Re: [Fis] Simple amswer: NOT!

[Koichiro Matsuno]

On 8 March 2018 at 8:10 AM, Plamen L. Simeonov wrote:

 

What do you think about the other more interesting phenomenon recently: the 
blockchain technology・・・?

 

Folks,

 

Yes, that looks lucrative protocols making our current Internet more secured. 
But it has some side effects. The likely introduction of that technology under 
the guise of crypto-currencies into the interlinked network of financial 
institutions regulated by the central banks such as FRB and ECB may induce an 
unexpected fragility in the system. One symptom could be the runaway explosion 
of outstanding accounts because of the P2P (peer-to-peer) nature set free from 
the control of the regulatory agencies by postponing the clearing of unpaid 
debts indefinitely. This fragility could easily flare up in any dialogic 
transactions or discourses unless each participant is sufficiently 
self-restrained. Of course, there should be no such fragility in the 
single-authored discourse by definition, while bilateral transactions are 
inevitable in our everyday life in any case. 

 

   Koichiro Matsuno

 

 

 

 

   Yes, that looks a lucrative technology making our current Internet more 
secured. But it also has some unwelcome side effect. The likely introduction of 
that technology under the guise of crypto-currencies into the interlinked 
network of the central banks such as FRB and ECB may induce an unexpected 
fragility to the system. One symptom could be the runaway explosion of 
outstanding accounts because of the P2P (peer-to-peer) nature set free from the 
control of the regulatory agencies by postponing the clearing of unpaid 
deficits indefinitely. This fragility could flare up quite easily in any 
dialogic transactions or discourses unless each participant is sufficiently 
self-restrained. Of course, there should be no such fragility in the 
single-authored discourse by definition. 

   Koichiro Matsuno

 

 

 

 

From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Dr. Plamen L. 
Simeonov
Sent: Thursday, March 8, 2018 8:10 AM
To: Krassimir Markov 
Cc: FIS ; Alberto J. Schuhmacher 
Subject: Re: [Fis] Simple amswer: NOT!

 

Dea FISes,

 

with respect to this big data and machine learning cults today, which I 
consider as somewhat useful fragments of a much bigger paradigm but not the 
non-plus-ultra tendency in science, let me ask you a bit different question:

 

What do you think about the other more interesting phenomenon recently: the 
blockchain technology and the chances for a forum like FIS to use it for 
perpetuating knowledge to change the paradigm of conventional thinking towards 
a global intellectual standard currency? Perhaps this is what deserves your 
attention. 

 

All the best.

 

Plamen

 



 

 

On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 9:09 PM, Krassimir Markov  > wrote:

Dear Alberto,

 

Let imagine that we are at the naturist beach, i.e. naked.

OK! 

You will see all what I am and I will se the same for you.

 

Well, will you know what I think or shall I know the same for you?

 

Simple answer: NOT!

 

No Data base may contain any data about my current thoughts and feelings.

Yes, the stupid part of humanity may be controlled by big data centers.

But all times it had been controlled. Nothing new.

 

The pseudo scientists may analyze data and may create tons of papers.

For such “production” there was and will exist corresponded more and more big 
cemeteries.

I had edited more than one thousand papers.

Only several was really very important and with great scientific value !!!

 

Collection of data is important problem and it will be such for ever.

But the greater problem for humanity is collection of money 

 

And the last cause the former!

And the last is many times more dangerous than former!

 

Do not worry of Data-ism!

Be worried of the Money-ism!

 

I will continue next week because this is my second post  ( Thanks to wisdom of 
Pedro who had limited Writing-letter-ism in our list! ).

 

Friendly greetings

Krassimir

 

 

 

 

 

 

From:   Alberto J. Schuhmacher 

Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2018 10:23 PM

To:   fis 

Subject: [Fis] Is Dataism the end of classical hypothesis-driven research and 
the beginning of data-correlation-driven research?

 

Dear FIS Colleagues,

I very much appreciate this opportunity to discuss with all of you.

My mentors and science teachers taught me that Science had a method, rules and 
procedures that should be followed and pursued rigorously and with 
perseverance. The scientific research needed to be preceded by one or several 
hypotheses that should be subjected to validation or refutation through 
experiments designed and carried out in a laboratory. The Oxford Dictionaries 
Online defines the scientific method as "a method or 

Re: [Fis] Is Dataism the end of classical hypothesis-driven research and the beginning of data-correlation-driven research?

