Beck and Limbaugh, like Terrorists, Prefer Soft Targets.

In most of the conservative media world, I submit that if anyone has a really, really good argument that they don't like, they will simply ignore it. It seems very worthwhile to test this:

The test case has to do with some old news. The strongest arguments against waterboarding and like interrogation techniques were made by Matthew Alexander, who using typical law enforcement interrogation techniques as seen on The Wire or Prime Suspect found and helped destroy Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who was for a while the most wanted man in Iraq -- the genius of "Al Qaeda in Iraq" who dreamed up decapitating people on webcam, as well as Robert Baer, a veteran CIA operative in the mideast who is so not soft on terrorism and general middle east badness that he was almost put on trial in Washington for almost coordinating a plot to kill Saddam Hussein by anti-Saddam Iraqis back in the Clinton Administration. It would be hard to find two people more passionately critical of the trashing of Geneva conventions - why? because they almost lead to losing the war in Iraq and certainly lead to escalating the violence to the tune of several thousand dead.

But it's so much easier to pick on Al Gore or Jeremiah Wright or Sean Penn.
Using google Advanced Search:
GlennBeck.com (add "Site:GlennBeck.com")

• Wright "God Damn America" ==> 13 hits
• Alexander "how to break a terrorist" ==> 0 hits
• "al gore" "global warming" ==> 1350 hits (far fewer if "climate change substituted; only 1 I think with "climategate")
  

RushLimbaugh.com

• "al gore" "global warming" ==> 192
• "al gore" "climate change" ==> 127
• "al gore" "climategate" ==> 19
• wright "god damn america" ==> 6
• alexander "how to break a terrorist" ==> 0

NO mention of "robert baer" on GlennBeck.com or RushLimbaugh.com

Some more searches:

AmericanThinker.com:

• "Robert Baer" ==> 9
• "Jeremiah Wright" ==> 788
• "Matthew Alexander" ==> 0
• "How to Break a Terrorist" ==> 0

Hotair.com

• Alexander "How to Break a Terrorist" ==> 0
• Wright "god damn america ==> 789
• "Robert Baer" ==> 13
• "Jeremiah Wright" ==> 968

MichelleMalkin.com

• Robert Baer ==> 1 (in followup comment by subscriber)
• "Jeremiah Wright" ==> 445
• Wright "God Damn AMerica" ==> 1180
• Alexander "How to Break a Terrorist" ==> 0

Epistemic closure

Did you hear the one about epistemic closure?

I find this little introduction, in the NYTimes online at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/books/28conserv.html

"The phrase is being used as shorthand by some prominent conservatives for a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement, a development they see as debasing modern conservatism’s proud intellectual history. First used in this context by Julian Sanchez of the libertarian Cato Institute, the phrase “epistemic closure” has been ricocheting among conservative publications and blogs as a high-toned abbreviation for ideological intolerance and misinformation.
Conservative media, Mr. Sanchez wrote at juliansanchez.com — referring to outlets like Fox News and National Review and to talk-show stars like Rush Limbaugh, Mark R. Levin and Glenn Beck — have “become worryingly untethered from reality as the impetus to satisfy the demand for red meat overtakes any motivation to report accurately.” (Mr. Sanchez said he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy"
Funny they should mention the National Review, where you can read a critique of Epistemic closure as represented (according to the reviewer) in "Mark Levin’s massive bestseller Liberty and Tyranny". But then, "Many of Mr. Manzi’s colleagues attacked him for his takedown of Mr. Levin." (says the NYTimes review).

The NR "The Corner" review is at http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/198279/i-liberty-and-tyranny-i-and-epistemic-closure/jim-manzi

The Echo Chamber Effect

Well, this has been discussed for years at least, but I'm just catching up on some of that discussion:

See, e.g.: http://thelurkingvulture.blogspot.com/2009/10/echo-chamber-effect.html

The 'Vulture' starts off with 'The echo chamber effect is hardly a recent phenomenon. In what perhaps may be an apocryphal quote, Pauline Kael is supposed to have said regarding the landslide victory of Richard Nixon over George McGovern in 1972, "I can't believe Nixon won. I don't know anybody who voted for him".'

