Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

I was listening to Kevin Kelly’s Long Now talk this afternoon while out for a walk (as an aside, the Long Now talks are one of the things I miss about the Bay Area, but I’m catching up on the ones I’ve missed over the past two years by listening to the podcasts on my iPhone). I liked Kelly’s book Out of Control many years ago, and in this talk, he applies some of those ideas to science. In talking about how science is evolving, he discussed the contingent nature of Truth, and got me thinking about science as a system. But let’s start with something easier: Wikipedia.

Clay Shirky has a great quote in Here Comes Everybody, where he says “A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product, and as a result, it is never finished.” Think about what Wikipedia is. If you took a snapshot of all the articles at a given point in time and recorded it, would that be Wikipedia? No.

Wikipedia is not just the knowledge contained in Wikipedia, but also the process by which that knowledge grows. It’s the thousands of people fixing typos and subscribing to articles to revert vandalism. It’s people building on each other’s knowledge (Shirky points out that the initial entry for asphalt was just “Asphalt is a material used for road coverings.” and has since evolved into a detailed entry). Wikipedia is an evolving system that includes the people, the knowledge embodied in the articles and also the wiki technology that enables the system.

Shirky’s other point that “it is never finished” is also important. Wikipedia articles are never “done”, with no more that needs to be said. Articles can always be improved. More citations can be added. Topics can be made clearer. New information can be included.

The analogy to science is clear. Science is a process, not a product that can be “finished”. It is a systematic way of expanding our knowledge. Scientists are always looking for ways to improve scientific knowledge, by running experiments to test the outer limits of current theories. Kelly touched upon this in the question and answer period - he said he realized that science was not about discovering the Truth, because Truth is a contingent entity (shades of Latour’s “Constitution”). The goal of science is instead to continue doing science, to continue expanding the realm of questions that we can ask, because good discoveries always bring more questions than answers.

Kevin Kelly described science as an infinite game, a concept which I learned about at the Long Now talk of James Carse. Infinite games are where the goal is not to win the game, but to keep playing the game, changing the rules as necessary so that the game endures. Science keeps on evolving, not just in terms of its knowledge, but also in how it is done (see the talk summary for a chronological history of improvements of how we do science).

I love this vision of a contingent, fluid, evolving system. I don’t like absolutes, or the idea that there is a single answer, or that there is only one way of looking at a situation. This may be because that’s just how my brain works. But I think the infinite game is a powerful vision of how we should conduct our lives. It’s why I felt discomfort with The 4 Hour Work Week, as that treats life as a finite game where the goal is to win. But how would one play an infinite game in other areas of life besides science?

Built to Last is a business book designed to extract the lessons learned by companies that have been successful for decades. Yet one could interpret the ideas in that book as a guide on how to play business as an infinite game. “Preserve the core, but stimulate progress” - stick to your core values, but be willing to change everything else from your business model to the products you make. Keep changing the rules by which you’re playing towards the goal of continuing to play the game.

Preserving the core is also important in playing an infinite game. With nothing to cling to, the game spins out of control and loses meaning. Kelly was asked about “intelligent design” in his talk. I see “intelligent design” as mimicking the trappings of science, without applying the core values - the scientific method and controlled experiments and falsifiability. Creationists are trying to win the finite game of we’re right and you’re wrong, but in doing so, lose all credibility in the infinite game.

We see this cargo cult science all over the place, where people take the surface lessons and try to apply them in such a way as to win their finite game, without understanding the core lessons that are what made the original an infinite game. I’m thinking of how we are fooled by randomness, or how people imitate the clothing and affectations of wealthy people in the hopes of becoming wealthy.

Another interesting aside is thinking through the implications of the idea above that it is the process that is important, not the end result. You may recall that I am scornful at best of process in the workplace, preferring to put my trust in the resourcefulness of people. So how can I support this idea of science as a process?

My review of a Six Sigma book gives a hint: “when process is an end in itself, … it can choke an organization and prevent people from achieving what needs to get done.” In other words, when the process is viewed as a finite game that takes precedence, it is a bad thing. However, if process is viewed as part of an infinite game, where it is being used to promote core values and where the process can modify itself to improve its ability to achieve those core values, then I think process can be valuable. Science is a great example - it continues to evolve in its search for answers, answers which then provoke more questions.

This is a big topic and I need to think more about it. I should also probably re-read Finite and Infinite Games for ideas. But I really like this vision of things like science and Wikipedia being processes in a continual state of evolution without an end goal, and of how that ties into the idea of infinite games. I think there’s a powerful idea lurking here someplace, and I’ll have to see if I can tease it out. I also need to figure out if I can apply these ideas to running one’s personal life - where the goal of life isn’t to have the most money, or most knowledge, or most fame, but to have created a process by which one is continually growing.

What do you think?

But in Ender’s mind, madness. Thousands of competing contradictory impossible visions that make no sense at all because they can’t all fit together but they do fit together, he makes them fit together, this way today, that way tomorrow, as they’re needed. As if he can make a new idea-machine inside his head for every new problem he faces. As if he conceives of a new universe to live in, every hour a new one, often hopelessly wrong and he ends up making mistakes and bad judgments, but sometimes so perfectly right that it opens new things up like a miracle and I look through his eyes and see the world his new way and it changes everything. Madness, and then illumination. (Xenocide, p. 439)

My worldview tends to be flexible in a lot of ways. I can often see both sides of an issue, and string ideas together as necessary to support each side. I see the world of ideas almost as a game, where the different ideas are game pieces and I can put them together in different combinations to serve my purposes at any given point in time. Occasionally, I find a pattern of ideas that I find useful, where things just click into place (”Madness, and then illumination”). I tend to keep those patterns around by recording them here in my blog, like the idea of cognitive subroutines. But the churning never stops.

I had a couple experiences in class earlier this week where this came in handy. In one class, we were having small group discussions, and towards the end, we were trying to summarize the group’s opinions about our reading, and I was able to string the discussion ideas together into a coherent pattern to present to the class on behalf of the group. In my other class, we had to do a group presentation and I ended up answering the questions at the end, because I quickly saw ways to reassemble our group ideas into a new pattern that tangentially related to the question.

One question that often comes up when I describe things in this way is where truth fits into all of this. In other words, is it a good thing that I have an affiinity for what would be called spin in politics? Or does it demonstrate that I have no morals, no regard for the truth, and will do whatever is expedient for me?

