Beach Haven

BibliographyKaiser, David. 2011. How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company.

Reviewed by Michael Beach 

The title of this book makes the topic quite clear. David Kaiser compares the state of theoretical physics post World War II (particular the 1960s and 1970s) as compared with pre-war science. In particular he looks at a group that formed primarily at UC Berkeley known as the Fundamental Fysics Group (sic). Members of this at first informal group were generally trained in traditional experimental physics, but longed for the days of European salons of the 1920s and 1930s that included the likes of Albert Einstein and Michael Polanyi where one was more free to speculate.

The author makes a central point how in order to advance understanding, “a critical mass of researchers needed to embrace a different mode of doing physics” (Kaiser 2011, xiv). “They had to incorporate philosophy, interpretation, even bald speculation back into their daily routine” (Ibid.).

Members of the Berkeley interlocutors embraced ‘new age’ ideas around eastern mysticism, spiritualism, and the like. They looked to link physics with human psychological power through use of experimental drugs, among other empirical approaches. They called this sort of ‘science’ after the Greek letter psi with a goal “to plumb the foundations of quantum mechanics in search of explanations for parapsychological… phenomena: extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, the works” (Kaiser 2011, 65).

So how did the group of mostly grad students and dropouts employ ‘drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll’ to ‘revive’ theoretical physics? After WWII, most practitioners of physics were focused on empiricism and number crunching. The work was not appealing to the book’s documented physicists who fancied themselves above what Thomas Kuhn called ‘normal science’. They were looking to create revolutionary ideas in the tradition of Einstein. Their group discussions often revolved around ‘Bell’s Theorem’ that postulates how “quantum mechanics worked impeccably ‘for all practical purposes’” (Kaiser 2011, 25). Success of a number of them waxed and waned. Some of them produced very popular books. There was a great deal of focus on mental performances by the likes of Uri Geller. As the hype gained more notoriety, a number of debunkers emerged. One of the primary members, Ira Einhorn emerged as a sort of leader and guru to the group, and to non-physicists who shared similar interests. Unfortunately, Einhorn spiraled downward. He eventually killed his girlfriend and fled to Europe to avoid prosecution. Physics as an industry began to be less funded, and psi topics in particular became eschewed. Members of the group who did not get wealthy on their earlier popular books were forced to seek other ways to make a living including taking on everyday jobs.
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Kaiser notes how more recently a sort of resurgence of theoretical physics is upon us, and some members of the Fundamental Fysics Group have reemerged in the field. In general, they are avoiding the link with parapsychology. Event he idea of ‘psi’ has changed. The group no longer exists, but some of its early participants redubbed a more modern version as “PSI: Physical Sciences Institute” (Kaiser 2011, 241). One might recognize later versions of physics speculation in the form of ideas like chaos theory or the more recently debated string theory. 

Bibliography

• Jasanoff, Sheila. 2008. "Speaking Honestly to Power." Amercian Scientist 96 (3): 240-243.
• Pielke, Jr., Roger A. 2007. The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 
Review by Michael Beach
 
Roger Pielke reviews some of the various roles in which scientific and technical advisers place themselves when involved in the policy process. It really doesn’t matter the policy or governing body involved (political, corporate, religious, etc.). For Pielke, there essentially four ‘idealized’ roles. The pure scientist has “no interest in… the decision-making process” (Pielke, Jr. 2007, 1). Pielke’s science arbiter is someone who “serves as a resource for the decision-maker, standing ready to answer factual questions” (Ibid., 2). An issue advocate looks to limit the scope of choice, perhaps even getting someone to believe there is really only one good choice. The books namesake, an honest broker, is generally not a single expert, but more likely a panel of them representing some larger group such as an association of experts. This broker group helps to fully vet a topic to give the best consensus on a given scientific or technology topic. For Pielke, individual experts choose how they will add to a policy discussion, and decision-makers seek out different sorts of experts in these various roles. Pielke admits there may be other descriptors, and a person may act in more than one of these categories on different topics, or even within the same policy research concern.

