An authoritative source of current scientific opinion woud be useful

I was talking to someone the other day who believed that Quantum Mechanics (QM) basically equated to the Copenhagen interpretation of it -- you know, the one where an observation collapses the quantum wave.

As far as I know, this interpretation is not very popular among working physicists.  But I can't recall anymore where I got this detail from.  No doubt it was from books I've read or things I've read in discussion forums, but I just can't remember.

I would have liked to have been able to point the person towards something online that showed that in fact most physicists don't believe the Copenhagen interpretation, but it's just not easy to find something that will tell you the current scientific opinion on a particular topic.

And if I can't reference some sort of reputable source, the person I'm talking to has no particular reason to believe what I'm saying.

Being able to easily find out, and link to, the current scientific opinion on topics would make it easier to address common misconceptions.  A better informed public can on-the-whole only be a good thing, and surely this would also be helpful for matters of public policy where scientific opinion is relevant.

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I'll explain what I mean by a source outlining current scientific opinion.

Imagine that a high status journal like Nature did a biannual survey of working scientists to gather their opinions about various topics, such as which interpretation of QM they believe.  They could survey scientists in different fields, asking them about topics specific to their field.   For example,  Cosmologists could be asked whether they believe the big bang theory is true.  Biologists could be asked whether they believe evolution is true.  And so on.

Obviously a lot of thought would have to go into the questions they asked.  Since the results of the survey would be for the general public, the media and the government to use, you'd want it to cover the sorts of questions these people might have a use for.

They could put the survey results up on a web-site that you could search and find answers such as (to make up a statistic) "99% of surveyed biologists believe in evolution".

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The goal would be to have an authoritative source of such information.  First, a reasonable proportion of practicing scientists would need to respond to the survey, so you know that the statistics it provides are representative. Hopefully scientists would be willing to respond to the survey, as a kind of public service.

Second, it would need to be a "brand" that was known to be reputable.  So that if you presented a fact like "99% of surveyed biologists believe in evolution", linking to this source, the people seeing it would recognise that site and know what it's about and believe that it is reputable.  (obviously this is just an ideal.  It couldn't just start out with that reputation, and it could never have that reputation for everyone in the population).

There's learned philosophers but not philosophical experts

I posted the following to reddit/r/philosophy:

It seems to me that the notion of expertise can only apply to fields in which there is an established body of knowledge. By that I mean fields in which we have (empirical) grounds for believing our knowledge is at least an approximation or heading in the right direction. Physics or genetics or how to fix cars are examples of such fields. You can be an expert in physics.

Philosophy seems different. What makes philosophy interesting is that it's about things we don't understand well. In philosophy we're not even sure that existing approaches to problems are heading in the right direction.

Philosophy is pretty much by definition about things we don't understand well. Once a philosophical topic is understood it ceases to be part of philosophy, and becomes part of another field like physics, biology, economics, etc. (or alternatively, the problem may be dissolved and seen as a kind of misunderstanding.)

I would say the kind of knowledge that exists in the field of philosophy is more of ways of describing problems, or particular arguments for or against a view of problems. It's more like a discussion.

You can be an expert in the different positions about a philosophical problem, but I would distinguish this from the idea that someone can be an expert on a philosophical subject.

For example, someone can be an expert on the various problems and arguments associated with consciousness, but I don't think anyone can claim to be an expert on consciousness (at least the hard problem of consciousness) because we just don't understand it.

So rather than saying there are experts in philosophy I would say that there are people who are very learned in philosophy.

Why does this distinction matter?

When there isn't established knowledge, we're less certain that existing approaches are correct. The fact that an existing approach hasn't been able to solve a problem for long time may mean that it's the wrong approach. It is more likely in philosophy that someone who comes from outside of the field, who isn't well versed in the existing approaches, can add something of use to the table. The fact that they aren't familiar with existing arguments may even be a virtue.

If there aren't philosophical experts, then there aren't experts to challenge.

Yet it seems to me that philosophy seems to hold greater reverence for 'experts' than most other fields.

Improving 'use by' labelling on food

Here's a pretty basic suggestion for improving 'use by' labelling on food.

Even food that's properly packaged and uncontaminated can still go bad well before its use by date.

For example, once a tub of tomato paste has been opened it needs to be used within a few weeks at most, even if its use by date is still more than a year away.  And of course, it needs to be stored properly, in the fridge.

'use by' labelling unfortunately suggests that the food is ok to consume as long as that date hasn't passed, regardless of any other details.  (the same applies for 'best before' dates).


Here's my suggestion for how the labels could look:

    Use by:
    7 days after opening
    and before 31 Mar 2012
    Refrigerate after opening.

Packaging does often show 'time after opening' information and storage info, but they're usually in some fine-print separated from the (much more prominent) use by date. I think all this information should be shown right next to each other, as in the labelling suggested above.

