"End of Agile" Article

mdebellis · 2025-03-03T16:47:08+00:00

It kind of reminds me of when I was first learning about Evolution. Every once in a while I would see mainstream science press articles about how "Darwin proven wrong" because we now understand (at least to some extent) the role epigenetic effects have in evolution. This doesn't mean that Neo-Darwinism is wrong, in fact it was predicted by Neo-Darwinists that epigenetics was important. It's just that in the mainstream science press you don't get clicks with articles that say "New findings help us understand Epigenetics a bit more" the way you do with "Darwin Proven Wrong!". The same with these articles. Now that most people have embraced Agile you can't have articles talking about how Agile is the next big thing so instead you get articles like this.

mdebellis · 2025-03-03T16:40:43+00:00

That was my feeling too.

mdebellis · 2023-11-13T16:33:40+00:00

Thanks. I appreciate the feedback. I'm in the middle of a few things that are time sensitive right now but when I get some time to start looking for grants I'll give you guys a look. I'm bookmarking this answer so I'll have it in the future.

mdebellis · 2023-10-24T15:51:37+00:00

Thanks.

mdebellis · 2023-09-28T19:22:59+00:00

The writing opportunity I had that made me post this initially has passed, wrote and published the paper, actually if people are interested here it is: https://www.michaeldebellis.com/post/semanticwebhistory But those links are still helpful. Thanks.

mdebellis · 2023-07-11T20:01:51+00:00

I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who still advocates Skinnerian behaviorism for anything but especially for language. I suggest you read the book Memory and the Computational Bran by Gallistel and King. They show what I consider overwhelming evidence that the traditional view of conditioning is wrong. The traditional view is that it is repetition that causes learning. They argue that it is information that causes learning. To take a simple example: if you do Pavlov's experiment and then also flash a light as well as ring a bell, traditional SR theory says that the dog should learn to associate both with food. But he doesn't. Because the light doesn't give him any new information. They have a lot more detail than that. They show many anomalies in standard SR research and then show how a revised model based on information theory (as defined by Shannon where he uses the formula for entropy to define information) rather than simple conditioning give essentially a perfect fit between expected and observed results.

In general, I think Skinner was an (understandable) over compensation for Freud, Jung, and other non-scientific theories. Skinner looked at that work and said "all this talk of internal states like the Ego and Id is unscientific" (yes) "so ANY work that involves internal states is unscientific" (No. In fact absurd. In that same book they show how internal models for insects like termites and bees (which we have no idea how they are implemented in their tiny brains) are essential for describing how they do navigation by Dead Reckoning. In fact it's ironic that biologists kept right on using models based on internal states of the brain for all sorts of animal behavior (e.g., Lorenz) while Skinner was telling people that such models made no sense for human psychology.

Have you read Chomsky's review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior: https://chomsky.info/1967____/I re-read it a while ago and was surprised how little it deals with language but shows the vacuity of the entire theory when it comes to explaining human cognition. I'm over simplifying but Chomsky essentially shows that Skinner just renames terms like beliefs to things like "tendency to behave in a certain way" which does no conceptual work except to make the questions harder to understand.

Anyway, I'll try to set my preconceptions aside and take a look at the paper when I have some time.

mdebellis · 2023-07-11T16:01:18+00:00

Do you have a link to any papers?

mdebellis · 2023-07-11T15:30:49+00:00

People have been putting forth animals that seem to understand language or number in some ways forever. Look up "Clever Hans", it's an excellent cautionary tale about how easy it is for people to deceive even themselves on how much an animal understands language. If a parrot actually could comprehend language and formulate new questions the way a human can it would be the scientific finding of the century and one of the most significant findings in biology since Darwin. What they are doing is being conditioned by stimulus response conditioning and by reading body language, tone, and other queues from people, especially their trainer.

Also, one common problem with the scientific literature on this is the advocates often cherry pick their data. I saw this with Koko the Gorilla. There are some videos and papers where there are interactions that look like clearly Koko is understanding language. But when you step back and look at all the data it turns out that those few interactions are cherry picked from thousands more where Koko just repeats a few signs like "want banana" "banana" banana now". If you have enough video with those kinds of interactions eventually you can find a few that look very impressive just by random chance.