Is there such a thing as the Truth? I’m not sure there is. So much of what we observe is influenced by our previous experiences that I don’t think it’s possible for anybody to have a truly objective point of view. Books like Latour’s Politics of Nature and Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action and Wilson’s Quantum Psychology describe the context-dependent nature of thought, and lectures like Hacking the Mind remind us how our brains can be fooled in all sorts of ways. I could throw around terms like “social construction of facts”, but the basic idea is that “truth” is a really tricky concept and depends a lot on what other people think. Truth evolves; the truth about the Earth went from being the center of the universe, to circling the sun, to being an insignificant mote. For there to be universal undisputed Truth, there would have to be an omniscient impartial observer to decide on what Truth is. God serves that purpose for a lot of people, I suppose, but since He is not available to me to communicate the Truth in any situation, I think it’s equivalent to there being no such observer.

So let’s say that playing games with ideas loses us the concept of absolute Truth. What do we gain, if anything? I would argue that we gain better communication. If we insist on the concept of Truth, then if somebody disagrees with us, it is because they are wrong. At best, they may be misinterpreting the Truth. This immediately sets up the conversation as being confrontational and a zero-sum game, where if one person is right, the other person is wrong. If we instead see the conversation as an opportunity for both sides to learn and to come to a mutual agreement, the conversation is much more productive.

To be an effective communicator, you have to be able to put things in terms that your listener will understand. Whether you want to call it sales or framing or storytelling, putting the ideas together into the right pattern is what lets us get our point across to our listener. This is important because better communication is what connects us and lets us create bigger achievements than any of us could achieve on our own. Being able to bridge the gap between people’s minds is at the root of a lot of problems I see around me, from management screwups to politics to discrimination.

And sometimes that communication can’t happen when people are concerned with the Truth. For instance, the difference between good storytellers and bad ones is that the bad ones don’t know which details to leave out. They see the story as a sequence of events, and in an attempt to be completely truthful, they include every element. The good storytellers know their audience and tailor their story appropriately, including details that will connect to the audience, and leaving out ones that won’t. Are they less truthful? Perhaps. But I think the connection to the audience matters more.

A similar example is the Dilbert-ian engineer who always talks in jargon and can’t help giving every last bit of detail about what they’re working on. They are holding to the idea that more information is always better, because Truth is what matters. But because they can’t communicate with the rest of their company, they end up being useless and ineffective, complaining about how their project was screwed up by “politics” (and, yes, I used to be one such engineer). One has to ask whether it’s more important to be “truthful” and make sure every detail is technically correct in one’s explanation, or to use a simplified explanation that isn’t perfectly accurate but gets the idea across so that other people in the company can use it.

I really like that quote at the top of the post, from the third book of the Ender series. It describes my mind in a lot of ways. One of the reasons I continue to blog is that it lets me take a snapshot of the “idea-machine”s going through my brain so that I can later refer to them and/or mock them if need be. I try to keep my mind flexible, to continue to try new patterns. I’m not always as successful at it as I would like, but it’s a good goal because it will make me a more effective communicator, and I think that’s the key.

Amazon link

I finally finished the Latour, about a month after starting it, which is about how long it took me to read his previous book, The Politics of Nature. It’s a hard book to review; the goal of the book is to explain actor-network theory, which Latour co-created based on the social studies of science, but is sufficiently obscure that even after twenty years of refinement, there is still great confusion about what it actually means. So Latour wrote this book to be the definitive explanation of actor-network theory. And 260 pages later, I’m still not sure I can sum it up.

The book is an attack on traditional sociology; on the second page, he starts things off with “’socio-logy’ means the ’science of the social’. The expression would be excellent except for two drawbacks, namely the word ’social’ and the word ’science’.” (p. 2) The main issue he has with traditional sociology is that it assumes that its purpose is to study society and social forces. What’s the issue? It assumes that such a thing as ’society’ exists to be studied. Latour makes the claim that it does not. He compares it to classical physics, where it was assumed that there must be an “ether” for waves to propagate in; Einstein developed the theory of relativity which showed that no such absolute frame of reference existed.

He believes that ’society’, as a concept, is a premature assemblage of entities. It has not been collected together with due process, as described in the process of creating a collective. Because it is assembled too quickly, it smooths over the bumps and ignores the things sticking out when it tries to jam everything together. These inconsistencies are what first gave Latour in his study of science the hints of the path forward.

Latour follows the same path he has always followed, as he described it in Science in Action; he follows the actors. He listens to what people say and the reasons they give for doing it. And then he traces those reasons back to other reasons, and figures out what forces are acting on the people. And it turns out it’s never “society” at the end of the various chains. It’s other people, other actors.

So here’s the basic idea of actor-network theory, as far as I can tell. Social forces and society don’t exist, per se, or at least not in any sort of abstract global sense (I covered a bit of this in a previous post). Social forces are the result of other entities influencing us in a variety of ways. Latour makes the claim that traditional sociology (which he calls the “sociology of the social”) removes initiative from its agents; in other words, people are treated as mere intermediaries of social forces, unable to overcome their social programming. My analogy would be the juvenile delinquent, who is treated as if he had no other choice than to become a criminal because of his social situation.

Instead, Latour proposes the actor-network as a central concept. The actor is acted upon by a variety of mediators, each of which is pushing him in a direction. The actor, instead of being a singular point which can be knocked around like a billiard ball by social forces, is instead a star-shaped network, deeply entwined with other actor-networks, such that it is difficult to trace back any sort of singular reason why the actor does anything. The actor-network has enough different influences that it comes down to choice, influenced by other factors certainly, but not compelled by them.

So how does one do an actor-network analysis? Latour includes an excellent 15-page interlude, where he writes an imaginary dialogue between a business student who wants to analyze the networks within a corporation and an actor-network theory professor. The student keeps on looking for reasons behind people’s actions, a unifying theme that he can write a thesis on. The professor points out that the idea that an academic can drop in on a corporation and discern an underlying force that the employees themselves were unaware of is hubristic, at the least. The professor recommends instead following the employees around, listening to what they have to say, and constructing an understanding of what is going on from their words and actions. There are no hidden forces, just people and other actors (bureaucracy, laws, architectural patterns) interacting with each other.

