How interesting the world is depends on how well it’s written.

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I watched some of the cross examination of Alex Murdaugh who is on trial for brutally murdering his wife and son — I’m a lawyer voyeur, as well as a reader of Bob Loblaw’s Law Blog — and happened to come in as the prosecution was pinning Murdaugh down with step-and-time data from Murdaugh’s cell phone. Sample:

8:05:35-8:09:52 p.m.: Alex Murdaugh’s phone records 54 steps.

8:05:46-8:15:24 p.m.: Paul Murdaugh’s phone records 303 steps.

8:06 p.m.: Paul’s phone begins moving from the kennels to the main house.

8:07:20 p.m.: Paul Murdaugh sends a Snapchat message to several friends.

8:09-9:02 p.m.: Alex’s phone records no steps, indicating he was not moving with the phone in his possession. He later told investigators he was sleeping during that time.

8:11:08-8:31:15 p.m.: Maggie Murdaugh’s phone is locked.

8:14-8:35 p.m.: Paul Murdaugh’s phone puts him at the main house.

8:15:55-8:21:45 p.m.: Paul’s phone records 140 steps.

8:17-8:18 p.m.: Maggie Murdaugh’s phone records 38 steps taken.

Note to self: The next time I plan on criming, leave my mobile phone at home watching PBS.

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Topic: The Supreme Court is hearing a case about whether section 230 exempts Google from responsibility for what it algorithmically recommends.

A thought from one of my favorite philosophers, Richard Rorty:

Rortiana, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

“…revolutionary achievements in the arts, in the sciences, and the moral and political thought typically occur when somebody realizes that two or more of our vocabularies are interfering with each other, and proceeds to invent a new vocabulary to replace both… The gradual trial and error creation of a new, third, vocabulary… is not a discovery about how old vocabularies fit together… Such creations are not the result of successfully filling together pieces of a puzzle. They are not discoveries of a reality behind the appearances, of an undistorted view of the whole picture with which to replace myopic views of its parts. The proper analogy is with the invention of new tools to take the place of old tools.” — Richard Rorty,  Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989, p. 12

We’ve had to invent a new vocabulary to talk about these things: Is a website like a place or a magazine?  Are text messages like phone calls or telegrams? Are personal bloggers journalists [a question from 2004]?

The issue isn’t which Procrustean bed we want to force these new entries into, but what sort of world we want to live in with them. It’s about values, not principles or definitions. IMUOETC (“In my uncertain opinion expressed too confidently”)

Procruste’s bed. And this is better than being too tall for it :(

A point all of this misses: “Yo, we’re talking about law here, which by its nature requires us to bring entities and events under established categories.”

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I  typed my doctoral dissertation in 1978 on my last electric typewriter, a sturdy IBM Model B.

My soon-to-be wife was writing hers out long hand, which I was then typing up.

Then one day we took a chapter to a local typist who was using a Xerox word processor which was priced too high for grad students or for most offices. When I saw her correcting text, and cutting and pasting, my eyes bulged out like a Tex Avery wolf.

As soon as Kay-Pro II’s were available, I bought one from my cousin who had recently opened a computer store.

The moment I received it  and turned it on, I got curious about how the characters made it to the screen, and became a writer about tech. In fact, I became a frequent contributor to the Pro-Files KayPro magazine, writing ‘splainers about the details of how these contraptions. worked.

I typed my wife’s dissertation on it — which was my justification for buying it — and the day when its power really hit her was when I used WordStar’s block move command to instantly swap sections 1 and 4 as her thesis advisor had suggested; she had unthinkingly assumed it meant I’d be retyping the entire chapter. 

People noticed the deeper implications early on. E.g., Michael Heim, a fellow philosophy prof (which I had been, too), wrote a prescient book, Electric Language, in the early 1990s (I think) about  the metaphysical implications of typing into an utterly malleable medium. David Levy wrote Scrolling Forward about the nature of documents in the Age of the PC. People like Frode Hegland are still writing about this and innovating in the text manipulation space.

A small observation I used to like to make around 1990 about the transformation that had already snuck into our culture: Before word processors, a document was a one of a kind piece of writing like a passport, a deed, or an historic map used by Napoleon; a document was tied to its material embodiment. Then the word processing folks needed a way to talk about anything you could write using bits, thus severing “documents” from their embodiment. Everything became a document as everything became a copy.

In any case, word processing profoundly changed not only how I write, but how I think, since I think by writing. Having a fluid medium lowers the cost of trying out ideas, but also makes it easy for me to change the structure of my thoughts, and since thinking is generally  about connecting ideas, and those connections almost always assume a structure that changes their meaning — not just a linear scroll of one-liners — word processing is a crucial piece of “scaffolding” (in Clark and Chalmer‘s sense) for me and I suspect for most people.

