We DESPERATELY Need More “Abstraction” to Escape the Simulation
Time to cut the crap and stop the blame game on the news, TV, social media and Google.
Previously this.
In the age of the Internet, an abundance of modern libraries and the prevalence of all kinds of tools for accessing information, I have once made a comment to a friend that the human race has not, in any way, become more informed or intelligent.
Let’s call this the ‘Facebook law of information filtering’. The problem that still persists, that was not necessarily introduced by modern (social) media, is that we do not know what or which information is useful or not. We cannot tell noise from signal. What the newly coined Facebook law is though, it is an attempt to beat the classical information problem by, basically cheating and lying. Social media platforms cheat by giving us what we want to hear. This all starts during the signup process. You are usually asked what your interests are. In that way the platform can lie to you in the future and suggest (pun intended) to you that you have better and more information than someone reading a newspaper.
The more concerning characteristic of the Facebook law, is that it makes people who would normally have the humility to accept that they do not know, have the arrogance to think that they do know. This is a group of people that have been victims of being surrounded by people like them, who like the same things they do, and who only like the people that like them. This ends up creating a concentric circle of bubbles.
Empirical Evidence Is Not Enough
The Facebook law, unfortunately, has far reaching consequences than social cohesion or whom people vote for. It also has scientific implications. Take the contributions made by one of the fathers of modern science, Francis Bacon. Bacon built and defended the scientific use of empirical and inductive reasoning over and against the use of logic or deductive reasoning to arrive upon scientific truth. Bacon’s contributions are slowly been eroded by modern media. How? Well, if it is true that all true scientific knowledge can only be arrived at via the empirical process, then it stands to reason that one should only pay attention to the events they witness, and should not attempt any rational (i.e. abstract) argument for why those events may just be… (random) events or noise. In other words, events are the truth. All events are signal.
The problem is, this is obviously not what Bacon meant or anticipated. Firstly, the events that one witnesses on social media are filtered for the user. In that sense they are synthesised and not real. Secondly, since we often choose to surround ourselves with people who are like us, there is a worrying precedent for confirmation bias. In other words, what we see as ‘evidence’, is not really evidence; we already told the platform to show us only the evidence we want to see (this also applies to the Google search engine). So, even when we talk of empirical evidence, in our modern world, we need to be extremely careful.
Falsification Rule
It is as if Karl Popper saw the impeding doom of the scientific discipline in our modern world when he wrote of falsificationism in the past century.
Falsificationism gives us more than what empiricism gives us. Empiricism clearly never anticipated the proliferation of big data that allows to ‘see’ patterns even where none exist. With pure empiricism one can clearly find evidence for any unintelligent theory they come up with.
Falsificationism, in a nutshell, is that for a theory to be scientifically acceptable, it needs to have the following characteristics:
- it must be bold
- it must be clear and simple
- it must be falsifiable via the empirical process
In a nutshell, for a propositional statement to be scientific, it needs to be possible for it to be proven false.
Project Managers!
I recently made a statement to the extent that project managers do not add any value, productivity, or substance to projects. I was summarily cornered on this, and my response to my interlocutors was for them to provide empirical evidence of project managers adding value, productivity and substance to projects.
Firstly, it is disappointing to realise that despite my predilection for falsificationism over empiricism, empiricism is still largely misunderstood. I happen to think that this is largely connected to the Facebook law outlined above. As a result, no real evidence has been provided. All that has been provided is anecdotes and a deferring reference to the ‘academic literature’.
Secondly, this only further demonstrates some of the potential limitations of empiricism. Naturally, some of my interlocutors will ultimately find the evidence they are looking for. The internet has enough junk research to confirm any unintelligent theory. The problem here is not just of the fact that they are looking for confirmation of what they already believe, but that they hold their believes so strongly that it will be a hard road to not only demonstrate contrarian evidence, but also to challenge and / or change what is clearly a dearly held belief.
The solution, according to falsificationism, is that my interlocutors need to define their falsification criteria: what clear criteria of evidence do they have, that will disprove their assumption that project managers do indeed add value? If they do not have it, then all they have is just a belief, or a heuristic. But if is it just a heuristic, then they need to treat it as such.
My personal experience is that heuristically speaking, project managers DO NOT ADD VALUE. In this sense, my propositional statement, is equally unscientific, as it does not meet the falsification criteria (clarity, and empirical falsifiability (a)).
It is, however, BOLD…
(a) Perhaps the next generation of geniuses will turn my heuristic statement about project managers into a more scientific statement?