Latour uses this dialogue to poke fun at his caricature of the traditional sociologist, who parachutes into an organization, comes up with an overarching theory, imparts it to the participants to edify and enlighten them, and leaves. These overarching theories always start to fall apart when you try to apply them to something, much like the classification systems in Sorting Things Out. Latour calls such theories panoramas, in that they provide the illusion of displaying the whole landscape, but are merely shadows on a wall; “They design a picture which has no gap in it, giving the spectator the powerful impression of being fully immersed in the real world… it’s this excess of coherence that gives the illusion away.” (p. 188)

The real world is messy. There are always conflicting priorities and influences that must be resolved in any local situation. I started reading the Amartya Sen book on identity, and he makes the same point - that we have a multitude of identities we can choose from; Sen says “The difficulty with the thesis of the clash of civilizations begins well before we come to the issue of an inevitable clash; it beings with the presumption of the unique relevance of a singular classification.” A worldview of Western civilization versus Muslim civilization is a Latour-ian panorama, which ignores a wealth of other possible classifications (as people, as workers, as husbands and wives and parents and children, etc.).

One of the common criticisms of actor-network theory is that because it is always so relentlessly focused on the local situation and local causes, no general principles can be derived from it. How can Latour claim to be scientific if there are no general principles? In a nice bit of table turning, Latour uses the example of science to illustrate his viewpoint. There is a platinum kilogram kept in France that is the definitive kilogram. Yet we don’t have to go to France every time we want to weigh something in kilograms. We use instruments which have been calibrated against other weights, which have been calibrated against other weights, until somewhere back in the chain, something was compared to that definitive kilogram. We can trace the chain of evidence back through each of those measurings. So there is no such thing as a universal kilogram, abstract and ethereal; the “kilogram” is constructed through well-understood chains of mediation radiating out from the definitive kilogram.

Latour makes the same claim as to how universal social concepts can be created through his methods.

“Can we obtain some sort of universal agreement? Of course we can! Provided you find a way to hook up your local instrument to one of the many metrological chains whose material network can be fully described… No discontinuity allowed, which is just what ANT [actor-network theory] needs for tracing social topography. Ours is the social theory that has taken metrology as the paramount example of what it is to expand locally everywhere.” (p. 228)

So what’s the point of the book? I think the main thing I take away from it is this viewpoint that things need to be continually reinvented and retraced. America is not an abstract concept, hovering in some sort of Platonic ideal space waiting to be discovered. It is an idea being constructed by the manifold ways in which people interact; in the terms of the Politics of Nature, it is a collective always being reconstructed. The same holds true for any sort of social concept that you can think of, from family to a company to friends; they don’t exist unless they are continually retraced and recreated by participants.

I also like his contention that things are complicated, that there are a multitude of influences at every step. We are not mere puppets being yanked about by social forces. Although we are being buffeted about by influencers, we are true actors who can create our own path incorporating those influences. One last quote:

Sociologists are often accused of treating actors like so many puppets manipulated by social forces. But it appears that puppeteers … possess pretty different ideas about what it is that makes their puppets do things. Although marionettes offer, it seems, the most extreme case of direct causality - just follow the strings - puppeteers will rarely behave as having total control over their puppets. They will say queer things like ‘their marionettes suggest them to do things they will have never thought possible by themselves.’ When a force manipulates another, it does not mean that it is a cause generating effects; it can also be an occasion for other things to start acting. … So who is pulling the strings? Well, the puppets do in addition to their puppeteers. It does not mean that puppets are controlling their handlers - this would be simply reversing the order of causality - and of course no dialectic will do the trick either. It simply means that the interesting question at this point is not to decide who is acting and how but to shift from a certainty about action to an uncertainty about action - but to decide what is acting and how. (p. 60)

I’m still not sure I have a firm grasp on Latour’s ideas here. I’ve got an inkling, though, and I’ve got some ideas as to how to apply them in a less theoretical domain that I’ll try to get to later this week. There’s also loads of other interesting ideas that he brought up that I didn’t get to. But I’ve undoubtedly lost all of my readers by now, so I’ll stop here.

As previously noted, I’m reading Paul Dourish’s book, Where the Action Is, in which he explores the branch of philosophy called phenomenology as a possible theoretical basis for embodied interaction. In particular, he mentions the work of Heidegger, about which I know nothing but a couple brief summaries I have read. But the concept which I want to address today is Heidegger’s exploration of equipment use, in which he divided equipment into “ready-to-hand” and “present-at-hand”. As Dourish explains:

These are ways, Heidegger explains, that we encounter the world and act through it. As an example, consider the mouse connected to my computer. Much of the time, I act through the mouse; the mouse is an extension of my hand as I select objects, operate menus, and so forth. The mouse is, in Heidegger’s terms, ready-to-hand. Sometimes, however, such as when I reach the edge of the mousepad and cannot move the mouse further, my orientation toward the mouse changes. Now, I become conscious of the mouse mediating my action, precisely because of the fact that it has been interrupted. The mouse becomes the object of my attention as I pick it up and move it back to the center of the mousepad. When I act on the mouse in this way, being mindful of it as an object of my activity, the mouse is present-at-hand. (p.109)

We’re all familiar with this concept. When we pick up a hammer and hit a nail, we’re not thinking about the hammer, we’re thinking about the task of hitting the nail. The hammer is invisible to our conscious thought; it has been absorbed into our extended self (Me++ explores similar ideas).

Dourish uses these philosophical concepts as a way to build a theoretical basis for designing embodied interaction. He talks about a bunch of different things, which I’ll explore more when I do a formal review, but for now I’m going to restrict the discussion to understanding how and why different forms of interaction can morph from “present-at-hand” to “ready-to-hand”, from visible to invisible, from outside my personal collective to inside.

While reading later in the book, it occurred to me that one of the keys, if not the key, to this transition is feedback. I am a tremendous believer in the power of feedback to effect changes in the world. It’s something I see everywhere, from the importance of aligning company processes with goals in Built to Last, to advocating using the feedback of others to change oneself.

How is it relevant in this particular situation? I believe that consistent and reliable feedback is necessary before an object can transition to the “ready-to-hand” state. If something is acting as an extension of oneself, it can not have an identity in its own right. It must behave exactly as one expects in response to one’s actions. If it doesn’t, if it starts behaving in an unexpected fashion, then the tenuous connection that has “coupled” it to one’s consciousness is broken, and the “ready-to-hand” status is lost. Dourish’s example of the mouse that reaches the edge of the mousepad is a good example of this transition. When the mouse is “ready-to-hand”, I move it up and the cursor goes up, so after a few moments, the mouse has disappeared from my consciousness, because when I think up, the cursor goes up. It is only when the feedback is unexpected, when I think up, and the cursor does not go up because the mouse has hit the edge, that the connection is broken.

