#and then different scientific disciplines may find different models for the same thing more useful for their purposes

[obstinatecondolement]

There is an aphorism in science that all models are wrong, but some are useful. The general idea is that a simplified representation of something much more complex may not perfectly replicate every element of the real thing, or account for every single factor that would affect it under real world conditions, but a good simplification potentially can approximate something more complex enough to get broadly accurate* insights that are useful.

In my opinion, specific sexualities and genders (all of them, fwiw), and the even the concept of being cis or trans, are best thought of as useful models for certain amorphous clusters of experiences and feelings, rather than as things that have concrete, inflexible definitions that map perfectly onto every single person who uses that model of identity as a shorthand. Dictionary definitions of what gay means/what a woman is/etc., are all assuming spherical cows in a vacuum to make the maths easier, and you look like an idiot if you think that cows really are spherical and are not affected by atmospheric pressure in any way (or indeed that they could survive vacuum conditions) and then go around harassing cows on this basis.

A person's internal sense of self is more important than your belief in a model. Fuck off and let me get back to chewing cud.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Machine learning's crumbling foundations

Technological debt is insidious, a kind of socio-infrastructural subprime crisis that’s unfolding around us in slow motion. Our digital infrastructure is built atop layers and layers and layers of code that’s insecure due to a combination of bad practices and bad frameworks.

Even people who write secure code import insecure libraries, or plug it into insecure authorization systems or databases. Like asbestos in the walls, this cruft has been fragmenting, drifting into our air a crumb at a time.

We ignored these, treating them as containable, little breaches and now the walls are rupturing and choking clouds of toxic waste are everywhere.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

The infosec apocalypse was decades in the making. The machine learning apocalypse, on the other hand…

ML has serious, institutional problems, the kind of thing you’d expect in a nascent discipline, which you’d hope would be worked out before it went into wide deployment.

ML is rife with all forms of statistical malpractice — AND it’s being used for high-speed, high-stakes automated classification and decision-making, as if it was a proven science whose professional ethos had the sober gravitas you’d expect from, say, civil engineering.

Civil engineers spend a lot of time making sure the buildings and bridges they design don’t kill the people who use them. Machine learning?

Hundreds of ML teams built models to automate covid detection, and every single one was useless or worse.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/02/autoquack/#gigo

The ML models failed due to failure to observe basic statistical rigor. One common failure mode?

Treating data that was known to be of poor quality as if it was reliable because good data was not available.

Obtaining good data and/or cleaning up bad data is tedious, repetitive grunt-work. It’s unglamorous, time-consuming, and low-waged. Cleaning data is the equivalent of sterilizing surgical implements — vital, high-skilled, and invisible unless someone fails to do it.

It’s work performed by anonymous, low-waged adjuncts to the surgeon, who is the star of the show and who gets credit for the success of the operation.

The title of a Google Research team (Nithya Sambasivan et al) paper published in ACM CHI beautifully summarizes how this is playing out in ML: “Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work: Data Cascades in High-Stakes AI,”

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/0d556e45afc54afeb2eb6b51a9bc1827b9961ff4.pdf

The paper analyzes ML failures from a cross-section of high-stakes projects (health diagnostics, anti-poaching, etc) in East Africa, West Africa and India. They trace the failures of these projects to data-quality, and drill into the factors that caused the data problems.

The failures stem from a variety of causes. First, data-gathering and cleaning are low-waged, invisible, and thankless work. Front-line workers who produce the data — like medical professionals who have to do extra data-entry — are not compensated for extra work.

Often, no one even bothers to explain what the work is for. Some of the data-cleaning workers are atomized pieceworkers, such as those who work for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, who lack both the context in which the data was gathered and the context for how it will be used.

This data is passed to model-builders, who lack related domain expertise. The hastily labeled X-ray of a broken bone, annotated by an unregarded and overworked radiologist, is passed onto a data-scientist who knows nothing about broken bones and can’t assess the labels.

This is an age-old problem in automation, pre-dating computer science and even computers. The “scientific management” craze that started in the 1880s saw technicians observing skilled workers with stopwatches and clipboards, then restructuring the workers’ jobs by fiat.

Rather than engaging in the anthropological work that Clifford Geertz called “thick description,” the management “scientists” discarded workers’ qualitative experience, then treated their own assessments as quantitative and thus empirical.

http://hypergeertz.jku.at/GeertzTexts/Thick_Description.htm

How long a task takes is empirical, but what you call a “task” is subjective. Computer scientists take quantitative measurements, but decide what to measure on the basis of subjective judgment. This empiricism-washing sleight of hand is endemic to ML’s claims of neutrality.

In the early 2000s, there was a movement to produce tools and training that would let domain experts produce their own tools — rather than delivering “requirements” to a programmer, a bookstore clerk or nurse or librarian could just make their own tools using Visual Basic.

This was the radical humanist version of “learn to code” — a call to seize the means of computation and program, rather than being programmed. Over time, it was watered down, and today it lives on as a weak call for domain experts to be included in production.

The disdain for the qualitative expertise of domain experts who produce data is a well-understood guilty secret within ML circles, embodied in Frederick Jelinek’s ironic talk, “Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up.”

But a thick understanding of context is vital to improving data-quality. Take the American “voting wars,” where GOP-affiliated vendors are brought in to purge voting rolls of duplicate entries — people who are registered to vote in more than one place.

These tools have a 99% false-positive rate.

Ninety. Nine. Percent.

To understand how they go so terribly wrong, you need a thick understanding of the context in which the data they analyze is produced.

https://5harad.com/papers/1p1v.pdf

The core assumption of these tools is that two people with the same name and date of birth are probably the same person.

But guess what month people named “June” are likely to be born in? Guess what birthday is shared by many people named “Noel” or “Carol”?

Many states represent unknown birthdays as “January 1,” or “January 1, 1901.” If you find someone on a voter roll whose birthday is represented as 1/1, you have no idea what their birthday is, and they almost certainly don’t share a birthday with other 1/1s.

But false positives aren’t evenly distributed. Ethnic groups whose surnames were assigned in recent history for tax-collection purposes (Ashkenazi Jews, Han Chinese, Koreans, etc) have a relatively small pool of surnames and a slightly larger pool of first names.

This is likewise true of the descendants of colonized and enslaved people, whose surnames were assigned to them for administrative purposes and see a high degree of overlap. When you see two voter rolls with a Juan Gomez born on Jan 1, you need to apply thick analysis.

Unless, of course, you don’t care about purging the people who are most likely to face structural impediments to voter registration (such as no local DMV office) and who are also likely to be racialized (for example, migrants whose names were changed at Ellis Island).

ML practitioners don’t merely use poor quality data when good quality data isn’t available — they also use the poor quality data to assess the resulting models. When you train an ML model, you hold back some of the training data for assessment purposes.

So maybe you start with 10,000 eye scans labeled for the presence of eye disease. You train your model with 9,000 scans and then ask the model to assess the remaining 1,000 scans to see whether it can make accurate classifications.

But if the data is no good, the assessment is also no good. As the paper’s authors put it, it’s important to “catch[] data errors using mechanisms specific to data validation, instead of using model performance as a proxy for data quality.”

ML practitioners studied for the paper — practitioners engaged in “high-stakes” model building reported that they had to gather their own data for their models through field partners, “a task which many admitted to being unprepared for.”

High-stakes ML work has inherited a host of sloppy practices from ad-tech, where ML saw its first boom. Ad-tech aims for “70–75% accuracy.”

That may be fine if you’re deciding whether to show someone an ad, but it’s a very different matter if you’re deciding whether someone needs treatment for an eye-disease that, untreated, will result in irreversible total blindness.

Even when models are useful at classifying input produced under present-day lab conditions, those conditions are subject to several kinds of “drift.”

For example, “hardware drift,” where models trained on images from pristine new cameras are asked to assess images produced by cameras from field clinics, where lenses are impossible to keep clean (see also “environmental drift” and “human drift”).

Bad data makes bad models. Bad models instruct people to make ineffective or harmful interventions. Those bad interventions produce more bad data, which is fed into more bad models — it’s a “data-cascade.”

GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out — was already a bedrock of statistical practice before the term was coined in 1957. Statistical analysis and inference cannot proceed from bad data.

Producing good data and validating data-sets are the kind of unsexy, undercompensated maintenance work that all infrastructure requires — and, as with other kinds of infrastructure, it is undervalued by journals, academic departments, funders, corporations and governments.

But all technological debts accrue punitive interest. The decision to operate on bad data because good data is in short supply isn’t like looking for your car-keys under the lamp-post — it’s like driving with untrustworthy brakes and a dirty windscreen.

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[quasi-derivative]

Why it's Pointless to Compare Disciplines: a Pantheist Take

The structure of this essay will be as follows. First, I will explain the conflicts and attitudes between the academic disciplines. Then, I will explain pantheism, specifically spinozist pantheism. And finally, I will attempt to show that it is pointless to compare disciplines

1. The Debate

There is often conflict and competition between what i identify as the 3 main disciplines: the arts, the humanities, and the sciences. The arts refers to music, visual art, theatre, etc. That is to say, they refer to expression of human emotion, and serve to present and convey themes and idea about the wider world. The humanities are philosophy, history, sociology, etc. These are the study of people, society and seek to explain and understand humanity. Finally, the sciences. These are simply physics and maths, biology and chemistry, which seek to find explanation for the processes that govern the Universe.

Conflict between these often hinge on a few questions; "which is more true?", or "which is better for people?" are just two of them. As an example, consider the climate crisis. There is debate as to how it should be tackled, whether a subject of the humanities should take lead, or if a physical, chemical alright should be taken. This is one of the areas where this conflict emerges. Another point of contention, that may be more familiar to Tumblr users, is the conflict between science such as physics and art on the internet. Although of smaller consequence than other clashes, there is often tension between artists (who create art with symbolic meaning), and physics students who tend to imagine that their descriptive, scientific process is much more valuable.

It should quickly be noted that conflict between western scientism and spirituality stem from a history of white supremacy, colonialism and exoticism.

I have laid the issues out quite simply here, in order to simply provide a summary of inter-disciplinary competition and act as a memory aid.

2. Spinozist Pantheism

Baruch Spinoza was a 17th Century Dutch-Jewish philosopher and rationalist. Excommunicated from his church and community for his unorthodox views, Spinoza created a whole new conception of God and ethics and the Universe - a metaphysic. His most notable work is The Ethics in which he explains and proves his metaphysical model using succint mathematical order and logic.

Here is a definition of some terms that will be helpful:

- Substance: the most fundamental 'thing' that exists. To someone who believes that atoms are the most fundamental things, all atoms are substances that make up other things.

- Attribute: the essence (nature) of substance when it is thought or conceived of in a certain way.

- Mode: things which are in and conceived through substance, such as a chair. if you imagine substance as a big ball of clay, modes are like this formed out of the surface of the ball.

- Theism: the belief in a God or Gods, who created and intervenes in the universe.

- Atheism: disbelief in existence of any god or gods

- Metaphysics: the branch of philosophy that deals with abstract things, such as being, time, knowing, and space.

These terms should hopefully help clarify terms that i use in the following section.

Spinoza's metaphysic is a substance monism. This means that the universe is made of exactly one substance, which spinoza calls God. His first argument in The Ethics is to prove that there is necessarily only one infinite substance, which he calls God This is pantheism, and can be best summed up in one quote - "Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived" (Ethics Part 1, Prop 15). Or, in other words, everything is part of God and created by God.

This is the definition of pantheism. Pantheism is the belief that God and the Universe are the same. Adamant in his belief, Spinoza labels traditional religion as "fiction" (not the same implication as 'fiction book', but you get the idea). He wrote that the Bible is just a book written by people, that prayer and appeals for divine intervention are pointless, etc.

His method for approaching God is intuitive and, to me, quite beautiful. Spinoza argues that asking for divine intervention is futile, since God is a huge immoveable thing, the universe itself. Instead, Spinoza says that this should be flipped. We should listen to God, bend our will to it, and follow nature, in order to live free of the pressures that come from spirituality and fear of eternal punishment.

This is the crux of argument, which i will clarify in part 3.

3. Argument

In the end of the last section, i said that Spinoza believes in listening to God. The way that he suggests this is through science and the humanities. By studying the laws of nature (which includes psychology and thought), we can get closer to understanding and appreciating God itself - not simply his Creation as Theism would posit. This aspect is why I, as a spinozist pantheist, believe that it is wholly absurd and pointless to compare different disciplines; they are all a form of understanding, explaining, and contemplation of God/nature.

The sciences describe the basic laws of nature, they seek to (with strict methods) approach a model that can explain how everything functions. The humanities are a study of human culture and society, and try to understand and appreciate these. The arts are expressive; a work of art is a form of expression, thought, and an act of creation and contemplation. All of these, inevitably, are a deep engagement with God. This makes competition absurd, since they all have the same purpose, and therefore holy. They are all of equal importance and value.

Thank you so much for reading this mess!!

[iriscomplimentarymedicine]

Iris publishers-Online Journal of Complementary & Alternative Medicine(OJCAM)

Integrative Approach

Authored by Viviana Siddhi*

Each year, Americans spend more than $34 billion on complementary and alternative treatment methods and visit alternative practitioners more often than they see primary care doctors. Complementary therapies are those that are used along with conventional treatments. The most effective is integrative approach. It refers to the combined use of evidence-based proven therapies and complementary therapies. This is the term that many people in the field are using more frequently. Integrative medicine services are becoming part of hospitals across the country and cancer centers.

Holistic medicine focuses on how the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual elements of the body are interconnected to maintain holistic health. When one part of the body is not healthy, it is believed to affect the whole person. Holistic approach concentrates on the whole body rather than focusing only on the disease or part of the body that is not working properly. A person should treat a whole self to reach a higher level of wellness. Patients treat disease by changing diet and behavior, taking botanical supplements, and undergoing various complementary therapies such as acupuncture, chiropractic, hypnosis, yoga, massage therapy. These approaches can be used along with conventional medicine such as surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy. By combining these different techniques, a person can take control of the disease and obtain a feeling of total wellness: spiritually, physically, and mentally.

The American Holistic Association says that healthy lifestyle habits will improve a person’s energy and vitality. Those habits include exercising, eating a nutritious diet, learning how to breath properly, yoga, acupuncture, and other alternative methods.

“Some doctors suggest that cancer pain and some side effects of treatment can be managed by incorporating different aspects of holistic medicine that include the physical, psychological, and spiritual factors involved with each individual. Health professionals realize that a person’s health depends on the balance of physical, psychological, social, and cultural forces. Adopting healthy habits related to diet, exercise, and emotional and spiritual well-being are considered important to maintaining good health [1].”

There is no scientific evidence that healthy habits such as humor can cure cancer or any other disease. It can reduce stress, promote health, and enhance the quality of life. Laughter has physiological effects that can stimulate the circulatory system, immune system, and other systems in the body.

Humor therapy is the use of humor or laughter for the relief of physical and emotional difficulties. It is used as a complementary tool to promote health and cope with disease, improve quality of life, provide some pain relief, encourage relaxation, and reduce stress. We have different types of humor. Passive humor is created by observing a comic film or reading a book. Humor production involves creating or finding humor in stressful situations. The physical effects of laughter on the body involve increased breathing, oxygen use, and heart rate, which stimulate the circulatory system. Many hospitals have incorporated special rooms where people with humorous materials, are there to help make people laugh. Laughter has many clinical benefits that include positive physiological changes and an overall sense of well-being.

Research has been done on the effects of humor on pain and stress relief. Laughter stimulates the release of special neurotransmitter substances in the brain that help control pain. Laughter increases stress-related hormones which provides support for the claim that humor can relieve stress.

Also, hypnosis helps to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression; manage pain; lower blood pressure; ease some of the side effects of chemotherapy; and create feelings in being in control.

“Physical exercise acts like a natural wonder drug for the brain; exercising is the single most important thing you can do to enhance brain function. It improves the heart’s ability to pump blood throughout the body, which increases blood flow to the brain. That supplies more oxygen, glucose and nutrients to the brain, which improves overall brain function. Research shows that exercise encourages the growth of new brain cells and enhances cognitive ability [2].

If you practice yoga, you will strengthen the immune system. The immune system is not a single, tangible part of the body like the lungs, heart, brain, or stomach. In one sense, the immune system includes all of the body’s parts and systems, being the interaction and union of all these systems. The goal of strengthening the immune system is to keep all the system working together, like working families in a large, healthy village. For example, if our bones are compromised from a break or osteoporosis, we will not be able produce new nourishing blood supply to feed our reproducing cells.

“Chemotherapy and other cancer treatments can compromise the immune system’s efficiency because they disrupt the development and balance of all cells, therefore stressing the body’s systems and increasing the risk of infection or other diseases. Specifically, treatments reduce white cells in the blood that are needed to form leukocytes, a natural immune protection. This is why it is so critical for active cancer patients to keep on “immune system alert”. Because yoga’s goal is to strengthen all body systems, the end product is an improved immune system [3].”

