book review: The Origin of Language

(that’s the best photo I could find. )

the title of this book is a bit misleading, as it’s not about “the origin” or “the mother tongue” — in fact, there is little discussion of what that original language may have been like or the evolutionary development of the capacity for language and all those other speculative fields (though he does offer a handful of what he believes are global cognates, and he does briefly try to sketch out the spread and branching of the world’s language families from Africa).  of course, those are terribly difficult subjects, and it’s understandable why there is little coverage in this book, but then why the misleading titles?

oh well, what the book is about is the use of comparative linguistics — classification and taxonomy — to identify not only the major families of languages worldwide, but also the larger families to which even these language families belong.  with little regard for the general consensus among linguists throughout the world (esp. historical linguists) — and with the credentials and data to back it up — Ruhlen makes his case in an interesting way: he introduces the reader to the basics of language classification — the basic tools used initially to identify Indo-European, setting historical linguistics as a field of study in motion — supplementing those basics with a few key points here and there (e.g., common sound changes among the world’s languages), and then allows the reader to work through tables of vocabulary to identify families of languages.  this allows the reader to discover some of the key features involved in classifying known language families, as well as then finding commonalities with larger super-families of languages.

a fair concern here is that he could be picking and choosing words that conveniently support his thesis, and the reader would never be the wiser.  in fact, that is a criticism that has been aimed at anyone trying to do this type of large-scale comparative linguistic work.  however, he does provide general statistics about the chance occurrences of certain similarities — and his vocabulary are not entirely random words, but more common words that are known to be more stable over time.  further, he answers those criticisms (though there may be more, for all I know) directly and in a satisfying manner.  for instance, someone may object to a large-scale grouping of the Amerind languages based on, among other things, consistent pronominal patterns by saying that pronouns look like everywhere, or that those sounds mimic infant sucking sounds and so are widespread.  unfortunately for the critic, the first claim simply isn’t true, and the second claim is not satisfactory because it fails to account for why those same sounds are not attested elsewhere, if not worldwide (assuming, of course, that we were all once infants).

one of Ruhlen’s beefs with most historical linguists is that they have forgotten the first order of business: classification and taxonomy.  since Indo-European and other families were initially discovered, most linguists have taken these families for granted and have set about reconstructing the proto-languages of those families, or trying to chart the various sound and grammar changes over time.  as a result, they have come to believe that only in the presence of such extensive work reconstructing proto-forms and documenting sound changes (such as what exists for Indo-European, which alone has been studied more than the rest of the world’s language families combined) can you believe you have a genuine family group — ignoring the fact that they were already operating within the assumption that IE was a language group, one that was identified on not nearly so many (a few handfuls, in fact) cognates.

in any case, this book has informed me about a lot, though I feel I have more questions now than I had before, but that’s usually a good thing (unless, of course, a book simply fails to provide you with any answers whatsoever).  it should also be said that he makes use of the best available genetic information that has independently tried to track human migration over time (using various means), most of which corroborates what linguists have uncovered over the years.  and his argument is that the evidence also confirms those who wish to group the world’s language families into ever more closely related family groups.

what’s boggling my mind right now is the rate at which languages change, as well as the innumerable twigs and branches of human language families.  for instance, look at this figure from his book, which represents human genetic populations organized loosely along language boundaries.  it’s not even as complicated as his final genealogical figure, but I couldn’t find that one online.

now look at where you see “Indo-European” and then look at the language family chart for Indo-European (from Wikipedia):

(click on the image for a bigger view).  and the truth is, this complex reconstruction of IE is unique among the world’s languages, as it’s been studied far more and has a lot more material (esp. written) to analyze.  so just imagine what the true history of it all may be!  what a ridiculously complicated story and subject.

book review: Infotopia

this book, as its subtitle indicates, is about the production of knowledge by many minds.  but the book is less about the fact that many minds produce knowledge than about the ways in which information that is dispersed among many minds can be accessed and the conditions under which those varying methods work best.  under discussion are surveys/polls, deliberation, markets, wikis, open source software, and blogs.