Dourish mentions feedback in passing a few times, but I think it is central to this particular issue. Of course, I haven’t finished the book yet, so it may yet make a more prominent appearance. But that’s why I’m writing this now, so I can feel all clever if it does.

This connection of feedback with making things “ready-to-hand”, making things disappear from one’s consciousness as they are absorbed into an extension of oneself has some interesting consequences. For instance, it ties in readily with this post on cognitive trust, where I say “as we learn to trust and respect [a coworker], we can learn to call upon them with little more overhead than we do a subroutine in our own head” - our coworker has become reliable enough in our eyes that they essentially become “ready-to-hand”.

I noticed this recently in my own life, actually. In my previous jobs, I was always in direct contact with my “customers”, because I was writing prototype software for my coworkers’ use. I didn’t worry too much about specification requirements or software process, because if I started coding and I ran into an ambiguity about what they wanted, I’d turn around in my chair and go “Hey, how do you want this to work?”. At my current job, however, I am at least two steps removed from the customer. The customer talks to the president of the company, and the president talks to us. The feedback loop is much longer because if there are any questions, it has to be relayed to the president, who then has to take it to the customer when she gets a chance, etc. So I’m starting to learn that I need to be much more proactive about clarifying requirements and specifications as early as possible in the software design process. At my old job, I hadn’t even been aware of how much I relied on the instantly accessible nature of my coworkers; they had been “ready-to-hand”, used without thinking. Now that the feedback has become much more distant, my link to the customer has been broken and I am aware of the customer’s existence as being “present-at-hand”, an entity in their own right.

I think this mutual dependency between tight feedback loops and the “ready-to-hand” status of something (or someone) is something to be aware of in design. Certainly one of the things that makes software so hated is that feedback is often inconsistent and reliable. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. And yet with our computers, we often repeat the same action over and over… and get different results. We don’t know what makes the software work. We develop elaborate incantations to invoke the blessings of the software gods (”Oh, I know that if I press this button, then call this from this menu, and then press F3, the report works, but if you do it the other way, it crashes”).

This actually ties into Lucy Suchman’s book as well, where she talks about patterns of conversation. One thing she mentions is that when we are talking to somebody, we assume that they are offering appropriate feedback to us. She cites a particularly thought-provoking study where they had students talking to a “psychiatrist” through a computer screen, but were only allowed to ask the “psychiatrist” yes or no questions. Of course, the “psychiatrist” was a program that randomly answered yes or no without any understanding of the questions. And yet the students were able to extract useful information from the conversation, hypothesizing mental models for the “psychiatrist” that resolved even seemingly contradictory answers. Suchman uses this understanding to illustrate how important it is for software to present appropriate feedback in response to a user’s actions; if the software doesn’t, the user will construct an incorrect mental model which will be detrimental to future interactions with the software.

An ideal tool is one that is “ready-to-hand”, that disappears from consciousness. We should aspire to create and design such tools, whether we work in software or any other form of design. And that means being ever aware of the importance of consistent and useful feedback.

I was having an email discussion earlier today with a friend where the topic of stereotypes came up. As is common, my friend said that stereotypes are bad, and we should judge people based on their own individual characteristics. This gave me an excuse to launch into a longstanding rant of mine, wherein I defend the existence of stereotypes and note common problems with them. While writing it up in email, I realized that I don’t think I’ve ever written this rant up for the blog, so I figured I should do that. We’ll see if it’s any more coherent this time than it was in the email I sent today.

Here’s the basic outline of the rant. Our brains have evolved over eons to be extremely good at recognizing patterns and classifying things, because those actions reduce cognitive effort exponentially, allowing us to use our big brains to work on innovations rather than memorization, thereby giving us a survival advantage. Therefore, fighting against the existence of stereotypes is pointless, because our brains will do it, and do it well, regardless. The real battle that needs to be fought is understanding how our brains develop stereotypes, and what the drawbacks to stereotypes are.

Let’s start with a non-politically charged example: doorknobs. A doorknob is a common object. Whenever we come across one, we turn it, the door opens, we go on our way. But how do we know that the doorknob in front of us works the way we expect? Our brain has encountered hundreds of doorknobs before, and come up with a universal theory of doorknobs - we see a doorknob, and we expect it to work like the other doorknobs we’ve used. In fact, the only reason a doorknob ever stands out from the canonical doorknob stereotype is when it fails to work as expected, when it needs to be pushed or pulled rather than rotated.

What’s the point of this example? It demonstrates the power of stereotyping - rather than have to remember how each individual doorknob of the hundreds of doorknobs we encounter work, we create a stereotype of a doorknob, remember how it works, and then all of the hundreds of individuals collapse into one category, possibly with a few outliers that work differently. It’s an incredible saving of cognitive effort.

Rather than delve into the dangers of stereotyping people, due to their comparatively more varied natures, I’m going to take this rant in a different direction, which is exploring the topic of classification systems. Stereotypes are just an example of the more general case of classification systems. What is a classification system? It is, in essence, a simplification of the world, throwing out “unnecessary” details to make the new description of the world more manageable. It is this throwing away of details that makes classification systems paradoxically both more and less powerful. Such systems are more powerful because they condense a lot of information about the world into a few bits of data. They are less powerful because in the process of condensing that information, they often ignore crucial details.

So what is one to do? The answer is to remember that classification systems are a cognitive tool. And just like a hand tool, they can be used both appropriately and inappropriately. As the saying goes, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” We might stretch that to say “When all you have is a single classification system, everything gets squeezed to fit.” So it is important to be aware of the limitations of any classification systems that we use, and to be aware of the information that gets thrown away when we classify objects using that system. As a side note, this line of thinking is heavily influenced (if not stolen outright) from the book Sorting Things Out by Bowker and Star).

We can often see what the limitations of our classification systems are by noticing what doesn’t fit. For instance, the taxonomic classification system is relatively straightforward; if something has fur, it’s a mammal, if it lays eggs, it’s a bird or a reptile, etc. Then they found the platypus, a furry creature that laid eggs. Scientists dubbed the platypus a freak of nature, as if it was the platypus’s fault for breaking their classification system (as another aside, this placing of fault with the object under consideration is a direct consequence of the “object-oriented” viewpoint that I rail against in this post). All the platypus did was point out that there were things not handled by the classification system. And that’s okay. In fact, a classification system that tried to handle every exception would be useless because it would be so unwieldy. It would be like the map of a territory that is as large as the territory itself. The power of the classification system is in its condensation of information, even at the cost of not fitting the data exactly.

