August 4, 2013, update to this post:Narrative Science is a company that helps businesses communicate by turning data into stories. The company's software program, Quill, "is an artificial intelligence engine that generates, evaluates and gives voice to ideas as it discovers them in data." The company's website elaborates:
"Quill imports your data and builds an appropriate narrative structure to meet the goals of your audience. Using complex Artificial Intelligence algorithms, Quill extracts and organizes key facts and insights and transforms them into stories, at scale. Quill uses data to answer important questions, provide advice and deliver powerful insight in a precise, clear narrative."
That ability could come in handy. For the CIA. The intelligence agency's business-investment arm, In-Q-Tel, has contributed an undisclosed amount of funding to Narrative Science. My original post, below, might explain why the CIA is pursuing the engineering of stories. The agency is out to weaponize narrative.
* * *
Once upon a time, there was a public policy think tank at the University of
Virginia, called the Miller Center. In October 1998, the Center invited historians,
editors and journalists to mull over “the state of the art” in political history. There was a problem to be addressed, which apparently was that historical narrative had slipped through the hands of its rightful authors. And with it went those failing authors’ control of public sentiment. Implied in the conference’s mission was the felt need to figure out not only how this situation came about, but also how history’s
rightful authors could recapture the historical narrative. Controlling narratives,
people in high places seem to believe, facilitates controlling mass behavior,
making it a subject worth study.
The Conference on Contemporary Political History
kicked off with remarks from then director of the Miller Center, Philip Zelikow.
(A few years later, during a leave from his directorship, Zelikow kept on
a short leash the Kean-Hamilton Commission, also known as the 911 Commission,
which he steered as its staff executive director.) In his opening remarks
to the history conference, Zelikow laid out his concerns regarding contemporary
political history:
“’Contemporary’” is defined functionally by those critical people and events that go into forming the public’s presumptions about its immediate past. This idea of ‘public presumption’ is akin to William McNeill’s notion of ‘public myth’ but without the negative implication sometimes invoked by the word ‘myth.’ Such presumptions are beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community. The sources for such presumptions are both personal (from direct experience) and vicarious (from books, movies, and myths).”
(All quotes from Zelikow are from the Miller
Center Report, Vol. 14, No. 3, Winter 1999.) We will return later to
McNeill and public myth. First, we need to follow Zelikow into the sources of
public presumption. He identifies four:
”First, public presumptions can be ‘generational.’ They are formed by those pivotal events that become etched in the minds of those who have lived through them [. . . ]. The current set begins in approximately 1933, although the New Deal generation is fading. The Second World War and Vietnam, however, continue to resonate powerfully.
“Second, particularly ‘searing’ or ‘molding’ events take on ‘transcendent’ importance and, therefore, retain their power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene. In the United States, beliefs about the formation of the nation and the Constitution remain powerful today, as do beliefs about slavery and the Civil War. World War II, Vietnam, and the civil rights struggle are more recent examples.
“Third, public presumptions often concern 'dramatic stories plucked out
of time,' such as the Alamo, Pickett’s Charge, or the Titanic.
“Fourth, some public presumptions gain currency because they have a particular resonance for us today, either because they invoke powerful analogies to the present [. . . .] or because they offer a causal link and seem to explain ‘why we are the way we are today.’ Taken together, we see that presumptions that remain ‘contemporary’ are—with few exceptions from the 18th and 19th centuries—events
and episodes from the last 60 years.”
Depending on which conspiracy theory one subscribes to, that of the Bush administration
and the Kean–Hamilton Commission or some variety suggested by the 911 Truth Movement, it takes little imagination to perceive in Zelikow’s assessment a premonition or foreshadowing of events to come, his remarks about searing events taking on transcendent importance being uttered just three years prior to the attacks of 9/11.
And nowhere in his comments will one find any concern that public presumptions should reflect history accurately.