On the molecular level, we find further support that yoga boosts the immune system. Yoga causes an improvement in gene expression within lymphocytes, which are our cancer-fighting cells, often referred to as immune cells, that are being produced in our body all the time. Every yoga movement, position, or patterned breathing technique has one goal: to strengthen the immune system.

Yoga practice seeks to free the mind of negative thoughts and feelings about our bodies. Instead of looking into the mirror and making poor comparisons to magazine cover models, yoga teaches us how to turn the mirror around to find what is hidden on the inside. When we do something every day, even if it is a simple stretch, breathing exercise, or correcting our posture while walking down the street, we develop a healthier, more positive image of ourselves. Unfortunately, not everyone manages stress with the same success related to post-traumatic stress growth that requires self-discipline.

Blood purification is absolutely essential to keep “river of life” flowing and delivering nutrients and oxygen. “What makes ozone so special, in my view, is the way it merely catalyzes the delivery of oxygen, and ultimately energy, into the cells. Ozone stimulates the production of cytokines, or “messenger cells”, that set off a domino effect of positive energy changes throughout the immune system, delivering more oxygen to cells so they can perform the metabolic and detoxifying functions for which they’re designed [4].”

Interesting enough, Neil Schachter, M.D. is mentioning in his book particulate matter. “Doctors are particularly concerned about the very fine particle matter (less than 2.5 microns in diameter) that can be inhaled deeply into the airways. Studies throughout the world have linked “Particular Matter” to a range of serious health problems [5].”

During aerobic exercise, the body needs additional amounts of oxygen. The heart needs to pump more blood with each beat and with exercise it becomes more efficient. Doing this type of exercise allows muscle arteries to dilate so that more blood can be carried to the muscle. This makes it easier for the heart to move blood throughout the body, a change which also lowers blood pressure. All these factors assist the heart, allowing it to work better with less effort. For the lungs the most important benefits of aerobic exercise are that the muscles throughout the body become more efficient at absorbing oxygen from the blood. This means that the lungs do not have to work so hard to supply oxygen. With exercise, muscles can become more efficient and obtain more oxygen because of improved circulation. Increased oxygen levels provide more energy and relieve feelings of fatigue.

Chinese medical practitioner analyzes a patient’s energy, looking for signs of excess or deficiency, for indications that something is blocking energy flow, or for clues that there is an ambulance between the main types of energy in the body: the yin and the yang.

“The main underlying concept of Chinese medicine is qi (pronounced “chee”; also spelled chi). Qi is the fundamental life force that guides and controls all life processes, from breathing and the beating of the heart to digestion and sleep. Qi is produced by the metabolism of food and the intake of breath. Qi serves many functions throughout the body and exists in various types, such as protective qi and food qi. Too much or too little qi can lead to imbalance and illness, as can stagnation or blockage of qi [6].”

Ying and yang represent the primary opposing and counterbalancing forces that operate in the universe and, consequently, within each individual. Yin and yang are not merely opposites, like black and white. Instead, taken together, they represent a complete dynamic equilibrium, a constantly changing balance. Yin and yang are expressed in many ways hot and cold, inner and outer, moist and dry, dark and light, male and female. When there is a balance between the qualities of yin and yang, harmony and good health exist. If either becomes too predominant, then disharmony exists. Illness may result.

One yin quality is moisture. If too much is present, the body may experience edema (swelling) or diarrhea. But if dryness (yang) predominates, a person may experience dry mucous membranes, dry skin, or internal dryness leading to constipation. It isn’t a question which is better, yin or yang. Both are necessary. What’s important for good health is the balance between the two.

“As we move toward “Health, Happiness and Harmony”, we experience a greater sense of freedom in our lives” [7].

Asian body healing originated thousands of years ago in the villages and small communities in and around the countries of India, China, Japan and Korea. The actual techniques used began as instinctive responses to manifestations of imbalance in the body. The only tools they utilized were their senses. Each person they worked with represented a microcosmic manifestation of the macrocosmic world. Everyone was treated individually, even if they displayed the same outward indicators. Many aspects of a person’s lifestyle including diet, climate, exercise, type of work, family relations and ancestral influences were considered relevant in order to ensure successful therapy. For example, if two people suffered from fatigue and one lived in a cold area while the other came from a warmer island home, the methods utilized would have to be different for each of them.

After working with many people over thousands of years, certain observations were collected on how all the elements of the environment harmoniously interviewed and coexisted with each other. Eventually, they were able to describe how the ever-changing forces of nature influenced the human body. This system was based on heaven’s force originating from the constellations, interacting with the forces emanating from the earth: yin and yang.

We can supercharge our immune system to protect our bodies against disease – everything from the common cold to cancer. “Super immunity can be best defined as the body’s immune system working into its fullest potential. Modern science has advanced to the point where we have evidence that the right raw materials and nutritional factors can double or triple the protective power of the immune system. If you learn to fill every cell receptor lock with the right nutrient key and meet the demands of each cell, the body’s defenses take on superhero qualities – and you will hardly ever get sick again. More important, this change from average immunity to Super Immunity can save your life [8].”

Smoothies are the quickest and easiest way to incorporate a variety illness fighting nutrients into your diet. The drinks are rich in phytoestrogens from the soy and contain abundant amounts of antioxidants from the fruits and fruit juices.

Excellent source of beta-carotene and vitamin C are apricots and mangos. Place the banana, mango, orange juice, and soy yogurt in a blender. Blend ingredients until they are smooth. Antioxidant-rich beverage is smoothie made of kiwi, mango, apple juice and silken tofu. Smoothie made of mango, carrots, soy yogurt and orange juice are very rich source of beta-carotene.

“The brain is a beautiful thing. It’s deeply complex and intricate with so many neural pathways that it’s hard to know exactly which electrical impulses are being fired from where. Remember that you are the master of your mind. Know that you can and will accomplish all that you set out to do if you just believe that you can do it [9].”

To read more about this article: https://irispublishers.com/ojcam/fulltext/integrative-approach.ID.000612.php

Indexing List of Iris Publishers: https://medium.com/@irispublishers/what-is-the-indexing-list-of-iris-publishers-4ace353e4eee

Iris publishers google scholar citations:

https://scholar.google.co.in/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=irispublishers&btnG=

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

If scientific discoveries and technological developments split humankind into a mass of useless humans and a small elite of upgraded superhumans, or if authority shifts altogether away from human beings into the hands of highly intelligent algorithms, then liberalism will collapse. What new religions or ideologies might fill the resulting vacuum and guide the subsequent evolution of our godlike descendants?

The new religions are unlikely to emerge from the caves of Afghanistan or from the madrasas of the Middle East. Rather, they will emerge from research laboratories. Just as socialism took over the world by promising salvation through steam and electricity, so in the coming decades new techno-religions may conquer the world by promising salvation through algorithms and genes.

Despite all the talk of radical Islam and Christian fundamentalism, the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Islamic State or the Bible Belt, but Silicon Valley. That’s where hi-tech gurus are brewing for us brave new religions that have little to do with God, and everything to do with technology. They promise all the old prizes – happiness, peace, prosperity and even eternal life – but here on earth with the help of technology, rather than after death with the help of celestial beings.

These new techno-religions can be divided into two main types: techno-humanism and data religion. Techno-humanism agrees that Homo sapiens as we know it has run its historical course and will no longer be relevant in the future, but concludes that we should therefore use technology in order to create Homo deus – a much superior human model. Homo deus will retain some essential human features, but will also enjoy upgraded physical and mental abilities that will enable it to hold its own even against the most sophisticated non-conscious algorithms. Since intelligence is decoupling from consciousness, and since non-conscious intelligence is developing at breakneck speed, humans must actively upgrade their minds if they want to stay in the game.

Dataism says that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing. This may strike you as some eccentric fringe notion, but in fact it has already conquered most of the scientific establishment. Dataism was born from the explosive confluence of two scientific tidal waves. In the 150 years since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the life sciences have come to see organisms as biochemical algorithms. Simultaneously, in the eight decades since Alan Turing formulated the idea of a Turing Machine, computer scientists have learned to engineer increasingly sophisticated electronic algorithms. Dataism puts the two together, pointing out that exactly the same mathematical laws apply to both biochemical and electronic algorithms. Dataism thereby collapses the barrier between animals and machines, and expects electronic algorithms to eventually decipher and outperform biochemical algorithms.

For politicians, business people and ordinary consumers, Dataism offers groundbreaking technologies and immense new powers. For scholars and intellectuals it also promises to provide the scientific holy grail that has eluded us for centuries: a single overarching theory that unifies all the scientific disciplines from literature and musicology to economics and biology. According to Dataism, King Lear and the flu virus are just two patterns of data flow that can be analysed using the same basic concepts and tools. This idea is extremely attractive. It gives all scientists a common language, builds bridges over academic rifts and easily exports insights across disciplinary borders. Musicologists, political scientists and cell biologists can finally understand each other.

In the process, Dataism inverts the traditional pyramid of learning. Hitherto, data was seen as only the first step in a long chain of intellectual activity. Humans were supposed to distil data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. However, Dataists believe that humans can no longer cope with the immense flows of data, hence they cannot distil data into information, let alone into knowledge or wisdom. The work of processing data should therefore be entrusted to electronic algorithms, whose capacity far exceeds that of the human brain. In practice, this means that Dataists are sceptical about human knowledge and wisdom, and prefer to put their trust in Big Data and computer algorithms.

Dataism is most firmly entrenched in its two mother disciplines: computer science and biology. Of the two, biology is the more important. It was the biological embracement of Dataism that turned a limited breakthrough in computer science into a world-shattering cataclysm that may completely transform the very nature of life. You may not agree with the idea that organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data. But you should know that this is current scientific dogma, and that it is changing our world beyond recognition.

Not only individual organisms are seen today as data-processing systems, but also entire societies such as beehives, bacteria colonies, forests and human cities. Economists increasingly interpret the economy, too, as a data-processing system. Laypeople believe that the economy consists of peasants growing wheat, workers manufacturing clothes, and customers buying bread and underpants. Yet experts see the economy as a mechanism for gathering data about desires and abilities, and turning this data into decisions.

According to this view, free-market capitalism and state-controlled communism aren’t competing ideologies, ethical creeds or political institutions. At bottom, they are competing data-processing systems. Capitalism uses distributed processing, whereas communism relies on centralised processing.

Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological changes. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, you can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but you won’t get an Apple or a Wikipedia.

There is a story (probably apocryphal, like most good stories) that when Mikhail Gorbachev tried to resuscitate the moribund Soviet economy, he sent one of his chief aids to London to find out what Thatcherism was all about, and how a capitalist system actually functioned. The hosts took their Soviet visitor on a tour of the City, of the London stock exchange and of the London School of Economics, where he had lengthy talks with bank managers, entrepreneurs and professors. After a few hours, the Soviet expert burst out: ‘Just one moment, please. Forget about all these complicated economic theories. We have been going back and forth across London for a whole day now, and there’s one thing I cannot understand. Back in Moscow, our finest minds are working on the bread supply system, and yet there are such long queues in every bakery and grocery store. Here in London live millions of people, and we have passed today in front of many shops and supermarkets, yet I haven’t seen a single bread queue. Please take me to meet the person in charge of supplying bread to London. I must learn his secret.’ The hosts scratched their heads, thought for a moment, and said: ‘Nobody is in charge of supplying bread to London.’

That’s the capitalist secret of success. No central processing unit monopolises all the data on the London bread supply. The information flows freely between millions of consumers and producers, bakers and tycoons, farmers and scientists. Market forces determine the price of bread, the number of loaves baked each day and the research-and-development priorities. If market forces make the wrong decision, they soon correct themselves, or so capitalists believe. For our current purposes, it doesn’t matter whether the theory is correct. The crucial thing is that the theory understands economics in terms of data processing.

[…] Dataism naturally has its critics and heretics. As we saw in Chapter 3, it’s doubtful whether life can really be reduced to data flows. In particular, at present we have no idea how or why data flows could produce consciousness and subjective experiences. Maybe we’ll have a good explanation in twenty years. But maybe we’ll discover that organisms aren’t algorithms after all.

It is equally doubtful whether life boils down to decision-making. Under Dataist influence, both the life sciences and the social sciences have become obsessed with decision-making processes, as if that’s all there is to life. But is it so? Sensations, emotions and thoughts certainly play an important part in making decisions, but is that their sole meaning? Dataism gains a better and better understanding of decision-making processes, but it might be adopting an increasingly skewed view of life.

[…] Of course, even if Dataism is wrong and organisms aren’t just algorithms, it won’t necessarily prevent Dataism from taking over the world. Many previous religions gained enormous popularity and power despite their factual mistakes. If Christianity and communism could do it, why not Dataism? Dataism has especially good prospects, because it is currently spreading across all scientific disciplines. A unified scientific paradigm may easily become an unassailable dogma. It is very difficult to contest a scientific paradigm, but up till now, no single paradigm was adopted by the entire scientific establishment. Hence scholars in one field could always import heretical views from outside. But if everyone from musicologists to biologists uses the same Dataist paradigm, interdisciplinary excursions will serve only to strengthen the paradigm further. Consequently even if the paradigm is flawed, it would be extremely difficult to resist it.

- Yuval Noah Harari, The Data Religion in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

[scifigeneration]

What if we ran society not based on the market but on evidence?

by Spyros Samothrakis

Will it soon be possible to draw a blueprint of our future society? Viktoriya/Shutterstock.com

Following the successful Brexit campaign, Dominic Cummings – the then campaign director of Vote Leave – published a series of blog posts describing how the campaign was run and what his plans were for a successful civil service. The last of these posts was released on June 26 2019, just before he became the special advisor to the current prime minister, Boris Johnson. The idea this post resurrects is a promise in public policy that has died since the 1970s – the use of hard scientific (knowledge-based) methods to guide policy choices.

In what looks like to be Cumming’s version of public policy, an elite group of administrators trained in the disciplines of pure thought – mathematicians and philosophers – would run society based on evidence. Collected data points would be used to create a machine simulation (often called the model). Policy makers would then be able to test the simulations with hypothetical policies (“what if drugs were legal?”) and, according to the results, adjust public policy.

A complete cybernetic version of economic policy was advocated, but not practised, in the Soviet Union by the likes of nobel-prize winning economist Leonid Kantorovich and mathematician and computer scientist Victor Glushkov. They hypothesised the possibility of taking things a step further – getting the machines to identify what actions to take to reach optimal outcomes. That is, policy makers would need to decide what they are looking to achieve (“maximise the production of butter”) and machines would come up with the the policy of how to allocate resources to achieve this.

Outside the Soviet Union, this kind of thinking was actually enacted with Project Cybersyn, an effort put together by management consultant Stafford Beer in the 1970s for the government of Chile under the then president, Salvador Allende to help manage the economy (the project was dismantled following the coup by General Augusto Pinochet).

Though Cybersyn was never fully operational, it was rushed into use so as to help break one of the biggest anti-government strikes, which was instigated by a right-wing union. Beer’s vision is far more decentralised and democratic than its Soviet counterpart, but it still falls within the same line of thought.

As you will have gauged by now, the cybernetic vision tends to be securely located on the left of the political spectrum.

The market

Sitting on the opposite side of the cybernetic vision, one will find the fathers of modern liberal economics, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. Their arguments, taken more broadly, consider the cybernetic dream impossible from a computational perspective, either due to not being able to model the world efficiently, or not having appropriate signals to evaluate the quality of solutions.

They argued that another mechanism that exists inside the real world (in their case, the market) needs to do the heavy lifting, by providing a signal – which, in the case of goods and services, is prices. For them, a good policy is not one that lays out what steps need to be taken towards a solution, but focuses more on setting a “game” of sorts with the right incentives and punishments. This basically just leaves room for one real public policy which can be summed up as “privatise everything, create a competitive arena, let the market sort the problems out”.

Leaving all real policy decisions to the market has been a very traditional (post-1980s at least) right-wing idea. This raises the question as to why someone advising the current UK government is even discussing concepts that are not purely market-driven. In his latest post, Cummings laments the inability of the British state to do serious modelling. This seems a superb contradiction – shouldn’t the market be able to solve everything?

It is worth mentioning that conceptions of planning methods differ a lot across individual thinkers – there are even advocates of socialist markets on the left. Though there is a clear left-right divide, in terms of actual party politics it seems that the idea of some planning has been partially accepted (somewhat grudgingly) by the historical right for some time.

Market signals. Tony Stock/Shutterstock.com

AI and public policy

So, does the progress in AI and (the concurrent) massive increase in computational power and availability of data allow us to circumvent the liberal arguments? I would say yes, but only partially. One can easily envision a solution where the latest AI methods are used to affect policy directly. It’s quite plausible that one could plan and re-plan millions of products and services on a daily basis, find the optimal set of actions to help tackle social ills and generally push for an overall brighter future.