Circling back to the original topic of stereotypes, what practical advice can we extract from this theoretical discussion? First of all, stereotypes can be useful. If we see a guy at the bar, wearing a sports jersey and drinking Budweiser, we will probably guess that he’s a jock fratboy. If we see them wearing all black with stylish glasses, we’re thinking hipster. Given that first impression, we can often ascertain the accuracy of that impression with only a few questions, whereas if we had to start from scratch with each new person, it would take much longer to get a read on the type of person they are.

However, we must always be aware that all of our stereotypes are necessarily incomplete descriptions of people, extrapolating from a couple bits of information. When new information comes in that contradicts the stereotype, we need to recognize that the individual does not fit in our classification system, and to recognize that the fault lies with the system, not with the individual. The stereotype is just a tool. It should not control our perceptions to the point where we can not distinguish the individual from the stereotype. If we start talking to the jock fratboy, and it turns out that he’s an avid reader of Foucault and Derrida, we should not reject him for not living up to our expectations based on our stereotype.

In fact, I can use this as an opportunity to tie this topic into the Latour series of posts. One thought I had while thinking about this was that classification systems are a subset of Latour-ian collectives. In his conception of the collective as a political entity, Latour talks about external entities demanding entrance to the collective, which, if admitted after due consideration, are placed within a hierarchy. In the case of a classification system, when an exception is found to our system (e.g. the platypus, or the Foucault-reading jock fratboy), it is up to us to determine whether we will ignore the exception or whether we will modify the system to try to accommodate the exception. There are tradeoffs either way - if we ignore the exception, the classification system may be overly simplistic and unrealistic - if we accommodate it, the system may be too complex and therefore useless. So there should be an internal debate that takes place as to how to modify our classification systems in the presence of an exception. It’s a matter of being aware of our biases and being able to explicitly take them into account rather than letting them unconsciously rule us.

Okay, one last point because this has already gone on way too long. One idea that came up while I was talking about this with my friend was the idea of using people’s classification systems to classify them. We were talking about the different criteria that people use to classify people. Some people will judge people by the kind of car they drive, others by the college they went to, others by the books they read, others by their appearance. Each of these classification systems is a reflection of the individual doing the classifying, a reflection of their internal Latour-ian collective, a record of their history of interactions with other people. So it seems like we should be able to use their classification systems to extract information about them, and thereby be able to classify them. As an example, we might dismiss somebody who judged others by their car or by their attractiveness as being shallow, whereas somebody who judged people by the quality of their mind and by their inquisitiveness might be judged as being more thoughtful. I’m not quite sure where the idea goes from here, but I like it a lot, partially because of the reflexive and recursive nature of it, so I’m hoping somebody else can help me flesh it out.

Okay, I’m done for now. Sorry for the long post, but this is a topic I’ve had saved up inside of me for a long time. Plus I’m not sure when I’ll get the chance to blog again - things have been busy. Speaking of which, a little journal-type update for those of you strong-willed enough to struggle to the end of this post: things have calmed down at work from that first week, but are still busy. Spending Memorial Day weekend in Boston visiting friends and going to Crusher’s wedding was awesome. The car has been okay for three days in a row - is it a trend? I’m tired, but glad I wrote this - I need to just make the time for blogging, because I like doing it. That’s it. More another time.

Okay, I said yesterday that part 2 would end my book review, but I lied. There is one crucial aspect of Latour’s book that I didn’t cover yet. To review, part 1 essentially covered chapters 1 and 2, part 2 covered chapters 3 and 4, and today we’ll cover chapter 5, which covers how to handle the meeting of two collectives, and then move on to how this work ties into some of my previous thoughts.

For the purpose of yesterday’s discussion, I made the assumption that we were dealing with a single collective, but the examples I gave should have made it clear that there can be many such collectives. Whether you call them different cultures, different paradigms, or even different reality coefficients, it is apparent that there can and will be conflicting versions of reality in play among different people. How should this situation be handled?

Latour suggests that the ancient art of diplomacy provides a solution. Diplomacy is valuable for a couple reasons; for one, it is a negotiation that does not necessarily assume anything at the start, and two, the diplomat is unabashedly a representative of his/her culture or collective, rather than making any claims towards objectivity. Since Latour has spent the entire book tearing down the claims of objectivity, this is a key distinction. Latour contrasts it with a parody of anthropology as now practiced:

“Thanks to nature, I know in advance, without needing to hear what you have to say, who you are; but tell me anyway what representations you have made of the world and of yourselves - it would be so interesting to compare your visions to the equally factitious ones of your neighbors.” (p. 210)

The diplomat, on the other hand, is exploring a new reality. He/she is also at a distance from his/her own collective, knowing that not everything currently in the collective reality is essential to that reality, and that, through a process of negotiation, two collectives can agree to merge, throwing away what is painfully decided to be superfluous, and keeping what is deemed to be truly essential. By both being an open representative of his/her collective, and yet detached from it, the diplomat is essential to the negotiations necessary for two collectives to communicate rather than fight. As Latour says,

Apart from a diplomatic trial, no collective can differentiate between what is essential and what is superfluous: it will go to war over anything, because it sees everything as equally necessary. Only slowly, through preliminary negotiations, pourparlers, will a collective agree to reconsider its own constitution, by differentiating what is essential from what is superfluous according to other principles.” (p. 214)

The first part reminds me of “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” or of the Israeli/Palestine conflict. Or even of the Christian fundamentalists, insisting that every word of the Bible is true. Every part of their reality is equally necessary.

Moving onto my personal take of Latour’s work, I think that it is so important that people are aware of the provisional nature of reality established by a collective. That they understand that there is not a “One True Reality” that only they are privy to. I also think that it reminds us to go humbly when we enter the realm of a different collective.

I also like Latour’s discussion because it fits so well with my friend’s theory of reality coefficients, where I said “My friend’s insight was that when you don’t share the same set of reality coefficients as another person, the two of you essentially live in different worlds/realities.” Here’s where I think I’d like to extend Latour’s theory, because if I can make a mapping between reality coefficients and collectives, it implies that people can simultaneously be members of multiple overlapping collectives. And then things get really interesting.

