 So, welcome everybody. I'm happy to see people here. Welcome to Professor Shavit, who comes from Tel Hai College and Techno in Israel. We're both very happy to have her here. We got to know Robert and I when we were doing a reading group on the philosophy of biodiversity. And we got really interested in how she discussed the role of values in biodiversity surveys and this concept of locality that didn't seem to be as simple as it seemed. So, what up? Thank you. And so, I will talk a little bit about locality, but I found a similar interesting problem with difference. So, I will talk about the meanings and implications of everyday measurements when you want to measure difference and when you want to measure difference in a place, in a locality. So, let's see what happens. So, first of all the bottom line, what do I want to try and convince you of? That by definition, right, biodiversity models, they track differences. They track biological differences, but they track differences across and within localities. Given that, they need to measure difference and they need to measure difference in a place. And I will argue that different and at some interesting points, conflicting measures of difference and conflicting measures of locality exist. And these gaps and at times these conflicts reveal value-laden gaps. That's one point. Second, ignoring these gaps, these gaps within the meaning of difference and the meaning of locality. Ignoring these gaps has or implies non-trivial costs. And these costs are epistemic, but they're also more. And they often afflict underrepresented communities. And with these underrepresented communities come costs for the local flagship species that these underrepresented communities care about. So, ignoring these gaps is not just a matter of, it's not semantic, definitely not in what Hillary Partnum calls trivially semantic. These semantical differences come with a cost. So, instead of these prices, what I suggest is what I try to sketch with, it's not just me, it's with my colleagues. What I suggest with their help is to track difference not only by diversity, but to track heterogeneity alongside diversity. Not to suffice with measuring difference only by diversity or by diversity. And not to track locality only by lat-long coordinates, but to track micro-habitats and niche-constructed micro-habitats alongside lat-long coordinates. So, enrich what I suggest to enrich the ways you measure difference, the ways you measure your locality. And lastly, when you measure things, noticing these aspects of locality and difference, do it in a proactive way that also notices hierarchical structures. So, the common theme for all my suggestions is when you care about difference, when you care about locality, track interaction. A locality is not just out there, and difference is not just things positioned one next to the other. And track and try to measure interaction. So, these are the bottom-up, and the structure will be very brief about what is a model and how to buy a diversity model. Track difference, and then I will offer two different measures of difference. There's a long tradition about what is a difference. I'm not going to talk about it, only about measures and the measure of diversity and the measure of heterogeneity. In the Q&A, we can go also into mathematical formalizations. I will offer first a very informal account of the difference between diversity and heterogeneity, because people use it as synonymous, right? In everyday species, it's the same. It's synonymous. So, I'll offer an informal account of the difference, and then a more formal philosophical account of the difference, because I understood that mostly philosophers up here, but I also have the formalization for professional ecologists, if they want. So, I will talk about these two different measures, and what is the epistemic price of ignoring heterogeneity? What is the price of measuring biodiversity only via diversity? What does it cost us epistemically? What do we benefit by noticing heterogeneity? Then, I will face criticism, a very valid one, that says, well, that's all very nice, but does this diversity, heterogeneity, distinction practically matter? It's very nice for your philosophy to talk, but does it matter for someone who cares about biodiversity conservation in the real world? And I will argue, or cares about social diversity within an academic institution. So, do your distinctions practically matter? And I will argue that yes, they matter. This gap sometimes produces a conflict between diversity and heterogeneity, not just different, but it's a conflict. And so, this conflict is underlined by evaluating gaps, the gap between wanting to say something general about the world, wanting your data to represent some other data in some other localities, and the value of being accurate at a certain locality about a certain chain of events. And the same type of gap between the value of being real or accurate and the value of being generalizable, the same type of gap underlies a measure of locality and incommensurability in the measure of locality. It's even worse than a conflict. When it comes to locality, the gap, the measure, they don't only conflict, they're incommensurable, we don't know from where it starts to decide something. So, it's a worse problem. And I will present a case, a case study. It's called Town Square Academia. It's a project, a proactive project that I'm involved in since 2011, and it illustrates the moral and epistemic price of one's measurement choice. And this measurement choice is done in a peripheral area in northern Israel where I live and where my high college is located. And this peripheral area is also a biodiversity hotspot. And so I'll present the problem and also how noticing heterogeneity can maybe help resist some of the problems. And we need a conclusion though, there will be one. Okay. So a very short note about models. There's a huge literature about this. I'm just taking out of the shelf definition that I really like by Michael Weisberg. And the model is an incomplete representation. It's specified by descriptions. What I mean by description is it can be words or pictures or mathematical formulations followed by some legend. So the representation is specified by a description and an interpretation. The interpretation, what do I mean? I mean a prediction. So given the description, which can also be like a causal chain, a model sometimes deduces, not always, an interpretation and a prediction about the phenomenon or the target in the world. Now what do I mean by a causal explanation in a model, which is part of the model description? Here I use Scriven's account of causal explanation and it amounts to identifying a factor that makes a difference for an idealized model. What does it mean that it makes a difference? That if we move, we take outside of the model that difference maker, the model, it prevents the model from entailing the occurrence of the phenomenon that we're trying to track. So this means a causal explanation in the model. Okay. So how do biodiversity models track differences? And again, I'm not talking about difference per se. Since Leibniz principle of indiscriminate. So difference has a long history of research. Most of it I will not touch at all. I will only talk about how differences are measured within models, either biodiversity models or social models. And in everyday language, measuring difference means measuring the diversity of the entity or its heterogeneity. And in everyday language, heterogeneity and diversity are used synonymously. Colleges typically use the term diversity. But outside of the paper you will often find the use of heterogeneity. So I won't go into it, but in the paper we talk about the different research cultures, statisticians, ecologists, social scientists. Each one has its own culture of using these terms. In everyday language, they use as if they're synonymous. And what do biodiversity models typically do? They track species diversity in a locality, typically a long-term track. And you want to track differences in either species richness or diversity species composition. You want to track some long-term difference in species in correlation with some long-term difference in, I don't know, average temperature, rainfall, land use. And you want to