I believe mediation is value for very one specific reason: it involves the practice of focusing on one single thing.

It is very easy to become distracted, particularly in this always-on world – indeed, I believe distraction is my number one impairment to productivity. Despite knowing about switching costs, depth of thought required, and so on (all of which, cumulatively, conclude that enough distraction drops overall productivity to zero – regardless of how minor or idle it is), I continue to be distracted.

Meditation allows one to practice to very simple, yet essential, skill of focus. Each time a thought intrudes, simply let it pass through and go away – without disturbing the primary focus. Each external stimulus which could cause distraction is allowed to wash over you, eliciting no reaction.

It has, of course, other – poorly understood – benefits. People claim it reduces stress, liberates the mind, and so on. There is even evidence that it changes (in a significant way) brain structure.

I think those are side-benefits: nice if they accrue, but a byproduct of practicing focus. Focus is the more valuable skill.

Good morning, and thanks for having me. 

 It’s really exciting to be here today, to talk to probably the most “with-it” energized, engaged audience that we’ve come across as we’ve been building out a hyperlocal news and media business for the past couple of years. 

 What’s we’re going to talk about today are the trends and the dynamics that are happening in local media that are impacting everything from how your customers find you, where the ad dollars are being spent, where customer attention is being spend and how that might impact you.

So I’m going to try to cover three things. 

The first are the trends that we see that are impacting the local media landscape.

Two, one of the models that we see that emerging from all the disruption and excitement that’s happening.

And then the third is what this might mean for you.

There’s another panel that I’m sitting on this afternoon where we’ll get a little more specific about what we do, and looking forward to talking about all of that. 

 So, it’s an unbelievably exciting time to be working in media, to be a startup focused on high-growth opportunities, and in a market where things are changing every day… you can’t pick up the paper – if you still pick up the paper – without reading about a new company or an old company that’s changing and what’s happening there.

 So I’m going to talk about a couple of important trends. 

The first is that the cost to create content in local media in any media, and distribute that content, has dropped it to almost nothing… the internet has taken the printing press, and made it… well, I guess that the printing press is now the metaphor that people sue for old businesses. 

And for local, particularly local content, used to be dominated by monopolies. There used to be the newspaper, the television station, and the local content used to be just that article that was in the newspaper. That was pretty much just about it. 

Today, completely upside down… there are still those articles in the newspapers, though fewer of them, there are local bloggers, y’know we see up to 10,000 local bloggers covering very specific neighborhoods, doing it for passion, doing it for expertise and effectively talking about what’s happening in their neighborhoods at a level that nobody else has ever covered before. 

We see people will cellphones taking pictures of planes landing in the Hudson river, that picture turns up on the front page of CNN Today… that never would have happened years ago.

We see people Tweeting about waiting in line at concerts, we see checking in on FourSquare… the amount of content, municipal data, crime reports… potholes that need to be fixed… the amount of data, the amount of content that’s being created at the local level is overwhelming.

It’s about abundance. It used to be scarcity.

Today, there’s just frankly too much content that exists in your local markets, and the challenge is how do you organize that and make it valuable for people. 

So one, everybody’s the published today. In New York, there are 8 million publishers, because we’re all doing something to express some information about what’s happening around us.

 
Second trend is that consumers’ expectations, customers’ expectations for targeting and specificity are getting more and more highly-tuned. We expect to get an email alert when the wide receiver on our fantasy football team blows out his knee. We only want to hear about art, the stocks that we buy, the houses that we’re interested in buying… the teams and information and the companies that are interesting to me… I was talking to somebody the other day about the experience about going to… remember when everyone used to use MyYahoo as their homepage, and the first time you went there it was really untargeted, because you hadn’t customized it yet? It used to be really exciting and interesting to customize that. Today, even that’s not good enough. The expectations are even more specific about what you should receive and how you should receive it.

 Today, there’s this whole enabling thing that we’ll talk about that enables the specificity to happen on a local level as well. 

 The next trend that’s impacting local media is mobile.

We’re all carrying little computer in our pocket, those computers are uh increasingly location-away… they have GPS, your browsers that you’re using on your desktop computers are now location away, your cars are now location aware, and we joke that eventually your toaster will be location aware.

 Knowing where you are is incredibly easy to do, both for you as a consumer but also for the business and services that are trying to reach you as a consumer, and the next question is if you know where you are, what’s happening around you?

