OLDaily

Wittgenstein’s Revenge
Mike Elias, Ribbonfarm, 2020/10/13

This article is really terse, which is too bad, because it obscures the richness of the thinking here. Here's the gist: Wittgenstein's Tractatus was embraced by logical positivists because it described a system of knowledge constructed logically from sense data, the semantics of which was assured by a 'picture theory' of cognition. Though Quine is widely credited with dismantling that edifice, it was Wittgenstein's own thinking (in the posthumous Philosophical Investigations and elsewhere) that laid out the core objections, many of which are restated in this post. Context, trust, persuasion - all these are quite rightly brought to bear against a theory based on 'facts'. So much for the worse for advocates of blockchain, web of data, and distributed consensus, right? "Even universal agreement on the facts often achieves nothing for public discourse."

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The Real Issue Isn’t Student Engagement
John Spencer, 2020/10/13

This piece is a nice counterpoint to the article from Donald Clark on engagement last week (though to be clear I'm pretty sure it was not written as a response to Clark). "The issue isn't engagement," writes John Spencer, "it's empowerment." The reason for this is that you can't control the distractions and other forces at work in an online environment that you could in an in-person environment. "Many of these student engagement challenges are actually a lack of student self-direction," he writes. "When students are self-directed, they are self-starters, meaning they can initiate the learning on their own." But self-direction depends on students owning their own learning. "By owning the learning, they have increased buy-in and thus better commitment. By self-managing, they are able to improve their focus."

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Elsevier Has Deployed an End-user Tracking Tool for Security. Should Users Be Concerned About Their Privacy?
Todd A. Carpenter, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2020/10/13

The headline should be phrased differently. Here's what it should be: "Elsevier Has Deployed an End-user Tracking Tool. They say it's for Security. Users Should Be Concerned About Their Privacy." Todd Carpenter writes, "The service being used by Elsevier is called ThreatMetrix and is owned and provided by the LexisNexis arm of the RELX holding company, which also owns Elsevier." Near the bottom of this article we see the real issue: "It is not that LexisNexis is specifically tracking the download of this paper or that on the Elsevier system, but that it is using these behavioral data, in particular its identification of people and their devices, to build a profile of an ever larger segment of the population to track those citizens." These profiles could in turn be used for a variety of reasons: for access control, for service provision, for hiring and employment decisions, for marketing, and to trigger further investigation. This is why we need laws about disclosure of what's being done and why, how the algorithms function, what decisions are being made, and what they're based on.

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Open Policy for Learning and Teaching
Lorna M Campbell, Open World, 2020/10/13

I'm not sure where the presumption origiates that classroom spaces are closed and private. It feels odd to me to think of learning as being more akin to a session with a psychologist than to an open discussion in Plato's agora. And the argument that students need 'safe spaces' seems to me to legitimize the harm caused were their discussions open and public. I don't disagree with privacy, but I do disagree with the presumption that classrooms are and ought to be private. In education especially, 'closed' should be thre exception, not the rule. At any rate, the presumption causes issues with respect to classroom recordings, which is the subject of Lorna Campbell's post here and the more in-depth webinar to which she refers. There's no transcript, sadly, but there is a useful list of resources.

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Dependency Grammar v. Constituency Grammar
Mark Liberman, Language Log, 2020/10/13

Nothing could be more basic than language and math, right? And these are built on solid foundations that form the basis for literacy and numeracy, right? Well - no. Today I have two cases in point. The lead item points to "three different foundational ideas can be identified in recent syntactic theory: structure from substitution classes, structure from dependencies among heads, and structure as the result of optimizing preferences" (my italics). In another post, Daniel Lemire notes that in most programming languages, 0.2+0.1 does not equal 0.3. Why? "The computer does not represent 0.1 or 0.2 exactly. Instead, it tries to find the closest possible value. For the number 0.1, the best match is 7205759403792794 times 2-56." Wait - what? Lemire explains that a computer could perform the operation the way humans do, but it's a lot slower. Now, note: none of this shows that math and grammar are wrong per se, only that they are much more complex phenomena than are generally supposed, and that there is more than one way of looking at them, and the way we actually do look at them might not be the best or most efficient.

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