track that on a long-term basis. So after we cleared... So after all that introduction, I want to say that diversity and heterogeneity are far from synonymous. Far from synonymous. And just to give you an informal account, it's like the difference between a zoo, the difference between diversity and heterogeneity is the difference between in a natural, between a zoo and an ecosystem. Or the difference between a queue and a social task force or workforce. So you can have the same number of species, even with the same abundance in the same area, in a zoo or in an ecosystem. But the survival of these species and the survival of the zoo as a whole does not depend on the interaction between these species at all. Whereas it's crucial, the interaction between these species, the structure of their interaction, who eats who. And the intensity of these interactions are crucial for the survival of these giraffes in the ecosystem and the survival of the ecosystem savanna as a whole. Okay? To give you a different example, the pictures on the wall here, they're diverse in the sense that there's these different pictures, one next to the other, but the wall does not depend on them. It's just diversity tracks differences. But heterogeneity pre-assumes a collective that depends on the specific kind of differences and how they interact with each other. So the same people could be standing in the queue and these exact same people, once they enter the theater, can decide, I don't know, they can be standing here, waiting to hear a talk about climate change. Then they can enter the theater and decide to establish a climate change, I don't know, a party. Now in Israel they're talking about establishing a new party. We don't have enough. About climate change. Okay? So here even if the people interact, it doesn't matter to the individual success or the success of moving along the queue. But here their interactions are crucial for the success of their party and the structure of interaction is crucial. And that's the difference between diversity and heterogeneity. Okay? To say it a bit more formally, so the property of heterogeneity describes an object. Both diversity and heterogeneity are properties of some kind of group. Okay? Depends if the group is a queue. And in heterogeneity this object, this entity upholds three criteria. First there's a difference between the entities that comprise this object and there's interaction between these different entities within a collective. Okay? So there's an assumption, a pre-assumption of a collective that depends on the type of interaction and the third one is integration. So the whole somehow depends on this type of... The differences matter to the whole. Okay? Whereas, so if I take the... You know, like the pictures on the wall, the wall doesn't... But for my watch it's crucial the different sizes of the wheels and how they interact with each other. If there's something in the interaction changes, my watch won't function. Okay? So the parts of the watch are heterogeneous. Okay? And the pictures on the wall are diverse. So, only the first criteria of difference between entities matters for diversity. So, diverse groups can be heterogeneous but heterogeneous groups must be diverse. So heterogeneity is a type, a special type of diversity. Okay? And because they differ, they require different formulations and if you want, we can talk about that more during the Q&A. And that's a formal distinction. So you might think it's a bit weird that I said before that diversity and heterogeneity conflict. How can they conflict if one is a special case of the other? How could that be? I mean, I have to decide, right? Either they conflict or one is a special case of the other. And so, what I'm arguing is that conceptually there's a gap, even a deep gap between them, and the conflict is not a conceptual conflict. So it doesn't... they don't have to conflict, but I'll try to convince you that in certain cases that we often really care about, that's when they conflict. So the conflicts, even though they're not necessary, it's an empirical question whether there's a conflict or not. The conflict matters and it matters for the biodiversity and the communities around biodiversity hotspots that we care about. Okay, so ignoring heterogeneity, sufficing with just measuring diversity, could come at an epistemic price. So what is the price? That if you think that the survival of a particular species depends on the interactions of other species in the ecosystem, especially endangered or rare species, then measuring differences while neglecting interactions and neglecting the view of the ecosystem as a collective might mean that in your model you neglected a relevant causal factor. Okay, so you neglected the ecological interaction within the biological community, the same biological community that you're tracking. You don't... It's not that you say there are no interactions, it's just that you say it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter enough for my model, for the predictions that my model will deduce. So that's one part, but the other, especially in peripheral areas and for endangered and endemic species, you also ignore the cultural interaction within the human community that often lives next to the biological community that you're tracking, and often that human community affects, might affect the chances of survival of the species or the ecosystem that you care about. Okay, so you... By measuring biodiversity alone and by measuring social diversity alone, you're actually saying interactions don't matter, and what I'm tracking, the entity that I'm tracking is not a collective, it's just a collection of things, one next to the other. Okay? So for some species, for some communities, it's fine. Sufficing with diversity alone indeed could lead to wonderful predictions, okay? But for some species and for some communities, particularly underrepresented communities and endemic flag species, in that case, sufficing with diversity alone could lead to an inaccurate model, both at the level of the description, the causal explanation, and at the level of the prediction, the model of the prediction, okay? So that's in the sense of what could it cost you if you ignore heterogeneity? You might have, and in the paper we show, different predictions, will produce different predictions under a different formalization of tracking difference, okay? So you might worry that your model will be inaccurate. But now I want to, in the next slide I want to argue that there's also benefits if you want to track heterogeneity. Okay? Not just, this is awesome. And here, when you track heterogeneity, you must notice interactions. It's, it's, there's no way ignoring interactions. And you're tracking not only the connectedness within your network, it comes from a network theory. So you're not only recording how many connections exist, but also their relative strength, okay? So you must track interactions and different types of interaction and often lead to different type of groups. So you have to care about the type of group that you're standing, that you're observing, okay? This is something that you can completely and safely ignore if you're measuring diversity. You just don't care about the group, whether it exists or not. It doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. And here I want to show you a sketch model. So, if you are, and I want to really thank Jim Grissimer, who was, oh, sorry. Oh. And who was my post-op advisor. And it's such a joy after many years to be working with him again. So, the term, the 3C model is history. So, if you track diversity, what it helps you to do is notice interactions and group. And this model, the 3C model, it tracks three different kinds of interaction processes, three different kinds of processes that often lead to the buildup of different types of groups, different objects. Okay. It's a gradual process and that's why it's called the 3Cs. It's actually the 6Cs. Okay. So, this, if you notice the process, you would treat your ecosystem or your community or your society, whatever, or your assemblage of species. You would, if you track different processes lead to different and might lead to different types of objects and if you care about conservation, they might lead you to advancing a different