And that’s some of the thing that’ we’re going after to try to fill in… and it’s increasingly social, it’s so easy to share information, and there’s been some great examples… FourSquare is fantastic, Twitter is easy… Facebook and sharing pictures and Pegshot, great ways to hare information about what’s going on around you, and that’s leading to an unbelievable amount of information… not all of it has value, some of it has less value than others, but there’s an incredible amount of information and it’s flowing through your mobile devices and its increasingly so. 

I saw a stat this morning that by 2013 the mobile web will bigger than the desktop web… I didn’t read the whole story so maybe there’s a caveat to that.

The following trend is undeniable and it makes for good reading during the week, but the old guard is changing. There’s no denying that the incumbents in any given market used to be the newspapers, they’re not anymore in the way that they … they’re not today and they won’t be tomorrow in the way in which they’re currently constituted. 

There’s a tremendous amount… we work with hundreds of them, because we’re trying to help them and we’re providing services to help them, get to the next level and the next models, and there’s two different categories that we see. We see those that are, who are really trying very hard to reinvent themselves… and you can see great examples of that with folks like the New York Times and what they’re doing with Local, and the New York Post, and the 200 neighborhood pages, sections on their web site (which we do for them – full disclosure). And you see new interesting models being invented from more traditional companies, so AOL is doing Patch… there’s startups like Neighborlogs and Prism and interesting businesses that are trying to create a new model for hyperlocal or local media publishing. 

So the barriers that existed don’t exist anymore.

 The… you had to buy the Sunday paper or you had to buy the ad at this place because that’s the only place you could get your customers, and that’s just not happening anymore. We see that now as local advertisers are really starting to stream online, and people are starting to spend dollars targeted at local in a way that hasn’t happened before. 

There were $115 billion dollars spent in local advertising. $15 billion of it is online, only $15 billion, but that number is picking up steam and it’s happening quickly. And it’s happening because the circulation and reach of the traditional print publications, and there effectiveness… is dropping. It’s just not working as well as it used to. 

If you think about customers expectations about more enhanced targeting and relevance – that’s the same for ads. Consumers actually embrace targeted ads; we click on ads that are relevant to the queries that we make, and if we’re looking for something and we see an ad that’s relevant, that’s great content. 

What we’re seeing is local advertisers streaming towards transparency. They know what they want, they know the customers that they want, and they know where to find them… and streaming towards results based pricing. 

I only want to pay for the things that work for me. 

And there are great companies that are really tackling this problem. There are folks like Yodle, or for the individual buyer there’s folks like RealDirect – trying to do interesting things to bring success to local advertisers. 

We see that happening and we see real progress being made there.

And that speaks to the new models that are emerging and it’s again as an entrepreneur and as a startup company, the ability to work in a market that is being re-written every single day is thrilling and I really believe, ’cause we’ve spent a lot of time with big publishers, we’ve spent a lot of time with local bloggers, we’ve spent a lot of time with local advertisers and real estate folks (as a great example of that) what’s happening on the macro-level with the big guys is exactly what’s happening on the micro-level with the little guys, and individual and local markets and neighborhoods. 

The rules are being re-written, and the barriers to build your business and to develop an effective strategy [are] just not what they used to be, and that’s just very exciting for us and for our company and for the folks with whom we work. 

 So… that leads to hyper-local. 

We love hyperlocal, but people don’t always know what hyperlocal means. 

So, hyperlocal for us is the obvious result of the confluence of the trends that we talked about. More content about more specific targeted places, technology that enables you to target that content – more local advertisers who have who are spending money on only
what works which means that the buys in the dollars you spend tend to be more focused and more targeted instead of trying to cast a wide net hoping you’ll catch people… and mobile that follows you around everywhere. 

So hyperlocal is, for us, as the definition, a deep geographic media reach that is typically at a block, a neighborhood, or a street-level… ’cause you can actually now build a business around a one-block radius of a central point, and that could never [have] happen[ed] before. 

And the thing that gets us, one of the things that gets us really excited is that what’s close to us is really important. Consumers value things that are close to [them], and advertisers get greater conversion, local advertisers, when proximity matters. When proximity is included. 

But there’s also an emotional connection that exists in your neighborhood, that exists with your community. So, we often talk about hyper-local not being just what’s close to you, but what’s close to your heart and what’s close to your wallet, because that’s where dollars are being spent, and that’s where we think the opportunity continues to evolve and expand. 

