Complexity and Forecasting the Future

Predictions of the future are notoriously prone to error. Up to this point, two major accounts have dominated discussions of why that is the case.

The classic explanation, offered by William Ascher in Forecasting: An Appraisal for Policy Makers and Planners provides detailed evidence documenting 1) that the core assumptions incorporated into the forecasting model are far more important than the methodology used, 2) that 'assumption drag' (the continued reliance on old and outdated core assumptions) is responsible for many of the most spectacular failures of prediction and 3) that failure to incorporate expert judgment (e.g. through the use of a method that mechanically applies past trends and structural relations without incorporating 'intuition') typically decreases the accuracy of the forecast.

The second account, presented in Phillip Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, extends the emphasis on subtlety and complexity implicit in Ascher's recognition of the importance of expert judgment. Tetlock divides experts into two types -- hedgehogs who are poor at making accurate forecasts and foxes who are more successful. Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.

Here is more from Tetlock himself:



Aside from the emphasis on complexity and subtlety, both these accounts share a materialist philosophy. They see forecasting as the act of understanding and predicting the empirical world of human activity and the institutions created, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity. The success of the forecast is wrapped up in the match between the sophistication and 'core assumptions' of the forecasting model and the material operation of the world.

The flip side of materialist philosophy is idealism -- the notion that ideas cause behavior rather than the other way around. This is the fundamental way in which complexity theorist John Casti's Mood Matters distinguishes itself from previous assessments of the practice of forecasting.

Here is some material from the book's website, followed by Casti's summary of the book's main thesis. There is an interesting correspondence between Casti's argument and the emerging recognition within the environmental community that effective climate change policy can't be forged around a doom and gloom philosophy (if you don't enact cap-and-trade, we're doomed) discussed here a few weeks ago.

Most people think that the outcome of elections causes the mood of the country to change. The opposite is true: The mood of the country determines the outcome of elections.

Most people think that a plethora of happy popular music on the charts makes the public happy and that a plethora of depressing popular music on the charts makes the public depressed. The opposite is true: A happy public pushes happy songs up the charts, and a depressed public pushes depressing songs up the charts.

Most people think that a productive economy makes people optimistic and that an unproductive economy makes people pessimistic. The opposite is true: Optimistic people make a productive economy, and pessimistic people make an unproductive one. Most people think that peace makes people content and tolerant while wars make people angry, fearful and patriotic. The opposite is true: Content and tolerant people make peace, while angry, fearful and patriotic people make war.

It sounds so simple, yet no one in the social sciences has made this case-until now. Mood Matters tells the story of why human events happen the way they do and not some other way, showing how it is the collective mood of a population, its social mood, that biases the events that we can expect to see. If you want to understand how information flows from the individual human impulse to herd together in groups to the overall social mood in a population that gives rise to events, read this book!

Finding Simplicity in Complex Ecosystems

A talk by ecologist Eric Berlow shows how network models and their nodes can help us find simplicity in complex systems, biological or social. The talk and demonstration of the model takes less than three minutes. The presentation is, unfortunately, so brief that he fails to describe the method by which nodes are selected and significant relationships are identified.

What I find most compelling about this concept is the possibility of using network/nodes analysis as a research method. I see that it has the potential to rival or exceed the capacity of statistical analysis to yield useful information for sociologists. The network/node analysis would reveal the significant relationships in a system; statistics would then be used as a refinement to quantify how strong the relationship is.

The Ecology of Time

Unfortunately, I don't read Croatian. From the abstract, the article sounds fascinating.

Author Cifric, Ivan
Title: Ecology of Time. Time As Integrative and Disintegrative Factor
Journal Title: Socijalna Ekologija ISSN: 1330-0113
Volume: 19 Issue: 1 Date: 2010-01 Pages 5-32


