How many piano teachers are there?
I started taking piano lessons at age five. My parents tried everything to get me to practice, especially appealing to my pride. ”How many people can play the piano?” my father would ask. ”You’ll be glad you learned as a kid! How many adults are there who started taking lessons and wish they had continued?” He would then start jotting down figures—how many piano teachers in our town, how many students each teacher had, how many would probably quit once they went to college—and come up with an estimate that proved I would grow up to be part of a very special and elite group of pianists.
My dad has long since given up on me as a pianist, but his questions still plague a different select group: search developers. The future of search may lie in the answers. In this two-part series, I’ll examine how search engines might answer them through social and semantic improvements.
Xavier Gréhant, a PhD student working in distributed computing, solved the first problem broadcast on hypios.com. He developed what is probably the first problem-suggestion algorithm (or engine) out there, and won $3,000 for his solution. Here’s the story:
Didn’t we just post about Twitter? Well, yes, but as a philosopher, I can’t ignore what’s happening. (Pun intended.)
I’ve always preferred Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?” to Twitter’s “What are you doing?” Here’s why:
Twitter asks about “you”: the untrustworthy, insignificant ego.
Twitter asks about what I’m “doing.” Action is usually not a philosopher’s strong point. Most of the time, we (the humans) do not doing anything interesting. Asking us what we do, provokes deeply annoying tweets about cooking spaghetti or somewhat unsettling messages about going into labor.
Twitter is about the now. Well, yeah, RT @BuDa: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery. But isn’t Buddhism also going for extinguishing the self?
Twitter seemed to think all you do is important. Facebook’s question seems designed to keep you from being too prosaic. Do you really want people thinking your overcooked spaghetti is all that’s on your mind? Even if you occasionally talk about your dinner (and breakfast and lunch and snack and…) at least the question assumes you have interesting thoughts to share. So on this first level, Facebook seems to be for philosophers whereas Twitter seemed to think of you as an ego-driven stupid. But users weren’t. They shared much more on Twitter than what they were doing. And if they hadn’t you wouldn’t even know that the site exists.
Of course, as the Twitter blog says, this isn’t going to change the way anyone uses the service; it’s quite the opposite. Like in the jeopardy quizz-game, where you have the answer and need to find the question, Twitter’s team got together, looked at all the answers for a few months and then they came up with the question people already seemed to answer. That is, the Twitter team starts to take into account how the users use what they have created. The new prompt reflects the actual use of the site, rather than its intended use. It never was the micro-blogging site they intended it to be, where people only told their friends what they were doing. It at once was a broader network where you could learn what’s going on, from election protests to planes landing in rivers.
Twitter may have changed the question, but the answer are still the same (and yet, always changing).
I recently came across a presentation on Slideshare that —even if very simplistic— formalized something I have been thinking about for a few weeks: could Twitter be a kind of unintentional, original and refined Ponzi scheme in the domain of marketing? A giant pyramid that will topple if more bricks aren’t added every day?
Disclaimer: We love Twitter
We use it every day. We get a lot of interesting information from it, we have many followers, we follow many people, we made some interesting contacts on it, but…
But…Twitter isn’t that good
Sure, Twitter is a good product. The application interface is accessible and wide open. It’s a real-time social bookmarking tool that’s original in terms of virality and network recommendation. This stream fits with some people’s needs to organize content. But honestly, it’s not that good. Following too many people (something that we, @hypios, admittedly do, as we follow pretty much everyone who follows us) makes the stream change so quickly that it’s impossible to really ‘follow.’ Follow fewer people, though, and it gets boring; you’ll just see the same excessive twitterers on your network.
Then there’s the functionality. I won’t go too far into that, but it’s maddening that there’s no ’select all and delete’ option for the 200 daily automated direct messages you’ll get (which are not at all distinguished, by the way, from the real ones). You have to click on every single one of them. “Delete all” a feature that you have with every simple email account. I’ll stop here, but to reiterate, it’s not that good.
The winner of a competition in problem-solving talks about his experience and his approach to problem-solving. Xavier Gréhant, working on a PhD in distributed computing solved the first problem that was broadcast on hypios.com: He developped what is probably the first problem-suggestion algorithm (or engine) out there.
