Peter, List,
Thanks for this post, and especially for your intriguing questions. I
also am not familiar with arXiv beyond Joe's discussion of it, so I
haven't much to say about Ginsparg's system as such. I am, however,
attending a dinner party this Saturday with a colleague-friend, the
physicist Alan Wolf, who, as I recall, was a colleague of Ginsparg at
Los Alamos 'way back when' . A mathematical physicist now at
Cooper-Union, Wolf was one of the founders of mathematical chaos theory.
I hope he can give me some insider 'dope' on Gisparg and arXiv, at least
as it is used in his field.
Indeed, I hope I'll have more to say when we discuss the last 1/4 of
Joe's paper, since, as you wrote, "The remainder of Joe’s paper contains
an interesting in-depth examination of the concepts of a peer and of
peer review, which I hope will stimulate a good bit of discussion."
I do too. Now, to the very short responses to your questions.
PS:1. Is the above a fair and adequate discussion of the Ginsparg
system? Is there anything important left out?
GR: I think yours is a fair and adequate discussion of arXiv. After all,
as Joe commented, the system is really quite simple. For one, there is
no "special sophistication or novelty involved in the programming." It
would seem that the principal novelty is to require an Abstract both of
the papers sent to reviewed as well as another Abstract of the
reviewer's response. I may be that it's been widely used (see my
response to your question 3, below) in part because of its simplicity.
PS: 2. What have the effects of the system been on prepublication
review? Does it function as intended and as Joe describes it, or has it
had unintended side effects?
GR: Again, my best bet here is to ask Alan your questions. I hope that
picking his brain on this might be helpful, even if only anecdotally.
PS: 3. Joe wrote this about ten years ago, while arXiv had been in
existence for only ten years. What is the standing of the system within
the scientific community today?
GR: Again, Alan might be of aid here. The Wikipedia article on the topic
does note these suggestive facts, however: "On 3 October 2008, arXiv.org
passed the half-million article milestone, with roughly five thousand
new e-prints added every month.The preprint archive turned 20 years old
on 14 August 2011" and cites these sources of this information.
^ Online Scientific Repository Hits Milestone - With 500,000 Articles,
arXiv Established as Vital Library Resource
^ Ginsparg, Paul (2011). "It was twenty years ago today ..".
arXiv:1108.2700
PS: 4. Joe very explicitly contrasts the prepublication discussion
facilitated by Ginsparg’s system with the kind of informal
listserver-based discussion that may be exemplified by our discussions
on peirce-l. How important is this contrast? What virtues of Ginsparg’s
system are/can be/should be embodied in informal, interdisciplinary
discussions such as ours?
GR: Peter, these last are, for me, exceedingly interesting questions,
and I imagine I'll have a few things to offer in response to them. I
hope several here will. But I'm going to postpone discussing them until
after you've posted your remarks on the conclusion of Joe's paper, that
part of it centering on peer-review; I think my answer must include a
reflection on Joe's reflection as to what constitutes a peer.
Best,
Gary
Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
E202-O
718 482-5700
*** *** *** ***
>>> "Skagestad, Peter" 01/01/12 12:54 PM >>>
Happy New Year, everyone!
Resuming the slow read of Joe Ransdell’s “The Relevance of Peircean
Semiotic to Computational Intelligence Augmentation,” we now move on to
the description of the physicist Paul Ginsparg’s publication system,
technically known as “arXiv” and pronounced like “archive”. This
description takes up roughly the third quarter of Joe’s paper, pages 15
to 22. Ginsparg’s system is presented as an example of computerized
intelligence augmentation in that it provides an automated mechanism for
improving scientific communication, thus augmenting the collective
intelligence of the research community utilizing it, originally the
community of physicists.
I should begin by making it clear that I personally know next to nothing
about the Ginsparg system (Joe’s preferred designation), and very little
about contemporary communication in the sciences. But I am confident
that there is ample expertise on both counts among the listers. I shall
simply present Joe’s account of the Ginsparg system and rely on others
to take the lead in discussion.
