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HomePosts tagged 'Albert Einstein'
Violations of Bell's Inequality: Drawing Conclusions
August 17, 2018 entirelyuseless Metaphysics, Science, Uncategorized	Absolute Time, Action at a Distance, Albert Einstein, Aristotle, Bell Inequality, David Hume, Determinism, Erwin Schrödinger, Future, Hugh Everett, Induction, Intelligibility, Isaac Newton, John Bell, Many Worlds, Mark Alford, Marvin Edwards, Ptolemaic System, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Vagueness
In the post on violations of Bell's inequality, represented there by Mark Alford's twin analogy, I pointed out that things did not seem to go very well for Einstein's hope for physics, I did not draw any specific conclusions. Here I will consider the likely consequences, first by looking at the relationship of the experiments to Einstein's position on causality and determinism, and second on their relationship to Einstein's position on locality and action at a distance.
Einstein on Determinism
Einstein hoped for "facts" instead of probabilities. Everything should be utterly fixed by the laws, much like the position recently argued by Marvin Edwards in the comments here.
On the face of it, violations of Bell's inequality rule this out, represented by the argument that if the twins had pre-existing determinate plans, it would be impossible for them to give the same answer less than 1/3 of the time when they are asked different questions. Bell however pointed out that it is possible to formulate a deterministic theory which would give similar probabilities at the cost of positing action at a distance (quoted here):
Moreover, a hidden variable interpretation of elementary quantum theory has been explicitly constructed. That particular interpretation has indeed a grossly non-local structure. This is characteristic, according to the result to be proved here, of any such theory which reproduces exactly the quantum mechanical predictions.
Nonetheless, I have set aside action at a distance to be discussed separately, and I would argue that we should accept the above surface appearance: the outcomes of quantum mechanical experiments are actually indeterministic. These probabilities represent something in the world, not merely something in our knowledge.
Why? In the first place, note that "reproduces exactly the quantum mechanical predictions" can be understood in two ways. A deterministic theory of that kind would say that because the details are unknown to us, we cannot know what is going to happen. But the details are there, and they in fact determine what is going to happen. There is still a difference on the object level between a world where the present fixes the future to a single possibility, and one in which the future is left open, as Aristotle supposed.
Of course there is no definitive proof here that we are actually in the situation with the open future, although the need for action at a distance in the alternative theory suggests that we are. Even apart from this, however, the general phenomena of quantum mechanics directly suggest that this is the situation. Even apart from violations of Bell's inequality, quantum mechanics in general already looked exactly as we should have expected a world with an indeterminate future to look.
If this is the case, then Einstein was mistaken on this point, at least to this extent. But what about the deterministic aspect, which I mentioned at the end of this post, and which Schrödinger describes:
At all events it is an imagined entity that images the blurring of all variables at every moment just as clearly and faithfully as does the classical model its sharp numerical values. Its equation of motion too, the law of its time variation, so long as the system is left undisturbed, lags not one iota, in clarity and determinacy, behind the equations of motion of the classical model.
The answer is that this is deterministic not because the future, as we know it, is deterministic, but because it describes all of the possibilities at once. Thus in the case of the cat it includes both the cat living and the cat dying, which are two possible outcomes. It is "deterministic" only because once you have stated all of the alternatives, there is nothing left to say.
Why did Einstein want a deterministic theory? He openly admits that he does not have a convincing argument for it. It seems likely, however, that the fundamental motivation is the conviction that reality is intelligible. And an indeterministic world seems significantly less intelligible than a deterministic one. But this desire can in fact be satisfied by this second kind of "determinism"; thus Schrödinger calls it "one perfectly clear concept."
In this respect, Einstein's intuition was not mistaken. It is possible to give an intelligible account of the world, even a "deterministic" one, in this sense.
Einstein on Locality
Einstein also wanted to avoid "spooky action at a distance." Admitting that the future is indeterminate, however, is not enough to avoid this conclusion. In Mark Alford's twin analogy, it is not only pre-determined plans that fail, but also plans that involve randomness. Thus it first appears that the violations of Bell's inequality absolutely require action at a distance.
If we follow my suggestion here, however, and consequently adopt Hugh Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics, then saying that there are multiple future possibilities implies the existence of multiple timelines. And if there are multiple timelines, violations of Bell's inequality no longer necessarily imply action at a distance.
Why not? Consider the twin experiment with the assumption of indeterminacy and multiple timelines. Suppose that from the very beginning, there are two copies of each twin. The first copy of the first twin has the plan of responding to the three questions with "yes/yes/yes." Likewise, the first copy of the second twin has the plan of responding to the three questions with, "yes/yes/yes." In contrast, the second copy of each twin has the plan of responding with "no/no/no."
Now we have four twins but the experimenter only sees two. So which ones does he see? There is nothing impossible about the following "rule": if the twins are asked different questions, the experimenter sees the first copy of one of the twins, and the second copy of the other twin. Meanwhile, if the twins are asked the same question, the experimenter sees either the first copy of each twin, or the second copy of each twin. It is easy to see that if this is the case, the experimenter will see the twins agree, when they are asked the same question, and will see them disagree when they are asked different questions (thus agreeing less than 1/3 of the time in that situation.)
"Wait," you will say. "If multiple timelines is just a way of describing a situation with indeterminism, and indeterminism is not enough to avoid action at a distance, how is it possible for multiple timelines to give a way out?"
From the beginning, the apparent "impossibility" of the outcome was a statistical impossibility, not a logical impossibility. Naturally this had to be the case, since if it were a logical impossibility, we could not have coherently described the actual outcomes. Thus we might imagine that David Hume would give this answer:
The twins are responding randomly to each question. By pure chance, they happened to agree the times they were asked the same question, and by pure chance they violated Bell's inequality when they were asked different questions.
Since this was all a matter of pure chance, of course, if you do the experiment again tomorrow, it will turn out that all of the answers are random and they will agree and disagree 50% of the time on all questions.
And this answer is logically possible, but false. This account does not explain the correlation, but simply ignores it. In a similar way, the reason why indeterministic theories without action at a distance, but described as having a single timeline, cannot explain the results is that in order to explain the correlation, the outcomes of both sides need to be selected together, so to speak. But "without action at a distance" in this context simply means that they are not selected together. This makes the outcome statistically impossible.
In our multiple timelines version, in contrast, our "rule" above in effect selected the outcomes together. In other words, the guideline we gave regarding which pairs of twins the experimenter would meet, had the same effect as action at a distance.
How is all this an explanation? The point is that the particular way that timelines spread out when they come into contact with other things, in the version with multiple timelines, exactly corresponds to action at a distance, in the version without them. An indeterministic theory represented as having a single timeline and no action at a distance could be directly translated into a version with multiple timelines; but if we did that, this particular multiple timeline version would not have the rule that produces the correct outcomes. And on the other hand, if we start with the multiple timeline version that does have the rule, and translate it into a single timeline account, it will have action at a distance.
What does all this say about Einstein's opinion about locality? Was he right, or was he wrong?
We might simply say that he was wrong, insofar as the actual situation can in fact be described as including action at a distance, even if it is not necessary to describe it in this way, since we can describe it with multiple timelines and without action at a distance. But to the degree that this suggests that Einstein made two mistakes, one about determinism and one about action at a distance, I think this is wrong. There was only one mistake, and it was the one about determinism. The fact is that as soon you speak of indeterminism at all, it becomes possible to speak of the world as having multiple timelines. So the question at that point is whether this is the "natural" description of the situation, where the natural description more or less means the best way to understand things, in which case the possibility of "action at a distance" is not an additional mistake on Einstein's part, but rather it is an artifact of describing the situation as though there were only a single timeline.
You might say that there cannot be a better or worse way to understand things if two accounts are objectively equivalent. But this is wrong. Thus for example in general relativity it is probably possible to give an account where the earth has no daily rotation, and the universe is spinning around it every 24 hours. And this account is objectively equivalent to the usual account where the earth is spinning; exactly the same situation is being described, and nothing different is being asserted. And yet this account is weird in many ways, and makes it very hard to understand the universe. The far better and "natural" description is that the earth is spinning. Note, however, that this is an overall result; just looking out the window, you might have thought that saying that the universe is spinning is more natural. (Notice, however, that an even more natural account would be that neither the earth nor the universe is moving; it is only later in the day that you begin to figure out that one of them is moving.)
In a similar way, a single timeline account is originally more natural in the way a Ptolemaic account is more natural when you look out the window. But I would argue that in a similar way, the multiple timeline account, without action at a distance, is ultimately the more natural one. The basic reason for this is that there is no Newtonian Absolute Time. The consequence is that if we speak of "future possibilities," they cannot be future possibilities for the entire universe at once. They will be fairly localized future possibilities: e.g. there might be more than one possible text for the ending to this blog post, which has not yet been written, and those possibilities are originally possibilities for what happens here in this room, not for the rest of the universe. These future alternatives will naturally result in future possibilities for other parts of the world, but this will happen "slowly," so to speak (namely if one wishes to speak of the speed of light as slow!) This fits well with the idea of multiple timelines, since there will have to be some process where these multiple timelines come into contact with the rest of the world, much as with our "rule" in the twin experiment. On the other hand, it does not fit so well with a single timeline account of future possibilities, since one is forced (by the terms of the account) to imagine that when a choice among possibilities is made, it is made for the entire universe at once, which appears to require Newton's Absolute Time.