This isn’t, however, trivial – delivering causal models to drive simulations is extremely hard, requires significant expertise, and can only be done in a limited capacity. On top of this, current AI methods lack a concept of “common sense”. A model created with a specific task in mind might be able to optimise for said task, but is prone to generating unwanted side effects. For example, an AI-optimised factory that aims to optimise production will do so without care for the environment.

But the mother of all problems in AI is that a lot of the more modern probabilistic planning algorithms are not stable without excessive human tuning, due to a number of reasons that are beyond the scope of this article. In practice, this means that outside straightforward, traditional planning (such as linear programming), getting value from modern AI requires significant human expertise. At the moment this sits mostly within private AI research labs and some university departments. Any serious attempt to create a cybernetic state would need both significant human resources to be moved towards the project and some further algorithmic breakthroughs.

Unfortunately, current AI deployments in public policy do not adhere to the ideas above. It seems that AI is mostly deployed only for simple predictive tasks (“will person X will commit crime Y in the future?”). For this reason, public bodies are finding this technology increasingly useless. But technological innovations almost always experience a series of failures before they find their pace, so hopefully AI will eventually be implemented properly.

Back to Brexit

What does Brexit have to do with any of this? My understanding is that Brexit (according to Cummings) is needed in order to help disrupt the civil service enough so as to allow it to be rebuilt. It would then be possible to deploy serious AI public policy solutions (which is another name for scientific planning). So the British state would be deploying projects that can model the future, with machines or civil servants probing the model for golden paths.

What is truly surprising, in my view, is that such proposals don’t come from the broad political left (though there are, of course, extremely interesting takes on the topic of scientific planning) – but from the right. This might imply the use of AI to hasten the free-market agenda by asking questions like “what is the best propaganda to produce in order to get everyone on board with increasing state pension age to 95, privatising every public service and getting people to accept a ban on immigration?”.

All this AI talk might be a red herring – the more traditional right-wing Brexit party policies are simply an intensification of a deregulation agenda, though again the signals are mixed. Alternatively, it might be the case that there is a split between One Nation Conservatives and free marketeers across the board.

It’s hard to imagine the EU allowing for direct planning (it goes against most of the principles of the internal market), but it’s equally hard to envision post-Brexit Britain doing the same. Most institutions see the market as the only legitimate form of organisation.

But some cracks in the consensus seem to be appearing. Perhaps we may end up in a position where actively planning using AI towards a “good society” is actively pursued.

About The Author:

Spyros Samothrakis is a Lecturer in Analytics and Data Science at the University of Essex

This article is republished from our content partners over at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[prairiedust]

The Folkloristics of Supernatural

So. Something interesting is happening in Season 14. I suspected that it was coming when they revealed in 12 that Jack’s name would be Jack. Jack as in “the Giant Killer” Jack. Jack like “Jack Tales.” Jack from all of the “Jack and the Devil” stories. This Jack. But Dabb is running a long mytharc, so last season was the set-up for this season-- priming the pump, if you will, for what the writers are doing now, and it came to fruition in the first few episodes.

As I said before, we got a hint of this theme in Jack’s name as well as in the way the season wrapped up with grieving Dean and Dead!Cas mirroring the last scene of despairing Cas and Possessed!Dean. Folklore brings with it the other thematic elements we’ve seen so far-- mirrors (oh my god the mirrors,) recursion and repetition, callbacks, sleep, and sleep-like death.

But why folklore *in particular*? And how is “folklore” as a theme in seasons 13 and 14 any different from the fact that this is a show *based* on folk tales?

This season, the writers are not only telling stories drawn from folklore, they are using folklore and folkloristics (the academic discipline) as a theme.

Andrew Dabb wrote a formulaic tale into the premiere, and I flipped my lid. A formula tale is one that relies on a set structure, such as the tale of Henny Penny, The Little Red Hen, or the Fisherman and his Wife, where challenges or episodes are repeated over and over until all the possibilities are exhausted or something breaks the chain. The story of Michael’s quest is a tale that relies on formula as well as on the structure of a “rule of three,” or two challenges that fail and one that succeeds. He asked a human and an angel what they wanted, before finding a monster whose desires he considered purest. Compare that structure to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, or The Three Little Pigs. I have a much more in-depth analysis of the “rule of three” that I will post later. This and other “folklore” elements in the next three episodes established this as an official “Thing on the Show.”

For now and for those of you new to the idea of the study of folklore, I’ll summarize the history of the academic discipline of folkloristics.

More than six hundred years ago, in post-Renaissance Europe, concerned scholars and bored aristocrats started doing something strange.

They started collecting folk stories from the lower classes.

This was strange because the disdain that the “upper class” (which included not just nobility and gentry but clergy and those squirrely scholars as well) felt for the emerging middle class and the peasantry can not be overstated. But perhaps because they were fascinated with that which they looked down upon, many learned men and women during the Age of Enlightenment began to study folkways and oral tales.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, “fairy tales,” “wonder tales,” “Märchen,” and “Mother Goose” stories lit up courts (and later salons) all over Europe. People recorded them from a handy peasant, wrote them down with a judicious application of upper-class refinements, and later crafted original stories inspired by them. There are works that were preserved from an oral version, like Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” (which is based on a Neapolitan folk tale but is considered a literary work rather than a transcription and if you read a faithful translation you’d get why that is, he very much polished it with literary allusions and asides) as well as those found in Grimms’ first edition (1812) of collected oral stories which included the bloody version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” then there are folk tales that were cleaned up and sanitized for your comfort, like every Grimm edition since that one, ha ha, and at last there are “literary” fairy tales, or stories that are “original content” but were constructed on a folkish scaffolding like, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” and Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose.” Authors still use fairy tales to inform and inspire-- Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling edited several anthologies of contemporary fairy tales or retellings of old tales by modern authors, beginning with Snow White, Rose Red in 1993 and ending in 2000 with Black Heart, Ivory Bones which, if you enjoy trope subversion and walking around for days bearing a lingering sense of disquiet, are seriously worth reading.

While the Grimms’ work in collecting German folk tales is considered the “watershed” moment for European folk studies (the Chinese, in contrast, have been archiving oral poetry and stories for thousands of years and Arab Muslim scholars may have started collecting folk tales as early as the 10th century CE,) it wasn’t until about a hundred years had passed from the Grimms’ first publication that the discipline took a distinctly scientific turn.

In 1910, a Finnish folklorist named Artti Aarne published a work entitled ‘Verzeichnis der Märchentypen,” or “Types of Folktales.” He had analyzed his own extensive collection of Scandinavian folk stories and realized that these tales often shared the same plots and elements—helpful animals, daring rescues, clever wives, and more-- albeit in different configurations. He broke the stories down to their essential components-- decoded their DNA, if you will-- and asserted that these story elements were used like beads on a string to construct a myriad of tales. He called these elements “Motive,” or motifs. In 1960, an American anthropologist named Stith Thompson translated Aarne’s work from the German and expanded upon it to include stories from a broader European sampling as well as Native American traditions. This became known as the Aarne-Thompson Motif Index. It is one cog in a larger academic movement during the 50’s and 60’s wherein researchers of all stripes endeavored to unearth the earliest roots of mankind—from the search for fossils of the earliest hominids, to tracing the very first languages, to reconstituting the ur-myths that shaped human culture. Academics and field researchers were determined to pinpoint the moment in time when we became more than just a bipedal primate (if we ever even have.) The Index revolutionized folkloristics as anthropologists and other scholars realized that they could trace these story motifs through time and across geography the way linguists were already doing with sounds and words to compile Proto-Indo-European, the language of Neolithic humans who settled India and Europe, and how geneticists today can trace human migrations out of Africa by studying human genomes.

The Index is a taxonomic classification system, like meteorology or the Dewey Decimal System. There are twenty-six parent categories, with subcategories and more subcategories. The Motif Index is organized alphabetically from A-Mythological Motifs (like creation myths) to Z-Miscellaneous Motifs (such as “Z210: Brothers as Heroes.”) There is an adjacent Index of Tale Types, as well, which works similarly. In the Tale Types Index, for instance, “Tales of Magic” comprise subcategories 300 to 799; one subcategory in “Tales of Magic” is “Supernatural or Enchanted Relatives,” which covers tale types 400-459. Tale type number AT 410 is “Sleeping Beauty.” The Basile tale “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” “Sleeping Beauty in the Woods” by Charles Perrault, as well as Grimms’ “Little Briar Rose” fall under this category. The two indices operate in tandem-- for instance, the Basile story and the tale collected by the Grimm brothers are the same kind of story, but they have unique motifs. Both Perrault’s princess and the German Briar Rose are the subjects of a dire prophecy-- motif M340-- and fall into a magic sleep, which is motif D1960. Other motifs are not shared among all three stories, like cannibalism. Yeah, that story is buck wild once you go back a few generations.

Anyway, in 2004, the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index was once again revised, this time by German scholar Hans-Jörg Uther, in an attempt to make the index more inclusive of other global folk traditions, and it was renamed the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folktales.

The quest to uncover the proto-stories of our ancestors continues in this very decade in the work of Julien d’Huy, who uses computer modeling to make “phylogenetic maps” of stories from around the globe. He can then create diagrams of a universal story-- for instance the “Cosmic Hunt” (D’Huy 2014).

You can also see the concept of the AT motif index in computer-generated novels and scripts, which are “written” by AIs who have ingested and digested and then assimilated whatever weird-ass shit their creators feed it and from that we get gems like “There is more Italy than necessary” from an AI-scripted Olive-Garden commercial.

The website TV Tropes works very much like the motif index, although in a much less taxonomic fashion—for instance, one trope they describe is “Room Full of Crazy,” a “motif” if you will that tv writers often use as a way of indicating quickly to the audience that a character is off their rocker (or at least obsessive to the point of near-insanity) by showing them writing or drawing something over and over in a notebook, on their bodies, on walls, etc. Supernatural used this recently to let us know how very messed up Gabriel was after his time with Assmodeus in season 13 “Bring ‘Em Back Alive.”

But it is important to remember that Kripke has used this exact trope before, in “I Know What You Did Last Summer” to let us know that Anna was having visions and hearing what would later be known as “Angel Radio.”

To some extent, Room Full of Crazy was also used all the way back in season one in “Dead in the Water” to represent the little boy’s repressed trauma.

The repetition of tropes (or callbacks) that have already been used earlier in the series is another signal that telegraphed this shift into the realm of folk tales and mythology in a thematic sense.

Yes, Supernatural has always been about folk tales and myth. Native American stories like that of the wendigo, urban folklore like the story of the hook man and other perils of “parking,” shtrigas, skinwalkers, etc, have served as both monsters-of-the-week and Big Bads. The premise of the show draws, pishtaco-like, from world stories to survive. But we’re going to dig down and find not just the fairy tales of season 14, but the tale types and the motifs and discover what this kind of focused close-reading can tell us about this season’s values.

Lots of people point out that the Index is dry and strips away so much that you could literally tell a story just by listing the motifs in order (this comment from my folklore prof many, many years ago when we got into the motif index in class.) But that is not at all how the originators intended the index to be used. If anything, as evidenced by the “phenogenetic” tale typing of d’Huy, the presence of a folktale motif is more powerful than any literary allusion or pop-culture reference. If you realize that you’re watching a story that involves a “beat the Devil” premise, and you’ve read some of those tales, they should all light up like a constellation in your memory. You might even mentally replay the electric guitar riff from Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” When we learned that the nephilim was going to be named Jack, and that his mother was hanging all of her hopes on him, you may have subconsciously thought of Jack and the Beanstalk or other Jack tales and made a prediction about the kind of story that we might see Jack feature in*. All the protagonists, all the challenges, all the outcomes of those stories will spread like beacons across a plain-- which is what comparative literature is all about in the first place. It is less about reducing a story to its DNA and more about finding that story’s family tree. And writers like Jane Yolen and the aforementioned Datlow and Windling use these bits of stories to write new ones. Oh and writers like Mr. Andrew Dabb, who used a most familiar formula (to his American audience at least) to start out the season. It’s wild, y’all.

So welcome to the folkloristics of Supernatural. As my favorite professor used to say, are there any thoughts, questions, miscellaneous abuse? My asks are open.

Here’s to a fantastic mideseason.

*allusion is not allegory, meaning you bring in an allusion to another text for depth; if you want to retell the story of Jesus and Christianity you write the Narnia Chronicles. However. Just because Jack was not the one to kill Lucifer does not mean Lucifer’s death was not foretold… the point of retelling these stories in a literary setting is to find the other values that the story can reveal, or to take a trope and twist it to reveal something that had not previously been considered.

Caveat: I’m NOT a prophet. None of us meta writers are. Nothing is stopping anyone involved in the show from making a decision that runs contrary to the story’s architecture, and it’s even been done before. I even have a post about trying to predict from the subtext or even text of a serial publication, like a tv series, that I’ll fit into this series. But anyway, use these posts to “prove” that destiel will be going canon at your own peril. And also I won’t be focusing only on “destiel” subtext. There’s stuff in these episodes for everyone, it’s chock full o’ nuts.

ALSO I have been deliberately staying away from a lot of meta while I compiled this, so if there’s more going on along these lines please feel free to tag me in :)

[foolishmeowing]

Introduction to Time and Qualia in a Cruelly Pluralistic Reality

Scattered across a couple years of posting, I've been leaving notes on an interpretation of reality designed to either resolve or clarify a number of outstanding metaphysical problems, especially regarding qualia, time, and causality -- fundamental cosmological issues which at this point tend to invoke defeat, fear, desperation, and dismissal due to the difficulties involved in a topic which upsets the foundations of the language used to discuss it, the amount of effort already spent to reach this point, and the lack of engineering applications which might entice people to study, say, M-theory to any equivalent level of difficulty. Nevertheless, the world, anomalously, exists, and that validates metaphysics as a real line of questioning.

What this post is going to attempt to do is write as clear of an outline as I can of the anomalies I've been covering, given my lack of polished essaying experience. I will try to consolidate my synonyms and place them together naturally, with some bolding. These terms come from a mixture of continental, analytical, and classic sources, as well as natural word-pairings. They may differ from the same phrase used elsewhere; This is normal in philosophy, as it is a sparsely populated field which mutates quickly from point to point, and modern analytical departments only just began the task of indexing known options a couple generations ago. “Horizon” mutates with with every flicker of an ontologist’s coping mechanisms. To limit space and executive function, many present and historical alternatives to the systems as presented will be glossed over. Many (especially formal properties bound within their scope) can be adjusted without breaking core points. Some are incompatible with core points, and may be considered disproven, too narrow to account for evidence, or in need of attention. One reaches a point where there are many valid paths, and the only way forward is to take your torch down a long path. Because this is a slightly reader-friendly outline, arguments won't appear in as full form as they do elsewhere or upon request, so the phrasing is somewhat prescriptive. I hope it's clear enough that it might make sense without a metaphysics background after a few attempts; It’s literally a one-draft infodump.

Ontology is the study of what it means "to be." Its problems are cosmological on a scale which sets the context for causality, and are not limited to the grammatical properties of "being," though that is a primary starting-point for study. Ontology is usually only understood publicly in terms of the behavior of formal properties, which are traits which exist as regions in a world built out of relations between such parts, such that the properties of some parts make the relations defining the other parts necessary restrictions according to the common behavior of the whole pattern. Scientific laws, math, and language when it's being used to behave as if grammatical rules were the primary source of meaning, are examples of theoretical formal properties. There are many different ways of interpreting meanings in these disciplines according to the basic rules we build models on, but they converge in an attempt to describe properties in as purely logical terms as can be done, within human limitations. Theoretical properties, however, are abstractions made by cognition, and cognition is a process which results from the ground of the very causes which we are attempting to study. By being a product of how causality comes to give us physical consistency in general, the many ways of modeling basic formal laws aim to trace over truths about real formal properties.

Chemical and biological properties emerge from physical properties. If you wrinkle some common subatomic particles out of spacetime, the way they fluctuate about tends to pool them into blobs of common stable patterns called atoms, which are shorthand for small and complicated processes which tend to fall into a reliable larger-scale property. Parts of human intuition and scientific methods like to understand the world in a way that makes all properties of any kind that exist in any way be the consequence of a series of more complicated patterns emerging and pushing against each other around a simple universal property, objectivity, as if the fact of the world being logical were a thing in itself, a monad, which is something so elementary that it doesn't contain specific parts, and can't be said to change because it exists in a way that lacks the context for how we understand change, but we still say it does exist by tracing the properties of the physical world as obeying a common logical symmetry which validates the causes and consequences we find. This kind of monad transcends formal reality as a universal. Physical events are instances of objectivity. The difference between an instance and a universal is an ontological difference, which is a difference so fundamental that it refers to different entire kinds of way that something can be said "to be." Because grammar is a formal theory, the way "being" normally behaves in a sentence reflects the way instantiated objective events exist, but grammar is a loose description after a wet and tangled system shaped to endure constant mutation and error, and we can recognize deep differences and point towards anything we can get ourselves to think, even if we're in a world which doesn't restrict itself to formal patterns. We can recognize a different kind of reality for a transcendent property by seeing its effects, in this case the universal fact of any physical event to follow logical causal patterns.