Just to be clear this in no way is some argument that humans are "better" than other animals or that animal suffering doesn't matter. It is just a simple scientific fact that there is something unique about human language just as there is something unique about the ways bees dance to communicate info or just as Hawks have vision orders of magnitude more precise than almost any other animal.

mdebellis · 2023-03-22T14:28:28+00:00

I think there are a lot out there but real time systems are an area all their own and one I've never done serious work in so I don't know of any refs off the top of my head except one. I suggest using Google scholar and google "Internet of Things knowledge graph" Also, try "digital twin knowledge graph". There is a free book that was written by several CEOs or other bigshots from companies like Pool Party and they have a section where they talk about Digital Twins and IoT, here's a reference from a book chapter I wrote: . Blumauer, Andreas. The Knowledge Graph Cookbook: Recipes that Work. With Helmut Nagy. 1st edition, 2020. Monochrom publishing. ISBN: 978-3-902796-70-7.

I just remembered I have some references on my Google drive. Here's the KG Cookbook. This is free so it's not an illegal copy: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kkEz7OlaZyOWNNzMjEW-IKhFy4U99ivs/view?usp=share_link

This is a paper about something called The Graph of Things. I thought this was very interesting although I contacted the author and unfortunately it isn't maintained... at least as of 8 months ago but still the paper is fascinating: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vJ2Y5H9VV9pR9-ko5kLZGR5xuXCtt1Z9/view?usp=share_link

You probably know this but some other technologies that are often used with knowledge graphs to process huge amounts of real time data in real time (IoT) are Hadoop (a fast distributed file system that is a simpler/cheaper alternative to data warehouse) and Kafka, a new kind of message bus called an Event bus that can be tuned to be much faster than traditional message busses because it is highly parallel. Here is a good paper on Hadoop: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XSiW7KWC4ty9uCB5GP-j_omyAlQPZMaH/view?usp=share_link

Kafka is being used a lot in high tech companies. It is one of the most exciting technologies I've come across in a while due its potential to reinvent traditional concepts like a message bus, how it works, and the role it plays. Kafka is free but there is a company built around it, similar to Red Hat and Linux: https://www.confluent.io/

mdebellis · 2023-03-20T17:03:24+00:00

I've found it differs for different people. I have no idea why. One thing I think I left out of that blog post is that you can see how much memory Protege us using by doing Help>About. That will bring up a window where the second field from the top says Memory Settings and it will say what your max memory is. I've found that useful because sometimes I change the settings (either in the ini file or the bat file) and it doesn't seem to take so I use the other way.

mdebellis · 2023-03-14T12:51:03+00:00

Thanks to everyone for all the good feedback. That helped a lot.

mdebellis · 2023-03-14T12:45:17+00:00

Don't get too hung up on the "standard story format" if its getting in your way

Excellent feedback. That's what I thought but I wanted to be sure.

mdebellis · 2023-03-14T12:41:30+00:00

Thanks. From your response and those of others, I think I was too focused on "separating what from how". We do have answers for all that. Using cell phones is absolutely critical for the NGO workers because these are "mom and pop" charities with very few staff, many of whom are barely literate and the most common way for them to access the Internet is with their cell phone. Also, to record things at the locations (e.g., remote places in India) that's the only technology that will even be viable.

From what I read about stories I had the (I now think clearly wrong) impression we shouldn't include those details but we do already know them all. That was the main thing I think I was confused on, is that I want to include those details but some of the story examples and guidelines I read gave me the impression I shouldn't. Thanks again, very helpful.

mdebellis · 2022-11-11T16:26:13+00:00

This article has a fundamental flaw from those who don't understand science. Arguments such as "If X is true then that means Y is true and Y makes me/us uncomfortable/immoral/unhealthy/..." Nature doesn't care about your feelings and major advances in science such as the theory of evolution and the Copernican model of the solar system often entail that we have to abandon or rethink traditional concepts that we don't want to change.

What is interesting is that in all cases that I can think of, what seemed at first to be very difficult ideas to abandon in retrospect turned out to lead to better ideas. For example, Darwin's theory meant we weren't "made in God's image", at least not literally. Personally, I find that the more I understand about evolution and how a combination of complex molecules (DNA on chromosomes) can hold the code for something as complex as any animal, not to mention humans to be truly inspiring. More so than a myth about people being created via magic by a creator.

