Wednesday,
August 25, 2004
National Project
Relationship to the think tanks and consulting industry
Comment
from scientist Ben Goertzel
Comments on memetic inhibition
Ben has become a good friend over the past few years, and has been an important voice in very advanced thinking about how to use computers to make sense of large data flows, like what is produced in micro arrays in genomics. See his advice below.
However, the exercise that the BCNGroup is involved with is in the exposure of the groupthink that controls the behavior of DC think tanks and Department of Defense consultants and program managers.
The existence of a single common groupthink is a reasonable hypothesis.
The emotions that Ben talks about are natural. These emotions are consequent to injustice that is imposed on all individuals who, like he and I and the gentleman at Institute of Defense Analysis, are in a position intellectually to bring natural complexity into the behavior of a human-computer interface. A discussion of the German polylogic system will be given to illustrate a different view of the theory that is underlying Human-centric Information Production (HIP).
What is more important than the development of stratified theory, and an operational HIP system, is an exposure of the behavioral mechanisms that are expressed as memetics by not only the MBAs of the think tanks and consulting groups, but the scientists employed in the thank tanks also. For example, the gentleman from Institute for Defense Analysis wanted to deeply and personally criticize me:
“You have to change your manner of communication, and you have to allow
yourself to be more sensitive to the social environment in which you operate.“
His most recent message is:
You are wrong on every point without exception.
I know of no MBAs at IDA. I have
not been here long enough to be part of any "groupthink".
You are welcome to your own macabre unreality. May you enjoy life in your teepee.
I am deleting all emails from and about you, as well as any and all addresses.
The emotional reactions from scientists, which this gentleman is, are important in that they reveal in how accommodations have taken place, out of necessity. There is a survive mechanism is in place. The exposure of some of these emotions is important, in order to understand the inhibitory consequences to anyone who expresses open and diverse viewpoints.
There is the belief, within the think tank community, that all viewpoints are expressed, but one knows that this belief is characteristic of any type of groupthink.
There is a common groupthink in ALL DC think tanks, no matter what variations in political positions are expressed. The Union of Concerned Scientists is a good example, of a group whose concern is extremely limited. The Virginia Center for Innovative Technology is a good example of using a name to serve business interests while at the same time inhibiting the natural expression of individual innovations.
It turns out the Union of Concerned scientists are not concerned about many things that scientists are concerned about, and the Center of Innovative Technology is a government funded entity that help venture capitalist control and shape the innovations that are natively brought to the CIT. They have rights to do what they do, but the names that they use are deceptive in specific ways, and these specific ways have to do with a groupthink.
As in the two political parties, there is the notion that everyone has a choice that satisfices one’s need to express a political viewpoint. But part of the groupthink is to deny that there are viewpoints that are left out, and to inhibit the discussion about openness. The choices are to a high degree artificial.
There are a group of scientists who make cultural adjustments and therefore will be barely tolerated by the MBAs and a group of scientists who cannot make this adjustment. One possible reason why the adjustment might not be made is that some scientists are not able to give up principles they consider vital to the scientific work that they are attempting to do. One of the “jobs” of the first group is to make critical and negative judgments about the scientists in the second group (as was recently done Jaques Reifman, Ph.D. Senior Research Scientist Director, Bioinformatics US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command) so that the “system” can develop the belief that the best science is the funded science, and that scientists that are not funded are not worth funding.
No objective review of these types of decisions is allowed by the system. The consequences is that there is no light brought to the practice and no exposure of the groupthink.
Paul,
I think you should take a one-year break (at least) from pushing ahead on all these projects and initiatives that you're so concerned about.
I think all these ideas and initiatives are becoming far too difficult for you emotionally. Your emotional state seems to be preventing you from making progress on these issues -- and I know from my experience trying to push my own big projects forward, that it's a hard sort of thing to do even when one is at one's emotional peak.
I think you should use some of your many contacts here in DC to simply get a job doing some kind of scientific work ---- simply working within someone else's project, rather than pushing your big ideas forward. Just do this for a year or two, until your emotional state returns to something healthier. Then, if you still want to, jump back into these initiatives again....
Is it really the case that you can't find a job simply doing scientific work somewhere [1]? I suspect you could, if you would temporarily drop your big ideas, with a view toward resuming them when you've cleared your emotional mind a bit.
Again, I offer these words to you as a friend --- I'm grateful that you've helped me in the past, and I wish I had some way to help you right now, but I really don't.
Ben
[1] This is an important foot note, as my job search has been
extensive and I have been very close to landing a job as a mathematics
professor, on several occasions but because of the nature of my scientific
judgments, many which you share, there has been a failure. I recently applied to a position in data
mining and analysis with
Jaques Reifman, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist
Director, Bioinformatics
US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command
MRMC/TATRC
And
his reply after looking at my publications and my paper on Orb
architecture was:
Unfortunately, after careful evaluation of your background and experience, there isn't a good match between your expertise and our current needs. Best of luck.”
I
started the discussion with him with a request that he allow me to see what the
specific issues were in informatics that his group is working on. I explained that my work had been broad and
extensive but that I was interested in looking specifically at the nature of
the targeted work that his group was doing.
As
a scientist, I cannot imagine why there was not a willingness to even talk with
me about my extensive work in pattern recognition, measurement and data
encoding. My experience, and the common
experiences of many of my colleagues is that the unwillingness to talk is part
of a larger set of behaviors that are in fact inhibiting the types of viewpoints
that you and I bring to the table.
There
are perhaps 20 in my immediate circle of scientists who are experiencing
the same type of poverty that I am, and that you have experienced in the recent
past, if not now. Each one struggles
with the same groupthink that somehow removes our viewpoint, a viewpoint that I
summarize as
1)
Understanding
that computers cannot, because of the physical nature of the computer,
become aware of the present moment, and thus cannot compete with humans
whose awareness of the present moment is the most essential element not only to
natural intelligence but life itself.
This understanding is expressed as HIP.
2)
That
a peusdo science has arisen in the computer science community that has a
memetic relationship with pure capitalism.
This peusdo-science is extremely powerful politically and economically
and actively seeks means to preserve itself.
An extensive scientific literature, however talks about the alternatives
and even talks specifically about the existence and power of this
peusdo-science. The most illustrative
example of the peusdo-science is the current DARPA program in “cognitive
systems”. http://www.darpa.gov/ipto/
3)
The
nation is in danger both because of the interests of large corporations in
exploiting the individual and in the vulnerabilities that this exploitation
causes to our information systems and to other elements of critical
infrastructure.
My
sense is that there is a groupthink that shuts the type of innovation that I,
and others sharing this viewpoint, might bring to “their” problem. This groupthink is a problem not only for me
as one person, but is a threat to the principles of democracy.
Examples
are not hard to come by, and are not isolated to me as one person.
My
work at Object Sciences was focused on “their” functional problem, the thematic analysis of Islamic
social discourse. As yet the
termination of the employment there was because I and many others, Sara (*)
being one, were seeing direct evidence (Joe * will testify about this) of
extreme systemic inhibitions towards addressing the stated functional task (for
which everyone was getting paid a great deal to address.)
Before
that, my work at Highlands Technology was on “their” problem, the ontology needs related to
automated declassification of twenty five year old documents. Here, also the issue that I came to face was
that the business processes and the government program managers were not in
tune with what the science was saying, and was instead growing rich with the
funds that poured into those who were willing to do what was necessary to keep
the money flowing.
The
problem is not me.