Having previously discussed the role, in inquiry, of norms governing
“serious assertion”, Joe introduces the Ginsparg system as a system
providing support for those norms:
JR: “The interest in Ginsparg’s work does not lie * in any special
sophistication or novelty involved in the programming, considered simply
as computer programming, but rather in the way the programming was
developed as material support for communication governed by certain
controlling norms believed to be conducive to the furtherance of inquiry
in the fields it was originally intended to serve.”
This is how the system works:
JR: “If one wants to make a claim to a research result to one’s research
peers in the field in question, one writes up the claim and the basis
for it, considered as a conclusion, in the form commonly understood to
be dictated by whatever would be required for purposes of testing or
replication, whether that involves an appeal to a priori reasoning, as
in the case of mathematical proof claims, or to observational or
experimental procedures. * The act of depositing is understood by the
research community to whom it is addressed as a serious assertion, i.e.
as an act of primary publication, and if it meets certain minimal
conditions (e.g. includes specification for replicability of results) it
may actually be recognized as being such.”
PS: Along with the paper one posts an abstract, usually containing key
terms, which is automatically distributed to all users who have
indicated an interest in the subfield which the paper belongs to.
Interested readers can then download the entire paper by clicking on a
link, and if they disagree with something, they can post a reply, also
accompanied by an abstract.
PS: As I understand Joe, this system serves the legitimate functions of
prepublication circulation and discussion, which a generation ago was
done with photocopying and snail mail, while escaping the elitism
imposed by the constraints of that system, in that only a select few
would receive the paper preprints, whereas the electronic preprint is
available to anyone who is interested. At the same time, the
requirement of accompanying all communication with abstracts prevents
the communication from turning into informal discussion that would allow
or encourage nonserious assertions:
JR: “But it is important to understand that the arrangement is not
conducive to the kind of informal discussion typical of, say, a
listserver based forum or an organized discussion group or among the
members of a special project team, or a “bulletin board” or “news” group
discussion, * Inappropriate responses might well be made and deposited
in the archive * there is nothing which precludes this * but the system
is designed to discourage that by making it necessary to deposit an
abstract if one wants others in the field to know that one has made a
reply. This helps to insure in practice a kind of formality which is of
the essence of what I am calling “primary publication”.
PS: Joe goes on for the next few pages * pp. 17-19 * to compare the
Ginsparg system to the prepublication peer review previously based on
paper copies distributed to a select in-group, noting the anti-elitism
and anti-authoritarianism introduced by the Ginsparg system. He goes on
to claim that the system has for this reason been met with increasingly
hardened resistance from the scientific establishment, resistance which
has effectively silenced the Ginsparg system as a reform movement.
The remainder of Joe’s paper contains an interesting in-depth
examination of the concepts of a peer and of peer review, which I hope
will stimulate a good bit of discussion. But I think we have enough to
chew on for the moment, so I will pause here and just throw out a few
questions:
1. Is the above a fair and adequate discussion of the Ginsparg system?
Is there anything important left out?
2. What have the effects of the system been on prepublication review?
Does it function as intended and as Joe describes it, or has it had
unintended side effects?
3. Joe wrote this about ten years ago, while arXiv had been in existence
for only ten years. What is the standing of the system within the
scientific community today?
4. Joe very explicitly contrasts the prepublication discussion
facilitated by Ginsparg’s system with the kind of informal
listserver-based discussion that may be exemplified by our discussions
on peirce-l. How important is this contrast? What virtues of Ginsparg’s
system are/can be/should be embodied in informal, interdisciplinary
discussions such as ours?
These are just a few questions that come to my mind. I am, sure others
will have their own questions to add.
Cheers,
Peter
________________________________________
From: C S Peirce discussion list [PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] on behalf
of Skagestad, Peter [peter_skages...@uml.edu]
Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2011 11:07 AM
To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Subject: Re: [peirce-l] SLOW READ: THE RELEVANCE OF PEIRCEAN SEMIOTIC TO
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION
Listers,
Although this slow read has spun off some interesting side discussions,
there has been no activity in the slow read itself since I posted the
segment below. I am going to attribute this inactivity to the busyness
of the season, rather than to any lack of general interest. I am
therefore going to break now for the holidays and move on to the second
half of Joe's paper in the first week of January.
Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year!
Peter
________________________________________
From: C S Peirce discussion list [PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] on behalf
of Skagestad, Peter [peter_skages...@uml.edu]
Sent: Saturday, December 17, 2011 3:15 PM
To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Subject: Re: [peirce-l] SLOW READ: THE RELEVANCE OF PEIRCEAN SEMIOTIC TO
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION
I want to move on to what I see as the second main part of Joe’s paper,
covering pages 8-14. I do not intend to rush anyone or stifle
discussion, so anyone who wants to pursue extant themes should feel free
to do so, but I also want to enable us to progress towards what I take
to be the heart of Joe’s paper.
Having ascertained that thinking is inherently dialogic and
communicational in nature, Joe posits that “the development of
intelligence is at least in part a matter of the development of critical
control practices that conform go communicational norms which make
discourse more efficient and effective relative to whatever ends it may
have.”
This perspective sets the task for IA as follows:
JR: “The sort of Intelligence Augmentation I am chiefly concerned with,
then, is that which would be achieved by devising mechanisms and
programs that would increase the effectiveness of the communicational
norms which encourage successful inquiry as these have developed in
research traditions whose ancestral forms sometimes go back more than
two and a half millennia ago* The project of development of any
computational devices that could be helpful in this would qualify as a
contribution to IA research of this special kind.”
PS: So, the type of IA that Joe is interested in is not the kind that
augments individual intelligence, but the kind that augments the
collective intelligence exhibited by processes of inquiry within
research traditions. Here, as noted earlier, Joe’s concern is close to
Engelbart’s project of “Boosting Collective IQ”. Now, Joe goes on to
delineate a Peircean/Deweyan account of inquiry, in which he finds a
central feature to be the claim of a finding or a discovery, a claim
which is expected to be found persuasive by the community, and which
therefore places the claimant under certain obligations. Joe also
characterizes a claim of this kind as a “serious assertion”, also known
as “primary publication:
JR: “ For present purposes, let me characterize serious assertion as
obtaining whenever the person making the assertion takes full
responsibility for making a claim which, taken seriously by the others
in the research community, will put upon them the obligation to take
what has been claimed seriously enough to allow themselves to be
persuaded to the conclusion which the claimant has already come to, if
the claimant has actually made the case for it in the claim in a way
that is found to be rationally persuasive. (Found to be so by whom? By
each member of the given research community taken distributively, i.e.
taken one by one, as distinct from the membership regarded as a
collectively constituted individual. The research community is not to be
regarded as a collective entity.)”
PS: I take the parenthetical comment here to be especially Peircean: The
community of inquirers is not a democracy, where majority rules; its
goal is ultimate unanimity, which means that each dissenting voice must
be allowed to be heard and must be allowed weight, and taken seriously
by the claimant and the other participants. Dialogic or communicational
intelligence is augmented by the development and enforcement of
communicational norms which enable this give-and-take to happen
efficiently and effectively.
This is so far rather abstract, and, and no doubt Joe is setting the
stage for his presentation of the Ginsparg publication system as a
paradigm case of the type of IA he is concerned with, which I would
suggest we move on to as soon as feasible. In the process he has two
pages on “nonserious assertion” , to set it off from serious assertion,
which are well worth reading, but which I am not going to go into unless
there is a special interest in discussing them.
Having touched what I take to be the high points in pages 8 to 14, I am
going to pause for comments and discussion. And please, if I have
skipped important points, please do not hesitate to let me know.