Physical science makes models of physical properties by modeling the logic of causality, the pattern of necessity among formal events according to their unfolding from a core property of symmetry. There exist incompatible theories of logic which nonetheless reveal common patterns of objective behavior, convergently suggesting but not proving truths about how real formal properties work. For the past hundred years, we've worked largely with axiomatic set theory, where a variable handful of basic ideas about how to include or exclude objects from being organized into groups (x = x becomes explicit) simulates a starting point for emergence which doesn't behave like a monad at its core, but achieves a similar process of emergence-relations. Once a set theory is started, you can unfold principles where "the set of all sets containing x, y, and z, where x, y, and z are not each other, is The Number Three" (the way of constructing numbers differs according to the axioms used in a set theory, but nothing alters the nature of formal properties as being a network of logical tension), create a whole mathematical system, and express physical patterns you find in its terms. The relation between objectivity and formal events, or between starting axioms and more complex physical laws, is called ontological priority. In ontological monism, such as materialistic monism (physical monism really, but few people adhere to Aristotelian matter), a universal property is said to come "before," in a special ontological sense outside the context of spacetime, anything which is an instance of it. Many monistic ontologies exist, and they are not always physical or even formal. Many forms of monotheism are often, but not always, ontologically monistic, though it is normal for everyone to have special theological techniques for describing how divinity might escape even the concept of a center of being. There are also approaches to formal properties which do not use the mathematical Platonism of the transcendent monad, though I haven't seen them differentiate themselves very thoroughly, and because I am breaking from monism anyway, and they're designed to result in similar models of physics, they won't affect much here.

On its own, this kind of Platonic monism can make working models of physics, but it doesn't provide a full cosmology. Instantiation describes the relation between events and the universal principle which transcends them, but it doesn't describe why the unchanging and prior symmetry principle would have sufficient reason to be encircled by a complex pattern which can be divided into particulars. It fulfills needs following some observations, but there is nothing to make a secondary reality which obeys it necessary. It also only describes formal properties, and we can observe properties that cannot be formal, which is the source of most of the difficulty concerning consciousness, time, and being. Although the Platonic instantiation model of form can be replaced without disrupting other parts of my ontology, my break into pluralism allows additional support for the leeching a formal realm out of a formal monad.

There are other kinds of ontological difference, and because they come from ways of existing more basic than any purely logical system's range of meaningful effects, every ontological difference must be painfully understood in its own case. Outside of forms of monism, ontological differences push the limit of what might ever be described, as they don't interact according to their different identities unfolding from a common point, nor do they behave like one has ontological priority; They entangle as a secondary effect which must be investigated according to its property of accessing them, which will make more sense when I get to the example which causes this problem (qualia). First, I have to specify the formal aspect of time, which gets spiffy in pluralism. Ontological priority is an example of time distinct from spacetime, and because "time" refers to changes or differences which are distinct according to the direction they are traced or produced, any ontological difference found will play into a fuller interpretation of time. Some aspects escape our being, such as the succession of priorities, but some entangle us in the pluralistic confusion, such as the qualia problem. These lead to confusing questions about a "moving present" when issues that arise over ontological divisions are confused for patterns entirely within formal time, and sometimes become dismissed as linguistic quirks, though they don't behave as arbitrarily as "spandrels" should.

Physical reality has a version of time which behaves like space in that it's an expression of formal properties distinguished only by its particular shape. Formal time is a dimension in spacetime relative to a given entity, also called "entropic time," because "entropy" is the name of the texture which makes following one direction in time appear different from going in the other even though the world tends toward balance. Entropy is the tendency of things jostling around arbitrarily to go from a state we interpret as orderly to disorderly, because we interpret orderliness according to how something fits a shape meant to behave a specific way, and most ways something can change randomly will leave that ideal. Once something decays, the details of its form lose their value; It is more of a general resource to be recycled or disposed of, and this holds true down to the specific thermodynamic definitions of entropy as available energy being dispersed into ambient heat. At our scale we find ourselves in a world where things fall and shatter but don't jump up and bond, and even in biological evolution, where statistical effects are creating lines of tightly organized patterns -- life -- the net entropic effect of the planet absorbing sunlight into temporary structures which decay into scraps and heat keeps the same pattern of decreasing order on the large scale. Time in this sense measures how many events are "computed," so to speak, by reality when you trace a line, and like space essentially measures the increasing mathematical complexity of possible truths as "distance." Why we live in a world where spacetime is warped into this shape instead of something flatter follows the anthropic principle, where local spacetime holding the shape where simple formal properties have an opportunity to shuffle into the cognitive processes of complex organisms assessing their environments. If there are much vaster expanses of more probable shapes of emptiness further from familiar spacetime, they are lacking in processes such as becoming bored of those regions. This kind of awareness, of the proposition of the self and the environment as formal objects in a causal system as understood by a thought process built from that system, is sometimes called "consciousness," as in "being conscious that you're an animal," but propositional consciousness is different from the properties we focus on in phenomenology, which are now popularly known as qualia. This is where things get hard.

The mind-body problem is old as balls, probably older, but it has mutated drastically over history. Before modern psychology, and for that matter modern mathematics and ontology, our professionals had some messy models of causality with the laws of motion separated from "inherent" properties of chemicals and the like, and the phrase "mind-body dualism" still provokes an outdated picture where psychological properties of a person's thought processes were opposed to the physical properties of a body, and an undefined "free will" may have been on the mental side along with qualia. In modern philosophy, psychology is understood as emerging from biology and thus being a specific pattern in formal reality as a whole, along with the physical body. Psychology deals with behavior and cognition, and cognition is thinking in the sense of a chain of formal causes, which in the case of animal brains includes moldable systems which can turn bits of information into proposition-like patterns reflecting outside events according to the limitations of the causes which shape the system. What this means is that propositional consciousness is only formal awareness; The psychological objects in question are, as with anything physical, built out of the necessities of their relation to other objects in an ongoing network of relations, of a whole universe holding its force between its parts according to the symmetry of objectivity.

This is important, because there are "mental" properties which are not formal, and thus aren't psychological, but whose differing nature reveals them despite the strangeness which grows as one investigates. The conundrum they create is not a new one, being clearly specified at the start of modernity, having a longer history of study in Indian philosophy, and sometimes appearing with minimal differentiation in the Western classics. While their presence was never lacking and their incongruities sometimes apparent, though lost in eras when every theory came in floating fragments, their ontological importance is revealed especially by a strong grasp of the formal properties of reality, which must be understood as pervading reality as thoroughly as we do among the common ontology of physical sciences and the behavior of competing theoretical formal systems gaining traction on formal reality. We study the convergence of possible formal theories and estimate the nature of objectivity itself. We see the common structure of parts making necessary and possible facts about other parts. We desire consistency, and hone in on it. Our skill of memory, not only a collection of representations but also the marks made on us in general, relate to the probabilities of facts in the direction of the entropic past, while other parts of our thought bear the mark of patterns more and more likely to predict facts in any direction. Objective reality reveals itself only by its capacity to relate logically-imitable forms, though of course any given instance can provide barriers to available clues or skills.

Qualia are sensations in the sense of their actual, colorful presence. This doesn't just refer to sight, sound, et cetera, but also the sensation of thoughts moving and pressuring one another, or how recognizing a picture as a duck or a rabbit not only comes with pseudo-knowledge of what it is, but shifts the experience in a way that has sensual presence. The key to defining qualia is their immediate presence in live first-person experience, as qualities which are known by the uniqueness of their very presence. Qualia as such cannot be "hallucinations of qualia," because they are the presence of feeling itself, rather than the facts these qualities are interpreted as reflecting about the objective world of networked causes. It is true that qualia will change in line with the formal objects (brain signals in our case) they trace, but their obedience in undergoing the unique changes they embody according to the changes one follows along in formal reality is not a fact which provides any structural basis for a property to be a quality of substantial presence. The embodiment of the unique selfsame quality necessary to complete the meaning its own being as a presence is alien to formal existence; We relate it to the formal causality it traces, but presence-of-color isn't a property of a system of logical forces.

No theoretical formal system can make even a simplified model of this kind of presence, but they can show part of its disobedience without touching its actual ground. In math, the objects you study are relations among logical necessities, facts about how logical consequences in general would behave in a given formal situation, with errors according to how badly core axioms simulate the instantiation of objective events from the objectivity principle. The reality mathematical models trace is the relation of formal instances in general to the universal objectivity principle, and models of physical situations exist as specifics entirely within the range of possible mathematical facts, as is the behavior of emerging instances of a universal, and formal reality is observed to behave in a manner parallel to the essentials endpoints by which theoretical formal systems make or break themselves. Formal things exist by the tension of being a part of a whole, but there existence is made only in the tension itself; Even a complex instance has no substance, only necessity. When you write 1 + 2 + 3 = 6, both sides of the equation refer to the same universal situation (which is the aspect of any formal event in which a property will include the objects {a, b, c, d, e, f} where none are the same), and when you write 1 + x + 3 = 6, you make a necessity for for x = 2, but you could just as well make the same necessity with 1 + y + 3 = 6. It doesn't matter whether you use x or y to = 2, because they're only tracing over the fact in the context of the system of relations. Qualia seems to hold fast to physical events in our brains, but it traces over formal properties arbitrarily, the way x or y does. This is why there are famous philosophical teasers where people say "how do you know my red isn't your blue" or suchlike, because the presence of the uniqueness of quality in our real experience isn't a hollow nexus of the possible necessary states of other regions; They lends us their own kind of existence, and cannot be analyzed as a mechanism, but studying their ontological difference from formal objects, we can better understand other metaphysical problems which are normally stalled by adhering to purely formal ontologies.

This kind of presence, where "present" doesn't mean a location defined in a formal network but rather the glow of present experience, where its unique quality as something real is also the knowledge of its reality to its person, is an example of philosophical immanence; I tend to call qualia immanent qualities, to emphasize their way of transcending formal properties. The study of qualia is called phenomenology, which makes modern usage of "phenomenal properties" another term for qualia. Phenomenological suspension, or phenomenological reduction, or epoche, is any attempt to hone in on phenomenal properties by suspending your beliefs about the world your experience is a part of and observing the qualities which do not necessarily imply what you thought. If this sounds like a Buddhist meditation, that's because it can be; I've heard mention from Hindu and Buddhist students of phenomenology that there is a history of meditations on this topic. The method I explained here consists of identifying the behavior of formal properties in general, in order to better identify a large range of what could constitute a systematic idea of any kind, to bracket away and reveal the unaddressed properties of immanence. Staring off into space paralyzed in terror by the inescapability of the cosmic anomaly shining within your very soul is also a more meditative form of suspension

Phenomenal consciousness is the existence of qualia, the concern over which is popularly called the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and questions about it deal with ontology. It is different from propositional consciousness, which is a psychological awareness of one's position in local formal reality, that is, awareness of one's animal (or robot or whatever) context. Both phenomenal and propositional consciousness are referred to as "subjectivity," which is as problematic as phenomenology's obscurity ever is. "Subjectivity" refers to first-person awareness, which both are in their own way, but it usually carries connotations specific to propositional consciousness, which is that it is a small mind in a big world and can't know things for sure. Objectivity/subjectivity in formal reality is the difference between the unknown truth and our thoughts, but objectivity/subjectivity in ontology is the difference between form and immanence. Calling things "subjective" can invoke this confusion as much as the word "consciousness."

When you make statements about formal properties, you do so using “modeling” in a way which speaks to the ability of the object in question to be broken down into internal and contextual parts; networks of formal relations identical to the same truth. Statements about non-formal properties do not “model” them according to grounding structure, and though “qualia” are still the “object” of linguistic statements, the properties modeled in a discussion are the points at which they transcend formal properties and lead to statements about the general world capable of featuring such phenomena.

Although we only have reports of immanent qualities from other humans with similar patterns of propositional consciousness, other humans are the only pieces of spacetime we can reach a certain depth of communication with, and there's no good indication that any particular feature of propositional consciousness is necessary for a region of formal reality to inform immanent qualities. Immanent qualities find their ontological ground independently from formal properties, so a description of when immanent qualities would be found associated with a region of spacetime (like a flux of brain signals) is not a question of a physical system creating qualia, but rather creating circumstances which don't contradict the means by which formal and immanent qualities meet. Some suggest that such regions are anywhere a width of information in spacetime has an indeterminate interior effect which can change its outcome, as in the case of uncollapsed quantum blahblahblah, but neurologists consider it doubtful that indeterminate quantum effects can localize enough interference to regularly affect brain-scale cognition, and the separation of the information of quantum effects on the micro-scale from the causal chain of information in the human mind is a real separation. It may be that rather simple entanglements of formal properties at any scale could be reflected in immanent qualities, and that propositional consciousness only ever granted the ability to gripe about it.

The difference between phenomenal and formal properties is the modern form of ontological dualism, even when formal properties are divided into universals and instances. Dualism as such is more observation than theory, as the assumed starting point is the formal monism which produces logical language for science and expresses alternative in terms of how they deviate. Qualia appears to be an extra "kind" of thing, and when you give up trying to reconcile the properties you have two piles. It gets worse, though, so much worse. The inability of formal properties to generate immanent ones also means that it can't generate a way to refer to them and give sufficient reason for their unique contact. Likewise, because immanent qualities are not objects formed of tension against an environment of information-states, there is nothing in immanence to cause a complex of tensions, and immanent qualities are absolutely particular to their presence; They are not universals. Because they cannot necessitate each other, they cannot make a meaning which would "request" the impossible other to entangle with. Therefore, there must be properties which are neither formal nor immanent, which can be known by investigating the relation it invokes between immanence and form. This means I'm breaking dualism into a more open pluralism. They can be further studied by observing from phenomenological reduction that formal properties we take for granted often don't apply the way we expect and drawing what inferences can be drawn; Much of the progress in ontology following phenomenology consists of critiques of formal properties such as ontological priority being found less necessary than thought possible for alienated ontological properties.

At this point many lean towards granting ontological priority to immanence over form, which is a monism called called phenomenalism, or taking cue for other non-formal priorities to both in monistic idealism and others. They don't get much further than feeling some kind of monism as necessary and considering some other kind more likely than simple materialism, but a desire for monism has historically been a good motive for philosophical and scientific progress. I prefer facing Ockham's nightmare of necessarily plural elements.

Ontological plurality may help with a question leftover from the monistic version of the universal/instance relation, where instances seemed to obey the priority of the universal, but didn't have sufficient cause for there to be an unfolded level of formal reality at all. If being a part of a whole completed the reality of qualia, qualia would not be of the closed tunnel of a human experience; The fact of having a quality to shine demands its distance from the very idea of a whole, whose part have their meaning in terms of complicating from a common origin, full of need and empty of presence. It may be that the seemingly arbitrary existence of instantiated objective reality, separate from objectivity as a universal, finds its cause in the coexistence of immanence and the monad itself. The monad need not change or recognize the ontological alien as real; Collisions across ontological divisions do not need to be reciprocated, as symmetry of tension is a formal pattern. The effect which touches both immanence and objectivity may join objectivity as a paired ontological priority to instantiated objectivity, leeching the need for instantiation under its ability to access the immediacy of immanence, while the unchanged objective monad remains the central reference of objective causality and, to itself, still truly being in a state of not having done or coexisted with anything at all.

Because there are unique immanent realities found alongside the tracing of entropic time which cannot be reduced to its formal nature, phenomenal time is an ontologically distinct element of the time-complex. It is suggestive of the idea of "presentism" in time, where some kind of moving present moment is real, and which is opposed to eternalism, which is the idea that all possible times exist at once as a stable array of facts. Eternalism hews to the simple and symmetrical behavior of formal reality, while presentism is usually framed in a formal context which makes it flounder even as people rub their chins at the phenomenological issue that haven't yet grasped. Phenomenal time is rarely represented comprehensively in discussions of presentism/eternalism or A-series/B-series time, which draws confusion through purely formal assumptions.