In fact, I’ve come to recognize I am not a writer so much as a re-writer of my own words.

Figures

1. Norsk Teknisk Museum – Teigen fotoatelier, CC BY-SA 4.0
   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
2. By Autopilot – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39098108

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[Please note important boldface corrections in this post – Feb. 1, 2022]

Just in case you’ve started getting notifications on your Mac that “Software from ‘Fei Lv’ added items that can run in the background. You can manage this in Login Items Settings”, here’s an explanation that I could not find anywhere on the Internet.

This seems to be coming from NordPass [Nope. Coincidence.], which I have been trying out as a replacement for 1Pass. a password manager. I like 1Password and it is a well-regard and trust password manager, but it’s UI has been getting overly complex for my tastes, mainly because I’ve entered too many redundant, broken entries. I recommend 1Pass and will probably be going back to it. But NordPass was offering a great intro deal, and I’ve been a satisfied user of NordVPN for years now.

I started getting the annoying Fei Lv notifications, and struggled to find what app, piece of software, or sneaky malware was causing them. Apple does not make it easy. It’s relatively easy to find in the log that the notification is happening, but not which app “Fei Lv” applies to. Neither did Google or Bing searches.

Trial and error, however, worked well. It looks like it’s NordPass [Nope]. So, if you’re hearing from the mysterious Fei Lv, try turning off NordPass through System Preferences and see if that does the trick. [It won’t] It did for me [For a few days].

i’ll consider turning it back on if NordPass reassures me that Fei Lv isn’t some malware that snuck on to my computer. [NordPass is not the problem. I still don’t know what is.]

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I just added a page to my home page where you can search and browse all my tweets from the past 15 years of tweeting. That’s 17,900 of them. And I guarantee that each one of them is worth not just reading but pondering. Let me put it like this: Every one of those tweets will be on the test, people!

In truth, I expect it to be one of the least-visited pages I’ve ever posted, and that’s saying something. But it’s a liberating feeling to know not only do I own my history, but there’s an easy way to make it available to a public that has no reason to care about it.

I used this simple, free tool. It requires that you download your tweets from Twitter, using the site’s service, which you’ll find by clicking on the dots under the “More” link on the left side of Twitter.com, and then “Settings & Account” > “Settings & Privacy” > “Your Account” > “Download and archive of your data.” It takes Twitter a day or two to compile your archive. (Mine was about 65mb if you’re worried about size.)

The free tool will upload the resulting zip file to a site of yours. Unzip it from a terminal and you’re done. If you don’t want to work in a terminal, you can unzip it on your local computer and upload the many many files to your site. It’s slower but it works.

Thank you Darius Kazemi for this tool!

PS: I am @dweinberger at https://mastodon.social

PPS: The ungrammatical title of this post comes from the even more ungrammatical book, Stephen Colbert’s I am America and So Can You!

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To say that facts are social constructions doesn’t mean everything put forward as a fact is a fact. Nor does it mean that facts don’t express truths or facts are not to be trusted. Nor does it mean that there’s some unconstructed fact behind facts. Social constructionists don’t want to leave us in a world in which it’s ok to sat “No, it’s not raining” in the middle of a storm or claim “Water boiled at 40C for me this morning under normal circumstances.” 

Rather the critique, as I understand it, is that the fact-based disciplines we choose to pursue, the roles they play, who gets to participate, the forms of discourse and of proof, the equipment invented and the ways the materials are handled (the late Bruno Latour was brilliant on this point, among others), the commitment to an objective and consistent methodology (see Paul Feyerabend), all are the result of history, culture, economics, and social forces. Science itself is a social construct (as per Thomas Kuhn‘s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [me on that book]). (Added bonus: Here’s Richard Rorty’s review of Ian Hacking’s excellent book, The Social Construction of What?)

Facts as facts pretty clearly seem (to me) to be social constructions. As such, they have a history…

Facts as we understand them became a thing in western culture when Francis Bacon early in the 17th century started explicitly using them to ground theories, which was a different way of constructing scientific truths; prior to this, science was built on deductions, not facts. (Pardon my generalizations.)

You can see the movement from deductive truth to fact-based empirical evidence across the many editions of Thomas Malthus‘ 1798 book,  An Essay on the Principle of Population, that predicted global famine based on a mathematical formula, but then became filled with facts and research from around the world. It went from a slim deductive volume to six volumes thick with facts and stats. Social construction added pounds to his Malthus’ work.

