Revisiting Tolerance

I wrote about tolerance a while ago. These sentiments of mine are nearly unchanged, but I think I need to address the specific issue of intolerance and its danger to an otherwise tolerant society. Basically one of the few things we have to be intolerant of is intolerance.

It seems self-defeating, if we are intolerant of intolerance then we are hypocritical. But let’s observe it from a slightly different vantage. Let us draw a hopefully erroneous link between intolerance and violence and say that every person disliking another person to the point of hate based on ethnicity is likely to be violent toward that ethnicity.

If we tolerate their hate but stop them from being violent, what have we accomplished? If we are perfectly omnipresent and can stop the violence before it begins, will the world be better? But we aren’t omnipresent, nor are our imperfect criminal justice representatives, and on top of that there can be threats of violence that can impact a person’s life just as much as a violent act, all the way up to death. You could call it psychological violence, let’s not escalate this too far. Unless the victim has a strong, supporting, understanding community it will likely end up doing just as much harm in the end.

So let’s go one step beyond and curtail the threats, then there will be immediate claims of first amendment violation. And that is where this argument wallows for all time. Everything comes back to the rights of an individual, or so it seems. Both sides start saying terrible things and the debate becomes a conflagration. It is up to the third party on the intolerant’s perceived side of the debate to correct that person. Yes, it is intolerance of a sort, but rather than the intolerance breeding more and more of itself, it is curtailed, one less perceived supporter.

Of course the medium bringing you this blog is probably partly to blame in the ease to which a person might find other people as intolerant as they are, with no way for us to quarantine a person and their brand of intolerance.

So what do we do? Well I have to confess that I have major issues with this thought. It’s not skin color or ethnicity that bother me, it’s beliefs. I will tolerate beliefs that I don’t hold, but it must be mutual. What I don’t want to do is support a advocacy group that is intolerant of other people’s beliefs. But then how can I hold these opposing thoughts? Am I contradicting myself? It would be nice to live in a nice insulated world, which I do in a way, and believe that I can get to know people I meet and respect them for who they are.

Am I going to support advocacy groups that have attacked Christians? If I flat out say “no” then how am I different than Martin Niemöller and his speech turned into poem “First they came…”? I still need to work it out, reflect, pray, and think about it. In the meantime I think it is absolutely imperative that we know what is going on from trusted sources, so I will definitely support NPR to continue reporting on as much as possible.

One major thing that I believe in and am supporting is Science. I might be looked down upon by some intolerant christians, but I believe that we really need strong science in order to understand our world and make it look more and more like the good parts of Star Trek, namely the abolition of material want.

Science is getting a bad rap from so many different groups that it pervades and distorts findings, but this is easier to do because of how many scientists have been corrupted by the need for “positive” findings in the science community. I did go on at length about this topic, but the main point here is that we need to support open and transparent science.

Go to Amazon Smile FAQs and consider listing the Center for Open Science as the beneficiary even if I don’t work for them anymore. Or become a member at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Or both!

Open Science, so what?

In reference to my job at COS, of course people ask me what I do. That is pretty easy to answer: I make websites work better for scientists to use and keep workflow/data. Great. But the question often not asked, maybe because adults left it back in their childhood and it might be considered rude: Why?

Why did I work for telescopes? Why is this current job more than just a pass-time in order to make money to support myself and my family in my old age? Two things, one intrinsically selfish, and another less so, but not completely altruistic: I need motivation in order to do things and I can go for ages without generating any motivation myself, and science needs to be more open.

So I need a bit of motivation. Once given a bit of outside motivation I can often generate enough extra to do a pretty good job at whatever I am focused on. For example summer semester AI course was definitely a motivator, but I liked it enough that I put in the effort to get an ‘A’. I am not certain how much I will like this next course, but proving to myself that I can do A-grade work means that I can convince myself to keep up the work. I will talk more about that course soon.

Anyway, enough preamble, really why am I motivated to do the work?

It comes down to the fact that I believe that we need science. Do I believe that science can solve all of our problems? In short: no. However, it can give us explanations for many questions. Those generally lead to more, or finer focused questions. But it’s the progress that has been made previously that colors my optimism for what may yet be discovered.

The problem is that today’s professional scientist/researcher falls into a system that has the catchy phrase of “publish or perish.” Not a phrase that inspires confidence in those unable to find something publishable. And that is just it, what isn’t published? And why isn’t it published? I am not talking about pseudo-science with obvious flaws and downright false conclusions, but rather negative results.

Negative results come about when a scientist poses a hypothesis, runs experiments, and then gets results that say the hypothesis is wrong. What’s a scientist to do? There are many options, the first of which is the least insidious, but still not good: changing the hypothesis to fit the outcome. But if negative results aren’t published, how can we avoid duplication of effort? Not to say that checking results is a bad thing, in fact being able to reproduce results in another study is great.

Let’s imagine for a moment that there existed a society where parents only told their children positive outcomes, only things (true or false) that could help them. One of the first things you notice is the consistent burn scars on the hands of just about everyone that you meet. The first few people that you meet won’t talk about the scars and the way the react the question seems to be taken as a rude question.

Finally one older guy chuckles and shakes his head when you ask the question again, carefully trying to choose the right words. He replies, “We are a positive society, we don’t tell people about bad outcomes. Everyone has to discover that the stove is hot for themselves, and some are more badly burned than others.”

Or to put it into current day science culture terms: What publisher is going to publish my negative result so others can avoid doing an experiment that will also have a negative result?

Maybe other scientists would be able to move on and try a different angle, or derived questions from the negative result?

