Steven Johnson takes on those who complain we lose serendipity on the Web. I’m with him 100%. Even if you only go to carefully curated sites that you carefully choose, you are always one link away from the serendipitous. In fact, it takes super-human will power to get from A to B on the Web without first getting sidetracked to C,M,R, C again and then a site with photos of obscene carved pencils.

I think of the Web as an enormous distraction engine, and I share Steven’s frustration with this serendipity meme that will not die. [Tags: serendipity steven_johnson everything_is_miscellaneous]

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In a day that would have shocked people just a few centuries ago — but, then, what day these days wouldn’t? — not only was the first polar-grizzly hybrid confirmed, but the first new genus for an African primate in 83 years was created. The Tanzanian monkey, the kipjuni, is now part of the genus Rungweebus, named after the mountain where it was found. At first scientists thought it was a mangabey but they’ve decided it’s more closely related to the baboon even though it’s anatomically different. The reclassification was cinched when scientists discovered it shoots laser beams from its eyes. (All according to the AP.) [Tags: taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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I just read Descartes’ Baby by Paul Bloom and found it fascinating and annoying simultaneously.

Bloom is a psychologist who argues for “intuitive dualism.” The fascinating parts are the many experiments he cites that show babies are more sophisticated than we usually give them credit for. At a very early age, babies are aware of the constancy of objects, that appearances may be deceptive, and that other people may hold false beliefs.

The annoying part is what Bloom makes of this. Bloom thinks those experiments obviously show babies are dualists because they distinguish objects from belief-holding humans. But Cartesian dualism isn’t simply the belief that there’s a difference between people and objects. We were making that distinction before Descartes. Cartesian dualism consists of conceiving of the mental and the physical as so distinct and different that it doesn’t seem the two could ever even interact. And that’s not a distinction babies make.

From the fact that babies seem universally (although I suspect most of the experiments were done on babies born into Western culture) to be aware that there’s a difference between faces and balls, that they are aware that the faces may have false beliefs, and that the faces care about what happens to them, Bloom jumps to conclusions.

First, he thinks Cartesian dualism is a natural outgrowth of baby dualism. But baby dualism isn’t even necessary dual. I can believe that you are different from a log because you are aware of and care about your world without thinking that you are made of two types of substance. For example, I can believe fish are different from birds without attributing to fish two substances, animality and swiminess. Getting to Descartes requires abstracting and fragmenting our experience in ways that babies don’t, many non-Western cultures don’t, and our culture didn’t before Descartes. I don’t think Bloom has shown much more than that babies are aware that logs don’t think and feel, but people do. That isn’t Descartes. It’s not even dualism in any interesting sense.

Bloom seems precise when dealing with baby psychology. He’s not so good when he heads into art, religion and philosophy, which constitutes the bulk of the book. His explanation of why we can be moved by “anxious objects” — edgy art such as Warhol’s Brillo boxes, pure white paintings, a real dead horse — is prosaic and oddly disconnected from the dualism that his book is about. He goes through the predictable reasons we like art — it pleases the eye, we look smart by valuing difficult art, etc. — and then comes back to the special case of anxious art. And what he says is distinctly wrong about anxious art:

We still have not fully explained why some of us like anxious objects.

In appreciation of these artworks all of the ingredients of pleasure discussed earlier come into play, but there is at least one more that we have not yet discussed: we enjoy displays of skill, of virtuosity, both physical and intellectual.

Ok, but anxious art can share that feature with the least anxious of art — “Look at how realistic those dogs playing poker seem!” — and much anxious art does not seem very accomplished technically. In some cases, that’s exactly what makes it anxious. But, Bloom drops this line of thought. He instead concludes that some art we like because we like what it shows — the pleasant view from a hilltop or Mary nursing Jesus. Other art, the more anxious type, we can only like because we’re able to see it as more than what it represents. We’re able to see the human intention in it. But, again, that’s true of all art, not just anxious art. His investigation does not come close to answering the question he raises.