This guy says he's a "Libertarian Christian", which is far from what I am, but part of the point of a "Truth Project", in my view (See rationalle for calling this blog "The Real Truth Project" - by the way, there are probably more "Real Truth Projects" than "Truth Projects", but I still like it because it reminds me of a childish "did not" / "did so" / "so are you" sort of argument which is the level we often get to in the epistemology business).

Um, I started a sentence didn't I, ... Part of the point of a "Truth Project" is the hope that people on both sides of many issues - those who aren't active and conscious propagandists at least, really would want to know the truth if it turned out that everything they think is wrong ... if they'd even consider the possibility.

Here's a guy with an attitude I like:
http://chris.pirillo.com/10-ways-to-eliminate-the-echo-chamber/ where he writes things like:
"Make yourself uncomfortable. I don’t do it often enough, but whenever I step outside my comfort zone – I grow."

OK, so is the blogosphere an echo chamber? No, it's lots and lots of echo chambers. There is the right wing blog echochamber and its many sub-echo chambers, there are liberal echo chambers populated by people who don't know, or don't think they know a single Tea-partier, and there are the various racial echo chambers (which functioned very well way before there was an internet). Religious cults like the Jim Jones one, and the Branch Davidians are super compact echo chambers. There are the online Islamic extremist echo chambers, and the brick and morter ones (certain mosques, madrassas, the Al Quaeda training camp), and there are the mega churches, and the Christian publishing business which can provide you with Christian romance novels, Christian diet books, Christian Yoga books ... hey you never have to go outside ... There is my beloved community of historians who don't know anyone who voted for George Bush ...

But there is something a little special about the internet. If you have to find books and magazines in libraries and bookstores (unless you only go to Islamic bookstores / Christian bookstores / "Radical" bookstores ...) you go to a store and you have to at least walk by books and magazines with other points of view. On the internet, you can go to your favorite blog, and never go anywhere except via links from that blog (or from your other favorite blog).

And before the internet there was the explosion of broadcast bandwidth and turning half the AM radio spectrum over to extreme angry talk. And now we can go to WNYC singles events, and whether we like it or not, we can live in a political district that always votes for one party or the other.

And why, why why are we like this? Well what's the alternative? Listen to every point of view and then the world will seem to have no coherence?

Here's a theory -- suppose you live the way humans did for a few tens of thousands of years -- before this strange period of literacy and "civilization". You know a few hundred people tops, and you will probably never know anyone else -- hey the people on the other side of the hill don't even speak the same language. Your societal worldview is limited to what a few hundred people can keep in their memories. You will never have an accurate view of the world by modern standards. What you need is a theory, a narrative, that gives some reasonable account of things, tells you what to eat and what not to eat. What men do and what women do, and for a select few, what a shaman does maybe. and so on. It seems we're driven to expand our set of explanations til they reach certain bounds. We seem to always want to have a theory of when and how the world was created (whatever we mean by "the world"). Once we have theories we typically are repulsed by alternative theories. If it weren't that way, we and those few hundred other people we know would have a coherent world view to which new (minor) facts could stick.

OK, in the immortal words of Ian Shoales "I gotta go".

The Boot, but not the Heel (Time For Better Search Engines, Part 2)

Well, here we go.

As many people must know, Secretary of the Interior Salazar did say "Our job basically is to keep the boot on the neck of British Petroleum to carry out the responsibilities they have both under the law and contractually to move forward and stop this spill,", which I discovered by throwing words out of the quote (as I should have thought to do); in particular, Rand Paul "improved" it just a bit by adding a heel ("boot heel on the") and changing "neck" to "throat". An ugly image that should have been disavowed by the administration, instead of being repeated, somewhat sheepishly, by Robert Gibbs, the worst presidential press secretary I can remember, at least I can honestly say that has always been my gut feeling.

