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Anonymous correspondent: “Peer review is elitist and oligarchic; adding a web-based post-hoc system would be democratic. It is often non-specialists, or Pro-Ams, who expose quackery.

Aristotle, by the way, taught a monarch, studied under Plato (who advocated oligarchies), and then lived in the Athenian democracy. He concluded that the democratic method was the most effective.

See Aristotle on Smart Mobs!“

On peer review: I agree completely that adding a web-based post-hoc system would not only be democratic but a dramatic, powerful new safeguard on validity. Don’t forget that post-hoc commentary is and has been my bandwagon all along: it’s what motivated “scholarly skywriting” and drew me into Open Access!

But the critical point is that it is post-hoc. It is not a competitor to peer review but a complement (“not a substitute but a supplement”). It is when people propose post-hoc commentary as a substitute for (rather than just a supplement to) the advance correction and filtration by answerable, qualified experts provided by peer review that I (appear to) go into opposition to the very thing I am fighting for — post-hoc skywriting — (but that is a misunderstanding).

Nothing is lost, and everything is gained, in putting a global, open commentary system at the tail end of expert-vetted work. But when it comes to medical treatment for my loved ones, I don’t want their medicine to be administered on the basis of a net-based straw poll or free-for-all alone. You see how rumour and ignorance and superficiality also propagate on the Web. A prior phase of closed, answerable vetting by qualified specialists is essential, otherwise we may as well treat patients on the basis of the latest in wikipedia. (And science and scholarship are surely not that much less important than health!) Entrusting all that to populist polling and vigilantism is a form of gaussian roulette.

On expertise: To put it another way: I really think we need to re-think, or think through, exactly what we mean by “elitist” and “oligarchic” in this sense: Is it elitist to have certified cardiologists decide what should be published as being a safe healthy operation to perform, rather than having it voted on by a Gallup Poll or swayed by persuasive blogsters? Is it oligarchical (to put it even more luridly) to keep hobbyists out of the operating theatre?

On specialised division of labour: I pick these melodramatic examples only to bring out the fact that there really is something at stake, and that it’s commonsensical: We cannot, in the modern world (of the past tens of thousands of years of civilization!) each be self-sufficient jacks of all trades. We rely on division of labor, and division of expertise, for everything from our food and shelter to our health and security. Our cumulative, collective knowledge and expertise (our “Creative Commons”) is also dependent on this distributed, complementary expertise.

So I ask: is that division into complementary expertise “elitist”? Is reliance on it “oligarchical”? Should we (like our failing education system) declare everyone equally expert as a matter of birthright, and cede judgment to democratic opinion polls in all matters instead?

On re-thinking “elitism”: Without for a moment denying that qualified expert judgment is fallible too (but recognizing also that mass inexpert judgment is no remedy for that, just a useful check/balance), I really think the rhetorical buzzword “elitism” needs a serious rethink — especially where it is in fact referring to specialized expertise, skill, knowledge that a minority have, and have worked hard to attain, whereas the majority have not…

In a sense, representative democracy involves something like this division of labour too: It is only that the tyranny of the daily opinion poll is sadly constraining the work of our elected representatives. Democracy, too, used to be “post hoc”: We would vote for those we considered to be provisionally best qualified to represent our interests (alas not always noble interests, but that’s another matter) and then let them do their job, until it’s time to vote again on whether they deserve re-election.

On mass micro-management: But now, with pervasive media and instantaneous polling, we hardly let them exercise any expertise they may have, or may have acquired on the job (for we hardly vote for experts either, preferring ignoramuses like ourselves, as more flattering and congenial!): we look over their shoulders daily, not only at their sex lives and their expense accounts, but at their daily professional judgments. We insist on a day-to-day participatory democracy, and we get what we insist on: a fashion show of trends and opinions: capital punishment ok today, not ok tomorrow, abortion yes, no, veils in schools, on, off, etc. etc.

Since many of these are matters of opinion anyway, perhaps it doesn’t matter if it is the winds of fashion or rumor rather than the wisdom of trusted electees that decides. But sometimes it does matter. And the catastrophic “popular” (at the time!) Iraqi war is one such result. The rest seems now to be putting out daily forest fires (still on the basis of day-to-day public opinion).

We not only blindly trust “populism” (and condemn “elitism”) — thereby ceding judgment to the vagaries of the “normal distribution” (“bell curve”), which, at best, guarantees regression on the mean; but at worst, or meanest, it is the occasional but inevitable burst of noise, or worse, closer to the tail end [the extreme] of the distribution, which sometimes manages to appeal to the mean, and become mainstream.

