Enough doubt

“…Each day I believed a little more, and each day I still had enough doubt.”
Physicist Rana Adhikari, from an interview with Derek Muller, How Scientists Reacted to Gravitational Wave Detection, Veritasium2, 5 January 2017

This interview with Rana Adhikari, following his teams’ discovery of gravitational waves in 2016, is an astonishing testimony to the role of doubt in scientific inquiry.

DEREK MULLER: Can you tell me how you first realized that LIGO might have detected gravitational waves?

RANA ADHIKARI: I think I was traveling on that day so I didn't know. I came back here I believe on the day after and I was wandering around in the building and people were sort of whispering and looking over their shoulders but didn’t want to spill it. They were like did you hear, did you hear?  Have you seen it? What do you think? [And I said] I don't even know what your talking about. And they said yeah it's like “there’s an event and it looks really real.” And it’s like, whatever, I don't have time for this nonsense. I got things to do man.

MULLER: Why weren’t you more interested. This could be it, right?  You’ve been working for a decade, two decades?

ADHIKARI: Two decades.

MULLER: And you didn’t want to say like “I’ll have a look” at least?

ADHIKARI: No. We had just turned the detectors on, barely, I was ready to wait for some month or 6 months...I don’t know. We were going to take data for 3 or 4 months. And I thought maybe in a month or two something will pop but it'll be really tiny and we won't find it and then maybe we'll spend another six months combing through the data and developing the algorithms to eventually find it, but, you know, no way would it be like, you turn it on and immediately there’s a signal, which is what people were saying. 

So I said I said look, just settle down a little bit. You don't understand how the world works, it's not like this. You turn on your device and there's some burps and glitches and it's a kind of growing pains at the beginning. And I said, when you've been around as long as I have you understand how complicated it is, young people, so just go back about your business and nothing to see here. And that's all.

And then it just wouldn't die. Everyone was still looking at it. And I just didn't bother to look at it for another week, probably, because it just seemed, like... there's always fake events, right?

MULLER: But how did you finally convince yourself that it was real?

ADHIKARI: I downloaded the data and I looked at it, and I [made] a lot of plots. When I looked at it it just seemed like... there's no bells and whistles to it. It’s two black holes, and it’s spinning a lot, and they merge together and it swoops up in frequency and it chirps in just the right way and then what emerges is no craziness — it just emerges and goes “whoop.” And then  it settles down and the final black hole is not spinning. It just seems like something that...if you were trying to fake a signal, that seemed like a fine fake signal to make.

And the peak frequency of that signal…and there are a lot of astonishing things…the peak frequency of that signal happens to be at the frequency where our detector is most sensitive. What are the chances that nature would engineer a signal right in our sweet spot?

The easiest thing to calculate is black hole [to] black hole mergers because black holes are simple and don't have a lot of stuff inside of them, it’s just a black hole in space. And these two are about the same mass so the calculation of what the waveform should look like it's really simple, so it’s the easiest thing to find in so many ways. 

And I have always wanted to find a signal which is about this heavy because I thought, wouldn't it be great to find the black hole that was heavier than what everybody else wanted? And the signal would be really loud, and if the universe made black holes this heavy we could detect them way back in time to the beginning of the universe and we’d be able to see by looking at how these things got distorted as the universe expanded we could figure out a whole thing about how the universe expanded. This is just my dream.

I thought, fantastic! And then I see you signal like that … I said, uh, it's too good to be true. How could there be a signal that would be just like what I wanted, and as soon as we turned the thing on? That would mean that these black holes are so numerous that we're going to get these signals, you know, a hundred or a thousand times more frequently than we estimated, and how… that's not how the world works, right? It can't be everything is great. So I just didn't believe it. 

Then I went through and with a lot of other people we examined all of the different conspiracy theories that we had for how the signal could have been faked.

