What good is philosophy?

In Sweden the university studies are starting for the term. Here in Upppsala one can see many new faces, students new to the city and the university. Last week there was an introduction to philosophy in the main university building. One professor spoke about the use of philosophy she quoted a passage from a source that elude my memory at the moment.

The quote began to say that if you want to be a barrister, economist, or a MD you probably do not have much use of philosophy. This is not a new idea, since the earliest days of philosophy the thinkers have been accused of being useless in all ways practical. In the end though we were told that if you study philosophy you will at least be able to spot when other people speak BS. (If this is in accordance with the old proverb “it takes a thief to catch a thief” I leave unsaid.)

If it is a fact or not, that philosophers learn to detect BS, is an interesting question. Is it true and is it enough. Even if you might be better at detecting inflated claims and dishonest reasoning with others as a philosopher, there is one very necessary thing missing. Do you as a philosopher learn to detect when you are talking BS to yourself?

The question about if it is true that philosophers are good at detecting BS probably needs some careful studying. I would think that after learning how to analyse arguments and looking at all kinds of fallacies philosophers might be better at realising when someone violates the rules of deduction or infer too much from a statement. On the other hand a philosopher without the proper premises are as lost as anyone else.

If the BS a philosopher is offered do not go against his or hers all ready formed ideas about how the world works, and if the construction of the arguments agree with the laws of logic, a philosopher is as likely as anyone else to fall for BS.

Unless of course it is the kind of philosopher that likes to throw everything they got at even their most cherished ideas. Fortunately that seems to be just the kind of people that becomes philosophers.

Everyday Epistemology

Epistemology is in philosophy the study of how we know things, often contrasted with ontology, the study of what is. There are many strange ideas about how to attain certain knowledge and some more realistic ideas about how to attain provisional knowledge. (The kind of knowledge that might be replaced by better knowledge in the future and leading to the question if the replaced knowledge really was knowledge to begin with.)

Everyday epistemology is something slightly different. Learning how to evaluate truth-claims is all very good but it is just impossible for one human being to build her entire world-view on tested claims. Each and every one of us, no matter how sceptical we want to be, accept things unchallenged out of necessity. With everyday epistemology I try to take a look at the limits of the examined life from a different perspective than what is traditionally done in philosophy.

In many discussions about epistemology the focus is how to find the truth about one thing or in one situation. In the real world we piece together billions and billions of impressions and data to form a picture of how the world is. Even if we had a perfect method of how to find the truth of each piece of data we would not have time to implement the method for each and every bit. When you want to study how a person knows how the world is, how her picture of reality is attained, it is a fact that mostly the knowledge, or information is perhaps a better word, is uncritically accepted.
(I use the word ‘information’ about bits and pieces of data without concern about if it is true or false, or even if it makes any sense.)

But very few accept everything they hear or see. At certain times people are more likely to test the claims that they encounter at other times they simply dismiss it. When people try to test new information we reach the field of classical epistemology, we ask ourselves if it is true and how can we find out if it is true. But before this we have the question of what makes people want to test new information and also when they should question not only new but old information.
The urge to test new information will arise then the information contradicts earlier ideas considered to be knowledge and it cannot be simply dismissed. The urge should arise than the information becomes, or is, an important part of ones world-view.

Factoids (mainly in Swedish) are interesting; they are small pieces of information that are not true, or at least unsubstantiated, but they are well known to be true or at least well know. Everyone knows Galileo’s famous utterance at the end of his trial because it is a good story. It is regarded as a true fact although it is not. For biographers of Galileo the story is important so they go through the trouble of checking the sources and find that they have to remove that piece of information from their knowledge of the world. Few people have that kind of a special interest in Galileo and the story will likely not contradict their world-view and thus simply becomes accepted as a small part of what they know. Factoids are not a perfect example of how information that is not confrontational and unimportant is easily accepted, because factoids are interesting and entertaining enough to be spread unlike much other information. Still they tell us that much of what a person know is uncertain because everyday we accepted information uncritically.

So the first “law” of everyday epistemology, the study of how people attain knowledge about the world in real life, is that everything is accepted as true.
The second “law” is that if new information contradicts what is all ready considered true there are three ways to handle the new information, testing the truth claim, dismissing the information without testing, or have a world-view that allow for contradictions.
It is out of necessity that we do not always test all the claims; it is out of necessity that we readily accept or dismiss information that agree or disagree with what we think we know. What is in my opinion a problem is that many appear to think that what is done out of necessity is also sufficient. Even when a set of believes have a prominent place in a persons world-view they think that accepting or dismissing information without testing is enough.