Although qualia are informed by a common objective reality, they are not made from instantiation. This means that immanent qualities do not relate to each other the way formal objects do, along a continuum of one whole spacetime would compose them. They are, rather, accessed in a common encounter with the objective world, and just as their grounding principle is their own unique presence, they have an ontological difference between each other; Immanent qualities don't contain a negative tension of that which is not present, the way formal entities share the tension of a formal continuum, because that is a property which emerges in the separation of a whole. As immanence is beyond the context of form, so too are they beyond each other, yet inevitable by their common binding to an objectivity by a process they have no means to contradict. It might be more accurate to say the apparent common nature of qualia is a product of a filtering for access to one particular way to non-contradictorily exceed the properties of form, according to the behavior of horizonal properties.

It is valid to say there is qualia for the feeling of moving through time, unique to the interflowing context of ongoing experience, but rather than the present motion, there is also the horizon, which is the reality of the fact that these ontologically alienated properties have a reality beyond one's own deepest grounding. Horizonal properties are not inherent in alienated entities; That would suggest the behavior of a formal ontological priority being sufficient to build immanent qualities. Rather, just as alienated immanent and formal properties lack the context to create each other, so too do they lack the context to meaningfully contradict a property which does not contradict their necessities but rather produces an ontologically unique situation which must be studied according to the anomalies we find rather than possible constructs of pure reason. What we observe is the capacity of a non-immanent, non-formal property to access that which is alien to it and each other. It breaks from the behavior of formal properties in its refusal of priority, but so do immanent qualities. It breaks from qualia's substantiating presence, but so do formal qualities. Its exotic behavior may be less impossible than imagined, but phenomenology takes some getting used to in the first place, and this is the bleeding edge for me. The ontological difference between experience and the horizon is another example of an asymmetrical "relation" not formed by common tension on common ground. The horizon imposes distance upon immanence despite itself and questions the self-sameness of its reality without contradicting it. This transcendence is different from the transcendence of a universal from an instance because it isn't the transcendence of a prior; It is a vulnerability to the beyond, and it is this opening from the utterly external which provides another aspect of the time-complex as the horizon: ekstasis.

"Horizonal properties" isn't a phrase that's floating around, but "horizon" is. It's a slippery word, but it ends up as the best label I have for the non-formal, non-phenomenal property of the vulnerability to being drawn into a relationship with things they have no ontological origin with. Husserl and Heidegger both wove the concept of horizon into ontologies which habitually tended toward some manner of monism -- attempting to unite phenomenal and formal properties under a common ground they all manifest, even if it wasn’t their ultimate conclusion. Husserl was very speculative about ontological statements following from his focus on phenomenological methodology, but he steered toward building formal properties out of the behavior of phenomenal reality, while Heidegger’s unity was more teleological, looking at the synthetsized results of the alienated modes (in other words, human reality as we are, with entanglements across ontological boundaries) as if it justified them in a convergent function in disclosure, which I find still carries too much symmetry in relations across ontological differences. In both of them, their concept of horizon blend aspects I have separated between formal and horizonal  (Husserl's protention/retention and Heidegger's thrownness/ecstasies), and they developed proto-formal versions of past-likeness, future-likeness, or parallel-likeness around the nest of immanent properties. I take cues from Levinas and clear things into an open pluralism moreso than most phenomenologists, and my emphasis goes to showing properties neither formal nor phenomenal nor of common ground with them, with a focus on asymmetrical intersubjectivity.

There is another anomaly which calls to effects neither formal nor immanent. Although it can become inescapably apparent that immanent qualities demand explanation, and would be difficult to return to the denial of, the immanence itself shouldn't be sufficient cause for us to notice it and discuss it as target of propositional awareness. We can see our awareness of it as its presence, but as discussed, that isn't a property which should affect any arrangement of formal necessities. This helps push some towards idealistic monism, trusting the secondary position assumed for formal properties to be concealing the truth of immanence creating external necessities, but gives little opportunity for further development and often keeps re-entangling supposedly derived formal properties into the nature of "monism" itself. Our ability to bring phenomenology into our actions gives the image of a teleological cause, a need for a reason for the possible paths of physical causality to converge into one as unlikely as a sustained and coherent field of study around a phenomenon which shouldn't partake in the causality people speak from. For the forcing of this understanding of immanence into our discourse, this gnosis, we have the appearance of a hand of fate, which means a topic which needs to be unpacked and scrutinized. Simple tricks of overlapping necessities can create teleological illusions, as in the anthropic principle’s world of seemingly improbable life-sustainability being outlined by the lack of experienced consequence for expanses which don't produce life. This should go hand in hand with the study of horizonal properties and how vulnerabilities to exotic effects can be filled or restricted. Note that any anomaly in the causality of our discourse’s context in animal causality, such as the ability of this non-formal but inescapable qualia situation to become a topic which can be honed in on by human study, means the potential contents of our reasoning differ in a certain drastic way from anything we understand about the limits of potential linguistic analysis, and we cannot declare any particular metaphysical question as forever beyond us.

Because we find ourselves in a world where apparently fundamentally alienated properties are aligned in non-contradiction, our existence as living souls is not only our common drive of animal objectivity, or the substantial light of our present experience, but the capacity of the horizon to call on that which is not of our deepest core or the height of possible wisdom. Between us is not only the common ground of our animal motives, or even only the ethical weight of substantial experience which descriptions of biological pain-signaling are hollow of, but our reaching each other across and as a separation as utter as the separation of the mortal from the eternal.

[geopolicraticus]

The Limits of Interdisciplinarity

Why do we have many sciences instead of one science? Why is not science more robustly interdisciplinary? These are a deceptively simple questions that are difficult to answer, as the answer takes us into regions of thought that rarely receive explicit exposition. I am going to approach these questions by way of a circuitous detour through the popularization of specialized knowledge.

Will Durant, who made himself independently wealthy from the success of his book The Story of Philosophy (which good fortune he paid forward by subsequently writing The Story of Civilization), wrote of his experience as a popularizer of philosophy in the Preface to the second edition of The Story of Philosophy:  

“The appetite of the layman grew by what it fed on. There were in America millions of men and women who had been unable to go to college, and who thirsted for the findings of history and science; even those who had gone through college showed a moderate hunger for knowledge… Then came the flood. Outline followed outline, ‘story’ followed ‘story’; science and art, religion and law, had their stenographers…”

Durant concluded, however:

“The public appetite was quickly satiated; critics and professors complained of superficiality and haste, and an undertow of resentment set in, which reached every outline from the last to the first. As quickly as it had come, the fashion changed; no one dared any longer say a word for the humanization of knowledge; the denunciation of outlines was now the easy road to critical repute; it became the style to speak with a delicate superiority of any non-fiction book that could be understood. The snob movement in literature began.”

While it is no longer the interpretation of philosophy for the general public that produces literary sensations, the task of interpreting increasingly subtle and complex scientific theories to the public now occasionally produces best sellers, such as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. While I do not myself consider A Brief History of Time to be a successful interpretation of science to the general public—Hawking made a lot of assertions without making much of an attempt to explain or clarify the ideas he asserted (and, yes, I read the book)—no one can dispute its literary success.

Science communications (which was once known as popularization, but I can understand why “communications” is preferred before “popularization”), when successful, plays an underappreciated role in providing an exposition of the underlying intuitions that form the background of a scientific discipline. Thus while popularizers are sometimes looked down upon, as Durant noted, they are doing something that many who make use of these underlying intuitions in advanced theoretical work cannot do themselves. 

For example, Brian Greene in his The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (pp. 291-292), has done a remarkable job of elucidating the different intuitive motivations that underlie physics and cosmology in his exposition of the flatness problem in cosmology: 

“By no means does the flatness problem show that the standard big bang model is wrong. A staunch believer reacts to the flatness problem with a shrug of the shoulders and the curt reply ‘That’s just how it was back then,’ taking the finely tuned matter/energy density of the early universe—which the standard big bang requires to yield predictions that are in the same ballpark as observations—as an unexplained given. But this answer makes most physicists recoil. Physicists feel that a theory is grossly unnatural if its success hinges on extremely precise tunings of features for which we lack a fundamental explanation. Without supplying a reason for why the matter/energy density of the early universe would have been so finely tuned to an acceptable value, many physicists have found the standard big bang model highly contrived. Thus, the flatness problem highlights the extreme sensitivity of the standard big bang model to conditions in the remote past of which we know very little; it shows how the theory must assume the universe was just so, in order to work.”

“By contrast, physicists long for theories whose predictions are insensitive to unknown quantities such as how things were a long time ago. Such theories feel robust and natural because their predictions don’t depend delicately on details that are hard, or perhaps even impossible, to determine directly. This is the kind of theory provided by inflationary cosmology, and its solution to the flatness problem illustrates why.”

Physics and cosmology, while both obviously natural sciences, are distinct natural sciences, and one of the things that distinguishes different disciplines of the natural sciences is the underlying intuitions that each makes use of, one part of the underlying intuition is the nature and degree of scientific abstraction that enters into the thought of each discipline. It is because of these distinct intuitions and forms of scientific abstraction that the cosmologist can shrug his shoulders at an observation that makes physicists recoil.

The particular kind of scientific abstraction of which physicists make use looks for isolatable systems that can be reduced to a mechanism. Physicists can be perfectly happy with laws of nature that work as well with time going backward as with time going forward, and think nothing is amiss in this, because these laws of nature are robustly testable (at least, testable in time as we know it, exclusively flowing forward) and can be isolated from the flow of history and elaborated in this idealized way. Physics is about finding mechanisms that work regardless of context.

Cosmology, like biology and geology, is essentially an historical science, and, as an historical science it is not so much looking for the kind of laws of nature that physics likes to find as it is looking for the exact sequence of development that brought us to where we are today. Historical sciences give meaning to their domain of knowledge by contextualizing that knowledge in larger structures, and so isolated, idealized mechanisms play a much smaller role in cosmology than they do in physics (though they are certainly not absent in physics). 

Cosmologists, of course, have their own forms of abstraction. They may not think to tell you that, for a cosmologist, the basic building blocks of the universe are galaxies, so when a cosmologists tells you that the universe is expanding in all directions, they sometimes have to answer questions like, “If the universe is expanding, does that mean we are getting bigger?” or, “If the universe is expanding, are the stars in the Milky Way moving farther apart?” These are perfectly legitimate questions for a common sense view of the universe when told that the universe is expanding in all directions. We want to know exactly what is expanding and how it is expanding. But since the cosmologist is accustomed to his particular level of scientific abstraction at which entities less than galaxies don’t play much of a part, addressing these qualifications will be an afterthought.

There is a contemporary discipline known as astrophysics that synthesizes some of the intuitions and methods of physics and cosmology, as well as touching on concerns of astronomy, but it is significant that a new specialization of astrophysics appeared to address the need that was felt, because this is how the western sciences have approached the elaboration of knowledge. Each particular domain of knowledge has its own specialization, and the expansion of knowledge that makes us aware of previously unsuspected problems produces new domains of knowledge in the attempt to address these problems. 

Astrophysics cultivates its own intuitions and its own forms of scientific abstraction that make the discipline function in its distinctive way. Indeed, these intuitions and forms of scientific abstraction more-or-less define the discipline, even if those who are working in the discipline cannot explain exactly what it is that they are doing, and must wait for a science communications specialist to come along and explain in ordinary language what the astrophysicists are doing. For science communications itself has its own intuitions and forms of scientific abstraction of which the other science specializations are innocent.

Brian Greene, obviously, is a physicist with a talent for science communications, and is capable of holding both physics and science communications in his mind at the same time, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous remark, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Despite the imperative of epistemic wholeness that we all feel (totality of knowledge achieved by a single method), and which is at the root of calls for interdisciplinary research, most interdisciplinary research ends up producing a new specialization, because we make progress in scientific knowledge by focusing on a particular area of knowledge, and this means masking the rest of the world from view in an act of scientific abstraction, so that the specialist’s view of the objects of his inquiry is uncompromised by irrelevant and distracting detail.

This irrelevant and distracting detail—what William James called, “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”—is what characterizes lived experience, and it is at this point that we can understand the point at which lived experience diverges from scientific knowledge. Lived experience is a blooming, buzzing confusion, and while we filter this confusion in order to make sense of it, and focus on things that interest us, the blooming, buzzing confusion is never far. In science and the production of scientific knowledge, the blooming, buzzing confusion is rigorously excluded by protocols of experimentation and scientific method that narrow the scope of experience to the value of an observed dependent variable.   

The literary genre we know as the novel is an evocation of lived experience, and we have much to learn from novels, but a novel is not an exposition of scientific knowledge. Literature is not going to give us the proper value for the Hubble constant; only science can focus on that question in a way that will produce an answer. A novel that described the drama of scientific discovery in the work of scientists converging on the Hubble constant would present a picture of the human side of doing science, and would help us to better understand the social context in which science is done—the lived experience of scientific researchers, at it were—and it might even illuminate the conclusions of researchers, but it would not arrogate to itself the role of arriving at the answers to the problems that science studies.

Science, on the other hand, is not going to give us the lived experience of researchers, but only scientific knowledge and a description of the meticulous process of arriving at this knowledge. This exclusion of lived experience can go so far as to obscure or even conceal the intuitions that underlie scientific research and discovery, and this is related to the problem that there is no science of science (on which cf. Theory Development in Science is Unscientific). That is to say, there is no systematic and methodical way to teach the intuitions and forms of scientific abstractions employed in science. The most one can do is to be a Socratic midwife to science, exposing someone to the procedures of scientific method in the hopes that they “get” it and are able to continue on their own. 

It is often difficult, in reading scientific papers, to try to extract the plain, intuitive meaning behind the many circuitous and apparently oblique assertions contained therein. Scientists deeply invested in the forms of intuition and scientific abstraction that characterize their particular discipline cannot easily step back and view these intuitions with the same objectivity with which they view their data. With these barriers to understanding the intuitions that underlie science, it is no surprise that we do not possess a fine-grained account of the various kinds of intuition and scientific abstraction employed by the special sciences. But this is what we need in order to make sense of what we are doing in the growing enterprise of scientific knowledge, which is the engine that drives technological civilization forward. 

The very least we can say in the light of the above considerations is that the problem of disciplinary silos is misconceived; researchers do not isolate themselves within disciplinary silos out of any sense of protecting their turf, or as part of a battle to attain status within a restricted domain, or to deny knowledge of the uninitiated and the Great Unwashed. Scientists are isolated within disciplinary silos because they have trained themselves into seeing the world through the filter of particular forms of intuition and particular kinds of scientific abstraction that are not employed, do not obtain, or are not relevant in the same way within other disciplines. One can blunder around other disciplines without a grasp of the relevant intuitions and forms of scientific abstraction, and everyone once in a while one will make an important connection that the specialists miss, but one will almost certainly never make a contribution to the advancement of the discipline itself. In all likelihood, if one does make an advantageous connection, this insight will then become the basis of a new specialization that will make progress to the extent that individuals converge upon novel forms of intuition and scientific abstraction that best serve this new discipline.

The specificity of disciplinary intuitions and distinctive forms of scientific abstraction define the limits of interdisciplinarity and the attempt to get the sciences to work together to the one, single end of expanding scientific knowledge, and thus this also explains why there are many sciences instead of one, single science. However, these many sciences accomplish the work of expanding scientific knowledge, though that knowledge is often highly specialized and must be interpreted in order to find its place within human life as knowledge that makes a difference in navigating the obstacles of an indifferent world.

Some time ago in a post I asked—Is it possible to specialize in the big picture?—and I think the above demonstrates how this question is more relevant than ever. We require stand-alone “big picture” disciplines with their own special kinds of intuition and their distinctive forms of scientific abstraction that can bring together the synthesis of scientific knowledge that is missing from the specialized disciplines. We should not expect that big picture disciplines—and there may eventually come to be many of them, as should be expected in light of the above reflections—will simply be an eclectic gathering of specialized scientific knowledge, but each will be a discipline in its own right, that makes use of the knowledge of the specialized sciences in its own distinctive way. We shouldn’t resist this movement of thought, but rather we should let a hundred flowers bloom.

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About SEO Tools

Beyond the basics, there are methods that can lend a major assist to your SEO game. SEO professionals have many ways of doing this. Within the SEO industry, methods tend to fall under “Black-Hat”, “Gray-Hat” or “White-Hat” practices.