so, for instance, he starts off the book talking about the surprising ways in which large groups of people can outperform individuals when answers are averaged out.  often the average answer — when guessing the weight of some object, when trying to correlate body weight with gender — is not only better than the best individual answer, but also better than what a supposed expert can offer.  to be sure, aggregating information like this only works under specific conditions, say, when it is reasonable to presume that people might have a general idea about something.  it would be useless to rely on the statistical responses of people for information not privy to most people, say, the year of some lesser known historical event or the name of someone’s pet (unless that someone is famous, maybe).

the reason that this works, Sunstein explains, is due to the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which states that the probability of arriving at a correct answer increases as the size of the group increases provided that there is greater than a 50% chance that people will arrive at a correct answer.  the more people you have, the closer you approach to 100%.  this is the reason why “ask the audience” usually works well in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — because there’s a decent chance that some people know the answer, or at least can correctly rule out false answers.  in these types of situations, it is beneficial to rely on the responses of a large group of people (as large as possible, in fact) to increase the chances of arriving at the correct answer.

the flip side of this math, however, is that if people have less than a 50% chance of knowing the correct answer — again, when asking about information not widely disseminated — the probability of arriving at the correct responses approaches 0% as the group increases.  so clearly this isn’t always (or even often) the best way of arriving at the truth.

the second method under review is deliberation.  Sunsstein is open about giving deliberation a bad rap here not because it is entirely inefficient, but because it is so often assumed to be the ideal way of accessing dispersed information and thus the truth.  deliberation lies at the heart of many practices in this country, from trials by jury to our deliberative democracy.  the problem with deliberation, in short, is that it doesn’t work very well.  Sunstein offers a number of reasons for this, owing to some of the natural shortcomings of the human mind (some familiar terrain after reading Kluge) and to particular behavioral phenomena in group settings, such as the general “groupthink” idea, along with informational cascades (when people factor into their responses the likelihood that other people, who may hold a different opinion, would be wrong and so answer or vote not purely on the basis of information but on what everyone else appears to know as well) and the many pressures on individuals to preserve group harmony (or their own status) by not offering information they may have that goes against the conventional group wisdom.  in experiments, people also tend to accord more authority to people in higher positions (including class, gender, and race — even if those social statuses are irrelevant to the immediate context) and to ignore others, regardless of the value of the information.

in one particularly illuminating example, the author discusses an experiment in which individuals of a group are asked to vote for candidates in an imaginary election.  the experiment is set up in such a way that Candidate A is clearly the most fit choice for the position.  when group members are all given about 2/3 of the relevant information for the candidates, the deliberation usually results in the correct choice of Candidate A (a statistical improvement over the initial poll of individuals — so here, deliberation helped).  however, when the members are all given 2/3 of the information about the other candidates, and the information about Candidate A is dispersed among individual members (even if the total information is more than in the previous scenario), the groups fail to access the relevant information contained by some of its members.  as a result, they end up choosing one of the demonstrably inferior candidates.  moreover, the percentage of votes for Candidate A fell after deliberation.  why?  because the information favoring the wrong candidate is that which is held by all the members — a phenomenon aptly called “the common knowledge effect.”

the major concern here is that deliberation groups often fail to access the relevant information held by some of its members because of the tendency to favor (and focus on) information shared by all rather than on individual perspectives, even when there was no evident (or stronger than usual) “status” issues or instances of social pressure on conforming to group opinion (indeed, there was no group opinion until the hypothetical information was given out).  in other experiments, the success of deliberation groups was also dependent on whether the group members were “primed” to think that arriving at the correct answer was important, as opposed to priming them for getting along.  this is cold comfort when thinking of juries and governmental deliberation.

this is not to say, however, that deliberation never works — obviously it worked in the first part of the experiment.  indeed, deliberation groups can perform as well as their best member, and sometimes they can even outperform their best member when pieces of relevant information are dispersed and the information, together, helps the group arrive at the correct answer.  but deliberation is best limited to instances when an answer is readily available (like problem solving) or “eureka” problems — when the correct answer can be identified by all as soon as it is made apparent.  on more ambiguous matter — say on social or moral issues, or anything involving ideology of whatever sort — deliberation groups are fairly terrible, often resulting in the amplification of previous biases (a well-documented event, familiar to anyone who’s ever been in a chat room or on a message board — or even among a group of like-minded friends, really).