 So… in order for hyper-local to exist and really grow, we believe that it’s reliant on an ecosystem, and this is one of our big points of view in the market. 

In order for communities to grow, and systems to evolve, everybody needs to play a part. 

And it used to be, again, a monopoly in a given market and now there’s complete transparency and atomization of the responsibilities… everybody owns something. An ecosystem is a model where everybody who takes something from the market puts something back in. Either overtly, covertly, intentionally, unintentionally… but you can’t just take value from the market, you have to provide value as well. 

That’s what’s going to enable hyperlocal communities, hyperlocal media businesses, and success for local advertisers, in the market. 

So, what does that mean in local and hyperlocal media? 

 So there’s a couple of key players. 

First is the publishers. The incumbents aren’t going away overnight, or entirely… they’re going to reinvent themselves and they’re going to be interesting. And those guys have actually a lot of traffic and a lot of audience in their local market that you can still be valuable to the ecosystem… and they also have great long-standing relationships with local advertisers that they can leverage, they just have… still have big printing presses that they’re trying to pay for. 

There are advertisers in the room and in local markets who want to reach customers and who put dollars into the ecosystem, and can sponsor and create and foster the creativity and things that need to happen in local markets. 

Consumers used to just take… let me read, and I’ll listen to a little bit of the advertising as well, but now with the advent of blogging and Twittering and Yelp and posting reviews and adding stars and taking pictures and checking in on FourSquare – we’re contributing, we’re all contributing to the market to the ecosystem and providing value in there. 

And local bloggers are really filling a need, and a niche that never existed before… [well] the need always existed, but now they can cover what’s happening at the on the street corners, and in the neighborhoods that the traditional media can no longer afford to do, so they’re driving a lot of value. 

So the last piece I want to talk about is perhaps what this means to folks in this room and to the real estate community. 

 And… I’m not a real estate… I’m not an expert on real estate. I like to think that I’m well-versed in local and local media, and online. What I would ask of everybody in this room is similar to what I’d ask of people in other groups that we’d talk to, when they ask what role can they play in the local media and hyperlocal media ecosystem. 

 I would ask yourselves “What do I know better than anybody else in my market?” “What am I good at, what do I know, what value am I uniquely positioned to add to the market?” 

And I know the best real estate professionals who I come in touch with that I come in touch with know more what’s happening in any neighborhood than any reporter, any blogger, any resident that exists there. 

So I would ask: Take your expertise, take your knowledge of what’s important and what’s interesting, and start sharing that knowledge in a way that’s easier… there’s some great examples before. [Now] we’re not a company that will get you online, but we can help make your online presence really sing and become a definitive resource for that local neighborhood.

 So, I would say that there are two things that you can do. The first is to start sharing that information online. If you have a blog, use it. If you don’t, create one. You should be Twittering, you should be sharing that information in a way that you can start to compete for audience online, and brand and attention. And if you have a website that’s for your neighborhood or for the regions that you’re working in, you can use our tools, and we’ll talk more about those later this afternoon, to help make it more robust, to help make it more of a destination, and easy to do. 

And the second thing is start spending your marketing dollars on neighborhood-focused media players. There are more and more of us (and we’re not the only ones) but put dollars into the ecosystem so that you can have more choices. We all benefit when there are more choices in the market. And right now there’s a unique point in time when there’s a lot of startup companies and a lot of innovation that’s happening that could use some of those dollars in our direction, and it’s going to come back and help you because you’ll be building audience and finding new places to get customers and find your success. 

And why do you do it?

 In the ecosystem, it all comes back to you. It’s more than just karma. I said there are 10,000 local bloggers, roughly, there’s anywhere between 50-80,000 neighborhoods as defined by folks like us as Neighbwise(?) that need information and need covering – and from a real tactical basis, people are searching on Google for information about neighborhoods. And you guys can compete. 

I think local real estate professionals can compete for organic traffic in the organic unpaid search results by having a robust and easy web presence that you can enhance with our tools and with your with a little bit of effort. It’s safe to assume most people are competing for cost per click in Google AdSense audience, but there’s a way you can actually be competing in getting attention in driving traffic, driving leads, building your brands, in local markets through an organic editorial product that we can help you do. And if you spent dollars online like I said, targeting towards neighborhood focused brands, you can it’s going to come back tenfold, we believe, in fostering growth amongst those sorts of companies. 