If you believe a lie then learn you’ve been lied to, you feel betrayed, embarrassed and angry. Maybe you’re not the shrewd operator, after all. Maybe you’re just a chump.
This realization produces a discomfort that psychologists call cognitive dissonance. It happens when a person holds beliefs that are incompatible, as in “I am a shrewd operator” and “I’ve been chumped.” A wave of cognitive dissonance is washing over the U. S. electorate, as voters face up to their chumpdom.
The electorate is seeing that political and economic fundamentals rest on something other than which party perches on the branches of the U.S. government. Wings left and right fly in and out of office, but election wins of neither camp deflect entrenched trajectories:
The wealthy grow disproportionately wealthier and the workaday blokes correspondingly poorer.
U.S. troops and their private-sector surrogates occupy more foreign turf.
Our sources of sustenance become increasingly adulterated.
My friends who navigate the evening news from the cargo bay of the left-right circus-train explain away the immunity of these trends to election results. Like UFO cultists whose deadline for the messianic rescue has come and gone, they circle the wagons tighter. It was a fluke, they say--the next time our team wins, that’s when things will change.
Fortunately, self-deception has its limits.
Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn found in the history of science examples of self-deception's limits, and he described what happens when those limits are breached. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn pointed out that when scientific experiments produce unexpected results, and eventually they will, then scientists explain away the anomalies, somehow or other, to preserve their foundational beliefs, what Kuhn called their paradigm. Scientists accommodate the anomalous results by amending the paradigm. In the above example, if “I am a shrewd operator” is the prevailing paradigm, and “I’ve been chumped” is an anomalous occurrence, then “I must have had a bad day” might be an adequate amendment to accommodate the anomalous data while preserving the paradigm.
But a paradigm can be stretched only so far. Eventually the anomalies, such as strings of coincidences or runs of bad days, accumulate beyond the elastic threshold of the paradigm, and it snaps. When that happens, the paradigm’s adherents convert or, eventually, die off, and a new generation adopts a new paradigm that accommodates the anomalous data.
The Structure of Political Revolutions.
Politics, like science, rests on foundational beliefs, or paradigms. A majority of the electorate, for example, seems to believe that the ruling class comprises more or less decent human beings who act in good faith (more or less) toward the ruled. But when outcomes contradict this belief, when its expectations are not met, then the electorate stretches the paradigm to accommodate apparent acts of bad faith, such as, for example, a pile of broken campaign promises.
A generally accepted amendment grants that our elected officials and their advisers are beneficent actors who act in good faith but are stupid. (This is the honest-but-stupid hypothesis.) Maybe they make big mistakes, because deep down they are boobs, or, more charitably, they just lack sufficient smarts to figure out how to keep their promises. The economy, the Middle East, the environment—it’s all so complicated. Sometimes things go wrong. The rulers mean well, but they bungle. Dang. Or, maybe they’re honest, well meaning and competent, but cowardly when opposed. (This variant is the honest-but-spineless hypothesis.)
Armed with these amendments, adherents of the prevailing paradigm can mitigate the dissonance created by anomalous outcomes. They can still gather and console themselves under the old paradigm. But the paradigm must have an elastic threshold; it cannot accommodate an infinite number of anomalous outcomes and amendments.
Mr. Østman explained that I had failed to distinguish between natural selection and genetic drift. These processes participate in distributing genes, but they are distinct mechanisms, according to the normal view. He offered some details about how researchers distinguish the two—that is, about how they decide when to attribute the distribution of a gene (or allele) or a phenotypic trait primarily to drift or to selection. Despite his clarifications, and I appreciate the time he took, the criteria apparently typically used to distinguish the two mechanisms seem not really to be able to do so. The argument:
Two mechanisms are proposed as the primary causal trendsetters in gene (allele) and trait distribution. These mechanisms are genetic drift, a random process, and natural selection, a nonrandom process. The latter explains the advance and retreat of traits in populations in terms of adaptation and fitness. The former explains the ebb and flow of traits in terms of chance. Given shifting trait frequencies through generations (in a local population of a given species), how does one distinguish outcomes due to natural selection from outcomes due to genetic drift?