On more sinister background forces we also trust: Today we are also blindly trusting another unquestioned “force,” rather akin to the ponderous inertial mass of populism, and that is the inexorable march of capitalism: global military-industrial interests being inexorably — indeed psychopathically, as the excellent movie The Corporation, showed — pursued in the background (the Cheneys behind the Bushes).

It is as unfashionable today to be anti-capitalist (in anything) as it is to be anti-populist (in anything). It is axiomatic that what is good for the market is good, and good for everybody, and what is judged good by the majority is good, and good for everybody.

On the wisdom of time: I beg to differ; and to be allowed the time to show that what appears momentarily to be right either to prevailing public opinion or to the corporate bottom-line, may not be right at all. It’s all a matter of time, after all. What allegedly sets our species apart is our capability of deferring gratification and deferring judgment, even deferring to the judgment of those who may be better qualified to judge. Yes, let’s have post-hoc controls on all that, but let them be “post” enough to give experts the chance to do what they are best qualified to do…

On Aristotle on collective wisdom: As to Aristotle on the latent collective (“whole is better than the sum of its parts”) wisdom, morality and ethics of mobs — that might be true of the audience of Hellenic Theatre, it might occasionally coalesce in the conscientiousness of juries (though one thinks of OJ Simpson) , but it hardly seems true when it comes to lynch mobs, Danish cartoon hysteria, or American voting patterns! Nor, for that matter, the mean value on which pop music has regressed, with the extinction of connoisseur elites (there, you can pillory me on that one!).

Aristotle may feel at ease facing a crowd, and deferring to its judgment. I am terrified; utterly terrified. Only demagogues can “reason” with crowds, particularly online, in real time.

I cannot share the feeling of many that the accolade “most popular” is synonymous (or even remotely related) to “best quality.” My own default reaction (sometimes wrong, I admit, but born of experience, not native conviction!) is the exact opposite: Most popular? Then chances are it is rather superficial, uninformed, and trashy…

It is fashionable today for those who need not worry about protecting anyone from anything (except fair, careful reflection) to moralize and sensationalize, idly and mischievously, about torture. Is it ever justified? Would our side ever do it?

Fair enough. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and torture is no idle matter. But consider where this eager Schadenfreude can lead, if given its head in hysterical times, when rumor and innuendo carry far, far more weight than sober analysis and answerability. Just as the terrorist need only succeed once, whereas his intended victims remain eternally vulnerable, so smears need only besmirch once, and thenceforward all the burden is ever on the victim to try free himself from the foul spot; all the better if the victim is already deceased and interred.

D.O. Hebb was the greatest research psychologist of the 20th century. (I say “research” to distinguish him from the armchair/couch kind of psychologist with which his work had about as much affinity as with a geologist’s or a gardener’s.) Hebb’s contributions spanned the full spectrum of human (and animal) experience, from behavior to brain function, from childhood to old age, from biological nature to cultural environment, from sensory deprivation to sensory enrichment — and the overarching theme of his life’s work was how experience affects the brain.

Now we are told that Hebb’s secret research taught the CIA how to torture at Abu Graibh. First, there was nothing secret about Hebb’s research. Generations of undergraduates have learned how his experiments discovered the disastrous effects of sensory deprivation (as well as the remarkable benefits of sensory enrichment). He had been investigating those factors long before the Canadian Defense Research Board (DRB) funded a portion of his research, and it is undoubtedly the case that they funded his research because of its possible interest to the DRB rather than that he did the research because the DRB was interested in it. That is transparent, because the implications of Hebb’s research for the DRB are a one-liner — sensory deprivation has disastrous effects, hence it’s a good potential form of torture — whereas their implications for Hebb’s life work on how experience affects the brain (positively and negatively) constitute the foundations of modern cognitive neuroscience.

That sensory deprivation is a good potential form of torture was what drew the DRB to Hebb’s work in the first place, and they did not learn anything from funding it that they would not have learned if someone else had funded it, and they had merely read it when it was published in a journal (as the DRB tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent him from doing). We must not forget that the the military, with its deep pockets, has funded an awful lot of research, a lot of it awfully trivial, and some (like the psychic research they funded to get people to divert nuclear missiles by telepathy), frankly absurd. Researchers, with far shallower pockets, must alas take their research funding where they get it — but that does not mean taking their research where their funder wants it to go.