The logical extension is to have each person be their own collective that negotiates with other collectives to form unions of collectives on certain issues. What does that mean? I’ve already covered it, in my cognitive subroutines extensions post, where I hypothesized that our brains take in parts of the external world for use internally, from walking sticks for the blind, to virtual prostheses such as browsers and email for people like me (inspired in part by the book Me++). We have integrated nonhuman aspects into our personal collective. And the process that I mentioned in that post maps really well to what Latour suggests:

By expanding the scope of the cognitive subroutines to include external influences and external controls, we then build in the power of the collective learning machine, because each of us will choose which elements of the external environment to leverage. … It gets incorporated into their internal cognitive subroutines, and soon it is embedded so deeply that they can’t distinguish it from “reality”.

In Latour’s terms, various external influences and controls apply for membership in my internal collective. Those that make sense to me, that I can find a place for in my internal hierarchy, I integrate into my collective, and they become so embedded that they are now part of my reality. This idea of a personal collective has been a running theme for me, all the way back to this conversation where I speculated that my self was a mosaic that I composed out of bits and pieces I found in the world around me.

I think Latour’s work also may give some clues as to how to move forward with negotiating between various factions in society, a problem I lamented in this post:

both sides need cognitive tools to help understand the others’ perspective. Otherwise, we are forced to treat them the way we treat anybody that is delusional - we declare them insane. Insanity is society’s way of saying “Your way of viewing the world is not valid.” When somebody says that space aliens are talking to them, necessitating an aluminum foil hat, we don’t give credence to their thoughts, even if they are lucid in all other ways. When a conservative claims that “We had to invade Iraq to keep its WMDs out of the hands of Al-Qaeda!”, a liberal often dismisses them in a similar fashion as the aluminum-hatted gentleman. I’m not sure what such cognitive tools for understanding look like. But they are clearly necessary as we drift further and further apart in our basic assumptions about how the world works.

It sounds like we need both sides to develop better Latour-ian diplomats.

I think I’ll stop here for the day. I’ve got one more post in this thread, where I go into a little more depth into how our internal collectives affect what we see and perceive. Plus, I’ve got a couple more references to old posts that I think are relevant. But I have to pace myself and my readers.

Continuing yesterday’s summary of Politics of Nature, by Bruno Latour. Today’s subject: Latour’s proposal for a “Constitution” on how we construct reality in a democratic fashion via due process, one that cuts across science and politics and multiculturalists and facts and values. I’m going to sketch out the process first, and then go back and fill in details.

The idea is that at each point in time, we have a provisional agreement that describes reality for us. Who is the “us” in that statement? Latour calls it a “collective”, a term meant to include both humans and non-humans. It is meant to indicate everything that is part of our currently described reality.

There are things that are covered by that reality, and there are things that the collective has decided to ignore for now. At the beginning of the process, one of the things that we have ignored rises up and demands to be taken notice of. This thing could be composed of humans (e.g. a group of workers unionizing or terrorists trying to overthrow a government), or nonhumans (e.g. prions making themselves known via mad-cow disease, or the negative effects of asbestos). Once it has presented itself to us, it is our responsibility to decide on the relative merits of its claims. This involves finding spokespersons to speak for it, whether scientists using instruments to determine what prions are doing, or union foremen using discussions to determine what the workers want.

Once the demands are made clear, it is up to the collective to decide whether to accept those demands for reification, and to decide how to integrate these new elements into the previously constructed reality. It involves finding a new hierarchy that incorporates both new and old elements. Sometimes it is impossible to find a new order that works, and the new elements are rejected and sent back outside for another round. Other times, a new hierarchy is found, and it is institutionalized as the new provisional reality, ready to handle the next round of supplicants.

This is really fuzzy, I’m sure. So let’s take a concrete example from science, quantum physics. For years, scientists had been noticing all of these anomalies in their experiments, where results were not what they expected. Light was behaving as a particle when they expected it to behave as a wave. The energy spectrum of certain decays was discontinuous. Blackbody radiation theory was predicting infinite energy. Each of these individual results was knocking on the door of the then-current paradigm of classical mechanics, but the scientists had no place for those results in that paradigm, so they were ignored and marginalized. Then came a round of phenomenological observations such as Planck’s suggestion that blackbody radiation was quantized rather than continuous, and Einstein’s explanation of the photoelectric effect. Then Heisenberg and Schrodinger came along, and established a new hierarchy of theory that encompassed all of the new results, providing the new provisional reality for the next round of experimental results. The similarities to Kuhn’s paradigms are pretty apparent, which makes sense given Latour’s background in science studies.

But Latour’s insight is that the exact same process can be applied to human political dynamics as well. A group of people who are currently excluded from the collective demand admittance. They formulate their demands. They negotiate with the collective to find a place for themselves in a new hierarchy. And either the negotiations are successful and the collective is expanded, or the demands are rejected and the supplicants are marginalized again. Whether talking about rebels performing a coup, or union organizers negotiating with management during a strike, the process is general enough to cover the situations.

Several aspects of this process impress me. One is that Latour specifically includes discussion (he calls it consultation) as part of the process. In other words, he thinks that it can only work if the collective is forced to explicitly make choices about what it is or is not included at any point in time. Otherwise, things get swept under the table. The tradeoffs are not apparent. I like his example of automobile deaths:

This is the case, in the example given earlier, of the eight thousand people who die each year from automobile accidents in France: no way was found to keep them as full-fledged - and thus living! - members of the collective. In the hierarchy that was set up, the speed of automobiles and the flood of alcohol was preferred to highway deaths. … for the time being, the rapid use of cars is “worth” much more in France than eight thousand innocent lives per year. (p. 124)

Under our current system, we never examine the tradeoffs of the choices we are making. Under his, we make them explicit. I’ve ranted about this before (using the example of cars, actually), but it drives me nuts to see people making decisions without discussing the tradeoffs.

The process also avoids letting certain people short circuit the discussion prematurely. One short circuit that Latour describes is that of the Scientist, who, in the world of the Cave, is able to dismiss entire lines of argument with the sentence “That’s not objective.” Multiculturalism, anything based on morals, the Scientist waves away. Another short circuit is that of the moralist, who refuses to accept anything less than total victory e.g. if one single snail dies, the entire undertaking is unacceptable. In the real world, compromises have to be made, and it is better that the compromises are made with all parties having a voice at the table.