Like, someone was mad and tried to do it. Someone hacked in and changed the software. Someone went in and pushed something and had someone else on the phone at the other side and pushed something in the same way, and set up devices…

But you see what kind of mess it is here. If I had a little Gadget that made a little thing like that I could probably hide it underneath some place and cover it with some aluminum foil or trash. And so we had people walk around physically with a flashlight and look around everywhere to look for hidden conspiracy devices that would be sneakily putting in fake signals, because, you know, what if what if it got to the point where if we haven't had signals for so long, and someone who's really been waiting a long time and whose career depends on it…

MULLER: ...who needs their PhD or something…

ADHIKARI: Yeah, right, and their career will be made by something like this so they just get desperate and unethical and then they spend a year building a really maniacal plan to somehow do this and evade  everybody. And eventually we came to the conclusion that there was only maybe like five or six people left in our whole thousand person collaboration who had enough know-how to do all of these things, and so we all just stared at each other for a while and said, did you do it? Did you do it? And we couldn't come up with any way that it could have been done because you need at least two people to do it. One person alone wouldn’t be able to do it.

So I’d say by two or three weeks after the detection I was pretty well convinced that it was real.

MULLER: How did that feel?

ADHIKARI: It was like a slow boil. Nothing dramatic.

MULLER: You did go crazy and go to Vegas?

ADHIKARI: No because it didn't happen all at once. It was just each day I believed a little more. And each day I still had enough doubt.

Free strategy workshops March 23 – April 3 (crosspost)

This is a crosspost from my main site.

Over the last few days I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, and talking with organizers, leaders and practitioners in the cultural community, about how GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) and community/civil-society organizations are coping with the Covid-19 crisis.

Most of us are in shock or reactive mode — closing down public spaces and caring for loved ones and neighbors.

But once the initial shock wears off (which hopefully, it will) and we’ve done what we can do easily in the realm of public service (for example, move programs to the web and promote online resources), we’re going to need to take a serious look at the role our organizations really play in society, and what we need to do differently in the short (next few weeks), medium (3-4 months), and long-term future (years) to make sure we’re doing justice to our missions and our communities.

With that in mind I’m offering some free strategy workshops for GLAMs and other public-facing community/civil-society organizations in the coming weeks.

Not that I have answers to teach you — far from it! I’m doing this because, as a trained facilitator with 25+ years experience in the digital cultural sector and a lot of international experience at a variety of scales, I think I can help teams and organizations find their own best strategies and solutions for this unsettling and difficult moment in time.

That’s what I’m trained to do. And I’m doing this because I can, and because I want to help, and because I believe in the value of what we do in the cultural sector and in civil society.

So here’s the plan

  1. What I imagine is that you are a team within an organization like a museum, a library, a civil-society org. that faces the public. You could be the online or communications team, a leadership group, the board of directors, whatever. Or you’re an ad-hoc team from a movement like Fridays for Future. The important thing for me is that you have a civic mission, you face the public, and you want to create value in society, as they say.

  2. You are hungry to dive deep, over the course of a day or two, into your mission, purpose, and identity — and to model through what those things mean now, in the world of Covid-19.

  3. You’re curious to experiment with the LEGO Serious Play process — a facilitated thinking, communication, and problem-solving technique for groups — in a remote (online, distributed) teleconference setting. (The LEGO Serious Play process is optimized for face-to-face interaction, so moving it to a videoconference format is unorthodox and experimental.)

  4. You want to start soon (as early as the week of March 23, 2020).

If that sounds interesting to you, or if you have any questions or suggestions, please get in touch with me through this form at the bottom of my “consulting” page. Tell me a little about who you are and what you’d like to do and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

Thanks!

P.S. If you want to leave a comment or question on this post, or make a suggestion, please ping me on twitter (@mpedson) or use this comment form here. I’ll review your comments/questions and respond, or post them here, as appropriate. :)

P.P.S English is my best language (though god knows I still struggle with it), but if you need to work in another language we’ll figure something out.

Free strategy workshops March 23 – April 3

UPDATE (March 28, 2010, 11:45am EDT): there’s a new, follow-up post about free workshops, peer-to-peer roundtables, and “Ignite” talks here: https://www.usingdata.com/covid19/2020/3/26/register-here-to-participate-or-help

Over the last few days I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, and talking with organizers, leaders and practitioners in the cultural community, about how GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) and community/civil-society organizations are coping with the Covid-19 crisis.