SEO Methods:

You don’t want to talk to the man in the black, or gray hat. Black-hat SEO is all about tricking Google’s algorithm by attempting to improve your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION performance without actually adding real value to your site. In other words, it’s the shortcut attempt. As Ali Husayni, CEO of Millionairium puts it, “Black-hat SEO is like robbing the bank. It’s exciting. It’s fast. You get results quickly. But the risk is that your site will get killed in the process – sooner or later. So would your content and domain. Then you have to start over again. ” Don’t try to outsmart Google’s algorithm. Work with it. Applying best practices like those found in this article is known as “White-Hat”. By making your site more useful and usable, you achieve honest, long-term gains. Content Clustering:

Content Clustering is a way to optimize SEO within your own site by leveraging Google’s rewarding of niche content. You choose a content piece to be the pillar, the piece from which others will be developed. Once you have your pillar piece, you create cluster content that is spun off from the pillar piece’s content, much like subtopics. The pillar piece links to the cluster pieces and the cluster content links back to the pillar piece. As one or more of the articles performs well, so do the others thanks to the link within the pieces. This causes a larger boost than just one high performing, unlinked article. Preemptive SEO Did the title of this article have you double-checking your calendar? If so, you unconsciously noted an example of Preemptive SEO. What is Preemptive SEO and why should you do it? This is akin to the “big fish, small pond” and it’s counter-reality. A lot of articles and blogs are written with trends in mind. However , there are a whole lot of marketers out there who jump on the same trends at the same time. This creates a lot of competition around content geared toward the same trends. Preemptive SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION calls for you to think ahead. While trying to predict the next big trend is great if you are able, something as simple as including an advanced year in the title can make a big difference.

Google Plus and Google SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING Tools Long seen as the forgettable social media platform, Google Plus is a great way to see major gains in your SEO performance. Google rewards your site when you use Google Plus. The best way to do this is to paste all the social media content you post elsewhere for your business into Google Plus along with a link to your site. The reason you do not need to be overly concerned about using unique content material here is that it’s not a popular platform. In other words, this is almost purely targeted to Google and not to your audience. Although, you never know, you may gain some new exposure here, too. Google rewards your site for using Google tools. Lucky for you, many of the Google tools are not only free, they are extremely useful in helping you manage your site and SEO performance. Checkout Google Search Console and Google Business for a start. Hire the Pros Running a business is time-consuming and challenging. Therefore is SEO. 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SEO PowerSuite is an very helpful tool through this kind of SEO strategy. If you would like to understand more about this effective auditing request, you can visit this specific Website Auditor Review while keeping focused an in depth dysfunction. SEO Spyglass The 3rd Factor towards the SEO PowerSuite Another portion of SEO PowerSuite is actually SEO Spyglass. This particular computer software may perform potent evaluation associated with just how the competition are executing so effectively inside search engines. WEBSITE SEO Spyglass will quickly realize out how many back-links every single competitor gives, that websites web address to the present competitor in addition to, most importantly, exactly what anchor-text these back links employ. The actual anchor-text from the hyperlink is only the words and phrases that make up the link. 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[thedatasciencehyderabad]

17 Prime Data Science Purposes & Examples You Need To Know 2021

An enterprise analyst profile combines a little bit of each to help companies make information-pushed choices. Hard expertise required for the job include information mining, machine studying, deep studying, and the ability to integrate structured and unstructured data. Experience with statistical analysis techniques, such as modeling, clustering, data visualization and segmentation, and predictive analysis, are additionally a giant part of the roles. Data scientists create them by running machine studying, information mining or statistical algorithms towards knowledge sets to predict business scenarios and sure outcomes or behavior. Though the position of a data analyst varies depending on the corporate, normally, these professionals collect knowledge, process that knowledge and perform statistical evaluation using normal statistical instruments and strategies.

These algorithms can catch fraud faster and with higher accuracy than people, merely due to the sheer quantity of data generated every day. For example, you might collect data about a customer each time they go to your web site or brick-and-mortar store, add an merchandise to their cart, complete a buy order, open an email, or engage with a social media publication. After making certain the data from every source is correct, you have to mix it in a course referred to as data wrangling. This may involve matching a customer’s email address to their credit card data, social media handles, and purchase identifications.

It may also be used to optimize customer success and subsequent acquisition, retention, and progress. So robust soft skills, significant communication and public talking capacity are key. In addition, results ought to all the time be related back to the enterprise goals that spawned the project in the first place.

There's also deep studying, a more superior offshoot of machine learning that primarily uses artificial neural networks to analyze giant units of unlabeled information. In another article, Cognilytica's Schmelzer explains the connection between Data Science, machine studying and AI, detailing their totally different characteristics and the way they are often mixed in analytics functions. From an operational standpoint, Data Science initiatives can optimize administration of supply chains, product inventories, distribution networks and customer support. To a more fundamental degree, they point to increased efficiency and decreased costs. data science course in hyderabad additionally permits corporations to create enterprise plans and techniques which might be based mostly on informed evaluation of customer habits, market developments and competition. Without it, businesses might miss alternatives and make flawed selections.

I am trying to find out the greatest career path for me in huge information or enterprise intelligence. Predictive causal analytics – If you need a mannequin that may predict the chances of a selected event in the future, you should apply predictive causal analytics. Say, if you're offering money on credit score, then the likelihood of consumers making future credit funds on time is a matter of concern for you. Here, you'll have the ability to construct a model that can carry out predictive analytics on the fee historical past of the customer to foretell if the future funds shall be on time or not. Machine studying delivers correct results derived via the evaluation of huge knowledge sets.

With Data Science, vast volumes and numbers of knowledge can practice models better and extra successfully to indicate more precise suggestions. A lot of firms have fervidly used this engine / system to advertise their merchandise / recommendations in accordance with user’s interest and relevance of information. Internet giants like Amazon, Twitter, Google Play, Netflix, Linkedin, imdb and plenty of more use this system to enhance personal expertise.

Here is considered one of my favourite Data Scientist Venn diagrams created by Stephan Kolassa. You’ll notice that the primary ellipses in the diagram are very related to the pillars given above. What occupation did Harvard name the Sexiest Job of the twenty first Century? There remains no consensus on the definition of Data Science and it's thought-about by some to be a buzzword. Signal processing is any technique used to investigate and enhance digital alerts. This picture illustrates the private and skilled attributes of a Data Scientist.

Read up on what a knowledge cloth is and the means it will use AI and ML to transform information structure and create a new competitive advantage for companies that use it. These corporations have plenty of open Data Science jobs out there right now. Here are some examples of how Data Science is reworking sports activities beyond baseball. While both biking and public transit can curb driving-related emissions, Data Science can do the same by optimizing highway routes.

Some of the best examples of speech recognition products are Google Voice, Siri, Cortana and so on. Using speech-recognition characteristics, even if you aren’t in a position to type a message, your life wouldn’t cease. However, at occasions, you would notice, speech recognition doesn’t perform precisely. Procedures such as detecting tumors, artery stenosis, organ delineation employ varied methods and frameworks like MapReduce to find optimum parameters for duties like lung texture classification.

It’s additionally very useful in that Data Scientists typically should current and communicate results to key stakeholders, including executives. The greatest thing that every one Data Science tasks have in widespread use is the need to make use of tools and software programs to analyze the concerned algorithms and statistics, because the size of the pool of knowledge they're working with is so huge. Data scientist is doubtless considered one of the highest-paying job titles, and there's a high demand for professionals who're in a place to fill the assorted duties of the role. On the other hand, citizen Data Scientists may be hobbyists or volunteers, or might obtain a small amount of compensation for the work they do for major corporations.

Starting from the display banners on various web sites to the digital billboards at the airports – nearly all of them are decided through the use of data science algorithms. Data scientists are professionals who source, gather and analyse large sets of information. Most of the business decisions at present are based mostly on insights drawn from analysing data, that is why a Data Scientist is crucial in today’s world.

Please discuss with the Payment & Financial Aid page for additional information. No, all of our packages are 100 percent on-line, and available to participants no matter their location. Our platform options include quick, highly produced videos of HBS faculty and guest enterprise experts, interactive graphs and workout routines, cold calls to keep you engaged, and opportunities to contribute to a vibrant on-line group. Catherine Cote is an advertising coordinator at Harvard Business School Online. Prior to joining HBS Online, she worked at an early-stage SaaS startup where she found her passion for writing content, and at a digital consulting company, where she specialized in search engine optimization.

Data analysts are often given questions and targets from the top down, perform the analysis, after which report their findings. No matter what path is taken to learn, data scientist’s ought to have advanced quantitative information and extremely technical skills, primarily in statistics, mathematics, and pc science. One necessary thing to debate are off-the-shelf data science platforms and APIs. One may be tempted to suppose that these can be used relatively simply and thus not require important expertise in sure fields, and therefore not require a robust, well-rounded Data Scientist. Below is a diagram of the GABDO Process Model that I created and introduced in my e-book, AI for People and Business.

Before you start the project, it could be very important to perceive the various specifications, requirements, priorities and required price range. Data scientists are those that crack advanced information issues with their sturdy experience in certain scientific disciplines. They work with a quantity of components associated with arithmetic, statistics, computer science, etc . Traditionally, the data that we had was principally structured and small in size, which might be analyzed through the use of simple BI tools. In addition, Google offers you the choice to search for images by importing them. In their newest update, Facebook has outlined the extra progress they’ve made in this space, making particular notice of their advances in image recognition accuracy and capacity.

The recommendations are made based mostly on earlier search outcomes for a person. But there are many different search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, AOL, and so forth. All these search engines make use of Data Science algorithms to ship one of the best results for our searched question in a fraction of seconds. Considering the fact that, Google processes greater than 20 petabytes of knowledge every single day. Over the years, banking firms learned to divide and conquer information by way of buyer profiling, previous expenditures, and other essential variables to analyze the probabilities of danger and default. Yes, Data Science is a good profession path, in fact, one of many very best ones now.

If you’re new to the world of data and want to bolster your abilities, two phrases you’re prone to encounter are “data analytics” and “data science.” While these terms are associated, they discuss different things. Below is a summary of what each word means and the means it applies in business. “In this world of massive data, primary data literacy—the ability to research, interpret, and even question data—is an increasingly priceless ability,” says Harvard Business School Professor Jan Hammond within the on-line course Business Analytics.

This programming-oriented job includes creating the machine studying fashions wanted for Data Science applications. Machine learning and data science have saved the monetary business hundreds of thousands of dollars, and unquantifiable amounts of time. For instance, JP Morgan’s Contract Intelligence platform makes use of Natural Language Processing to process and extract important knowledge from about 12,000 commercial credit score agreements a year. Thanks to Data Science, what would take around 360,000 guide labor hours to complete is now finished in a few hours. Additionally, fintech companies like Stripe and Paypal are investing heavily in data science training in hyderabad to create machine studying tools that quickly detect and prevent fraudulent activities.

Applying AI cognitive applied sciences to ML methods can result in the effective processing of information and information. But what are the key variations between Data Science vs Machine Learning and AI vs ML? Simply put, synthetic intelligence aims at enabling machines to execute reasoning by replicating human intelligence. Since the principal objective of AI processes is to show machines from expertise, feeding the best data and self-correction is crucial. AI specialists depend on deep studying and natural language processing to assist machines establish patterns and inferences.

Retailers analyze customer habits and buying patterns to drive personalised product suggestions and targeted promoting, marketing and promotions. Data science also helps them manage product inventories and provide chains to maintain items in inventory. Data science permits streaming companies to trace and analyze what customers watch, which helps decide the brand new TV reveals and movies they produce. Data-driven algorithms are also used to create customized suggestions primarily based on a consumer's viewing history. It’s cutting-edge now, but soon a data cloth shall be a vital software for managing data.

The term was first used in 1960 by Peter Naur, who was a pioneer in laptop science. He described the foundational aspects of the methods and approaches used in data science in his 1974 book, Concise Survey of Computer Methods. [newline]There are many instruments out there for Data Scientists to make use of to govern and research huge portions of knowledge, and it's important to at all times evaluate their effectiveness and maintain attempting new ones as they become out there. Data scientists must depend on experience and intuition to decide which strategies will work greatest for modeling their data, and they should modify those methods constantly to hone in on the insights they seek. Data science plays an important role in safety and fraud detection, as the end result of the large quantities of information allows for drilling down to search out slight irregularities in knowledge that can expose weaknesses in safety methods. Delivery companies, freight carriers and logistics providers use Data Science to optimize supply routes and schedules, in addition to one of the best modes of transport for shipments.

Whereas knowledge analytics is primarily centered on understanding datasets and gleaning insights that can become actions, Data Science is centered on building, cleaning, and organizing datasets. Data scientists create and leverage algorithms, statistical fashions, and their own customized analyses to collect and form uncooked information into something that can be more simply understood. Some of the key variations however, are that data analysts sometimes usually are not laptop programmers, nor answerable for statistical modeling, machine learning, and lots of the other steps outlined within the Data Science process above. Many statisticians, together with Nate Silver, have argued that Data Science isn't a model new field, but quite another name for statistics. Others argue that data science is distinct from statistics as an end result of it focuses on problems and methods unique to digital knowledge. Vasant Dhar writes that statistics emphasizes quantitative knowledge and description.

They handle knowledge pipelines and infrastructure to transform and transfer data to respective Data Scientists to work on. They majorly work with Java, Scala, MongoDB, Cassandra DB, and Apache Hadoop. This web site makes use of cookies to improve your experience when you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are saved in your browser as they are essential for the working of primary functionalities of the internet site.

Yet, to harness the power of huge knowledge, it isn’t necessary to be a data scientist. Hopefully this article has helped demystify the info scientist position and other associated roles. More and more today, Data Scientists should be capable of utilizing instruments and technologies associated with huge amounts of information as nicely. Some of the most well-liked examples include Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Hive, Pig, Drill, Presto, and Mahout.

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[textbooksolutionsmanuals]

Statistical Inference Solution Manuals

Statistics is nothing but the scientific way of gathering, examining, presenting, and expounding data. It is the highly sought-after interdisciplinary discipline which is used frequently in all scientific field as well as research. The inference draws from the statistical data through various methods and computational tools.

 Impact on Statistics in our life:

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Weather often plays a significant role in our day-to-day life. With rapid deforestation and global warming, the vagaries of weather are perceptible. The computer simulation model on statistics predicts important information regarding the weather.

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To put it simply- Data mining is the use of statistics in terms of analysing  and infusing what if model to find out pattern and trend from a huge amount of   data. The concept of data mining stems from Database Technology, AI, Machin  Learning and Statistics. Having said that, Data mining helps in extracting useful information from the heaps of data and thereby helping business to grow.

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 Statistics and probability can play a significant role in every human activities.

It helps in shaping effective monetary as well as fiscal policies. Besides, it also  

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7) Pharmaceutical Domain:

The advancement of medicine is no doubt a boon for the  mankind. It has been

making our life more robust over the years. At the same time, one should bear in mind that is not an exact science. Some medicines work best and others may not work thats way. At this stage, statistics use in medicine for making the medicine and subsequently develops treatment for this malady. Statistics , however, tries to find out the desired effect of the medicine..

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 If properly followed, These solution manuals are a sure-shot way of attaining academic success. At this stage, they want Statistical Inference Solution Manuals to solve academic woes. Solution Manuals provide them an on-the-spot solution. Besides, the finest techniques the solution manuals are adopted, it is the boon for the students to comprehend it in a better light. 

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[buffster]

A New Man (BTVS 4.12)

This is part of my ongoing Buffyverse Project, where I write notes/meta for every episode in an attempt to better understand the characters and themes of the shows. You can find the BTVS list here and the ATS list here. Gifs are not mine.

As Buffy’s birthday episodes go, this one ranks pretty low. Thus far Surprise is my favorite followed by Helpless.

It does serve a purpose: it shows us how Giles is feeling left out in preparation for The Yoko Factor plot later in the season. Retirement is boring him, Buffy doesn’t need him anymore, and she isn’t even sharing details about her life with him (that she’s dating Riley or that he’s a commando). I felt sorry for Giles because it’s clear he was throwing himself into research on the Initiative, desperate for a purpose. His desperation in that area led to his misfortune later in the episode because he trusted Ethan Rayne (just a smidge). Always a mistake. 

Spike is finally moving out of Xander’s house, which was a grievous error on the part of the Scoobies. Sure, he’s annoying, but just because he can’t attack humans himself doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous. He would have been much more useful to have under their thumb when the fight with the Initiative began. I don’t feel too much anger about the plot armor Spike is wearing this season because I feel I can explain it away relatively easily. Buffy does have a history of being less than proactive when it comes to problems. She tends to wait until shit hits the fan to go to battle. So I can see her just rolling her eyes and letting Spike wander off. A problem for another day. 

Buffy is finally introduced as the Slayer to Maggie Walsh. Maggie would be an absolute nightmare as a mother-in-law for Buffy (let’s face it, that’s the role she’s playing here). She’s mastered the art of insulting someone while pretending she’s innocent. I can just see Buffy ranting about her rudeness while Riley gives an oblivious shrug. 

Maggie: Our goals are similar. We're each interested in curtailing the Sub- terrestrial menace. It's only our methods that differ. We use the latest in scientific technology and state-of-the-art weaponry and you -- if I understand this correctly -- poke them with a sharp stick.

She does the same thing when she meets Giles. 

Maggie: She's very self-reliant, very independent... Giles: That's what I-- Maggie: Which is not always a good thing. It can be unhealthy to take on adult roles too early. I suspect what I'm seeing is a reaction to the absence of a male role model. Giles: The absence of a-- Maggie: Buffy clearly lacks a strong father figure. 

