google, grep, and grok

In their new book, mu colleagues Dan Sarewitz and Braden Allenby put it this way (parenthetically, I might add): "Turning a corporate brand into a verb is one flag of a socially interesting phenomenon, and in this case 'to google' is a profound statement about important, and very new, changes in cognitive systems."

I have resisted most verbifications and I find the "google" one particularly problematic, but that is tangential to my story here.  What is interesting to me here is that in my mind and often in my vocalizations, when many people say "google", I say "grep".  "grep" is actually a verb in that all unix commands are verbs.  "grep" is also an acronym for "get regular expression print" and I used that verb a lot in my graduate school days.  Many a text file list functioned as a flat data base and coughed up just the number or string that I needed through my clever use of grep and its associated regular expressions (yes, I was that guy).

So when I think about searching the darn near (?) incomprehensible thing we call the internet, my brain leaps back to horrendous and darn near unmanageable text files full of geodetic data and the beauty of grep.  With a simple command line like "grep DIAB* stalist" I could find everything that a file called "stalist" had to tell me about stations whose first letters were "DIAB" (with a simple flag that I no longer remember, I could tell grep to ignore case as well).

In my mind then, one does not google the internet, one greps it.  All that Google has done is provide a really big and incredibly interesting flat file for me to search.  And this amplifies Allenby and Sarewitz's point (and provides an example of Gibson's attributed observation regarding the distribution of the future) - we are already transhuman.

The question of groking remains.

Norms and Rules

In the last couple of weeks I have had serious concerns that Wisconsin was headed for a constitutional crisis.  This concern was fueled by the apparent disregard or complete lack of understanding of the checks and balances implicit in the separation of powers that is central to the democratic functioning of our state and federal governments.

Here in Wisconsin, the majority party in the executive was consistently invoking, what it claimed to be, nuance in The Rules while ignoring the painfully clear intent of an injunction from the judicial.  For a few days it was clear to anyone who was thinking and paying attention that the executive branch was, in clear contempt of court, seeking to implement a legislative action, which had been judged to have been executed improperly.

This situation illuminates how rules and norms need to work in concert.  Let me be clear, Wisconsin loves its rules.  When I moved here I was flabbergasted - there is a rule for everything.  And I mean a Rule; there is no room for nuanced departure.  After living in NYC where nuanced departure is what makes it possible for so many people to ride the subway, buy groceries, and walk down the sidewalk, Wisconsin was a shock.  Wisconsin runs on Rules, NYC places much more stock in Norms.

Now that would seem to imply that I would not be surprised by the attempts to implement the budget repair bill.  But in fact recent events have made me realize that there is a strongly normative element to behavior in Wisconsin.  While people are upset about the bill, they are much more upset by the behavior of those who have been gobbling up every bit of power within site.  Even people who are basically sympathetic to the ends of the bill are appalled by the behavior of the current leadership.

One of the very important norms in our democratic functioning is respect for separation of powers and, in particular, for the authority of the judicial.  When a judge says stop, you stop; especially in Wisconsin.  The crisis I was concerned with had to do with the not-stopping of the executive; a not-stopping that came on the heals of ignoring the strongly held sense of importance of open meetings and open government.

While Constitutions spell out how we go about our general governance, good drafters (and we had some good ones in the early days of our country) know that the real importance of Constitutions is at times when people are not playing nice - times when the things have gone a bit wrong and people in power are misbehaving.  Hence the separation of powers and checks and balances.

Here in Wisconsin, we also have code that specifies the powers of a judge when those in her court are, lets say, not on their best behavior.  But putting the Secretary of the Department of Administration (yes we have a Dept of Administration (DoA for those of you who like ironic acronyms)) in jail is something that you really want to avoid.  Yet there were 36 hours where I thought that might happen; further I was exploring The Rules to figure out how I could contribute to creating a stage where the judicial branch could exert its authority.

The executive ultimately stepped back from the precipice and the crisis was averted for now.  But the whole episode illustrated to me how fragile our democracies can be.  So a couple of pleas:

• Pay attention to what is going on
• VOTE
• Support civics education - some of the things that said by people who should know better are appalling
• Support thinking education - democracies only work if people think about what they are up to and can imagine the consequences of their actions

Is CO2 concentration and emergent property of Earth?