But it is more than just publishing negative results: In order for science to pull itself, and its associated parts, out of the decline in popularity it needs to have a vitality and veracity that doesn’t allow otherwise uninterested people to ignore it, or disparage science in general.

Why I like working with and for science is because there is room for improvement. It isn’t just about catering to the masses, but rather discovering things for the masses, and letting them know about discoveries in a transparent way.

There is negative science, but there is also science results that are wrong. When data is falsified or manipulated in such a way that results are completely twisted around, then this is bad science, not just negative results, but false results. If we can help weed these out by making science more reproducible, then we are well on our way to making science trustworthy again.

I am optimistic that I can help in this area by making better tools. That is what motivates me day to day.

Done! For Now...

Sometimes progress is hard to come by. Right now, for instance, I am trying to learn something new, specifically a Python web module known as flask but running it on a ipython notebook which is probably complicating matters. Maybe I should just make another sandbox to test these things with…

Anyway, on to other more interesting things while I wait for the program to complete or fail: I turned in my final for Knowledge Based AI for Georgia Tech’s Online Master's in Computer Science. It was actually quite an interesting class. We had three projects over the course of 3 weeks looking to solve visual IQ tests using cognitive techniques.

I certainly wasn’t the best in the class by a long shot, but I know I got a pretty solid B in the course and am hoping that I somehow squeaked an A, though if I don’t get one I will be close. I really enjoyed the challenge of the class and most of the time I enjoyed writing the papers too. An interesting tool the course used was a peer feedback system for the papers. Some feedback was less than useful, but there was certainly quite a bit of it that was useful.

The topics looked into how we could model AI off of human intelligence, rather than just building a logical and/or super fast machine, think Deep Blue: brute force chess playing works, but it really isn’t the way most people would approach chess, not even the masters. No one can consider the next million possible moves in a few seconds.But even if there are approaches to how to do something that make a computer behave a bit more like a human, it still isn’t the generalists that we are. Even the most strictly uni-tasked human can generally figure out how to do something new, and we are only beginning to delve into those depths of general learning. And hopefully Empathy, but I will leave it at that.

I didn’t feel as though I got my agent to be an AI much. There was quite a bit more image processing going on than trying to follow all of the different concepts we were introduced to. It might be interesting if each of those topics had a more in-depth set of materials to mess around with and code a small agent using all of those materials. That does sound like a possible project, to make mini-agents that incorporate each concept separately and only include other concepts that are needed to facilitate the actual workings of the agent. Of course that is possibly a great undertaking… and I am mostly just full of good ideas and distractions.

For instance, I was introduced to an interesting thought just now: http://nytlabs.com/projects/editor.html that could have huge effects on the osf.io wiki, by connecting it to SHARE, allowing the piecemeal typing to be sent to an agent that would use previously learned references and list them to the side of the wiki editor, so that the person writing a wiki page might see similar published items. These could also be split, sort of as the article describes, into smaller agents.

However, my agents might be grouped into science categories so that a chemist gets chemical references, and not psychological references. That could lead to boxing results a bit too closely, so there might be agents that cross disciplines so that discoveries in other disciplines might be helpful to the current project. But of course this “distraction” would have a dedicated “9-to-5” time to work on it.

Another problem with free time projects is that we just moved into our new house. It is huge, at least compared to the last, well, long while. Unpacking is nearly done and mostly waiting on Jessie to get back, but there are plenty of things to do.

One of the more fun things will be making an archery target. With all the empty boxes I have started doing triage to find the worst of them and cut them up to make the target. We also have way too much packing paper and grocery bags. Moving from Hawaii, where they were banned, to Virginia was quite a shock as to how many we accumulated over 6 months. The bags will make pretty decent fill though.

Also I have been working pretty much eight to sixteen hours extra a week on the class, no real down-time. Some projects, especially on my own will have to far away from code so I can mentally refresh and prepare for the Machine Learning class that starts at the end of August! Oof.

Maybe I should just keep the nose to the grindstone in order not to miss the fleeting down-time.

The Only Constant

I have no idea how many people read this blog, or rather I haven't looked at in depth stats recently. One thing I will tell you is that I certainly have an issue with consistently writing. So I will keep this short in order to motivate myself to write another post with more details about the specific things that have been keeping me from writing.

First and foremost: I no longer work for the Joint Astronomy Centre, it is no more. The telescopes were successfully transferred to University of Arizona and the East Asian Observatory. I did not want to transfer, and could give you many reasons which sum up to the fact that I am not enamored with Hawaii. (Nice place, but needed to move back to a larger bit of land.) I interviewed with two telescopes: NOAO in Tucson, AZ and NRAO in Green Bank, WV. Didn't get either of those jobs despite my experience, I think I definitely flubbed the NRAO one with choosing a topic I am only now becoming familiar with and of not much interest to them. But I also interviewed with Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, VA.

Despite having 7 years of pure telescope experience and seeing exactly how I could help the NOAO I didn't get an offer from either telescope organization. However, COS offered me a job despite my nearly complete lack of web development experience. To put it shortly: In the last 6 months I have learned a huge amount about the web as well as having a supportive environment to delve into interesting software engineering problems. Ironic, really.

I also started a Masters with Georgia Tech in January, and moved during my first big project for a class. I got a 20% but managed to claw my way to a B, including managing and coding for a group project at the end in which we got a 98%! I will go into more details at some point.

Oh yeah, we are set to buy a house tomorrow. Oh man, a bit of a vertigo moment. Am I finally an adult?

Maybe more on all this next time. I also read some of my sci-fi physics posts, I certainly want to edit and add more posts in that area, but homework. Hopefully soon.