This suggests that Einstein was basically right about action at a distance, and wrong about determinism. But the intuition that motivated him to embrace both positions, namely that the universe should be intelligible, was sound.
Spooky Action at a Distance
August 12, 2018 August 10, 2018 entirelyuseless Mathematics, Science, Uncategorized	Action at a Distance, Albert Einstein, Bell Inequality, Causes, Determinism, John Bell, Locality, Mark Alford, Max Born, Natural Laws, Quantum Mechanics, Realism, Space, Speed of Light
Albert Einstein objected to the usual interpretations of quantum mechanics because they seemed to him to imply "spooky action at a distance," a phrase taken from a letter from Einstein to Max Born in 1947 (page 155 in this book):
I cannot make a case for my attitude in physics which you would consider at all reasonable. I admit, of course, that there is a considerable amount of validity in the statistical approach which you were the first to recognize clearly as necessary given the framework of the existing formalism. I cannot seriously believe in it because the theory cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance. I am, however, not yet firmly convinced that it can really be achieved with a continuous field theory, although I have discovered a possible way of doing this which so far seems quite reasonable. The calculation difficulties are so great that I will be biting the dust long before I myself can be fully convinced of it. But I am quite convinced that someone will eventually come up with a theory whose objects, connected by laws, are not probabilities but considered facts, as used to be taken for granted until quite recently. I cannot, however, base this conviction on logical reasons, but can only produce my little finger as witness, that is, I offer no authority which would be able to command any kind of respect outside of my own hand.
Einstein has two objections: the theory seems to be indeterministic, and it also seems to imply action at a distance. He finds both of these implausible. He thinks physics should be deterministic, "as used to be taken for granted until quite recently," and that all interactions should be local: things directly affect only things which are close by, and affect distant things only indirectly.
In many ways, things do not appear to have gone well for Einstein's intuitions. John Bell constructed a mathematical argument, now known as Bell's Theorem, that the predictions of quantum mechanics cannot be reproduced by the kind of theory desired by Einstein. Bell summarizes his point:
The paradox of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen was advanced as an argument that quantum mechanics could not be a complete theory but should be supplemented by additional variables. These additional variables were to restore to the theory causality and locality. In this note that idea will be formulated mathematically and shown to be incompatible with the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics. It is the requirement of locality, or more precisely that the result of a measurement on one system be unaffected by operations on a distant system with which it has interacted in the past, that creates the essential difficulty. There have been attempts to show that even without such a separability or locality requirement no "hidden variable" interpretation of quantum mechanics is possible. These attempts have been examined elsewhere and found wanting. Moreover, a hidden variable interpretation of elementary quantum theory has been explicitly constructed. That particular interpretation has indeed a grossly non-local structure. This is characteristic, according to the result to be proved here, of any such theory which reproduces exactly the quantum mechanical predictions.
"Causality and locality" in this description are exactly the two points where Einstein objected in the quoted letter: causality, as understood here, implies determinism, and locality implies no spooky action at a distance. Given this result, Einstein might have hoped that the predictions of quantum mechanics would turn out to fail, so that he could still have his desired physics. This did not happen. On the contrary, these predictions (precisely those inconsistent with such theories) have been verified time and time again.
Rather than putting the reader through Bell's math and physics, we will explain his result with an analogy by Mark Alford. Alford makes this comparison:
Imagine that someone has told us that twins have special powers, including the ability to communicate with each other using telepathic influences that are "superluminal" (faster than light). We decide to test this by collecting many pairs of twins, separating each pair, and asking each twin one question to see if their answers agree.
To make things simple we will only have three possible questions, and they will be Yes/No questions. We will tell the twins in advance what the questions are.
The procedure is as follows.
A new pair of twins is brought in and told what the three possible questions are.
The twins travel far apart in space to separate questioning locations.
At each location there is a questioner who selects one of the three questions at random, and poses that question to the twin in front of her.
Spacelike separation. When the question is chosen and asked at one location, there is not enough time for any influence traveling at the speed of light to get from there to the other location in time to affect either what question is chosen there, or the answer given.
He now supposes the twins give the same responses when they are asked the same question, and discusses this situation:
Now, suppose we perform this experiment and we find same-question agreement: whenever a pair of spacelike-separated twins both happen to get asked the same question, their answers always agree. How could they do this? There are two possible explanations,
1. Each pair of twins uses superluminal telepathic communication to make sure both twins give the same answer.
2. Each pair of twins follows a plan. Before they were separated they agreed in advance what their answers to the three questions would be.
The same-question agreement that we observe does not prove that twins can communicate telepathically faster than light. If we believe that strong locality is a valid principle, then we can resort to the other explanation, that each pair of twins is following a plan. The crucial point is that this requires determinism. If there were any indeterministic evolution while the twins were spacelike separated, strong locality requires that the random component of one twin's evolution would have to be uncorrelated with the other twin's evolution. Such uncorrelated indeterminism would cause their recollections of the plan to diverge, and they would not always show same-question agreement.
The results are understandable if the twins agree on the answers Yes-Yes-Yes, or Yes-No-Yes, or any other determinate combination. But they are not understandable if they decide to flip coins if they are asked the second question, for example. If they did this, they would have to disagree 50% of the time on that question, unless one of the coin flips affected the other.
Alford goes on to discuss what happens when the twins are asked different questions:
In the thought experiment as described up to this point we only looked at the recorded answers in cases where each twin in a given pair was asked the same question. There are also recorded data on what happens when the two questioners happen to choose different questions. Bell noticed that this data can be used as a cross-check on our strong-locality-saving idea that the twins are following a pre-agreed plan that determines that their answers will always agree. The cross-check takes the form of an inequality:
Bell inequality for twins:
If a pair of twins is following a plan then, when each twin is asked a different randomly chosen question, their answers will be the same, on average, at least 1/3 of the time.
He derives this value:
For each pair of twins, there are four general types of pre-agreed plan they could adopt when they are arranging how they will both give the same answer to each of the three possible questions.
(a) a plan in which all three answers are Yes;
(b) a plan in which there are two Yes and one No;
(c) a plan in which there are two No and one Yes;
(d) a plan in which all three answers are No.
If, as strong locality and same-question agreement imply, both twins in a given pair follow a shared predefined plan, then when the random questioning leads to each of them being asked a different question from the set of three possible questions, how often will their answers happen to be the same (both Yes or both No)? If the plan is of type (a) or (d), both answers will always be the same. If the plan is of type (b) or (c), both answers will be the same 1/3 of the time. We conclude that no matter what type of plan each pair of twins may follow, the mere fact that they are following a plan implies that, when each of them is asked a different randomly chosen question, they will both give the same answer (which might be Yes or No) at least 1/3 of the time. It is important to appreciate that one needs data from many pairs of twins to see this effect, and that the inequality holds even if each pair of twins freely chooses any plan they like.
The "Bell inequality" is violated if we do the experimental test and the twins end up agreeing, when they are asked different questions, less than 1/3 of the time, despite consistently agreeing when they are asked the same question. If one saw such results in reality, one might be forgiven for concluding that the twins do have superluminal telepathic abilities. Unfortunately for Einstein, this is what we do get, consistently, when we test the analogous quantum mechanical version of the experiment.
Generalized Kantian Dichotomy
June 30, 2018 June 30, 2018 entirelyuseless Logic, Metaphysics, Uncategorized	Albert Einstein, Alexander Pruss, Common Sense, Disagreement, False Dichotomy, Immanuel Kant, James Larson, Kantian Error, Knowledge, Realism, Reality, Reductionism, Richard Rorty, Scott Sumner, Sean Carroll, Subjectivity, Truth
At the end of the last post I suggested that the confusion between the mode of knowledge and the mode of being might be a primary, or rather the primary, cause of philosophical error, with the exception of motivated error.
If we consider the "Kantian" and "anti-Kantian" errors in the last post, we can give a somewhat general account of how this happens. The two errors might appear to be mutually exclusive and exhaustive, but in fact they constitute a false dichotomy. Consider the structure of the disagreement:
A. Common sense takes note of something: in this case, that it is possible to know things. Knowledge is real.
B. The Kantian points out that the mode of knowing and the mode of being are not the same, and concludes that common sense is wrong. Knowledge is apparent, but not real.
C. The anti-Kantian, determined to uphold common sense, applies modus tollens. We know that knowledge is real: so the mode of knowing and the mode of being must be the same.
Each party to the dispute says something true (that knowledge is real, that the mode of being and the mode of knowing are not the same), and something false (that knowledge is not real, that the mode of being and the mode of knowing are the same.)
A vast number of philosophical disputes can be analyzed in a very similar manner. Thus we have the general structure:
A. Common sense points out that some item X is real.
B. The Kantian points out that the mode of knowing and the mode of being are not the same, and concludes that common sense is wrong. X is apparent, but not real.
C. The anti-Kantian, determined to uphold common sense, applies modus tollens. We know that X is real: so the mode of knowing and the mode of being must be the same.