This post is an expansion of the core CO2 idea from my previous post...

I have been pondering the inexorable rise in the CO2 concentration of our planet’s atmosphere.  With the signing of the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, political leaders from around the globe agreed that we should take steps to stop the increase of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere.  Nearly 20 years later, despite many Conferences of the Parties and extensive public policy efforts, those gasses continue to accumulate.  And they continue to accumulate at roughly the same rate as when the FCCC was signed in Rio.

The usual response to this state of affairs is that we need to work harder at those approaches that have failed so far.  At some point I began wondering whether in fact our challenge is deeper: perhaps we have incorrectly diagnosed the nature of the problem.   What if the continuing emissions reflects some overarching intentionality of the Human System and hence is immune to direct public policy solutions?

A friend of mine agreed that we may have misdiagnosed, but he argued that I was giving humanity and public policy too much weight – what if increasing CO2 concentration is simply an emergent property of the Earth system?  That is, growing CO2 concentration is simply a property of the complex interactions that occur as a result of the evolution of the Earth System.

In this context, our policy efforts have been akin to a hammer looking for a nail.  If CO2 concentration is in fact an emergent property, then we will need to work at the scale of the Earth System as a whole if we are to manage GHG concentrations.  Perhaps more importantly, if this is the case, we should also be investing much more than we are in planning for life on our planet with CO2 concentrations in the 700ppm range.

Emergence and Empiricism

This one is too cerebral for Qualia (but I am going to rework it for them):

In the gray of a late '70s northern Ohio winter, Norman Care led me through Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. At the time I really didn't get it, but as I have continued to ponder in the intervening decades, I have come to take Meditations as the origin of the mind / body split and extended that event to the separation of Humans and Nature.  Several centuries after Descartes, John Searle solved the mind / body problem to my satisfaction (to my pleasure even) in his Rediscovery of the Mind by essentially declaring that it is a red herring and asserting that consciousness is simply an emergent property of brains.

So what might be the analog to my extension of the mind / body problem to the Human / Nature problem?  It is an entertaining exercise to think of humans as neurons in an Earthly consciousness, but I usually stop short of taking that analogy too far; none-the-less, it does not seem too far fetched to imagine that there are properties of Earth that are observable, but that are not simple, linear causal / effect relationships.  There are all sorts of Gödelian knots in here, but putting those aside, consider the implications of mistaking an emergent property for a something simpler...

One of my candidates for this sort of thing is the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere.  Observations of that parameter clearly show unbroken increase despite decades of policy wrangling and hand wringing.  Is is unreasonable to think that greenhouse gas concentrations are simply an emergent property of human evolution?  And if this is the case, are linear policy approaches the only solutions we should consider?

I don't know the answers here, but I find the questions fascinating.

Trust and Transparency

My most recent Qualia post:


I have spent the last couple of days trying to decide what I think about the most recent Wikileaks dump.  On the one hand, I think that transparency and a free press are vital elements of functioning democracy.  On the other hand, I do not have much confidence in the ability or willingness of our media and other social institutions to be nuanced in their reactions to the material.

My deepest concern related to this latest episode is that it will unnecessarily erode hard won trust among diplomats and politicians whose job it is to make the our planet a safer place to live (this concern is nicely captured in a recent TNR article by James Rubin).  Climate science experienced its own analogous brouhaha with the release of emails among prominent modelers.  The subjects of that leak did not always come off as particularly nice folks, but who among us does not have moments of lesser discretion?  And while the climate science has been vindicated, it is less clear that relationship between the scientific community and others has come away unscathed.

I have reached the following conclusions so far:

• each of us should all strive to be the best human that we can be, 
• each of us is indeed human and with that comes a set of foibles and flaws which brings a need for nuance and forgiveness in our trust building, and finally,
• well-deserved and robust trust enhances our ability to the create the communities we need in order to address the complex challenges that we face going forward.