Political equality in a large group

This post is aimed at being the first part in a long-delayed “attempt to embark on” “a methodical analysis of the set of possibilities for achieving political equality”.

Part 1: Optimal decision-making, group rationality

… in which it is argued that groups, in an ideal setting, can achieve rational decisions. Group decision making constrained by practical circumstances should therefore be designed so as to produce decisions that approximate the decisions that would have been made under ideal conditions.

It is sometimes asserted that groups cannot form good policy. When such notions are expressed by the less educated, they are are attributed to the authoritarian sentiments of the unsophisticated. When such ideas are proposed by the educated, they are considered evidence of hard-headed realism. Elite speakers often mention Arrow’s “impossibility theorem” (what Arrow called the ‘General Possibility Theorem’) and claim that it “shows” that group rationality is impossible.

Obama’s name recognition history

The case of Rudolph Guiliani suggests that mass media cannot dictate to the public who to vote for. However, since it is impossible to vote for a candidate one has never heard of, mass media cannot help but determine who the public will not vote for.

Senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president in January 2007, yet even by by February 2006 over 40% of the people heard enough about Obama to have an opinion about him.

For comparison, a different Democratic congressmember running for the nomination, Dennis Kucinich, never managed to have more than 35% name recognition, even during the height of the primary season.

(The points marked with ‘k’ show the proportion of people recognizing Kucinich.)

Data: pollingreport.com: Newsweek, NBC and Gallup series.

Comment on Phillip Davis’s “The Market for Scholarly Articles”

As Phillip Davis writes (reprinted in the IMS Bulletin), scholarly authors are driven to publish in journals because that is the way to have their work noticed and readers read journals because these provide some measure of quality assurance. Davis is wrong, however, on multiple counts, when he concludes: “This system is not intended to be fair and democratic, but it saves the time of the reader and functions to help consensus building in science. For those who feel that this perpetuates hegemony, let them eat cake.”

The academic publishing system is intended to be fair; the current system (though better than nothing) performs poorly as a time saving tool for the reader; “consensus forming” (i.e., suppressing non-conventional thought) is not a legitimate function of a scientific communication channel; and, finally, there is no reason to dismiss people who are unhappy with the current system with “let them eat cake”: there is a better way to run the scholarly publishing system.

The functions of mass media

When considering the form that democratic media could take, it is important to consider whether mass media – with its inherent potential for non-democratic effects – has any useful functions that are not anti-democratic. This question is akin to the question of whether government has any functions that are not oppressive. In an analogy to the anarchist position which claims that any governmental activity is necessarily oppressive, one could claim that the only functions of mass media are anti-democratic, i.e., those of allowing a privileged minority influence over the rest of the population. That position would claim that all mass media should be abolished (in the same way that the anarchists want to abolish government altogether) and people should rely exclusively on non-mass (or intimate) forms of media. In this view, the best that a democratic control structure over mass media could produce would be neutralizing those anti-democratic functions, leaving the entire organization useless.

A proposal for democratic media

The term “censorship” describes the act of suppressing certain ideas by those who control some distribution channels. Despite regular attempts by interested parties to limit the term to describe very restricted or extreme cases of suppression of ideas, the term is usually, and very reasonably, understood to cover any attempt at reducing the circulation of an idea, by any person or organization. The negative view, which most of the population, as well as official ideology, take of censorship therefore encompasses any such activity. According to this view, the desirable media system is democratic – i.e., one which allows all people an equal opportunity at presenting their ideas and having them considered by others.

The implicit universal rejection of censorship notwithstanding, much of the communication patterns that dominate Western society are inherently censoring activities. The members of the elite group that influences (to varying degrees) the content of wide circulation media – publishers, broadcasters, advertisers, editors and reporters – routinely make decisions that amount to suppressing some communications, containing certain ideas, in favor of other communications, containing different ideas. Those decisions, although usually purporting to reflect only objective accepted standards, are in reality almost completely subjective. They therefore reflect the ideas and biases of the very select and atypical group of people who make them.

The self-review system

This post presents a substitute to the peer-review system: a method to regulate the publication of scholarly work in journals. For background see: Academia as the industry of self promotion and Taking the self promotion out of academia.

Notification of intent to publish, waiting period, publishing quota

A person who intends to engage in research in a field and may wish to publish results, or who already has material he wishes to publish, will submit an indication of intent to publish to a central repository tracking research activity. In that indication of intent, the person submitting will indicate a field, or a small number of fields (up to, say, 4) in which he will be active. Each field is associated with a set of journals – the sets may overlap.

A person may, at any time, revise the set of fields in which he is active – but leaving the number of fields of activity below or at the limit (i.e., 4).

Once an indication of intent to publish in a certain field is given, a waiting period is in effect – say, 18 months. After that period, the researcher may publish in the journals covering that field at any time. A researcher may not publish more than a fixed amount of papers, say, 3, in a fixed amount of time, say 10 years. A multiple-author paper counts toward the quotas of each of the authors as 1/2 of a paper.

