The leadership of philosopher kings

Those who work in scientific or technological institutions may be interested in a short paper on leadership structures by Gregory Canavan. Canavan's basic point is that all the individuals in a scientific organisation should spend some of their time doing creative, rather than administrative work. If the people with experience spend all of their time doing administrative work, then their ability and knowledge is wasted. Moreover, argues Canavan, to be an effective leader it is necessary to be engaged in creative work, because leadership requires inspiration, guidance and insight:

Managing is a function that can be applied easily to any process: producing cars, IRS forms, sausages,etc. Science requires leadership more than management. Doing science, particularly applied science, requires insight and inspiration on which way to go, not just a daily reckoning of where you have been. Many organizations have quietly substituted management for leadership. The result is generally polarization, lack of commitment, inflexibility, the premature loss of scientific excellence, and fossilization, which are sufficiently familiar and uncomfortable to require no elaboration.

In specific terms, Canavan argues that

1) The greatest number of people an individual can effectively manage is 7. Individuals who manage 7 people have no time for creative work at all.

2) Apart from those people on the lowest level in a company, each individual should lead (at most) 3 people. This takes up 3/7 of an individual's time. Assuming that 1/7 is taken up responding to one's own leader, this leaves 3/7 of the time for creative work.

3) Whilst the rule of seven creates log₇ 6N layers in an organisation containing N employees, the rule of three creates log₃ 2N layers. In an organisation containing 7,500 employees, for example, the rule of three generates 9 layers rather than 6. To ensure everyone is working creatively, it is necessary to add extra layers to a leadership hierarchy.

The main problem with Canavan's idea is hidden in his assertion that "If [an employee] doesn't feel an urge to do [creative work], he is probably in the wrong organization." This is true, but all organisations do harbour people in the wrong jobs, or people who possess a negligible amount of creative ability. For these people, a management role which involves administrative drudgery is both a refuge, and a means for advancing one's career to a higher salary scale. Nevertheless, Canavan's idea has a bracingly radical feel to it. Bravo!

The greatest scientific book ever written

Andrew Jaffe writes in Physics World that "Nowadays, science (or at least physics) progresses not by sustained argument in books but by short snippets. Books serve to consolidate knowledge and present it to students or to the public."

This is sadly true, and indicative of the way in which science in particular, and academia in general, has been mechanised, and transformed from a compulsion into a career. The output of most scientific research consists, not of genuine discovery, but of modestly scoped, often irrelevant, and even straightforwardly incorrect papers published in narrowly specialised journals.

Scientists should stop writing papers, and should avoid the desire for a career in a particular discipline. There should be no desire to maximise citations, or to gain tenure in a university department. If science is a calling rather than a career, then knowledge and understanding should itself be sufficient reward. A true scientist should aim to finish life in abject loneliness and poverty.

The end product to which a true scientist should be aiming is the greatest scientific book ever written. This book will be stylishly and succinctly written with clarity and precision; it will synthesise concepts from different subjects and simultaneously solve multiple problems in disparate disciplines; it will tell an engrossing story; it will paint vivid pictures; it will cast speculative asides and footnotes like confetti through the text; it will re-cast the familiar as the unusual; it will titillate the reader, and hold him in suspense; it will defy convention; it will be a seamless blend of the lyrical and the analytical; it will integrate natural language concepts and mathematical concepts, the observational and the theoretical; and it will be as broad as it is deep. I look forward to reading it.

The evolution of the eye

Sir David Attenborough explains the evolution of the eye, for the benefit of those who may be suffering from a touch of epistemological astigmatism.

Stupidist epistemology and philosophy of science

Stupidist epistemology and philosophy of science studies the ways in which intelligender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, the knowing subject, and practices of inquiry and justification. It identifies ways in which dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification systematically disadvantage stupid people and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform these conceptions and practices so that they serve the interests of these groups. Various practitioners of stupidist epistemology and philosophy of science argue that dominant knowledge practices disadvantage stupid people by (1) excluding them from inquiry, (2) denying them epistemic authority, (3) denigrating their 'stupidine' cognitive styles and modes of knowledge, (4) producing theories of stupid people that represent them as inferior, deviant, or significant only in the ways they serve the interests of intelligent people, (5) producing theories of social phenomena that render stupid people's activities and interests, or intelligendered power relations, invisible, and (6) producing knowledge (science and technology) that is not useful for people in subordinate positions, or that reinforces intelligender and other social hierarchies. Stupidist epistemologists trace these failures to flawed conceptions of knowledge, knowers, objectivity, and scientific methodology. They offer diverse accounts of how to overcome these failures. They also aim to (1) explain why the entry of stupid people and stupidist scholars into different academic disciplines, especially in biology and the social sciences, has generated new questions, theories, and methods, (2) show how intelligender has played a causal role in these transformations, and (3) defend these changes as cognitive, not just social, advances.

The central concept of stupidist epistemology is that of a situated knower, and hence of situated knowledge: knowledge that reflects the particular perspectives of the subject. Stupidist philosophers are interested in how intelligender situates knowing subjects. They have articulated three main approaches to this question: stupidist standpoint theory, stupidist postmodernism, and stupidist empiricism. Different conceptions of how intelligender situates knowers also inform stupidist approaches to the central problems of the field: grounding stupidist criticisms of science and stupidist science, defining the proper roles of social and political values in inquiry, evaluating ideals of objectivity and rationality, and reforming structures of epistemic authority.

The Arctic Grand Prix

"Hi Gord. Bernie here."

"Hi Bernie! How's tricks?"

"Not bad, not bad. Bit of a problem with the trouble and strife, but musn't grumble I suppose."

"Indeed."

"Anyway. About your idea for a Snow Grand Prix."

"Yes."