More important, art refutes dualism. As Bloom acknowledges throughout the chapter — belaboring the obvious — we react to objects differently if we know they were created as art. So, here’s a physical object that embodies something mental and intentional. The artwork has no inner life, but it can’t be understood apart from the intentionality it embodies. Art and all objects we create are inseparably infused with matter and spirit. Monism is far more important to our experience than dualism.

The book is muddled over all, except for the fascinating research on babies scattered throughout. For example, his section on our “natural” belief in intelligent design confirms what I think we all already suspected: Children are “consistently more creationist than their parents.” (p. 62). Bloom is careful to say that creationism is not necessarily only for the immature. It is “a natural by-product of a mind evolved to think in terms of goals and intentions.” (p.63) Ok. So is animism. So what? How does this help? And what does it have to do with dualism, unless you define it as weakly as Bloom does?

The book suffers from overstatement. He defends essentialism, but so waters it down that it becomes merely the belief that humans think in categories and are capable of assigning an object to a category based on non-visible characteristics. Wow, that is so not what essentialism is. He knows this, too, contrasting it with Plato’s and Aristotle’s view of essences as eternal, immutable types. He argues against that strong view because it leads to evils such as racism (51). But racism can follow from the “essentialism lite” that Bloom propounds. Both types of essentialism say that there is a real way a thing should be categorized. Plato and Aristotle happened to think that that real way is eternal and immutable. Bloom thinks that the real category “is clear once we consider again what concepts are for. Tomato is a good category, because once you know something is a tomato, you know things about it, including that it is good to eat.” (41) So suppose a lite essentialist believed that dark-skinned humans have the mental and spiritual capacity of cattle. The problem with racism isn’t that it is based on eternal and immutable categories. The problem with racism is that it’s based on false facts and the false categorization that follows from them.

Besides, what Bloom calls essentialism lite just isn’t essentialism. Essentialism implies that there are clean lines between things and clear criteria for deciding what they are. Neither is true in the world of tiny, purple, winter, hybrid, genetically-engineered, insect resistant, square-cornered-for-easy-packing tomato-cantaloupes.

Nevertheless, the book is full of interesting ideas, historical references, and an open-minded back and forth on the issues. It’s fun to read and exceptionally engagingly written. It just doesn’t hold together. At least for me. [Tags: descartes descartes_baby paul_bloom books taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous psychology]

AKMA replies. I can addres part of his concern: I didn’t mean to imply that art is distinctive in its fusion of matter and intentionality. The same is true for all our artifacts. Not did I mean to say that to understand an artwork is to understand the artist’s intentions; rather, to take it as an artwork one must see that it was created intentionally. Bad writing on my part. But AKMA’s point is broader and more important than that.

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The podcast of my “Web of Ideas” session at the Berkman Center on messiness as a virtue is now available. It’s a long ‘un and more of a lecture than usual.

My topic wasn’t why you really should tidy up your office. (You know you should.) It’s about knowledge and why we have thought neatness is a sign of a proper understanding of a topic, why it’s good that our mental categories are messy, what Aristotle got wrong, and whether the Semantic Web is too much of a fuss-budget for its own good. [Tags: berkman everything_is_miscellaneous knowledge km semantic_web]

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I got to talk with Brian D. Farrell, a professor of Biology and Curator in Entomology at Harvard the other day. For my book, I wanted to see the chain of authority that lets us know that this particular beetle is a member of that particular species. Here are some photos:

One of the thousand cabinets housing Harvard’s 7+ million specimens. About half are beetles.

One of the drawers

The red labels indicate that the insect is “type specimen,” i.e., the reference to which all species identifications point. It’s the argument settler. Some of the insects in the collection are almost 150 years.

This drawer has no red-tagged beetles because it was assembled for an exhibit. This drawer, in other words, was assembled based not on taxonomy but interest. But, because of the metadata, the specimens can of course still be found.