Apparently one does so by determining whether a particular genotype or phenotype is more fit than a competing genotype or phenotype (in the local population of the given species). One does this by comparing the number of fertile progeny left behind by individuals with the one genotype or phenotype with the number of fertile progeny left behind by individuals with the other genotype or phenotype. The ratio is a measure of fitness of the types relative to one another. Phenotypes with similar traits also can be grouped, and averages taken.
Genotype/phenotype variants associated with a small fitness advantage (slightly better reproductive success) will tend to spread more rapidly in a small population but more slowly in a large population, due to greater opportunity for random mixing, or drift, in the large population. So, if a spreading gene or trait is associated with even a small fitness advantage, then the spread of the gene or trait in a small population can be taken to be a case natural selection. But in a large population, the advantage must be large for selection to be given credit for the spread of a gene or trait.
In other words, when the ratio of the fitness advantage to the population size crosses a threshold, then natural selection gets credit for the spread of the gene or trait, otherwise the spread is attributed to drift, or some other mechanism.
Whatever the merits of such a threshold-crossing formula, it cannot distinguish among mechanisms. Like the difference between a sluggish economy and a recession, or between the outbreak of a disease and an epidemic, or between a planet and a Pluto, the distinction between genetic drift and natural selection rests on an arbitrary threshold. It's a taxonomic distinction based on a variance from a statistical baseline. It's just a convenient way to label distribution ranges.
The differential labeling in the case of drift vs. selection is supposed to imply that a qualitative distinction is being used to distinguish two mechanisms, but nothing about the formula or its application entails that there be a qualitative distinction between or among proposed mechanisms. A difference of mechanism is implied, but there's no there there. In short, the formulas of population genetics can distinguish statistically among outcome distributions and assign labels to various distribution ranges, but that's about it.
To claim that such a formula justifies a theory of how phenotypes get to be how they get to be due to adaptation and fitness—that the formula informs us as to when changes in phenotypes are due to selection or to drift—really does beg the question, because it assumes that, among differing genotypes and phenotypes, differences in reproductive success (when they cross a statistical threshold) are DUE TO the differences among the genotypes and phenotypes of previous generations, specifically due to their relative adaptiveness. But to draw causal inferences from statistical results is some kind of logical fallacy.
I can't even say that it's assuming causation from correlation, because there's no correlation. We can't say that certain outcomes are correlated with drift and other outcomes are correlated with selection and that therefore each proposed mechanism causes the correlated outcome. The problem is that the item in question—natural selection—is taken from the outset as being a mechanism available for explaining gene distributions. Wouldn't one have to establish first that it's actually available, before one moves on to the question of which criteria distinguish it from other mechanisms? My argument is that it's not there; it's not available, unless it's just another name for the observation that some creatures enjoy more reproductive success than others, which we know is the primary cause of gene and trait distributions.
So, if natural selection cannot be the primary mechanism of macroevolution, what might be? Unlike various mechanisms that have been proposed, such as the ongoing and contingent interplay of endogenous and environmental variables called natural history ("just one damn thing after another"—this solution is proposed by Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini in "What Darwin Got Wrong", from which I appropriated the phrase, how phenotypes get to be how they get to be), or the deliberate intervention of alien intelligences, or one of the other proposals listed HERE, the star larvae hypothesis proposes a mechanism that not only agrees with the latest discoveries in genetics, epigenetics, and the growing sense among researchers that environmental influences should be downplayed and endogenous factors emphasized in accounting for phenotypes (this is the gist of the papers collected in "Evolution, The Extended Synthesis"), but also accounts for evolution's apparent directionality.
"What remains to be recognized is that a very able person may often choose to freeze or anesthetize large areas of his mind and experience for the sake of social and practical success or the pleasures of group solidarity."