But it affords an excuse for another lesson on search engines. Voila: http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/ which I found, described as "experimental" on searching for "search engine" "by date". I had already tinkered with the quote removing the heel, and continuing to use "-rand" "-paul" to find only pages with no mention of rand or paul, and was coming up with Robert Gibbs, then it was Gibbs quoting Salazar.

But the google news timeline really let me do just what I'd been wanting to do, namely find "who said it first". When I did a search for "boot on the neck of bp" using the timeline, I got an array of columns, one per date, with news stories. The bad news is it seems to be limited to news stories from major sources, but it did give a graphic picture of stories containing the phrase blowing up starting on 5/21, when Rand Paul was quoted slightly misquoting the quote. Arrows let me walk back in time -- little or nothing from May 13-20, then a cluster of references going all the way back to May 2, and then stopping.

I find the interface nicely graphic, but slow and cumbersome, and if somebody used the phrase a year or 2 ago, it really wouldn't be much help (correct me, google, if you can). But it did the job, and nicely shows the value of such a feature if we just improve on it a bit, and integrate it into regular google.

It also suggests another class of improvements we could use in our search engines: something approaching search by meaning. Computers can't really "understand" meaning, but they are getting better and better with translation, which indicates quite a bit of adaptation to the structure of language, and so, suppose I could have posed a search like this:

"{boot heel}* on the neck ..." where {...}* means "What's in the bracket or something roughly equivalent".

One problem is, if you have a million exact matches, and a smaller number of modified matches, how to give the user some handle on the variation(s). Typical "search by relevance" arguments would probably see the exact match as way better than the inexact match, so that it would be way, way down on the list. I'd suggest something like, as either an alternative or addition to the current type of google listing, something like:

VARIATIONS:
"boot heel on the throat" 11,707 hits [date range: 5/21-5/23]
"boot heel on the neck..." 1,305 hits [date range: 5/21-5/23] (I'm making the numbers up)
"boot on the neck" 7,222 hits [date range 5/2-5/23]

and then you would click on a variant to see all the specific examples in the format normally used by google, or another search engine.

There is much more to be said about search engines, and vastly much more that I don't know, I'm sure.

The thing about the internet is "The truth is out there", but often, like the dynosaur bone in the rock, it can be quite a job to pry it out of there.

It's Time for Better Search Engines (Who said: "..put my boot heel on the throat of BP")

Is there a search engine that will let me ask?

Who said: "..put my boot heel on the throat of BP"

OK Rand Paul said it, or lets say the the answer looks like a sort of summary "Rand Paul said it" AND a list of pointers to articles quoting Paul as saying it, and maybe a few quite different entries, such as Rand Paul saying he didn't say it. So what if I could say "show me the most atypical entries first". That sounds like a very generally useful followup question when you get 2 million hits, and as far as you can tell the all say more or less the same thing. Could a computer program do a reasonable approximation of what a human (with a year to wade through the 2 million hits) could do? My guess is yes, that wouldn't be a big stretch even.

I've been skimming so many web pages, I feel like I've seen something somewhere quoting someone in Obama's cabinet actually using a phrase like: "..put my boot heel on the throat of BP". Can I confirm that? or be very comfortable in saying it didn't happen (or hear who the Cabinet member was, and see if he/she gets fired the next day)? Well, I can find someone directly attributing the phrase to Obama: "I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP." Barry Obamma http://twitter.com/busybrains/status/14497679203.

An important question, and perhaps it represents one of those big stories the news media misses: How many people today, next week, next month, next November literally believe or will believe Obama did say that? Are there any pollsters asking that sort of question? My guess, it could easily be something on the order of as many people as think Saddam Hussein was directly behind 9/11 (at least some pollsters paid attention to that).