Most of us are in shock or reactive mode — closing down public spaces and caring for loved ones and neighbors.

But once the initial shock wears off (which hopefully, it will) and we’ve done what we can do easily in the realm of public service (for example, move programs to the web and promote online resources), we’re going to need to take a serious look at the role our organizations really play in society, and what we need to do differently in the short (next few weeks), medium (3-4 months), and long-term future (years) to make sure we’re doing justice to our missions and our communities.

With that in mind I’m offering some free strategy workshops for GLAMs and other public-facing community/civil-society organizations in the coming weeks.

Not that I have answers to teach you — far from it! I’m doing this because, as a trained facilitator with 25+ years experience in the digital cultural sector and a lot of international experience at a variety of scales, I think I can help teams and organizations find their own best strategies and solutions for this unsettling and difficult moment in time.

That’s what I’m trained to do. And I’m doing this because I can, and because I want to help, and because I believe in the value of what we do in the cultural sector and in civil society.

So here’s the plan

  1. What I imagine is that you are a team within an organization like a museum, a library, a civil-society org. that faces the public. You could be the online or communications team, a leadership group, the board of directors, whatever. Or you’re an ad-hoc team from a movement like Fridays for Future. The important thing for me is that you have a civic mission, you face the public, and you want to create value in society, as they say.

  2. You are hungry to dive deep, over the course of a day or two, into your mission, purpose, and identity — and to model through what those things mean now, in the world of Covid-19.

  3. You’re curious to experiment with the LEGO Serious Play process — a facilitated thinking, communication, and problem-solving technique for groups — in a remote (online, distributed) teleconference setting. (The LEGO Serious Play process is optimized for face-to-face interaction, so moving it to a videoconference format is unorthodox and experimental.)

  4. You want to start soon (as early as the week of March 23, 2020).

If that sounds interesting to you, or if you have any questions or suggestions, please get in touch with me through this form at the bottom of my “consulting” page. Tell me a little about who you are and what you’d like to do and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

Thanks!

P.S. If you want to leave a comment or question on this post, or make a suggestion, please ping me on twitter (@mpedson) or use this comment form here. I’ll review your comments/questions and respond, or post them here, as appropriate. :)

P.P.S English is my best language (though god knows I still struggle with it), but if you need to work in another language we’ll figure something out.

The Web We Want, part II (slides)

I’ve posted slides from The Web We Want, the talk I gave a few weeks ago at Culture 24’s Let’s Get Real conference in London a few weeks (or more like 100 years) ago.

This presentation is part two of a two-part effort to call attention to the evils of the big 3rd party social media platforms and show why they’re relevant to cultural and civil society organizations and what we should do about it.

The first installment was my Ignite talk, The Web We Want (video), at the Museum Computer Network conference in November (an annotated, PDF version of that talk is here).

And now this set of slides unpacks evidence that shows the deep problems with 3rd party social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and others; proposes some high-level patterns that help explain the nature of the problem; and then proposes some practical ways that organizations and individuals can take action.

What’s the big picture?

The big picture is that we have a moral/ethical obligation to make adjustments to our online strategies because 3rd party social media platforms are behaving in ways that are contrary to our values in the cultural sector (not to mention our values as human beings).

Hopefully these slides can help you have a good discussion in your organization — and take some concrete steps — to address the problem and make the web a better, safer, more productive place for our communities.

As Zuck prattles on

“As Zuck prattles on in revisionist blog posts about how he intended [Facebook] to ‘Give people a voice’, he consistently misses this point: harassment of this sort *silences* voices. It deters counterspeech to terrible ideas by making the reputational, time, and sanity cost too high…”
From a thread by Renee DiResta (@noUpside), of the Stanford Internet Observatory, regarding anti-vaxers harassing and threatening physicians’ over vaccination-related content.

A dystopian future or something

“I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases there’s never going to be privacy. Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”
Clearview investor, founder of Kirenaga Partners, and intellectual heavyweight David Scalzo, who “dismissed concerns about Clearview making the internet searchable by face.” From The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It, by Kashmir Hill, New York Times, 18 January 2020. Peter Theil is also an investor. I might add that you most certainly *can* ban it.