D.O. Hebb was a great scientist, with a grand vision, who left a lasting legacy in our understanding of how behavior is organized in our brains; the DRB was and is thinking at about the scale and depth of the journalists who are now seeing in these banal and empty facts about some of the sources of his research funding the germs of a sinister conspiratorial theory of how Hebb’s work is behind the abuses pictured in those lurid hooded photos we’ve been seeing in the papers. Perhaps we should look more closely at the funding history of Faraday too, to see whether we can attribute some of the other abominations at Guantanomo to the father of electricity.

In infants, the sense of entitlement is no doubt a healthy instinct. The illusion that our parents exist only to minister to our needs and wants is adaptive; it makes our childhoods feel secure. But we are best weaned of it, sooner or later, because, if it is allowed to generalize to the sense that the world’s raison d’être is our welfare, it becomes self-contradictory, an evolutionarily unstable strategy, breeding generations that expect only to take, with no one left with the inclination to give — except perhaps to their own children.

Your child is entitled to protection from such a rude awakening too.

On: Janet Malcolm “Pandora’s Click,” a review of Shipley & Schwalbe’s The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe

The Power of Skywriting

What makes email into a potential nuclear weapon (and, like nuclear power, usable for either melioration or mischief) is its “skywriting” potential: the fact that multiple copies can easily, and almost instantly, proliferate, intentionally or unintentionally, to targets, intended and unintended, all over the planet. Paper letter-writing (indeed all writing) already had much the same possibility for haste, thoughtlessness, solecism and misinterpretation, and it too was deprived of the emotional, interpersonal cues of the oral tradition of real-time, “live,” interactive speech. But it was when writing took to the skies with email and the web that it came into its own. Hearsay, even when augmented by video and telecommunications, never quite attained the destructive (and constructive) power of skywriting. It’s all a matter of timing, scope and scale. Verba volunt, scripta manent.

Harnad, S. (2003) Back to the Oral Tradition Through Skywriting at the Speed of Thought. Interdisciplines. In: Salaün, Jean-Michel & Vendendorpe, Christian (eds.). Le défi de la publication sur le web: hyperlectures, cybertextes et méta-éditions. Presses de l’enssib.

A late-comer’s appreciation of John Huston’s 1952 Moulin Rouge, based on Pierre La Mure’s novel about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec:

Although the French wikipedia states that HT-L’s contemporaries said he was not bitter or inhibited because of his hereditary deformity (dwarfism and disfigurement, exacerbated by a childhood accident; his parents were first cousins), but rather an ebullient bon vivant, and even something of an exhibitionist, the novel and movie portray him as deeply wounded and stigmatized by his condition, hypersensitive about it, yet prone to make cruelly ironic, self-deprecating allusions to it in his communication and interactions with others.

The idea is that HT-L, who would naturally have been a horseman, athlete, dancer and lady’s man, instead withdraws into painting and a perceptive but passive observation of life, certain that he is repulsive, especially to women, as a man (and the film has ample actual confirmations of this conviction, with people finding him repulsive and saying so).

HT-L falls in love with a prostitute who had sought his help, and he dares to get into a physical relationship with her only because he perceives that in her profession there is indifference to his condition. But she is indeed a prostitute, and it is never quite clear whether she is really just as repulsed by him as anyone else, or perhaps less so because she too feels a stigma. At any rate, she, ex officio, “betrays” him and his only carnal relationship (according to the movie — in real life HT-L had many prostitutes and mistresses too) ends, leaving him overwhelmed by despair and drink. But again his art, and his sardonic view of life draw him back from despair, if not from drink. He continues to frequent the Paris demi-monde and to paint it affectionately, unjudgmentally. He interacts with its denizens the same way — sympathetic, but unengaged. The implication is that the conviction has now been definitively confirmed that he cannot be loved physically, and that he will never again expose himself to the added torment of inspiring disgust by seeking love.

His sense of being repulsive overflows only occasionally to his work or his words. It is mostly his body’s inability to inspire anything other than disgust that prevents him from daring to hope or to respond when another woman, far better born than the prostitute, and deeply responsive to both his art and his character, may or may not have fallen in love with him. She may love him, or she may just identify with him in a deeper way than the prostitute did; but she seeks a sign whether he will ever be able to allow himself to reciprocate or even acknowledge her feelings, and he is unable to allow himself to dare to show her — and perhaps even himself — that he loves her (although he does, having secretly followed her, jealously, exactly as he had the prostitute). So she — not a prostitute, but, like a prostitute, needing a provider — accepts to marry someone she does not love. As with the prostitute, his last-minute impulse to call her back comes too late.

What is most universal about this film is that the sense of stigma that generates such a sense of being incapable of being loved, especially carnally, is not reserved for the physically disfigured. Or perhaps “appearance” is subtler than just bodily form.

