Hopefully Anonymous

Brain Droppings Saturday May 22, 2009

1. behavioral epistemology: sort of where neuroeconomics/behavioral economics and social epistemology meet.

2. behavioral game epistemology: add game theory/analysis to the mix. I'm aware of (and I think I blogged about) behavioral game theory, but I'm not aware of much explicit application of game theory analysis to social epistemology (although it's embedded/latent in game theory since some of the earliest days).

3. the "less wrong" blog is moving in a great direction. A lot of credit goes to Yudkowsky and his willingness to apparently be transparent about his own cognitive flaws.

4. I'm interested in what can come out of looking at self-control mechanisms and optimizing participation in social epistemological projects. It seems to me that deformations of social epistemological commons occur as subcomponent participants engage in at least two common forms of rent-seeking: (1) the classic one of reduced effort when detection/punishment mechanisms are too costly for the larger group, and (2) the perhaps more specifically primate one of deforming one's contributions to the social epistemological commons in such a way that optimizes one's internal sense of status (or one's external status performance). The latter seems to be what Professor Hanson bumps up against in dealing with self-described empiricism-based communities such as the medical community.

Brain Droppings Thursday April 23, 2009

I've been focused on the practical hustle of real life, so I've managed to go a surprisingly long time without feeling a strong need to post here.

1. Social epistemological sincerity vs. social epistemological pageantry (the latter can be about identity capture of audiences for status competition with other teams).

2. identifying competing teams: for example: the team of Republican Senators vs. Democrat Senators, or of Harvard Economics faculty vs. Chicago economics faculty.

3. journal article title I'd like to see: "An examination of how pageantry deforms the social epistemology of reducing existential risk and solving mortality.

Katja, of the overcomingbias comments section, has an excellent blog

http://meteuphoric.blogspot.com/

A wiki observing an academic journal observing a wiki

P2P foundation has a wiki on the social epistemology journal Episteme's recently published issue on wikipedia:

http://p2pfoundation.net/Wikipedia_-_Epistemology

Effing Fantastic: Coherence Theory as a subset of Social Epistemology

This doesn't really explain coherence theory, but I like its critiques of social epistemology that leans too heavy on analytic philosophy. I think exploring the concept of coherence is fruitful, given that ideas and knowledge exist in various states of coherence in their distribution across people, institutions, and across time.

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-28200338_ITM

Real Knowing: New Versions of Coherence Theory.(Review)

Publication: Hypatia

Publication Date: 22-JUN-00

Author: Wong, James

 
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COPYRIGHT 2000 Indiana University Press

Real Knowing: New Versions of Coherence Theory. By LINDA MARTIN ALCOFF. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Linda Alcoff's Real Knowing: New Versions of Coherence Theory is a timely contribution to a fast-growing body of research in "social epistemology," a field drawing the attention of philosophers, sociologists of knowledge, social constructionists, and others. Her book begins with an introductory chapter, laying out her project for a new paradigm of epistemology and the consequent metaphysical position that she calls "immanent realism." Alcoff follows with chapters on Gadamer, Davidson, Foucault, and Putnam, devoting two chapters each to Gadamer and Foucault. In these chapters, she shows how their works--Gadamer's hermeneutics, Davidson's account of truth, Foucault's analyses of discursive formations and his idea of power/knowledge, and Putnam's internal realism--contribute to her project. In the concluding chapter, Alcoff summarizes her coherentist theory of knowledge and distinguishes it from Michael Williams's contextualist epistemology in his Unnatural Doubts (Williams, 1996).

A NEW PARADIGM FOR EPISTEMOLOGY

Analytic epistemologists have until recently been largely silent on the topic of social influences on knowledge. Their apparent lack of interest in this area is not because they deny that knowledge is socially mediated; rather, their concern is with determining the conditions of knowledge under which a person has knowledge. That project has had a decidedly individualist focus. But more recently, philosophers working in that tradition, like Alvin Goldman (1999) and Frederick Schmitt (1994), have extended traditional analytic analyses to take into account social processes as well. To accommodate social factors, Philip Kitcher has proposed that the standard S-knows-p formula be amended as "for any S and any p, such that S correctly believes that p, whether S knows that p depends not simply on the psychological processes undergone by S but on the activities of a chain of others, extending from those who have taught S into both the contemporary and ancestral communities" (Kitcher 1993, 160). The proposed analysis does not tell the whole story about the social dimensions of knowledge. Philosophers with wider concerns, like Alcoff, could rightly say: Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose.

Alcoff is dissatisfied with the narrow focus of the traditional epistemological project. There is hardly anything social in "social epistemology" as practiced by analytic philosophers. In her view, standard analyses, focusing as they do on examples such as "Jones owns a Ford" and "I see a computer screen in front of me," are detached from "real" processes by which people come to know. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, it is an analysis fed on a slender diet of examples. In real life, individuals have to deal with knowledge claims about how children develop, about parenting, about social issues (teen parenting and workfare, for instance), and much else. Epistemologists, Alcoff urges, must address questions arising from these more complicated examples. Rather than just concentrating on the criteria of knowledge, they should examine other salient...