Relying on existing search engines and their limited abilities, how close could I come to answering this sort of question?
Well if somebody said it before Rand Paul, and Paul picked it up a couple of days later, wouldn't there be some references to this on the web, before there was any association between the phrase and Rand Paul?

Consider this Google search: "put my boot heel on the throat of BP" -paul

The quotes ("") mean I don't want just any combination of the words "put", "my", "boot".... but want that exact phrase. The "-paul" means nothing containing the word "Paul". So I get 4 hits, all from context being clearly from the Ron Paul interview, except for the twitterer directly attributing it to "Barry Obamma".

OK, but what if the quoted secretary was named Paul ____?_____ ?
I tried already -"rand paul", which picked up too many pages in which Rand Paul was just referred to as Paul. Some other approach? OK, when Paul was putting words in the President's mouth, he started with "What I don't like from the president's administration..."

HOW ABOUT: "put my boot heel on the throat of BP" -paul -"What I don't like from"

That cuts the hit count down quite a bit. There are a couple in which "don't" came out "dont" or "donit", or they just cut the quote down so the whole phrase "What I don't like from" didn't appear, and finally we are left with the twitterrer quoting "Barry Obamma" which I'm inclined to discount.

Suppose I could say "Who said it first"? Computer logic to approximate that could rely on that fact that every internet page in google's (or another search engine's) vast database will have a date and time of posting. In fact, can't I just tell google "display in order of posting", which would make the question much more easy to answer? NO, apparently not; at least I don't see how. I could probably put a front end on google accessing google via it's more computer friendly interface (or API), and voila, a new and useful search engine.

For more (and drier) discussions of search engines, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines
or searchenginewatch.com,

or just google "search engines". You will get, according to google "About 69,600,000 results". Bon appetite!

Email from a Friend of a Friend: From Urban Legends to Political Smears

Anonymous forwarded emails have for years been a  vehicle for circulating jokes, inspirational pictures and poems, a source of urban legends, and other frivolous but entertaining stuff.


Now, camouflaged by the fluff and amateur political commentary is  a stream of carefully constructed lies and disinformation which does not look like the work of amateurs.

Unlike past, mostly local, whispering campaigns, email is harder to trace and easier to do on a national scale. A couple of years ago, I started getting forwarded emails from my Mom, with claims that could generally be shot down with less than 15 minutes of internet research. They seemed to be really affecting my parents' views, and based on what they told me, they were generally believed by most of their friends. But they were quite simply full of provable lies. They would show signs of having been forwarded a half dozen or so times, with visible 'CC' lists giving them a sort of homey look. When many people receive this sort of thing forwarded by a friend or relative, they are apt to trust it as coming from ordinary outraged citizens as they might not trust direct mass email, but many could simply not have originated as misinformation that the sender believed, which means they can't be anything but deliberately constructed lies, and the number of them, and the similar techniques used seem to prove that they are mass produced.

Here are a couple of references:

The New Right-Wing Smear Machine by Christopher Hayes Oct 25, 2007

MyRightWingDad.net: FW: OBAMA DEATH LIST

If the same sort of phenomenon is going on with Liberal or Ultra Liberal sources, I would be very interested to investigate that as well.

Practical Epistemology

[Heavily revised on 11/3/2011]
Wikipedia defines epistemology as "the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge". Traditionally it has led to questions like whether we can really know anything, and discussing the qualities of different kinds of knowledge like logical or mathematical knowledge.

How much attention has been paid, however, to the question "Who can I trust" -- perhaps far and away the most important epistemological question that anyone can ask. Why? Because nearly every bit of knowledge you use to live your life came from some source that you decided to trust.

