[Fis] [External Email] Re: Summary of the New Year Lecture Discussion

[Stanley N Salthe]

Pedro -- Here’s a footnote that I did not think of during the discussion of
disinformation -- the fairly widespread phenomenon of protective coloration
of various species of animals. In some cases this mimics an aspect of the
natural world that serves as background for an animal, or it could mimic a
dangerous (like poisonous) other animal. This disinformation is built into
the ecological adventures of various kinds of animals, from fished to
insects.

STAN

On Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 2:53 PM Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.iacs en aragon.es>
wrote:

> Dear Joseph and FIS colleagues,
>
> Thanks indeed for the work done. It has been a New Year Lecture that has
> left a rich sediment of ideas and reflections that hopefully, as you
> mention, might find continuity.
> In my own view of the theme I was mostly focused on the biological
> underpinning and also in some social-historical aspects. In particular, the
> historical mixing (inseparability?) of information and disinformation is
> fascinating. I had penned a short paragraph about that (in what follows).
>
> From the most abstract perspective, it is information the essential
> concept that underlies the revolutionary changes of human
> societies--perhaps accompanied by its inseparable companion:
> disinformation. For instance, books ignited the Scientific Revolution,
> although it was accompanied by national states wars and by religious wars.
> The outstanding developments of steam engines, railways, electricity,
> telegraph, phones, cars, planes, radio, TVs, electronics, etc., that
> propelled the first, second, and third industrial revolutions, had attached
> a string of deep social conflicts and political upheavals. The continuous
> clash of nationalistic and politic ideologies contributed to create a
> blanket of disinformation that made very difficult the sheer perception of
> the new conflicts and the means to solve them. Nowadays it is computers,
> Internet, cell phones, robotics, and genomics what are propelling the new
> revolutionary period. But once more, along these crucial informational
> inventions a new wave of discord and disinformation is menacing the
> promising outcomes of the new epoch… It looks as if the “global brain” will
> always be victim of new viruses, more and more sophisticate ones (sorry--an
> unfortunate metaphor in the current times).
> Best wishes to everybody and, again, thanks Joseph.
> --Pedro
>
> El 30/01/2020 a las 9:11, Joseph Brenner escribió:
>
> Dear Friends and Colleagues,
>
>
>
> For people interested in information, the New Year Lecture on
> disinformation and its discussion has taken place against an unbelievable
> background. It is nightmarish, *ubu-esque*, Orwellian. Literally, the
> United States Minister of Health stated last week that a woman’s *freedom*
> to have an abortion was *slavery*. War is peace. The greatest short-term
> menace to humanity is coming from entities that consist essentially of
> information plus a few bits of protein and RNA. The not-so-long term menace
> is global warming whose existence is considered disinformation by some
> people, themselves heavily involved in disinformation.
>
>
>
> In spite of everything, I think the key issues came out well:
>
>
>
> 1. Disinformation and Misinformation. Intent
>
> There was general agreement on the fact of the existence of disinformation
> and of misinformation as distinct from it. Disinformation is characterized
> by the anti-social intent of the disinformer, although questions remain
> about the detailed structure of intent as an operator.
>
>
>
> 2. Countering Disinformation
>
>             Faced with the pernicious phenomenon of disinformation, there
> was a substantial consensus that ‘something should be done about it’. The
> need for tools, perhaps at first computational ones, to identify
> disinformation in documents was mentioned by several contributors. Others
> suggested the inherent limitations of solely computational approaches and
> the need to find and authenticate other criteria or ‘markers’ to identify
> disinformation. I think there should be a working group on disinformation,
> based on the willingness of FIS members to commit time to it.
>
>
>
> 3. The FIS Group (1)
>
>             I found a certain confusion between different perspectives.
> Considering the diversity of our group, this is not surprising. There has
> not been a consensus about what information and information science are. I
> noted here a lack of consensus about what *foundations* or foundational
> principles are or should be. The result was that many valid insights were
> stated in the form of examples and anecdotal cases, rather than as
> structures or principles. The, for me, basic principle that information is
> a process, an ‘informing’ rather than a datum or data received little
> attention. It should also be obvious that this Lecture could not cover all
> related aspects of communication and *behavioral* science.
>
>
>
> 4. The FIS Group (2)
>
> The above notwithstanding, I feel that many fascinating concepts related
> to information/disinformation, just touched upon here, are well worth
> further development; the following list is completely open for additions,
> including significant points I may have missed. The order is not
> significant:
>
>
>
> -        grounding of disinformation in cognitive structures/the genome ;
>
> -        hypocrisy and other recursive disinformation processes
>
> -        public origins of disinformation
>
> -        the universe of discourse in informational terms
>
> -        art and its informational content
>
>
>
> Thank you. It was a pleasure working with you.
>
>
>
> Joseph
>
>
>
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> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
> pcmarijuan.iacs en aragon.eshttp://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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