ECOLOGY OF TIME. TIME AS INTEGRATIVE AND DISINTEGRATIVE FACTOR

Ivan Cifrić; Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb

The work places emphasis on (a) the importance of some terms in the ecology of time with regards to socioecological research (irreversibility, rhythm, tempo, speed, time sovereignty, ecological timeprint, measure of time), (b) time as the medium of dis/integrative processes and (c) the need to slow down the tempo of life and social changes. The main thesis is that the problems (in the environment and social) arise due to the clash between two dimensions of time and their rhythms – the rhythm in nature (natural) and the rhythm in society (cultural). The clash arises because of the intentional tendency of modern society to separate social (cultural) time from natural time, to separate social time and social rhythm from the human being, and to subordinate natural rhythm and natural forms of time to time and accelerated rhythm of contemporary society. Through universal time contemporary society integrates different cultures and attempts to integrate nature into society through the domination of social time. At the same time its actions are culturally disintegrating. In order to decelerate the tempo a radical reorientation of post/modern society is needed, it is necessary for it to accept the dynamics of the relation between natural and social systems, and their different time perspectives on the level of individual and social actions.

Can you control the Population of Malthusians when Ideas have Sex?

Brendan O’Neill recently posted "The definitive guide to modern-day Malthusians"

Malthusians are multiplying like rabbits. They’re everywhere. In respectable Western society you can’t swing a bat without hitting a Malthus-inspired misery guts. Yet while many of them are happy to talk openly about the plague of people making Gaia sick, some don’t consider themselves Malthusians at all. There are old-style Malthusians who doom-monger about frenzied fecundity in the dusty Over There, and newer Malthusians-in-denial who never, ever use the words ‘population’ and ‘control’ in succession, yet who still claim that humanity’s consumption habits threaten to bring about eco-doom.

Either way, the Malthusian attitude – the idea that every problem we face is a product of our temerity to try to live beyond nature’s means – is rampant today, whether it labels itself Malthusianism or something less likely to get people’s backs up. So to help you spot Malthusian thinking in its many guises in the year ahead, as we welcome the seven billionth human being, spiked offers this guide to the myriad of modern-day Malthusians.

The article then goes on to describe a variety of different flavors of Malthusianism: Unreconstructed, celebrity, psycho, feminist and green (complete with cute photos caricaturing the various categories).

Andrew Revkin, in Deconstructing a Bestiary of Malthusian ‘Miserabilists’, delivers an email Q and A which reveals to O'Neil to be considerably more sensible than the populist characterization one constructs from the article. More interesting, to me, however, was Revkin's take on the significance of a particular type of person -- an educated and networked individual -- over population in general in recasting the cornucopian viewpoint.

Q.

What’s your take on my recent dissection of Julian Simon’s “ultimate resource” thesis?

I don’t argue against more minds = more innovation and a faster route out of poverty.

But I also see no implicit “need” for more people (again, I’m not a Malthusian, just noting a potentially extraneous element of the “cornucopian” argument).

What’s needed is more minds that are educated and — in the sense Matt Ridley describes so well — networked.

I’m cheering for more education and access to information, not more (or less) babies except by choices made ideally by informed, educated [couples].
A.

Well, I am not pro-natalist; I don’t think the Earth needs a certain number of people. I am simply opposed to any controls or coercion whatsoever in the realm of reproductive choice. Often the flip side to Malthusianism is natalism, the idea that we need more people in order to do A, B and C. Both of these outlooks are based on a demographic obsession, and my belief is that we should move away from understanding our problems as demographic towards appreciating that they are social.

For those interested, here is Matt Ridley's TED Talk 'When Ideas have Sex'

TEQs: UK Gov't Tradable Energy Quotas

The UK Parliament's All Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil, which began in 2007, is backing a TEQ scheme, or Tradable Energy Quotas. TEQ is a system of energy accounts for each adult that both sets a price on energy and quantifies the amount of carbon emissions per energy unit. It links the two major energy issues together: peak oil and carbon emissions. The price floats depending on scarcity/price, and the carbon units change, depending on the emissions level of the energy source. The scheme is designed to price fuel according to its scarcity and emissions, but also make sure that no one is "energy poor", that energy distribution is fair.

I can't vouch for the fairness of the scheme because I haven't read a critique on exactly how it would price and distribute energy in the real world. However, one has to begin with the presumption that the wealthy can buy as much fuel and carbon emissions as they would like, causing scarcity that both raises the price of fuel and reduces the amount of carbon emissions the less-than-wealthy can have. The scheme merely says that each adult is given an equal share of TEQs at the start of the year. If you use less than your share, you can sell your surplus; if you need more, you can buy more. Industry and Government bid for their units at a weekly Tender (auction). It appears that there are no limits on the amount of units that a wealthy person would be allowed to buy, although there is an annual "budget of units" that is projected until 2020. The story in the Energy Bulletin gives a bit more detail on the policy.

