Posts Tagged ‘knowledge’
“Man’s first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one”*…
From the new series, “Conjectures,” in the invaluable Public Domain Review, a piece by Octavian Esanu…
What do we want from “school”? Knowledge, surely. But other things too. Experience, perhaps? — the vibrating sense of having been present as new thinking happened, of having been affected by an encounter with ideas? Certain kinds of teaching and learning, anyway, privilege that vaunted nexus of knowing and being. Early in the first session of his seminar on Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, the American Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson asserts, here below, that “aesthetics” can be thought of as precisely a project that lies “halfway between the cognitive and the artistic” — which is to say, it is the enterprise of trying to understand (conceptually) that which seems to elude reduction to concepts (because we are, somehow, there in aesthetic experiences; and we are not conceptual!). By meticulously translating his recordings of Jameson’s seminars into the theatrical idiom of the stage script, the artist and scholar (and former Jameson student) Octavian Esanu doubles down, playfully and tenderly, on this deep problem. Pedagogy as performance? Teaching and learning, about art — as a work of art?
Series editor D. Graham Burnett‘s introduction
An experiment with historical form and method: “[Door creaks open. Footsteps]: Fredric Jameson’s Seminar on Aesthetic Theory,” from @PublicDomainRev.
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As we investigate the ineffable, we might send absolutist birthday greetings to Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury; he was born on this date in 1588. A father of political philosophy and political science, Hobbes developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be “representative” and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid– all this, though Hobbes was, on rational grounds, a champion of absolutism for the sovereign. It was that, Hobbes reasoned, or the bloody chaos of a “war of all against all.” His 1651 book Leviathan established social contract theory, the foundation of most later Western political philosophy.
Indeed, it was in some large measure Hobbes (and his legacy) that Adorno’s Frankfurt School colleagues Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse (et al.) were working to revise.
“When languages are lost most of the knowledge that went with them gets lost”*…
We’re all aware that many of the world’s plants and animals are in danger of extinction, but not so mindful that many human languages are in danger of becoming extinct too. Globalization has helped to make the world a smaller place. But, as Stephen Jones illustrates, it has also contributed to the loss of many languages around the world…
Across the 7,168 living languages today, 43% are at risk of being endangered.
In fact, a language dies off every 40 days. The vast majority of endangered languages are found in Indigenous communities, which risk the loss of culture and knowledge that they contain. At current rates, 90% of the world’s languages could disappear over the next 100 years…
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For instance, during the 1970s, the Māori language was spoken by just 5% of Māori schoolchildren. Fast forward to today, and 25% speak the language, driven by efforts from the Māori, leading the government to protect it by law.
In Hawaii, just 2,000 people spoke the native language in the 1970s. After the government ensured it was taught in schools, the number of speakers jumped to 18,700 in 2023…
“The State of the World’s 7,168 Living Languages,” from @derivationllc @VisualCap.
AI is being used to preserve endangered languages (e.g., by Google, Microsoft, and Jones’s own organization, Derivation). But in the end, what keeps a language and its cultural impact alive is human use. Check out Wikitongues for an organization that’s devoted to preserving collective wisdom the old-fashioned way.
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As we deepen linguistic diversity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1928 that a milestone in the development of a technology that has contributed to the globalization of culture (and the threat to languages) was achieved: John Logie Baird transmitted a TV image across the Atlantic ocean (using short wave radio) from station 2 KZ at Purley, England to Hartsdale, NY.
Baird’s system was electromechanical: a light sensitive camera behind a rotating disc. The picture was crudely formed from a scan of thirty lines at twelve frames per second. The television receiver in Hartsdale displayed a tiny, uneven– but “readable”– image. Still, this caused a sensation: The New York Times (accurately) compared the event to Marconi’s sending of the letter “S” by radio across the Atlantic, 27 years earlier.
“The spirit of inquiry and the courage to challenge the status quo are at the heart of scientific progress”*…
Adam Mastroianni on the challenges– and opportunities– facing science…
Randomized-controlled trials only caught on about 80 years ago, and whenever I think about that, I have to sit down and catch my breath for a while. The thing everybody agrees is the “gold standard” of evidence, the thing the FDA requires before it will legally allow you to sell a drug—that thing is younger than my grandparents.
There are a few records of things that kind of look like randomized-controlled trials throughout history, but people didn’t really appreciate the importance of RCTs until 1948, when the British Medical Research Council published a trial on streptomycin for tuberculosis. Humans have possessed the methods of randomization for thousands of years—dice, coins, the casting of lots—and we’ve been trying to cure diseases for as long as we’ve been human. Why did it take us so long to put them together?
I think the answer is: first, we had to stop trusting Zeus.
To us, coin flips are random (“Heads: I go first. Tails: you go first.”). But to an ancient human, coin flips aren’t random at all—they reveal the will of the gods (“Heads: Zeus wants me to go first. Tails: Zeus wants you to go first”). In the Bible, for instance, people are always casting lots to figure out what God wants them to do: which goat to kill, who should get each tract of land, when to start a genocide, etc.
This is, of course, a big problem for running RCTs. If you think that the outcome of a coin flip is meaningful rather than meaningless, you can’t use it to produce two equivalent groups, and you can’t study the impact of doing something to one group and not the other. You can only run a ZCT—a Zeus controlled trial.
It’s easy to see how technology can lead to scientific discoveries. Make microscope -> discover mitochondria.
Clearly, though, sometimes those technologies get invented entirely inside our heads. Stop trusting Zeus -> develop RCTs.
Which raises the question: what mental technologies haven’t we invented yet? What brain switches are just waiting to be flipped?…
On reinvigorating science: “Declining trust in Zeus is a technology,” from @a_m_mastroianni.
Apposite to an issue he raises: “Citation cartels help some mathematicians—and their universities—climb the rankings,” from @ScienceMagazine.
[Image above: source]
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As we deliberate on discovery, we might send micro-biological birthday greetings to a woman who modeled the attitude and behavior that Mastroianni suggests: Ruth Sager; she was born on this date in 1918. A pioneering geneticist, she had, in effect, two careers.
In the 1950s and 1960s, she pioneered the field of cytoplasmic genetics by discovering transmission of genetic traits through chloroplast DNA, the first known example of genetics not involving the cell nucleus. She identified a second set of genes were found outside of the cell’s nucleus, which, even though they were nonchrosomomal, also influenced inherited characteristics. The academic community did not acknowledge the significance of her contribution until after the second wave of feminism in the 1970s.
Then, in the early 1970s, she moved into cancer genetics (with a specific focus on breast cancer); she proposed and investigated the roles of tumor suppressor genes. She identified over 100 potential tumor suppressor genes, developed cell culture methods to study normal and cancerous human and other mammalian cells in the laboratory, and pioneered the research into “expression genetics,” the study of altered gene expression.
“Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets, but gold that’s put to use more gold begets.”*…
The scientific literature is vast. No individual human can fully know all the published research findings, even within a single field of science. As Ulkar Aghayeva explains, regardless of how much time a scientist spends reading the literature, there’ll always be what the information scientist Don Swanson called ‘undiscovered public knowledge’: knowledge that exists and is published somewhere, but still remains largely unknown.
Some scientific papers receive very little attention after their publication – some, indeed, receive no attention whatsoever. Others, though, can languish with few citations for years or decades, but are eventually rediscovered and become highly cited. These are the so-called ‘sleeping beauties’ of science.
The reasons for their hibernation vary. Sometimes it is because contemporaneous scientists lack the tools or practical technology to test the idea. Other times, the scientific community does not understand or appreciate what has been discovered, perhaps because of a lack of theory. Yet other times it’s a more sublunary reason: the paper is simply published somewhere obscure and it never makes its way to the right readers.
What can sleeping beauties tell us about how science works? How do we rediscover information the scientific body of knowledge already contains but that is not widely known? Is it possible that, if we could understand sleeping beauties in a more systematic way, we might be able to accelerate scientific progress?
Sleeping beauties are more common than you might expect.
The term sleeping beauties was coined by Anthony van Raan, a researcher in quantitative studies of science, in 2004. In his study, he identified sleeping beauties between 1980 and 2000 based on three criteria: first, the length of their ‘sleep’ during which they received few if any citations. Second, the depth of that sleep – the average number of citations during the sleeping period. And third, the intensity of their awakening – the number of citations that came in the four years after the sleeping period ended. Equipped with (somewhat arbitrarily chosen) thresholds for these criteria, van Raan identified sleeping beauties at a rate of about 0.01 percent of all published papers in a given year.