type of activity, a different type of conservation activity. Now, this is a highly idealized model. It's not like with the heterogeneity diversity models. It's not a mathematical one. It's a conceptual sketch and we're now working on its mathematical formalization, but it's far from ready. And so, okay. It's idealized also in the sense that it doesn't always have to go this way, right? It's not a one-way track and not in evolutionary terms, but what I'm suggesting here is not that it always happens this way, but I'm suggesting a general schema that might explain some cultural evolutionary emergence and some ecological evolutionary emergence and some benefits to particular types of policy. It's just a general schema that might help us think about some of the processes we see, but it doesn't have to go this way. It can go we already found cases that it goes that way, but this direction, okay. So what we're saying is low or minimal and relatively minimal interaction processes within the different units in the collection. These minimal interaction processes, what they do is that they typically locate or position objects or events in order. So when there's very low individual interaction, what you get is different entities that are coordinated. We don't crash onto each other. So we do this minimal coordination. I'll drive the car on the right hand and you'll drive the car on the right hand and we won't crash. Or sorry. Or in the evolutionary terms or in the ecological terms, there will be minimal coordination of the camel going on the same footsteps of the camel before him. Okay. When the path is steep. So when you have these minimal coordination type of organization, the type of interaction, what they're expected to produce is a collection. A collection of entities that are co-located one next to the other according to this order. And it can be and when this happens you can model it well enough with diversity. Okay. It's just these different entities located one next to the other. And in the ecological sphere such measure may fit common species that what you mostly need to know is where they are located. But typically they don't fit rare or endemic ones whose survival typically depends on a particular set of interactions among a particular set of species. So only okay. I don't want to repeat myself. In the local so in the local sphere not the ecological sphere assuming that the humans only coordinate and they're just part of a collection. There's just this collection of people. There is no collective here or if it does it doesn't matter. So if the local human society is a relevant factor for conserving this species okay. A collection of human individual is not likely to produce any joint labor. But only each one of us need to follow some kind of rule. I don't know. Don't pick the flowers. Take your rubbish with you. Okay. And if it's correct that you need a whole village not just to raise a child but you need a whole village to preserve some flagship species. Then a conservation activity of this kind might not be very efficient for the type of species we care about. Again for some species this is great. This is all you need. Okay. Now when intensity of interaction increases what you get what you get what emerges is a more complex object. It's a joint meeting point of different organisms and such a connectus is complex but it doesn't have to be integrated. There is no necessary integration. There is no necessary common goal there could be but it's not built in the community. So the group here requires some reciprocal cooperation. Okay. So different entities co-operate. Okay. It's different than co-label and the type of interaction we are expecting is reciprocal. So without okay so what we get here is that within this nexus each organism each individual node sorry the node doesn't have to be an organism the node here can be the individual node here can be a species it can be a population but each individual node in the system the node can be a family or a village or an individual each node in the system co-operates to maximize its own benefits okay it's this win-win system and a happy benefit might be okay a mutual benefit mutual benefit can emerge but it's just an epiphenomenon you see it doesn't have to emerge. What does have to emerge is some kind of individual win okay so mutual benefit is not a prior request and if we in many conservation efforts the aim is for win-win okay the social interaction sought after is that everyone will win what actually happens is often a degradation or a special effort on the part of the weaker party win-win situation okay does not assume we are part of the same community no it's not necessary and what often happens is that we do not aim for any change of structure within the structure that we have each one of us tries to benefit to maximize one's individual gains okay so as time goes by and every time we meet again and we struck this deal what we've seen in the case study that we followed is that the weaker party finds it more and more difficult each time to enter this game okay because no we do not belong together to any kind of a common community so if this happens for a long enough time and it's intense enough sometimes not necessarily a transition occurs and then what we get is not just cooperation it's collaboration and there's a huge gap between cooperation and collaboration because collaboration assumes a common community and what entities do is that they participate will become a part of this community okay and here here the joint labor is taking place as a necessary aspect of taking part within a larger whole so noticing and tracking these different types of interactions and as required by the heterogeneity index not only differs from the diversity index but in some context okay and I will try to show you later on that these types of measures they conflict what you need to see here is that reciprocity does not change anything dramatic in the social structure or in the interaction structure but collaboration does something has changed in the structure after the transition we are part of something different than when we were before and not only do we work for our own individual gains but we work for some common group okay so someone might say and it makes perfect sense to say look this is all very nice but scientists and especially conservationists we work in the real world nothing is perfect it's really difficult to measure all what you want here okay so instead of dwelling on semantic detail and instead of adding all these complex requirements of measurement what we really should do now even if we all agree that we want to reach this collaboration stage what we really should do now is measure diversity carefully notice diversity urgently and try to have a good measure of diversity in ecological and social world and it's a plausible expectation that if we measure diversity well enough and if our policies reward diversity well enough eventually and gradually diversity will bring us to heterogeneity okay so from a collection of entities we will reach a community of collaboration and what I argue is that this is misleading and it's misleading both epistemically and morally so here's an example of how and the reason it okay here's an example of how diversity cannot be a stepping stone towards and cannot always be a stepping stone towards heterogeneity because they conflict sometimes so what you have sometimes is that even if okay even if diversity significantly increases so let's say we had an area with old growth forest and we start cutting it and overall there's a significant increase of diversity in that locality okay or we had a university with very few minorities and we let a lot of new a lot of women will suddenly be here okay or other types of groups so even if diversity increases okay as long as diversity increases but the structure of interaction is ignored and when it's ignored actually what we do here is that we it's the structure remains intact okay because we don't measure it we don't do any policy changes according to it so let's say then that if we began with an unequal type of interaction or an unequal social structure let's say unequal land ownership or an unequal social demographic level but we completely ignore it so a lot more women enter the university okay or we see