In the last few months, most of our blog posts have been about issues surrounding Open Innovation, Crowdsourcing, web-communities, some were turned towards “pure” science, interesting facts, issues and figures. But the death of Claude Levi-Strauss (on October 30) reminded some of us of our backgrounds in disciplines like social science, philosophy and history… For most of us, Levi-Strauss was not just a familiar name, but an intellectual figure that truly influenced the way we think. And that brings me to my main point for this post: in what respect is Levi-Strauss’ thinking important (even if you’re not an anthropologist?)
The figure of “structuralism”
Levi-Strauss is the most prominent name associated with what is commonly called “structuralist” thinking. Structuralism is a theoretical approach that was born with Ferdinand de Saussure’s pioneering work in linguistics. Its general principle is to grasp an entity (such as language, in the case of Saussure), as a system of elements (rather than as a set of atomistic elements). To think in terms of the system means that each element can only be defined in terms of the relations (of equivalence or opposition) it has with other elements of the system. Take language, for instance. Saussure’s approach showed that meaning in language can be best explained not by assuming the “identity” or pre-existing “content” of the linguistic signs it is composed of (which, added together, make up a language), but by assuming the priority of the system, and the relations between the combined elements. In this case, meaning has to be thought of oppositionally (as the result of a contrast between opposing pairs) and differences between terms assume prominence. Saussure goes even further: we do not choose, when we speak, to combine certain elements of language. In language it is always a matter of pre-existing possibilities, combinations that form language itself (the structure) command social agents when they are speaking. The structure commands the agents, which is a very strong thesis.
In this view, structuralism is a fairly deterministic theory. From it’s origin in linguistic theory, Levi-Strauss’ theoretical & field work applied the structuralist framework to the problem of understanding how societies, and, in particular, non-western societies (like the South-American Bororos) worked. Structuralism proved an especially powerful tool, allowing Levi-Strauss to explain the meaning and evolution of social entities and the social system better than competing models used in anthropology. Other explanations were either historical (basically explaining the existence of a social entity by giving an account of how it appeared) or functionalist (a tradition represented by Boris Malinowski and Franz Boas that analyses social forms through the function they fulfill within society, e.g. marriage is for stable reproduction); both are tautological. That is, they don’t really offer explanations but just repeat our still unexplained preconceptions. Levi-Strauss opposes to these two theories an analysis that’s mainly relational: “examining the logical structures that underlay relationships rather than their contents” is the mission of modern anthropology as he sees it.
De-Naturalization
Applying his method allowed Levi-Strauss to make powerful claims about social reality; in particular, he is widely known for his analysis of kinship. The claimed universality of the functionalist idea of family – father, mother, children – was directly undermined by Levi-Strauss’ analysis (as ethnocentrist and complacent), which showed that in some societies, for example, the figure of the uncle was more prominent than that of the father. Later work in theories of gender attacked the purported “naturalness” and universality of men’s domination in families, picking up on Levi-Strauss’ work in this field.
In which sense is the “structuralist” analysis of kinship novel? Here’s a famous example, developed in Structural Anthropology: let’s call “A” the relation between uncle and nephew; “B”, the relation between brother and sister; “C” the relation between father and son, and “D” the relation between husband and wife. Levi-Strauss discovers the following suprising fact: in every society, A is to B what C is to D. That is, Levi-Strauss shows that while the individual elements vary in their relations with each other, there is a certain invariability at the system-level. This conclusion is the result of the “structural investigation”: “the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity.”
A “handbook” against racism
Levi-Strauss’ work on “savage” societies, decomposing myths, symbols or social events that might appear totally irrational to us, made these phenomena more understandable. Decomposing the elements, he showed how a relatively small repertoire of meaningful entities are combined (each time differently) in myths, rituals, etc in different cultures and historical epochs. According to reknowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this analysis of fundamental units (say characters or plot elements) rather than the content, showed the underlying rationality of often stigmatized rituals, religious practices, etc… It was now harder to judge things that seemed at first glance strange or unfamiliar as absurd or barbaric. Structuralist analysis is a powerful lens, allowing the social scientist the possibility to see meaning as a construction out of universal elements–flattening the perceived differences between cultural productions. It’s this aspect of Levi-Strauss’ work that I take to be most significant and most durable: his books are, as Bourdieu said, a “very powerful handbook against racism.”
What’s a “classic”?