With the way it currently is, you can easily just see the use by date by itself and draw the conclusion that if today's date is before then the food is ok.

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You might think it'd be obvious how food needs to be stored, but people often put condiments that according to the labelling should be refrigerated in the pantry.

And even if you have stored it properly, the sight of the use by date being still months or years off can make it feel like the food must still be ok.  I've seen someone who has, for this reason, used tomato paste that's been put in the fridge but since gone mouldy (first scraping the mould off).

Of course labelling is never going to *stop* people from doing anything, but that's not the point.  It's to try and help reduce the chances of it happening, even if only by a relatively small amount.

Keep in mind, also, that it's not just about the one-off effects of eating unsafe foods, but whatever the cumulative effects of this may be.

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Warning: the following is a bit rambly... where I try to think through some of the issues to do with human perception and psychology that underly labelling.

Labelling concerns human perception and psychology.  It's not a matter of what information is, strictly speaking, available.  It's about what information we'll notice and how we'll perceive it and how it can effect our actions.

The thing is that people aren't going to devote much time or effort to checking food safety info on labels.

The amount of time and effort and concentration we devote to a task tends to be proportional to how important it is to us at that point in time (and this is not usually the result of a conscious choice).

We don't fully consciously process the smaller things.  To some extent we're always handling certain tasks on automatic, rather than giving them full conscious deliberation.  We're creatures of habit, as they say.

While we're doing the little tasks we usually have our concentration focused more on the bigger tasks and concerns on our minds.

We're unlikely to ever devote that much time or effort or conscious thought to food labelling info.

As soon as a person finds something that seems like its telling them the whole story (the "use by" date) they're likely to stop their search.

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Think what it'd actually take to actually find and process the other food safety information in addition to the use by date.

We'd have to think to look for it.  We'd have to find it on the packet, then take the effort to read it.  And then we'd have to reconcile that information with the use by date information.  The latter is harder than it sounds.  It took me a fair while to get clear how the use by date relates to the 'time after opening' info.

And we'd have to overcome our natural inclination to stop our search once we have found an answer (you can find a description of some research on this here.  I can't recall where I had first heard about this, but I do remember that Dan Airely describes it in his book Predictably Irrational).  We make swift, relatively sub-conscious judgements.

Where's the motivation in a normal situation to do these things?  There doesn't seem to be one.  There's always heaps of things you could be doing, but unless they're relevant to what you are doing or want to do they don't come to mind.

It may seem so "obvious" as something to focus upon because that's what we're doing right now in this bit of writing.  Which is the 'paradox' of discussing aspects of tasks that you wouldn't think of when you were actually doing the task - when you're discussing it you're making yourself to focus on it.

Future scenario: personal AI drone cameraman

Here's a possible future scenario.

There's really cheap, light, compact drones (mini helicopter things) with good AI, an on-board camera, and really good battery life. They're quiet, too.

You and a friend go on a hike together, and take one of these with you.

At the start of the hike you take it out and tell it to follow you. (it's got voice control, so you just tell it what to do).

You tell it to take shots every once in a while. Its AI is good enough to compose reasonable shots, ensuring it gets one or both of you in the frame.

Perhaps it can even spot things of interest on the side of the track (e.g a big mushroom nestled in a rotting log on the side of the track) you might have missed.

You come to nice waterfall beside the track so you ask the drone to fly out so it can get a shot of both of you with the waterfall in the background.

It flies out to where it thinks it might get a good shot. It's transmitting the image to your phone so you can see what it looks like. You want it to move more to the left and get a little lower so you tell it that.

At the end of the walk you sit down on a picnic blanket and have lunch together. You figure it'd be nice to get a shot of both of you having the picnic so you instruct the drone to take one.

(and of course that's just one of many possible scenarios, many no doubt with a sinister edge, that such technology might make possible).

Reframing how digital content is sold

Perhaps we could change how digital content (e-books, MP3s etc) is offered for sale.  Instead of "buy a copy of this item", offer it as "pay for the effort that went into creating this item".

Buying a copy means buying some bits, and since bits sound insubstantial and making copies of bits is effortless, it doesn't sound like it should be worth much money.

But when you frame it as paying the content creator for their effort, that sounds (to me) like something that's worth more.

This is about changing how people view what it means to purchase digital content.  There's obviously a big question about how that could be achieved and I'm not sure of the answer.

One component of that is the user-interface in online-stores.  I wonder if you could replace the 'buy' button with something else?  Replace it with something that suggests you are giving money to pay for the effort that went into creating that content.

Perhaps it could be a 'pay' button, with hover-text saying "pay for the effort that went into creating this item".

Obviously you'd want it to be something pretty short and sweet.

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update: I wonder if the visual "branding" used by Creative Commons might serve as a model for this.  There are a range of buttons that represent particular Creative Commons licences (see the image to the right of this paragraph for an example).  Perhaps you could have something analogous to this and by, instead of a 'buy' button, having a special button that represents this notion of paying for the creation of the content instead of for the content itself.