Determining the trustworthiness and compatibility of a person

“Airbnb has a patent for AI that crawls and scrapes everything it can find on you, then judges whether you are conscientious & open or show signs of ‘neuroticism, involvement in crimes, narcissism, Machiavellianism, or psychopathy.’ Good luck challenging these judgments, too!”
Harvard researcher Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale), 17 January 2020, on AirBnB/Trooly patent 9070088, Determining trustworthiness and compatibility of a person.

Trooly unctuous

“…and now we’re looking at groups of historically marginalized people being denied involvement in mainstream economic, political, cultural and social activities — at scale.”
Your online activity is now effectively a social ‘credit score’, Especially when the Morality Police get acquired, by Violet Blue, Engadget, 17 January 2020

Trooly (a play on ‘truly’, ugh), crawls social media, news sites, police and court registries, credit bureaus and similar sites and uses AI to determine whether, say, an AirBnB renter, is likely to be trustworthy, in their opinion.

It does this on-demand in about 30 seconds, for a cost of about $1.

The quote in full context, below.

Trooly — [now used by] Airbnb — is combining social credit scores with predictive policing. Tools like PredPol use AI that combines data points and historical events, factors like race and location, digital footprints and crime statistics, to predict likelihood of when and where crimes will occur (as well as victims and perpetrators). It’s no secret that predictive policing replicates and perpetuates discrimination.

Combine this with companies like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and yes, Airbnb deciding what legal behaviors are acceptable for service, and now we’re looking at groups of historically marginalized people being denied involvement in mainstream economic, political, cultural and social activities — at scale.

Full and alarming incoherence

“In most circumstances, presenting information in as intelligible a form as possible is what we are trained for. But the shock I felt hearing half an hour of unfiltered meanderings from the president of the United States made me wonder whether the editing does our readers a disservice.”
As a foreign reporter visiting the US I was stunned by Trump's press conference, by Lenore Taylor, Editor of Guardian Australia. The Guardian, 20 September 2019

Lenore Taylor continues,

I’ve read so many stories about his bluster and boasting and ill-founded attacks, I’ve listened to speeches and hours of analysis, and yet I was still taken back by just how disjointed and meandering the unedited president could sound. Here he was trying to land the message that he had delivered at least something towards one of his biggest campaign promises and sounding like a construction manager with some long-winded and badly improvised sales lines.

I’d understood the dilemma of normalising Trump’s ideas and policies – the racism, misogyny and demonisation of the free press. But watching just one press conference from Otay Mesa helped me understand how the process of reporting about this president can mask and normalise his full and alarming incoherence.

And then nothing at all

“It also made me think of what life is basically like now: a calm foreground with an inferno on the horizon. And it struck me that this would be a thing that would happen at the end of the world. People would point their phones at the fire in the sky, and they would send photos to their friends in other places. ‘This is what the apocalypse looks like here,’ they would say. ‘How is it where you are?’ There would be a great storm of content and engagement, and then there would be nothing at all.”
Pictures of the world on fire won’t shock us for much longer, by Mark O'Connell, about the 2020 bush fires in Australia. The Guardian, 13 January 2020
“Our ads are always accurate so it’s good that Facebook won’t limit political messages because it encourages more Americans to be involved in the process. This is much better than the approaches from Twitter and Google, which will lead to voter suppression.”
— Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh, as quoted in Facebook Says It Won’t Back Down From Allowing Lies in Political Ads, by Mike Isaac and Cecilia Kang, New York Times, 9 January 2020
“How many lives did Katie Porter save today using a whiteboard, a bullshit detector, and an ability to retain focus?”
— Writer Hart Hanson, on Congressional Representative Katie Porter's (Democrat, California) questioning of Robert R. Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a televised Congressional hearing that has gone viral, Rep. Porter persuaded the CDC director to fund Covid-19 tests for all Americans for free. Via The Hill.