Another thing that I like about the process is that it is iterative. Things that are dismissed this time around can knock on the door and be let in next time. He uses the example of asbestos:

The case of asbestos can serve as a model, since it is probably one of the last objects that can be called modernist. It was a perfect substance (was it not called a magic material?), at once inert, effective, and profitable. It took decades before the public health consequences of its diffusion were finally attributed to it, before asbestos and its inventors, manufacturers, proponents, and inspectors were called into question; it took dozens of alerts and scandals before work-related illnesses, cancers, and the difficulties of asbestos removal ended up being traced back to their cause and counted among the properties of asbestos, whose status shifted gradually: once an ideal inert materia, it became a nightmarish imbroglio of law, hygiene, and risk. (p. 23)

The original reality of asbestos, as accepted by the collective, was the “magic material”. Only as time went on, and as we proceeded through several iterations, did other properties of asbestos become apparent and added to reality. Latour argues violently against the idea that those properties are inherent in the material. They can be discovered in a process of investigation, but to say they are part of the eternal “essence” of asbestos is a misleading statement, because it implies that we as humans can know the “essence” of an object without investigation. Since that is not possible, assuming that as one of the premises of a system leads to yet another short circuit of discussion.

This temporal nature of an iterative reality is also good because it reminds us that we have to make decisions based on imperfect information all the time. Latour scoffs at the idea of an ideal world, where Scientists can have infinite time to discover everything there is to know about something before it’s used in the “real” world. We know the world doesn’t work like that. We look at what we know, we weigh our options, and then we take our best guess. This is a cooperative effort. Scientists give us their current theories. Moralists serve as spokespeople, speaking for those who don’t have a voice (whether nonhuman, as in the case of the environment, or human, in the case of indigenous natives). Economists try to break things down into a model to give us rough estimates of the various tradeoffs. Politicians work out compromises between the various factions. Everybody brings something to the table.

I think that covers the broad outlines of Latour’s process, and what I like about it. I could spend pages going into more details, but I think I’ll stop the book review here. I’m skipping a lot of his efforts at deconstructing various academic ideas, because I think they’re mostly relevant as responses to other academic works that I haven’t read. But these last two posts capture the ideas that I think are the most important and relevant to my thoughts going forward; in other words, the ideas that have become part of my personal collective.

More tomorrow on ways that Latour’s ideas integrate readily into my own, with references back to previous posts that I think are relevant.

Amazon link

I started this book more than a month ago, as I mentioned at the end of this post. It’s incredibly dense. I don’t think I could have even started on it without having been trapped on that crowded bus with no other options for a few hours. Even once I got started, it was very slow going. Using the BART ride to my former workplace as a metric, I had about an hour’s worth of reading time (40 minutes on BART, 20 minutes on the shuttle bus). On a typical book, I would read about 60 pages during that time. On a fluffy book like scifi or McGinn’s book, it’s more like 100 pages. On this book, I was lucky to get through 15 pages in that hour, just because I had to crossreference the glossary and the footnotes, and sit back and think about what he was saying, and then re-read the last few pages to see if it made more sense in light of what I now thought I understood. Tough sledding. But well worth it.

As I mentioned in a comment in an earlier post, Latour’s viewpoint has infiltrated my brain to the point where I’m seeing everything through his prism right now. I also have another post which I had been kicking around, exploring why everything I read is placed in relation to my internal hierarchy, that I can now explain using his terminology. And I can relate what he’s saying to everything from an old conversation about identity to Howard Bloom’s Global Brain. Unfortunately, this is not an easy book to summarize. I think I’m going to have to do it in a couple parts, with more posts afterwards to elaborate on applications.

Let’s start with why Latour wrote this book (as a warning, I’m going to be paraphrasing wildly with my own interpretation of the book - this is not meant to be a definitive review or anything to replace reading the book, especially since I’m going to have to make some major leaps to avoid writing a review that’s as long as the book itself). He wants to explore the consequences of what he calls modernism, where science and reason will determine everything if only we could get past our fuzzy thinking. That there is an eternal unchanging Nature out there that our scientists explore and bring back definitive answers from. And that multiculturalism is mucking about aimlessly because it’s talking about artificial “socially constructed” viewpoints that are meaningless when they clash with the obdurate reality of Science. It’s a similar question to the one I posed towards the end of this post on conservative postmodernism, where I wonder how to reconcile my affinity for postmodernist contextual viewpoints with my belief in the power of reason and truth.

He relates this current situation to Plato’s parable of the Cave, where all we see are shadows of the true Reality on the wall. In his telling of the tale, modern scientists are given the privilege of going to explore Reality and then come back to tell us poor humans what’s going on. The rest of us are left to construct our own interpretations of the shadows in our postmodernist contextual way. He contrasts mononaturalism (One True Reality) with multiculturalism (different interpretations).

But given Latour’s background in science studies (as described in Science in Action), he’s immediately skeptical of the scientists’ view of the One True Reality, since he’s spent time studying how a fragile scientific consensus is constructed. It’s not merely a matter of going and looking at Nature and shouting “Eureka!” It’s a continual process of feedback between theories and observations, with construction of new instruments always changing what we see and how we see it. Latour wonders how something so socially constructed can possibly be the voice of the One True Reality.

His answer? It isn’t. There is no One True Reality that trumps anything we can say. There are nonhuman things that demand our attention, but they require the human intervention of scientists to be able to speak. And here’s where things get really interesting, because he observes the congruence between scientists speaking for nonhuman things and politicians speaking for groups of humans. Both are spokespersons, using the tools at their disposal to determine what their subjects are expressing, and presenting it. Presenting it to who? That’s the subject of the rest of the book.

Before I continue down that path, let me take a moment to explain why I, a confirmed rationalist and believer in Science, can accept what Latour has to say about the constructed nature of science and what it implies about the non-unity of Nature. For one thing, I’ve worked in various science labs for most of my adult life. I know all too well the contortions that happen between the initial observations in the laboratory and the wonderful, clean results that get presented in journals and at conferences.

For another, Latour makes the excellent point that we don’t see what we don’t look at. We only look at things that matter to us at any given point in time. While I was visiting Jofish, I was talking to one of his friends, who is doing research on the implications of biologists’ switching over the past few decades from studying planaria to C. elegans (as an aside, I was proud of myself for being able to identify C. elegans as the worm she was talking about without prompting). Her thesis is that C. elegans presents a rationalist view of the world, one where genetics and neurobiology is destiny, where the effect of each gene can be tracked. Planaria, on the other hand, are completely messy, because you can cut them into pieces and each piece grows into a new organism with some of the knowledge of the old. There is no easy cause and effect here, as behavior and function is distributed across the whole organism. Scientists don’t want that sort of messiness interfering with their triumphant march towards genetic determinism, so they ignore the planaria. It is relegated to non-existence in scientific papers.