Is the U.S. federal government not to be trusted, because it is the tool of socialists who want to centralize power and control?Or is the U.S. federal government not to be trusted, because it is the tool of capitalists who want to centralize power and control?What do these questions have in common?Are they operationally indistinguishable?
Campaigning for president, Barack Obama promised to post online, for at least five days, all pending legislation so that the public could review it. Now, he’s president, so, sorry chumps, it was only campaign rhetoric. Duh, assholes.
Campaigning for president, Barack Obama promised to shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Now, he’s president, so, sorry chumps, it was only campaign rhetoric. Duh, assholes, I’ll detain anybody I want for as long as I want.
Campaigning for president, Barack Obama promised to end the war in Iraq. Now, he’s president, so, sorry chumps, it was only campaign rhetoric. Duh. Six months into the Obama administration, the Democratic majority in Congress approves another $106 billion for the war. That's bad enough. But then Obama says he will use "signing statements" to ignore parts of the bill--after attacking Prez. W. Bush for doing the same thing!! Oh, and the sections that Obama wants to exclude are provisions regulating U.S. aid given to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Can't cross his banker buddies, now can he?
It goes on and on:
Taking Bush's position, administration denies msnbc.com request for logs
The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn't have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.
The Spotlight, a tabloid published by a group called Liberty Lobby, warned its readers that Communists, negroes, Jews, Catholics, immigrants—and the Federal Reserve—threatened the purity and wholesomeness and righteous authority of the United States of America. I encountered The Spotlight in a factory where I worked when I was a student. The factory owner had a box of the papers delivered each week, to which employees could help themselves.
Reading The Spotlight was my first exposure to what respectable folk and journalists call "conspiracy theory." To my mind the paper was a curiously crazy right-wing rag, alternately unintentionally disgusting and unintentionally comical. I was struck at the time by the commingling of attacks on the Federal Reserve with race baiting and anti-semitism. I wondered why these redneck hate mongers were paranoid about bankers.
As misguided as the editors of The Spotlight were about non-Whites, non-Protestants, and leftover hippies, they seem to have thrown their net wide enough to pull in some genuine threats, as we're seeing now — now that global financial markets are underwater, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few has accelerated off the charts, at least partially because of Fed policies. The Liberty Lobby, John Birchers and their kind have done the United States a double disservice. Fundamentalist populists not only have spread White supremacist bile and other sordid hate mail, but by associating scrutiny of the Federal Reserve and its privileged status with their xenophobic venom, they succeeded in casting a taint of kookiness onto any examination of the Fed's origins, operations and accountabilities. They helped insulate the Fed from proper public scrutiny. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I might suspect that the whole thing had been a plot from the beginning to set the Fed outside the bounds of normal journalistic investigation. (Liberty Lobby was put out of business in 2001 by a lawsuit related to accusations it printed regarding the Kennedy assassination. Good riddance, though it has come back in miniature, online.)
Whatever paranoid tendencies I have are stoked daily now that it's becoming clear how privileged the executive class is as it exists among the country's largest banks. There might be token wrist slappings here and there or a ceremonial condemnation of executive bonuses that amount to a sliver of the total bailout swindle, but by and large the people at the top of the Federal Reserve system of banks and associated financial institutions remain in place, collecting their generous compensation packages and wielding their vast influence to shake down the economy.
Those who occupy the financial stratosphere remain unfazed by elections. Political parties and candidates apparently function in their hands as disposable tools to be picked up or discarded at will. The elite executive class similarly is unfazed by markets, being compensated equally for performance and nonperformance. Doesn't a corporation's board of directors have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that executive compensation is tied to performance, as in increasing shareholder value? That's a fine theory, but the executives choose the board, which in turn sets executive compensation. It's a clubby world at the top. I wish I could handpick the people who set my compensation. I might even signal to them my availability to join their boards and, you know, one hand washes the other. This mutual aid society for the financial elite, the system of interlocking directorates, ensures with rare exceptions that even when executives fail to deliver shareholder value (shares in the major U.S. banks now sell for pocket change), the responsible chieftains will remain ensconced.