Sunstein then moves on to markets — prediction markets, more specifically.  on the general level, the author discusses why online review sites (of movies, restaurants, products, etc.) have worked so well on the principle of a market and the establishing of a “price” of a particular commodity.  but what is most interesting is his discussion of more recent developments of prediction markets in which people place value (and trade stock) on the likelihood of a certain outcome — say, the winners of Oscars or the results of a political election.  surprisingly, these “markets” have often (but not always) outperformed even the best experts in their predictions.  the reasons why these markets work is that they provide an incentive for people with good information to put their money where their mouth is, resulting in predictions made by people who, in theory at least, have relevant information.  if you are concerned, as the author is, with how we most efficiently go about accessing widely dispersed information in society, then markets are often an excellent way of bypassing some of the social pressures and dynamics of deliberation groups.  these don’t always have to be (indeed, they often aren’t) open to the public and so can limit the predictions and trading to the relevant individuals.  so far, these types of markets have proved excellent within individual companies (e.g., Google and HP) at predicting what products will be the most successful or when a new product or program will be ready for distribution.  this new approach undermines conventional wisdom of a board of big wigs — who couldn’t possibly have access to all of the relevant information possessed by all the employees — making the decision from the top down.

to keep the rest of this brief(er), Sunstein then moves on to the various Web 2.0 developments in social media and information aggregation — including wikis, open source software, and blogs — and discusses their relative merits, as well as causes for concern.  as it turns out, unmediated forums for the sharing and refining of information have proved more effective than many feared.  that is not to say there are not problems with, say, wikis — indeed, Wikipedia is far better on some topics than others, and even then usually as a general guide, not the end-all authority — or blogs — here we can find some pretty terrible groupthink behavior, along with more than generous helpings of bullshit — but overall, they are very effective in ensuring that dispersed information sees the figurative light of day.  in fact, Sunstein discusses a few instances where information shared online by bloggers helped to correct statements made by political candidates (leading to apologies) or to debunk a phony document (leading Dan Rather to apologize and retire).

the book ends with a few discussions about the situations in which the various methods work best and a few suggestions about how groups and organizations can best make use of them.

overall, this is a very interesting book and fascinating information.  unfortunately, for even such a short book (225 pages), it was more repetitive than necessary and could have benefited from more individual case studies.  also, while I am tempted to say that this book is to groups what Gary Marcus’ Kluge is for the individual mind, this book is not nearly as entertaining and engaging as Marcus’, which is unfortunate because it certainly had the potential to be as captivating and perhaps even more relevant.

scientific truth in the age of Wikipedia

in February of last year, Seed magazine ran a brief article addressing the question of (concern about) scientific truth in the age of Wikipedia — that is, whether “the radical egalitarianism of the wiki undermine notions of scientific authority and consensus.”  obviously, as is pointed out, group consensus is not always the best way to arrive at objective truth.  some are concerned (indeed, outright frantic) over the extent to which this bottoms-up approach will undermine those hard-won facts of, say, scientific or historical research.

but the author of this article (T.J. Kelleher) argues that these fears are mostly unfounded, as “[i]t is not scientific rigor that is accommodating the wiki, but the wiki that is accommodating science.”  just think of areas of knowledge where no control test is possible (e.g., in historical research, where we are limited to the accident of history and the chances of discovery) or practical (e.g., large-scale scientific hypotheses about populations or, as the author proffers, the human impact on global warming).  here, consensus is often based on the best available knowledge and the most rigorous forms of analysis; often it comes down to what hypothesis best accounts for all of the data — and for this, consensus is key.