they sit around the table or indeed we see overall increase of diversity in a locality as long as we don't address the interaction structure and it remains intact okay and it remains intact for a long long long time what happens is that the stress often emerges among the underrepresented groups so if women see more and more women here but they notice that they don't talk and they're not deans and they're not managing anything here they're just sitting there's more women at the table but they don't call the shots or okay we see that there's more diversity but nothing in land ownership changes and for that particular community let's say the Bedouin community where I live land ownership is a crucial thing 95% of the land in Israel is state land okay but it's a it's a Jewish state and if you are a Bedouin Muslim sometimes you feel this is not my state I'm not talking about the occupied territories I'm talking about within Israel 20% of Israeli citizens maybe 17 are Muslim another 3% of the Christian I'm not exactly sure but 20% are not Jewish so nothing has changed and people invite you to participate in conservation but nothing has changed in land ownership and people tell you how important it is not to hunt gazelles and to be part of the discussion of conservation but nothing changed in land ownership what often happens is that you talk amongst yourself you feel a higher and higher degree of distrust so the rangers who come to talk with you in the class about conservation they're Jews and they belong to the state most of them okay and the more there's diversity and there's more and more women around here so you might find that their view is taken into account okay if it goes so if it goes on for enough time they will continue to talk and express their views but do it amongst themselves so you will find I don't know in the social realm these safe zones in US colleges and you will find here that the threat to these rare flagship species increases because now people from that community say wait I want to express my own my own culture, my own community we hunt this is part of our community this is part of our culture you tell us how important it is so I'll continue to do this and there's a greater and greater alienation so what you get is the reduce of interaction between the local group and other groups and in short what you get is a conflict okay so the heterogeneity is reduced because people don't interact with each other and you get a conflict and this may explain conservation failure especially among marginalized groups and it's especially sad because marginalized groups often live next to biodiversity hotspots but they consider conservation the white man issue the Jews follow okay and where I come from the Zionists follow so this diversity heterogeneity conflict may also explain why focusing on and sufficing with diversity okay only with diversity measures both in our society how we measure social diversity and in ecology how we measure biodiversity is not expected to be a stepping stone towards increasing heterogeneity if you want to preserve these specific rare species that's not the way how it's not going to be easier a policy that's that is relevant only to diversity and in a social world there's at least in the US and also in Israel there's a lot of measures of social diversity and the university gets money if it enters more groups and minorities but once these minorities are in how much is invested in their interaction with others and so they leave okay and they feel often a bigger failure than before and more alienated with the general culture than before so increasing diversity as much as possible is sometimes in conflict with increasing heterogeneity so a similar problem what underlies this is a conflict a gap between if you want accuracy you're asking yourself did my model interpretation fit the data you're asking yourself did my model prediction did my survey my experiment my explanation didn't detect a causal process or did I just detect I stumbled on some random effect so one aim in the model is realism generality you want to extrapolate you want your work in that locality so yes I care about the specific Bidouin community and that specific gazelle but I also want my model to be general and it has so all my results that I measured in a given context or a given locality whether or not my results are founded upon causes or random sense of events all these results were presented in other localities that's a different question okay and we want both but they differ that's the issue here and that differ is relevant to another problem in biodiversity models and measurements and that's the measurement of a locality so I'm reminding you that what we do is long-term sampling it's crucial for tracking biodiversity laws okay so we want to go back and back to the same locality and we want to measure that locality to make sure that we came back to it but different practical meanings of space what is that space and assume different values that suggest different location measures so is the space exogenous abstract from the entity that's located in that space or like with heterogeneity is that space interacting is the entity in that space interacting with that space does it construct its niche or is it just there so if you have different meanings of space and you have different values for what is the best practice or the best re-sampling method and you have to choose if what and you cannot execute both methods on the same spatial scale at the same time so what you get is an inevitable problem of locality and I'll give you an example okay so you have this exogenous concept of space I came here today so I came here using an exogenous concept of space that is I had a let's assume I came here I could have had a point a lat-long coordinate which is right here and I would follow that lat-long coordinate and arrive here and that concept of space doesn't care what's here it's just a point and what it gives me is a value of generality it's the same all over okay but I could arrive here by following instructions of telling me look you go to this universe this new levant that was established in 1970s and look for that building and go up to the second store so here here it's the specific people who are here niche constructed this locality and now it's not very general it depends on who's here and what it did but it is a representative of realism in the sense that I talked before it describes what is exactly here so here the best way is randomized positions and here the best way is targeted position of my measurement device so it's very very different it's a conflict but it gets worse why it gets worse it's not just a conflict it's incremental because the routine working protocol requires you to do things completely the other way around so let's say you care mostly about generality and you want your model to be general so what you do you pick at home your randomized GPS points ok and then you go out to the field with your and you find them you find these maps I don't know every 10 meters you find these points you follow the abstract space you put I don't know your cups for your ants right you put them there and only then you record which micro habitat you found but if you care about which animal particularly is there and you care about the biology of the ground squirrel you're following it doesn't work that way it's completely the opposite first you go out to the field and you track micro habitat you ask yourself ok where will the ground squirrel where can I find it ok let's take something bushy tailed wolf wrap at least something rarer ok and now you track micro habitats once you found the relevant niche constructed micro habitat that a bushy tailed wolf wrap would choose then you record the GPS points you can't do it both you can't so often and often people think philosophers so this is the problem and there's no compromise here there is no middle ground ok and often people think that incomincibility is a problem of no fact of them at how much more time do I have so people think it's a question of run about 10 minutes ok so if you want I can talk about this more because people often conflate incomincibility with no fact of the matter oh no no no there is fact of the matter either the device is here or it's here it's an empirical