Latour observed such behavior and realized that scientists are not the dispassionate observers and recorders that mononaturalism would imply. They have theories and preconceptions, and go out searching for bits and pieces in nature that would support or contradict those theories. It is anything but a value-neutral process. They are just as much in the business of social construction of reality as the multiculturalists. And having realized that, Latour set out to determine the process by which both sides construct reality. And even better, he laid out a “Constitution”, a process in which every voice, human and nonhuman, gets a hearing as to whether it should be included in a version of reality.

And, wow, this post is getting long. I’m going to put the actual reality construction process in another post, because I have a lot to say about it, as it’s the part that has totally infiltrated my thinking. And if I make this post ten pages long, nobody will read it. I’d make a comment here about how nobody reads my posts anyway, but then Jill would give me a well-deserved whap upside the head, so I won’t.

Amazon link

I really liked Science in Action, another book by Latour, so when I saw this on a friend’s shelf, I borrowed it. Unfortunately, it took me several months to actually get through it; I started it over Christmas vacation, but I kept on getting distracted by other things, until I finally powered through the last bit a few weeks ago. And now I’m finally writing it up.

Aramis was a proposed public transit system in France, one that would combine the best aspects of the train and the automobile. It was designed to be a point-to-point train system, with small cars that would pick you up at your home and take you directly to your destination with no stops in between. To do this involved many technology leaps, such as “nonmaterial coupling”, where two train cars would act as a train without any physical connection (so that a car that was speeding out of a stop could hook up to the train in front of it, and another car could drop out and stop without stopping the whole train). It sounds like a fantastically cool system. The project existed in various forms from 1970 to 1987, through several iterations of prototyping and proof of concept. The technology even worked - the book has some great photographs from the final testbed of cars actually travelling together without being connected physically. But Aramis never made it to the real world. And this book is the tale of a sociologist hired to find out “who killed Aramis?” - what was the fatal flaw in the project or in the management of the project that prevented Aramis from achieving reality?

Latour takes an interesting approach to the book, using a form that he calls scientifiction, a cross between narrative and history, of culture and technology. His protagonist is a young engineer working with the sociologist to figure out the history of Aramis and where things went wrong. Interspersed throughout the work are interview excerpts from people they talk to, as well as impersonal observations from the author himself. Plus there are bits where Aramis itself speaks and asks to be born. These different authorial voices are distinguished by typeface, but that only makes it slightly less confusing. And it made it a bit of a slog to try to keep everything straight, so every time I put it down for a couple weeks, it would take some effort to figure out where I had been and what was going on.

It’s pretty interesting, though. Latour is a philosopher of science, emphasizing the culture in which the science is embedded. In Science in Action, he talks about how the bureaucrat lobbying for a laboratory in his district is doing science, because it’s all part of the same process. Here he is taking the same approach to project management. The main idea of his that I took away from this book was that a project is not real until it’s built. Until there’s something physical that everybody can point to and say “That’s Aramis”, it exists in a realm of uncertainty, where all of its parameters can still be negotiated. Latour goes one step further in fact; like his idea of black boxes in Science in Action, where things are packaged up so we don’t think about them, Latour claims that the project doesn’t really exist until it no longer exists. That sounds contradictory when I say it that way, but his point is that if Aramis had been built, people would have started using it and it would have faded from their consciousness. They would not have said “I am taking Aramis to meet you at the theater”, they would have just said “I’ll meet you at the theater”. Only when something is taken for granted is it truly real.

The book is fascinating because the sociologist and his engineer intern interview all the various parties involved with the Aramis project, and trace it through its various ups and downs, and the number of different viewpoints is astounding. Everybody has a pet theory of why the project eventually failed, but none of them seem to match up with what happened. If it had really been a critical technical failure, it would have been caught much earlier in the process. If certain people had the antipathy towards Aramis that others suggest, it would never have been approved to go forward with the final full trial. If it was all just politics, that doesn’t quite sync up either. It’s a conundrum.

Latour brings out all of this and presents it to the reader. His authorial viewpoint sections also point out the negotiations that are taking place in the design of Aramis. As new people get involved, the vision of Aramis changes as do the requirements (”The only way to increase a project’s reality is to compromise, to accept sociotechnological compromises.”). He points out that in a successful project, these requirements eventually converge and a physical thing actually gets built which sets the technology into a concrete reality. In Aramis, that never happened; the requirements shifted on a yearly basis depending on which branch of the government was involved, and where they were trying to build it. Latour warns the reader:

If we say that a successful project existed from the beginning because it was well conceived and that a failed project went aground because it was badly conceived, we are saying nothing. We are only repeating the words “success” and “failure”, while placing the cause of both at the beginning of the project, at its conception… All projects are stillborn at the outset. Existence has to be added to them continuously, so they can take on body, can impose their growing coherence on those who argue about them or oppose them.

Those projects that succeed are those where the actors involved agree on a coherent vision of what they are building, or alternatively where one of the actors is strong enough to impose their vision on others. This did not happen in Aramis. There was actually a nice compare and contrast project that Latour uses, called VAL, which was an automated rail system built during the same timeframe by the same company. That was an instance where the desires of the company matched up with the desires of the city where it was to be built, and the project went smoothly and VAL came into existence. It’s interesting to see how things went differently in the two cases.

This whole thinking of the project as a continuous negotiation is of great interest to me. At work, I couldn’t see the point of spending weeks writing a Product Specification Document. But reading Latour made me realize that the point was that setting things down in such a document was a process of negotiation and compromise, and the reason that people took the document so seriously is that they were authoring their vision of the future. My cry that “It’s just a document - it’s not real!” is inappropriate, because the document will define reality for this instrument, and now is the time when all of the various actors need to address their issues and balance their needs. The project is a living thing, with the documents being merely the history of the compromises necessary to move the product along.

It’s an interesting viewpoint, and one that should have been obvious to me, but reading this book really made it evident. Latour’s emphasis that technology is always embedded in a social and cultural context, and that the technology does not bring itself to life, but requires real people (the sociologist in the book repeatedly emphasizes following the actors) to invest in it, both fiscally and emotionally. And following the trail of negotiations and compromises as Aramis moved from phase to phase, with new interests being brought aboard at each stage, was a fascinating mystery hunt for Latour to try to solve. I won’t give away the ending of who actually killed Aramis, though - it won’t make sense without reading the book…