More socially useful than Paris Hilton. Prettier, too.

This ledger – one of six – lists what the numbers on the red tags refer to. Without this, the collection is just a pile of dead bugs.

No one part of this system — ranging from pins and red labels to an institutional commitment that’s spanned generations — is knowledge. All of it together is.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous knowledge entomology harvard ]

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Dave Sifry of Technorati has posted part two of his April “State of the Blogosphere” report. [ [Disclosure: I am on Technorati’s board of advisors and Dave is a friend.]

Part One said (as per Dave’s summary):

Technorati now tracks over 37.3 million blogs

The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months

It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago

On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day

Part Two dives into the internationality of blogging. Dave writes:

Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn’t the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn’t even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.

It also finds that 47% of posts have an author-generated tag or category associated with it — the blogosphere is a nation of metadata monkeys! (And Lor’ bless ’em, every one.)19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created

Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

[Tags: blogosphere tagging david_sifry technorati]

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Siderean , one of the interesting faceted classification companies, has announced some new capabilities that aim at automating the generation of metadata and that integrate tagging with facets.

The automation comes from entity extraction tools (plus the ability to integrate third party tools, because, frankly, Siderean is not in the entity extraction business) that isolate names of people, places, organizations, dates, etc. from a collection of pages. This addresses one of the real inhibitors of the use of faceted classification: The data has to already be well structured and well tagged. That makes it great for browsing databases but not as good for browsing big piles of unstructured data (= documents).

The system integrates tags in a useful way. Users can tag items and then use tags to further specify searches through the faceted interface. In fact, the tags can be “bucketed” and treated as facets. The tags can be marked as personal or public, and can be associated with groups and other contexts. Yes, the system does integrate with del.icio.us. (Siderean fooled around with this in a beta project called — wonderfully — fac.etio.us.

Siderean also announced that it’s now using the faceted information to drive analytics. This is really “just” another way of displaying the faceted information. But it can be quite useful because a faceted system has so much data built into it. For example, a library system might know that (and this is a made-up example) there were fifteen times as many books about Iraq published in the past two years than in the past twenty; it has to know this if it’s going to let users browse for books by subject and then by year (or vice versa). Siderean’s analytics offering follows that of Endeca.

Faceted classification is young. It’s exciting watching imaginative companies like Siderean invent new twists and turns right under our eyes. [Tags: taxonomy faceted_classification facets siderean tags]

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Dan Klyn has some practical suggestions for retailers thinking about letting users tag merchandise. Why not pre-populate your catalog with tags drawn from the item descriptions? Why not rank tags higher based on the popularity of the page or item? What do you do about a product that’s tagged “crappy” or “over-priced”? (I think Dan’s answer that last one is that you surface tags based in part on how popular they are.) The result is not a pure folksonomy, but purity isn’t always what we — merchants and shoppers — need.

He also points to Etsy.com as an example of a merchant using tags well. [Tags: taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous dan_klyn ia tagging ]

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At the Taxocop wiki you can read a fascinating discussion of how tagging systems can and are being used internally by corporations. Christine Connors explains, for example, that at Raytheon, librarians moderate user suggestions for sites and keywords. “We only rarely disapprove of a user-submitted term; overly general, vague or completely off-base terms are those that get deleted. We occasionally call to clarify a submission,” Christine says. [Tags: taxonomy tagging everything_is_miscellaneous raytheon christine_connors]

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According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Philips Electronics has signed an agreement with Time Inc. that requires four magazines (Time, Fortune, People, Business 2.0) to put their tables of contents on the first page. A front-cover flap will announce that Philips is behind this “innovation.”

That Time has to be bribed into not hiding their way-faring page shows how little magazines respect their readers.

Meta-idea: Philips should sell space on their flap, announcing that the flap is being brought to you by… [Tags: media advertising time philips_electronics taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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