Katharine Jenkins — Can a woman have a penis? How to understand disagreements about gender recognition

Ok, the title is clickbait. But, uncharacteristically of clickbait the article is about much more and it is important.

The point is that gender is a complicated concept that does fit simple models like biological appearance.

This is a point that Ludwig Wittgenstein sought to elucidate by applying logical analysis. The meaning of many words in ordinary language are more like family resemblances than essences. For example, many words have several entires differentiating the different uses in dictionaries. 

The Conversation
Can a woman have a penis? How to understand disagreements about gender recognition
Katharine Jenkins | Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Nottingham

Jason Smith — One purpose of information theory

Unfortunately, Shannon's entropy, often referred to as information entropy, and then shortened to just information, is often confused with the colloquial term "information". This brings connotations of data, of knowledge, of specific sets of symbols with specific meaning. But as Shannon and Weaver said in their book from a year later, we must not confuse information theory information with meaning. This collision of terminology is amplified when it encounters economics, where information economics deals specifically with the economic value of meaningful information.

I believe the best way to understand this difference is to understand what information theory illuminates. Information theory gives us a way to quantify concepts when we have limited knowledge about what underlies those concepts. For example, information theory is essentially a more general framework that encompasses thermodynamics in physics — thermodynamics is the science of how collections of atoms behave despite not having remotely enough knowledge about the trillions upon trillions of atoms to make a model. We give up talking about what a single atom in a gas is doing for what an atom could be doing and with what probability. We cease talking about atoms are doing and instead talk about the realm of possibilities (the state space) and the most likely states....

Information Transfer Economics
One purpose of information theory
Jason Smith

Lord Keynes — The Left needs to abandon Postmodernism

It is high time that the Left dispensed with and put an end to the fashionable nonsense that is Postmodernism (or “Poststructuralism” as the French intellectual movement which gave rise to it was originally called).

I can, incidentally, speak on this subject from personal experience. When I was an undergraduate I learnt a lot of this Postmodernist nonsense myself, and encountered it frequently at university, but I had the great benefit of learning a considerable amount of analytic philosophy (an acid under which Postmodernism dissolves) and listening to, and reading, no-nonsense Leftists who always understood it for the idiocy that it was and still is.

This subject is relevant to economics, because there are some actual Post Keynesians who seem to think that they can adopt a serious “Postmodernist” methodology and epistemology as a foundation of Post Keynesian economics. This, in my view, is a terrible delusion.…

The logical issue involved is criteria, a subject which underlies both meaning and truth as the necessary grounds for communication.

Social Democracy For The 21St Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective
The Left needs to abandon Postmodernism
Lord Keynes

See also

Steve Keen on Yanis Varoufakis

Perceived Injustices Are Meaningless Without Context ... Surviving Reality Requires Continuous Exploration of Response Options

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)

Injustice?

"If the wealth of the world's 5 richest families was confiscated no human being would have to starve again."

This one misses the point, even if technically plausible. Better to define optimal tuning options, rather than ONLY define current injustices.

Problem? The rich are given, and are hoarding, immobilized, an outsize proportion of present fiat?

Suggested alternative? Why bother confiscating it? Just alter the ratio of feeding it (excessive hoarding) vs feeding dynamically distributed fiat. The huge hoards of unused fiat would wither as fast as they accumulated - or become irrelevant.

Why? Because today's net public fiat is always dwarfed by tomorrow's. It's been unstoppable for 4.5 Billion years!

How Public Initiative (fiat) used is NOT. That depends entirely upon the quality (including tempo) of OUR distributed decision-making.

Here's a suggestion. Participate, yourself, in defining your own local and your own country's distributed options.

If you don't, some deranged economist will!

And that will only constrain the rate of exploring our cultural options.

Then you'll have to deal with the PRINCIPLE OF PRIOR PLAUSIBILITY, where an initial hypothesis builds outsized institutional momentum, SOLELY for lack of early opposition or alternatives. The statistics of phenotypic persistence dictate cultural agility. If we want to adjust quickly, then we have to end some cultural habits as fast as we start other ones ... or be far more selective about which ones we start!

Hence Leonardo's famous maxim.

"It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end." Leonardo da Vinci

He might just as easily have said "be selective," rather than just "resist."

And an immediate corollary?

"Democracy works better when practiced every minute, instead of trying to repair it every four years."  RGE :)

Call it the "Broken Democracy" approach. :( The prize to keep our eyes on is our own, constantly increasing Cultural Adaptive Rate. That's the best way to prevent the crime of innocent fraud.

ps: If we question the adaptive value of human fat, why don't we question the cultural utility of obese wallets that immobilizes people in gated communities? A fatty liver is bad for personal health. A fatty wallet is bad for cultural health. Anything beyond 0.1% having fatty wallets is an epidemic of unhealthy demand leakages, i.e., sloth.