Also sometimes really dumb

“We are a unique species and have various ways in which we are exceptionally different from every other creature on the planet, but we're also sometimes really dumb.”
Julia Watzek

Watzek was the lead author of a paper published in Scientific Reports illustrating how capuchin and rhesus macaque monkeys were significantly less susceptible than humans to "cognitive set" bias when presented a chance to switch to a more efficient option. The research results supported earlier studies with fellow primates, baboons and chimpanzees, who also showed a greater willingness to use optional shortcuts to earn a treat compared to humans who persisted in using a familiar learned strategy despite its relative inefficiency.

“I think we're less and less surprised when primates outsmart humans sometimes,” Watzek said.

The "Science" Channel is hurting America

sciencechannel.jpg

The Covid-19 pandemic is shining new light on America’s dysfunctional relationship with scientific literacy.

From Trump on down, elected officials, business and civic leaders, and regular-old-citizens are making choices about the virus that seem to reflect a less-than-stellar understanding of infectious diseases, the immune system, and public health.

Trump is generally baffled by everything having to do with Covid-19 and has stated that the virus can be defeated with the seasonal influenza vaccine.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton is fixated on conspiracy theories.

Talk show host Bill Maher went down the rabbit hole with a misleading comparison of mortality counts, get-over-it fatalism (“People die. That’s what happens in life. I’m sorry”) and statements comparing the pandemic to Y2K and the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig accident in 2010.

New York Times columnist Russ Douthat told his audience “Just go on a cruise, two weeks it’ll be over.”

And tycoon Elon Musk Tweeted on March 6 that “The coronavirus panic is dumb,” a statement that has garnered 1.7m likes even as “top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned that a large-scale outbreak of the disease occurring in the U.S. is possible in the coming weeks.” (via The Hill.)

Churlishness and ignorance is nothing new among public figures in the United States, alas, but with Covid-19 now showing signs of exponential growth in the US the short-term consequences of a less-than-constructive public dialogue may be extreme.

And the public’s background knowledge and ability to make sound judgments in this arena is thin to begin with.

72% of Americans are scientifically illiterate and 70% of Americans “cannot read and understand the science section of the New York Times, according to a 2007 study reported by Science Daily

All of this has renewed a conversation in my family about the role cable TV science programming has played in making Americans dumber.

So I was interested to learn through archaeologist Sarah Parcak that a Mr. Mark Etkind, formerly the General Manager of of the Science Channel, has left his job.

Mr. Etkind, who spent 12 years at the Science Channel and Discovery (the channel’s parent company), was responsible for creating programs such as,

  • Finding Bigfoot

  • Call of the Wildman

  • Gator Boys

  • Pitbulls and Parolees

  • BBQ Pitmasters

  • Hillbilly Blood

  • Buying Alaska

  • Monsters & Mysteries in America 

  • United States of Bacon

  • Mountain Monsters

  • Buying the Bayou

  • Last Call Food Brawl

I remember being excited, long ago, at the prospect of having new cable TV channels devoted to science and history, but the dream of great programming was short lived as reality programming and low-caliber, lowest-common-denominator dreck filled the channels 24-hours a day.

And I wonder, as we confront the grim reality of a runaway pandemic in the United States and elsewhere, if an American watching the last 10 years of the Science Channel, Discovery, the Smithsonian Channel, the History Channel, and National Geographic would have picked up enough background information and critical thinking skill to be able to grasp the significance of Covid-19 and make good decisions for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Given what I’ve seen of the programming on these channels I’m guessing not. (Though I will make an exception for Mythbusters, one of the best “popular” shows about scientific method and critical thinking, ever.)

Unusable

Whereas a social movement has to persuade people to act, a government or a powerful group defending the status quo only has to create enough confusion to paralyze people into inaction. The internet's relatively chaotic nature, with too much information and weak gatekeepers, can asymmetrically empower governments by allowing them to develop new forms of censorship based not on blocking information, but on making available information unusable.
Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, 2017. Introduction.
“My fear is that homo sapiens are not just up to it. We have created such a complicated world that we’re no longer able to make sense of what is happening.”
— Israili historian and author Yavul Harari, on the difficulty of acting morally in a fast and complex world. From What’s Next for Humanity: Automation, New Morality and a ‘Global Useless Class’, by Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, New York Times, 19 March 2018