Perhaps the study of how people in fact form their world-view is more psychology and sociology than philosophy. I still think it is of huge importance to understand this part of epistemology if one wants people to live an examined life in the real world. Socrates said “the unexamined life is not worth living”.

Magic Balls

There is no such thing as magic, and if something sounds to good to be true it probably is. Strangely enough this blog entry is in a way connected to the previous one because it is about scams.

A few days ago a Swedish newspaper (In Swedish) mentioned a test of environmental safe ways to wash your clothes made by a Norwegian consumer rights organization. Among the tested products was a “magic ball” that contained some ceramic beads that was claimed to have some remarkable properties.

In the test the magic ball had no effect above washing the clothes in plain water. A similar product had been sold in a chain of stores in Sweden (Design torget) and the newspaper contacted that chain to get a comment. The product had sold very well and they had no complaints, they had actually sold out; but now they were not going to take in any more until they had them tested by an independent third party.

I saw the product in the stores before they were sold out and reading the description on the back about how it was supposed to work it was obvious that it did not. At least if it was working it was not working in the way that was described.

If you sell something to people that does not work that is to scam them, isn’t it?

I assume that the stores are not as cynical that they are selling something that they know does not work. And I am sure that people are not as stupid that they buy things that they know does not work. The problem is that people do not always know enough to understand what works and what does not.

So whos responsibility is it to make sure that people are not scammed? Is it a matter of caveat emptor so that if you buy something that does not work it is your own fault? Or is it the person that sells a product that is responsible to make sure that it works? Could it be the manufacturer that should know their products enough to be sure it works?

There is no easy answer because even if it is not legally the buyer’s responsibility there will always be con men out there and people selling dreams so it is necessary to be aware.

And if you sell something that does not work but is not aware of the fact are you when perpetrating a scam? I guess that depend on if you were supposed to understand that it did not work.

Everyday we accept a lot of information uncritically. And if what we hear does not go against anything we know even if it is just because we do not understand it, we do not react. It is possible to sell a non-working product without consciously trying to scam your customers. Of course if you make a lot of money from selling something you may choose to disregard your doubt in a product and just not put in the effort to find out if it works or not.

If buyers and sellers had excuses surely the manufacturers cannot get off as easily. If some one is to know if a product works or not it must be the people that invented it and makes it. And yes, they should know. There are those that perpetrate scams creating products that they know does not work, you can make a lot of money with cheap labour, good public relations, and without scientific testing. But that is true even if you do not want to scam people and really believe in your idea. The problem is of course that being convinced that your product works is no guarantee and no substitute to scientific testing.

I do not know the makers of the magic ball, it might be that they are good willing and simply does not know how to test their product or they can be not so good willing scammers. None the less even the manufacturer may not be guilty of purposefully committing a fraud when a non-working product is sold.

The last blog entry was about how people are scammed, this one was about how people may lose money on products without anyone trying to scam anyone. Knowledge is the way to avoid both.

The Real Hustle

This is not news for people in the UK. Objective productions, the company that has produced Derren Brown’s TV shows and TV specials, have a wonderful series about how to con people. Although I should perhaps say that it is about how to avoid being conned but knowledge is a double edged sword. Dishonest people watch TV as everyone else so it is not impossible that some of them learn some new tricks.

One of the differences between a magician and a cheat is the same as the difference between an educated person and an expert. The magician knows many more moves than the cheat but the cheat has perfected his. The audience tend to be less forgiving to a mediocre cheat than to a mediocre magician.

But even if some scoundrels learn a few more tricks I think the overall effect of the series is positive. First, con artist are specialized so they will only try a few if any of the scams. Second, to do a scam requires effort and practice; to see through the same scam and avoid being fooled you only need knowledge. So I see no reason why they could not show The Real Hustle in Sweden, though I hope they show the original British version.

The series is on its sixth season in Britain and the British version is the better one in my opinion. I do not understand why Americans always need their own version; proper English isn’t that hard to understand.

The three people staring in the show are Alex Conran, Jessica-Jane Clement, and Paul Wilson an excellent magician who's lecture I attended at the world championship of magic in Stockholm 2006.

They are really good at explaining how the different scams work because there are a lot of different layers in working a con. There are the practical details of the scam and the psychology that draws the victim into the fantasy world. Appealing to emotions work quite well, especially greed. It is also great fun to watch the show and the reaction of the people that are conned.