Cheers,
Peter
________________________________________
From: C S Peirce discussion list [PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] on behalf
of Skagestad, Peter [peter_skages...@uml.edu]
Sent: Saturday, December 17, 2011 9:29 AM
To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Subject: Re: [peirce-l] SLOW READ: THE RELEVANCE OF PEIRCEAN SEMIOTIC TO
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION
Thank you, Gary. This is definitely the direction in which I would like
the conversation to go. There are, however, some housekeeping tasks I
need to attend to, and hope to be able to do so this afternoon.
Cheers,
Peter
________________________________________
From: C S Peirce discussion list [PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] on behalf
of Gary Fuhrman [g...@gnusystems.ca]
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 7:39 PM
To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Subject: Re: [peirce-l] SLOW READ: THE RELEVANCE OF PEIRCEAN SEMIOTIC TO
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION
I'd like to bring this conversation a little closer to the aspect of IA
that Joe Ransdell devoted most of his paper to, namely the process of
genuine peer review that is facilitated by Ginsparg's innovation in
physics, which amounts to cutting the gatekeepers out of the publication
process, and thus democratizing it.
Gary mentioned "flying to international conferences" as one of the
benefits of technology generally. Personally i would very much like to
see an alternative to air travel -- which is, after all, a major
contributor to climate change -- in the form of a system that would
allow conferencing over the internet, for groups of (say) a dozen peers
who could all meet (i.e. see and hear each other) without leaving home,
and without any special equipment beyond their laptops. Surely the
software and hardware to do this can't be far away, if it doesn't exist
in cycberspace already. Conferences usually have to "break into groups"
(or break for lunch) in order to have really good, productive
conversations anyway.
I think genuine dialogue among peers (in Joe's sense) takes place all
the time on peirce-l, but there are definite advantages to doing it in
"real time", and i think those advantages can be realized without having
to move our bodies thousands of air miles. I'm sure it would augment the
intellligence of the participants.
Gary F.
} Real time is the wheel reinventing itself. [gnox] {
www.gnusystems.ca/Peirce.htm }{ gnoxic studies: Peirce
-----Original Message-----
From: C S Peirce discussion list [mailto:PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] On
Behalf Of Gary Richmond
Sent: December-16-11 5:52 PM
To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Subject: Re: [peirce-l] SLOW READ: THE RELEVANCE OF PEIRCEAN SEMIOTIC TO
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION
Steven, Gene, Ben, Peter, List,
IA as contributing to the possibility of actual intelligence
augmentation is a mere goal of such visionary thinkers as Engelbart,
Technology is a tool that can be used wisely or poorly, as several have
already noted. My friends who teach in some of the better educated
countries in Europe do not seem to have as much of a problem with new
technologies as is being expressed in this thread. "The book" is itself
the result of a new technology of the time, the printing press, and its
dissemination to many in especially the 19th and 20th centuries was the
result of the further advancement of that and other, related
technologies. Pre-computer/internet reading of books resulted in a very
well educated European population, but that did not keep Europe from
falling into two disastrous, finally, world wars.
The total dumbing down of, for example, the American population, I mean,
the American education system, also pre-dates computers. The 1%, it
appears, benefits from a dumbed-down population, the better to
manipulate it through, admittedly, especially the television media
(think Fox "news"). That "vast wasteland" of idiotic television
programming was also a conscious decision by corporate interests in the
interest of making big profits. The principles and practices of a
hunter-gather society (which Gene has so beautifully articulated in his
books and articles) is nothing that we are going to regain as desirable
as it might seem to want to do so. It ain't gonna happen.
Meanwhile, many of us on this list enjoy our technological advances (I
especially am fond of modern plumbing), use the web rather well for
research purposes, enjoy flying to international conferences, etc.,
etc.--and regret that some of these 'conveniences' are paid for at a
cost which, in a vaguely poetic way, I sometimes make equivalent to the
suffering of much of the population of Africa. The point for me is NOT
to stop using these tools, but to try to find ways to make educational,
political-economic, infra-structural, and other changes in the interest
of benefiting individuals and society. I would think that Peirce would
have celebrated the new technologies, possibly have contributed to them;
but he would have deplored their misuse. On that point, at least, I
think we are all in agreement.
Best,
Gary
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