- Dr. Specterman explained to me the progression of consciousness in The Phenomenology of Spirit. The first stage is animal, and so there is no contradiction with the empirical result that children (infants even) have empathy for other beings. Meanwhile, recognition that there is one essence does not mean the same thing as, for example, contemplative withdrawal into the Absolute. One can be fully engaged in ones own manifestation of it? I will lend her The Ethics of Ambiguity; I wonder what she will say about it.
- Speaking of empathy, Dr. Parikh explained his interest in empathy-inducing technology and business. He did so tentatively, as appropriate when switching contexts from technical questions to questions of value or intent. Or…is this a switch? Should the norms of communication or evaluation be different? In what context is it acceptable to rigorously discuss ethics?
- Technical discussions on an open source mailing list (for example) are passionate. The use of religious rhetoric (e.g., the “Holy War” between emacs and vim) is not accidental. Conversion happens, ideally through persuasion.
- The ability for groups that initially disagree to come to consensus via internet discussion stands in opposition to David Weinberger’s proposal that disagreement on the internet is fractal and irresolvable. It is possible for one side to, in certain contexts, win over the others. More often, a synthesis of positions will emerge from active discussion by disagreeing parties. A sublation of opinions via dialectical reasoning. Though there is nothing constraining the number of parties to 2. Fractal pluralectic. (You heard it hear first!)
- The politics of search engines. Two issues. First, ‘filter bubbles’ caused by an individual’s ability to find only what they want. Fragmentation of culture. What is the common ground for communication (lifeworld, lebensvelt) that is necessary for e.g. democracy? I think Anosognosia (wearing Kantian hat) still believes that this will be transcendental reason. I’m worried about “access” to transcendental reason. I.e., if participation in “directly democratic deliberation” or “consensus process” or civil society depends on transcendental ground, then doesn’t that condition civil society on Kantian education? Too weird.
- Clues in David Graeber. Education as process of deferring authority, or power. Maybe in fractured culture the broadening of the lifeworld is empowering enough to legitimize it strategically despite lack of normative justification internal to the perspective of the subject?
- The politics of search engines. Second issue. Algorithm transparency. Who is biasing what you are getting? Skepticism about media channels creates problems for credibility of information sources analogous to global skepticism problems for inference from sense data. Hard to see how transcendental rebuttals could apply. How about antifoundationalist ones? Non-parametric Bayesian ones? In general, the problem of who curates the curators.
- Very hopeful about this coming summer. Dave Kush interested in sentiment analysis. Dwins interested in a non-maps side project. Last semester’s work highlighted some limitations of topic modeling with Latent Dirichlet allocation. I wonder whether something more inspired by Conceptual Role Semantics is possible. Promising application of Neo4j? Need to keep learning Scala. Twitter keeps open sourcing tools; becoming more and more impressed with them every day. Dr. Parikh says, encouragingly, “It’s run by a bunch of hippies.” Despite this, skepticism from without makes sense. Limited perspective. Other options?
- To what extent is society a macrocosm of personality? Ultimately, convinced by Rachel McKinney’s argument that functionalism implies that it is in principle possible for mental categories to apply to social bodies. Dr. Specterman’s analysis of politics corresponds to this as well: we see revolt, both internally to psychology and in the political landscape, when a voice is unexpressed or unacknowledged. Creative solutions happen when there is an open space for expression. Given that assumption: Is the Buddy Roemer Twitter campaign the cries for attention by an oppressed voice? Dr. Specterman thinks that “we all already know” about the money in politics issue, but who are “we” to believe that our perspective is complete? Isn’t exclusion from debate a sign that this aspect of politics is not sufficiently conscious? Or is there such a thing as overdoing it–real pathology and egoism under the guise of needing to be heard?
- Eddie Pickle wonders after “the physics of information” that would enable the design of, for example, a business model around open data. In our last conversation, was able to persuade him of the connection between open data marketplace and open code marketplace. Code is data–see LISP for extreme demonstration. I think: Code has logical depth (in Bennett’s sense). Excited for research this semester with Dr. Chuang on “Economics of Data and Computation.” It’s where a lot of the missing pieces are? Chuang has already posed fascinating and difficult (for me) question: how do the bounds on confidence level and computational complexity of machine learning on combinatorial optimization problems vary with the properties of the optimization function (continuous? discontinuous? multiple local maxima?)
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