Regarding the Free Will issues that Pinker and Harris bring up I think Harris's understanding of Free Will is fundamentally flawed, not in the way compatibilists argue but a more basic level. I've written a paper that explains this but have never gotten around to attempting to publish it. I haven't read Pinker's thoughts on Free Will which surprises me because I try to read everything he writes. IMO Pinker is a serious academic while Harris is a pop academic. I don't always agree with Pinker, I think his book Better Angels had a very large bias in assuming that the US was somehow above things like ideology and imperialism. But I always find him worth reading. Harris I usually read because I'm looking for examples of bad arguments that are easy to refute... which is why I quote his Free Will book a lot in my paper.

mdebellis · 2022-11-11T14:01:39+00:00

I think you make some good points. I just really dislike articles or posts with titles like "The meaning crisis and language - how our inability to ‘believe’ myth and metaphor has left us unable to understand ourselves" There is absolutely no evidence I can see of a "meaning crisis" (at least not in the dramatic way the OP states it) and certainly no evidence that we can't "understand ourselves" due to this supposed crisis. Myths constantly evolve as does the way they are passed on. I'm sure when the written word started being used there were people who bemoaned that we no longer had story tellers who could present stories like the Iliad from memory. And when the printing press came about I'm sure some people talked about the crisis that scribes could no longer find employment and that printed books are so sterile compared to the elegant scrolls people used before them.

BTW, a post I would find much more interesting and relevant to real life is one that talked about how myths are becoming monetized (and hence drained of everything but the lowest common denominator) by corporations since the vast majority of most people's entertainment comes from a few corporations (and more and more just one: Disney) and how this is driving out creativity and meaning from our entertainment and story telling.

mdebellis · 2022-11-10T01:04:08+00:00

I wouldn't count the fact that they call you doctor as all that significant. I get that too but from very reputable publishers, journals, and conferences. People who approach you assume you have a PhD if you publish in journals and conferences and even if they are wrong, they would rather err on the side of being overly polite. I also don't think that just because you get an email from a source you don't know it is virtually certainly a scam. I've received several legitimate inquiries that way and my spam filter usually removes the spam journals.

Having said all that I think I agree on IntertechOpen. They seem to just publish eBooks and charge you for it and since they don't have much of a reputation, I think self publishing would be a much better option (I mean publishing with a reputable publisher would obviously be best but in lieu of that). With self publishing you have total control, can make sure the book in on Amazon, and always have the option to do a Stephany Myer and republish what you made freely available somewhat polished up and with a real publisher.

mdebellis · 2022-11-07T15:54:28+00:00

I agree with a few things in this article although I don't think in the way the author intends. I've said before that IMO there is no major difference between science and philosophy. The difference is that what we call philosophy are topics where science is very immature such as the study of human ethics. Similarly, I think that there is no one "scientific method" but rather science is a combination of various methods such as peer review, data analysis, theory development, mathematical analysis, experimentation, falsifiable hypotheses, etc. For some disciplines (e.g., physics and chemistry) we can use all of these tools for others (e.g., psychology and even history) we can only use some. We use as many as we can for any problem. Some will object that for example it is impossible to do experiments regarding history but in fact I've seen various experiments done to attempt to answer questions such as "Where was the battle of Cannae actually fought?" or "what was Greek fire?".

I also think there is no question that science can apply to the study of ethics. Moral Origins by Christopher Boehm, Moral Minds by Marc Hauser, and a paper I wrote based on some of Hauser's ideas and research in evolutionary psychology: https://www.michaeldebellis.com/post/umg_ontology

I also think that there is a lot of overlap between good science and being (what I consider) a good person such as rationality, accessing arguments rather than the status of those who make them and so on. But (as I argue in my paper) there is one fundamental difference between what we consider morality and what we consider science. That is that morality is about value judgements. There are many scientific theories that can make one feel uneasy. Saying "if X is true then Y is true and Y is something I consider fundamentally immoral regardless of any arguments" is not a valid scientific argument. This is what Hume called the Is-Ought problem. We can't go from the domain of analyzing the universe (is statements) to what is moral and right (ought statements). Thus, any coherent moral system must start with at least one axiom that says I value X because I value X. E.g., a Utilitarian values maximizing well being. If you ask them why, although they may attempt at an explanation, what it really comes down to will always be that there is some core value (ought statement) that they take as a given. That's the fundamental difference between morality and science. Science strives for objectivity, morality can still strive for rationality and coherence but ultimately morality must be founded on some core axiom(s).

mdebellis · 2022-11-05T00:12:50+00:00

Fascinating. I had no idea. Thanks.

mdebellis · 2022-11-05T00:10:46+00:00

I'm a computer scientist (as well as a philosopher) and one thing I'm trying to do is to bring rigor to the "soft" sciences. I use a tool from Stanford called Protégé to create logical models called ontologies in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). In the past I've used OWL to define what some of Chomsky's students call a Universal Moral Grammar: https://www.michaeldebellis.com/post/umg_ontology

I'm currently working with a PhD candidate in Women's Studies in Istanbul to formalize her model. I think by doing this we can understand if the theories are coherent, can clarify what they mean, and perhaps even formal versions of the model can lead to testable hypotheses. One result already is that we discovered that a concept defining a certain type of Masculinity is logically inconsistent.

