Deliberate Ambiguity

A speech to the Quality Students of the Tonawandas

Note: I was asked to give a short speech to the Quality Students of the Tonawandas on March 22, 2012.  I decided to ask them to call the notion of "Quality Student" into question and come up with their own definition.

Congratulations on being named a Quality Student of the Tonawandas.  Many years ago, I was a Quality Student, so I am honored to speak tonight to this illustrious group: surely many of you will go out into the world and make a significant impact.

I worried my parents by studying philosophy in college.  As a consequence, I often ask undermining questions, not because I’m a contrarian, but I find that skepticism often engenders a better understanding of the concept in question.

 

The question that was on my mind in preparing for this speech was: what exactly is a “quality student”?

 

When I was a quality student, I was surprised to see some people in the room – they didn’t fit my notion of quality.  But even worse, I was sad that some of my friends, whom I considered to be of supreme quality, were not in the room.  Take a look around you right now – not to judge – but to ask yourself the question: who isn’t here that should be?

 

Since I was coming back to my hometown, I also tried to channel a younger Mark Johnson from high school.

 

Back then, numbers and awards were disproportionately important to me. I knew my rank in my class.   I knew the rank of my university stood in US News & World Report.  I knew my IQ, my SAT scores, how many AP classes I took… heck, I even knew my GPA to 7 significant digits.

 

Numbers gave me a sense of comfort, as if the world were patting me on my back and telling me, “You’ve done a great job, Mark,” or, in my more arrogant moments, “You’re better than other people.”

 

Luckily, life has disabused me of my unhealthy focus on numbers.  I’m a math and science nerd, so I can’t escape the notion that numbers do shed light on the world, but they don’t tell the whole story.

 

If you’re sitting in this room, you probably know a lot of the numbers that relate to you.  I’d like to question how accurately those numbers reflect reality.  For example, class ranks were announced today at NTHS, so think about that number: do you consider everyone above you in your class rank to be smarter than you?  Everyone below you to be dumber?

 

Being smart isn’t about IQ or grades.  It’s about what you do with the intelligence in your head.  One of the reasons I was so excited to get out of high school and into college was that I wanted to be in a classroom of people who wanted to learn, not a classroom of people who wanted a grade.  In the working world, intelligence is prized, but only insofar as it allows you to make an impact on your coworkers and product.

 

Tonight I’d like to suggest to you that quality – whether to a student, a parent, a teacher, or a CEO – is something that is subjective, personal, and difficult to quantify.  Though you’ll often find yourself going back to numbers as a guide to quality, when you look into the mirror and judge yourself, no numbers well help you feel better.

 

The world is full of extrinsic judgment: people telling you that something is bad or good, or that you should do this or that, or that some people are “better” than others.  The easy way out is to use society’s view of quality to guide your life.

 

It’s not easy to define success in life using your own internal system of judgment – just as it’s difficult to define happiness or love – but the rewards are great.  You’ll feel a sense of satisfaction with your own life that you’ll never get by using external factors.  Let’s face it, there’s always going to be someone richer, smarter, or more successful, but perhaps you can still be happy and feel successful, even if you aren’t “the best.” You can only do this by justifying to yourself, by your own high standards, that you are successful. 

 

Tonight is a time where you can feel excited that a community has come together and given you collective pat on the back.  I join them in saying, “Great job!”  But, it’s important not to spend your life looking in the rear view mirror.  The real challenge for you is not only to enjoy being a Quality Student tonight, but also to wake up tomorrow, figure out what “Quality” means to you, and tireless spend every day working to become a Quality Person.

 

Descartes said interesting things other than "Cogito, ergo sum"

Through SFSU's College of Extended Learning and the grace of Professor Sowaal, I found a spot in Phil 770-03, a seminar on Descartes.  I'm so excited to be back in school!

Whenever I have time after class, I've decided to transcribe some of my notes and thoughts to paper.  I'll also be posting my papers on here, in case there was any doubt that I am a true philosophygeek.

My knowledge of Descartes comes mainly from my (analytic) epistemology classes, debates over the mind-body problem, and Rorty's scathing criticism, all focused on around Descartes famous statement: Cogito, ergo sum. Since Professor Sowaal is a Descartes scholar, she's teaching the class by focusing on Descartes other texts and contributions, and only then tackling The Meditations.