Even as a possibly flawed scheme, I would rather see one government move ahead and implement the policy as an experiment, to see how it actually plays out. We won't really know what the issues are until somebody tries it.

UPDATE: One question I had about the TEQ scheme was how energy and emissions would be counted in embodied forms: the purchase of consumer goods. TEQ has a scheme to count those energy and emissions units by requiring the producer to pay those TEQs. From The Oil Drum:

"The purchase of goods other than energy would not require the surrender of TEQs units, since the producers of those goods would have already surrendered units for the energy used in the production of the goods. Producers would then pass on the cost of buying these units to consumers, who would simply find that certain goods (those produced in a more energy-intensive manner) cost more."

However, this scheme hides the fact that a significant portion of goods in OECD countries (in some countries, the majority) are produced outside the country in places like China. The TEQ scheme, therefore, externalizes the energy and emissions costs associated with buying consumer goods to the country of production, where energy and emissions are not counted. This scheme gives consumers a free-pass to consume as much "cheap goods from China" as they can, since they will not have to surrender TEQs for those purchases. Furthermore, it gives a free ride to major retailers, like Walmart, who won't have to surrender TEQs for selling foreign-produced goods. It also penalizes the local production of goods, which may be producing such goods with lower energy and emissions and under stricter environmental laws. Consumer tendency would be to purchase foreign goods that don't reduce one's TEQs. This discourages the local production of consumer goods.

1.	TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas) is an energy rationing system to enable nations to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases along with their use of oil, gas and coal, and to ensure fair access to energy for all.
2.	There are two reasons why such a scheme may be needed: 1. Climate change: to reduce the greenhouse gases released into the air when oil, gas and coal are used. 2. Energy supply: to maintain a fair distribution of oil, gas and electric power during shortages.
3.	TEQs (pronounced "tex") are measured in units.
4.	Every adult is given an equal free Entitlement of TEQs units. Industry and Government bid for their units at a weekly Tender.
5.	At the start of the scheme, a full year's supply of units is placed on the market. Then, every week, the number of units in the market is topped up with a week's supply.
6.	If you use less than your Entitlement of units, you can sell your surplus. If you need more, you can buy them.
7.	All fuels (and electricity) carry a "rating" in units; one unit represents one kilogram of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent in other greenhouse gases, released when the fuel is used.
8.	When you buy energy, such as petrol for your car or electricity for your household, units corresponding to the amount of energy you have bought are deducted from your TEQs account, in addition to your money payment. TEQs transactions are automatic, using credit-card or (more usually) direct-debit technology.
9.	The number of units available on the market is set out in the TEQs Budget, which looks 20 years ahead. The size of the Budget goes down year-by-year - step-by-step, like a staircase.
10.	The Budget is set by the Energy Policy Committee, which is independent of the Government.
11.	The Government is itself bound by the scheme; its role is to find ways of living within it, and to help the rest of us to do so.
12.	TEQs are a national scheme, enabling nations to keep their promises, guaranteeing their carbon reduction commitments within whatever international framework applies at the time.

Hottest year on record: A Visual Memorial

According to the New York Times, two agencies, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have independently reached the conclusion that the global average surface temperature for 2010 tied the record for hottest year on record set in 2005.

The high temperatures were matched by a decline in Arctic sea ice. Arctic sea ice extent averaged over December 2010 was 12.00 million square kilometers (4.63 million square miles). This is the lowest December ice extent recorded in satellite observations from 1979 to 2010, 270,000 square kilometers (104,000 square miles) below the previous record low of 12.27 million square kilometers (4.74 million square miles) set in 2006 and 1.35 million square kilometers (521,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average. The extent of Arctic sea ice has declined 3.5% per decade between 1979 and 2010.

In recognition of these milestones, we are highlighting a specific work by Canadian artist Diana Thorneycroft from her series "Group of Seven Awkward Moments." Thorneycroft describes the purpose of the series as follows:

In this new series "Group of Seven Awkward Moments", I investigate the relationship between the Canadian landscape and national identity. Reproductions of paintings by the famous Canadian collective The Group of Seven are used as backdrops to the dioramas I photograph.