incomincibility no fact of the matter this happens at the next scale this is indeterminacy of reference or indeterminacy of translation ok here you can't translate so when I talk to these people both in Berkeley and in Harvard and in Israel each one of them they didn't say the other guy was wrong or impractical they said I couldn't understand him you know he's a reasonable guy he's actually a good biologist these guys wrote the grant together but in the field it doesn't work together it cannot ok so there is fact of the matter and there is no way to decide and if you want we can talk about other concepts like indeterminacy later on ok so here I want to show you a case study that actually puts brings this to light ok and it's a project called Townsville academia 2011 there was here you had there was the Arab Spring if you heard about it and here I think you had something different and I'm not exactly sure but in the US they had occupied Wall Street and in Israel we had a town a tent movement ok and so the idea was to look critically at academia and at existing power structures and to try and change them so I only followed my students and tried to do something and it combines what it does with Townsville academia it's voluntary researchers, local experts volunteer with academic experts and together they try to build local knowledge that will affect conservation policy and will affect social policy ok so the problem is that minority groups ok living like these Bedouin groups ok they're not considered experts and their heritage and their knowledge about the plants is completely irrelevant to the models and to the conservation policy ok so they suffer not just epistemic injustice do you know what epistemic injustice is ok so they suffer not just epistemic injustice but also environmental injustice ok the land where this stream exists is not even their own ok in Israel it's easy I see injustice right in front of my house ok it's ok so what we so what we do typically the sampling and the typical sampling maps they do not record data location history so if there's record of location history they have no claim of saying look this is the name of our stream this is our stream and this is the type of things we do with these types of plants the name of the stream is not their own on all the official maps ok and and the ok and all their knowledge about well I don't have time so what also biodiversity models do not do ok they don't record how they interact with their land they don't record the different structure and the different power structures within Israel ok so policy recommendations when the state says I'm fair I'm equal I'm treating everyone the same way no they treat everyone the same way but they disregard the inequality that exists so what people here feel is not being treated the same way and what this project does ok I don't have time but what this project does is bring to light on a GIS map you put you establish a new trail putting in the original names with the original history academics with local experts and bringing this to the government and now it's not just this local knowledge of this group of bidwins it's a collective that comes together to the state and it has way more power and this trail for example was an official authority and now the state is investing money and it's how do you say forgot the word ok oh I don't so what you see I don't have time but what you can see here is old maps from from the and how on the old maps you think you use local knowledge for correcting historical maps within this conservation world you put layers upon layers in your GIS maps but the first map is wrong you can see different you don't have time but there's different names for the streams and there's different the British who did this they used standardized legends so for example here what you're supposed to see is vineyards because they used the same thing for all across the Middle East vineyards so you have here deep deep problems when you just begin with the map and what you do you use local knowledge to correct the historical maps and you use heterogeneity differences for reclaiming one's history and one's policy and then you put a sign with your history and your suggested policy and I don't have time so there's much more to say about all of this but notice how it's very very small details of how you measure something that make a huge difference later on okay so I want to say this diversity is not similar to heterogeneity okay no one increasing the formula eventually increase the latter no it matters these gaps matter second our locality latron coordinates is not clearly translatable to it's micro habitat and I didn't have time to actually fully show this to you but the problem gets worse the better science you do so the more accurate you are the bigger the problem becomes okay and the more accurate the measurement the deeper the increments of ability and so because these measures we assume different practical meanings values and at times different causes in the model and at times different policy costs for minority because all this sorry so because these measures do all this it's really important to track interactions and to build measurements that track interactions and I want to finish by saying something about failures because a project like town square academia and working hard on these type of measurements sometimes it's really difficult and often it fails okay it often fails so why invest so much time and effort in a project or in a type of measurement that will often fail okay and here's my argument that a project like this like towns for academia okay that promotes a heterogeneous measure of difference and an interactionist concept of space and thus by doing so it increases a dialogue between dissenting social groups okay and it reduces epistemic injustice afflicting underrepresented groups okay so given the basic importance of problems in measurements and the basic problem of injustice and conservation failure among minorities given all that even if a program like towns for academia only sometimes succeeds perhaps even rarely succeeds it is an important success whenever it happens I'm not saying do it always I'm not saying but I'm saying where it matters to you okay it should always be attempted before it's ruled out so try first to model and to measure interactions and if it doesn't work leave it alone but don't begin by skipping it because it's hard okay that's it see there's a lot of people helping here there's a lot of people volunteering volunteering so much time and effort to this project it's highly rewarding thank you very much that was really nice I have a lot of questions but I'm not going to abuse my position as chair so if anyone has some questions before yes Peter thanks a lot for the great talk so I think I understand the heterogeneity this takes with the diversity but I've been surprised about the easiness with which we go from ecology and species to cultural things that are obviously much more value laid and so on and might conflict so our interactions between cultures and people and so on even measurable in similar ways as interactions in giraffes and other species and so on I mean you completely put them on the floor it seems there's like a sort of gradual distinction if there is already a distinction but value issues they blame so much more once we talk about humans so I was wondering what you that's an excellent and tough question and I'm looking at measures and it's astonishing and I can show you on the back but the exact formula Simpson index for diversity the exact formulation independently devised is the Hirschfield Hirsch or something and that's how social diversity is measured exactly the same so policy about social diversity in the social sphere is measured the policy is based on measures that are exactly the same okay it doesn't mean that the world, the biological world and the social world are the same not at all I'm looking at how we measure things because I think how we measure things really matters about what we care about and I totally agree with you that there's a deep gap and I think maybe I wasn't careful enough to stress it and thank you for that there is a huge huge difference between the ecological world and the social world given that difference another point is that the social