When a famous intellectual dies, you can hear, among other intellectuals, politicians, etc… a sort of uniformly reverential tone: s/he was a “classic”, a prominent public intellectual, a national treasure, extremely influential, etc etc. Some of them, with lots of nostalgia, might also say: “he was the last giant” (I think in France we’ve lost twenty or thirty ” last giants” this year alone). But, with Levi-Strauss’ death at 101 years of age, no one can deny he loss of an important intellectual figure. What’s really clear in this case was Levi-Strauss wide influence outside of his field, anthropology–his influence, that is, on the larger culture. No one, among philosophers, sociologists, historians, and even mathematicians (structuralism brought a lot to cybernetics, for example), could ignore his name; and most of them know a bit about its work. I think here we have something that can be said to be an objective criterion for what it means to be a “classical” intellectual figure. Given increasing specialization, it will likely be harder and harder to find individuals who’ve affected the progress of disciplines other than their own.
We’re happy to announce that hypios has its first problem in sustainable development. One of our Seekers is looking for a biodegradable battery with the same power as a traditional battery. The need for this innovation emerged in a very specific environment (reflected in the problem’s specifications), so a potential solution will only have to work in this environment. But prospective use of this kind of device is not limited to the domain where the problem emerged.
We really hope that this problem will find a solution on hypios, and that there are more of its kind to come! It might seem like a tiny problem, but it reflects one of the biggest environmental issues of the contemporary world: the production of energy (and especially the immense source of energy represented by nuclear power plants) produces non-degradable and non-recycable waste. Perfecting the biodegradable battery is a small but crucial step towards a sustainable world.
Last fall, Google launched Project 10^100, a call for ideas that would change the world by helping as many people as possible. Google will choose 5 winning ideas (to be announced shortly) and has pledged $10 million US towards their implementation. While the design of the contest isn’t very innovative—Google is essentially passing around a suggestion box, and the rewards are traditional grant-style funding—the company seems to have learned from previous crowdsourcing disasters. Here’s what they’ve done right (and what every company tempted to let the people decide should keep in mind) and what they haven’t:
1. Appeal to principles.
The project asks how the world could be changed by helping people. The 10^100 website is well-designed, with an appealing video. It seems like this project is important, not just something a marketing department was too lazy to do and left up to the public.
Normally, when asked its opinion, the crowd likes to see the mighty fall. If we’re not members of the community affected by a vote, for example the caring users of a product that we vote about, we have very little incentive to make the right choice. When Time magazine put its Most Influential Person of 2009 up to an Internet vote, for example, the crowd chose the founder of 4chan, the forum where memes are born and productivity goes to die. (The crowd in question was made up mostly of forum posters, who were later accused of hacking the vote, not magazine readers.) Not only did Time have to honor what it called a “stunning result,” it had to acknowledge the influence of the forum that a 2008 Time article, quoting Star Wars, referred to as “a wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
Google isn’t using the crowd’s ideas for a new ad campaign or its own website, but for charity. Project 10^100 appeals to people’s altruism, not their desire to make themselves heard. If you submit silly ideas, that is, you’re not hurting Google, you’re hurting the starving children of the world.
You know their names: Wittgenstein, Turing, Cantor, Gödel and Russell. But do you know what they did? Or why their achievements (set theory, the incompleteness proof) are still important today? Neither did I. But unlike many of you, I work at an office where photos of Turing and Wittgenstein adorn the walls. Ignorance was getting to be a greater liability than usual. So when I saw favorable reviews for a new graphic novel called LogiComix (said to explain how this whole cast of characters are connected) I decided to order it. The text is by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou. Perhaps anachronistically, when it comes to philosophy, I have an instinctive trust for the Greeks. This trust was not misplaced.
Maybe the book wouldn’t satisfy a specialist, but several hours in its company will likely increase your knowledge of logic and its history by several orders of magnitude, allow you to see connections you never noticed between intellectual figures you are only dimly aware of, and fill you with a sense of wonder at the kind of collaboration and competition that would eventually lead to computer theory and cybernetics.
The unlikely hero of LogiComix is Bertrand Russell, who, with Alfred North Whitehead, wrote the modestly titled Principia Mathematica in the pre-war years. The co-authors were so obsessed with the project that they moved in together. (This was convenient for Russell since he apparently had a thing for Mrs. Whitehead.) The impetus for the project came after Russell exposed a major problem in logic and set theory—formalized as Russell’s paradox. It was widely viewed as taking down the “naive set theory” associated with Frege and Cantor. The paradox highlights the problem of self-reference with respect to sets. Namely that naive set theory cannot handle the issue. (more…)
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