So, only one slide about who we are and what we do. 

 We aggregate, organize and distribute local media. We work with over 50,000 sources of local information, algorithmically organize it into 50,000 different neighborhoods, then we distribute it out to our own site, but in partnership with hundreds of media companies, like the New York Post, like the New York Times, like McClatchy, MediaGeneral, Down Jones, Lee Enterprises, and Gannett.

We’re reaching millions and millions of consumers every month, we partner with thousands of local bloggers, and we are focused really on helping sit in the middle of that ecosystem and develop value and create value for all the participants in there. At 4:30 I’ll be talking more about what we do and how we do it and what you can all do. 

It’s an unbelievably exciting time to be working in local, to be in a conference again with the most engaging and exciting and excited people about what we’re doing. 

So, thanks so much. 

How? Well, it’s pretty simple, and arranged like an experiment. Each day, he’ll drink a cup of coffee – but in each cup, there will be some regular, and some decaffeinated. Furthermore, his wife will be randomizing the proportions. And each day, he’ll record his performance, and how he feels – with the hope of proving to himself that on the days he does have caffeine, he feels fatigued or less effective.

But there’s a problem.

Before that, an interlude:

Psychologists in the middle of the last century spent a lot of time studying “learning.” Learning is divided into two types; there’s classical conditioning, which is Pavlov’s dog salivating in response to a bell, and operant conditioning, which is an individual (or rat) choosing to do something. A classic example of operant conditioning is pulling a lever to get some food; once the creature learns they pull the lever to get food (as opposed to whining piteously).

In operant conditioning, one thing is really important: the reinforcement schedule. A continuous reinforcement schedule – where you “reward” the individual every time they complete the action – is standard, and the fastest way to get something to learn something. The alternative is partial reinforcement schedules – where the individual is rewarded only some of the time. Partial reinforcement doesn’t cause people to learn as fast as continuous; but it makes the “response more resistant to extinction.”

That is, under partial reinforcement, people won’t eventually stop. If a rat in a cage presses a button, and food comes out sometimes – randomly – then the rat is going to push the button more than under continuous reinforcement, and will also keep pushing the button long after a rat under continuous reinforcement has given up on it. Humans are worse, if anything – they try to create a pattern to predict when the reward will come, even if it’s completely random.

So why could Matt’s plan backfire?

Matt’s basically putting himself on a partial reinforcement schedule. He’ll drink a cup of coffee in the morning, and sometimes he’ll receive caffeine, and sometimes he won’t; and the amount of caffeine he receives will vary.

This plan could make him drink more coffee, in the end.

The only way to oppose that – which Matt is also doing, to some extent – is to have a negative reaction to drinking coffee. He has a “generally negative” view already (which is why he’s embarked on this plan), and is buying a book to convince himself of the evils of coffee.

Still, I don’t think the negative steps Matt is taking are enough.

There are also, additionally, other problems – e.g. his wife is randomizing the proportions. The way she randomizes the proportions will be very important, and could have a significant effect on the results (she should use something like Excel to generate really random proportions, and not pseudo-random).

Overall, he’d probably be better switching to decaffeinated outright, and after a long time (6 months? However long to kill, or at least diminish, the learned behavior that drinking coffee makes you feel good) stopping entirely. Even better would be having his wife give him just decaf for this entire experiment, and not tell him.

But, since the tech media/blogs have jumped to the support of Amazon – or of Apple, but either way again Macmillan, I thought it worth saying something in support of Macmillan.

Let’s start off with what Henry Blodget says:

First, to clarify what is happening here, you [Macmillan] are already getting your money: You are selling ebooks to Amazon at whatever price you set ($10-$15), and Amazon is turning around and selling them at a loss, sometimes for $9.99.  We’re not against your charging what you want to for your books.  We’re against your telling Amazon what it has to charge for them.

Also, we don’t want to pay $15 for ebooks, and we don’t think we should have to.  The marginal cost of an incremental ebook is pretty much zero.  So why on earth should we pay $15 for it?

So the above seems a trifle misguided. If people don’t want to pay $15 for an ebook, they …won’t. A portion of economics cannon left unscathed by the financial crisis – supply and demand – indicates that prices will eventually arrive at an equilibrium (where profit is maximized).