And somewhere in the global financial mess, there must be fraud. No one would have purchased the toxic assets unless the value of those assets had been misrepresented. But will criminal charges be brought, will anyone besides expendable flunky scapegoats be prosecuted? There's been no indication so far. Besides, our laws of incorporation invent legal fictions, called corporations, to protect personal fortunes from corporate missteps. Talk about leverage.
In short, the top-level, most connected bankers, even the deadbeats, are not subordinate to anyone. They occupy the top office of the control pyramid, despite the quaint reassurances that mass media spoon feed to the public about an elected government being in charge. More saccharin, yum, yum.
Untouched, unscathed, unruffled, a bemused Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, the eye of the hurricane, surveys his bequeathed estate from sea to shining sea. He is a dictator answerable to NO ONE. Given the inability of elections, laws, and markets to deliver a just system of accountability, what should be taught in civics classes today? That all that business about democracy, elections, the consent of the governed, the balance of powers, and all the rest of it is a bunch of fairy tales? Maybe. Weave those fantasies in with the mythic rivalry between capitalists and socialists and you've got a realistic curriculum for the current generation.
Capitalism and socialism, those wacky kids, poking each other in the eye and calling each other names, a regular Punch and Judy sideshow: "Am I a Democrat or a Republican? I'm both and neither. Never mind that man behind the curtain. Let my slapstick transfix you!"
It's an obsolete rivalry, folks. OK, break it up and go home.
For one thing, a premise of the capitalist/socialist rivalry, that the public and private sectors are distinct entities, has evaporated. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, central players in the current debacle, are government owned corporations, mutant entities whose operations span the supposed gulf between the public and private sectors. And consider the revolving door that connects federal office holders with Wall Street board rooms and lobbying consultants. Same people, different letterhead. What about the privatizing of government functions? If I'm a peacekeeper in Kabul, what difference does it make if my paycheck says U.S. Army or Blackwater ? In either case the money is taken from the taxpayer and given to me, via the Pentagon. Where there is an intervening private contractor, it's just another layer in the bureaucracy, skimming salaries at taxpayer expense.
And don't forget about the venerable tradition of budgetary earmarks and pork that codify through legislation the transfer of public monies into private hands. Indeed, all government procurement networks redistribute wealth from taxpayers to private beneficiaries. Corporations lay off employees, who then collect unemployment from the government, which pays those benefits from monies pulled from private hands by taxation. And now we have the spectacle of Too Big To Fail (TBTF). The banking and auto industry bailouts, by eliminating the possibility of failure, pull the rug out from under capitalism. TBTF? There's a cure for that. It's called anti-trust.
Then there's the nuclear bomb of all public/private demolitons, the Federal Reserve.
The Fed is presented to the public as if it were an agency of the government, and most people probably believe that it is, but the Federal Reserve is a system of privately held banks whose shares are not available for purchase by the public but are held by a small clutch of elite shareholders.
Capitalist/Socialist? Don't bother. The public and private sectors of the economy are so intricately interwoven and intertwined and interdependent at this point that economic models based on some categorical distinction between the two sectors are just incoherent. "Public sector" and "private sector" are no more than tropes that radio talk jocks spew.
But how about Master/Slave? Now there's an economic distinction that remains meaningful.
When I was a youngster futurists populated my prospective adulthood with personal helicopters and lawn-mowing robots. The promise of technology was wealth and leisure for the masses, because machines would do the work. The technology arrived, right on schedule. Automation delivered the promised per-capita productivity improvement. So, given the new industrial efficiencies, where's the wealth and leisure for the masses? As Sarah Palin might say, "I ain't seein' it."
What was wrong with the crystal ball?