further, Clay Shirky — author of a book I’d like to read — argues that notions of authority and expertise are only “social facts,” and that works (and their writers) are considered authoritative only because everybody agrees that this is so.  and to be honest, when venturing into an area of knowledge with which I am not familiar, I will often reach out to recognizable landmarks and sources that I deem — from experience elsewhere and ongoing critique — to be authoritative (e.g., a particular author, a publisher, a university or institution affiliation, etc.).

when it comes to the scientific process, some believe that a source like Wikipedia will actually prove useful in its ability “to act as a chronicler and creator of repositories for science, to create a home for what we haven’t proved to be false and for what we think to be true.”  in other words, wikis can be beneficial to the notion of falsifiability — a key step in the scientific process.  thus bad ideas can easily set aside, and good ones can be continually refined, since the business of science, as some would argue, is more often than not establishing what is false, not necessarily what is true in some unchangeable sense.  to this end, as an MIT professor puts it, “the wiki model is ‘reasonably good’ at discerning, if not what is true, then what is false.”

one problem that remains, however, is the anonymity of the contribution and editing process.  not only is this a problem for managing the content of the site (are the contributors even qualified?), but it may also undermine the processes whereby we uphold notions of authority, “social fact” though it may be.  when someone stumbles across differing opinions or is left with an ambiguous answer to a query, how does that person go about seeking a more authoritative take on the problem?  if we cannot all become experts in the various fields of knowledge in which we might dabble — or into which we must wade (e.g., when seeking emergency medical information) — how do we learn where to invest that “capital” when it matters if knowledge production or maintenance is done anonymously?  you might feel slightly better about taking someone’s advice if they have widely acknowledge credentials and if their professional career depends on them being right.

some scientific organizations have sought to counter this problem by creating rival “wikis” that remove the veil of anonymity and involve an application and approval process that restricts an individual’s contribution to their certified field of knowledge.  and even here, the process of peer-review and consensus continues to play an important role.

personally, I don’t think that Wikipedia should be much of a threat to the scientific process or to fields of knowledge, provided that there is an understanding of where Wikipedia’s value lies.  if individuals turn to wikis for answers to every problem or as the end-all source of knowledge, unaware of how to go about verifying that knowledge and where to go for more in-depth understandings, I don’t blame Wikipedia — I’d blame any academic system that has failed to demonstrate how research is conducted.  many people in this country or woefully ignorant of the basic scientific process, not to mention principles of, say, historiography, but I don’t think that this is a new problem resulting from the development of more egalitarian forms of knowledge maintenance such as wikis.

also, I think that Wikipedia is a fairly reliable source — introductory source, that is — for many of the bodies of knowledge I’ve stumbled across.  and I am pretty sure that the rules have changed so that not just anyone, at any time, can make whatever change he or she would like with little to not policing.  so far I think that there has been substantial — and satisfactory — sifting to ensure fairly reliable information — often superior to (and far more practical than) traditional storehouses of knowledge such as encyclopedias.

oh, hell to the no

I have just read that the United States is apparently sponsoring a UN resolution to limit freedom of speech with respect to religion, in an effort to curtail anything deemed grossly insensitive to and disrespectful of religion.  over the past several years, there have been a number of cases in the western world in which people have been fined or worse prosecuted for having made jokes or drawn cartoons poking fun at a religion (or two).  worse off, some of these events (such as the publication of those infamous Dutch cartoons depicting Muhammad — now available on Wikipedia!) have ended with rioting and the deaths of a few non-Muslims.  so what is our reaction to this?  to defend free speech or to clamp down on artists or activists who dare offend radical Muslims (in some cases just not agree with entirely), whom we either fear or want so badly to befriend?

as the author of the article writes,

Thinly disguised blasphemy laws are often defended as necessary to protect the ideals of tolerance and pluralism. They ignore the fact that the laws achieve tolerance through the ultimate act of intolerance: criminalizing the ability of some individuals to denounce sacred or sensitive values. We do not need free speech to protect popular thoughts or popular people. It is designed to protect those who challenge the majority and its institutions. Criticism of religion is the very measure of the guarantee of free speech — the literal sacred institution of society.