It’s also important to note that Macmillan would like variable pricing (which the music industry has also wanted for years). In other words, popular (and new) stuff is priced higher than unpopular (and old) stuff. Yes, this means that publishers make more money. But it also means that less popular stuff is cheaper (unless it’s for niche markets with deep-pocketed customers). In any event, variable pricing is not evil, and nor are profits.

Still, to dismiss Blodget’s claim as simple price-whining is a misrepresentation. He’s rooting for Amazon not because he wants lower prices, but because he want the publishing industry to die:

Also, please don’t argue that, if Macmillan goes bust, books will be bad.  Publisher editors don’t really edit anymore.  They acquire, package, and market them.  […] Yes, if Amazon charges $9.99 for ebooks and prints them instantly, some writers will conclude that they don’t have to write 100,000 words and wait a year for the publishing industry’s dinosauric practices to finally get the thing into physical print…and they’ll write shorter, more timely books that will skip the whole "hardcover" process altogether. 

It’s funny, because that’s precisely what Amazon is trying to do (nice analysis). It’s been evident since the Kindle that publishers seem unnecessary to Amazon – why bother getting the book from a publisher, when they can publish it themselves?

Of course, this isn’t a revolution: companies like Barnes & Noble have published (out of copyright) books themselves for a while. However, it’s transformative because ebooks are a new product category, and there’s every reason to think that old-style paper books are dying (rather, the number of paper books purchased as a percentage of all books will dramatically decline). Given that the internet and other technologies have lowered the marginal cost of publication and distribution to near-zero, a number of reasons for the existence of publishers (filter content “worth printing”, put up initial capital to print, market – though not well – etc) are, well, no longer good reasons. So, Amazon thinks, why not eliminate publishers directly, the way bloggers are eliminating formal newspaper companies?

The Amazon-Macmillan spat seems to be Amazon wanting to assert that its the sole publisher for all ebooks sold via the Kindle Store, and Macmillan (rightly) telling Amazon to fuck off; and Amazon resorting to brinkmanship. If Amazon gets away with that, then publishers are essentially dead – already – and not when the close their doors for more legitimate reasons. Which will probably happen in 20 years or so.

(Yes, publishers will still be around. But smaller. And more focused).

Edit: Amazon is now reporting that they are “capitulating” to Macmillan. So we can expect publishers to be around for a while – and we might even see their profits increase.

When I put together my self-determined major in Epistemology of the Social Sciences, one of the core drivers was the realization that I didn’t know who to believe – that is, I was being taught “facts” about the world which were at best different and at worst contradictory. I imagine this problem occurs less in the hard sciences than the social sciences, where we’re beset by the over-formalization of economics, the valiant attempts at laboratory testing in psychology, “wishy-washy sociology”, etc and so on.

So the problem became: how do I judge what information to accept at the moment? Certainly, you can ask experts – people who know everything about a field – or you can become an expert yourself (in 10 years or so). But what happens if you ask multiple experts, each of which gives you a different answer? Whose information do you accept? Is it whoever has the best suit?

It turns out there’s a skill-set involved in judging what information is best for you at the moment, given some pre-existing criteria. Among other things, you focus on methodology over findings; under the assumption that if you know the limits of the methods, you know the limits of the conclusions. “Knowing that” is much less important than “knowing how”, in the end.

Knowledge isn’t everything of course, and being able to pick out which facts are salient – and which are really facts, as opposed to guesses masquerading as facts – is never sufficient. But it is necessary for so many things – good decisions being the most obvious.

The green line is a simple linear regression line, courtesy of Excel. It’s not, of course, authoritative – but hey, that is a pretty high r squared value!

Needless to say, we would expect unemployment to top out at some point as businesses reach the end of what they can cut, and wages are driven down. Still, a U3 unemployment rate this high isn’t a happy situation. To compare, the nationwide U6 rate is 16.8% – probably a bit higher in New York City these days.

Note: this is in no way a complete or even useful picture of the unemployment situation. It’s just a cute graph. We’d need to delve into quite a bit more to get an idea of the true unemployment situation.

Yes, well, that would be more of a story if the YouTube video embedded in their post didn’t say “Game developed with MonoTouch.” MonoTouch is a framework to allow .NET application development on the iPhone, using the Mono .NET Framework which is a re-implementation of the Microsoft .NET framework.