world today has an effect on the ecological world and therefore just if I want to focus on the ecological world I'm saying look for preserving I don't know, species composition in a given ecosystem you should also care about the social interactions in the community that you're looking at and when you ignore social interactions and you come to the community and say oh each one of us will do his share we are not a collective it's not surprising it doesn't work I completely agree with that it's a huge difference but I'm just saying look at the human groups measure their interactions and measure their social structure do that also for improving the chances of your conservation efforts follow up so it seems like one of these value issues might be that conservation and human culture might be actually a bad thing I mean that's almost literally conservatism you know sometimes you want to change human environment while in nature it's probably a good thing to keep it as well and of course this is a difficult thing because if a white guy comes to a community and says you have to change this or that I mean that's obviously colonialism and dangerous but as just humans we want to make things better we values are there to change things after all so if you're using the same sort of language for conservation biology as for conservation and relate that directly or extrapolate that to humans then isn't there a danger of falling in a sort of conservatism trap maybe I'm wrong but let me try and show you an analogy for noticing interaction as a way to resist conservatism if your model requires you to notice structures versus a model that does not require you to notice structures the first way, yes I agree with you it could bring me to conservatism but it doesn't have to another thing it could bring me is to notice inequalities and then to destabilize the same gaps or the same structures that I've seen so when I look at society and I see this inequality I don't know in land use in recognition of knowledge in all that if I track it I notice it, if I notice there's an option for change in standard view when the academia says we're open to everyone just come and I don't track any interaction and any difference in structure what eventually it does is conserve the inequality that exists so I agree with you that I could I could reach conservatism and colonialism all that I have to mind that as well you're absolutely right I'm only saying I don't have to and by looking at interactions and the structure of interactions it could actually be and that's what's happening in town school academia it could actually be an activist tool to destabilize the gaps that we have today thank you I wanted to come back to the objection you've discussed so you made a point there's a cost to not having the heterogeneity in your model but obviously there's a cost as well to evidence like there's usually a 30 cost I imagine it's very just data is difficult to collect often you won't have the data as well so can we be confident that in that trail it's better to have the heterogeneity than to just use the simpler models and so connect to that do we do we have ways of estimating or measuring to what extent are better or worse in achieving whatever we're trying to achieve so first of all yeah thanks for that what I try to argue here and what I try to argue here is that no it's you don't always have to use it and for many contexts you don't need it all I'm saying is that in some contexts that you really care about if it's a locality a specific locality when you deeply care about catching the causal chain in some context either in an ecological context or in a social context when then noticing heterogeneity I'm not I'm saying check it out before ruling it out I'm not saying always use it and you can see the difference so with diversity reasons what you have is quite simple so you put okay so what you do is that you put all the you count all the entities and what you do with them is that you you measure you measure the unweighted number of individuals and then you weigh their number by the abundance of their species so all you need to count here is the number of individuals weighted by the number of species and the closer the closer this gets to zero the more diverse your community that's great I don't have time for this there's various kinds of diversity I don't know if you care about it as much alpha, beta, gamma but in any case it's really fascinating but that's in another paper what I want to say is that I agree with you it's a simple and it's very efficient and I'm not saying don't measure diversity I'm saying for some context it really matters the degree of connections so what you want again here it's still not very, very complicated so what you want here in this what we use here when I say we it's Aaron it's like when I say we it's like the fly on the elephant saying how much dust did we do so he built the map and my role was to say when did I understand in this work so what you want here is in you use the systems theory as it's applied to interacting networks and just like with the Simpson index and the Hirschfield index you can we're working on this but it can be used for various kinds of entities not just biological entities okay so what you have here is the number of unweighted what you have in the system is these nodes connected by ledges and the ledges they defined the relations between the nodes so what you're checking here is this is unweighted so many ledges are connecting how many nodes and the closer c is to 0 each node is not connected to anyone else the closer this is to 1 all nodes are connected by ledges to all nodes so this is still not very complicated and it can give you a map of interactions but for what we want we also want to say something about the structure and the strength of the interactions and I agree with you it gets more complicated here you want to say the transfer of I don't know energy or data or whatever the transfer between the i-th and g-th nodes okay and here both the nodes and the ledges are weighted and I agree that often when it comes to this it becomes really complicated what we're trying to do now is translate it to something that I can measure in a conversation who's talking so I'm starting it's weird but I'm starting with humans it seems like it's easier to count interactions in some ways okay and Aaron is trying to check it out on plants so in some for some context to measure the discussion that's happening who's talking how much information is transformed okay really matters I'm not saying use it always I'm saying if I I'm a Jew in a country that is defined as a democratic Jewish state so I'm not a neutral person when I meet another Israeli who is a bit okay and when I talk and I say oh we were all together and I don't measure anything that has to do with that and I say oh we came up together to this idea it's dangerous okay and so if I have something like this I can at least know better what I don't know and at least next time when I come out of the meeting and I didn't measure this I know there's something that might be deeply misleading with what I think about the discussion that happened okay so yes sometimes it's completely done no but sometimes when you really care try try that's what I'm saying I think what's next thanks for the talk that's very interesting so the partly PSR the question already I was wondering about this this concept of heterogeneity generally and it's it's important that the physical question characterised it was not only emphasising the interactions between the components or entities that define the community but they were also saying that they formed some complex entity right as interactions and this seems to me to already apply a specific stance on this discussion of how to interpret them at the physical status of epidemiology where you have the endpoints this individualistic versus this highly constantly integrated so would you is it intentional that your concept of heterogeneity comes out on the far side of the spectrum towards at times it sounds like a super organism view or would you say well this concept is metaphysically neutral with how you see the community and I don't think I'm neutral I don't want to go back to the old Garison you know to that discussion in the history of ecology but