"I like it. I like it a lot. Cars with studded tyres, cars bouncing off snowbanks, head-up displays for the drivers, and the first ever global sporting event covered entirely in the infrared part of the spectrum. Nobody will be able to get to the track, but hey, plus ca change..."

"Indeed."

"Thing is, the only parts of the world which can afford to pay for the right to host a Grand Prix these days, tend to be in the Middle East and South-East Asia. The countries with territory in the Arctic circle tend to be a bit flaky with the old GDP, and no-one seems to own Antarctica yet. At the end of the day, Gordon, Formula 1 is owned by a private equity company which needs to recoup its investment in some way. So..."

"I understand Bernie. It was only an idea."

"Sure."

"How's Max?"

"Oh, same old, same old..."

A trip to the linguistic foundry

You know when you walk through deep, freshly-fallen snow? What's the onomatopoeic word for the sound your footsteps make in the snow? It's definitely not 'crunch'. If the snow has lain for two or three days, and gone through a couple of freeze-and-thaw cycles, then it will make a crunching sound, but that's because of the higher ice content. Freshly-fallen snow doesn't crunch, it's a more complex, staggered, semi-muffled, compaction sound. I reckon you can refer to a staggered crunch as a 'scrunch', but what's the term for a semi-muffled scrunch?

And another thing: you know when you've taken a dump, and the main mass has been expelled, but there's a little straggler hanging on? You have to give it another squeeze, and maybe a wiggle, before the little fella plops into the bowl. What's the word for such a faecal straggler? If there isn't one already, how about calling it a brown loafer?

Dirac and Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously insisted at the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Ironically, then, Graham Farmelo's recent biography of the British physicist Paul Dirac, reports that Dirac's verdict on his Cambridge contemporary was:

"Awful man. Never stopped talking."

Snow complaints

It's difficult to believe, I know, but some people are complaining. They're complaining, in fact, about the snow, about the fact that many children haven't gone to school for a couple of days, and about the fact that some adults didn't go to work on Monday.

The Federation of Small Businesses, (which also recently distinguished itself by complaining about the 'Take a Benylin day' advertising campaign), moaned that 20% of the workforce hadn't gone to work on Monday, and plucked a figure of £1.2bn as the cost to the economy. The System doesn't like it when people change their behaviour.

Those complaining about school closures, meanwhile, divide into two camps: those who complain about the loss to children's education; and those who complain that parents have to find alternative childcare arrangements at short-notice. Both complaints strike me as rather odd.

Firstly, the notion that our children receive an education at school is refuted on a daily basis by the ignorance, innumeracy and illiteracy of the majority of school-leavers. 10 years' worth of cumulative schooling appears to be insufficient to equip most children with the fundamentals, so a couple of days lost here and there hardly seem to be of any relevance.

Secondly, as I understand it, parents love their children, and earnestly seek to spend as much time with them as possible. Hence, what could be more fantastic for the modern parent, than a good excuse to take the day off work, and spend it playing in the snow with one's children?

Of course, if the real function of school is not to educate children, but to rid modern parents of their benighted offspring for a few hours, and to confine them to a localised region of space in which they cannot pose a nuisance to other members of the public, then the reason for the complaints becomes clear.

Overall, these snow complainers need to be reminded of the fact that their lifespan is finite, and as such, there will be a time in a few short years, when they're going to be dead. I hope the schools remain closed, and the economy loses even more money. Given human mortality, there is only one rational reaction to the current weather conditions:

It's snowed! Wheeeeeeeee!

The modern music scene

Back in fin de siecle Paris, UK Garage was the big new thing. As it evolved, the bass lines became more ruthless, and the rhythms more disjointed — especially in the 2-step style, with its characteristic absence of any tune whatsoever. Although garage was temporarily driven underground, young crews in East London resurrected it in the form of grime, a British version of hip-hop, whilst in Croydon a group of producers centred on the record shop Big Arse, stripped out the singing, ramped up the bass and created dubstep. Within a few years, dubstep conquered the world. This atmospheric style borrows from dub reggae its lack of imagination, and creates a striking sense of emptiness and predictability. Perhaps buoyed by dubstep’s success, garage producers set to work again, and produced a lighter style called funky house, or simply funky, which pretty much brings garage full circle.

The anti-thesis to House's thesis, was Techno. This came in two strains, Detroit techno and acid techno. Although the Detroit producers made free use of 'hydrofluoric acid', the metallic ping-pong tone wrested from the Rolf Harris Stylophone, they also often based tracks on funky basslines; acid techno, in contrast was predicated entirely on the Stylophone. Whilst there were offshoots such as Gabber, (a harder variant developed in Rotterdam, and played on the harpsichord at a manic tempo), everyone was happy with the formula. Until, that is, several lone producers independently thought something was getting lost in the maximal approach, and a minimal movement, centred on Berlin, took root in about 2003. The latest technology can create music with an appealing sense of nothingness, and is perhaps the most 'techno' techno yet.

Snowflake update

When most people in South-East England drew back their curtains this morning, the first question on their lips was probably: 'What are the temperature and humidity conditions for the different types of snowflake morphology?'

Fortunately, Kenneth Libbrecht of Caltech provides the answer:

Thin plates and stars grow around -2 C (28 F), while columns and slender needles appear near -5 C (23 F). Plates and stars again form near -15 C (5 F), and a combination of plates and columns are made around -30 C (-22 F)...snow crystals tend to form simpler shapes when the humidity (supersaturation) is low, while more complex shapes at higher humidities. The most extreme shapes -- long needles around -5C and large, thin plates around -15C -- form when the humidity is especially high.

Snowflakes

A winter couplet

Wheeeeeee! It's going to snow, it's going to snow!

But please, be careful, and don't crash your car into a hedgerow.