It is through the use of the collective's iconic northern landscapes, which have come to symbolize Canada as a nation, combined with scenes of accidents, disasters, and bad weather that gives the work its edge. By pairing the tranquility of traditional landscape painting with black humour, the work conjures up topical and universally familiar landscapes fraught with anxiety and contradictions.

The image immediately below is "Icebergs, Davis Strait (1930)" by Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris. At the bottom is Thorneycroft's riff on the image. Enough said.

Integrating Economic Gain in Biosocial Systems

A few of the past posts have drawn attention to West's work on scaling rules and, in particular, the distinction between the sublinear scaling properties of biological processes as compared to the superlinear scaling properties of social processes.

A recently published article by Timothy Allen, Joseph Tainter and others (Integrating Economic Gain in Biosocial Systems in Systems Research and Behavioral Science Syst. Res. 27, 537-552 2010) develops a model that has relevance to this situation, though its more explicit focus is on how systems evolve. Specifically, they note that observed hierarchies change their level structure and organization as they pass through time. Think, for example, of the European Union. This is an attempt to reorganized a social system through the insertion of an intermediate hierarchical level (the EU) that sits between the existing hierarchical levels of socio-economic organization at the level of the state and at the global scale. This idea is consistent with the work of Holling and other panarchy theorists who argue that the number of levels in a panarchical hierarchy can increase through time.

Allen et al argue that "The concept of gain and profit is introduced into ecology as a way of summarizing strategies of biological and social structures. High gain systems can be predicted by flux as they take in fuel at a rate. Low gain systems must refine low-quality materials in order to acquire fuel. Low gain systems are predictable from their plans and coded behaviour. Changes from high to low gain mode and vice versa represent a reordering of a hierarchy over time." The model of socio-ecological systems they utilize is described below.

Figure 1 "There are two basic parts to biological and social systems: thermodynamic happenings and coded limitations. The coded information amounts to plans which are executed in some sort of construction process. In biological systems the codes might be embodied in DNA, hormones or even mating dances. The construction might be protein synthesis, but could equally be making a nest for a bird. In social systems, there are many modes of construction, all involving plans. The whole constructed material system is an update on the narrative that the whole tells its mates, predators and prey. The scientist observes the updated whole with its extended story. The scientists tell stories about those stories amongst themselves. The construction may not live up to the plans such that the system must become something else more efficient by creating a new plan. Economists let their systems continue to tell their respective stories as they watch adjustments in plans as the system repeatedly becomes more economical, more flexible or bigger. Ecologists and biologists in general do not wait for their systems to update, and merely note that the old plan fails to work as resources are used up. Economists expect adjustments to be only temporary and simply note that scarcity increases costs that demand ever more efficiency."

Note the role of the observer in the above model. Definition of a system as high gain or low gain is dependent on the level of analysis. Thus, if the boundary of the system is the fuel entering the car, then the system is high gain. But if the system is bounded to include oil drilling, transportation and refinement, with crude oil as the original input, then it is low gain.



And the manner in which work gets done is dependent on whether the system is low or high gain. "High gain takes in high quality material and degrades it without effort put into being efficient: profligate consumption. Low gain efficiently degrades inputs to get more work out of them. The option may then be open for taking in lower quality of inputs. There is not only more quantity of raw lower quality inputs, but they also contain potential for producing a greater quantity of refined material that is of the same quality as the high gain inputs used directly as fuel. Degradation is separate from dissipation, which is input quantity times degradation. Low gain in the end gets more work done by increased degradation opening the door to greatly increased dissipation."

The article ends with a discussion of termites aimed at illustrating the processes of system evolution.

Termites make a very good example of how shifts over evolutionary time follow the patterns of high and low gain. Primitive termites eat good wood in which they live. In the end they literally eat themselves out of house and home. These high gain termites are forced to reproduce and move to a new site where new good wood prevails (Thorne and Traniello, 2003). The forced move amounts to a high gain collapse. More advanced termites eat a wide range of organic materials from the environs (Wilson, 1971). As opposed to the moderate colonies of high gain termites, the large low gain termite colonies live in huge ventilated mounds built of saliva cemented feces. They still eat woody material but they do so by gathering dead and rotting wood from the landscape around them. The large size of these colonies is characteristic of low gain systems. Lower quality woody remains exist in larger quantities over an area than does good wood. Good wood is a local resource, focused on individual chunks. Gathering woody material that is diffuse is clearly low gain and offers economies of scale.