even when you go to Weaver and you think about messy and you think about complex systems you do not have to think about a collective in this mythical the metaphysics of our collective don't have to be don't have to sound strange all I want to say is that but I'm not neutral so I'm saying and at least if we go here so in this 3C model so now you'll see it there right so you're correct that the object that I'm talking about is a collective it's some kind of group so I'm starting from a group but the group need not be some kind of mysterious super organism it can be just a collection of things but the property of heterogeneity like the property of diversity a single entity cannot be diverse right it just cannot be so I'm not neutral in the sense that I'm starting the discussion assuming that the individual is within a group context okay but that group context need not be some kind of super organism especially when you look at the history of the concept of super organism and you see how it has been used in the 60s okay and some kind of fascist or in the 40s and so before World War II you have people from both ends political ends using the concept of super organism for their own terms so you'd have someone like Uxgen joining the Nazi party talking about a super organism but you would have also Wheeler talking about super organism in a different way or Ali took it so you would have different political views talking about super organism but after World War II whenever you say super organism people think about it as some kind of oppressive frightening entity think about how Hamilton is talking about a super organism it's terrifying okay so I'm not meaning super organism in that in that way I think the reason why people after World War II started talking about super organism in that way is because of the connotation of a super organism okay so I'm suing a group but that group is not some kind of oppressive frightening collective that determines everything for the individual even a collection is good okay thank you for the talk so I really appreciate your advice to try because we know in history of science even in physical science often we miss some phenomenon because we did not have any sort of interaction between and part of the system but when you say try so it's also a little bit misleading because it's extremely difficult to build that kind of measure so if we don't have an idea what we have to measure we will never finish the measure and turn all stuff so it must be guided by some model about what is a relevant interaction social system so for biodiversity for conservation in the biology system where should we what kind of model should we use to guide us to build that could be a relevant measure maybe we should do it later when we have more wow that's so good typically someone tells you you have a good question so the guy has an answer but I don't and not yet I definitely want to it's a bit like we can stay in the paradox of rules I have to build a model for how to use the model and then a model for we're trying exactly now to do that but you're right right now I'm waving my hands so I have some kind of tool and I'm trying to first of all to use it good enough and second after doing that to find some easy guidelines where for now I just said if it's common if it doesn't really matter interactions it will survive anyway think about an invasive species it survives whatever locality it arrives to right so I do not recommend checking heterogeneity for that so not for invasive species but but I don't have a good answer and it's definitely missing and we want to do that this is a book project that will take a few years but that can I but that will be maybe theory driven so we will have to have maybe better theories about ecology and to to help us to guess what would be the relevant factor to measure in certain contexts and I'm not in fossil biology so I don't know how far are these theories to guide us about how this factor is more relevant than this one or probably not that I don't know because as far as I know my colleagues in biology are not a lot driven by theoretical models they are quite the slight that they because most of the time they are so wrong maybe we should not use that but I see here to build a complex measure if you know what I'm saying oh it's quite this one or the mathematics was the mathematics when you have to weigh the nodes and the relations so first you have to identify the right nodes after that you have to weight them or certain weight independent or dependent of the relations and you have to identify the right relations the general problem is very difficult maybe in certain case because we know already a lot of stuff about the interaction it could be manageable but for any college I totally agree and what we aim for is in this particular context that we really care about and we have why do we care about it we already have quite a bit of knowledge about it and for example we are afraid that this species is on the banks of extinction and we really care about it I totally agree with you the only thing I I think differently is we don't want to start from the fear so we do want to start with a few cases in the social world we have a case that we want to build and in the ecological world we want to build this thing only on how it's being used and honestly I think a lot of theory doesn't so theory is great but if it just remains that way and if we as philosophers only look at ourselves and how we use our theories and our concepts it's then we come close to, I think Penn was said that philosophers are relevant to scientists like or an ethologist are relevant to birds I don't think we will be relevant if we don't actually work with scientists and we don't actually see try to find something to say that is in some kind of dialogue with how scientific work is being done so I'm an amateur here I'm a developmental biologist with interest in ecology so just to stay in point but following up my next question how do you then define an ecosystem as a single heterogeneity, as a collection of heterogeneities because that's what people and conservationists are all about so the cases that we looked at actually people began from the locality they knew what location they want to conserve and then it's often these land use borders so you have a nature society told you that here you have a nature reserve and now you want to conserve that nature reserve so you actually it doesn't emerge from nature it emerge from social agreements and from there we started and it actually thank you for this question I didn't notice it before but it actually in all the cases that I followed it began from there and people were careful to choose a spot that was socially limited by society and not by nature because probably nature is so complex questions I wanted to get a bit more concrete on the case studies because I was curious about on the Town Square Academia case studies you talked about about this maps right that you sort of rewrite take a bit of these maps that's really cool and it seemed that you were taking what you called this local interactionist notion of space and you sort of rewriting the official map that's the exogenous space and so there seems to be some translation work because at some point you claim that translation work is actually not possible that either you have one or here you seem to explain a case where you successfully did it who did that, how did they do it okay, yeah so I think where it's incommensurable is in the field at the lowest spatial scale where you actually put your device okay this is not what happens here even in the field when they and it happened wherever I checked the device was either here or here but later on when you for example check you build your you need to put on your model map you want to predict in occupancy modeling you want to predict what are the chances that I will find this species in this locality given what I found now and given the detectability effort that I've invested in this locality and finding this species now I'm taking this map and I'm projecting so just like here it's it's not in the field it's in the map and here what you have is you had a trap line of 40 traps now you can agree on the number of species or the number of individuals organism found on the on the whole trap so even