Presentations and the Concision Requirement

Friday 30 June 2023

Much of the past week has been spent working on my presentation for the upcoming IBHA conference. The conference is going to be distributed among many locations, and with much of it will be online. However, I will go to Villanova University where several people will gather who have been participating in the quarterly big history working group meetings, which have been online over Zoom.

The title of my presentation is “Big History for ETI: Recognizing Parochial and Non-Parochial Complexity.” This is an idea that I have been working on for quite some time, though in different forms as my ideas develop. And working on a presentation usually accelerates the development of the ideas I want to present, so it changes day-by-day. While, on the one hand, a presentation is a way to share ideas, on the other hand, working on a presentation is an opportunity to expand ideas and to go deeper into the most difficult and therefore the most interesting aspects. Part of this deeper penetration of an idea comes from the realization that, in communicating one’s idea to others, one must set the stage properly. In a sense, one has to recreate the route by which one came to one’s position, so that the audience can understand why you attach the importance that you do in fact attach to something that perhaps no one else is especially interested in developing. This process of filling in the background and showing the way, as it were, often leads to new insights; however, it tends to greatly expand the scope of the idea, and an idea of greater scope takes longer to communicate. This creates problems for the presenter, who wishes to present his ideas, but who cannot afford to spend the whole of his twenty minutes sketching the background.

I have listened to presentations in which this would have been appropriate, i.e., it would have been appropriate to spend the bulk of the time preparing the audience to appreciate one’s work, and then just giving the highlight of that work at the very end. In this way, any interested participants can reach out later for more details, or look up the technical papers to get the full exposition, though being able to understand the technical papers might require considerable preparation on its own. In any case, I am going to keep this structure in mind for some future presentation: make a claim that seems a little odd, or perhaps too bold, though clearly stated, and then back up from this and explain to the audience how I got to the initial claim, which is then re-stated at the end, by which time the audience may be able to understand and appreciate it. That’s not the method I’m following this time, but it’s not a bad idea. A full exposition of this kind would likely take more than twenty minutes — one might perhaps do it in a keynote talk. This time I have tried to discipline myself to a greater degree to respect the time limits of presentations, and this has meant cutting out a lot of material that I would prefer to include. The question then becomes how much can be cut out without making the remainder incoherent. This can be a tough call when one has lived with one’s ideas for long enough that they have the feeling of familiarity.

Many years ago I went to see the 1992 film “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media” (at Cinema 21 in Portland, which has always featured offbeat flicks) which is mostly about Noam Chomsky not getting invited for interviews on mainstream television (the book on which the film was based as co-authored by Chomsky). He still doesn’t get to be a talking head very often, but the film comes from the heyday of leftist critiques of mainstream media, when they could never get past the gatekeepers. Now the shoe is on the other foot, so to speak, with the gatekeepers at mainstream media outlets keeping out the people on the right, but still not terribly friendly to far left voices like Chomsky, or indeed anyone advocating the redistribution of wealth. Chomsky himself has been rather critical of the cultural leftists who are now having their place in the sun. Perhaps if Antonio Gramsci were alive today he would be getting interviewed; indeed, I can pretty easily imagine him on Italian television, even with Georgia Meloni in office.

In any case, I recall that there was a section of this film in which one of the excuses used for not inviting Chomsky on as a talking head for news programs was the question of whether he could make his point succinctly. In other words, was he capable of producing a sound bite? Chomsky later elaborated on this, calling it the “concision requirement” (if memory serves). I find myself struggling with the concision requirement. I don’t have to produce a six second sound bite, but at a conference one is expected to make one’s point within twenty minutes. This isn’t really enough time for me to get across the alternative framework I have been constructing for the past several years, especially what I call emergent complexity pluralism, which came to me on a beach on the island of Menorca in the summer of 2018, and the first exposition of which was my presentation in Milan at Claudio Maccone’s event in 2019. Since then, most of my presentations have been about this in one way or another. My NoRCEL presentations, for example, focused on origins of life, but in each case I tried to place origins of life in a larger context of emergent complexity, which not only might include other kinds of life on other worlds, but also other kinds of emergent complexity that aren’t really life at all, unless we abandon at least some of our assumptions as to what constitutes life.