[Mark Johnson]

Hi Alex,

Yes I agree about intuition. We should understand it better, and
that's best done with some kind of practice with it. For you it's
yoga; for me it's music. I suspect they're very closely related.  I
think it's dangerous, however, to disregard technology. Music is
highly technological: some of the earliest technologies we possess in
our museums are musical instruments. But they work to "tune the
intuition". This is what we need our computers to be (the word
"computer" is "com-putare" - "putare" is "to contemplate"). I suspect
the problem is the logic of the digital computer... music (and yoga?)
itself seems to work on the basis of some kind of analogue computation
(contemplation!).

Stafford Beer wrote this account of Ross Ashby's sudden decision to
join Von Foerster at the University of Illiinois. I found the
manuscript in Beer's archive in Liverpool. Beer was fascinated by
Ashby's decision. Ashby (who was quite a cold fish, by all accounts)
expressed his rationale for his decision...

"Late in 1960, a group of Heinz von Foerster’s friends were together
in the evening at Heinz’s home in Urbana, Illinois. A complicated
ballet ensued, the choreography of which I do not altogether remember.
At the precisely proper – the balletic -  moment, Heinz offered Ross a
Chair in BCL. He quietly accepted, without a moment’s pause, and asked
to telephone his wife back home in Bristol. It was the middle of the
night: thank goodness that the sun moves from East to West. Everyone
concerned was totally astonished – Mrs Ashby, I think I may say,
especially. And so he changed his life: for vitally important years
1961- - 1970, W Ross Ashby MD was Professor in the Department of
Biophysics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois in
Urbana. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer psychiatrist.

We walked back alone together to the Faculty Club, where we had
adjacent rooms, across the campus under a full moon. We were strolling
quietly and relaxed. I told him that I was amazed at his instance
decisiveness. He asked me why. I talked about his scientific acumen,
his meticulous methodology, his exactitude: I had expected him to ask
for a year to consider, to evaluate the evidence for and against
emigration. Surely his response had been atypically irrational?

He stopped in his tracks and turned to me, and I shall never forget
his TEACHING me at that moment. No, he said calmly. Years of research
could not attain to certainty in a decision of this kind: the variety
of the options had been far too high. The most rational response would
be to notice that the brain is a self-organizing computer which might
be able to assimilate the variety, and deliver an output in the form
of a hunch. He had felt this hunch. He had rationally obeyed it. And
had there been no hunch, no sense of an heuristic process to pursue?
Ross shrugged: ‘then the most rational procedure would be to toss a
coin’."


Best wishes,

Mark

On 13 March 2018 at 07:38, Alex Hankey  wrote:
> Dear Mark and Alberto,
>
> Let me propose a radical new input.
> The Human intuition is far more
> powerful than anything anyone
> has previously imagined, except
> those who use it regularly.
>
> It can be strengthen by particular
> mental practices, well described
> in the literature of Yoga.
>
> Digital Computing machines are
> not capable of this, and although
> number crunching is a way for
> Technology to assist, it is no substitute
> for the highest levels of the human mind.
>
> Alex
>
>
> On 13 March 2018 at 01:10, Mark Johnson  wrote:
>>
>> Dear Alberto,
>>
>> Thank you for this topic – it cuts to the heart of why we think the
>> study of information really matters, and most importantly, brings to
>> the fore the thorny issue of technology.
>>
>> It has become commonplace to say that our digital computers have
>> changed the world profoundly. Yet at a deep level it has left us very
>> confused and disorientated, and we struggle to articulate exactly how
>> the world has been transformed. Norbert Wiener once remarked in the
>> wake of cybernetics, “We have changed the world. Now we have to change
>> ourselves to survive in it”. Things haven’t got any easier in the
>> intervening decades; quite the reverse.
>>
>> The principal manifestation of the effects of technology is confusion
>> and ambiguity. In this context, it seems that the main human challenge
>> to which the topic of information has the greatest bearing is not
>> “information” per se, but decision. That, in a large part, depends of
>> hypothesis and the judgement of the human intellect.
>>
>> The reaction to confusion and ambiguity is that some people and most
>> institutions acquire misplaced confidence in making decisions about
>> “the way forwards”, usually invoking some new tool or device as a
>> solution to the problem of dealing with ambiguity (right now, it’s
>> blockchain and big data). We - and particularly our institutions -
>> remain 

Re: [Fis] Is Dataism the end of classical hypothesis-driven research and the beginning of data-correlation-driven research?