Anyone with an interest in how con artists operate can search youtube for some practical psychology at work (and some physics as well). Unfortunately the very best youtube channel was shut down, I guess that someone did not want these shows available for free. But some places to start looking are here, though they might be shut down soon so hurry:

ScamOnTv
Realhustledotcom
Scamplot’s

I think it is possible to learn a lot more from the series than only the mechanics of the plots and the specific psychological hooks that are used. In essence a good con artist let the mark fool himself. To avoid fooling oneself is perhaps something of the most difficult there is, it requires knowledge about the world and how we think and to apply it to oneself.

I guess that when a show is written (by Paul Wilson and Alex Conran incidentally) this is not what they think about; there is a clear educational angle to the series but focused more on consumer awareness than science and philosophy.

I should say something about the American version as well but I let someone else do it.

Objective Productions/Crook Productions’ new show, The Real Hustle, features a pickpocket/security consultant, a magician, and an actress hustling innocent passersby on television. Apollo Robbins, who made national news when he picked the pockets of Secret Service agents while performing for former president Jimmy Carter, heads up the team. New York City magician Ryan Oakes supplies the sleight-of-hand expertise, while Dani Marco is the actress onboard. Her credits include Law&Order The Sopranos, and most recently the Chris Rock movie, I Think I Love my Wife.

Magic Magazine, No 5, vol 17, January 2008, p.27

Caveat emptor

That the buyer should beware is something most people know. Even in countries where you have a lot of consumer rights it is not always enough to protect the public from unethical people but that is not what this post is about. In this post buyer and seller as well as all innocent bystanders are assumed to act ethical, in the normal sense of the word.

When writing about this I regret that I do not know anything about economics because I find this an interesting and important aspect of how business is conducted and I am sure it has been studied. Probably there are a number of dissertations and papers on this that I have not read. But then again I am only a stupid uneducated scientist and magician not an economist.

As an example I will take public transport and how you decide what payment system to use. I guess that it is a good idea to have someone that have studied economics to compare different systems, how much the system will cost initially, how many that will avoid paying for the public transport by bypassing the system, the maintenance cost, personnel cost etc. There are probably many more variables that will be important. And I am no expert when it comes to public transportation or economics, but I do think I know a thing or two about people.

I have some ideas about what can influence the choice so that it is perhaps not the least expensive and most manageable system that is chosen. I think this was the case when they decided in Stockholm what system to use.

Having been to Vienna and having lived in Prague I consider their payment systems to be among the best I have experienced. And I also think that I know why it would never make it in a competition with for example the system they have in Paris.

There are no expensive machines in the Viennese system or the one in Prague and that is why they are less likely to be chosen by someone that has to invest a lot of money in a new payment system.

I do not know how much personnel the system in Paris requires compared to the systems in Vienna or Prague. The cities are not of the same size and not all the people that work within the public transport system are concerned with the payment system. But I do know that the system they have in Paris and Stockholm is less practical from a user perspective. In Prague or Vienna if you have your ticket you can get on and of trams and busses, in and out of the subway without taking the ticket out of your pocket and without any gates or detectors.

The reason why I think that a system like the one in Vienna or Prague is less likely to be chosen when someone is deciding on a new payment system is that no one is selling the system. There is no large investment in machines and thus there is no company spending money on selling the system. Sure there are som machines that you can buy tickets from set up in the subway stations but that is it.

The people selected to try to find a new payment system do not have to be taking bribes for the influence from the big companies to be a factor. Persuasion is a very important tool to make people do something. Companies with large budgets have more money to try to persuade people to buy their products. The simple system has no one that speaks up for it and I think that will make a huge difference. People do not always care so much about the hard facts, the comparison of how much the system will cost initially, how many that will avoid paying for the public transport by bypassing the system, the maintenance cost, personnel cost etc. People care about what other people tell them, and if there is no one that speaks up for the better system it will probably not be chosen.

It would be very interesting to learn if this hypothesis of mine have been tested and what the result was.

Making an impression

I guess that as from today I have an official web page. I have had a Swedish version up for some time but now the first version of the full web page is up. I have heard that a web page is a little bit like a house, it is a never ending project. The people I know that owns a house at least confirm the part about a house always being in need of something. So this is a first version of my presence on the Internet and I realise that much improvement can be done. The page is fairly simple, although at this point I am at least prepared to focus on other projects for a while.

Who knows what the next version of the page will look like. www.rasmark.com

Arguments regarding intelligence gathering

Although most of the people in the world are unaware of what the Swedish government are up to I happen to live in Sweden so I take an interest. The quick background story is that the government want all Internet providers to connect their networks to FRA’s computers. The acronym FRA stands for “Försvarets Radio Anstalt”, which translates as something like “The Defence’s Radio Department”. Strangely enough this is a civilian and not a military authority.