Once again, in this general structure, each party to the dispute would say something true (that X is real, that the mode of knowing and being are not the same), and something false (the denial of one of these two.) As an example, we can apply this structure to our discussion of reductionism and anti-reductionism. The reductionist, in this case, is the Kantian (in our present structure), and the anti-reductionist the anti-Kantian. The very same person might well argue both sides about different things: thus Sean Carroll might be anti-reductionist about fundamental particles and reductionist about humans, while Alexander Pruss is anti-reductionist about humans and reductionist about artifacts. But whether we are discussing fundamental particles, humans, or artifacts, both sides are wrong. Both say something true, but also something false.
Several cautionary notes are needed in this regard.
First, both sides will frequently realize that they are saying something strongly counter-intuitive, and attempt to remedy this by saying something along the lines of "I don't mean to say the thing that is false." But that is not the point. I do not say that you intend to say the thing that is false. I say that you give an account which logically implies the thing that is false, and that the only way you can avoid this implication is by rejecting the false dichotomy completely, namely by accepting both the reality of X, and the distinction of the modes of knowing and being. Thus for example Sean Carroll's does not distinguish his poetic naturalism from eliminativism in terms of what it says to be true, but only in terms of what it says to be useful. But eliminativism says that it is false that there are ships: therefore Carroll's poetic naturalism also says that it is false that there are ships, whether he intends to say this or not, and whether or not he finds it useful to say that there are.
Second, this outline uses the terminology of "Kantian" and "anti-Kantian," but in fact the two tend to blur into one another, because the mistakes are very similar: both imply that the unknown and the known, as such, are the same. Thus for example in my post on reductionism I said that there was a Kantian error in the anti-reductionist position: but in the present schema, the error is anti-Kantian. In part, this happened because I did not make these distinctions clearly enough myself in the earlier post. But is it also because the errors themselves uphold very similar contradictions. Thus the anti-reductionist thinks somewhat along these lines:
We know that a human being is one thing. We know it as a unity, and therefore it has a mode of being as a unity. But whenever anyone tries to explain the idea of a human being, they end up saying many things about it. So our explanation of a human being cannot be the true explanation. Since the mode of knowing and the mode of being must be the same, a true explanation of a human being would have to be absolutely one. We have no explanation like that, so it must be that a human being has an essence which is currently hidden from us.
Note that this reasons in an anti-Kantian manner (the mode of being and the mode of knowing must be the same), but the conclusion is effectively Kantian: possible or not, we actually have no knowledge of human beings as they are.
As I said in the post on reductionism, the parties to the dispute will in general say that an account like mine is anti-realist: realism, according to both sides, requires that one accept one side of the dichotomy and reject the other. But I respond that the very dispute between realism and anti-realism can be itself an example of the false dichotomy, as the dispute is often understood. Thus:
A. Common sense notes that the things we normally think and talk about are real, and that the things we normally say about them are true.
B. The Kantian (the anti-realist) points out that the mode of knowing and the mode of being are not the same, and concludes that common sense is wrong. The things we normally talk about appear to be real, but they are not.
C. The anti-Kantian (the realist) applies modus tollens. We know these things are real: so the mode of knowledge and the mode of being must be the same after all.
As usual, both say something true, and both say something false. Consider Scott Sumner, who tends to take an anti-realist position, as for example here:
Even worse, I propose doing so for "postmodern" reasons. I will start by denying the reality of inflation, and then argue for some substitute concepts that are far more useful. First a bit of philosophy. There is a lively debate about whether there is a meaningful distinction between our perception of reality, and actual reality. I had a long debate with a philosopher about whether Newton's laws of motion were a part of reality, or merely a human construct. I took the latter view, arguing that if humans had never existed then Newton's laws would have never existed. He argued they are objectively true. I responded that Einstein showed that were false. He responded that they were objectively true in the limiting case. I argued that even that might be changed by future developments in our understanding of reality at the quantum level. He argued that they'd still be objectively approximately true, etc, etc.
On the one hand, a lot of what Scott says here is right. On the other hand, he mistakenly believes that it follows that common sense is mistaken in matters in which it is not, in fact, mistaken. The reasoning is basically the reasoning of the Kantian: one notices that we have a specific mode of knowing which is not the mode of being of things, and concludes that knowledge is impossible, or in Scott's terminology, "objective truth" does not exist, at least as distinct from personal opinion. He has a more extensive discussion of this here:
I don't see it as relativism at all. I don't see it as the world of fuzzy post-modern philosophers attacking the virtuous hard sciences. It's important not to get confused by semantics, and focus on what's really at stake. In my view, Rorty's views are most easily seen by considering his denial of the distinction between objective truth and subjective belief. In order to see why he did this, consider Rorty's claim that, "That which has no practical implications, has no theoretical implications." Suppose Rorty's right, and it's all just belief that we hold with more or less confidence. What then? In contrast, suppose the distinction between subjective belief and objective fact is true. What then? What are the practical implications of each philosophical view? I believe the most useful way of thinking about this is to view all beliefs as subjective, albeit held with more or less confidence.
Let's suppose it were true that we could divide up statements about the world into two categories, subjective beliefs and objective facts. Now let's write down all our statements about the world onto slips of paper. Every single one of them, there must be trillions (even if we ignore the field of math, where an infinite number of statements could be constructed.) Now let's divide these statements up into two big piles, one set is subjective beliefs, and the other pile contains statements that are objective facts. We build a vast Borgesian library, and put all the subjective beliefs (i.e. Trump is an idiot) into one wing, and all the objective facts (Paris is the capital of France) into the other wing.
Now here's the question for pragmatists like Rorty and me. Is this a useful distinction to make? If it is useful, how is it useful? Here's the only useful thing I can imagine resulting from this distinction. If we have a category of objective facts, then we can save time by not questioning these facts as new information arises. They are "off limits". Since they are objective facts, they can never be refuted. If they could be refuted, then they'd be subjective beliefs, not objective facts.
But I don't want to do that. I don't want to consider any beliefs to be completely off limits—not at all open to refutation. That reminds me too much of fundamentalist religion. On the other hand, I do want to distinguish between different kinds of beliefs, in a way that I think is more pragmatic than the subjective/objective distinction. Rather I'd like to assign probability values to each belief, which represent my confidence as to whether or not the belief is true. Then I'd like to devote more of my time to entertaining critiques of highly questionable hypotheses, than I do to less plausible hypotheses.
Again, this makes a great deal of sense. The problem is that Scott thinks that either there is no distinction between the subjective and objective, or we need to be able to make that distinction subjectively. Since the latter seems an evident contradiction, he concludes that there is no distinction between subjective and objective. Later in the post, he puts this in terms of "map and territory":
The other point of confusion I see is people conflating "the map and the territory". Then they want to view "objective facts" as aspects of the territory, the underlying reality, not (just) beliefs about the territory. I don't think that's very useful, as it seems to me that statements about the world are always models of the world, not the world itself. Again, if it were not true, then theories could never be revised over time. After all, Einstein didn't revise reality in 1905; he revised our understanding of reality–our model of reality.
"Statements about the world are always models of the world, not the world itself." Indeed. That is because they are statements, not the things the statements are about. This is correctly to notice that the mode of knowledge is not the mode of being. But it does not follow that there are no objective facts, nor that objective facts are not distinct from opinions. Consider the statement that "dogs are animals." We can call that statement a "model of the world." But is not about a model of the world: it is about dogs, which are not our model or even parts of our model, but things moving around outside in the real world. Obviously, we cannot concretely distinguish between "things we think are true" and "things that are actually true," because it will always be us talking about things that are actually true, but we can make and understand that distinction in the abstract. Scott is right, however, to reject the idea that some ideas are subjective "because they are about the map," with other statements being objective "because they are about the territory." In the map / territory terminology, all statements are maps, and all of them are about the territory (including statements about maps, which refer to maps as things that exist, and thus as part of the territory.)
We can see here how Scott Sumner is falling into the Kantian error. But what about the realist position? It does not follow from any of the above that the realist must make any corresponding error. And indeed, in all such dichotomies, there will be a side which is more right than the other: namely, the side that says that common sense is right. And so it is possible, and correct, to say that common sense is right without also accepting the corresponding falsehood (namely that the mode of knowing and the mode of being are the same.) But if we do accept the realist position together with the corresponding falsehood, this can manifest itself in various ways. For example, one might say that one should indeed put some things in the category of "off limits" for discussion: since they are objective facts, they can never be revised. Thus for example James Larson, as in an earlier discussion, tends to identify the rejection of his positions with the rejection of realism. In effect, "My beliefs are objectively true. So people who disagree with my beliefs reject objective truth. And I cannot admit that my beliefs might be false, because that would mean an objective truth could be false at the same time, which is a contradiction." The problem will not always be manifested in the same way, however, because as we said in the last post, each end of the false dichotomy implies a similar contradiction and cannot be reasoned about coherently.