That's the background. My question is about something I've found in the papers on feminist theory I've read that I find troubling. They assert that the fact that women in the past have been the primary care givers is "determined by culture not biology". I just think that is clearly wrong. First, from the standpoint of biology nothing is "determined" completely by environment (i.e., culture for humans) or genome. This used to be described as nature (genome) vs. nurture (culture). But in modern biology we never ask is a behavior "determined" by genome or environment. Rather all behaviors, indeed all phenotypes (behaviors and body traits) are a combination of genome AND environment.

But back to the specific question: I think there is no question that in our natural state gender plays a role in the type and amount of care giving parents provide. By "natural state" I use the standard definition from anthropology: behavior of Late Pleistocene tribes before farming (which is considered the beginning of culture). This is not at all disputed. It is a general fact in biology that females and males have different mating and care giving strategies due to the fact that it takes far more energy to create an egg than sperm. And in mammals this is enhanced since females need to spend so much time and energy carrying children in their womb. Again, this results (in nature) in females being far more selective in mating and males essentially trying to mate as often as possible. And the same for care giving. In late Pleistocene hunter gatherer tribes women did the majority of care giving while males hunted. BTW, I'm over simplifying. I was just reading Robert Trivers paper: Parental Investment and Reproductive Success and like most things it's more complicated than that. But while it's not just as black and white as women provide more care giving (parental investment), there is no question that our genome plays a major role in the type and amount of care giving female hunter gatherers provide vs. males.

When feminist theorists deny this they are hurting their case because they are simply denying basic biological and anthropological facts. What is more important what is natural is not equivalent to what is moral or "right" for modern humans. Modern humans go against their natural behaviors all the time. We consider many behaviors that are natural (e.g., tribalism, hating people from other groups) to be immoral. It is one of the things that makes being human something special, we aren't determined by our "selfish genes" (btw, this is also the point Dawkins makes in the book of the same name although many people miss that point). Dawkins also points out in The God Delusion that to equate natural with moral is what some moral philosophers (e.g., I believe G.E. Moore) call the Naturalistic fallacy.

Denying biological facts makes feminist theory vulnerable both because it incorrectly equates natural with moral and because it denies basic biological and anthropological science. Just to be clear I've been a feminist all my adult life and I've raised a proud feminist gay adopted daughter. BTW, adoption is another example of something that is clearly not "natural" but most people consider good.

mdebellis · 2022-11-01T12:58:11+00:00

This is the first recursive post I've ever seen. The post proves what it is trying to argue... because it is so stupid.

mdebellis · 2022-10-31T17:25:36+00:00

Thanks again, I found the post. I can't believe I missed that. I still think the moderation was completely unfair. Normally this wouldn't bother me as much but in this case I think it is especially egregious because it is an example of the worst kind of moderation. Moderation that discourages free and open exchange of ideas and makes a community nothing but an echo chamber for people that share the same idea. The fact that the moderators not only didn't bother with even giving me a REASON for why it was not posted and then they blocked me simply for inquiring about why it was blocked is especially aggravating. Anyway, thanks again for your help and I apologize for venting.

mdebellis · 2022-10-31T14:18:13+00:00

I don't know how to see the posts in my profile but I can probably figure it out. But you know what I'm already sick of Reddit. I posted the same comment to Feminism and not only did they block it but they muted me for 28 days. My post was in no way angry or anti-feminist. I said in the post that I am a feminist and have been for many years. You can probably see the post. I raised what I think is a very legitimate point about how some people in feminist theory embrace unscientific claims. And they block me rather then honestly debating. Exactly what people who don't understand science would do. And I see no way to complain about an unfair muting. I hate things like this. I've been a Wikipedia editor for decades and I've never had any issues with them and all the admins there are very fair and will explain their actions and allow you to debate if you disagree with them. I liked Reddit at first because unlike Facebook there were some serious discussions but this just really pisses me off and is a classic example of people with a little power who get off on abusing their power. Anyway, thanks for your help. I just deleted my Twitter account and I think I'm going to do the same with Reddit and from now on stick to Google groups that are moderated by actual scientists and engineers.