In several areas, Sheila Jasanoff asserts conclusions that are directly opposite those of Roger Pielke as he expresses in his book The Honest Broker. For example, Pielke makes the argument that too much dependency on the linear model may in fact have the effect of politicizing science which is the opposite of what proponents of the framework claim. In his definition, Pielke asserts politicization of science involves advocacy which he defines as seeking to constrict policy options. In fact, advocacy seeks to narrow options to essentially one alternative cloaked as the natural outcome of scientific knowledge. He says this is a false notion that scientific knowledge compels a specific outcome.

In her review of his book, Jasanoff conversely argues that Pielke depends too much on a simplistic quadrant diagram of his own making. She notes how STS scholars have argued that forms of political engagement are not fixed in advance. It continually shifts. Where Pielke argues that the best role of science is to widen the number of the scope of policy alternatives. Jasanoff points out how widening the scope of choice does not always serve public interest. “Negotiated, knowledge-based consensus that compels a particular policy may depoliticize value conflicts” (Jasanoff 2008, 242).
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Perhaps the two authors can find common ground. Jasaoff sees a problematic tendency in scientists to naturalize values and social preferences that are embedded in science itself. Speaking about the idea of honest brokers in the form of panels in his final chapter, Pielke notes how scientists are humans and citizens. They have personal and professional values and views. It seems to me, if scientists can acknowledge their personal and professional values and how their perspective may be affected by them, the idea of honest brokers in the form of professional groups may be possible. As a typical STS argument, Jasanoff points out that the scientific process itself is value-laden. One conclusion to this typical STS position is how noting personal and professional values not only effect knowledge on policy evaluation, but effect knowledge creation as well, can ultimately help decision-makers to qualify scientific perspective as one of many considerations in creating policy. Understanding these human limits on objectivity would influence policy-makers not to discredit scientific advice, but also not to overweight it.

Lupton, Deborah. 2013. Risk. 2nd. London and New York: Routledge.

Review by Michael Beach

Deborah Lupton takes a fairly thorough look at risk from a social perspective. She spends time comparing the ‘objective’ (read numerical) expression of risk in the form of the invention of statistics and actuarial science. Then she makes a coproduction argument how this approach is a function of social factors, and how belief in numerical objectivity may be misplaced.

She spends time examining risk from theory, culture, government, ‘otherness’, and pleasure. Lupton further gets more specific around cultural and social issues with a focus on modernity and an increased attention on reflexivity. By modernity she means increases societal preoccupation with “individualization, reflexivity and globalization” (p. 77). When Lupton speaks of reflexivity, she breaks ‘societies’ into like-minded people concerning risk rather than thinking about those defined by political borders. For example, those who seek risk such as adventurists reflect their interpretation of risk, as opposed to people who consider medical pandemics.
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Aside from the introduction, the author references several major authors related to chapter heading topics. Her chapters tend to be a review of their various positions, followed by her own support and criticism of what the other authors have to say about each. It’s a helpful approach for anyone interested in digging deeper into the topic of risk in that she essentially provides a reading list of contemporary thought. 

Vasquez, Robinson. 2021. Prepare My People for the Singularity: Surviving the Dark Side of the Artificial Intelligence Revolution. Monee, IL: Robinson Vasquez.

Review by Michael Beach
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I struggle with this particular review. This is because I actually know the author. The base assumption to the work is that the singularity is inevitable and will happen soon. The idea of ‘singularity’ refers to the point at which artificial intelligence (AI) systems become sentient and begin to act independent of programming created by humans. Most of the first half of the book makes a case for these two premises in a largely technological determinism argument. The literature and thought of most who study socio-technical issues have left technological determinism behind for several decades now. It’s simply not true that technology advances independent of human choice. It’s not clear that ‘advances’ is even accurate. It seems clear there is technological change over time, but advancement assumes the change is toward some desired outcome. The very linking of change with human goals shows that technical change will follow an inevitable path.

Later in the book, Vasquez makes a shift. He starts discussing how people can avoid a malignant outcome of the singularity. This would put into question his earlier arguments in favor of determinism. Vasquez also speaks to how ‘governments’, ‘corporations’, and ‘churches’ make decisions or could intervene. Such organizations are not independent entities any more than AI is. Organizations are groups of people who interact with each other in a prescribed way. Corporations don’t decide things, rather people within a corporation decide.