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Note added Jan 24 2010: Since seeing Offenbach’s Comptes de Hoffmann, both Hoffmann and Kleinzach, come to mind — but perhaps these were all late 19th-century bohemian/Parisian clichés…

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SUMMARY: The ethical case for Open Access (OA) (free online access) to research findings is especially salient when it is public health that is being compromised by needless access restrictions. But the ethical imperative for OA is far more general: It applies to all scientific and scholarly research findings published in peer-reviewed journals. And peer-to-peer access is far more important than direct public access. Most research is funded to be conducted and published, by researchers, in order to be taken up, used, and built upon in further research and applications, by researchers, for the benefit of the public that funded it, not in order to generate revenue for the peer-reviewed journal publishing industry — nor even because there is a burning public desire to read (much of) it.

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(1) All peer-reviewed research articles are written for the purpose of being accessed, used, applied and built upon by all their potential users, everywhere, not in order to generate royalty income for their author (or their publisher). (This is not true of writing in general, e.g., newspaper and magazine articles by journalists, or books. It is only true, without exception, of peer-reviewed research journal articles, and it is true in all disciplines, without exception.)

(2) Research productivity and progress, and hence researchers’ careers, salary, research funding, reputation, and prizes all depend on the usage and application of their research findings (“research impact”). This is enshrined in the academic mandate to “publish or perish,” and in the reward system of academic research.

(3) The reason the academic reward system is set up that way is that that is also how research institutions and research funders benefit from the research input they produce and fund: by maximizing its usage and impact. That is also how the cumulative research cycle itself progresses and grows, along with the benefits it provides for society, the public that funds it: In order to be used, applied, and built upon, research needs to be accessible to all its potential users (and not only to those that can afford access to the journals in which the research happens to be published.).

(4) Open Access (OA) — free online access — has been demonstrated to increase research usage and impact by 25%-250% or more. This “OA Advantage” has been found in all fields: natural sciences, biomedical sciences, engineering, social sciences, and humanities.

(5) Hence it is true, without exception, in all fields, that the potential research benefit is there, if only the research is made OA.

(6) OA has only become possible since the onset of the online era.

(7) Research can be made OA in two ways:

— (7a) Research can be made “Gold OA” by publishing it in an OA journal that makes it free online (with some OA journals, but not all, covering their costs by charging the author-institution for publishing it rather than by charging the user-institution for accessing it; many Gold OA journals today still continue to cover their costs via subscriptions to the paper edition).

— (7b) Or research can be made “Green OA” by publishing it in a conventional, non-OA journal, but also self-archiving it in the author’s Institutional Repository, free for all.

(8) Despite its benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the R&D industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research, only about 15% of researchers are spontaneously self-archiving their research today (Green OA). (A somewhat lower percentage is publishing in Gold OA journals, deterred in part by the cost.)

(9) Only Green OA is entirely within the hands of the research community. Researchers’ funders and institutions cannot (hence should not) mandate Gold OA; but they can mandate Green OA, as a natural extension of their “publish or perish” mandate, to maximize research usage and impact in the online era. Institutions and funders are now actually beginning to adopt Green OA mandates especially in the UK, and also in Europe and Australia; the US is only beginning to propose Green OA mandates.

(10) Some publishers are lobbying against Green OA self-archiving mandates, claiming it will destroy peer review and publishing. All existing evidence is contrary to this. (In the few fields where Green OA already reached 100% some years ago, the journals are still not being canceled.) Moreover, it is quite clear that even if and when 100% Green OA should ever lead to unsustainable subscription cancellations, journals will simply convert to Gold OA and institutions will then cover their own outgoing Gold OA publishing costs by redirecting their own windfall subscription cancellation savings on incoming journal articles to cover instead the Gold OA publishing costs for their own outgoing journal article output. The net cost will also be much lower, as it will only need to pay for peer review and its certification by the journal-name, as the distributed network of OA Institutional Repositories will be the online access-providers and archivers (and the paper edition will be obsolete).

(11) One of the ways the OA movement is countering the lobbying of publishers against Green OA mandates is by forming the “Alliance for Taxpayer Access.” This lobbying group is focusing mainly on biomedicine, and the potential health benefits of tax-payer access to biomedical research. This is definitely a valid ethical and practical rationale for OA, but it is definitely not the sole rationale, nor the primary one.

(12) The primary, fundamental and universal rationale for OA and OA mandates, in all disciplines, including biomedicine, is researcher-to-researcher access, not public access (nor even educational access). The vast majority of peer-reviewed research in all disciplines is not of direct interest to the lay public (nor even to students, other than graduate students, who are already researchers). And even in biomedical research, what provides the greatest public benefit is the potential research progress (leading to eventual applications that benefit the public) that arises from maximizing researcher-to-researcher access. Direct public access of course comes with the OA territory. But it is not the sole or primary ethical justification for OA, even in biomedical research.