The figure to the left shows "termite evolution from high to low gain on a pleated surface. Starting up in the top left of the surface, high gain termites eat themselves out of house and home, collapsing at point A where the colony must reproduce and move. The shift to low gain always occurs only as the instability is imminent. The course correction at the last minute avoids collapse of the resource base by becoming suddenly much more efficient. The correction may avoid collapse by reaching the continuous surface at point B. The alternative route to B is the dotted line of prudent planning. No system ever does that because it is out-competed by high gain rivals, and there is no incentive to economize anyway. Point B is transitional. It leads to low gain efficiency and increase in size due to economies of scale at point C. Burdened with much infrastructure the low-gainers at C can become too large and demanding, in which case they fall over the front side of the surface. The super low gain strategy of the soil eaters goes to point D with deep adaptation and energy limiting super low gain resources."

This article is both deep and abstract. As I've only started to seriously work my way through it, I've focused more on expanded quotes rather than summary and exposition. Any thoughts?

A Reasonably Good Facsimile of a Future with Less Carbon

Bill McKibben suggested in Deep Economy that America could cut its carbon emissions in half, not by going back to primitive village life and donning hair shirts, but by becoming more like Europe, which has half the carbon emissions of the US (and per capita, Canada, for that matter).

An article by George Marshall in New Internationalist Magazine makes the case that Britains could cut their carbon emissions by 80% by living the way they did back in 1972. He seasons personal anecdotes of his life as a boy with statistics that offer proof that we had a pretty decent life back in 1972. We lacked nothing but excess consumption and we had more time together as families and communities, which Robert D. Putnam says in Bowling Alone is the one thing that will really make us happy.

"What will life be like if wealthy countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent or more? George Marshall finds a trip down memory lane can teach us plenty about a low-carbon future.

Imagine reducing emissions by 80 per cent. It seems huge and daunting without a technological revolution. But imagine achieving that target just by turning the clock back to the time when emissions were still at that level. For example, how far back would you have to go to reduce by 80 per cent the amount that British people fly?

1972. Yes, 1972. It really isn’t so long ago – and if it does seem a long time, consider that to halve flights you only have to go back to 1993.

When we try to envision a low-carbon society we often forget that one is still alive in our collective memories. Nearly half the current population of Britain was alive in 1972 and it was hardly the dark ages. People lived, laughed, and loved just as much as now.

The early 1970s marked the first time in Britain when people’s basic needs were largely met. Yes, there were still pockets of absolute poverty, but by and large, people were housed, fed, clothed, and in work. They had weekends off, annual holidays and spare cash for entertainment and leisure. It was not a time of great plenty – but of ample sufficiency.

For every sector, the figures tell the same story – had we chosen to keep that standard of living and applied our ingenuity to making it better, fairer and more efficient, we would not now be facing catastrophic climate change. I feel a deep sadness that we did not make that choice, but some hope in the knowledge that a potentially sustainable society has occurred within my lifetime.

With this in mind I have been re-examining my own memories of 1972, supplemented by the statistical evidence.1 I want to know how it felt to live with lower consumption and lower expectations. What lessons can we learn, and can we move forward in a way that is intelligently informed by our own recent past?"

Math, Systems Theory and Cities: West in NY Times

It's worth going over again, this time in text, the mathematical theories of physicist Geoffrey West regarding cities and social metabolism. The NY Times article does a remarkably good job of laying out the theories and findings in a few pages. One thing that the article discusses that was not mentioned in the videos is how much West's theory supports the findings of social urbanist Jane Jacobs:

"It’s when West switches the conversation from infrastructure to people that he brings up the work of Jane Jacobs, the urban activist and author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Jacobs was a fierce advocate for the preservation of small-scale neighborhoods, like Greenwich Village and the North End in Boston. The value of such urban areas, she said, is that they facilitate the free flow of information between city dwellers. To illustrate her point, Jacobs described her local stretch of Hudson Street in the Village. She compared the crowded sidewalk to a spontaneous “ballet,” filled with people from different walks of life. School kids on the stoops, gossiping homemakers, “business lunchers” on their way back to the office. While urban planners had long derided such neighborhoods for their inefficiencies — that’s why Robert Moses, the “master builder” of New York, wanted to build an eight-lane elevated highway through SoHo and the Village — Jacobs insisted that these casual exchanges were essential. She saw the city not as a mass of buildings but rather as a vessel of empty spaces, in which people interacted with other people. The city wasn’t a skyline — it was a dance."