Robinson Vasquez even begins linking AI singularity with Christian views of the second coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. He wonders if Christ might even come in the form of an AI, or at least communicate with humans through an AI. He finishes the work advocating for ‘prepper’ actions such as hoarding supplies and obtaining remote property to which one might retreat as AI attacks human civilization. In deed, many arguments he makes are direct references to science fiction works and sees dystopian versions as predictive.

The first half and second half of the book would seem to disagree with each other. I find the idea of a singularity and of its inevitability as unfounded. There are certainly many who have made these arguments, and some of them very highly visible proponents. There is a famous example when an AI invented a unique language in order to carry out its programming in a more efficient way. None of these examples make a sure argument. Many others working in the field of AI make arguments against the idea of a singularity. Although there are some interesting ideas in this book, they are just that… ideas. Much of the logic is muddled. 

Porter, Theodore M. 1995. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Disinterested? Self-delusional? Both?

Theodore Porter describes two kinds of objectivity. The very approach of sorting kinds of objectivity would suggest objectivity is more than the positivist view, that it is the way to describe actual truth. Porter calls the positivist view mechanical objectivity, yet he questions if such objectivity really exists. He points out how theoretical (mathematical) reasoning is more easily shared, but has “no relation to any actual world” (p.14). Scientific knowledge for example depends on a correct approach in an effort to tame human subjectivity (p.21), yet the very act of taking the correct approach in itself requires definition as to available approaches and which would be correct. For Porter, truth is negotiated by a community of disciplinary specialists (p. 12), meaning it is really disciplinary objectivity.

Expanding on Porter, Funda Ustek-Spilda acknowledges his distinction of mechanical and disciplinary objectivity and how they seem to melt into a single negotiated objectivity. Ustek-Spilda gives specific examples in the form of how countries in Europe count asylum-seekers and refugees using a seemingly universal set of rules for counting people. The trouble is there is some ambiguity in the description of who to count and how, so local administrators have to decide on rules and processes to incorporate the definitions using the context of their specific country. The result is a mix-match of approaches and something less than universal data-sets.

The process of localized decisions makes the bureaucrats not just implementers, but effectively policy-makers in their aggregation of approaches. She notes several important STS-related concepts that support Porter’s argument about the predominance of disciplinary objectivity. Statisticians become performative in their approach in that they enact the social world in efforts to describe or represent it (p. 295). She describes how statistical methods are really like Latour’s idea of ‘sociotechnical’ in that the resulting data are neither completely technically nor socially produced, but rather are a product of both. Yet, there is power in the numbers that are eventually normalized and aggregated. She describes uncertainty absorption in that the discretion (socially influenced decisions) behind the numbers fade into the background as the numbers are accepted as truth. The numbers, though, are really a result of statistical rule-making based on interpretation, adaption, and application of abstract standards, guidelines and concepts (p. 295). Interesting how in his article, Warwick Anderson seems to advocate for that sort of approach in modeling using numbers seeking to "open up a space for greater ecological, sociological, and cultural complexity in the biopolitics of modelling" (p. 167).
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Given all this, can we even put any real trust in numbers? Perhaps with an understanding of all the caveats we can say some number represents some special set of circumstances, defined in a very specific way, under very specific conditions. Seems like so long as we consider numerical representation as a sort of ‘good-enough’ data to make a relatively informed decision there may be some reason to trust what numbers are telling us. At the same time, how likely is it for those who actually make decisions to understand and accept all that qualification language? It’s much easier to just ‘go with what the data is telling us’ and absolve oneself of personal responsibility. In this way there is at least an appearance (and maybe a self-delusion) of disinterested objective decisions.

 

Phillips, Whitney. 2015. This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press.
 