In other words, a developer coding in Mono is capable to – shockingly – rebuild the application in another .NET environment in a very short amount of time. That’s testament to Novell’s work implementing the .NET framework – but it really shouldn’t surprising, since it’s the entire point. A .NET application built on one platform is easily portable to another – since the .NET framework is itself platform-agnostic.

In other words: No, porting games from the iPhone to the newly-released Zune HD is not that easy. As always, difficulty porting is a function of how many platform-specific libraries you use. If you develop right against the iPhone API in Objective-C, it’s going to be bloody difficult to port over to the Zune HD.

McKinney summarizes and dismisses Smolin’s approach:

His argument that physics can change over time and space is apparently based on an extremely specific strawman argument which depends on separating experimental procedure into initial conditions and laws.  He says you can only arrive at laws by examining a large “configuration space” of possible setups.  In the lab you can set up a large number of tests, in cosmology you can look at a wide variety of situations, so in both you can arrive at laws.  His argument is that since you can’t actually rearrange the stars themselves to set up different initial conditions in each place, you can’t make conclusions about the physical laws there.  He uses many, many more words to describe this idea.

Let’s just be clear: Smolin is applying Roy Bhaskar’s ideas to cosmology. Bhaskar used the distinction between closed systems – where you can predict – and open systems – where you cannot predict, but you can explain -  as an explanation for why the social sciences have not met the same successes as, say, Physics. A key point is that it’s impossible to isolate certain attributes of open systems within a closed system. A good example is nationwide voting – you can’t isolate any the mechanisms involved, because by the time you’ve assembled the mechanisms necessary to test it, your closed system is indistinguishable from an open system. Yes, you can test individual things (e.g. how a single voter reacts to a political ad). But you can’t test the interaction effects. On a side note, it’s only just recently that scientists (such as psychologists) are even considering connections between more than two variables – the complexity increases exponentially.

Bhaskar’s point is interesting to keep in mind, quite valid, and fairly non-controversial. Scientists know that you need to carefully control an experiment to identify a causal relationship between factors. If you can’t isolate the elements you need to perform the experiment, you can’t test it.

An analogy is that cosmology is like Freudian psychology. That it, methodologically it uses the perspective of the individual to create and test theories. Freudian psychology, as well as Jungian and other variants of the time, used introspection and therapy sessions as a way to explore the mind. They gathered a great deal of observational data (of open systems), and then constructed a theory on top of it. However, as Popper, Quine, Kuhn, Lakatos and other have pointed out in the philosophy of science – you cannot validate a theory by gather a great deal of information and perching a theory on top of it. For starters, there are always multiply possible theories for any given data set. And any information that could contradict some element of the theory can always be disregarded (Quine). Then, positivism cannot actually prove anything (Hume’s problem of Induction; Popper), and both the evidence gathered and the standards of proof are a function of the social context (Kuhn). Historically, science has not been a steady progression of every more-accurate theories, as Lakatos and others explain. It moves in fits, with huge effort going into theories later abandoned – and for the most part, forgotten by later scientists.

Another problem with Freud was that his approach was not generalizable. e.g. one explanation for Freud’s narrow focus is that he developed his theories while working as a therapist in Russia. In other words, the only people he talked to when constructing his theory were mentally ill people. That ended up generalizing quite poorly to the rest of the population (leaving aside some of the other glaring problems).

In the case of cosmology, the only things we know – the only tools we have to create and test theories – is the information coming in from telescopes out of an open system, and whatever experiments we can run on Earth. We cannot isolate much of what’s in cosmology. In other words, we only have what’s on Earth to test, and what we can see of the wider world. There is no guarantee that what we demonstrate on Earth actually applies to other planets; what we find out about our solar system actually applies to others. Cosmology has a problem similar to Freud; we’re working with a limited sample, and we don’t know how representative it is of the overall population. You can claim that cosmology is different – that Freud really was dealing with crazy people and obviously what he discovered wasn’t universal, whereas the ‘laws’ cosmology discovers are. But hey, Freud certainly believed his sytem was universal, that it completely explained human behavior. As did a number of people at the time, and even some today (who didn’t get the memo post-Watson/Skinner).

All of this makes this part of McKinney’s next paragraph somewhat entertaining to read:

If you’re going to claim that general relativity stops working beyond some sort of interstate-of-existence line, the burden of proof is on you to show that’s the case – and strawman arguments on the nature of experimentation aren’t going to cut it.