(effects of liver cirrhosis)

Stages of cultural damage?

  From healthy culture (distributed decision-making)

  To cultural financial fibrosis? (bought politicians; "yellow" NeoCons)

  And on to cultural liquidity cirrhosis? (free trade? foreign adventures?)

Any artists care to illustrate a cirrhotic Wall St. poisoning American policy agility?

Keeping Up With FULL Context: OpenSourced Hardware AND Software As One Key To Distributed OBT&E

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

NVIDIA Unveils First Mobile Supercomputer for Embedded Systems

I wonder if ARM licensees can keep up? Or other CPU mass producers. Maybe CPU will also soon become Open-Sourced commodities, rather like grass for cattle, or ants for insectivores. :)

Regardless of hardware vendors, cheaper data-intensive hardware will allow more distributed access to serious data-crunching and complex model simulations.

Full context simulations? We're nearly there with sophisticated gaming, even though developing gaming technology is still mostly applied to culturally trivial distractions.

Sophisticated, full-context modeling could nevertheless soon follow. Simply by using real-time, real data feeds, instead of only artificial-reality imaging engines.

This will slowly make it more feasible for more people in all settings and all disciplines to begin to model their entire supply chains or "eco-systems" - as well as the full context (the whole that grows as less/equal/more than the sum of all sub-eco-systems).

The "Singularity" is more likely to accelerate human coordination. Enslavement of humans by their smart-phones/watches/glasses still seems improbable. :)

Keeping up with context is how all organizations reduce internal frictions to low enough levels that all sub-members aren't simply fighting one another. That's what OBT&E is all about. Outcomes-Based-Training-&-Education, aka, cultural evolution.

Making it harder for citizens to work at cross-purposes is always a function of processing key data flow. Just running enough model simulations (i.e., thinking) to even keep recognizing minimal-data short-cuts for given contexts is itself a considerable task.

Distributed awareness of full context - aka, an informed public. It's not just the data that matters. Without context, any amount of data is still meaningless. So getting slowly improving, full-context models in front of more people is the name of the game.

Real-time, full-context awareness, across full groups? That requires:

streaming even far more data flows, in real-time, 

RAPID pattern recognition within and across more data flows, 

massively parallel testing of distributed tuning steps (local actions), 

and most of all ... an ongoing ASSESSMENT model ("Public Purpose" as the agile, floating Desired Outcome).

All inter-linked, through massively parallel feedback data flows, of course. No, corporate owned advertising & propaganda channels will NOT suffice. Don't even ask. It's already just in the way, and a significant paywall obstacle that is slowing the evolution of the USA.

How about personal "Citizen Dashboards" able to serve distributed citizens as well as the cockpit data displays serve airplane pilots? That should help +320 million people run a more agile culture and country. It might even save our collective butts. The aggregate return on coordinating REQUIRED distribution of nearly all available info to nearly all "tribal" or citizen members ... will be a far higher return than ANYTHING any individual can currently imagine. Even legendary King Midas - or anyone else from 2000 years ago - couldn't imagine the distributed wealth we argue over today. Why should we constrain even our own, following grandchildren, let alone the 7th generation yet unborn?

Why NOT OpenSource our survival ... the challenge is wide open, and not yet sourced. Supposedly, none of us is as smart as all of us, so lets just figure out ways to USE all of us?

As Ben Franklin (and every tribal member throughout history) said, it seems we still must all hang together, or we'll surely experience a common demise.

The Campaign to Neuter Our Fiat

   (Commentary by Roger Erickson)

Neuter our Fiat?

May the gods, universe and our own MiddleClass please take pity upon these sad people for their lack of insight, and lack of situational awareness.

This is a growing, ironically "well funded" and strangely distorted campaign. These folks do NOT grasp semantics OR fiat currency operations.

Over 2000 years ago the Sophists "proved" - using a linguistic loophole since named semantics - that if you owned a cat, and that cat was a mother, that it was therefore "your" mother. Ergo, we all have a responsibility to neuter our mothers.

It took over 2000 years before Walter Shewhart noticed the depth of the resulting problem, and publicly declared that

"Without context, data has no meaning."

Seriously, I'm more than half afraid that the Neuter-The-Fiat campaigners might endorse the same faux "logic" - and start neutering their mothers.

