Monthly Archives: August 2009

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A salute to Flo Skelly

Published by peter on 2009-08-04 in Advertising, Culture, Heroes, Market planning and Marketing data. 0 Comments

Watching Season 2 of Mad Men with its arc of the rise of a female copywriter (Peggy Olsen, played by Elisabeth Moss), I was reminded of that real pioneer woman in advertising, Florence Skelly, who died in 1998 aged 73.  I never had the good fortune to work with her, but I have worked with lots of people who did.  The stories about her were legion.    I recall especially hearing about a series of detailed presentations she gave in the mid-1990s on the attitudes and aspirations of teenagers — those in what we would now call late GenX and early GenY — a group she seemed to know better than any other researcher around.   The irony was that she herself was at the cusp of her eighth decade!
Interestingly, season 1 of Mad Men had a couple of scenes involving market researchers, but the one woman was a PhD psychologist with a Central European accent, apparently unable to be creative and clearly instantiating a different (albeit then-common) archetype to Flo Skelly.
On Mad Men,  a reminder that Ta-Nehisi Coates, mashing Karl Rove, last October captured the demographic of the typical viewer with great precision:

Even if I’ve never met you, I know you all. You guys are that dude at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette, standing against the wall and making snide comments about all the CSI-viewers who pass by. And you’re also a Muslim. Can’t forget Muslim.

Argumentation in public health policy

Published by peter on 2009-08-03 in Argumentation, Consumer Behaviour, Culture, Decision theory, Game theory, Intelligence and Espionage and Science. 0 Comments

While on the subject of public health policy making under conditions of ignorance, linguist Louise Cummings has recently published an interesting article about the logical fallacies used in the UK debate about possible human variants of mad-cow disease just over a decade ago (Cummings 2009).   Two fallacies were common in the scientific and public debates of the time (italics in orginal):
An Argument from Ignorance:

FROM: There is no evidence that BSE in cattle causes CJD in humans.
CONCLUDE:  BSE in cattle does not cause CJD in humans.

An Argument from Analogy:

FROM:  BSE is similar to scrapie in certain respects.
AND: Scrapie has not transmitted to humans.
CONCLUDE:   BSE will not transmit to humans.

Cummings argues that such arguments were justified for science policy, since the two presumptive conclusions adopted acted to guide the direction and prioritisation of subsequent scientific research efforts.  These presumptive conclusions did so despite both being defeasible, and despite, in fact, both being subsequently defeated by the scientific research they invoked.   This is a very interesting viewpoint, with much to commend it as a way to construe (and to reconstrue) the dynamics of scientific epistemology using argumentation.  It would be nice to combine such an approach with Marcello Pera’s 3-person model of scientific progress (Pera 1994), the persons being:  the Investigator, the Scientific Community, and Nature.
Some might be tempted to also believe that these arguments were justified in public health policy terms – for example,  in calming a nervous public over fears regarding possible BSE in humans.   However, because British public policy makers did in fact do just this and because the presumptive conclusions were subsequently defeated (ie, shown to be false), the long-term effect has been to make the great British public extremely suspicious of any similar official pronouncements.   The rise in parents refusing the triple MMR vaccine for their children is a direct consequence of the false assurances we were given by British health ministers about the safety of eating beef.   An argumentation-based  theory of dynamic epistemology in public policy would therefore need to include some game theory.   There’s also a close connection to be made to the analysis of the effects of propaganda and counter-propaganda (as in George 1959), and of intelligence and counter-intelligence.
References:
Louise Cummings [2009]: Emerging infectious diseases: coping with uncertainty.  Argumentation, 23 (2): 171-188.
Alexander L. George [1959]: Propaganda Analysis:  A Study of Inferences Made from Nazi Propaganda in World War II.  (Evanston, IL, USA: Row, Peterson and Company).
Marcello Pera [1994]: The Discourses of Science. (Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press).

Computers in conflict

Published by peter on 2009-08-03 in AI, Argumentation, Books, Computer technology, Decision theory and Rhetoric. 0 Comments

ArgAIBook
Academic publishers Springer have just released a new book on Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence.  From the blurb:

This volume is a systematic, expansive presentation of the major achievements in the intersection between two fields of inquiry: Argumentation Theory and Artificial Intelligence. Contributions from international researchers who have helped shape this dynamic area offer a progressive development of intuitions, ideas and techniques, from philosophical backgrounds, to abstract argument systems, to computing arguments, to the appearance of applications producing innovative results. Each chapter features extensive examples to ensure that readers develop the right intuitions before they move from one topic to another.
In particular, the book exhibits an overview of key concepts in Argumentation Theory and of formal models of Argumentation in AI. After laying a strong foundation by covering the fundamentals of argumentation and formal argument modeling, the book expands its focus to more specialized topics, such as algorithmic issues, argumentation in multi-agent systems, and strategic aspects of argumentation. Finally, as a coda, the book explores some practical applications of argumentation in AI and applications of AI in argumentation.”