(13) The general ethical rationale and justification for OA is that research is funded, conducted and published in order to be used and applied, not in order to generate revenue for the journal publishing industry. In the paper era, the only way to achieve the former was by allowing access to be restricted to those researchers whose institutions could afford to subscribe to the paper edition. That was the only way the true and sizable costs of peer-reviewed research publishing could be covered at all, then.

(14) But in the online era this is no longer true. Hence it is time for the institutions and funders who employ the researchers and fund the research to mandate that the resulting journal articles be made (Green) OA, to the benefit of the entire research community, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public. (This may or may not eventually lead to a transition to Gold OA.)

(15) It is unethical for the publishing tail to be allowed to continue to wag the research dog. The dysfunctionality of the status quo is especially apparent when it is public health that is being compromised by needless access restrictions, but the situation is much the same for all scientific and technological research, and for scholarship too, inasmuch as we see and fund scholarly research as a public good, and not a subsidy to the peer-reviewed journal industry.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Proust describes Swann as lazy in his scholarly work, as one who is more interested in life itself than in reading or writing. Swann found an excuse for his laziness in “the idea that ‘Life’ contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.” Swann had “acquired the habit of finding life interesting–of marveling at the strange discoveries that there were to be made in it.” (SW, Swann In Love)

Proust often reproached himself for not sitting down at his desk and working. Proust probably used the same excuse for his laziness that Swann used–life is more interesting than books. Proust wasn’t the only writer to believe that life is more interesting than books; “from life”, said Kafka, “one can extract comparatively so many books, but from books so little, so very little, life.” (Conversations With Kafka, by G. Janouch)

For the writer maybe, but for the reader?

And can one have the will (or wherewithal) to write without first having had it to read?

So, for a writer, laziness in reading is more unpardonable (and limiting) than laziness in writing.

Proust describes Swann as lazy in his scholarly work, as one who is more interested in life itself than in reading or writing. Swann found an excuse for his laziness in “the idea that ‘Life’ contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.” Swann had “acquired the habit of finding life interesting–of marveling at the strange discoveries that there were to be made in it.” (SW, Swann In Love)

Proust often reproached himself for not sitting down at his desk and working. Proust probably used the same excuse for his laziness that Swann used–life is more interesting than books. Proust wasn’t the only writer to believe that life is more interesting than books; “from life”, said Kafka, “one can extract comparatively so many books, but from books so little, so very little, life.” (Conversations With Kafka, by G. Janouch)

For the writer maybe, but for the reader?

And can one have the will (or wherewithal) to write without first having had it to read?

So, for a writer, laziness in reading is more unpardonable (and limiting) than laziness in writing.

It is right that Dr. Kevorkian has been freed, and it was a cruel miscarriage of justice to have imprisoned him in the first place. He is part-quack, but for the most part hero, and for a just and timely cause. He is naive and irresponsible on the criteria for euthanasia (that’s the quackish part), but right and brave on the basic need for and right to euthanasia. Let us hope that the reactivation of his campaign will help rather than hinder the spread of the Netherlands, Swiss and Oregon policies.

Anon: I got to thinking, as I pinched up a word and moved it to another place in the sentence: was it the same token?  If I cut an apostrophe and paste it somewhere else, is there ANY coherent sense in which it is the same apostrophe?  Heck, if I insert a few words in a document, so that all the succeeding ones have to “shift” down, are the “shifted” ones in any sense the same?  If I do nothing at all but watch as the computer continually redraws the words in front of me, isn’t there something really, really Heraclitean about visibles on a computer screen?  Of course just about everything like that, on a much slower scale; but this is unnerving.

I’m not sure whether you are wondering about recurrence in general, or just about token-identity vs type-identity.

It seems to me that epistemically (for Borges Funes-the-Memorious reasons), and ontically (for thermodynamic reasons), no two real-time events — hence, a fortiori, no two objects figuring in those events — are identical:  (“are identical” is already a misnomer: a thing can only be identical with itself, and even that only instantaneously). If there is a delta-T– change in time — then there is, a fortiori, a change, and hence non-identity. (At time T I am me-at-time-T and at time T+1 I am me-at-time-T+1: One could make the same argument about the “same” object at different points in space, but time has already done the trick, as the same object cannot be simultaneously at two different points in space — only different parts of the same object can be…)