In her ethnography focused on Internet trolling, Whitney Phillips seeks to understand motivations and tools within this group she often refers to as a subculture. Through her research journey, she comes to see the group not as a group so much as a continuum of people of all sorts with varying and changing perspectives. Working through a form of history, Phillips shows how the term ‘troll’ has evolved to mean different things to different people. Early examples included an ethic of exposing what trolls deemed as hypocrisy in any dominant culture. Some trolls’ antics gained notoriety in society outside their fellow trolls. This became a form of currency, called lulz, and was a prime motivation for many.

Over time, trolling behavior became personified in the form of a movement referred to as Anonymous. Factions within the trolling community and within Anonymous splintered, attacking each other at times. For example, Phillips describes two Anonymous groups. She calls the politically motivated faction as “Big-A Anonymous” who are also sometimes called ‘hacktivists’. The other portion of Anonymous she refers to as “little-a anonymous” who are primarily those still interested in lulz, or ‘lulz-ists’.

In terms of her ethnographic approach, Whitney Phillips lines out her process primarily in chapter 3. She defines her work as “a qualitative, mixed methods study” (Phillips 2015, 37). She describes conducting “dozens of online interviews with twenty-five trolls” and exchanging large numbers of emails and private messages with her “trolling collaborators” using the snowball approach to adding “research recruits” (Ibid.). Phillips acknowledges how during her research the platforms used by trolling communities and the community itself (its ranks and ideological stance) shifted and splintered. Perhaps her largest challenge was the insistence of anonymity by all the self-identified trolls willing to work with her. Over her time of participant observation, she could begin to identify individuals, even when their online names changed, through their messaging, language, and when conducting audio-only interviews, by their voices.
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She breaks up the chapter on methodology into each of the difficult research functions using section headings, including: Establishing Borders, Navigating Platforms, The Problem of Anonymity, Moving Targets, and Putting the “I” in Troll. In each of these sections Phillips discusses the barriers to research and how she approached overcoming them. For example, the last section is about how she needed to ‘out’ herself to a group of so-called ‘RIP trolls’. This sort of troll would seek out public online memorials for people who had recently died. They would then provoke family members and others through uploaded images or jokes about the person who died, or their family. Phillips had been invited to speak on a TV talk show about the issue. Feeling she had gained their trust, yet wondering if her public appearance would make her a troll target, she reached out to some of her collaborators. After several conversations she notes how one of them replied to her saying, “It’s not your job to defend us” (Phillips 2015, 46).

Biagioli, Mario. 1993. Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
 
Mario Biagioli spends little time in this book on the specifics of the scientific arguments of Galileo Galilei, though he does touch on a few high-level positions. Instead, Biagioli depicts how Galileo uses his scientific discoveries and invention of the telescope as means to position himself within the court culture of the Medici in Florence, and later in his life in papal Rome.

One of Biagioli’s arguments has to do with how patronage was used to maintain the power of the Medici and the Pope related through to putting ideas to the test (though testing processes might have been themselves questionable at times). It makes me think about science in the theoretical vs the practical. For example, G.E.R. Lloyd in The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World of Ancient Greece and China compared Greek and Roman ideals as differences of value around knowledge. Biagioli likens a differing of ideas to duels. He argues that the disputation was more important than the outcome in that honor is maintained in the fight itself. This perspective he describes as embedded in courtier life.

Patronage might be thought of as a sort of mentorship arrangement. As I understand it, a mentor would help a scientist in terms of collaboration of ideas, like say a more experienced scientist. The patrons as Biagioli describes them I think are more like sponsors by helping to set an agenda financially, if only indirectly. The sponsor hints at ideas they are willing to pay for through a broker, and the scientist woos a sponsor by properly framing research efforts, again through a broker. The sponsor-scientist relationship is clearly symbiotic in that the stature of each is raised by the position or ideas of the other. The greater the sponsor or broker, the greater the reputation of the scientist. The more striking the ideas of the scientist, the more prestige is implied upon the broker and sponsor. Interesting, sponsors do not directly pay a scientist so as not to seem to be buying loyalty. Instead the brokers act as go-betweens, not unlike a modern agent.