Semi-Parmenidean Heresy
February 22, 2017 February 22, 2017 entirelyuseless Metaphysics, Science, Uncategorized	Albert Einstein, Atomic Theory, Causes, Copernicus, Elements, Eliminativism, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Knowledge, Language, Material Cause, Naturalism, Parmenides, Sean Carroll, Skepticism, Thales, Thought
In his book The Big Picture, Sean Carroll describes the view which he calls "poetic naturalism":
As knowledge generally, and science in particular, have progressed over the centuries, our corresponding ontologies have evolved from quite rich to relatively sparse. To the ancients, it was reasonable to believe that there were all kinds of fundamentally different things in the world; in modern thought, we try to do more with less.
We would now say that Theseus's ship is made of atoms, all of which are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons-exactly the same kinds of particles that make up every other ship, or for that matter make up you and me. There isn't some primordial "shipness" of which Theseus's is one particular example; there are simply arrangements of atoms, gradually changing over time.
That doesn't mean we can't talk about ships just because we understand that they are collections of atoms. It would be horrendously inconvenient if, anytime someone asked us a question about something happening in the world, we limited our allowable responses to a listing of a huge set of atoms and how they were arranged. If you listed about one atom per second, it would take more than a trillion times the current age of the universe to describe a ship like Theseus's. Not really practical.
It just means that the notion of a ship is a derived category in our ontology, not a fundamental one. It is a useful way of talking about certain subsets of the basic stuff of the universe. We invent the concept of a ship because it is useful to us, not because it's already there at the deepest level of reality. Is it the same ship after we've gradually replaced every plank? I don't know. It's up to us to decide. The very notion of "ship" is something we created for our own convenience.
That's okay. The deepest level of reality is very important; but all the different ways we have of talking about that level are important too.
There is something essentially pre-Socratic about this thinking. When Carroll talks about "fundamentally different things," he means things that differ according to their basic elements. But at the same kind the implication is that only things that differ in this way are "fundamentally" different in the sense of being truly or really different. But this is a quite different sense of "fundamental."
I suggested in the linked post that even Thales might not really have believed that material causes alone sufficiently explained reality. Nonetheless, there was a focus on the material cause as being the truest explanation. We see the same focus here in Sean Carroll. When he says, "There isn't some primordial shipness," he is thinking of shipness as something that would have to be a material cause, if it existed.
Carroll proceeds to contrast his position with eliminativism:
One benefit of a rich ontology is that it's easy to say what is "real"- every category describes something real. In a sparse ontology, that's not so clear. Should we count only the underlying stuff of the world as real, and all the different ways we have of dividing it up and talking about it as merely illusions? That's the most hard-core attitude we could take to reality, sometimes called eliminativism, since its adherents like nothing better than to go around eliminating this or that concept from our list of what is real. For an eliminativist, the question "Which Captian Kirk is the real one?" gets answered by, "Who cares? People are illusions. They're just fictitious stories we tell about the one true world."
I'm going to argue for a different view: our fundamental ontology, the best way we have of talking about the world at the deepest level, is extremely sparse. But many concepts that are part of non-fundamental ways we have of talking about the world- useful ideas describing higher-level, macroscopic reality- deserve to be called "real."
The key word there is "useful." There are certainly non-useful ways of talking about the world. In scientific contexts, we refer to such non-useful ways as "wrong" or "false." A way of talking isn't just a list of concepts; it will generally include a set of rules for using them, and relationships among them. Every scientific theory is a way of talking about the world, according to which we can say things like "There are things called planets, and something called the sun, all of which move through something called space, and planets do something called orbiting the sun, and those orbits describe a particular shape in space called an ellipse." That's basically Johannes Kepler's theory of planetary motion, developed after Copernicus argued for the sun being at the center of the solar system but before Isaac Newton explained it all in terms of the force of gravity. Today, we would say that Kepler's theory is fairly useful in certain circumstances, but it's not as useful as Newton's, which in turn isn't as broadly useful as Einstein's general theory of relativity.
A poetic naturalist will agree that both Captain Kirk and the Ship of Theseus are simply ways of talking about certain collections of atoms stretching through space and time. The difference is that an eliminativist will say "and therefore they are just illusions," while the poetic naturalist says "but they are no less real for all of that."
There are some good things about what Carroll is doing here. He is right of course to insist that the things of common experience are "real." He is also right to see some relationship between saying that something is real and saying that talking about it is useful, but this is certainly worth additional consideration, and he does not really do it justice.
The problematic part is that, on account of his pre-Socratic tendencies, he is falling somewhat into the error of Parmenides. The error of Parmenides was to suppose that being can be, and can be thought and said, in only one way. Carroll, on account of confusing the various meanings of "fundamental," supposes that being can be in only one way, namely as something elemental, but that it can be thought and said in many ways.
The problem with this, apart from the falsity of asserting that being can be in only one way, is that no metaphysical account is given whereby it would be reasonable to say that being can be thought and said in many ways, given that it can be in only one way. Carroll is trying to point in that direction by saying that our common speech is useful, so it must be about real things; but the eliminativist would respond, "Useful to whom? The things that you are saying this is useful for are illusions and do not exist. So even your supposed usefulness does not exist." And Carroll will have no valid response, because he has already admitted to agreeing with the eliminativist on a metaphysical level.
The correct answer to this is the one given by Aristotle. Material causes do not sufficiently explain reality, but other causes are necessary as well. But this means that the eliminativist is mistaken on a metaphysical level, not merely in his way of speaking.


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Home Issues Astronomy Big Bang and Dark Matter Mysteries May Have Been Solved
Big Bang and Dark Matter Mysteries May Have Been Solved
Jerome Drexler
Fri April 20, 2007
LOS ALTOS HILLS, Calif., April 20 – Jerome Drexler, author of, "Comprehending and Decoding the Cosmos," (Universal Publishers, 2006) recently submitted a scientific paper to a cosmological conference. The paper appears to provide solutions to two important mysteries, namely, "What is the precise nature of the dark matter of the universe?" and "Did the Big Bang satisfy the Second Law of Thermodynamics?"
Drexler provided solutions to both of these mysteries in his cosmological paper entitled, "A Relativistic-Proton Dark Matter Would Be Evidence that the Big Bang Probably Satisfied the Second Law of Thermodynamics."
The abstract of his scientific paper reads as follows: "A new research hypothesis has been developed by the author based upon finding astronomically based 'cosmic constituents' of the Universe that may be created or influenced by or have a special relationship with possible dark matter candidates. He then developed a list of 14 relevant and plausible 'cosmic constituents' of the Universe, which then was used to establish a list of constraints regarding the nature and characteristics of the long-sought dark matter particles. A dark matter candidate was then found that best conformed to the 14 constraints established by the 'cosmic constituents.' The author then used this same dark matter candidate to provide evidence that the Big Bang was relativistic, had a low entropy and therefore probably satisfied the Second Law of Thermodynamics."
The paper explains that the Big Bang dispersed relativistic protons and helium nuclei, in a ratio of 12 to 1, that evolved into the mysterious dark matter halos and filaments that now represent about 83 percent of the mass of the universe.
Drexler's discoveries of the nature of dark matter and its relationship with the Big Bang, and with star formation, starburst galaxies, ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays, and the emergence of dark matter halos were the result of five years of analyzing and interpreting astronomical data of others. The five-page paper is also posted on the Cornell University Library arXiv.org physics website as, "A Relativistic-Proton Dark Matter Would Be Evidence the Big Bang Probably Satisfied the Second Law of Thermodynamics." It is available to the public free of charge at: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0702132 .
One type of astronomical evidence supporting such a relativistic-proton Big Bang is provided by the ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) protons that bombard the Earth every day. In Drexler's relativistic-proton dark matter theory, these UHECR's are considered to be stragglers from the galaxy-orbiting relativistic protons that form the dark matter halos surrounding galaxies.
It is generally accepted that the dark matter of the universe was created by the Big Bang. Because of this strong Big Bang/dark matter linkage, the scientific evidence for the existence of relativistic-proton dark matter provided in Drexler's 2003 and 2006 books also provides strong evidence for the existence of a relativistic-proton Big Bang. Such a relativistic-proton Big Bang probably would satisfy the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Note that a relativistic-proton Big Bang would be a very efficient way of creating a universe and conserving its energy because the fewest number of particles and the least amount of unusable energy would be created and dispersed. These characteristics may be desirable for the Cosmic Inflation theory and its associated Big Bang.
Drexler is the author of "Comprehending and Decoding the Cosmos," published in May 2006, and "How Dark Matter Created Dark Energy And The Sun," published in December 2003. The books are available through Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com.
The 2006 book is cataloged and available at libraries of 25 prominent universities and astronomical institutes including: Harvard, Harvard-Smithsonian, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, UC Berkeley, Vassar, University of Illinois, University of Hawaii, University of Toronto, University of Edinburgh, University of Helsinki, Kyoto University, Universidad de Chile, University of Hamburg, University of Bologna, University of Goettingen, Max-Planck-Institut for Astrophysik, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Astronomical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, University of Groningen, University of Copenhagen, University of Lisbon, Universidad de Guadalajara, and the Czech Republic's Academy of Sciences.
Drexler entered the race to identify dark matter in 2002, by utilizing Albert Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity, Johannes Kepler's 400-year-old idea of re-analyzing the astronomical data of others, and Occam's razor logic of the 14th century.
