Archive for the ‘Energy’ tag
The Pit and the Pendulum of extended and over-elaborate metaphor no comments
Mors ubi dira fuit vita salusque patent.
So, to expand the first blog post a little: what I think is nagging at me is this sense of a range of āobjects,ā of pieces of āknowledge-meatā, or ācurrencyā, that are consumed or traded within their own disciplines. Sometimes these objects of knowledge have the same names in other subjects, but they mean different things. And across disciplines the means of making them edible, civilized, tradable can be hugely different. Traditionally these bits of ontologies, of data (they are sometimes data) are going to somehow be examined, discussed, prodded, perhaps measured: quantified or qualified in some sense. In the past this might have been described on paper. These days, some of us (perhaps not that many, globally) have the web as a means of mediating discovery and knowledge acquisition. There are many things that can be done with knowledge on the web: it can be hidden, it can be spread, it can be created, it can be pushed around. If tiny bits of data somehow fit with the tiny little pieces of the structure of the web, then one might suppose that a sort of true picture emerges. However, again, something that has nagged at me is how so much of our thinking is analogical, or metaphorical. So that true pictures are actually very hard to locate using reductionist mapping – see Wicked Problems, for example.
What I think might be part of one of the questions I want to pursue, is to do with how the web might change the analogies that are implicit or embedded within disciplines. Sometimes the process of collaboration can bring out these assumptions. Sometimes, collaboration is hugely impeded by them.
For example, one of our widely used assumptions or analogies that fascinates me, is that which describes electricity. Electricity has long been portrayed as a commodity. Walter Patterson (a physicist by trade) has written at length on this subject, in a book called, āKeeping the Lights On.ā The traditional picture of electricity is of something that āflowsā like water, and can be cut off, traded, conserved, or wasted. Entire forests have been destroyed in the pursuit of the subject of electricity and our consumption of it. Generations of schoolchildren have suffered sleepless nights, worrying (somewhat misguidedly) about global warmingās fatal pendulum hanging over the Polar Bear every time they put their heating on (along with the location of the calorie Ā – another rather elusive and misleading concept.)
Patterson says, āHow many times have you heard or read some energy specialist refer to āenergy productionā or āenergy consumptionā? These people are supposed to be experts. Surely they ought to know one unbreakable law, the First Law of Thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy. No one produces energy. No one consumes energy. The amount of energy in the whole universe remains the same.ā
He then goes on to describes a host of assumptions that arise incorrectly out of our making electricity a commodity to be traded, the most simple being that arising from the regulators who are allegedly looking for the best deal for the household market – a low unit price does not equal a low bill – the holy grail for the āconsumers.ā To me, having worked with the UKās largest energy company and, in particular, with their hard and soft data, itās clear on a fairly elementary level that describing our relationship with electricity like this is going to cause anxiety for the āconsumerā. It describes a selfish market. Itās all about measuring how much we use, and not the quality of our relationship with it. Too much = red, not very much = green. Itās almost a little bit childish. Imagine designing an app to somehow map our relationship with energy. It would have reds and greens, wouldnāt it? Ā It would be about āa lotā (scolding) or āa littleā (caressing tone of voice- well done.) It would be great to break from this model and look at different ways of being technical about how we are with energy.
Even as Iām doing my preliminary, slightly distracted, coffee-table pre-reading, this strikes a chord with me. A book I picked up a coupleĀ of weeks ago, written by Stephen Landsburg is called, āThe Armchair Economist.ā (In the manner of many inhabitants of armchairs he keeps disappearing just when I want him. Iām also wondering if The Spy in the Coffee Machine can see him from the kitchen, and if so, whether they should talk. Never mind.)
The first chapter of this book starts boldly with, āMost of economics can be measured in four words: āPeople respond to incentives.ā The rest is commentary.ā He then goes on to describe, or perhaps, hypothesise, how making cars more safe kills more people, as people drive more safely in more dangerous cars. Landsburg continues by saying that economics begins with the assumption that all human behaviour is rational. I’m presuming that part of the rest of the book is to decry this notion triumphantly. It is very fashionable nowadays (and seems to cause great joy for the evolutionary psychologists) to show how entirely irrational we are; however I canāt help feeling that there is sometimes a confusion in the literature between say a system of perception, or of governance that overcorrects, and the net result that that has for the movement and/or survival of its owner. (I know, feeling something isnāt really academic: itās another question to explore.)
So, now I have economics and markets intruding a little into my original speculation about how the concepts or metaphors embedded in disciplines might be creating pictures that arenāt entirely correct. Itās certainly the case that while markets have their own language, they also trade in the languages used by the disciplines that come together to create the products or objects on sale. And now, for some of us, the sorts of things that can be traded, over the net for example, are elusive objects, which it might be worth while trying to pin down a little further. Iām worrying that some of this sounds as though Iām just talking semantics. I do intend to explore this further and show how itās not just trivial misunderstandings, but deep ones that maybe re-cast our notion of the world to some extent.
As far as a methodology goes, my approach to research is often about contingency. Particularly interdisciplinary research. I donāt believe that using a wholly empirical, top-down filtering method is always going to work, as this assumes that there is an explicit pool of knowledge out there to be refined. My very subject matter says that this might not be the case. So, although I intend to use the traditional method, and my next step is to get my text books on economics and psychology/ sociology, and to read and annotate findings from them, I will Ā also read a lot of not-quite academic, coffee-table stuff that gives me a feel for whether I would be happy to say, sit and have lunch with the people who are writing. And, more immediately, Iām suffering from a nagging sense of not having figured out what the correct referencing procedure for blogging is. Iām used to using hyperlinks and checking theyāre still live every now and then. Suspect I might need proper references.
I also havenāt yet drawn out my reasons for an interest in psychology, but, quickly, this is because I think that in the pursuit of truth (which should arise somewhere when looking at how subjects are affected by the web), it is is probably going to be interesting to look at what drives people to co-operate and trust each other when working together within specific subject areas that use specific ontologies that might or might not be affected by the emergence of the WWW.
I am now releasing these thoughts into the wild, where they can roam about in a Ā sort of purgatory of waiting for approval.