It might be argued that court patrons were more interested in gaining and flexing their power (giving titles, positions, making others do "their desires", etc). Perhaps they were less interested in only helping a client financially. Maybe the mentor role of the patron was more about mentoring the client in how to navigate the life of a courtier more than mentoring how to be a scientist. At the same time, I realize that my personal perspective on mentoring is based on how we might view the idea today. Back in Galileo's time the relationship described might have been thought of more like a mentor relationship.

One interesting perspective of Biagoli was how patronage was more stable under Florentine rule by the Medici family. Once Galileo moved to Rome to seek influence in the papal court it didn’t go so well for him. In that era popes tended to be old entering office, so they didn’t tend to last long before death caused a change in dynasty. As such, courtier influence waxed and waned quickly. In Florence, Galileo only had rivals of scientific prowess. In Rome, religious rivals tended to be as steeped in dogma as they were in power and face-saving struggles. As a result, when Galileo disagreed with a powerful Jesuit, he found himself in serious jeopardy. The arguments were in part about helio-centrism, but only in part. In his old age he was forced to recant some of his findings and lost much of his scientific authority.

​Mario Biagoli depicts an interesting picture of one scientist’s attempt at personal advancement through discovery, and the system of court patronage as a tool to raise standing of both benefactor and beneficiary. He also shows how such political and personal concerns influenced scientific findings, and argues that perhaps some similar influence happens still today. I tend to agree on this latter assertion. Science in many ways is beholden to whoever holds the purse strings. Perhaps funders don’t directly decide how science happens, but they do often determine lines of research by deciding which questions to pursue. 

Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, Inc.
 
The work creates a link between the perspectives of a given historical social milieu in France and the choices French society made (and makes) about how to conduct judicial and penal activities. Foucault makes the argument how in feudal France, judicial proceedings were largely closed to the public, and the execution of sentence was the opposite. Punishment was all about the spectacle. As French society morphed to more democratic morays, the opposite happened. In contemporary France trials are open to the public, and sentences are largely away from the public gaze.

The author asserts much of the shift is a function of accountability and power. Public display of brutal executions helped keep others in check, at least so the theory goes. Yet crime still happened so one could question the effectiveness of public executions. Foucault points to a balancing act by despots to allow enough public spectacle to instill fear without going so far as to seem unfair, inspiring general insurrection. In the days of kingship, the people were accountable to power. In more modern democratic societies, leadership is more accountable to the people. Many argue if this is really true, but Foucault makes the point of the technology of evermore specific legal codes which in many ways proscribe judges from arbitrariness.

A key point Michel Foucault makes is how punishment has shifted from the specific punishment to fit the crime, to generic punishment for any crime. For example, in feudal France, it would be common for a thief to have his hand(s) cut off. Today, all go to some form of prison and the only variation is the length of stay. The one modern exception to prison sentences is use of the death penalty, yet there are many legal ways to make actual execution a reality for most convicts. Likewise, all forms of execution are the same, not varied based on the specifics of the crime.

On last point I’ll share relates to the intent of punishment. In early France, motive was not considered. Crime x received punishment y. Punishment was to the body with the hopes of creating repentance within the assumed criminal. Because the spectacle was as much for the observers as for the convicted, it was not unusual for penalties to continue post-mortem. For example, a person may be strangled unto death, then disemboweled, drawn and quartered, and body parts put on public display. In such an example, the prisoner is dead after step one yet the punishment went on. Pre-execution torture was intended to extract a confession, but Foucault notes how it was understood such confessions could be false, so other forms of evidence were required for conviction. Confession would not lessen the punishment as it was only one form of evidence, and was more intended to help the sinner repent than it was for proof of culpability.

In modern times, intent or sanity are important parts of sentencing. Just as the old way was to help reform the sinner in the next life, in modern times we look to help heal the soul in this life. In this way we have adopted sentences that involve confinement in mental institutions for example. Foucault sees psychiatric efforts to confirm the accused mental state at the time of the crime, or their ability to stand trial as modern-day technologies of the court system.

The final section of the book focuses on the technology of a panoptic physical prison and the psychological effects such an experiment had on prisoners. I wrote a blog post early about panopticism. Here is the link:

http://bhaven.org/blog/the-modern-virtual-global-panopticon

​One final comment. Michel Foucault links many of the disciplinary processes and attitudes used in the penal system with those used in hospitals, the military, and schools. Each of these have a need for regimentation and hierarchy on a large scale. All claim their effort to be for the public good. 

