Anthropology of YouTube
So, I’ve never given YouTube much thought (never really felt it deserved much thought either) consigning it as a fun if trivial place to see stupid videos of dogs and skateboards (like OMG!!! ROLFLCOPTER!!!!). Amusing, to be sure but not serious or worthwhile.
But then Mike Wesch of The Machine is Us/ing Us fame changed my mind with An anthropological introduction to YouTube. It’s a bit long (50 min) but definitely worth it if you are at all interested in web culture. What’s amazing here is he has gone beyond the trivial examples of YouTube (while still embracing what most of us consider trivial — he dedicated the video to Gary Brolsma aka the numa numa guy) and show us the community that has formed through vlogs. He has some pretty profound statements about how that culture is shaped by the medium (webcams) and how if reflects the wider culture as a whole.
Great stuff and well worth a watch.
Joss Whedon strikes again!
For those of you itching to get your Joss Whedon fix (you know…the guy who only just gave us Firefly!), you might want to checkout Dr. Horrible. It’s an amazing show that defies categorization (actually, it’s pretty easy to categorize this as a musical, but don’t let that turn you off). Amazing, hillarious…go watch it.
As an added bonus it was produced online entirely outside of the big studios which Whedon has good reason to be weary of after they axed what was perhaps the best shows ever made for television (granted that’s not necessarily saying a lot…but Firfly was amazing!). If Dr. Horrible is successful (and it’s definitely worthy of success) than maybe we can start seeing more shows created outside the “system”. This would be nothing but good to my mind.
QOTD #2 - Doubt - Newbigin
As soon as a mathematical formula is applied to a situation in the world outside the mathematician’s mind, it ceases to be certain. In Polanyi’s summary, only statements that can be doubted make contact with reality. In other words, the mark of an indubitable statement is that it makes no contact with reality. If we are to make contact with reality, we must have the courage to make statements that can be doubted. There can be no knowing of reality without the courage to affirm what can be doubted and to act on the affirmation.
– Lesslie Newbigin Proper Confidence
To continue on with my last post on Polanyi, Newbigin has something to say as well. I just recently started reading Proper Confidence for the second time, it had been so long I’d forgotten most of it. It primarily deals with (as the subtitle gives away) “faith, doubt and certainty in christian discipleship”. Basically this means he writes a lot about Polanyi. If you want an nice easy overview of Polanyi’s thought without actually having to read Polanyi, you can’t go wrong with Proper Confidence.
In the quote I found last time, Polanyi was asserting the personal component to mathematical knowing. Here however, Newbigin is saying that certainty is only found at the expense of contact with reality. Pure mathematics existing solely in the mental realm can make statements that are absolutely certain…and yet have nothing to say about reality (that is, the reality that exists outside of the mind).
Newbigin’s eventual conclusion is that we must embrace doubt in our thinking. Not the paralyzing doubt that rejects any hope of knowing, but a kind of critical realism that recognizes the limits of certainty. This middle ground between the unthinking certainty of fundamentalism and paralyzing nihilistic doubt is appealing.
QOTD #1 - Axiomatization of Mathematics - Polanyi
We can now turn to the paradox of a mathematics based on a system of axioms which are not regarded as self-evident and indeed cannot be known to be mutually consistent. To apply the utmost ingenuity and the most rigorous care to prove the theorems of logic or mathematics, while the premisses of these inferences are cheerfully accepted, without any grounds being given for doing so, as ‘unproven asserted formulae’, might seem altogether absurd…if the acceptance of any proof requires the acceptance without proof of some presuppositions from which the proof is ultimately derived, it follows that the principle of rejecting any unproven statement in mathematics implies also the rejection of all proven statements and therefore of all mathematics.
The solution lies in rejecting the rule which denies acceptance to unproven statements, by admitting that our belief in logically anterior maxims of mathematical procedure is based on our previous acceptance of the procedure as valid…we should declare instead candidly that we dwell on mathematics and affirm its statements for the sake of its intellectually beauty, which betokens the reality of its conceptions and the truth of its assertions.
– Michael Polanyi Personal Knowledge p. 191-192
Ah Polanyi! For those of you who aren’t familiar with him, he was a scientist turned philosopher (of science) in the middle of the last century. His work in general and Personal Knowledge in particular is an attempt to remove the “cult of objectivity” from science. He wanted to replace the idea of science as impersonal with the recognition that the scientist is personally involved in the “art of knowing”.
So, this particular quote is interesting because Polanyi is extending his argument to mathematics, a branch of science that is in a sense easy to regard as the purest and most objective of all (XKCD believes it too). The theorems and proofs of mathematics are not things that can be turned out mechanically as if through a machine (well, not usually). They are statements of “intellectual beauty” that are affirmed by the personal commitment of the mathematician.
The popular understanding (and indeed my base understanding still) of mathematics is that of bits of freewheeling truth that we can derive if only given the right axioms and enough time. While it may still be in some sense true, the process (at least according to Polanyi) is much more subjective since it must always involve a subject (aka the mathematician).
Vim again
So this will be the last post on vim for a while (I’m not obsessed really!) but I thought you all should know about MacVim (not to be confused with Mac Vim). It’s a project aimed at integrating better with OS X than the standard port. It has nice looking tabs, toolbars with macish looking buttons (which I turn off of course…don’t need buttons crowding up my text editor!), transparent background, and key bindings to some of the more important “standard” OS X shortcuts (Cmd-o, Cmd-v, etc). It’s a bunch of little things that add up to make vim feel like a native app.