After all, just because the process by which a nation creates it's own, sovereign fiat currency is referred to by accountants as a "nominal," fiat debt, and is an expression of Public Initiative or "fiat," .... semantic sophism dictates that the nominal fiat accounting "debt" is OUR real "debt," right? Weepin' Erbles in a Marriner Eccles trap! Is that the best we can do here in the USA, in the year 2014?

Hence, a foolish population and it's public fiat are soon neutered, and hoisted on their own semantics. Worst, the emasculating campaign is funded, ironically, by the very people most desperate to maintain the buying power of their hoarded fiat currency. They desperately want to stop the flow of what they want! What can you do with such simpletons? Send them back to highschool?

Maybe the people running the Neuter-The-Fiat campaign will fall for a dose of their own logic? Fine. I hereby suggest that they maintain their cranial blood pressure by tightening a tourniquet around their neck, one twist per day, until their middle section gives up the battle & dies. They'll succeed, by stopping the flow of what they want.

Maybe it'll werk fer thum!

David Glasner — Two Cheers (Well, Maybe Only One and a Half) for Falsificationism

Philosophy of science. Mostly on Popper v. Logical Positivism. Good comments, too.

Uneasy Money
Two Cheers (Well, Maybe Only One and a Half) for Falsificationism
David Glasner

"Why-Fidelity" Always Matters More Than All Tactical Information Combined. We need Why-Fi hotspots far more than just Wi-Fi.

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Why is it that we don't know that? :(

Google Knows Every Wi-Fi Password in the World?

Should we panic? Even if they do?

What's the ancient saying? Without context, data is meaningless? Anyone with a superior paradigm will always be able to operate in complete secrecy, while operating in plain site, using all the right symbols predicted by their own parasites. That's how evolution works, through domestication and assimilation. For optimal utilization, hosts allow parasites to see literally EVERYTHING, simply because they understand NOTHING that matters critically to future survival.

Rest assured. No one knows all the emerging Why-Fi passwords. There are none!

Look at it this way. How many conversations have you had where you slowly realize that two or more people are carrying out a seemingly coherent discussion exchanging the same words ... but it, only slowly to you, if at all to them, becomes apparent ... that they are assigning entirely different meanings to the shared words they're both seamlessly using! And neither knows the full extent of what they THINK they are really saying and hearing?

Ok, leave out the glaring example of Deficit Hawks talking with those capable of rational thought. That's a skewed example. Think of other, less critical cases.

It's called semantics, and it occurs - intended or accidentally - everywhere from comedy to philosophy to propaganda and now, of course, for decades in daily policy discourse, entirely unintended we assume. Without defining terms, however, group discourse does NOT hold or express potential group intelligence.

And so, in our endlessly divisive arguments over who's got the fiat, where public initiative comes from, and who's got what ... is our net search for gorup meaning getting warm yet?

No? Then perhaps it might help to heat up the national intelligence with a few Why-Fi hotspots, not just Wi-Fi transimission of data missing context?

Throughout history, Elders, then Shamans, then Libraries and Universities served as early Why-Fi hotspots.

Where can you find even one now, that logically discriminates context from just data? Is the Center of the Universe really found at the Harvard Economics department - or is it unwelcome there by the elite, Sophist residents?

Umair Haque — Making the Choice Between Money and Meaning

You and I face the difficult choice of trading meaning for money; we weigh the searing moments of real human accomplishment against the soul-sucking "work" of earning the next car payment by polishing up another meaningless PowerPoint deck packed with tactics to win games whose net result is the creation of little of real value for much of anyone who's not a sociopath. This is the deepest kind of theft; not merely prosperity having been looted from societies, but significance having been stolen from human lives.

Yet, the unforgiving truth is: the trade-off between meaning and money is as real — and as toxic, as characteristic of our post-prosperity present, and as strikingly intensifying — as climate change. And, like climate change, while you can argue that it's existed throughout history, to do so is a weak argument; so has, say, human trafficking.

In the simplest sense, the very point of a "capitalist" economy is to minimize the trade-off between meaning and money. So, for example, you and I don't have to spend a lifetime building, stone by stone, a Great Wall or a Pyramid — to satisfy the whim of an Emperor or a Pharaoh — and so burn through our one invaluable precious life. Every life has worth; and because it has worth, so it must seek, and discover, meaning.

So what can you do about it? There's only one good answer, and it's simple. Stop trading meaning for money. It's the worst trade you'll ever make.

The Harvard Business Review | HBR Blog Network
Making the Choice Between Money and Meaning
Umair Haque | Director of Havas Media Labs and author of Betterness: Economics for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business
(h/t Scott Fullwiler via Twitter)