Caldwell, Taylor. 1946. This Side of Innocence. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
 
On the surface this is a period romance, however there are underlying themes that relate to technology and society. The romance portion revolves around the Lindsey family. They include an aging grandfather William, a spinster daughter Dorothea, and a derelict son Jerome. As children, the siblings were joined by their cousin Alfred. Dorothea had long term designs on her cousin who became adopted by the widower patriarch. William was a banker. He retired and while Jerome was off sewing wild oats, Alfred was the steadfast bank manager. Alfred married, fathered a crippled son Phillip.

Alfred’s first wife passed away. Instead of acting on the obvious (for the time period) choice of his cousin Dorothea, Alfred used his influence and money to connect with a questionable younger lady of the area, Amalie. Jerome gets low on money and fears Alfred will step in with his betrothed and take over the family fortune so he returns to the family mansion.

Intrigue surrounds the family. Jerome and Alfred both work at the bank with rivalrous philosophies of how to manage affairs. Amalie marries Alfred, but later Jerome and she have a tryst while Alfred is away on business. Alfred assaults Jerome and nearly kills him. He then divorces Amalie and moves out of the family home along with his son. Dorothea moves away with him as well, though they never marry or even have any sort of romantic relationship. Jerome and Amalie eventually marry and have two children together. For nineteen years there is animosity between the two homes. All the stress causes the death of the patriarch William.

It is the next generation stirs up the hatred as Phillip becomes a trusted partner to Jerome. The older child to Jerome and Amalie is Mary. She and Phillip eventually fall in love and want to marry. That brings the old hatred out again. Alfred has softened from the conservative business man to a benefactor of the community. He only does so through persuasion of Phillip. Jerome has been in favor of using the bank to improve living standards in the community all along, so he and Phillip work together to make improvements to Rivers End. When he and Mary announce their desire to marry, all are supportive except Jerome who flies into a rage. On the way home from a confrontation with Alfred and Jerome he softens, then dies as the carriage he was riding in overturns in a bad winter storm.

The family journey is about greed, betrayal, remorse and eventually some reconciliation, though not complete. The technology and social aspects are interesting. In a number of places in the book there are philosophical arguments about the best way to use the finances of the bank and prominent citizens. Alfred is about investing conservatively and maintaining an agrarian society with money controlled by wealthy landholders. Jerome wants to invest in factories and housing for the workers. He wants each worker to have a small plot of land of their own to raise their own food, or created marketable crops as they see fit. Phillip agrees with Jerome and together they turn the investors locally and with Jerome’s connections in New York from his profligate past.

The technology comes from the arguments around how building factories and creating a more industrial society would take people away from the land. Acquisition of things become the pursuit as people become more materialistic. Education is also an argument in the story as to whether it would cause workers to become less satisfied, or help them improve their lives. There were also debates around who should lead society. Alfred favored the cold businessman. Phillip was more about educated social science minded people. Jerome argued for a mix of STEM and social sciences. Both Jerome and Phillip agreed that leaders should come from all walks of life and they established scholarships to help make that happen. Secretly, Alfred joined their cause with the persuasion of Phillip over years. Jerome never knew this was the case.

In chapter fifty-five Amalie argues that those building society like Jerome and Phillip were really doing it for selfish reasons. She postulates that people build walls out of fear, and creating a happy community at Rivers End was really just Jerome’s way of building a wall. By placating the people he would have a buffer around himself. She herself had married Alfred for his access to money, then began to feel more respect for him as she got to know him. Despite this, she allowed her feelings for Jerome to overcome her and they had an affair that resulted in a pregnancy. If one follows her own logic, it could be said that marrying Alfred and later Jerome for money and perhaps some form of love was her way of building a wall out of fear as well.

In general I’m not a romance fan. I got this book among a bunch of older ones from various library sales. I guess the STS (science, technology, and society) scholar in me latched on to the tech and society implications in the book. Perhaps Caldwell was trying to make social statements and used the family story as a way to contextualize her thoughts.
 