Big Bang Enigma May be Solved by Relativistic Dark Matter
So-Called Anomalies in NASA-Hubble 3D Dark Matter Map Explained
Big Bang Not Fiery Chaotic Explosion, Orderly High-Velocity Relativistic Protons
Jerome Drexler, inventor of the LaserCard optical memory card, worked at Bell Labs, was a research professor in physics at NJIT, and chief scientist of LaserCard Corp. Drexler is the author of four books on his discovery of the nature of dark matter, dark energy and "dark matter cosmology" of the universe.
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The Perils of Using Technology to Solve Other People's Problems
What will it take to design socio-technical systems that actually work?
By Ethan Zuckerman
Stephen Lam / Reuters
I found Shane Snow's essay on prison reform — "How Soylent and Oculus Could Fix the Prison System" — through hate-linking.
Friends of mine hated the piece so much that normally-articulate people were at a loss for words.
A real person thought it would be a good idea to write this and post it on the Internet. pic.twitter.com/rj8viJr1HQ
— Susie Cagle (@susie_c) January 30, 2016
With a recommendation like that, how could I pass it up? And after reading it, I tweeted my astonishment to Susie, who told me, "I write comics, but I don't know how to react to this in a way that's funny." I realized that I couldn't offer an appropriate reaction in 140 characters either. The more I think about Snow's essay, the more it looks like the outline for a class on the pitfalls of solving social problems with technology, a class I'm now planning on teaching this coming fall.
Using Snow's essay as a jumping off point, I want to consider a problem that's been on my mind a great deal since joining the MIT Media Lab five years ago: How do we help smart, well-meaning people address social problems in ways that make the world better, not worse?
In other words, is it possible to get beyond both a naïve belief that the latest technology will solve social problems—and a reaction that rubbishes any attempt to offer novel technical solutions as inappropriate, insensitive, and misguided? Can we find a synthesis in which technologists look at their work critically and work closely with the people they're trying to help in order to build sociotechnical systems that address hard problems?
Obviously, I think this is possible — if really, really hard — or I wouldn't be teaching at an engineering school. But before considering how we overcome a naïve faith in technology, let's examine Snow's suggestion. It's a textbook example of a solution that's technically sophisticated, simple to understand, and dangerously wrong.
Though he may be best known as co-founder of the content-marketing platform "Contently," Shane Snow describes himself as a "journalist, geek and best-selling author." That last bit comes from his book Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success, which offers insights on how "innovators and icons" can "rethink convention" and break "rules that are not rules."
That background may help readers understand where Snow is coming from. His blog is filled with plainspoken and often entertaining explanations of complex systems followed by apparently straightforward conclusions — evidently, burning coal and natural gas to generate electricity is a poor idea, so oil companies should be investing in solar energy. Fair enough.
Some of these explorations are more successful than others. In Snow's essay about prison reform, he identifies violence, and particularly prison rape, as the key problem to be solved, and offers a remedy that he believes will lead to cost savings for taxpayers as well: all prisoners should be incarcerated in solitary confinement, fed only Soylent meal replacement drink through slots in the wall, and all interpersonal interaction and rehabilitative services will be provided in Second Life using the Oculus Rift virtual reality system. Snow's system eliminates many features of prison life — "cell blocks, prison yards, prison gyms, physical interactions with other prisoners, and so on." That's by design, he explains. "Those are all current conventions in prisons, but history is clear: innovation happens when we rethink conventions and apply alternative learning or technology to old problems."
An early clue that Snow's rethinking is problematic is that his proposed solution looks a lot like "administrative segregation," a technique used in prisons to separate prisoners who might be violent or disruptive from the general population by keeping them in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. The main problem with administrative segregation or with what's known as the SHU (the "secure housing unit" in supermax prisons) is that inmates tend to experience serious mental health problems connected to sustained isolation.
"Deprived of normal human interaction, many segregated prisoners reportedly suffer from mental health problems including anxiety, panic, insomnia, paranoia, aggression and depression," explains the social psychologist Craig Haney in a paper for the journal Crime & Delinquency. Shaka Senghor, a writer and activist who was formerly incarcerated for murder, explains that many inmates in solitary confinement have underlying mental health issues, and the isolation damages even the sound of mind. Solitary confinement, he says, is "one of the most barbaric and inhumane aspects of our society."
How does a well-meaning person suggest a remedy that likely constitutes torture?
Due to the psychological effects of being held in isolation, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has condemned the use of sustained solitary confinement, and called for a ban on solitary confinement for people under 18 years old. Rafael Sperry of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility has called for architects to stop designing prisons that support solitary confinement—the argument being that they enable violations of human rights. Snow's solution may be innovative, but it's also a large-scale human rights violation.
Snow and supporters might argue that he's not trying to deprive prisoners of human contact, but wants to give them a new, safer form of contact. But there's essentially no research on the health effects of sustained exposure to head-mounted virtual reality.
Would prisoners be forced to choose between simulator sickness or isolation? What are the long-term effects on vision of immersive VR displays? Will prisoners experience visual exhaustion through vergence-accommodation, a yet-to-be-solved problem of eye and brain due to problems focusing on objects that are very nearby but appear to be distant? Furthermore, will contact with humans through virtual worlds mitigate the mental problems prisoners face in isolation, or exacerbate them? How do we answer any of these questions ethically, given the restrictions we've put on experimenting on prisoners in the wake of Nazi abuse of concentration camp prisoners.
How does an apparently intelligent person end up suggesting a solution that might, at best, constitute unethical medical experiments on prisoners? How does a well-meaning person suggest a remedy that likely constitutes torture?
The day I read Snow's essay, I happened to be leading a workshop on social change during the Yale Civic Leadership conference. Some of the students I worked with were part of the movement to rename Yale's Calhoun College, and all were smart, thoughtful, creative, and openminded.
The workshop I led encourages thinkers to consider different ways they might make social change, not just through electing good leaders and passing just laws. Our lab at MIT examines the idea that changemakers can use different levers of change, including social norms, market forces, and new technologies to influence society, and the workshop I led asks students to propose novel solutions to long-standing problems featuring one of these levers of change. With Snow's essay in mind, I asked the students to take on the challenge of prison reform.
But it's rare that technology provides a robust solution to a social problem by itself.
Oddly, none of their solutions involved virtual reality isolation cells. In fact, most of the solutions they proposed had nothing to do with prisons themselves. Instead, their solutions focused on over-policing of black neighborhoods, America's aggressive prosecutorial culture that encourages those arrested to plead guilty, legalization of some or all drugs, reform of sentencing guidelines for drug crimes, reforming parole and probation to reduce re-incarceration for technical offenses, and building robust re-entry programs to help ex-cons find support, housing, and gainful employment.
In other words, when Snow focuses on making prison safer and cheaper, he's working on the wrong problem.
Yes, prisons in the United State could be safer and cheaper. But the larger problem is that the U.S. incarcerates more people than any other nation on Earth. With five percent of the world's population, we are responsible for 25 percent of the world's prisoners.
Snow may see his ideas as radical and transformative, but they're fundamentally conservative — he tinkers with the conditions of confinement without questioning whether incarceration is how our society should solve problems of crime and addiction. As a result, his solutions can only address a facet of the problem, not the deep structural issues that lead to the problem in the first place.
Many hard problems require you to step back and consider whether you're solving the right problem. If your solution only mitigates the symptoms of a deeper problem, you may be calcifying that problem and making it harder to change. Cheaper, safer prisons make it easier to incarcerate more Americans. They also avoid addressing fundamental problems of addiction, joblessness, mental illness, and structural racism.
Some of my hate-linking friends began their eye-rolling about Snow's article with the title, which references two of Silicon Valley's most hyped technologies. With the current focus on the U.S. as an "innovation economy," it's common to read essays predicting the end of a major social problem due to a technical innovation. Bitcoin will end poverty in the developing world by enabling inexpensive money transfers. Wikipedia and One Laptop Per Child will educate the world's poor without need for teachers or schools. Self driving cars will obviate public transport and reshape American cities.
The writer Evgeny Morozov has offered a sharp and helpful critique to this mode of thinking, which he calls "solutionism." Solutionism demands that we focus on problems that have "nice and clean technological solution at our disposal." In his book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov savages ideas like Snow's, regardless of whether they are meant as thought experiments or serious policy proposals. (Indeed, one worry I have in writing this essay is taking Snow's ideas too seriously, as Morozov does with many of the ideas he lambastes in his book.)
Am I advocating codesign of prisons with the currently incarcerated? Hell yeah, I am.
The problem with the solutionist critique, though, is that it tends to remove technological innovation from the problem-solver's toolkit. In fact, technological development is often a key component in solving complex social and political problems, and new technologies can sometimes open a previously intractable problem. The rise of inexpensive solar panels may be an opportunity to move nations away from a dependency on fossil fuels and begin lowering atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, much as developments in natural gas extraction and transport technologies have lessened the use of dirtier fuels like coal.
But it's rare that technology provides a robust solution to a social problem by itself. Successful technological approaches to solving social problems usually require changes in laws and norms, as well as market incentives to make change at scale.
