Archive for April, 2007

Accessing Times Select

April 11, 2007 at 2:23 pm · Filed under Socio-Political Commentary, Uncategorized

Those with a university-affiliated email address can access the New York Times’ “Times Select” offerings. Limiting access in the way they have is ridiculous, as some of their own op-ed contributors have noted. Alas, some have a way in. Simply go to http://www.nytimes.com/university to sign up.

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But We Don’t Talk That Way

April 10, 2007 at 4:52 pm · Filed under General Science, Linguistics, Uncategorized

In the study of linguistics, some of the most profound discoveries about the nature of our linguistic capacities have been made by formulating sentences that we would, in the normal course of events, never say. Some of these are ungrammatical: “Who did John see Mary and?” Some are grammatical, but kind of weird: “What did you wear without ironing?” Others are grammatical, but it’s not clear why anyone would say such a thing: “Either the bathroom is upstairs or there is no bathroom.” It is sentences like these that have given rise to some of the best work in linguistics, and this fact has led many to conclude that there’s something seriously wrong with linguistics in general, and with linguists in particular. “But we don’t talk that way” is a common complaint. Why not try to develop theories whose aim is to handle naturally occurring sentences, such as those found in large corpora?

The complaint, though it has some force to it, is clearly off the mark as a criticism of linguistic methodology. If physicists, for instance, had set themselves the task of accounting for the world as we normally observe it, it would be a rather uninteresting endeavour through and through. Indeed, some of the best work in physics, as in other sciences, requires that we, in the words of Francis Bacon, ”twist the lion’s tail.” In other words, we need to manipulate nature to learn her secrets.

For instance, consider recent work on the “ultracold,” the physics of the very, very cold, the physics of near absolute-zero. There has been a burst of research in this domain. Wolfgang Ketterle, Director of the Center for Ultracold Atoms here at MIT, shared the Nobel Prize for having discovered a new state of matter, the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), which required cooling into the nanokelvin range. The existence of this state was predicted by Bose and Einstein about eighty years ago, but no one was able to create the right conditions for it to reveal itself. Indeed, Steven Chu, professor of physics at Stanford, is reported to have said: “I am betting on Nature to hide Bose condensation from us.”

What is important about this discovery in the ultracold is that it would never have been made had physicsts satisfied themselves by merely observing nature as is. Instead, much money, time, effort, creativity, and ingenuity was spent in “twisting the lion’s tail.” The goal of scientific understanding is to discover what nature is about, whether or not she reveals herself to us in the normal course of events. This usually requires not merely passive observation, but direct intervention. One needs to play with the lion, to manipulate the lion, to coerce the lion, that holder of Truth, to reveal to us whatever window of truth we happen to be interested in. Sitting on the sidelines watching from afar generally leads to very little by way of understanding.

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Truthful Speech

April 8, 2007 at 3:08 pm · Filed under General Science, Linguistics, Socio-Political Commentary, Uncategorized

Why should people speak the truth? Why should they lie? Do people speak the truth? Is there such a thing as truth? The last question is rather pointless, and we’ll leave it to the post-modernists to grapple with. People do speak the truth, and they also lie. Do we have any understanding of what the conditions are under which they do one as opposed to the other?

Much of modern pragmatic theory, the theory of language use, begins with the assumption that people speak the truth. This is stipulated as a primitive of our communicative machinery, and it is on the basis of this assumption that algorithms are constructed for computing inferences based on speech acts (such as the inference that if I say “Mary ate some of the pie,” you conclude that Mary didn’t eat all of the pie).

On the other hand, work in game theory, in particular on various kinds of “signalling games,” asks a more fundamental question: Given agents with various goals who find themselves in the strange predicament of having to communicate, under what conditions will honest signalling arise? The answer on offer seems to be that honest signalling will arise to the extent that the agents’ interests are aligned. Thus, when applied to certain kinds of games of information exchange that humans play, such as when we’re really trying to exchange information with our interlocutor and get them to come to believe the meaning encoded in our sentence, truthful speech is what we should expect. It is no wonder, then, that linguists and philosophers have been inclined to posit truthful speech as a primitive, for the kinds of language games that have tended to interest them most have been coordination games of information exchange (such as when you ask me how much of the pie Mary ate, and I tell you that she ate some of the pie, intending to get you to believe that Mary ate some but not all of the pie).

However, it seems that the theory doesn’t exactly apply to humans. Experimental results suggest that humans tell the truth more than they “should,” where by “should” I mean “should according to game theory.” In other words, even when it’s not in the agents’ best interest to speak truthfully, they will, as if driven by some deeply rooted impulse to tell the truth. But people do of course lie. However, as it stands, the conditions under which truthful speech will or will not arise are not well-understood. What is clear is that human communication is not guided solely by any narrow construal of “self-interested” utility maximization. But that is to be expected, since human motivations are diverse and plentiful.

However, what is true of humans need not be true of inanimate agents, such as firms or other organizations. Consider, for instance, the corporate media, such as the New York Times. Can we understand when they will or will not speak the truth? Since the motivations of such firms are simple, guided only by the need to maximize profit, the game theoretic apparatus can be more readily applied to them. Since most of the New York Times’ profits are driven by advertising, the game-theoretic results suggest that when the needs of the advertisers clash with the need to speak the truth, truth will find itself going the way of the dodo. And this is indeed what we find, to a large extent. Thus, we can expect a self-generated, self-enforcing, decentralized propaganda system to emerge solely from the fact that large media firms are driven by the profit motive, with profit generated from advertising. As such, the game theoretic results support Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky’s “propaganda model,” which suggests that propaganda in the Western media emerges out of market forces, and not through some centralized decision maker imposing informational restrictions on what the public can and cannot see.

George Orwell had this idea well over sixty years ago. He once wrote: “Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.”

There is of course a lesson to be learned here, namely, if we, the public, want truthful, reliable information sources to inform us about the goings-on in this nasty world of ours, these sources should be stripped as much as possible from motives that interfere with the emergence of truth. Another way of saying the same thing is that there should be an incentive for an information source to be truthful, in that the extent of its utility is derived from the extent of its truthfulness. A media system designed to sell human brains to advertisers is destined to become a liar from the beginning. Its fate is sealed from the get-go, a rather unfortunate thing, for no one wants to be a liar. The liar draws the venom of all for having abused us in such a vile way. Surely, media firms deserve a better fate than that, as does the public, whose thirst for truthful, reliable information remains unquenched.

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