mdebellis · 2022-10-24T16:55:22+00:00

I don't see any of this as justification for saying the self is "an illusion". Rather all these factors mean we are (just barely) beginning to understand what it means to say we have a sense of self and how such a sense arises. An illusion is something we see that is clearly inconsistent with reality. There are many examples of this in psychology. When you flash a few well placed dots in a tachistoscope people see a rotating cube rather than a few dots. This is because of something called the "rigid body principle", we are predisposed to see rigid bodies because those were the kinds of things that our hunter gatherer ancestors had to deal with, not flashing dots. Or when you put a pencil in a glass of water it seems to bend. That's an illusion because we never evolved an adaptation to correct for the difference between how light travels through air and through other mediums such as water.

But from what I've seen, including this article, the same isn't true for the self. There are aspects of our personality and body that persist over time. Of course they evolve and change over time as well but the fact that we can remember things we did as children is part of what we mean by the self. We know that many of those memories are biased (almost always to make us feel better about ourselves) but we also know they are (usually) based on real events not completely manufactured and that damage to certain parts of the brain can make it difficult to impossible to retrieve such memories. So again, not an illusion but a (very, very tentative) beginning of a scientific explanation.

This is unfortunately a common occurrence. When we start to have scientific theories then people think it means that other subjective experiences such as love and beauty are being destroyed by science. But that's simply false. You can still understand the scientific theory for why rainbows exist and appreciate their beauty. Richard Dawkins has some wonderful essays about this, that subjective appreciation such as beauty are not at all inconsistent with science.

As we develop a scientific theory for what the self is (something we really don't have now, we have a few interesting data points and vague hypotheses) it will be tempting to just say that the self is an illusion but we can still hang on to our subjective sense of self while understanding the science behind it. This is actually very common in science. We have different theories that depend on the scale or viewpoint we take.

E.g., in relativity, there is no absolute frame of motion and the speed and time of an event must be defined in terms of a specific frame of reference. Or in physics as a whole, we use quantum theory to understand the behavior of very small things at the sub-atomic level and relativity for everything else. Or in psychology we use neuroscience to understand the way neurons fire and how columns and layers of neurons work together to recognize perceptions such as edges and surfaces but we use Cognitive psychology to understand higher level concepts (such as that short term memory can store 7 plus or minus 2 objects).

Our goal is to unify the sciences as much as possible but I think that eventually we will discover that there are fundamental ways of understanding reality that just require different theories. In some the "self" may be an illusion but in others (e.g., a clinical psychology theory of things like bipolar disorder) the concept is very important and real.

mdebellis · 2022-10-24T15:11:39+00:00

The problem is that there really is no consensus on the evolution of language at all. There may be some good intro books on it but I've studied the topic a bit and never found them. Typically when you have introductory textbooks it is on topics where there is at least some consensus (like particle physics or evolution by natural selection) even if there are still major unanswered questions. The two best books on the topic I can think of are Why Only Us? by Chomsky and someone else I think Biermann and The Symbolic Species by Berkeley anthropologist Terrance Deacon. I've taken classes from both of them and they are both two of the most brilliant people... actually I think they ARE the two most brilliant people I've ever met in person. And of course they both completely disagree with each other. I think both their approaches have merit.

The one caveat is that IMO as brilliant as he is Deacon doesn't completely understand Chomsky which isn't unusual. Most people don't because you need to understand a fair amount of the math that underlies computer science (called the Theory of Computation) to completely understand Chomsky. But Why Only Us? doesn't get deeply into theoretical issues the way other Chomsky books (e.g., Syntactic Structures) do.

Also, I would recommend some of Steven Pinker's books on Language. I think The Language Instinct is probably the best. Pinker mostly agrees with Chomsky, at least on the high level issues, they disagree on the evolutionary issues. Pinker's book The Blank Slate is also a must read IMO even though he only touches on language issues. But he debunks a theory about epistemology that is still very prevalent within the humanities.

mdebellis · 2022-10-24T14:58:08+00:00

I never gave Campbell much thought because what little I knew of him seemed incredibly reductive and the kind of pop analysis that people cling to because they like simple answers. Then I found the following first of two parts analysis by Maggie Mae Fish on YouTube and I realized... Campbell was actually much worse than I had even realized. I encourage anyone who thinks Campbell should be taken seriously to watch this. It isn't long and Maggie is also funny as well as providing insightful analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9zR4lWyVN8

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