wide. . . . Its width at its greatest extent . . . can be suggested by a comparison of the intellectual level of the first sentence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric with that of the first sentence of an American elocutionary textbook of the late nineteenth century. Both of these works were intended for mature students. Said Aristotle: “Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic.” Said the elocutionary textbook: “Always inhale through the nostrils.”

Howell, W.S., Eighteenth Century British Logic and Rhetoric, New Jersey, 1971, p. 713-4.

 

 

 

 

An idle thought experiment

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On the suggestion, some time ago, of Ian Marsh, I finally caught up with the New Democracy Foundation a few weeks ago. Not surprisingly we got on well.  I’ve always been keen on things like consensus conferences – which bring the deliberation of a jury to wider social and political issues.  And when we were debating the republic and the evils of Pauline Hanson I proposed as an antidote to the latter, a third house of parliament chosen by lot. I liked the proposal that Gillard put up to a the the last election for climate change to go to such a body, but it was done in such a way and in such circumstances that it got buried under the media’s and the electorate’s (justified) cynicism about it.

Anyway, I’ve recently been thinking about how such institutions could improve our politics. If the ALP had the courage of its convictions, if, as a relatively conscientious government it comprehended the ease with which the Opposition has been able to divide and conquer the electorate with one scare campaign after another, it would realise that developing such institutions would be in its own long term interest.

In any event, pondering these things an idea occured to me. Sometimes people lament what the party system has done to us – with elected representatives not being able to vote issues on their merits.  In fact this is as it should be – or arguably so. They’re supposed to be representatives after all, so they’re supposed to be publicly accountable for the way they vote, and, given how much community consent is channelled through political parties, they need to be publicly accountable to the party they represent.

Still, wouldn’t it be interesting to know how they would vote if they had a secret ballot? Of course that would be inconsistent with representative democracy.  We need to know how they are voting or all sorts of strange things could occur – like parties placing ‘moles’ inside their opponents’ parties. In fact the members of parliament do have a secret ballet (or if they dont’ now, they did once) in electing the titular heads of the chambers, the Speaker of the House and President of the Senate. And at some stage a public vote would have put in a Liberal as President of the Senate, but in fact the votes when counted supported the Labor candidate. I think it was Justin O’Byrne but the date (1974) seems wrong. Perhaps someone can enlighten us. In any event the ALP candidate was a better candidate than his opponent and one Liberal crossed the floor – or perhaps I should say snuck across the floor – in the secret ballot that was held.

So the thought experiment is this. We can keep going with the current system, but we could also require Parliamentarians to post secret ballots as well – which could be expedited very easily over the net. It would place a bit more pressure on the parties to avoid acting too cynically as they would be shown as supporting policies that do not have the support of the majority of Parliamentarians when some choose to vote according to their consciences.  Of course I’m not really suggesting it could ever happen.  But it might be good if it did. It would also be more fun!