Idea: hold-and-swipe touch-screen gesture

An idea for a type of touch-screen gesture for phones: the user places their left-thumb anywhere on the screen and keeps it in the same place, and at the same time they swipe across with their right-thumb.

You can think of the left-thumb as acting like a modifier, like the shift-key.  A left-handed person could keep their right thumb stationary and swipe their left thumb - it'd have the same effect.

Each different swipe direction (up, down, left or right) could be recognised as a distinct gesture with its own distinct meaning.

I don't know if anyone has used this type of gesture before, but the benefit of it is that it's quite easy to perform.  Which is one of the challenges with gestures: finding ones that are really quick and easy to do.

On distinctions made between 'data', 'information' and 'knowledge'

Someone recently asked me what I thought about the distinction between data, information and knowledge.  I emailed them a response, and I thought I might as well turn that response into a blog post.


I think that it's good to recognise that not all "information" is the same, and that there is a kind of spectrum between 'raw data' and 'deep knowledge'.


But I'm not that keen on all the arguments about how you distinguish between these three concepts.  I just don't think we have a clear enough picture of what *any* of them are to draw sharp lines between them.  I also doubt there are any *sharp* lines to be drawn along that spectrum.


But aren't these sorts of arguments what is required to get a clearer understanding of the concept?  I don't think so.  I think our current understanding of these concepts is a "pre-scientific" one, and that what these arguments are doing is trying to find some set of criteria within these concepts that sharply distinguishes each from the other.  


I think that task is doomed to failure.  Here's an analogy: when philosophers had a "pre-scientific" understanding of matter, they could get into all sorts of arguments about what was the difference was between liquids, solids and gasses (this is a thought-experiment, I don't know the historical details well enough to know specifically what happened).  But they were never going to solve the problem just trying to find some criteria to sharply distinguish these concepts from each other.


We now know that what was required was to get an understanding that we'd now label with terms like 'chemistry' and 'physics' -- an understanding in terms of molecules, atoms, etc.  What was required was to go deeper than their phenomenal concepts of 'liquid', 'solid' and 'gas'.  To have an understanding of what each of those things actually are, rather than just how to distinguish between them.


So, in the case of data, information and knowledge we need to go beyond our phenomenal notions of them and get at their "underlying physics", so to speak.  And when we do so we may find that -- like with 'liquids', 'solids' and 'gasses' -- there is an underlying unity there.

Nassim Taleb on the lack of respect for those not doing steady and predictable work

Our society doesn't really understand work that doesn't deliver steady and predictable results.  People working away on this kind of work tend not to get much respect.  This is a real problem, because such work is essential to society.  In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb nicely describes what it's like for people having to deal with this lack of respect:

     Every morning you leave your cramped apartment in Manhattan's East Village to go to your laboratory at the Rockefeller University in the East Sixties. You return in the late evening, and people in your social network ask you if you had a good day, just to be polite. At the laboratory, people are more tactful. Of course you did not have a good day; you found nothing. You are not a watch repairman. Your finding nothing is very valuable, since it is part of the process of discovery—hey, you know where not to look. Other researchers, knowing your results, would avoid trying your special experiment, provided a journal is thoughtful enough to consider your "found nothing" as information and publish it. 

     Meanwhile your brother-in-law is a salesman for a Wall Street firm, and keeps getting large commissions—large and steady commissions. "He is doing very well," you hear, particularly from your father-in-law, with a small pensive nanosecond of silence after the utterance—which makes you realize that he just made a comparison. It was involuntary, but he made one. Holidays can be terrible. You run into your brother-in-law at family reunions and, invariably, detect unmistakable signs of frustration on the part of your wife, who, briefly, fears that she married a loser, before remembering the logic of your profession. But she has to fight her first im­pulse. Her sister will not stop talking about their renovations, their new wallpaper. Your wife will be a little more silent than usual on the drive home. This sulking will be made slightly worse because the car you are driving is rented, since you cannot afford to garage a car in Manhattan. What should you do? Move to Australia and thereby make family re­unions less frequent, or switch brothers-in-laws by marrying someone with a less "successful" brother? 

     Or should you dress like a hippie and become defiant? That may work for an artist, but not so easily for a scientist or a businessman. You are trapped. 

     You work on a project that does not deliver immediate or steady results; all the while, people around you work on projects that do. You are in trouble. Such is the lot of scientists, artists, and researchers lost in society rather than living in an insulated community or an artist colony.

(pg 86)

     Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel, no Shnobel. "How was your year?" brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the out­side. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come. 

(pg 87)


This touches a nerve with me, as my research is definitely a long way from the steady and predictable, though I would say that I've been pretty fortunate in that I have had support and understanding from people.