you can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater, and you definitely shouldn’t insult the Prophet in a crowded mosque, but why in the world should the United Nations pass a resolution to defend the sanctity of religions and justify the prosecution of people who dare say things like, “Islam is bad for women,” or “Scientology is not a religion; it’s a cult”?  (news flash: they just might be.)  it’s already scary enough business protesting or speaking out against Scientology (hence the masks) — but now you have to worry about more legal actions?

this is going in the opposite direction of what is needed in certain parts of the world now, where far too many people are imprisoned for blasphemy of one sort or another.  an article on Canada.com (oh I love you, Canadians!) has the right perspective:

“It provides international cover for domestic anti-blasphemy laws, and there are a number of people who are in prison today because they have been accused of committing blasphemy,” said Bennett Graham, international program director with the Becket Fund, a think tank aimed at promoting religious liberty.

…

“From the human rights side of things, this is the opposite of what is supposed to be happening,” said Becket’s Graham. “Instead of protecting an individual, this resolution protects an idea, and relies on hurt feelings as a source of judgment. It can only lead to a jurisprudence of hurt feelings.”

Canada says governments have abused laws against defamation or contempt of religions to “prosecute and imprison journalists, bloggers, academics students and peaceful political dissidents.”

why should the freedom of speech be sacrificed out of respect to religions that, frankly, haven’t really earned that respect?  and for those religions that have evolved over time and are more respectable, well then, maybe they should work on that sense of humor.  personality counts.

article review: “The Dumbing of America”

Susan Jacoby has started quite a few debates regarding the state of intellectualism in this country, one of which can be found over at The Economist, which I hope to review in the near future.  the article under review here, from The Washington Post, appeared last February.  it’s not terribly long, but somehow my summary and comments are … consider yourself warned.

Jacoby starts by commenting on the transformation of “elitist” into a pejorative term, one that those contending for political office exert incredible efforts to parry.  instead, candidates would give anything just to be seen as “folk,” an ordinary fella, just one of the gals.  “Such exaltations of ordinariness,” she writes, “are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.”

our level of dumbness is being defined by “a combination of heretofore irresistible forces,” including

• the triumph of video culture (including all digital media) over print culture
• a disjunction between the rising levels of formal education and our “shaky grasp” of basic geography, science, and history
• and a potent fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

in support of this first point, along with the decline and feared end of print media, she cites statistics from the National Endowment for the Arts in support of the idea that reading rates are down.

In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book — fiction or nonfiction — over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Jacoby dismisses as “balderdash” the idea, advanced by some, that the zombie-like stares of gaping children before the TV are signs of focus rather than atrophy.  The real question,” she says, “is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.”  (although a recent study about how internet searches improve brain activity in older persons may add an interesting dimension to this debate, though it has to do with first-time users.)

another indicator of decline is the inability to concentrate for long periods of time, along with the rapid rate at which people forget even recent news events.  people have no patience for consuming news, which — far from indicating an insatiable need for information — demonstrates our unwillingness to chew over anything meaty.  as a result, news channels and politicians have to get the point out as quick as possible, collapsing complex issues and stories to headlines and sound bites.  speaking of the latter, she writes,

Harvard University’s Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate — featuring the candidate’s own voice — dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.

a similar case can be made regarding our impatience with long articles (and my blog posts), as well.  (in fact, a case has been made, and reviewed by me here).  one fears what the future may hold as news agencies seek out their audiences on facebook or twitter.

skipping over her second point (which is supported by general thoughts and a survey about whether people find it necessary to know where other countries are or learn a foreign language — they largely don’t, btw), she moves to her final, more important point, which is

not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place.

what’s far worse than our ignorance (not always a completely pejorative term, as most of us are quite ignorant about a lot of things, and that’s mostly OK) about, say, where other countries are located or about basic facts of history or science is the denial that such knowledge is even important in the first place.  and taking it a step further, you often find people who are militantly stupid.  (see photo at top.)