[Alex Hankey]

Dear Mark and Alberto,

Let me propose a radical new input.
The Human intuition is far more
powerful than anything anyone
has previously imagined, except
those who use it regularly.

It can be strengthen by particular
mental practices, well described
in the literature of Yoga.

Digital Computing machines are
not capable of this, and although
number crunching is a way for
Technology to assist, it is no substitute
for the highest levels of the human mind.

Alex


On 13 March 2018 at 01:10, Mark Johnson  wrote:

> Dear Alberto,
>
> Thank you for this topic – it cuts to the heart of why we think the
> study of information really matters, and most importantly, brings to
> the fore the thorny issue of technology.
>
> It has become commonplace to say that our digital computers have
> changed the world profoundly. Yet at a deep level it has left us very
> confused and disorientated, and we struggle to articulate exactly how
> the world has been transformed. Norbert Wiener once remarked in the
> wake of cybernetics, “We have changed the world. Now we have to change
> ourselves to survive in it”. Things haven’t got any easier in the
> intervening decades; quite the reverse.
>
> The principal manifestation of the effects of technology is confusion
> and ambiguity. In this context, it seems that the main human challenge
> to which the topic of information has the greatest bearing is not
> “information” per se, but decision. That, in a large part, depends of
> hypothesis and the judgement of the human intellect.
>
> The reaction to confusion and ambiguity is that some people and most
> institutions acquire misplaced confidence in making decisions about
> “the way forwards”, usually invoking some new tool or device as a
> solution to the problem of dealing with ambiguity (right now, it’s
> blockchain and big data). We - and particularly our institutions -
> remain allergic to uncertainty. To what extent is “data-ism” a
> reaction to the confusion produced by technology? Von Foerster sounded
> the alarm in the 1970s:
>
> “we have, hopefully only temporarily, relinquished our responsibility
> to ask for a technology that will solve existent problems. Instead we
> have allowed existent technology to create problems it can solve.” (in
> Von Foerster, H (1981) "Observing Systems")
>
> With every technical advance, there is an institutional reaction. The
> Catholic church reacted to printing; Universities reacted to the
> microscope and other empirical apparatus; political institutions
> reacted to the steam engine, and so on. Today it is the institution of
> science itself which reacts to the uncertainty it finds itself in. In
> each case, technology introduces new options for doing things, and the
> increased uncertainty of choice between an increased number of options
> means that an attenuative process must ensue as the institution seeks
> to preserve its identity. Technology in modern universities is a
> particularly powerful example: what a stupid use of technology to
> reproduce the ancient practices of the “classroom” online?! How
> ridiculous in an age of self-publishing that academic journals seek to
> use technology to maintain the “scarcity” (and cost) of their
> publications through paywalls? And what is it about machine learning
> and big data (I'm struggling with this in a project I'm doing at the
> moment - the machine learning thing is not all it's cracked up to be!)
>
> Judgement and decision are at the heart of this. Technologies do not
> make people redundant: it is the decisions of leaders of companies and
> institutions who do that. Technology does not poison the planet;
> again, that process results from ineffective global political
> decisions. Technology also sits in the context for decision-making,
> and as Cohen and March pointed out in 1971, the process of
> decision-making about technology is anything but rational (see “The
> Garbage Can Model of Organisational Decision-making”
> https://www.jstor.org/stable/2392088). Today we see “Blockchain” and
> “big data” in Cohen and March’s Garbage can. It is the reached-for
> "existent technology which creates problems it can solve".
>
> My colleague Peter Rowlands, who some of you know, puts the blame on
> our current way of thinking in science: most scientific methodologies
> are "synthetic" - they attempt to amalgamate existing theory and
> manifest phenomena into a coherent whole. Peter's view is that an
> analytic approach is required, which thinks back to originating
> mechanisms. Of course, our current institutions of science make such
> analytical approaches very difficult, with few journals prepared to
> publish the work. That's because they are struggling to manage their
> own uncertainty.
>
> So I want to ask a deeper question: Effective science and effective
> decision-making go hand-in-hand. What does an effective society
> operating in a highly ambiguous and technologically abundant
> environment look like? How does it