I installed solar panels on the roof of my house last fall. Rapid advances in panel technology made this a routine investment instead of a luxury, and the existence of competitive solar installers in our area meant that market pressures kept costs low. But the panels were ultimately affordable because federal and state legislation offered tax rebates for their purchase, and because Massachusetts state law rewards me with solar credits for each megawatt I produce—which I can sell to utilities through an online marketplace because energy companies are legally mandated to produce a percentage of their total power output via solar generation. And while there are powerful technological, economic, and legal forces pushing us toward solar energy, the most powerful driver may be the social, normative pressure of seeing our neighbors install solar panels—leaving us feeling like we weren't doing our part.
My Yale students who tried to use technology as their primary lever for reforming U.S. prisons had a difficult time. One team offered the idea of an online social network that would help recently released prisoners connect with other ex-offenders to find support, advice, and job opportunities in the outside world. Another looked at the success of Bard College's remarkable program to help inmates earn bachelor's degrees, and wondered whether online learning technologies could allow similar efforts to reach thousands more prisoners. But many of the other promising ideas that arose in our workshops had a technological component — given the ubiquity of mobile phones, why can't ex-offenders have their primary contact with their parole officers via mobile phones? And given the rise of big-data techniques used for "smart policing," can we better review patterns of policing—including identifying and eliminating cases where officers are over-focusing on some communities?
The temptation of technology is that it promises fast and neat solutions to social problems. It usually fails to deliver. The problem with Morozov's critique, though, is that technological solutions, combined with other paths to change, can sometimes turn intractable problems into solvable ones. The key is to understand technology's role as a lever of change in conjunction with complementary levers.
Shane Snow introduces his essay on prison reform not with statistics about the ineffectiveness of incarceration in reducing crime, but with his fear of being sent to prison. Specifically, he fears prison rape, a serious problem which he radically overestimates: "My fear of prison also stems from the fact that some 21 percent of U.S. prison inmates get raped or coerced into giving sexual favors to terrifying dudes named Igor." Snow is religious about footnoting his essays, but not as good at reading the sources he cites — the report he uses to justify his fear of "Igor" (nice job avoiding accusations of overt racism there, Shane) indicates that 2.91 of 1,000 incarcerated persons experienced sexual violence, or 0.291 percent, not 21 percent.
Perhaps for Snow, isolation for years at a time, living vicariously through a VR headset while sipping an oat flour smoothie would be preferable to time in the prison yard, mess hall, workshop, or classroom. But there's no indication that Snow has talked to any current or ex-offenders about their time in prison, or about the ways in which encounters with other prisoners led them to faith, to mentorship, or to personal transformation.
The people Shane imagines are so scary, so other, that he can't imagine interacting with them, learning from them, or anything but being violently assaulted by them. No wonder he doesn't bother to ask what aspects of prison life are most and least livable, and which would benefit most from transformation.
"Is it ever okay to solve another person's problem?"
Much of my work focuses on how technologies spread across national, religious and cultural borders, and how they are transformed by that spread. Cellphone networks believed that pre-paid scratch cards were an efficient way to sell phone minutes at low cost — until Ugandans started using the scratch off codes to send money via text message in a system called Sente, inventing practical mobile money in the process. Facebook believes its service is best used by real individuals using their real names, and goes to great lengths to remove accounts it believes to be fictional. But when Facebook comes to a country like Myanmar, where it is seen as a news service, not a social networking service, phone shops specializing in setting up accounts using fake names and phone numbers render Facebook's preferences null and void.
Smart technologists and designers have learned that their preferences are seldom their users' preferences, and companies like Intel now employ brilliant ethnographers to discover how tools are used by actual users in their homes and offices. Understanding the wants and needs of users is important when you're designing technologies for people much like yourself, but it's utterly critical when designing for people with different backgrounds, experiences, wants, and needs. Given that Snow's understanding of prison life seems to come solely from binge-watching Oz, it's virtually guaranteed that his proposed solution will fail in unanticipated ways when used by real people.
Of the many wise things my Yale students said during our workshop was a student who wondered if he should be participating at all. "I don't know anything about prisons, I don't have family in prison. I don't know if I understand these problems well enough to solve them, and I don't know if these problems are mine to solve."
Talking about the workshop with my friend and colleague Chelsea Barabas, she asked the wonderfully deep question, "Is it ever okay to solve another person's problem?"
On its surface, the question looks easy to answer. We can't ask infants to solve problems of infant mortality, and by extension, it seems unwise to let kindergarten students design educational policy or demand that the severely disabled design their own assistive technologies.
But the argument is more complicated when you consider it more closely. It's difficult if not impossible to design a great assistive technology without working closely, iteratively, and cooperatively with the person who will wear or use it. My colleague Hugh Herr designs cutting-edge prostheses for U.S. veterans who've lost legs, and the centerpiece of his lab is a treadmill where amputees test his limbs, giving him and his students feedback about what works, what doesn't, and what needs to change. Without the active collaboration with the people he's trying to help, he's unable to make technological advances.
Many of the technologies we benefit from weren't designed for their ultimate beneficiaries, but were simply designed well and adopted widely.
Disability rights activists have demanded "nothing about us without us," a slogan that demands that policies should not be developed without the participation of those intended to benefit from those policies.
Design philosophies like participatory design and codesign bring this concept to the world of technology, demanding that technologies designed for a group of people be designed and built, in part, by those people. Codesign challenges many of the assumptions of engineering, requiring people who are used to working in isolation to build broad teams and to understand that those most qualified to offer a technical solution may be least qualified to identify a need or articulate a design problem. This method is hard and frustrating, but it's also one of the best ways to ensure that you're solving the right problem, rather than imposing your preferred solution on a situation.
On the other pole from codesign is an approach to engineering we might understand as "Make things better by making better things." This school of thought argues that while mobile phones were designed for rich westerners, not for users in developing nations, they've become one of the transformative technologies for the developing world. Frustratingly, this argument is valid, too. Many of the technologies we benefit from weren't designed for their ultimate beneficiaries, but were simply designed well and adopted widely. Shane Snow's proposal is built in part on this perspective — Soylent was designed for geeks who wanted to skip meals, not for prisoners in solitary confinement, but perhaps it might be preferable to Nutraloaf or other horrors of the prison kitchen.
I'm not sure how we resolve the dichotomy of "with us" versus "better things." I'd note that every engineer I've ever met believes what she's building is a better thing. As a result, strategies that depend on finding the optimum solutions often rely on choice-rich markets where users can gravitate towards the best solution. In other words, they don't work very well in an environment like prison, where prisoners are unlikely to be given a choice between Snow's isolation cells and the prison as it currently stands, and are even less likely to participate in designing a better prison.
Am I advocating codesign of prisons with the currently incarcerated? Hell yeah, I am. And with ex-offenders, corrections officers, families of prisoners, as well as the experts who design these facilities today. They're likely to do a better job than smart Yale students, or technology commentators.
It is unlikely that anyone is going to invite Shane Snow to redesign a major prison any time soon, so spending more than 3,000 words urging you to reject his solution may be a waste of your time and mine. But the mistakes Snow makes are those that engineers make all the time when they turn their energy and creativity to solving pressing and persistent social problems. Looking closely at how Snow's solutions fall short offers some hope for building better, fairer, and saner solutions.
The challenge, unfortunately, is not in offering a critique of how solutions go wrong. Excellent versions of that critique exist, from Morozov's war on solutionism, to Courtney Martin's brilliant "The Reductive Seduction of Other People's Problems." If it's easy to design inappropriate solutions about problems you don't fully understand, it's not much harder to criticize the inadequacy of those solutions.
What's hard is synthesis — learning to use technology as part of well-designed sociotechnical solutions. These solutions sometimes require profound advances in technology. But they virtually always require people to build complex, multifunctional teams that work with and learn from the people the technology is supposed to benefit.
Three students at the MIT Media Lab taught a course last semester called "Unpacking Impact: Reflecting as We Make." They point out that the Media Lab prides itself on teaching students how to make anything, and how to turn what you make into a business, but rarely teaches reflection about what we make and what it might mean for society as a whole. My experience with teaching this reflective process to engineers is that it's both important and potentially paralyzing, that once we understand the incompleteness of technology as a path for solving problems and the ways technological solutions relate to social, market, and legal forces, it can be hard to build anything at all.
I'm going to teach a new course this fall, tentatively titled "Technology and Social Change." It's going to include an examination of the four levers of social change Larry Lessig suggests in Code, and which I've been exploring as possible paths to civic engagement. The course will include deep methodological dives into codesign, and will examine using anthropology as tool for understanding user needs. It will look at unintended consequences, cases where technology's best intentions fail, and cases where careful exploration and preparation led to technosocial systems that make users and communities more powerful than they were before.
I'm "calling my shot" here for two reasons. One, by announcing it publicly, I'm less likely to back out of it, and given how hard these problems are, backing out is a real possibility. And two, if you've read this far in this post, you've likely thought about this issue and have suggestions for what we should read and what exercises we should try in the course of the class — I hope you might be kind enough to share those with me.