Yeah, she’s a jerk, but you have to admire her quickness when it comes to reading Giles’ role in Buffy’s life. It was so adorable how offended Giles was over this. We’ll see more of his desire to be a father figure vs. his desire to be a Watcher.

Through Maggie, Riley learns more about Buffy’s life as a Slayer. The scene reminded me a bit of Faith’s introduction when Xander was awed. Of course, Buffy takes it a bit more humbly than Faith. 

Buffy: But those were my best stories. Didn't tell you the "Buffy breaks her butt" stories. Riley: But you killed the... You did the thing with the... And you drowned, and then... snake! Not to mention daily slayage of....

Despite this episode not being a favorite overall, there were some great moments. The first was Buffy kicking Riley’s butt and then admitting she held back. He’s a little thrown by her strength but eventually admits he likes it. I think this was true. I do think Buffy’s strength played a role in their downfall, but not in the way people think. I’m getting ahead of myself. 

The second moment was Ethan and Giles getting drunk. 

Giles: We're relics, mate. Dusty scraps of a world that doesn't exist anymore. I mean, the bleeding "Initiative"--their methods may cause problems, but they're getting it done. What am I? An unemployed librarian with a tendency to get knocked on the head and a drawer full of grotty amulets. 'S pathetic. 

Of course, no good deed goes unpunished when it comes to Ethan Rayne and Giles is turned into a Fyarl demon. He tries to go to Xander for help but is speaking another language.

Spike: Of course I understand you. Giles: I'm speaking English? Spike: No. You're speaking Fyarl. I happen to speak Fyarl. And, by the way, why the hell are you suddenly a Fyarl demon? 'Cause I like to think I'm pretty observant, and I never saw a sign of it, I swear. 

I can’t explain why exactly, but I loved that Spike spoke Fyarl. I guess I just like when they show us he’s more than a washed up vampire or a fool for love. He’s got skills. Apparently he learned because he had some Fyarl lackies at one time. 

After being frightened by Giles, Xander has told Buffy there’s a demon on the loose and they’re all searching for Giles. Riley arrives to help and uses some impressive things like having keys to every building and searching hotel records. When he locates Ethan he’s not supposed to bring Buffy. I saw this as a clear power move on Maggie’s part; testing the boundaries of her pull as it were. She loses that wager and Buffy comes along. She nearly kills Giles, realizing only after she’s stabbed him who it is because of his eyes. 

The episode closes with both Buffy and Riley getting warnings about the other from their parental figures. 

Maggie: Be careful with her. She reacts on instinct. There's no discipline there. Her loyalties are uncertain. Riley: You won't be disappointed in her. She's good at what she does, and she has the... the truest soul I've ever known.

We see Maggie walk into a room, alone, with the label 314. 

Character Notes:

Rupert Giles: In public school he pulled a prank involving a dart board in the activities room. He’s cut off before he can explain. Side note: Giles went to public school? Not what I pictured. As a Fyarl demon Giles decides to terrify Maggie.

Willow Rosenberg: We get a very sex-ish scene with Tara and Willow where they have to be in “perfect synchronicity” in order to remove the petals of a rose. Willow continues to keep the relationship a secret. 

Buffy Summers: This episode is her period of perfect bliss with Riley before things start to implode a bit. 

Ethan Rayne: The writers try to show us he’s interested in women by having him give one his number. I always saw him as gay? He’s been taken into custody by the Initiative. 

[laceyspencer]

Return to the Spirit of the Athens School (Raphael, 1509 – 1511) and to Humanistic Culture- Juniper Publishers

History

The School of Athens is one of a group of four main frescoes on the walls of the Stanza (those on either side centrally interrupted by windows) that depict distinct branches of knowledge. Each theme is identified above by a separate tondo containing a majestic female figure seated in the clouds, with putti bearing the phrases: “Seek Knowledge of Causes,” “Divine Inspiration,” “Knowledge of Things Divine” (Disputa), “To Each What Is Due.” Accordingly, the figures on the walls below exemplify Philosophy, Poetry (including Music), Theology, and Law. The traditional title is not Raphael’s. The subject of the “School” is actually “Philosophy,” or at least ancient Greek philosophy, and its overhead tondo-label, “Causarum Cognitio”, tells us what kind, as it appears to echo Aristotle’s emphasis on wisdom as knowing why, hence knowing the causes, in Metaphysics Book I and Physics Book II. Indeed, Plato and Aristotle appear to be the central figures in the scene. However, all the philosophers depicted sought knowledge of first causes. Many lived before Plato and Aristotle, and hardly a third were Athenians. The architecture contains Roman elements, but the general semi-circular setting having Plato and Aristotle at its centre might be alluding to Pythagoras’ circumpunct (Figure 1).

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Economy Social Science or Positive Science? The End of a Sociocultural Model

A visit to the Vatican Museums gives a chance to explore the history of humanity through its genius and works of art. The masterpieces found there illustrate the sense of aesthetic and cultural values of that history, the spirit of those who created them, the inspiration and willpower that guided their task. In short, what human beings have been capable of producing is simply amazing.Initially visitors admire the beauty of these works, often without asking themselves what the artist wanted to express, just taking in the exterior image while failing to observe the sense and spirit that breathes through their works. Among these masterpieces, a really outstanding one (and very pertinent to this book) is The School of Athens that Raphael painted starting in 1508 when, aged 25, he was called to Rome by Pope Julius II. Raphael grew up during the Italian High Renaissance and drew on legendary characters who have contributed to creating world history as we know it today, adding his own contribution [1-5].

In that extraordinary, perhaps unique period, artists, poets, intellectuals, scientists, philosophers, mathematicians and physicists met and exchanged ideas in an ongoing dialogue about the essence of man, which was the focus of their interest. A cultural scene free of dogma and intolerance was created, one open to a cross-fertilization of ideas that led to a great leap forward in creative and intuitive thought. A similar cultural scene had previously existed during the golden age of Athens and the thinking of that time can rightly be considered one of the cornerstones of our history and culture [6-8]. In his fresco Raphael portrays the characters with such masterly brush strokes that even their spirit reaches out to fire the imagination and penetrate the heart of those viewing it. The leading lights of that era are all there, gathered around the two central characters – Plato, his finger pointing skywards to indicate the world of ideas and the spirit, and Aristotle, who instead stretches out his hand palm down to indicate the real world and scientific experience [9].

The world of ideas and the spirit can never be divorced from an empirical quest for truth. So, everything must be focused on a search for what is true, for beauty, to promote the primary aim – the fulfilment of human happiness. But the world was by no means a paradise in either ancient Athens or in Raphael’s time. Both were times in which life was generally extremely hard, unrefined, times of trepidation and suffering. And yet despite these conditions human beings managed to achieve moments of sublime creativity [10].

Today we ought to be in a completely different situation from that of Plato and Raphael, thanks to the progress and power of technical knowledge. A knowledge which has become an end for the modern world, one that should have provided answers to satisfy our primary needs, releasing us from our “shackles”, reducing inequalities, freeing us, at least in part, from a life of fatigue and suffering in physical terms. Scientific knowledge should have helped to create a situation in which our free, inventive mind could once again be the driving force of life, leading us to that dimension of spiritual joy we admire in splendid works of art [11].

This is what Keynes thought would happen. In his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren written in 1930 he said: ‘Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, which science and compound interest will have won for him [...]. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semipathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease’. Sadly, this has not been the case, in fact, the very opposite has happened. Technical-instrumental knowledge has become moral knowledge, an indisputable truth and so in no way open to discussion [12]. It dictates the rules for everyday life to the point that humanity itself has become its instrument. The technical culture of modern times has failed to achieve the aim that was hoped for. However, it is not the culture that is at fault but the improvidence of homo sapiens.

We have failed to redistribute wealth; inequalities, famine and poverty have increased; we have not resolved major health problems afflicting most of the world’s population. Technical knowledge has separated us from our souls, made us sterile and impersonal, incapable of true human relations and the profound sentiments of love and joy. Unless, that is, these are linked to the sole satisfaction of material and fleeting pleasures. We have imprisoned thought, disintegrated family bonds and forced youngsters to roam the streets without hope. All of us have made this mistake, given that responsibilities are always personal, even if at different levels. This modern age needs rethinking if we are not to find ourselves once more facing chaos [13].

The first step we must take is to ask ourselves if all this talk about the economy being the cause of the crisis of these times is true. Can we continue to think that all the misfortunes mentioned previously are the result of the malfunctioning of rules governing the economy? Or should we admit that a cultural model which has produced the opposite results to those intended has collapsed? Our lack of a social and spiritual life, of creative and intuitive thought, the drabness of an existence in which we are no longer capable of questioning the meaning of life itself ‒ can all of this depend on a malfunctioning of the economy? Is economy social science o positive science? We urgently need to review our recent history [14]. We must question the role we have assigned to the economic sciences and methods of study these have been based on for the past thirty years. Methods effectively founded based on the fundamental idea that economic sciences and the underlying choices and decisions involved are “totally” independent from human nature. So, this means our emotions have no bearing on these choices and decisions. The assumption has therefore been that given equal conditions and information the results will always be the same, thereby endorsing a rational approach that cannot be questioned.

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The New “Leviathan” Is Finance as an Unconventional Weapon: The End of Real Economy and Human Spirit. History ‘S Evolution

Instead the technical-rational culture applied to a social science like economics has produced a non-science. Friedrich von Hayek already warned us of this in his speech on accepting the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974: ‘It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. […] This brings me to the crucial issue. Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.

Hayek’s warnings didn’t manage to halt the diffusion of a model that we could define as “the mirage of rationality”. Today we find ourselves having to face the failure of a model that has separated the nature of people from the results of their activity. We have ignored six thousand years of history with an arrogance that can only have been inspired by the hubris of technical science and interests that the latter ought to have legitimated. The inseparable bond between the technical culture and economics, as recognized and studied, leaves the door wide open to humanity’s ancestral greed. A limitless hunger for profit realizable only through material goods. It creates the very system we are prisoners of today and is the source of a deadly risk. The risk of a society in which we become objectivised and lose all sense of ourselves, of our life, our feelings and creative ability [15-18].

It is artistic masterpieces that show how our most intimate being is rooted in a sense of creative spirituality as opposed to being concerned exclusively with an obtuse rationality for its own sake. So today the time has come to again make economics a tool and not an end. A process must be launched to humanize it, abandoning the absoluteness of a rational approach that repudiates history. Rethinking our role and the sense of our life is the real challenge we must face all together, for ourselves and for future generations [19]. In this context, some declarations on the non-role of the humanistic (classical) school and culture provide evidence of shallowness, a limited real culture, falling into dangerous demagoguery because in the long run, despite all the good intentions of this world, the lesson that history teaches go unlearnt. In this sense, among the “good” reforms - adjectives do not replace content and must be defined with respect to the ends (good for what?) - the purely technical school certainly has some positive aspects but the debate on the humanistic school and on the uselessness of dead languages explains better than any other argument the aforementioned perception of the incorrect understanding of the real historical moment we are living. The judgement of the futility of dead languages is a dangerous cultural drift of the debate on the best type of school in the world - the classical (in this author’s opinion) - precisely today that humanism is the path to take to overcome the era of barbarians, as Vico defined the extreme limit of the social and moral degradation that marks “the courses and recourses” of a cyclical history. The great G.B. Vico who wrote “New Science” in 1725 had had a stroke of genius on the cyclical nature of history because the nature of its actor has never changed and history is dictated by the emotional nature of man perennially struggling between the path of aggression and that of solidarity - Eros and Thanatos in ancient Greek – which the genius Freud, profound scholar of Greek and Latin, had analysed drawing on the psychic structure of human nature [20-22].

Historical periods alternate according to the prevalence of one or other social model tending to greater or lesser solidarity or aggressiveness, in this case, the conflicting socio-cultural context contributes to enhancing the aggressive part of the human soul, ending up in the pains of war. The pain of confrontation between men then leads to wisdom as the great Aeschylus and the Greek tragedians - Sophocles and Euripides - had foreseen; 2000 years passed before another great tragedian such as Shakespeare joined their ranks. Man is not naturally good, otherwise religions would not state as the first commandment “love thy neighbor Fas thyself”. Vico evidenced the changing of the time of the gods, heroes and barbarous men representing the worst period from which man must try to return to the time of the gods [23].

The long waves that run through the times of history show the drama of human life from the Greek thought whose ancient language is not commonly spoken today but the content has contributed and still contributes to the development of Western civilization and represents its cultural matrix. Is it better to have living languages but dead thought or dead languages but living thought? We are at the end of a socio-cultural model that has raised technical and instrumental knowledge to incontrovertible truth by attributing it purposeful and metaphysical value that it does not have, and so the questions we had asked of philosophy, religion and mythology, today we ask of medicine and the measurable science. The single technical-rational thought has removed from our lives the fundamental rights written in 1948 with the blood of two devastating wars, stifling creative and intuitive thinking. We have returned to a type of Alexandrian, industrious, scientific culture dedicated only to the facts but without the ability to make real and important discoveries for the profound life of man and incapable of creating a single true value [24].

The deification of technology and the principle of utility have as their “nemesis” the increasing aridity in the field of artistic, philosophical, religious and even scientific achievements. Technique becomes an end and man the means. At least since Keynes, a profound scholar of classical studies, no general theory has been produced and precisely in the “The End of Laissez-Faire” he wrote, “A study of the history of opinion is preliminary to the emancipation of the mind. I do not know which makes a man more conservative – to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past” [25]. In the end, history vindicated him and disavowed the foundations of the Chicago School who helped deify finance. After Keynes, economics and finance took on the role of the philosopher’s stone that solves the problems of life, and economics from a moral and social science has been unnaturally turned into an exact science. This is the great deception of a science devoid of scientific foundations whose deviated nature was first condemned by Aristotle in “Politica”, which students today should read, and not only those in classical schools [26].

Economics - oikia nomos - was born as and remains a social science, only the interested can consider it exact and only in order to use it as a monetary weapon with the power to destabilize social systems. Only a return to the convertibility of money into a real asset -the gold exchange standard -can remove it from the mythological context in which it was falsely issued and return it to a means of exchange and not a value. Today we are in a profound anthropological crisis, a kind of transition between the late Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, as Vico wrote, “historia se repetit”. We do not yet understand the roots of our problems, so we continue to worsen the state of things.

Every single day we see all types of devastation and continue talking about the economic crisis and not the real crisis of man as a person who has given up thinking, leaving us at the mercy of ancient ghost that seemed to have vanished after two devastating world wars but duly reappeared in a global age as the biblical damnation. “… The educational system, which is first and foremost a training school devoted to ‘useful knowledge’ and the crafts. Its chief business is to prepare successful businessmen, craftmen, engineers and technicians, lawyers, doctors, teachers, preachers and so on. Mastery is sought in such arts as amassing a fortune, farming, home cooking, barbering, the invention of machines, research work, teaching and preaching. Elementary, high-school and college education – all are oriented principally in the same direction, paying scant attention, if any, to the forgotten purpose of real knowledge and wisdom: the nature of true reality and true values” wrote Pitirim Sorokin in 1941 in his work “The Crisis of our Age”, which would seem to have been written in the future [27].

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The Role of Humanistic Culture

The humanities school (this from someone who went to a scientific school, yet with great attention to classical studies; but at the time, the school closest to home was chosen) was introduced by Giovanni Gentile in his last book “Genesis and the Structure of Society” where he theorized the humanism of work, anticipating the problems of today and noting that classical culture was crucial to develop thinking and creativity, qualities which today have withered. The history of man shows that knowledge and thought are fundamental to carry society forward over time.

The a priori forms of prevention are harmful and short-term, classical studies marked the lives of many who carried the world forward: Fermi, Rita Levi Montalcini, Maiorana, Dulbecco, only in the sciences in Italy but also Pirandello, Carducci ... But if we look at history, we have Keynes, Hayek, von Mises, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, Marx, Leibnitz, Heisenberg. Bernard Shaw said, “ Napoleon and other great men were makers of empires, but these eight men whom I am about to mention were makers of universes and their hands were not stained with the blood of their fellow men. I go back 2,500 years and how many can I count in that period? I can count them on the fingers of my two hands. Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Kepler, Copernicus, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and Einstein -- and I still have two fingers left vacant”, all with the same classical culture as inspiration.

Humanity over centuries has sent little men to appear for us at the edge of the abyss on which the Earth travels, the suns blazes and light parades. All great politicians who extended the Commonwealth studied at Oxford and Cambridge, where the basic subjects were classical from Greek and Latin, they absorbed a more integral vision of human nature and the way in which history evolves. Since the technical-rational cultural model has prevailed, we have lost touch with the flow of history because we only look at the future as a guarantee of success. Thus, “homo sapiens”, as we presume to call ourselves, while seemingly very attentive to understanding the causes and effects of physical ills is no longer able to understand the relationship between cause and effect in his history. He behaves as if the past had never existed and as if history had never shown similar situations to those, he now finds himself before, pushed to a form of repetitive coercion.