This happened because statistics arrived in Britain, by way of Germany, in the early 19th century. Statistical facts became important at that time not only because they enabled the inductive grounding of theories (as per Bacon and Malthus), but because they could rebut people’s personal interests. In particular,  they became an important way to break the sort of class-based assumptions that made it seem to t be ok to clean rich people’s chimneys by shoving little boys up them.  Against this were posed facts that showed that it was in fact bad for them. 

Compiling “blue books” of fact-based research became a standard part of the legislative process in England in the first half of the 19th century. By mid-century, the use of facts was so prevalent that in 1854 Dickens bemoaned society’s reliance on them in Hard Times on the grounds that facts kill imagination…yet another opposite to facts, and another social construction.

As the 19th century ended, we got our first fact-finding commissions that were established in order to peacefully resolve international disputes. (Narrator: They rarely did.) This was again using facts as the boulder that stubs your toe of self-interest (please forget I ever wrote that phrase), but now those interests were cross-national and not as easily resolvable as when you poise the interests of lace-cuffed lords against the interests of children crawling through upperclass chimneys.

In the following century  we got (i.e., we constructed) an idea of science and human knowledge that focused on assembling facts as if they were bricks out of which one could build a firm foundation. This led to some moaning (in a famous 1963 letter to the editor)  that science was turning into a mere “brickyard” of unassembled facts.

I’m not a historian, and this is the best I can recall from a rabbit hole of specific curiosity I fell into about 10 yrs ago when writing Too Big to Know. But the point is the the idea of the social construction of science and facts doesn’t mean that all facts — including “alternative facts” — are equal.  Water really does boil at 100C. Rather it’s the idea, role, use, importance, and control of facts that’s socially constructed.

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“Quine … had his 1927 Remington portable modified to handle symbolic logic. Among the characters that he sacrificed was the question mark. “Well, you see, I deal in certainties,” he explained.” [1]

This is from an article by Richard Polt about Heidegger’s philosophical argument against typewriters in light of the discovery of Heidegger’s own typewriter; it was apparently for his assistant to transcribe his handwritten text.

Polt brings a modern sensibility to his Heidegger scholarship. The article itself uses Heideggerian jargon to describe elements of the story of the discovery and authentication of the typewriter; he is poking gentle fun at that jargon. At least I’m pretty sure he is; humor is a rare element in Heideggerian scholarship. But I’m on a mailing list with Richard and over the years have found him to be open-minded and kind, as well as being a top-notch scholar of Heidegger.

Polt is also a certified typewriter nerd.

[1] Polt’s article footnotes this as follows: Willard Van Orman Quine profile in Beacon Hill Paper, May 15, 1996, p. 11, quoted at http://www.wvquine.org/wvq-newspaper. html. See Mel Andrews, “Quine’s Remington Portable no. 2,” ETCetera: Journal of the Early Typewriter Collectors’ Association 131 (Winter 2020/2021), 19–20.

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First there was the person who built a computer inside of Minecraft and programmed it to play Minecraft. 

Now Frederic Besse built a usable linux terminal in GPTchat — usable in that it can perform systems operations on a virtual computer that’s also been invoked in (by? with?) GPTchat. For example, you can tell the terminal to create a file and where to store it in a file system that did not exist until you asked, and under most definitions of “exist” doesn’t exist anywhere.

I feel like I need to get a bigger mind in order for it to be sufficiently blown.

(PS: I could do without the casual anthropomorphizing in the GPT article.)

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I’ve been on Twitter for a long time. A very long time. In fact, I was introduced to it as a way for a bunch of friends to let one another know what bar they were about to go to. It seems to have strayed from that vision a bit.

I have not yet decided to leave it, although I’m starting to check in at Mastodon. Here’s what I use it for, in no particular order, and not without embarrassment:

• Quick check on breaking news. It’s by no means comprehensive, and what trends is by no means always important. But I find some of it worth a click even as a distraction.
• Quick commentary on issues of the day by people I follow because they’re good at that.
• Issues worth knowing about raised by strangers who know about them.
• Keeping up with fields I’m interested in by following people who I don’t know, as well as some I do.
• Engaging with people I otherwise wouldn’t have kept up with.
• There are people I know just barely in real life who I feel quite close to after many years on Twitter together. 
• Engaging with a low bar of social inhibition/anxiety with people I don’t know, sometimes leading to friendships. 
• An outlet for my stray thoughts and, well, jokes.
• A medium by which I can publicize stuff I write.
• A number I can cite to publishers as if people automatically read the stuff of mine I’m publicizing on Twitter.
• The Twitter I’m on is often very funny.

Switching social platforms is hard.

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