In the end, I'm grateful for Shane Snow's surreal, Black Mirror vision of the future prison both because it's a helpful jumping-off point for understanding how hard it is to make change well by using technology, and because the U.S. prison system is a broken and dysfunctional system in need of change. But we need to find ways to disrupt better, to challenge knowledgeably, to bring the people they hope to benefit into the process. If you can, please help me figure out how we teach these ideas to the smart, creative people I work with—people who want to change the world, and are afraid of breaking it in the process.


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Ken Rudin
On the C-SPAN Networks:
Ken Rudin was an Editor for Politics in NPR with 19 videos in the C-SPAN Video Library; the first appearance was a 1992 Journalists' Roundtable as an Editor for Politics in the National Public Radio. The year with the most videos was 1996 with three videos as a Managing Editor for the Hotline, The. The year with the highest average number of views per program was 2012 with an average of 4,644 views per program. Most appearances with Steve Scully (5), Susan Swain (2), Susan B. Glasser (2). Most common tags: Campaigns, Republican National Convention.
Appearances by Title:
Editor, Politics, National Public Radio c. January 1, 1998 - c. January 1, 2013 Videos: 8	Managing Editor, [Hotline, The] c. January 1, 1994 - c. January 1, 1998 Videos: 6	Director, Politics, [Hotline, The] c. October 22, 1996 - c. January 30, 1997 Videos: 1	Editor, Politics, National Public Radio c. September 11, 1992 - c. January 1, 1994 Videos: 4
Recent Appearances
Interview with Ken Rudin
C-SPAN interivewed Ken Rudin on Media Row at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Mr. Ruding is a blogger and host of the podcast…
Ken Rudin on Campaign 2012 House and Senate Races
NPR's Ken Rudin talked about contested House and Senate races in Campaign 2012, the defining issues, the candidates, and the…
Susan Ferrechio and Ken Rudin talked about the 2012 elections and the Republican presidential nomination race thus far.…
Newsmakers with Senator John Cornyn
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Posted in ALL write-ups, blogs, and pods at OtherSideoftheFame.com, Entertainment: Popular Culture (Reality Television), Entertainment: Sports culture
EVELYN LOZADA Is Making Manifest: "Baseball Wife" Current Situation: Engaged To CARL CRAWFORD
"Basketball Wives" are all across social media fulfilling the prophecies of manifesting the reality show's name, and too; becoming one step closer to becoming thee wedded wives in real life reality.
Less than one week ago we reported and asked that you all join us at Other Side of the Fame in congratulating actress Gabrielle Union and basketball player: Dwayne Wade on their union, engagement, and plans of becoming lawfully wedded husband and wife.
Another couple has stepped in to the paint: VH1's "Basketball Wives'" reality show star Evelyn Lozada, too, got her shot at everlasting love once again with baseball player: Carl Crawford.
Although Evelyn may be notorious for being outspoken and (according to unpopular and popular opinion) louder than many wished she was; she switched up her game-completely.
Shortly after the most recent season of VH1's "Basketball Wives: aired, she emerged in pictures all across the Internet pregnant-leaving viewers wondering who could be fathering the child (since she never mentioned anything about being preggers OR dating anyone at the [present] time while the show was being aired).
According to how far along she was when the pictures made their way around the Internet, she had to have been preggers during taping of the show but kept nun-like mum about it-she basically satisfied the curiosities of all inquiring minds who wanted to officially see her face, and to see what she had to say about Chad "OchoCinco" Johnson since the unfortunate event where she was head-butted and as a result; hauled ass from that relationship.
*YAWN* Because According to reports, while the Internet was a-buzzing with honeys posting bags, handbags and boxes for Christmas; Evelyn was being adorned on bended knee by Carl-who certainly didn't box, fold, or slouch in the bling department with his token of love Lozada's hand. He proposed with a pretty sizable diamond ring designed by Jason of Beverly Hills that reportedly weighing 14.5 carats and appraised at 1.4 million dollars.
Jason is getting a lot of business this season as Union and Wade reportedly utilized his services as well, for Gabrielle's 8.5 carat token of love.
Yes, now that you got the G's on the "who," we at Other Side of the Fame know you want to know the "when's," "where's," "why's," and "how's" of (what seems like) Lozada's all-of-a-sudden-ness, so her it goes:
Fiance + father of unborn child: Carl Crawford of the L.A Dodgers-reportedly just signed a 142 million dollar contract with the team.
Their ages: Evelyn Lozada, 37 | Carl Crawford, 32
D.O.D (date of dating): We don't actually know the date, but rumors had been circulating that she had been dating Crawford since May 2013 (that's all we know about that).
Her due date: March 2014
Her Back Story:
She and Patriots wide receiver: Chad "Ocho Cinco" Johnson had been dating while she was on "Basketball Wives," and officially married on July 4, 2012 in Saint Martin.
The couple's wedding and blissful lives was to be captured for the VH1 camera's for all the world to see in a spin-off show of their own that was cut short by popular demand after the incident where it was alleged that Johnson, who came in after a night of cheating, got into the altercation with Lozada. He then head-butt her with such force that she needed stitches for the gash. The two separated in September after their brief 2-month marriage.
Lozada's "initiation" and welcome to the "Basketball Wives" club/reality show was due to her being engaged to NBA star Antoine Walker. Although they never made it in the paint and to the alter, it didn't stop Lozada from being the most infamous + well-known "Basketball Wife."
Mother of a 20-year old daughter, Shaniece, by someone (who we never hear much about) before she met, and was was engaged to Walker.
Her other gigs include being the co-owner of a high-end store called Dulce and as well at OMG! Insider Magazine.
When Evelyn took the lid off about her being pregnant (on November 29, 2013 to be exact), she announced to People Magazine: "I am so excited to announce a wonderful blessing…I'm pregnant!" said Lozada. "I'm excited about being a mommy all over again, this is something I've been wanting for years and I can't believe it's finally happening." she expressed.
During a recent Internet chat with OMG Insider, Lozada stated she'd 'definitely get married again' and went on to explain: "I still believe in love … I'm not one of those people that's like: 'We need to get engaged, we need to get married.' No, absolutely. I feel like that's going to come, just like with the baby, let it come. I'm not forcing anything, so if it happens, it happens."
She obviously changed her whole tune when less than a month later, that day came. On December 25, 2013 she was pitched a proposal that she obviously wasted no time catching.
End Story:
May Evelyn Lozada finally knock this relationship out the park and score a home run! We at Other Side of the Fame bid her congratulations and sincere well wishes!
Eye Spied at MailOnline.com/DailyMailUk
Tagged Antoine Walker, Basketball Wives, Carl Crawford, Chad Johnson, Dwyane Wade, Evelyn Lozada, Gabrielle Union, Jason of Beverly, Jason of Beverly Hills, newly engaged
CHRIS BROWN: in Better Spirits, the Christmas Spirit & Singing New Songs Spends a Sunny Christmas with Visit from Girlfriend. RIHANNA: In the Bed, in the Rain →
← "The Jerk": STEVE MARTIN Apologizes for Bringing Down the House on the Twittersphere with "racist tweet"


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Nokia Lumia 930 : Best Windows & camera phone
Leave a Comment	/ Gadgets, Review / By Ninaada Bellippady / February 1, 2015 May 20, 2018
Lumia 930 is the successor to Nokia Lumia 920 which was released in late 2012. Lumia 920 for the first time brought OIS and great low light performance into smartphone cameras, and was one of the best camera phones at the time. Being the successor and latest flagship, we see how 930 improves and fares.
For a flagship, the hardware specifications seem bit dated:
Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 Quad-core 2.2GHz Krait CPU, Adreno 330 GPU
5 inch Clearblack AMOLED Multi-touch Display screen with 1920 X 1080 Resolution
Gorilla Glass 3 for protection
2GB RAM, 32GB Flash Storage, no micro SD extension
20 MP PureView OIS Camera with Carl Zeiss lens, 0.9 MP front camera
Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n
[singlepic id=58 w= h= float=center]
The phone looks good, Nokia/Microsoft has taken the design from 920 and added metal casing to it on the either sides of the device. Also, it carries a curved Gorilla Glass 3 on top. The dimensions are 137 x 71 x 9.8 mm. It is not thick or thin at 8.5mm and feels solid to hold in a hand. The sides made of aluminum, bit curvy at the edges and the back panel make it easy for the user to grip the phone and it feels like you are holding a premium metallic flagship. At 167 grams, it feels bit heavy on the hand. The phone is quite easy to operate in one hand since the screen size is not more than 5 inches.
The buttons go on the right side with volume rocker on the top followed by the power/lock-screen button and the dedicated camera button further downwards near the end. A 3.5 mm audio jack and a nano-SIM slot are on the top of the phone. There is a micro USB slot for connecting and charging at the bottom portion. Below the screen, you can find the 3 touch buttons for back, start and search which are standard for every windows phone.
The 5" AMOLED screen with a Full HD resolution (1920 X 1080) produces a great 441 ppi display with colours that are crisp, which is a treat to look at. The polarizing ClearBlack technology makes the screen display deep blacks more effectively and outdoor visibility is best in its class. You can actually use the phone for even watching movies in direct sunlight. And this screen is protected by Corning Gorilla glass 3, which means it can take quite a lot of punch. It also packs a super sensitive touch mode, which allows user to use the phone even with the gloves on, which would be a handy feature at times.