if in each particular so the incommensurability is at the lowest spatial scale on the higher spatial scale where maps happen at least ecological maps then it's not incommensurability now you have indeterminacy because there is not a fact indeterminacy let's say you have two kinds of indeterminacy indeterminacy of reference indeterminacy of translation so first of all let's take indeterminacy of translation so we can agree on the number of organisms found on this 40 40 traps and and then I can say and we can agree on the polygon what you see here is a map from 1980 with 2019 polygons matched on it okay so what you have here is an assemblage of data and we can agree on that why we can agree on that it's not pinpointed on some particular point okay and so you can take the average this is a polygon for example a rainfall you can take the average rainfall and draw this polygon and you can take the average number organisms trapped and put them here or elsewhere and it's but that's a different scale than what I've talked about and at different scales you prioritize different things so what you have here yes you have to have generality over realism and so we can agree we can agree that the data of the world is that 50 organisms were found on average and on average there's 200 millimeters of rain here okay in this area and 250 let's say 220 let's say over here we can agree on that now on the same data that we agree on on the transparency of translation we can have different theory sentences that will describe this okay so I can describe it in different ways on the map we all know that right I can have different statistical packages to use on the data that I already agreed upon okay and there is no fact of the matter here it's not new data that emerged how it matches together you see because it's a different scale and the problem here is not increments of ability it's also a problem because different theory sentences okay can fit the same thing but the theory sentences don't agree with each other okay or to take it to in the terminology of reference you can have you can have model based prediction okay what are the chances of finding here I don't know ground score but there's no ground scores here I don't know heinous okay and we can agree okay on the prediction this theory sentence prediction of the model but when you come to the world to the data that's supposed to describe the causal explanation you can have very very different you can agree on the prediction but you can have very very different descriptions of the world that will lead to that and it's difficult to decide so these are different types of problems and we often not we sorry maybe not you but very often philosophers of science use these terms as if it's the same as if incommensurability is very similar to indeterminancy and indeterminancy of references similar to indeterminancy of meaning translation okay and as if in determinants of translation there is no translation okay and scientists help philosophers because looking at the work helps you see these conceptual differences much more clear can I piggyback on that sure because one thing so this yeah I'm reminded of some things that I know you know this Angela Ptocznik has argued a bunch that for spatial scale has this kind of super important organizing concept especially theoretical ecology but one thing that she's always said that I thought was really interesting and I'm just interested to know whether you've seen this in your work what are the reasons that she's argued for that is that in a bunch of her examples people have actually been really self-conscious and really explicit about what spatial scales they're operating at about what spatial scales they expect their claims to hold for etc etc I'm almost hearing in some of the ways that you've been talking about spatial scale that in some of your examples it's much less explicit than that the role that spatial scale is playing is a little more implicit you have to kind of go finding the practice it's a bit more hidden what do you think because it's always surprised me when I read her that in a lot of her examples it's very clearly stated by the scientists in the practice I guess you know we have this theory about species dispersal but we only think that it works at this kind of mesoscale what do you see in the examples that you've been so and in the lowest spatial scale people don't they don't publicize about it so that's the field work you don't see it in the paper if you don't follow people in the field you won't know about it but that's it once on higher spatial scales after I think colleges are very given you know Simon Levine's work about scale people are very attentive very careful people are working in this field and so they're not they're aware of the scale that they're talking about also because scale matters to effort and when you build an occupancy model you have to talk about the effort that went into it and so scale comes there not always but often so what I'm saying is that I think I agree with what you're saying and I think it's a resolution issue so mezzo and local and global is huge scale so for me because I'm very provincial so I care about particular places and I care about particular types of injustice and so mezzo and Israel is extremely small so it's the size of the whole country the size of New Jersey so what you think as mezzo is five times our scale so it's a resolution thing but I agree anything else here I had a question about one of your main conclusions they made that heterogeneity doesn't fall from diversity so you gave one example in which that's not the case but unlike a more general case it's not reasonable to think that's typically if we have more stuff then there will be more relations more interactions so in general overall policies do we use diversity that typically will be relevant to heterogeneity as well so maybe I should say it in a more general so I'm saying this whenever the phenomena you're tracking is the phenomena pre-requires a collective entity a complex collective entity okay that resembles a community so whenever the phenomenon you're tracking involves that type of entity if there's a certain level of diversity if diversity increases it makes sense that heterogeneity would decrease whereas if the entity you're tracking is a collection of things the more diversity is the small interactions that occur in any way would continue so you won't I don't expect a conflict to emerge there I expect a conflict only in the cases that interactions really matter for the function of the entity that I'm tracking and only if the entity that I'm tracking is a kind of community or a complex collective just a question to clarify maybe it sounded like criticism and I probably missed it myself but what I'm missing in this is difference like heterogeneity after all it's about difference diversity is about difference measuring difference and interactions in itself has nothing different related if that's what you're focusing on like if you talk about super organisms and so on just sort of regimes or groups like if everything is the same but interacts very very well seriously intensely that's perfectly possible homogeneous groups interact more easily even so I was expecting something like interaction in virtue of difference rather than interaction as like the main thing like first find the difference and see what does it do for the interactions rather than go directly to the interactions and leave the difference question open or maybe stop left open so maybe I wasn't clear enough I'm beginning from assuming difference so think about my watch again if all the wheels are the same size it won't function again so I'm not I'm not explaining what difference is I'm not explaining what difference is I'm saying assuming that we have difference in the entity that we're tracking and what types of measuring difference do we have but I'm starting from difference but you're right that I didn't explain what difference is okay and after reading Deliz's book there are some points I'm saying I don't know what to say about what difference is it's we have a saying in Hebrew it's too big for me I'm concentrating on how people measure difference but yes it has to be assumed the difference and it's not explicit here you're right questions? thank the speaker