My upcoming presentation is part of this same ongoing argument about emergent complexity pluralism, but once again I am split between giving enough background so my ideas can be understood as intended, vs. presenting my newest approaches which flesh out this idea. I’ve already come up with a new thought experiment that was intended to be part of the presentation, but, given the time limits, I have already cut it out with the intention of using it elsewhere — fate willing I will live long enough to have a chance to make use of it. And I have been asked to contribute a paper to an upcoming volume — Death And Anti-Death, Volume 21: One Year After James Lovelock (1919–2022) — which will provide me with another opportunity to elaborate upon my theme. Having a definition of life is as good as having a definition of death, and ambiguity in a definition of life means ambiguity in a definition of death. I can add Lovelock into the mix as well. Lovelock’s Daisyworld model that he used to defend the Gaia hypothesis demonstrates ecological thinking on a planetary scale and in an astrobiological context. This is a perfect chance to further delve into the implications of emergent complexity on a cosmological scale.

Eventually I’m going to have to do a full exposition of this material. I am working on an outline for it, and in its current state of development it is divided into 24 talks, each of which would be between 30–60 minutes each. I also have an outline for an exposition of space ethics that runs to 36 talks, and an introductory exposition of the study of civilization that is at 14 talks. The work on these outlines goes rather slowly, as I work on them slowly and incrementally. But they are growing as I add detail, and I am at present kicking around the idea of starting to record some talks this year or the next. I’m not sure how much to put into this. I would like good audio and video quality, so should I get a good microphone and camera, get a blue screen, and do it all at home, or should I find a small (and cheap) video production place and get help from people who know what they’re doing?

My reasoning, as always, is focused on how to communicate my work. Most of what I have done to date is written, and perhaps the bulk of it in blog posts. I am inclined to believe at this stage of my life that that was a misdirection of labor. If I had spent a dozen years writing papers and getting them published I might have had more of an impact than any number of blog posts. Now, my blog posts have connected me to a few people and to a few opportunities for which I am grateful. Would I have built a better network if I had written papers instead? What about my ten years of speaking at conferences — essentially, any conference that would have me? Again, the alternative is a counterfactual that cannot be known or quantified.

Would a number of talks, uploaded to every platform to get the most exposure possible, be yet another enterprise into which I sink years and, at the end, have very little to show for it? I can be responsive to this dilemma by limiting the amount of time and effort I put into it. But I think it’s worthwhile, as people listen today more than they read (this is true of me as well), and having some material saved in an alternative format is another way to leave something that has a chance of surviving. If I uploaded fourteen hours worth of talks on civilization I don’t delude myself that anyone would listen to the whole thing. But maybe, some day, someone would. I have about a thousand pages’ worth of newsletters uploaded on Academia.edu, and I don’t expect anyone will read these through, but they are occasionally accessed, and they may yet find their place.

I am somewhat pleased with the structure I have found for my introductory material on civilization. This won’t be an exposition of my own conception of civilization, but rather an exposition of the state of the study of civilization to date, so it will be historically organized, but each historical discussion will be followed by a “methodological addendum,” in which I will discuss the theoretical problems involved in the study of civilization. Without pushing my own views, then, I can show why so little progress has been made to date, and how science itself can still develop so that it can more successfully model social phenomena and big picture phenomena.

The study of civilization labors under this double burden: the lack of a rigorous social science tradition, and the lack of a clear conception of how to formulate a big picture science (in contradistinction to formulating a new science as a finer specialization of accepted subject matter, which is well understood). Here’s the current outline of my civilization project:

This outline is currently 38 pages with the first section being the most developed. I don’t yet have a sense of how the length of an outline will correspond to the time required for delivery. Because this is all introductory, it would need to be followed by another series of talks specifically developing my own ideas about civilization. That’s the idea anyway.