Lumia 930 runs Windows Phone 8.1 with Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 2.2 GHz quad core processor with 2GB RAM. It shows while operating the phone because the UI is very fluid and buttery smooth. Windows Phone 8 UI in itself is very smooth. The animations and transitions play out without any stutter. The UI of WP8 is very user friendly, without any hassles and simple to use. Windows Phone 8 has a new home screen, wherein you can customize the home screen by resizing the tiles in 3 different sizes. With 8.1 update, you can also group the tiles together which expand on tapping them. Although the UI is very good and all, we are yet to see lot of choices for apps on Windows Phone Store, when compared with iOS and Android. There are some popular apps like Angry Birds, Facebook and Twitter etc. and the number is still growing and has a long way to go before it catches up with Android or iOS. You won't be disappointed with the UI for sure.
The built in video player (Xbox Video) comes with quite a few codecs and hence plays most of the videos out of the box. Lumia 930 supports HD videos upto 1080p, which played without any hitch or glitch. The playback was very smooth. The other downside that we found was that the built in video player does not support .mkv files. Other than that, it managed to play all the files we threw at it: .avi, .mp4, .wmv, .m4v etc. There are some 3rd party apps in the store like VLC Player, CCPlayer which do play other formats.
The default app for music is Xbox Music. The music is arranged according to artist, albums, genre, playlists and all songs. Nokia has also given a 7-band equalizer, which, sadly is not accessible in the music player and can be accessed on the settings page, which makes it little inconvenient because you have to navigate every time there whenever you have to change those settings. Also, the equalizer settings work on the loudspeaker too, not just the earphones. The Music can be accessed using the default app or the MixRadio app, which also allows you to download songs from MixRadio Store, which has pretty good collection, and also allows you to stream songs, which can also be downloaded for offline listening, which is a nice feature given that we don't have good internet connectivity while on the move.
It also has a FM Radio, which requires you to connect an earphone, which doubles up as an antenna for signal reception.
You are left with 3G or EDGE. Wi-Fi (dual band) support is also there and so are NFC and Bluetooth for data transfer, it can also act as your personal Wi-Fi hotspot with the internet sharing feature, allowing you to tether up to 8 devices at once. Wi-Fi is also useful for sharing via DLNA using the PlayTo app.
WP8.1 comes with IE11 which has full support for HTML5 and browsing is smooth and easy, with no issues. There are a few alternatives like UC browser on the app store if you don't like IE11. Setting up accounts is quiet easy. WP8 supports Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Nokia, Yahoo, Google accounts for now. It also supports e-mail accounts via POP and IMAP. Setting up these accounts is clutter-free and it automatically pulls contacts and calendars from Facebook, although you would need the Facebook app to be installed in order to do so. The social integration with the phone is unmatched. You can link the same contact from Twitter, FB, and LinkedIn into one contact, which is quite handy. Email and the social accounts sync very well without any problem.
GPS with GLONASS support is also thrown in for the location based services and apps like HERE Maps, HERE Drive, City Lens etc. HERE Maps also offers maps to be downloaded onto the device so, that you can use the maps in offline mode, which is a very useful feature wherein you can use the maps where there is no network coverage.
WP8.1 comes preloaded with Office Suite with OneNote, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The downloaded games can be accessed through Xbox game tile. Microsoft has thrown in a number of exclusive apps for its Lumia phones in Windows Phone Store like Lumia Camera, OneDrive etc.
Apps corner – It is a kind of guest mode where you can make only some select apps appear there, which is useful if you are sensitive about the data in your phone and have to give a small demo kind of thing to somebody else.
Kid's corner – As the name suggests, it allows for parental control of the content and apps, music, games etc.
Backup – You can set auto backup to back up your settings, installed app list, photos, videos to OneDrive storage, so that you can restore it in any of the devices linked to your Microsoft ID.
Motion data/sensor – It collects the motion data like number of steps etc. which can be used by fitness & health apps that are installed, like Bing Fitness & Health, adidas miCoach etc.
Double tap to wake – This is a neat feature to wake your phone by double tapping on the screen instead of pressing the lock button on the side. It feels more intuitive than pressing the button.
One of the disappointing things of Lumia 930 is that there is no glance screen feature, which is there in Lumia 830 and 1520.
Lumia 930 comes with 20 Megapixel Carl Zeiss lens with OIS (Optical Image Stabilization). The main camera, with f/2.2 BSI lens takes some good photos in low light conditions, which easily exceeds many high end flagship phone cameras. Add OIS to this and what you get is a camera that puts many point & shoot cameras to shame. Microsoft packages a very good app called Lumia Camera which is the default camera app in Lumia phones. This app allows lot of control over how you can shoot the picture. It allows you to change most of the settings like exposure, shutter speed, ISO, white balance, etc. This is the best mobile camera app out there in any platform. It allows for manual focus. The UI for this app is very intuitive, with all the dials where you drag the along the arc to change the values. Very slick.
There is also a LED flash, which is OK for snapping a picture in a medium sized room in total darkness. It is not a powerful flash though. It won't illuminate objects satisfactorily at a distance of more than 10 feet. The built-in picture editor offers some basic features like rotating, cropping and an auto-fix option. The Lumia creative studio is a better option at that. There are also Adobe Photoshop express and many more such apps available at the windows store which offer more options for post processing. The 0.9 MP front secondary camera is ok for taking selfies in wide angles and skype calls.
Video recording allows for capturing in 720p and 1080p resolutions on main camera, with 30fps. Video details are very good & crisp. You can switch on Surround sound recording for the video recording, which will record videos with Dobly Digital Plus 5.1. The audio recorded in the videos with these setting switched on is stellar, it captures audio from multiple directions and you can feel it when you play it back on using an earphone. The OIS works very effectively at cancelling out small shakes & nudges while shooting videos from the main camera. Front camera only allows 720p video capture.
There is a firmware upgrade (Lumia Denim) which is rolling out to Lumia 930, Icon and 1520 which will enables 4K video recording and brings much more enhancements to the camera department.
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Lumia 930 packs in a 2420 mAh battery, which lasts almost 1.5 days on moderate usage, which is ok for a smartphone, but being a flagship, much more battery life is desirable. With heavy usage it will just make it through the day. There is also a battery saver mode which automatically kicks in at 20% which turns off live tile animations and background apps to save the power, which will extend the battery life by few more hours.
Price & Verdict
Lumia 930 has been launched for Rs. 38,200, but should be available for around Rs. 36k. For this price it is one of the good phones you can buy, but for a flagship, we feel it should have bit more updated hardware, which android flagships have. It should have been priced some 3-4k less. The hardware seems bit dated for the price though, but it makes up for that with best camera and a great design at this price. It's a great all round phone with great multimedia performance. The issue with this is that being a Windows Phone, you won't find all the apps that are in Android or iOS. It's a good buy at this price if you are particularly looking at a great design and best smartphone camera.
Ninaada Bellippady


As of now, the prescribed fires are taking place in Stevens County, Pend Oreille County and Ferry County areas of Colville National Forest.
The Washington Employment Security Department's Monthly Employment Report showed July 2018 had the lowest unemployment rate in more than a decade, and Washington gained more than 12,000 jobs.
The one-car rollover crash happend at Leclerc Rd and CeeCeeAh Creek Road in Pend Oreille County. Officials are asking people to avoid the area near Cusick.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers finished the night with just about 500 more votes than her competitor Lisa Brown.
Campfires will only be allowed in approved campgrounds and smoking will be prohibited outside of the vehicle.
Officials said around 7:20 p.m., a detour was in place at Calispel/1st Street to Deer Valley in Newport and South Shore to Coyote Trail at Diamond Lake.
The Washington Department of Natural Resources announced its changes to burn restrictions on DNR protected lands.
The Pend Oreille Sheriff's Office is asking communities in eastern Washington to help with finding 16-year-old Elijah Toombs, who has been missing since Friday.
The Pend Oreille County Sheriff wants people to know the river is extremely dangerous due to the high flow of water, cold temperatures and debris.
It was within the last couple of days when things at their cabin along the Pend Oreille River started to look grim.


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Q: Printable string interpolation not working Given the following test code, why aren't the string interpolations \(t1) and \(t2) working?  Renaming description causes the compiler to fail with "Type 'Test' does not conform to protocol 'Printable'" and description obviously works given the second println of each test.
enum Test: Printable {
    case A
    case B(Int)

    var description: String {
        switch self {
        case .A:
            return ".A"
        case let .B(value):
            return ".B: value = \(value)"
        }
    }
}

let t1 = Test.A
let t2 = Test.B(-100)

println("t1 = \(t1)")       // prints "t1 = (Enum Value)"
println(t1.description)     // prints ".A"

println("t2 = \(t2)")       // prints "t2 = (Enum Value)"
println(t2.description)     // prints ".B: value = -100"

A: Note that enums being printed as (Enum Value) is a known bug in Swift version 1.0 (swift-600.0.51.3). It will be fixed in a future release.

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