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979 & 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
 
Review by Michael Beach

​This work examines one of the large questions in the field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS). Are scientific facts discovered, or constructed? For the authors, facts are constructed.

Among the ideas of this work, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar describe reducing disorder in data as lowering noise, or increasing the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) between data that support a specific hypothesis, and those that don’t. Data that don’t support a hypothesis are not necessarily counter-finding data, they are just not supporting data, hence noise. This is a concept I am very familiar with from my work in satellite and broadcast networking. It also directly relates to the authors’ concept of inscription. When data are created through process, the result is inscription. As theories become accepted they tend to change into tools to further test new theories. Tools can be physical machines or processes. When the machine or process become normalized they are said to be 'black boxed'. Such black boxes are no longer questioned, but are simply accepted. In labs, the machines (black boxes) referred to take information in and spit out printed material (data sheets or curves). It is the interpretation of data or curves that come to represent what matters in the argument for one idea over another. The more isolated one point of data is over others, the more distinct the information (higher S/N), and the more it supports a specific idea.
 
There are lots of steps along the way in the machine input, processing, printing, and transcribing of data into descriptive curves. Part of the work’s argument is that without all the manipulation a distinctive curve would not result. It is just as likely, the author’s say, that another set of complex manipulations could lead to a completely different looking curve, and a different conclusion. This is especially true if earlier curves had led to a different machine (black box) to process data in a different way.
 
My satellite and broadcast example includes the use of two tools. One is called a spectrum analyzer (SA), the other is called an integrated receiver decoder (IRD). Anyone who has ever worked with satellite or broadcast signals is familiar with these tools. In satellite, for example, after a transmit earth station (uplink) sends a signal to the satellite, and the satellite receives and sends the signal back to earth to a receive earth station (downlink), signal parameters can be both displayed by the SA, and made sense of by the IRD. Both machines have complex electronic systems within them. For example, the IRD has to first demodulate the radio frequency (RF) energy, then decrypt the data stream, then decode the information within the data stream, then transform the information into something a human can understand (audio, video, text). The SA similarly requires many parameter adjustments until the energy sent through the air can be displayed and measured in a standard format, typically comparing energy density levels at given frequencies (instantaneous or averaged over some period of time). Without all that effort the information does not really exist from the perspective of Latour and Woolgar. In fact, without the equipment, intelligence (audio, video, text) would simply be lost in space.
 
I’m reminded of basic communications theory. In order for communication to happen someone must have an idea, encode it (i.e. speech), and send it across a medium. The requirement does not stop there. Someone else must perceive the signal within the medium, and have the knowledge required to decode the information (shared language and context). Does the knowledge actually exist before all those communication steps are taken? Many in the field of STS would argue that knowledge not shared is not really knowledge. Chapter 5 of Laboratory Life emphasizes the need for a form credit in order to incentivize scientists to share or communicate findings, which in turn causes knowledge creation. This idea doesn't seem to sit well with Robert K. Merton's scientific norms, but are more akin to Ian I. Mitroff's counter-norms. Because of all the required inscription effort, the authors (Latour and Woolgar) argue that such knowledge is constructed rather than discovered.
 
Below is a typical SA plot. The square shape in the middle is the desired signal. The somewhat horizontally flat lines at either side are a representative measurement of the “noise floor”. There is never an absence of noise as radio frequency (RF) energy is always present everywhere. It is generated by the sun and many man-made devices. To obtain the S/N ratio is a simple comparison of the power measurement at a representative (average) frequency at the top of the desired signal as compared to power as measured at a representative (average) place in the noise floor. The two are then divided into a ratio. Depending on the sensitivity rating of the IRD in use, there is a minimum desired threshold. All measurements are in a decibel (dB) scale. Note the specificity of the measurement scales, as well as several 'settings' in the bottom right corner required to construct the graph. All of these scales and settings are adjustable within the black box of a spectrum analyzer. To Latour and Woolgar's point, changes in scales or settings (or principles and processes leading to creation of the SA) would yield data depicted differently on the plot.