It apparently failed to account for something. That overlooked variable seems to have been the ability and willingness of the gilded class to redistribute wealth from our pockets to theirs, without guns or political revolutions, but simply by sucking pensions into the financial markets (the 401k swindle), then deregulating and manipulating those markets. At least Bush failed to suck in Social Security or that would have been wiped out too.
If it's time to restructure the economy, let me suggest that we go through a simple exercise and ask ourselves, "What should an economic system do?" The problem is that we (are encouraged to) confuse means and ends. An economic system should not be graded in terms of markets, taxes, profits, or other abstractions. The success or failure of the economy should be defined in terms of feeding, clothing, housing, and educating everybody. There's enough wealth to do it. If markets get the job done, great. If centralized planning does it, great. Those things are potential means. They possess no intrinsic merit. Their merit derives only from their results.
Moral of the story, getting back to The Spotlight: If you want to insulate your interests from criticism, get on the enemies list of some outspoken bigots. Getting lumped in with targets of bigotry will coat you in Teflon. "You're criticizing me? Look, those bigots are criticizing me too. You must be a kook like them." This tactic is glaringly evident in official attempts recently to link criticism of the Federal Reserve and criticism of globalism to "violent" "terrorist" groups. Only an enemy combatant would chant, "End the Fed"?
Fortunately, a new generation is growing up that, thanks to Ron Paul and others, effectively has decoupled the redneck mentality from a critique of the Federal Reserve and never internalized the taboo against questioning monetary policy along with fiscal policy.
Then again, if only the conspiracy theorists had praised to the hills the piety and patriotism of the Federal Reserve. Then we might not find ourselves becoming reduced to slavery, indebted financially to such vile masters as the plutocratic kleptomaniacal oligarchy that owns the presses that print the money.
Declining newspaper circulations, the rise of the blogosphere, fraud scandals, fair and balanced Faux News and its imitators, media consolidation, and, of course, the epidemic of “spin” –all contribute to public cynicism about the integrity and vitality of the fourth estate.
Well, now it’s official. Journalism is dead, fossilized. Its mummified remains are on public display at the journalism museum, or Newseum. Next time you’re in Washington, D. C., be sure to pay your respects to the remains of a once noble enterprise, journalism.
We hardly knew ye.
The Sacred and the Profane. This is how Mircea Eliade, historian of religions, distinguished between two conceptions of time. The former typifies Non-Western traditions. It is time as a cycle. Sacred time revolves culturally around what Eliade called the Myth of the Eternal Return, the archetype of time as a recursion, anchored by a Golden Age, the perfect state of the universe’s origin. In Sacred time, all durations aim to return the world to its original perfection. Religious ordeals and ceremonies attempt to re-instate the aboriginal condition, ritually, through theatrical re-enactments.
Any digression from the perfection of origins is a descent into folly, into degeneracy. Novelty is to be avoided. Innovation is a cosmic error. The obligation of culture is to assist nature in its striving to cycle back, through seasonal, lunar, generational and the countless other natural cycles to re-establish the perfection of the aboriginal world.
The challenge to this conception came from the West. Profane time—the unidirectional, linear time of history—is a brainchild of the Western mindset, originating in Judaic tradition. (After plowing through Thomas Cahill’s "The Gifts of the Jews", I gather this is the guy’s point.) From the Profane conception grows the modern notion of historical progress. Events are going somewhere. Time does not just cycle back endlessly recapitulating the past. There IS something new under the sun.
And limited only by our powers of invention, the future is open-ended, tending toward infinite novelty.
Or?
Is the linearity of historical time merely apparent? Think about the apparent flatness of the Earth. To the casual observer, the Earth’s surface is an endless expanse. But that apparent flatness is an artifact of the enormity of the Earth’s circumference. So it is with Profane time. The apparent progress of history occurs within a cycle of such enormity that it is not perceived as an overarching, cyclical context for history. Hence, time seems flat.