I'm excited about seeing Descartes from this different lens.  One of the biggest challenges in philosophy can be to give a generous reading to a philosophy that you find distasteful, untenable, or even illogical.  Anyone can bring down a weak argument, but it takes a great deal of skill to repair a broken argument and make it palatable for modern sensibilities.  Professor Sowaal made an astute observation that there's a common trope in modern thought: "Descares said these very interesting, but stupid things, and this is why he is wrong."  My challenge in this class will be to figure out how to preserve the interesting and correct the "stupid."

Much of the class we spent discussing the problem of universals (oddly enough, I just finished reading Quine's smackdown of the issue, in Two Dogmas of Empiricism).  Roughly, the problem questions the difference between the abstract concept of "computer" and a particular computer, like the one I'm typing on.  The rationalists (like Descartes and Plato) belived in the supremecy of universals, and used those to explain the variety of particulars.  That is, how do we go from the form of "computer" to a bunch of things we agree are computers.   On the other hand, the empiricists (Locke, Hume, et al.) try to explain how universals provide some kind of unity for a bunch of similar, but non-identical particulars.  That is, how is it that we have a bunch of machines called "computers" that somehow get lumped into a concept of "computer." 

From our modern perspective, this "problem" might seem ridiculous at first blush.  Most everyone these days is an empiricist and language issues center around problems of meaning and representation, not about the existence of extra-sensory universals.

We read an excellent paper by Alan Nelson called The Rationalist Impulse to help explain the stance of the rationalists.  First, he notes that rationalists have a different methodology: whereas empiricists use sensory perception as a primary, a rationalist must take a student through a thought experiment to arrive at their conclusions.  Thus, even though universals are more primary to the rationalist, the universals are not necessarily easy to see.  As an example, if one didn't know anything about music or trained in a different school of tonality, one might think that a Beethoven symphony is cacophonous.  Second, he points out that empiricists still have a lacuna to cross: they must be able to explain their more abstract notions.  Even Hume, the father of empiricism, couldn't say anything more about the problem of induction than "habit." 

I'll be posting a paper later this week on Daniel Garber's article, Descartes against His Teachers: The Refutation of Hylomorphism.  That should be interesting, since I haven't written a real philosophy paper in quite some time!

Forecasting Fact and Fiction

Earlier today, I commented on a blog post that had wild speculative remarks about Powerset.  The author sent me an e-mail back, noting that the piece was actually satirical.  I would have left the comment even if I had noticed: what about other people that stumble upon the article and don't realize that it's satire?  As a steward for Powerset's brand, I want to make sure that people know what's true and what's false.

But, I was reminded that the line between truth and fiction on the Web is very fuzzy.  People's doctored profiles oftentimes bear little, if any resemblance to their real-word referents.  One might suggest that reference is foundational to truth, but then one would be adhering to a much maligned philosophical tradition.  There are also facts that are only true in some contexts.  For example, in the Wikipedia article about Saddam Hussein in South Park, it's true that Saddam was killed by Satan, but we know that in the real world, Saddam was hanged.  The "right" answer to "Who killed Saddam Hussein" depends on what you're talking about; and both answers might be interesting, regardless of their truth value.  Satire presents another problem.  Though something might be written full of "incorrect" information, the piece overall might have a lot of meaning and value.  Normative statements are especially hairy.  The truth of "George Bush is an idiot" depends on what your definition of "idiot" is. Truth seems to be elusive.

Inbound links, anchor text, and hundreds of other signals might be useful in determining the popularity of a page, but it's not clear to a dumb marketing guy like me how to construct a signal for truth.  The source isn't much of a help, because sites like Valleywag report truths, half-truths, and fantasy all under a single umbrella.  A fact's frequency might be some kind of help, but what happens when a fictional story of a historical character gets more internet play than his real story?

Part of the problem might be our inability to give an adequate theory of truth, but the same might be said about popularity in a pre-Google world.  Google helped to shape our version of popularity by giving popularity a formal definition, but only because that definition agreed with our common sense notion of popularity.  When you see bad search results, Google can't scold you and tell you that your ideas of popularity is wrong according to their definition.  Rather, it has to figure out how to conform it's definition to the majority of people.

From that angle, maybe my worries are unfounded.  People seem to have a good eye for differentiating fact from fiction, even with (or especially because?) all of the information available on the Web.  My selfish concern, of course, is to make sure that Powerset returns the "right" answers to questions, but the definition of "right" is the crux of the problem.

No answers here, just a bunch of questions.  That's why I love philosophy!