I've begun a study of Manuel Castells book "The City and the Grassroots." Along with Jane Jacobs, David Harvey, Richard Florida, and now Geoffrey West, I consider Manuel Castells, the Barcelonian sociologist, to be one of the greatest urban sociologists. Indeed, he is considered THE foremost urban sociologist in the field today.

Much Ado About Not Much in Anthropology

First, two disclaimers. I have no inside knowledge about the the matters about to be discussed. Like most other commentators, I only know what has publicly circulated. Second, despite what I'm about to say, I have a lot of respect for Nicholas Wade as a science journalist.

A few days ago the New York Times published an article by Nicholas Wade "Anthropology a Science? Statement Deepens a Rift" describing an internal debate within anthropology.

Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan. The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.

During the last 10 years the two factions have been through a phase of bitter tribal warfare after the more politically active group attacked work on the Yanomamo people of Venezuela and Brazil by Napoleon Chagnon, a science-oriented anthropologist, and James Neel, a medical geneticist who died in 2000. With the wounds of this conflict still fresh, many science-based anthropologists were dismayed to learn last month that the long-range plan of the association would no longer be to advance anthropology as a science but rather to focus on “public understanding.”

Until now, the association’s long-range plan was “to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects.” The executive board revised this last month to say, “The purposes of the association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects.” This is followed by a list of anthropological subdisciplines that includes political research.

The word “science” has been excised from two other places in the revised statement.

Note the construction of the paragraphs, which constitute the lead portion of the article: Wade sandwiches the discussion of a well publicized decade old controversy between two paragraphs devoted to the article's main point (the change of wording in the association's long-range plan). By referring to the earlier debate Wade documents the existence of significant divisions among anthropologists. By surrounding his description of the past incident with material about the current event, Wade links them together in the reader's mind. It is the juxtaposition of the two events that provide evidence of the supposed ongoing "tribal warfare" within Anthropology.

Individuals familiar with studies of how journalists construct their stories (see, for example, Tuchman's Making News: A Study in the Social Construction of Reality or Ericson's Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News Organization) will recognize some of the strategies Wade is deploying. First, there is the obvious emphasis on social division present in the "tribal warfare" reference. As captured in the well known journalistic homily, "If it bleeds, it leads" crime, deviance, violence, tension, etc. all attract readers. Or, stated another way, a story framed in terms of conflict and drama is more likely to make it past the editors desk than the same information framed in a less attention-grabbing format. Second, by providing context journalists help their readers understand the information being presented. Without that context, the event might be dismissed is trivial and irrelevant. Wade's reference to the earlier controversy is designed to provide that context. It lets the reader understand the current event not as an isolated event but, rather, as an outgrowth of a long-standing rift within the discipline.

Viewed in this light, we can pose a simple question: Has Wade described an actual feud within anthropology or has Wade, through the use of journalistic tropes, constructed a narrative that fundamentally misrepresents the situation? My vote is with the second alternative.

(Parenthetical note: I'm treating Wade as representative of a variety of reports, not as the sole origin of the problem. Indeed, other sources (see the articles in Inside Higher Education and The Chronicle of Higher Education) reported the dispute earlier. I've focused on the Wade article for three reasons. First, a focus on the specific construction of an article is necessary to highlight the points I'm trying to make. Second, as a long standing and highly regarded science journalist for the NYTimes, I hold Wade to a higher standard. Third, Wade's characterization of the dispute is less nuanced than the Inside Higher Ed piece and more stereotypical and cartoonish than the Chronicle article.)

