Reflection: His Master's Voice

First off, Phil, I am definitely NOT a bastard! Unless, of course, somewhere between the course of graduating with a bachelor's of science and getting your PhD, you suddenly become completely disingenuous to society and decide that it's not worth your time. I can't say for sure, though. Graduate school can be a scary place.

I want to dedicate this post to the scientists of the world. The general consensus on HMV, at least from discussion and posts, that the book is firmly in a kind of "anti-scientist" camp. We've arrived in a situation where, when prompted with the PTJ's question of who do we entrust the message to, half the class is ready to throw it to the poets instead of the scientists (at least no one really threw it to the government camp). And before that, PTJ asked what kind of success we can attribute to HMV, comparing it to something like the Manhatten Project. Where we ended up was a kind of vilification of the scientific process, where we look at HMV, with its lack of answers and say "these guys suck because they got nothing definite out of it". Personally, I find that trend extremely disturbing in. Let me try and convince you that the HMV project, as it was outlined in the book, couldn't have been given to the "elves".

First off, the question of the "success" of the project. Whatever happened to the scientific method? You guys remember that, right? Going in with an attitude of whether or not something is "successful" is influencing your results from the start. In the end, that's what the government wanted in HMV. From the beginning of the project, it was pretty obvious the military wanted some kind of weapon from it. Imagine if drug companies ran trials predicated on whether or not their drug worked, and when their drug killed people instead of helping them, walked away calling it "unsuccessful" and fail to publish results (well... actually they do this pretty often, despite it being quite illegal). Just because you negate a possibility doesn't mean it's unsuccessful! In science, the very definition of success can be the negation of theories. Therefore, PTJ's question about the success of the HMV isn't even a legitimate question! That line of thinking arises from our basic assumption that the signal actually is a message, that it somehow means something, which is probably a common view point. It's the wrong view point.

But, of course, there are practical problems here. Let's go back to my "pure" science argument from class, which is really a distinction of "science for the sake of science" and "science for humanity". Science for the sake of science is something like what I do for research right now - that is, looking at the evolutionary relationships within a phylum of marine worms that have NOTHING to do with humanity. That's science for the sake of science. You can't really say my research is "successful", because it has no expected end-point. We're simply looking to expand humanity's knowledge. Of course, you can say whether or not the science in it is valid (like, you can't just throw away results you don't like), but it's not like I'm looking to make something out of these worms. Science for humanity is something like cancer research. It has a goal, and it can actually be judged on a scale of "success". But there, we know there is an attainable end-product. We have enough knowledge to form protocols - we know cancer is the result of human cell mutation, and not, say, alien cells inhabiting our bodies.

In His Master's Voice, the government treats the interstellar message like it's cancer research. This is the wrong approach. Discovering the TX effect during the HMV project is equivalent to me discovering that my marine worms produce weapons grade plutonium out of their rectum. It would be a product of research, but not a goal of research. So, we know the government took the wrong approach to HMV, but is there any evidence that their expectation of a product from the research directly affected the science of the project? Clearly hardly any of the scientists at HMV were government officials, and had no purposeful drive to make some kind of weapon. And clearly, all sorts of research was allowed, and Hogarth didn't mention research purposely stifled by the government. Perhaps the only influence of the government was the secrecy of the project and its placement of scientists in one facility - but it's evident from the book that this helped research, since public release of information hasn't led to many more successes.

So, would I give the project over to purely the government? No, since they clearly have motivations which hinder their success. We're already seen how being biased toward the message didn't help. Certainly just looking for a weapon isn't the best option. Of course, the second option is what we've collectively called the "poets", or people who think "outside the box". That's all well and good, but I see one massive problem there: they have no ability to work with quantifiable data. Sure, an artist or a poet thinks differently about the world than a scientist, but what could they do with it? Without some kind of quantitative analysis of it, something only the scientists are equipped to do, the poet is trapped in the realm of the physiological qualitative analysis. And, of course, early on in the book, Hogarth runs through what is effectively a proof on how physiological qualitative analysis of the message is one of the most biased ways of looking at the message. It's like trying to force it into a human context when there is no human context.

The most immediate opposition to this point that I can see is the "philosopher argument", where someone could apply qualitative analysis to the message without bringing in their physiological biases, someone who would think "outside the box". This is all a well and good theory, but in practice, it's hardly doable. How could someone who didn't have scientific training think qualitatively about massive amounts of very specific data? It doesn't work - it's not that easy, nor is it that simple.

Let me end by saying that Hogarth's critique's of the scientists he was working with was valid. But what I think many who read the book failed to realize that Hogarth wasn't criticizing all of science, he was criticizing bad science. And for people who don't really know a lot about how science works, it's hard to tell good science from bad science. Hogarth obviously had it out for scientists who thought there was some kind of "goal" for the message, or outright believed that it was obviously a message of good or evil. He was denouncing having a bias going into it. And, at the same time, he was criticizing them for not thinking outside the box - they weren't being creative, and they weren't relying on quantitative data to back them up. In reality, what the HMV really needed was zero government involvement in terms of driving towards a goal, and a team of scientists who had the ability to analyze their data as if they were "philosophers". In the end, it got a little bit of that, but certainly not enough. What HMV pointed out was the fragility of scientific understanding, and just how much we DON'T know. In science, and hopefully in all disciplines, the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. HMV was a grand testament to how much we don't know. And that's a good thing.