McKinney makes a couple of mistakes, which merely show is ignorance of philosophy. First of all,  The argument against the nature of experimentation that Smolin levelled at cosmology, courtesy of Bhaskar, is not a strawman. A straw man is a misrepresentation, and - while I haven’t read Smolin’s book – I’m fairly confident that he is not misrepresentating the nature of experimentation. Now, Smolin (and Bhaskar) may be wrong about the impact of open & closed systems on the types of experiments that can be run and the conclusions that can be made. But that charge is quite different from dismissing his argument as based on a strawman.

Second, I would bet that Smolin does not, in fact, claim that general relativity will “stop working beyond some sort of interstate-of-existence line.” Such a claim actually is a strawman. No, I would speculate that Smolin is only claiming that we cannot know whether general relativity will remain the same “beyond some sort of interstate.” This claim is epistemological, not theoretical – based on the nature of knowledge, not the content of knowledge. The claim is fairly limited: we do not have the tools to prove that general relativity – or other ‘laws’ of physics – work the same way across the entire universe. In other words, Smolin is claiming that cosmological theories do not have sufficient proof to be called “true.”

Well, no. Of course we don’t. Hume demonstrated than centuries ago. Anyone who claims otherwise doesn’t understand “the problem of induction.” Scientific laws are not absolute, and nor are they probablistic, either. They are theories about how the world works which (i) have not yet been disproved, and (ii) we do not expect them to be disproved. That does not mean they cannot be, or that they will not be. It is a social convention, part of the scientific “paradigm”, as Kuhn calls it. Theories accepted as “as good as true.”

The upshot – or why McKinnon wrote the post – seems to come down to the rather standard Positivist smack-down of metaphysics:

It’s all very intellectually stimulating, but mainly demonstrates the difference between metaphysics and useful physics. [...] You can say that the plank constant is a variable over time and space, but when we want to build an bridge or a fusion reactor we’re going to stick with our silly, provincial, non-new-book-publishing “actual physics.”   And that’s the difference.

Yes, the difference is that philosophy – and incidentally, this isn’t metaphysics, it’s epistemology – can’t be used to build bridges. I’m agog at the insight. That’s like saying that English can’t be used to predict financial crashes. Or that Biology can’t be used to build spaceships. The purpose of philosophy is not to build bridges. That’s why we have engineering and physics. The purpose of philosophy – well, I guess that depends on who you ask. I’d say the purpose of philosophy is to contextualize our present reality; to make us aware that there are other possibilities that what we currently believe. But no doubt that my post-Nietzsche relativism bias; in the time of Kant, people would say that the purpose of philosophy was to arrive at absolute truth.

Of course, this whole debate – about the limitations of science in general, and Cosmology in particular – seem incidental to the topic of the book as summarized by Wikipedia. Smolin’s book looks to be his pet theory, summarized. If I wanted to be charitable, I would assume that McKinnon was so irritated by Smolin’s criticisms of science because Smolin used them to try and negate the authority of conventional cosmology in order to push his own (baseless) theories. That is, if you’re trying to convince someone to accept a theory both against conventional wisdom and without proof, you have to destroy both conventional wisdom and the standards of proof upon which conventional wisdom relies. If you claim that “it’s impossible to know anything about cosmology, so why don’t you accept my theory as equally valid”, most people would look at you funny. It’s also the same argument that Creationists have employed against Evolution – “You can’t say that theory theory is completely accurate, so why don’t you accept Creationism as equally valid.”

Such an approach is, of course, quite invalid. For starters, it’s representing truth as binary – something is true, and you have proof, or something is false, and you don’t. When one starts arguing about both the nature of truth and what can be accepted as proof, such binary distinctions become meaningless.

It would be more productive, I think, to debate the philosophy of science after reading books actually on the philosophy of science as opposed to criticising the philosophy of science when it’s misused to buttress baseless theories.

Of course, I haven’t read Smolin’s book – so I really don’t know if Smolin even does that, or if that’s why McKinney is irritated enough to blog about a book written in 1997.

Mountebanks like Taleb sell their wares by making the regular jamoke reading his books and essays feel fiendishly intelligent for understanding the concept of fat tails at the expense of all those pointy headed Ph.D.’s in the back room with their slide rules and white laboratory jackets.

So true.

Scott Locklin on Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

I think a better use is publishing pre-written drafts, and checking comments.