What does epistemology, the relevant academic discipline, have to say about how we decide who to trust? When I go to Google and pair the word "epistemology" with any of the phrases "who do you trust", "who can you trust", and "who can I trust", the number of "hits" is about 100 for the 1st 2 cases, and 28 for the third. Those who have done more than a few Google searches will recognize how small these numbers are. E.g. if I pair "baseball" with "Who can I trust", I get not not 28 but about 1060 hits. For "music" and "who can I trust", I get 23,300 hits. Is it just that the web has so few references to epistemology? Not really. If I pair "epistemology" with "literary theory" I get 148,000 hits; with "epistemology" and "scientific investigation", I get 25,000 hits; with "mathematics", 1,890,000 hits; with "feminism", 475,000 hits.

So it seems as if I must be either very original, or perhaps very wrongheaded to want to associate the question "Who can I trust" with "epistemology". Yet if I want a true answer to questions like "What needs to be done to make my car run well, and what will it cost?" or "Could this funny looking mole turn into skin cancer?" or "Does this house I'm about to buy have a serious radon problem, or termite infestation?", for the most part I answer these questions by first asking who I can trust to answer them for me -- and in most cases, I'll only ever have at most a superficial idea how the "experts" arrived at their conclusions. So why has epistemology failed to look in that direction?

For a couple of reasons, I think. First, modern philosophy was born out of a reaction to misplaced trust, faith, or dogma. The Church, and especially the Roman Catholic Church, had set itself up as the arbiter of truth. If Galileo said he "saw" moons circling Jupiter, or spots on the Sun, the Bible and/or Aristotle, and their medieval interpretors said no, this was impossible -- and it was dangerous to allow people to claim otherwise.

Then there is the nature of philosophical proof, or demonstration. You have to go through it step by step, and "see" that the first statement implies the second, and so forth, more or less the same way that one can "see" that 2+2=4, or that if A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, then A is bigger than C. The "demonstration" may have been written on paper by me or by Professor so-and-so, but the implicit premise of such demonstrations is that if it is a valid demonstration, and you are a qualified (at a minimum, "sane") person, it will work when run through your mind. 

Philosophical argument is supposed to be complete in itself. Statements like "Just check X's credentials and you'll see you can trust him" have no place in philosophical reasoning. A philosopher may, like anyone else, think "I should read Dr. S's book because Frank, whom I highly respect, recommends him", or "I'm not going to read this book which claims to be philosophy because the author has no credentials" -- but such decisions are not justified on philosophical grounds, and yet that is just the sort of decision that plays the greatest role in most people's search for the truth, or in particular, for knowledge that directs their actions.

In the process of deciding which doctor I should trust my life to, is there anything that is not subject to doubt? Mr. Smith had a very good outcome with Dr. X, and raves about him, but could Smith just have been lucky? Dr. Y highly recommends Dr. X but mightn't that be due to a close friendship? We may feel that we can "for practical purposes" get around such difficulties, but we cannot prove with philosophical rigor that we made the right choice.

But during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, many people realized there was such an accumulation of misplaced trust, and authorities whose claims were clearly contradicted by the natural world, that it was essential to view arguments on their own internal merit, or based on experiment ("empiricism").


The last few decades have seen a growing consciousness of knowledge as a social phenomenon.  This has, at times, taken on an anti-Enlightenment tone, in the academic world as "postmodernism", and elsewhere as good old anti-intellectualism.  In very recent times, we have seen a new discipline called "Social Epistemology", which addresses some of the questions I've raised here (I've only just learned about it, 18 months after writing the original version of this post).  It seems to be split into two factions, one of which seems too close to postmodernism and Christian intellectualism, but the other, led by Alvin Goldman, looks appealing to me as it purportedly "defends the integrity of truth and shows how to promote it by well-designed forms of social interaction. From science to education, from law to democracy, he shows why and how public institutions should seek knowledge-enhancing practices." **

I do believe we have a need for "knowledge enhancing practices", not to be implemented in some top down fashion, but I believe in the gentler spirit of Amartya Sen and Gene Sharp.  If this last statement makes any sense to you at all, I hope you will write a comment.

** Quote taken from Amazon page for this book: