Jason Silva banned me from his G+ stream.

About a week or so back, I wrote a longish critique of +Jason Silva's philosophy of technology. Although my comment was critical and negative, I don't believe I trolled, insulted, or otherwise abused anyone in the thread. Nevertheless, my comment has since been deleted. See for yourself:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/102906645951658302785/posts/U4EFvbX9pa5

You'll notice a few direct responses to my comment, and my replies to those comments are still around, but my original comment has been deleted. Luckily, I archived it here:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/J2TxJqhSv2D

I'm rather disappointed that Silva chose to censor my critique, instead of addressing it and taking it seriously. I think I'm raising legitimate concerns that ought to be addressed. I've enjoyed engaging the responses from Silva's fans, including some G+ science heavyweights whom I respect a lot, like . I've tried to engage the community in a respectful manner with the goal of discussion and dialogue. I'm not trying to start a fight, I'm just trying to do some philosophy on a topic I care about at least as much as Jason. 

I'd understand if Jason is too busy to respond, but I don't understand the need to delete my comment. He's since reshared the talk, presumably to get a fresh comment thread going without my critique. I'm not trying to troll, so I'll leave the thread alone. 

However, Silva's series of talks makes it clear that he's willing to stake quite a lot of his intellectual motivation on this idea of "exponential thinking". In my original critique, I argued that this term is empty, and has no basis in neuroscience, psychology, or philosophy. The only academic reference you'll find for the term comes from the Singularity Institute and their brand of futurism. That's fine if you're looking to give motivational speeches to the tech industry, but as a philosophical approach to technology it ranks with  "quantum healing" as an approach to medicine. In both cases, a serious misunderstanding of the phenomena gives rise to seriously troubling disinformation and pseudoscience. I imagine a critique of Chopra would go over quite well in G+ science communities, so I'm surprised at how defensive people are at a similar critique of Silva. 

I left another comment on the video I've shared below questioning this term, which I'm reproducing here in case it also goes missing:

> By "exponential", do you mean nonlinear? I've looked for any serious treatment of "exponential thinking" outside the context of the Singularity Institute, and I've yet to come up with any reputable reference for the term, or indeed any acknowledgement from the psychological or neuroscientific communities that this term has significance when discussing the mind and brain. I've come up short in my research, and I'd love to hear something more concrete on these topics. 

There are, of course, a number of nonlinearities to be found in a complex network like the brain, but describing this as "exponential thinking" seems deliberately misleading. 

// I'm trying to be civil in these comments, but in my own thread I'll speak my mind.  The ideology being pushed Silva and other Singulatarians is a feel-good, new age snake oil. It is packaged as futurism and psychedelic art, but it presents a picture of science, technology, and the world that is either seriously misleading, deliberately bewildering, or just plain false. Since these are issues I care about, I also care to get them right, and the mystical futurists make my job that much harder with their bullshit. 

The support given to Kurzweil by Google, and more generally the support given to the Singularity Institute by Stanford and others, has done a lot to make these careless thinkers gain some undeserved legitimacy in academia, in the tech industry, and in popular consciousness. I think it is imperative that serious thinkers on technology subject this work some much needed critical scrutiny and philosophical clarity. The fact that this has not been systematically done is disappointing, but apparently there is active suppression of these critiques, so I shouldn't be surprised. 

We desperately need a clear, mature discussion of technological change and the future of humanity, and Singularity theory is manifestly not giving us such a treatment. Please stop taking them seriously. Please stop giving them high profile jobs and cable TV shows. It is not helping. 

         


Update: Before I was done writing this essay, I was banned from Silva's G+ stream, and can therefore no longer share or comment on his posts. Unfortunately, that means Silva has decided to kill the network between us and undo whatever connections and conversation might there form.


More discussion of the ban is taking place here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/FGpYH8voWcb

Things I believe that you probably don't: Human Caste Systems

Things I believe that you probably don't
volume 1

Human Caste Systems

I believe that human beings naturally self-organize into components that tend to accommodate the larger organizations in which they are embedded. That doesn't mean that people are always altruistic or considerate of others; it just means that people will tend to work together towards organized interests when provided the opportunity. I'm thinking, for instance, about the ways a crowd might distribute itself inside a subway train: how they make room to accommodate incoming and outgoing passengers, or passengers with special needs, and so on. Each individual on the train must consider not just their local territory but also the distribution of other passengers on the car in order to determine where best to settle. Since each of us is in a different position relative to the others and the distribution of people on the train is regularly in flux, the passengers are each performing a slightly distinct balancing act in subtle coordination with all the rest. I'd hardly describe this process as "altruistic", but it's certainly an investment in collective, cooperative behavior, and it's frankly amazing that we not only have the ability to do it, but that we actually do. Not always, but enough to run all the cities.

I also believe that what we take to be the "appropriate" distribution of persons in space is influenced at a deep structural level by the conceptual and procedural assumptions shared by all the individuals on that train, and furthermore that many of those structures are socially conditioned. The "appropriate" distribution of persons on a bus, or the accommodations taken to be adequate for persons with special needs, or indeed, whose needs are worth considering at all, are all going to change depending on the social and historical circumstances shared by those individuals sharing that space. The fact that individuals can, however slowly, collectively change their assumptions and dispositions over time to the point of yielding entirely distinct arrangements when crammed in roughly the same tight space, speaks yet again to the deeply human disposition to work together.

You might believe these things too; they aren't particularly controversial beliefs.  Underappreciated, underrepresented perhaps, but far from controversial.

But I also believe that the way humans self-organize falls into distinct and regular patterns, and that at least some of these patterns will hold constant across social and historical circumstance. In particular, I believe that at least some human communities self-organize a division of social labor that manifests in the production of a set of regular and predictable roles, and that these roles discharge social functions that will appear again and again in the production of human communities, across time and culture.

In the ant world, the regular production of distinct functional roles for dividing the social labor is called a caste system. So I believe in natural human castes. You probably don't.

People tend to reject the notion of castes, and with good reason; caste systems that exist in India and elsewhere are and have historically been the source of much unnecessary human suffering (start here). Such systems tend to stratify people by their hereditary or ethnicity or occupation, dictate what is proper to those roles, and then enforce these arbitrary mandates with extreme prejudice. By concentrating and segregating political and social power in the hands of a few to leverage against the rest, we do a disservice to all of humanity. I am certainly not advocating anything like this. If you believe in castes of this sort, you and I probably have much deeper disagreements about the world.

In fact, I believe that part of the problem with such systems is that they are ultimately a clumsy and confused attempt at modeling the complex dynamics of natural human organizations; the same critique would apply not just to historical caste systems, but also the systems of managerial oversight, representative democracy, capitalism, or any other system for artificially selecting a successively more powerful elite. While organizations do, I'm claiming, have functional roles to be divided up among the components, those roles are typically not structured as simple hierarchies within a straightforward power gradient. Instead, the organization of human communities is a highly interdependent system with many degrees of freedom. The work done by these communities often require the subtle interactions between a great number of components operating within narrow parameters. What roles exist emerge from the operation of these components as they work together. The hierarchical institutions we create in an attempt to control this process is but a cargo cult parody of their natural counterpart; your boss and the president are both voodoo dolls propped up to to appease Humanity, the last living god.

Let me be explicit. For example, most human organizations will form scale-free networks. One characteristic of such networks are the "hubs" with degree much higher than average. In some contexts, these hubs are easily recognizable as the "popular" persons in an organization. Such persons, because of their popularity, perform a number of functions that disproportionately influence the dynamics of the organization. You might have lots of beliefs about scale free networks, but you probably don't believe the structure of these networks suggest a natural framework for describing the self-organizing castes of natural human communities. I do.

I should be clear about a few things. First, degree centrality is just one measure of network centrality. There are many ways of decomposing the distribution of influence in a network, depending on the properties you are interested in, and the highest degree node might not always be organizationally interesting. Nevertheless, centrality represents one way of modeling the naturally organizing dynamics of human communities without the potential bias of artificial selection, and is suggestive of non-hierarchical organizational procedures radically unlike anything we've historically institutionalized. From the analogy to ant societies I think it's appropriate to call this a caste system, despite its deep structural dissimilarity to historical caste societies. Next, we should remember that our networks are densely layered and synchronized, such that a single individual might be both central and peripheral depending on the context we are interested in: I'm a peripheral node on Twitter, but a central node in the office, etc. Neither of these two points should imply that these organizational features are merely subjective or ephemeral; these are real patterns that I'm suggesting should be taken seriously. Third, I'm certainly not suggesting that the central nodes should be given a position of oversight or control, or in any other way advocating a method for forcing natural human organizations into the broken and incompetent institutional monsters we've hacked together and unleashed on the world. I think those institutions should be dismantled with all haste; if anything, I'm arguing for an alternative conception of human organization that doesn't rely on an institutionalization of roles. A popular person isn't permanently popular; their popularity depends essentially on the reinforcing activity of the rest of the network, just as one's position on the train subtly depends on the position of all the other passengers. That role doesn't persist independent of the continued support of the rest of the network; self-organization manifests a community consensus in a manner that artificial selection simply does not.

Finally, I'm emphatically not arguing in favor of a system that discriminates among individuals to confer to some power over others. Even the most well-meaning system of control will inevitably fail to appreciate the lived experience of the persons it controls, and fail to respond gracefully when those experiences change. Instead, I'm arguing that by carefully understanding the dynamics of human organization we can design our environments to support the flourishing of self-organized systems, without imposing any artificial or bureaucratic controlling roles. A method for spontaneously identifying central nodes within certain contexts could have obvious social benefits without the need for granting anyone the traditional sort of institutional authority. For instance, quick feedback from my peers concerning their prior experiences with the Heimlich maneuver would have obvious benefits in certain emergency conditions. This procedure can be understood in terms of determining a context-sensitive measure of centrality among the individuals in the crowd, very much in the spirit of Google's attempt to resolve a search query. That's not to impose some new distinctions on that crowd, but instead to find the distinctions already present and make the relevant ones salient, whether we endorse them or not. This can be done both in an effort to assist the organizational structures we like, but also to highlight and combat the organizations we don't.

I could continue to elaborate, but hopefully I've gotten across the idea in broad strokes. If you still don't believe this with me and think I should also revise my belief, I'm quite open to the possibility that I'm wrong.

Bewilderment in the age of technology

// This essay was originally posted here.


I have complex feelings about . He describes his work as "philosophical espresso shots" of "psychedelic art" conveying wonder and awe in technology "as the manifestation of our dreams". I'm all in favor of psychedelic art. I've honestly found some of Silva's art to be inspired, and I've used it in my classes. It's started some interesting discussions. 

But I've also found myself needing to say a lot to provide background and context for the claims he makes. Sometimes I can, but too often I find that in fact _there is no background_ for helping to make sense of the claims being made in this work. There is very little theory supporting the stream-of-consciousness style association of infobytes and futurism. Maybe I come from a different school, but for me philosophy is associated with rigor and clarity of thought, in the pursuit of _understanding_.  What Silva packages as "wonder and awe" is too often just disguised bewilderment.

Perhaps we should encourage a childlike sense of wonder, but I also think we should try to cultivate clear and mature thinking wherever possible. In any case, we should be careful to distinguish wonder from bewilderment. Wonder is a sense of fascination that encourages further exploration. Presumably, that exploration ought to settle into a mature and developed understanding of a field-- not to eliminate wonder but rather to mark intellectual progress and to encourage still further exploration of the details. Bewilderment, on the other hand, is the sense of confusion one feels when overwhelmed by experiences one can only just barely process. Bewilderment might be an inevitable aspect of any learning experience (including psychedelic ones), but it is clearly distinct from wonder, and it isn't so clearly something that we should be encouraging. Learning, done properly, should provide an anecdote to bewilderment even if it encourages wonder. 

Silva's presentation, in both his videos and his live performance, is a study in practiced bewilderment. Each mind-bending revelation is followed immediately by the next, without much pause to consider the relevance of any of it, much less the relations that bring them together in the piece. One does not come away from these "shots" with an enlightened understanding of the phenomena of technological development. One maybe comes away with the sense that "anything is possible" and "the future is awesome" and "there's so much I don't know", and these is more evidence of bewilderment disguised as awe than any genuine understanding. 

Interestingly, Silva is careful to provide author references for a surprising number of his claims, some of which I'd think he could just say because they are so obviously true. I feel like the abundance of references is too much protest, and adds to the bewilderment instead of clearing anything up. I happen to recognize most of the references because I'm a tech philosopher by training too, and while there's nothing in particular I want to disagree with here, there's also nothing in particular that makes it all hang together as a coherent view. 

The closest thing is Kurzweil, Kelly, and the Singularity brand of futurism, which have used the new-agey term "exponential thinking" (which, just to be clear, DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING) to justify a range of predictions over the near and absurdly long term that would make Nostradamus blush. It is no surprise that a thinker born of this intellectual paucity would generate such bewilderment in his wake. This isn't the place to bash the Singularity views, but let's just say this is an intellectual problem. (More: http://goo.gl/id2Cdi)

I appreciate Silva's appeal to Clark, a text I've used in my technology classes since 2006. But Clark's view bears little relation to the futurism Silva defends in the same breath. Clark has a theory of technology and its relation to human minds and communities. I have intellectual quibbles with his theory that I can elaborate on in boring detail, but I know what it is, how it works, and the broader views of science and philosophy from which they spring. 

I have no idea what Silva's theory of technology is, or the general philosophical or metaphysical perspectives he's endorsing in these confused but entertaining spectacles. I'm worried that they endorse or even encourage views of science and technology that I wouldn't endorse, like "technology makes my dreams come true". That's not a fact of the world, that's an ad slogan for silicon valley, and as an educator I care to keep them distinct, thank you very much. 

More importantly, I worry that they inspire the same bewilderment with technology in my students: that by showing them Silva's performance, I'm somehow encouraging the belief that these ideas are overwhelmingly large and incomprehensible, or that understanding is an unachievable goal. That's entirely the opposite of what I'd hope to express.