while I see the lack of attention span as a problem, certainly, this may not be the worst thing in the world, per se.  after all, who isn’t excited about not only the increased access to information available through electronic resources (along with the digitization of books) but also the ridiculous speeds at which we can get it?  plus, do we really need to read every sentence of the newspaper or an article, especially when what we’re after is the “core” of the argument or news and the writing may not be all that good?  (also, the founder of Wikipedia, understandably enthusiastic about global digital-based enterprises, weighed in briefly on this article here.)

what worries me more is our (in)ability to get to those “cores” of arguments.  in other words, an incapacity not only to identify the essential line of reasoning and evidence in a given argument, but also to sift through the endless amount of garbage out there in order to arrive at “the facts.”

not too long ago, in those dark, distressing days leading up the 2008 election, someone I know thoughtlessly recycled a piece of information regarding one of the candidates that had previously been debunked.  this person was incredulous that people could support that candidate for something the latter allegedly said, even enclosing the phrase it in quotation marks as if that settled the matter.  the problem, of course, is that this person actively retrieved (or passively received) this quote from an email, most likely, and not from any direct, credible source.  when the mistake was pointed out, in the form of various web sites explaining the misquote and how it didn’t appear where it was claimed to, this person seemed generally frustrated and confused about how one was supposed to know what’s what.

that’s terribly depressing.  in this case, it was a simple matter of looking for a supposed source for a quote and then checking the source — running to the library or the local bookstore.  or if nothing else, doing a few internet searches for arguments regarding the validity of something, such as a fact checker or — if you dare! — a site of someone making the opposite claim in order to compare arguments and try to sift out the golden nugget.

anyway, moving on: as for Jacoby’s claims about the alleged widespread disdain for fields of knowledge, this is surely troubling.  although I would need to see statistics regarding knowledge of certain facts overall, along with publishing statistics relating to the consumption of “pop science” books (even those books by reputable authors), which appears to be expanding, it is clear to see that there is a large contingency of “folk” in this country who not only could care less about learning some things, but also seem to be actively creating cultures that are opposed to genuine learning, such as modern science.  you only have to think of groups, religious or otherwise, who oppose the practice of medicine and rely on quackery for their well-being (which somehow manages to go wrong…).  this turns tragic when they implicate their children in this nonsense, in which case I fervently support government intervention.

even more frustrating are resurgences of creationism and intelligent design.  not that people who think evolution is a hoax should necessarily bear all the blame, as I myself was woefully ignorant at one point of what the theory of evolution actually stated, not to mention the wonderful amounts of evidence in clear support of it.  the real blame lies with those who continue to propagate this misinformation, either deliberately (as in they lie — and there plenty of demonstrable cases of this taking place) or ignorantly.  and in the case of the latter, there is room for blame, because they, as educators or shepherds, haven’t bothered to understand what they’re talking about.  if someone were to set up a hospital and treat people based on Galen’s texts, unconcerned with learning actual medicine, they should be duly punished (in this case, they couldn’t even bother since they need a license … so maybe you should have to have a license to teach anything regarding science?  you kind of do now, and most people speaking in churches around the country don’t have any qualifications, but somehow that doesn’t seem to matter…).

add to this (well, it’s not like they’re entirely unrelated…) the significant portion of this country that chokes down whatever is erupting from Glenn Beck’s fat head every night and you’ve got the recipe for a dum diddy dum dumbed down America.

now can we move, Emily, pleeeeeease?!?

a flat earth?

so I’m reading a book on the history of science in the West, and I noticed how early Greek philosophers believed the earth to be spherical — a view that was shared by many thinkers after that.  then I got to wondering, How and why did people revert to believing that the earth was flat?

turns out they didn’t, really.  you can read all about the “myth of the flat earth” on Wikipedia (there’s also a significant treatment in a book called Inventing the Flat Earth by Jeffrey B. Russell).  here is one quote from the late Stephen Jay Gould taken from the Wikipedia page:

there never was a period of “flat earth darkness” among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology.

I feel so lied to.