The consequences of this historical blindness are before our eyes every day, seeing the disasters of US foreign policy dominated by the idea of technical power and unable to understand history because its ruling class has lost touch with it and has forgotten the cultural lesson of the founding fathers who were accustomed to speaking in Latin and Greek. A cultural model that is also experiencing a dramatic moment of social instability due to poverty, unemployment, inequality, devastating social pathologies, but continuously hidden and masked by the media mystifying reality.

If the principle of utility is the only principle applied, then only that which is useful or instrumental serves, and life itself becomes a means to achieving short-term material desires. If this principle is invoked to denounce classical studies as non-vocational, the ancient languages have died but the thought that lies beneath them shines more than ever, and the study of their structure helps to develop the most important thing that man can do but seems to have unlearned by only studying technical subjects, namely, “thought”. We have lost the ability to think, because thinking takes effort, time, does not pay right away and is dangerous, as Bertrand Russell said, “Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death [28].

Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man …. But if the thought is to be held by many, not the privileged few, we must deal with fear. It is fear which stops the man, lest their cherished beliefs are not going to be illusions, fear that the institutions with which they live will not be harmful, fear that they themselves will not be less worthy of respect would have assumed”.

Given what has been said previously it seems we need to rethink our way of being a society. The desire to give space to humanity’s sense of omnipotence again seems to have whisked it back in history – to the myths of Prometheus, of Icarus – and force it once more to face the eternal dilemma of human destiny. A more social vision of life will be needed in order to re-pacify people with themselves, one in terms of relationships and not as single individuals, and to redefine the priorities of their needs. This doesn’t mean curtailing progress but conceiving it in a different way. In this sense the priority becomes to refocus on people’s spiritual dimension, today subordinated to the physical one, which determines choices and priorities of their needs. The spiritual and religious dimension are not closely bound to a religious belief because the ability to “feel” is within each one of us, it is innate. Today it is dormant but not lost, our task is to recover it, starting from each single moment of every day of our life, in relationships that bind us to others.

We need to return to a relationship with the natural world that the real economy can help reconstruct. Contact with this facilitates growth of the social dimension, not only considered as a series of mere chemical but also emotional reactions, which must once more become the subject of economics and other social sciences. All of this doesn’t mean renouncing the vital contribution of sciences in our life, but the acceptance of evidence that they cannot be absolute values, they cannot be considered moral knowledge to the point that we are induced to consider only the material dimension of our life. The return to a more spiritual dimension is a course to follow because it is written in the agenda of our history that, as European philosophy has attempted to describe, seems to follow a continual alternation over time of the predominance of material decadence and spiritual revival. In fact, we cannot renounce our spiritual dimension without renouncing living: we have a permanent nostalgia for our own being beyond material aspects, a nostalgia that is alive in us like embers that lie dormant under ashes.

In his work Homo creatus est written in 1986, Hans Urs von Balthasar speaks of “man’s nostalgia”, reminding us that this need for a spiritual dimension is an innate feeling, first mentioned in Greek philosophy that aimed to explain the sense of harmony of life. Starting from Plato’s Symposium, in which all the participants discuss Eros who has nostalgia and flies off towards the supreme and divine beauty, to Plotinus’ key concept of conversion (epistrophé) and of nostalgia that hastens towards the return (hormé), all of Greek philosophy only considered the issue of the true nobility of man. Man, who must not be content with fleeting pleasures and joys unless he wants to renounce satisfying his aspiration to happiness. The focus of this search for wisdom (philosophia) is always the blissful life as being man’s aim and his ultimate essential form, towards which he tends after his conversion from mere earthly captivity (think of Plato’s allegory of the cave). Given that, as we have said, the difference between the natural and supernatural was unknown in Greek philosophy, it was expressed in the fall of the human soul from the divine heights from which, however, man brings a spark that forces him to feel nostalgia for what was once his country, the paradise lost.

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Conclusion

Begin Again from People, The Sense of Humanistic Culture

Sixty-five years have passed since various premonitory considerations were made by Europe’s philosophers. During this period the facts have borne out their intuitions as to the danger of relying on a technical culture alone to provide guidance for society. Today it would seem that the role of feelings is making headway in people’s hearts ‒ appropriate answers and conduct in the face of change can no longer be postponed. It is time for people to realize what happens to a society when it fails to invest in social relations and the need imposed by history to again make social capital the focus of our interests. We must understand that social capital cannot be replaced by economic capital. A good society is always the precondition for growth of economic values and empirical evidence would seem to confirm this thesis.

But the question is whether we will manage in time to dominate this current, limitless greed and aggressiveness in favour of a greater focus on a sense of fraternity and solidarity expressed by love for others. Homo sapiens really does seem to be rather stubborn as regards understanding its own errors. A species that seems to be very attentive as regards learning the causes and effects of physical ills but that has not yet managed to correlate causes and effects in its history. Conceptually, similar situations to those we find ourselves having to face today have occurred before. Perhaps this explains why history is ignored, as if by doing so erects a kind of barrier to the fear of having to face suffering. Whether Homo sapiens will manage to deserve this appellation is difficult to say, time will tell if intelligence will turn out to be a benefit or a curse. Should it turn out to be a curse, this will only be because of a failure to use a truly precious gift, namely, our “humanity”, in an intelligent way.

The past few centuries have seen revolutions, wars and other tragic events that have ended, even in recent times, with solemn declarations of peace and democracy. But unfortunately, in the brief course of one generation they seem to disappear. And so, the history of progress of civilizations continues a course filled with doubts. Answers to the needs of an increasingly global society represented by a culture that relies on a single philosophy – technical knowledge as an end in itself – is showing it has reached the end of the line with the collapse of society and the very essence of humanity.

The time has come to rethink economic studies, making a move away from the technical-rational paradigm that has proved inappropriate for the aim assigned to it, to a different one capable of broadening the field of studies to include human nature as a decisive variable. An approach that considers human beings as “individuals” in an integral sense in order to provide a complete and constructive contribution towards the development of society. Absolute faith in scientific progress has ended up by creating an exaggerated sense of omnipotence that in the end has turned against us, because our ability to govern this tumultuous growth has not kept pace with it. Humanity has become so infatuated with its conquests that people have lost sight of themselves, ending up by considering their very own lives as if they were just another consumer good. As Guardini said, people must again find the ability to bring the excess of power that has been created over their lives under control by returning to an order of things capable of restoring harmony within themselves and the world

‘In a context of uncertainty unparalleled in history, one that in no way compares to developments in our ability to dominate nature, people now aspire to a valid order that can remain under their power. An order that is both useful and promotes human progress, capable of reconciling humanity with the extent of its scientific knowledge, which today is perceived as an absolute value, placing it at the service of the search for a more widespread common good’ [9]. Now, perhaps, the boundary of the enigma and this hope seem better defined and can therefore lead to a clearer answer for everyone, while remaining fully aware, however, that responsibilities are always an individual concern. Let us hope that in the middle of all this confusion and uncertainty we manage to see the light and find the right path to follow. A path that humanity must find in order to fulfil its destiny and its unique and creative mission on this Earth (Figure 2).

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[randomnessunicorn-imagine]

~My Little Pony Headcanons ;

{ Awww~ At the end, I wrote some HCs for every pony because they are all fabulous ~! 

I put a lot of effort in it but I had so much fun writing something different C: }

👑 Rarity~

She truly cares about her S/O’s opinions especially when she creates new dresses and S/O is the first to see her creations. Rarity is always so excited and curious to know what S/O thinks about her new outfits. Anyway, Rarity is very touchy so if S/O confesses to her that they don’t like so much her creation, she would feel offended and she will pass all the next days working on the same dress until it’s perfect and S/O will give their approval. Then, if she truly cares about that outfit she could just ignore their opinion, sometimes she acts a little paranoid and she’s divided by her own desires and others but she just wants every client to be satisfied by her clothes.

Rarity always shows to S/O all her drawings and projects and S/O can always give her advises about some new dresses and things she can create. It’s better talk to her when she’s free because Rarity becomes a little stressed when she works since she concentrates so much and she’s such a perfectionist pony.

S/O is her muse and personal model, Rarity enjoys organizing fashion shows in her own house, and she considers these events like a training for when she will do her true fashion shows and all the most important ponies will wear her outfits, it’s one of her big dreams. Sometimes, she invites also her pony friends and it becomes a Fashion Sleepover. 

Rarity thinks about S/O’s wardrobe because S/O must be as best dressed as her and Rarity cannot be seen by all (and by possible designers) with a beggar pony, she’s got a reputation so they have to wear the best clothes when they date her but she’s happy to create them for S/O. It can be a little exaggerated but, at least, they are sure her outfits are gorgeous.

Her favourite dates are the ones in the SPAs because she loves so much massages, baths, sauna and all this relaxing stuff. It’s something paradisiac, so she will invite her S/O to have a great time there and they won’t deny it. It’s totally awesome and S/O will feel so good.

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📑 Twilight Sparkle~

Since she is a bookworm she always gives S/O advises about the books they should read and she is very attempt and acute searching for the best volumes because Twilight wants to impress her S/O showing to them how much she knows them. All the books Twilight suggests to S/O are totally fit and she knows all their tastes, their favourite authors and genres. It’s impossible finding Twilight Sparkle unprepared.

Her favourite dates are the scientific ones (she’s a sort of scientist herself but her interests are so much and all of them regard culture and magic). She loves bringing her S/O to the Observatory, telling to them stories about the constellations. She knows everything about it. Everything. It seems she’s unable to stay quite so S/O should ask her to be more silent so the two of them can enjoy this romantic moment and stars remain always beautiful even if you don’t know all those theories and facts. Sometimes, she’s too much talkative.

Another of her hobbies is magic and she likes showing to S/O how expert she is with it and maybe Twilight seems a little too superb and she thinks to be the most intelligent pony of Ponyville but she’s just so passionate in what she does. S/O could make an alliance with Spike, pranking the poor pony and hiding her potions and books. Seeing Twilight nervous and stressed is funny so maybe Twilight will learn how to be less serious.

Everyone knows, she’s so fond of Princess Celestia so Twilight will bring them into her presence because it’s so important S/O and Celestia become friends, it’s like Twilight wants her blessing since Celestia is like a mother for the little pony so you have to befriend Celestia and she wants only the best for Twilight.

Staying with Twilight, S/O will become a fountain of knowledge and they will learn so much things without realizing. Twilight is the kind of pony who loves explaining the origin of phenomenon and stuff so they have to listen all her lessons. S/O is still Twiligh’s S/O, so we may think S/O is a geek too if they’re able to handle a pony like Twilight

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🍎 Applejack~

Her S/O can help her with the apples picking since we all know how she cares about apples and her job in the ranch. Applejack would tell to S/O everything about apples and she will train S/O to become the perfect farmer.

Every weekend Applejack invites her S/O to enjoy her and her family in the ranch so they can do so many games and activities. It’s like an agritourist experience and S/O will learn so many things about the agrarian life and even her family will be glad to know them since Applejack always tells about them saying how they’re fantastic and she’s so happy so her family is glad seeing Applejack so content thanks to S/O.

It’s obvious, S/O must have the approval of her family because they want Applejack to be happy and this pony must be strong, smart, funny and dutiful since if they will become a part of the family they will have new duties and they can gain all the supreme knowledge about apple’s production and it’s so important. They are traditions that pass down from generation to generation and S/O should feel honoured to be part of this.

In particular, Applebloom will check on S/O because she cares so much about her sister since Applejack is her heroine and one of Applebloom’s duties is to protect her sister even if she is the little one. Applebloom organizes games and challenges that S/O must win if they want to be with Applejack (the poor Applejack is unaware of it). S/O must demonstrate to Applebloom to be the perfect pony for her sister. She’s just a little pony so there’s no need to take her so seriously.

Applejack loves telling stories to S/O about her ancestors and all the various legends about her family. They will enjoy hearing also the weird fables of her grandmother and S/O will have so much fun because Applejack’s family is so special and, even when Applejack is too busy with her job, S/O can spend time with the other members of the family. There will never be a dull moment.

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🌈 Rainbow Dash ~

It won’t be easy to win her heart because her standards are as high as the sky where she lives. She will dare her S/O to demonstrate they’re strong, brave, cool and talented enough to be her special pony. Dash will organize so many challenges and competitions about different disciplines. They will be trials of strength, intelligence, speed, resistance, comedy. She’s quite needy and, at the end, she’ll understand her standards are too high and she will accept S/O for what they are.

Dash is so competitive so every occasion is gold to challenge her S/O but she will take these contests too seriously and her S/O must be so patient and understanding with Dash, it’s just her nature. She’s born to compete.

Sometimes, Dash is a hothead and she can be so stubborn so her S/O has to be a strong pony who is able to tell her the truth even when it’s unfair and Dash appreciates honestly so she will be glad when her S/O confesses to her what’s wrong. At first, Dash would feel offended but, after an attempt analysis, she will take their criticism like an advice to become a better pony. It takes time but it’s worthy.

If S/O is not a Pegasus like her, she will bring S/O everywhere because Dash wants them to see the vast and beautiful sky, her primal element. She will show to S/O every cloud, rainbow and peace of Cloudsdale. She’s just like a tourist guide. In the meantime, she will pump herself showing to her S/O all her flying skills doing exhibitions (especially when there are other ponies that can see and applaud her).

We all know she’s the greatest fan of the Wonderbolts and she will always talks about them to her S/O. Dash will invite S/O to see all their competitions and races. She acts just like a fangirl and she does not stop to say how they are fantastic and cool. If S/O wants to conquer her heart, it would be a good idea to bring Dash to one of their exhibitions, buying to her gadgets branded Wonderbolts and if you are able to take hold of their autographs then you have already won.

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🌺 Fluttershy~

Before S/O can consider themselves like her special pony they have to be approved by Angel and all her animal friends because they are her family and they want Fluttershy to be happy. She is so timid and candid so people usually take advantage of her kindness, so S/O has not to be a bully.

Obvious, S/O does not have to do matches or challenges to demonstrate their value but they have to show they truly care about Fluttershy because she’s too precious and she does not deserve to suffer. S/O has to be a gentle, comfortable and understanding pony who accepts Fluttershy for the pony she is. Her animals keep an eye on them studying their behaviours towards their loved pony. Then, when they understand S/O’s love is sincere and real, they will approve this union. 

Fluttershy is so shy, especially with her crush, and she will stutter like crazy, becoming as red as a tomato in front of them. She’s afraid to be rejected and S/O has to be the one to declare their love to her and Fluttershy will explode for the embarrassment and joy, she can’t believe they share the same sentiment. She will act like a baby pony with her first crush and she becomes so clumsy since she daydreams a lot.

Fluttershy loves gardening and flowers so her S/O can buy to her seeds the two of them can plant together and she will be happy to talk about botany with them. She will feel so useful if she can share her knowledge with the pony she loves.

She often thinks she’ s not enough for her S/O and she feels so inferior because of her shyness and insecurities but she’s super just like all the other ponies. Sometimes, her S/O has to remember it to her so she can gain some self-esteem. She’s such a cutie and she’s so adorable when she blushes and she hides herself under her mane.

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🎈 Pinkie Pie~

It’s rare Pinkie gets crushes on other ponies because every pony is her friend and she wants to befriend every creature of the earth so she thinks S/O is her friend too and Pinkie will treat them the same way. They are still so special and great friend to Pinkie. S/O will suffer so many friendzones with this pony *pat pat to S/O*.

Pinkie is so weird and noisy so her S/O has not to be too much perfectionist or scorbutic because Pinkie is a pony who loves life and have fun. S/O can bet they are not going to have neither a dull moment with her and Pinkie knows all the funniest activities of the world.

Every day she spends with her S/O is a party. Literally. Pinkie will organize a party for everything and all will be an anniversary. For example, the first time they have hold their own hooves, the first time when they have laughed, the first time S/O has smiled for a Pinkie’s jokes, the first time they have had a party. Pinkie remembers every date, hour, place and word. Her memory is impeccable. S/O won’t have the time to think about the situation that Pinkie starts another party proclaiming another important date.

Pinkie screams to everyone S/O is her special pony, and they have to know all her friends… Which is the entire Ponyville, good luck! Then, all the city is invited to the special party for your 392 day anniversary (actually, she knows the exact second, minute, hour, latitude and longitude S/O and her become a couple).

Every moment is the perfect moment for a song and Pinkie loves serenating S/O under their balcony. Pinkie has a team of singer ponies that accompany her. They also play instruments but Pinkie is the soloist. Sometimes, Pinkie sings at random when she is so inspired but she can’t contain her joy and she has to demonstrate how much she loves her S/O.