COPYRIGHT 2000 Indiana University Press

Brain Droppings Saturday March 14, 2009

1.

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047138349X.html

"Applied Statistical Decision Theory" is a textbook that apparently has been around since the '60s.

2.

First post by orgtheory

http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2006/04/21/greetings-organizational-world/

3.

The TGGPosphere: it's impressive. TGGP reminds me something of 2001's monolith, or Rainbow End's rabbit.

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=TGGP&scoring=d&sa=N&start=0

Why do biomedical researchers studying consciousness seem more professionally responsible than social epistemologists? I'm thinking here of Fuller's seemingly crankish involvement in intelligent design debates.

4. I'm surprised the web isn't already filled with papers and literature like this:

A draft paper on social epistemology and the internet

http://travel-guide-travel.blogspot.com/2009/03/designing-wisdom-through-web-passion-of.html

Columbia Business School professor Eric J. Johnson has commented in an overcomingbias thread on animal status contention

It looks like Columbia Business School professor Eric J. Johnson has commented in an overcomingbias thread on animal status contention. He's an expert on decision theory and behavioral economics. The post is enlightening:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/status-prudes.html?cid=6a00d8341c6a2c53ef01127966c06a28a4#comment-6a00d8341c6a2c53ef01127966c06a28a4

I'm curious how competing ideologies may employ these strategies in the competition for mindspace. Also its interesting how macrosocial entities comprised of humans may be dumber than nonhuman animal cultures or wirings (by not avoiding mistakes illustrated in some of these animal examples).

Neil Strauss Blogs

I just got around to noticing.

Neil Strauss may be the most transparently socially intelligent person alive (there are people who I think are probably nontransparently more socially intelligent than Neil -George Soros, Barack Obama, Rupert Murdoch, Brad Pitt). It's not that I think Neil is perfectly transparent, probably no one can be and survive, but among the community empirically investigating social intelligence, and sharing much of their findings with each other and the public, Neil seems to be the smartest of the cohort to me.

Further, many of my best epiphanies related to social intelligence (by my own ranking) Neil has in public musings either beat me to them, came up with them simultaneously, or came up with them independently shortly thereafter.

Now with his latest book, his transparency has extended from social intelligence to maximization of persistence odds. I haven't read the book yet, but I heard an inteview on opie and anthony radio, and he seems disappointedly focused on more cartoonish aspects of survivalism -- not on more statistically intelligent approaches that some combination of Aubrey de Gray and Nick Bostrom would come up with. But his books tend to be journey books -perhaps he ends up in more enlightened territory by the end of the book.

Its interesting that Neil never has cited Erving Goffman to my knowledge, because it occurs to me Neil may be his truest intellectual heir.

Although I haven't met Neil yet, I have a very close degree of separation from him, and actually was recruited to be a professional pick up artist by people close to the Mystery Method circle. I came close to going that route, but opted to more traditional paths of social status and wealth-building instead.

Nevertheless I try to keep tabs on the seduction empiricism community. I'm not interested in banging hotties more than transient horny periods we get as healthy primates, but social intelligence does seem vital to me, and much like the first transparent empiricists on human productivity, these guys have set off a bit of an arms race. Unfortunately its probably wasting social resources at the macrosocial level (we're using resources to compete in building personality plumage with their technology, rather than competing in ability to reduce communal catastrophic existential risk) but I'm not a macrosocial entity, I'm an individual human, and as such I wouldn't choose to disarm on principle. So ... who do you think lies more, men or women? ;-)

http://www.neilstrauss.com/neil-strauss/

Using human intellectual resources more efficiently

It's an easy point, but worth drawing attention to. We leave a lot of intellectual resources on the table, and it's a good idea for more effort to be devoted to employing them. For example, topic experts not being utilized because they're in countries where they don't speak the primary language.

http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2009/03/newcomers_langu.php

Some thoughts on social epistemology

These may be pretty random, in the "brain droppings" format:

1. Iterations, discrete sequential moments in time, and social epistemology. I don't have anything coherent to say about this yet, but I think there's something there, which Yudkowsky hints at with his Eliezer-subscript1997, etc. representing his state of knowledge and mind at different points of time. Even now within the epistemological blogosphere we see it: Mankiw shares information or has an epiphany, Krugman reacts on it, Cowen reacts on it, DeLong reacts on it, etc. There's an element of social performance (to use the analytical frame of Goffman), there's an element of relatively raw cognition, but the iterative, sequential element of this social production of knowledge lacks a meta-awareness/transparency that I'm trying to reach for here.

2. The social epistemology of the blogging. I haven't seen that as a journal title but if it's not out there, it should be soon. What's great about blogs, message boards, and comments is that there's an easily accessible record.

3. I surprised there are serious researchers and theorists of any stripe that aren't blogging daily. There's a field of cohort experts and outside experts that's most easily accessible by making your daily musings globally accessible. Also, I don't get the reluctance to make it very easy to comment on one's blogging. It just makes it harder for you as an individual to capture useful ideas and insights. I suspect there's significant free-riding by closed bloggers (andrew sullivan, mankiw) off of the comment-capture of open bloggers (yglesias, cowen).