Later studies hinted that sleeping beauties are even more common than that. A systematic study in 2015, using data from 384,649 papers published in American Physical Society journals, along with 22,379,244 papers from the search engine Web of Science, found a wide, continuous range of delayed recognition of papers in all scientific fields. This increases the estimate of the percentage of sleeping beauties at least 100-fold compared to van Raan’s.
Many of those papers became highly influential many decades after their publication – far longer than the typical time windows for measuring citation impact. For example, Herbert Freundlich’s paper ‘Concerning Adsorption in Solutions’ (though its original title is in German) was published in 1907, but began being regularly cited in the early 2000s due to its relevance to new water purification technologies. William Hummers and Richard Offeman’s ‘Preparation of Graphitic Oxide’, published in 1958, also didn’t ‘awaken’ until the 2000s: in this case because it was very relevant to the creation of the soon-to-be Nobel Prize–winning material graphene…
Indeed, one of the most famous physics papers, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen (EPR)’s ‘Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?’ (1935) is a classic example of a sleeping beauty…
More examples, and explanation of why they slumber, and thoughts on how to awaken them sooner: “Waking up science’s sleeping beauties,” from @ulkar_aghayeva in @WorksInProgMag.
[Image above: source]
* Shakespeare, “Venus and Adonis”
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As we dwell on discovery, we might send healing birthday greetings to a woman whose scientific work thankfully rarely napped, Gertrude Elion; she was born on this date in 1918. A pharmacologist, she shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George H. Hitchings and Sir James Black for their use of innovative methods of rational drug design (focused on understanding the target of the drug rather than simply using trial-and-error) in the development of new drugs. Her work led to the creation of the anti-retroviral drug AZT, which was the first drug widely used against AIDS. Her well-known and widely deployed creations also include the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine, used to fight rejection in organ transplants, the first successful antiviral drug, acyclovir (ACV), used in the treatment of herpes infection, and a number of drugs used in cancer treatment.
“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: Patricia Fara explains how the tension between religion and science as arbiters of knowledge came to head in the French Revolution, and how that inspired Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist, to introduce a radically new way of thinking about human beings:
… God had been forcefully excluded from astronomy during the French Revolution, when Pierre-Simon Laplace rewrote Newton’s ideas to create his deterministic cosmos, in which scientific laws govern every movement of every planet with no need for divine intervention. Inspired by this success, a Belgian astronomer called Alphonse Queteler decided that human societies are also controlled by laws. Each country has its own statistical patterns that remain constant from year to year–suicide and crime rates, for instance–and so Quetelet suggested that an ‘average man’ can consistently encapsulate a nation’s characteristics. Politicians should, Quetelet prescribed, operate like social physicists and try to improve average behaviour rather than worry about extreme anomalies. For him, variations from the statistical mean were–like planetary wobbles–imperfections to be smoothed out so that overall progress could be ensured.
Quetelet had introduced a radically new way of thinking about human beings. As one of his admirers put it, ‘Man is seen to be an enigma only as an individual, in mass, he is a mathematical problem.’ Quetelet’s successors took his ideas in many different directions. For one thing, his work was valuable politically because it could be interpreted in different ways. While conservatives insisted that little could be done to alter the current system, radicals accused governments of impeding the natural course of progress, and Utopians–such as Karl Marx–envisaged harmonious societies governed by nature’s own laws guaranteeing improvement. Data collection projects proliferated, and statisticians searched for laws governing every aspect of life, ranging from the weather to the growth of civilization, from stock market fluctuations to the incidence of disease. Many scientists took their ideas from Quetelet rather than from abstract textbooks–but they added their own twist. Whereas Quetelet regarded individual deviations from the norm as errors to be eliminated, scientists set out to study how variations occur…
An excerpt from Fara’s Science: A Four Thousand Year History, via the invaluable Delanceyplace.com (@delanceyplace): “God, Science, and Data.”
* Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
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As we focus on frames, we might spare a thought for a man who kept his eye on the individual, Wilhelm Reich. A medical doctor and psychoanalyst, he was a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. Reich developed a system of psychoanalysis concentrating on overall character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. His early work on psychoanalytic technique was overshadowed by his involvement in the sexual-politics movement and by “orgonomy,” a pseudoscientific system he developed. He also built a device he called a cloud buster, with which he claimed he could manipulate the weather by manipulating the “orgone” in the atmosphere. Reich’s claims aroused much controversy; and he was taken to court for fraud by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The court ordered his books and research burned and his equipment destroyed. Reich was sentenced to prison where he died of heart failure on this date in 1957.
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