Rationale: The rationale for the imposition of a quota is discussed in the background documents above. The imposition of a wait period is aimed at minimizing abuse of the system by people who are not committed to sustained contemplation of a field of research, such as activists of various sorts.

Submission, refereeing

Once an author or a group of authors decide to publish in a certain journal, and if all the authors are within their quotas and beyond their waiting period, they submit a manuscript to the editors of the journal. If the authors so wishes, they may choose to go through a process of refereeing. The authors can choose a set of referees (up to, say, 3) from a list provided by the journal. The referees’ must excuse themselves promptly or write their reports within a set period. The authors may introduce changes to the paper after receiving the referees’ reports. If both the authors and referees are willing, further communication may take place.

Referees’ reports and any communications between the author and the referees are published together with the paper. If these are too long, a prefix is published together with a link to a full version.

Rationale: In the suggested scheme refereeing is seen as a service rendered by the research community to the individual researchers active in the field. Its role is not to block unworthy papers but to help authors produce better papers. Publishing referee-author communications benefits readers by providing third party comments on the paper, and guarantees that referees receive appropriate credit for their work.

Form of publication, page limit, automatic redaction, link to full version

The refereed manuscript (or the unrefereed manuscript, if the authors declines to take advantage of the refereeing process) is truncated at a certain amount of pages (say, 20) and scanned automatically for discouraged patterns (say, profanities or unpleasant typesetting), which are redacted. The author can then resubmit a corrected version or accept the automatically edited version as is. This final version is published in the journal chosen by the authors. If the author so wishes, he may provide an opt-in link (i.e., a link which requires a certain amount of attention to follow) to a full version of the paper which he would host and which is not constrained by the page limit and the pattern prohibitions.

Rationale: The rationale for the guaranteed publication is discussed in the background documents above. The page limit in the centrally hosted version is meant to encourage authors to make their points succinctly.

Epistemology omnibus

This omnibus post collects draft fragments that are associated with the economy of attention and the sociology of science and expertise.

John Stuart Mill on the power of habit

[Owing to] the power of habit the simplest idea, if unfamiliar, has as great difficulty in making its way to the mind as a far more complicated one.

John Stuart Mill, Representative Government (1861)

Achieving greatness and recognizing greatness

Attention patterns in our society seem to be built around the assumption that it is much easier to detect or recognize greatness than to achieve it. Few people will ever achieve greatness, but we are all able to recognize the greatness of those who have achieved it.

This is held to be true in any area of achievement: sports, art, cooking, science, accumulation of wealth, politics, virtue, wisdom, etc. It is as easy to know a great scientist or artist as it is to measure who is the fastest bicyclist.

This assumption is a special case of the assumption that reality in general is self evident. In this special case, however, the facility of perceiving the reality of greatness is supposedly much more immediate and universal. It seems to require neither training, nor time, nor effort. Indeed, the ease of recognition of greatness is considered such a fundamental property of greatness, that greatness is often defined as being the characteristic possessed by someone who is recognized by others as being great.

Like the truth of scientific or legal positions, which are implicitly held to be self-evident, in some, rare, cases, recognition may take a while (van Gough, Gregor Mendel, JK Rowling) or may be delayed by powerful interests (Mozart), but it shall come.

There are 3 interesting corollaries to this way of seeing greatness:

1. When approaching an issue, it is best for the average person to find someone great and follow their example or teachings rather than try to deal with the material directly. It is safe and easy to accept the ideas of great people.
2. The sure way to find greatness (in people, objects or ideas) is to observe others and see who, or what, it is that they consider great.
3. Greatness in people must be rare. According to some conceptions, this is simply a matter of definition. The commonplace cannot be great. But even when not explicitly defined as being extraordinary, the rarity of greatness follows from the requirement that it is widely acknowledged. Since cognitive barriers preclude the possibility that a large proportion of the population is well known to many people, it follows that there is a very low upper bound on the proportion of the population that may be seen as possessing greatness.

Those corollaries, it is easy to see, legitimize and solidify the position of accepted elites: their position at the center of attention validates their greatness and indicates that attention should continue to be bestowed (corollary 2), their views on matters should be accepted as correct (corollary 1) and the members of those elites possess highly unusual properties that differentiate them from the average person and justify their special status (corollary 3).

Quality of ideas, peer review

The quality of an idea is an objective property, but it is one that we usually do not possess any direct way of measuring. Since any natural language argument is informal, it is impossible to make a definite objective determination of which ideas are good (or correct) and which are bad (incorrect). This does not mean that there aren’t good and bad ideas, and better and worse ways to think about issues and to reach conclusions. It does means that care must be taken when evaluating ideas, that every piece of an argument is open for dispute or reinterpretation and that all conclusions must be taken as tentative.