Traditionally FRA has been listening to radio communication of military importance but with more and more communication going through cables instead of through the air they are trying to find other tasks to justify their existence.

In line with many other nations that introduced legislation that could be seen as an infringement of personal integrity after 9/11 the Swedish government legislated to “filter” all communication across the nations border. (As I understand it the new law actually says ALL communication and is not specifically about electronic communication.)

Since a lot of domestic communication is likely to pass over the boarders en route to its destination and thus becoming international communication this law leads to a large portion of all the communication being monitored by the government, but that is not the point here.

In the debate one argument for connecting all networks to the governments computers is that it will enable the nation to keep an eye on Russia (in Swedish). Much of the international Russian traffic goes through cables that cross Swedish borders. Recent events confirm that it is a good idea to keep an eye on Russia. But is that what the politicians are really interested in?

It is obvious that a lot of money must be invested in new technology and FRA also wants to increase the number of employees. The exact numbers are not important, numbers can be confusing, ‘a lot’ suffice.

One very important way to get information about another country is to have an efficient embassy in that country, that is one of the reasons countries have embassies.

You would think that if information about Russia really is important than the Swedish embassy in Russia would be able to sustain a qualified staff. Unfortunately this seems not to be the case. Apparently the Swedish embassy in Moscow cannot pay competitive wages for local staff (in Swedish). In comparison with the money the government want to spend on eavesdropping on the Russians this is clearly not a question of a lot of money.

If an argument is to carry any weight it is difficult to use it to defend a big change at a high cost while a small cost to the same goal is simply overlooked. That might make people wonder how much weight the argument really carries.

Strictly speaking this is not a logical fallacy, just because an argument is used to support one thing that you want to do does not imply that something you do not want to do has to be done because the same argument support that as well.

Although it is not a logical fallacy it will weaken the convincing power of the argument when it seems to only be important when it supports something that you want.

A rose by any other name…

Shakespeare was of course right and yet so wrong. The fragrances a flower emits are the same no matter what name we have for that flower. Our mere naming of a plant does not affect its molecules. But our perception of the smell of anything is determined to some degree by our expectations. And the names of things do lead us to expect certain things.

I am sure that there is no need for examples of how the wrong name for a project, a product, or a person have led to missed opportunities. Though I would have liked to back up the previous statement with a reference to some carefully researched paper, some papers are sure to exist.

The reason for this entry regarding names is that people have asked me about the name of my company. Unlike many other artists I have not, apparently, used simply my own name. It might be a mistake since I, as all other performance artists, am selling my self as the product, thus there might be an advantage to have the product name and the company name being the same.

My unscientific opinion is that lecturers and educators unlike performance artists quite often use their company names to sell their product, at least if they are not themselves famous. I guess that although many on the lecture circuit are simply selling a performance under the disguise of motivation or education they like to give the impression of being serious.

Some day I will let the world know my opinion of people that sell BS as information, education, or training. For now I limit myself to the observation that no matter if they believe their own BS or not they rob people of a lot of money.

Still I like to be perceived as serious lecturer myself some day, when I am sure that I am not peddling BS. Hence I created a company with a name different, but not unconnected, from my own.

Here is the explanation to the company’s name, PJOR Entermation.

As can be seen it consists of two parts, the last part is a made up word, my contribution to the English language. Everybody has heard of ‘infotainment’ a melange of ‘information’ and ‘entertainment’, which is a synonym for “pointless-distraction-under-the-cloak-of-importance”. I guess that my opinion on infotainment is quite clear.

My melange of the two words, (enter-tainment and info-rmation) is supposed to convey an idea similar to “important information delivered in an entertaining fashion”.

The first part of the company name can be read out as ‘pure’, and in deed it should be with all the positive connotations the word ‘pure’ carries. The spelling is explained by the proud Swedish tradition of putting your initials in the company’s name (think IKEA). Unlike Ingvar Kamprad I do not confuse the point with the names of the places I am from. PJOR simply stands for Per Johan Olov Råsmark.

A friend pointed out a very good example of the importance of names and how inconsistent we humans are. We all know how calories should be avoided and energy is something good. A drink that has a lot of energy is a good drink and a bagel with a lot of calories is a bad bagel. It might not be necessary to have studied both physics and semantics to notice that they are two names for the same thing, but it helps. The SI unit for measuring energy is Joule but calorie is traditionally used in measuring the energy content of food. The lovely energy rich drink by the other name of “lots of calories” does not smell as sweet.