References:
Previous posts on argumentation can be found here.
Iyad Rahwan and Guillermo R. Simari (Editors) [2009]:  Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence.  Berlin, Germa ny Springer.

Smoking and obesity – the illogical case

Published by peter on 2009-08-02 in Culture. 0 Comments

The usually sensible James Fallows joins the debate about obesity in America with some arguments of, ahem, dubious logical value:

If you’ve been around the US as long as I have (ie, if you’re as old), you have seen very significant aspects of public-health behavior change in your own lifetime. When my dad went to medical conventions in the 1950s and 1960s, most of his fellow doctors smoked. By the time he retired in the 1990s, very few of them did. For better and worse, smoking has become a class-bound phenomenon in America: better for the people who don’t smoke any more, worse as one more disadvantage of being poorer and less educated. The difference is startling and obvious if you spend time in, let’s say, China, where many more people of all classes smoke. As individuals, Americans have the same human nature as they did 40 years ago, and the same nature as people in China. Will power, compulsions, addition-seeking instincts, etc. But their overall behavior about smoking has changed. Some individuals did not or could not change their behavior. (One of my grandmothers, who had started smoking as a flapper in the 1920s, died of a horrible case of emphysema, sneaking cigarettes on her last conscious days.) But average behavior changed dramatically. In my view, no sane person can deny that public anti-smoking campaigns have made a huge difference.

Well, certainly over the last 50 years, the proportion of Americans (as in other western nations) who smoke has declined significantly.   Some of this decline may even have been due to smokers quitting, and some of those quitters may have done so in response to government anti-smoking campaigns.  But the overwhelming reason for the decline in proportions is the death of the smokers and the failure of the newly-born to take-up smoking.   “Will power, compulsions, addition-seeking instincts, etc” (does he mean “attention-seeking instincts”?) has little to do with this. Average behaviour certainly changed, but so did the people who comprise the averaged population.  It is NOT the case that there are fewer smokers now than in 1959 in the USA simply because lots of smokers just exercised some will-power.
A second logical flaw Fallows makes is in the very analogy between smoking and obesity.  Unlike the use of nicotine, eating is necessary to live.   Unlike smoking, it is not possible to give up eating by complete withdrawal (ie, going cold-turkey).  It is even not possible to give up eating less quickly than complete withdrawal without usually suffering serious adverse health effects.   Moreover, it is not even certain that eating less food will lead a person to lose weight.   The human body is a complex adaptive system with many non-linear relationships between its components.   Decreasing food intake, for example, may lead the body to storing proportionately MORE of the nutrients in the consumed food than previously, so that total body weight does not necessarily decline in proportion to the fall in consumption.  Whatever it is, the relationship between food consumption and human body weight is certainly not linear, as the scientific evidence makes clear.
The main problem here for public health policy is that we do not yet know the ultimate causes of the obesity epidemic now seen in parts of the West.   It surely is not lack of exercise (since what little scientific evidence there is says that regular exercise seems to INCREASE weight, by stimulating appetite and adding to muscle mass); and the cause is surely not over-eating, since the epidemic has arisen faster than the major changes in people’s eating habits (20 years versus 60 years).  The ultimate cause could be a virus; it could be a consequence of particular food-additives (eg, the increased use of sucrose, or trans-fats, etc) or some particular adverse combination of these additives; or it could be a consequence of the particular combination of proteins, carbohydrates and nutrients in our diets; or indeed any number of other causes – medical, nutritional, lifestyle, and/or sociological.
The medical profession has such a shameful historical record of wrongly blaming the victim of an illness for the sickness before discovering the real cause (eg, cholera, stomach ulcers, RSI, CFS, ADD) that it ill-behooves anyone, in the current state of medical ignorance, to lecture people that the cure for their obesity is just to eat less.

Lecture styles

Published by peter on 2009-08-02 in History and Rhetoric. 0 Comments

In response to Timothy Burke’s guidance notes for academic lecturers, I recalled Henry Adams writing in 1905 of his time as a student at the University of Berlin in 1858:

 . . . but in the Civil Law he found only the lecture-system in its deadliest form as it flourished in the thirteenth century. The Professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed to make, notes; they could have learned from books or discussion in a day more than they could learn from him in a month, but they must pay his fees, follow his course, and be his scholars, if they wanted a Degree.  To an American the result was worthless.

Reference:
Henry Adams [1905]: The Education of Henry Adams. (The Library of America, 1983, p. 789)

The wisdom of Merlyn

Published by peter on 2009-08-01 in Culture. 0 Comments

Merlyn to Wart in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone:

‘The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.’