Individuals interested in a blow by blow account of how the controversy emerged and spread should read Anthropology, Science, and the AAA Long-Range Plan: What Really Happened and the series of related posts at Neuroanthropology. What you discover are the following:

1) There was no attempt to exorcise 'science' from the association's conception of anthropology. (Click here for a marked up version showing the original and more recent versions of the controversial text.) While the word 'science' was deleted from the long-range plan, the same meeting approved a document 'What is Anthropology' including the following text:

Anthropology is the study of humans, past and present. To understand the full sweep and complexity of cultures across all of human history, anthropology draws and builds upon knowledge from the social and biological sciences as well as the humanities and physical sciences. A central concern of anthropologists is the application of knowledge to the solution of human problems.

The language here is quite inclusive -- covering natural science, social science and the humanities. Moreover, the committee's claim that the wording changes were really a matter of mundane housekeeping appears supported by the shift of another passage -- that dealing with the "application of knowledge to the solution of human problems" -- from the long-term plan to the 'What is Anthropology' document. Thus, in contrast to Wade's account of an internal putsch aimed at re-defining the discipline, the motives for the word change appear to have been boring and bureaucratic -- the updating of documents -- with no sinister intent.

2) The controversy spread mainly through articles, like Wade's, written by outsiders. It did not emerge organically from inside the discipline. The discussion became an intense focus in the blogging community only after articles about the feud appeared in the Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and other similar locations. The notable exception to this generalization is Peter Peregrine's email on behalf of the Society for Anthropological Sciences. However, the SAS appear to have based their understanding of what transpired at the AAA executive meetings entirely on the text of the long-range plan without knowledge of the 'What is Anthropology' document. In addition, there is the possibility that Peregrine was attempting to arouse a sense of outrage in order to boost membership in the SAS. If nothing else, he clearly saw the controversy as an opportunity for encouraging membership renewals.

3) There exist real divisions within anthropology -- and indeed within all social science. But they are neither as tidy nor as stable as Wade's warring tribes allusion suggests. For example, if you survey the range of online reaction to the controversy, virtually none of the comments invoke the Chagnon debate that Wade uses to frame the dispute. Rather than attempt to unpack the real divisions, Wade constructs an overly simplistic division between 'science' and everything else without ever defining science. Indeed, the whole controversy has played itself out that way. People are for or against the change in wording -- but few actually define what they mean by science. They are, in many ways, ships passing in the night.

In short, the current controversy tells us more about the state of contemporary science journalism than it tells us about anthropology. But, the title of the post is 'much ado about not much' and not the proper Shakespearean 'much ado about nothing' for a reason. The fact that these articles created such a stir is a sign of something -- I just don't think it is a sign of what Wade claims. In the same way that a psychologist will say that an affair is the result of marital breakdown rather than the cause, Wade's ability to stir up controversy is a manifestation of real divisions even if they are more complex and unacknowledged than he is aware.

Attempting to explain those divisions would make this (already long) post much, much longer. Suffice it to say that I think there are at least three major things going on:

1) A post-Kuhnian understanding of how scientific knowledge changes. I take this to mean both a) an appreciation that the production of scientific knowledge is rooted in social context (for example, that observation is theory-laden) and b) that scientific knowledge evolves from rather than evolves toward (i.e., that it moves away from theories with empirical problems rather than toward 'truth')

2) The legacy of the Science Wars of the 1990s between natural scientists and social constructionists over whether natural science is or is not just another belief system.

3) The organized chaos of modern methodological practice so brilliantly explicated by Andrew Abbott in Chaos of Disciplines. Challenging the accepted belief that knowledge is in a perpetual state of progress, Abbott contends that disciplines instead cycle around an inevitable pattern of core principles. New schools of thought, then, are less a reaction to an established order than they are a reinvention of fundamental concepts. This leads Abbott to characterize the social space of methodological practice as analogous to a city street grid. Thus, not only can researchers opt for recognizably different methodological practices (e.g., locate themselves at the intersection of different streets) but they can mistakenly think they are engaged in the same research practice (e.g., find themselves at the same intersection but only realize after much discussion that they arrived there by taking different paths and that those paths affect the meaning they ascribe to a particular research practice).

Anyone seriously attempting to understand the social dynamics within anthropology would need to start with a clear definition of science (is it a method? a body of knowledge? a form of reasoning? or what?) in light of the above considerations.