As I sit here waiting on my Jeep to get inspected ... endless economic growth yes I really understand this pain point. I've spent embarrassing amounts of time trying to come to terms with the fact that we can't stop consumerism "once it starts." People simply don't give up the latest "innovations," barring I suppose the Unabomber. The "entrepreneurs" in this narrower and quite troubling sense are simply responding to demand--or creating it, but the difference is increasingly beside the point. I don't know what to say about this--we have eight billion people on the planet largely because we can feed orders of magnitude more people per acre. Some small percentage after benefitting economically from the very society they despise can f-off to Alaska or what have you (count me in). But the vast majority need their cell phones for their bosses and their day to day. No one is REALLY eschewing technology, anymore than no hunter gatherer insisted fire was the devil and he'd eat his Musk Ox raw, thank you very much. Complaining about tech and consumerism is a full time sport. Changing anything is a fiction novel. Argh I feel your pain. Really. It's very very difficult anymore to opt out or to change let's call it rampant consumerism and Wall Street values. I have friends who tell me they're moving to Idaho and two weeks later tell me they got their investment and are opening offices in Seattle. No one is--really can be anymore--truly serious about opting out. I have European friends who are energetically confronting the "American experiment"... using Silicon Valley technology. I don't blame them and am somewhat of a Europhile myself, but it again highlights the fundamental Sysophysian challenge. Perhaps it's a harbinger of the end of times, and THIS is the exact problem I want to discuss, so thank you. I might add: I wrote a book for Harvard and now turn to saying what I say here. And it's better. Harvard is part of the problem, though I very much respect my ex editor(s). It's all hands on deck. Erik
I appreciate your making the effort to comprehend an off-beat perspective and taking the time to answer. A I said elsewhere, I grew up with IT and technology in general (starting university in 1979) and was "pro-establishment" in orientation - understanding that as a call to cooperate in joint civilizational development - and so was always quite leery of naive utopists and system-critics. It's just that I made the very personal experience in my somewhat successful career as engineering-manager in automotive-industry while having a family "on the side" - that it was actually the human element (cooperating on meaningful and enjoyable things - in professional and private life) that was the most satisfying - and that my 3 daughters were really the achievement of my life - despite my having spent so little time with/on them. It makes me feel sad to have set the wrong priorities in my life - for lack of deeper understanding - "following the herd" instead. Having come this far, I now see that the herd (=culture) I dropped out of keeps going, getting faster and faster - and, yes, it might be rushing toward the end of times because ATEOTD climate-catastrophe and nuclear Armageddon are looming - and one cannot but recognize that these huge risks are direct outcomes of modern culture (including innovation and technology in the service of capitalism). That's the irony: when I was young and energetic I believed in the culture, now I am old and wise and recognize it is not only meaningless but suicidal - and can't be stopped - and am actually happy that my daughters don't realize that - lacking an alternative for them.
Dataism's metaphysics envisions data as given and envisions givenness as the mark of the objectively real. Something given, it is thought, is something whose existence and character no mind, no will, could alter. And something thusly unalterable, it is thought, is something objectively real.
Brooks was on to something: with data, dataists assume they have a window onto untouched, mind- and will-independent reality.
Which suggests that dataists don't understand what data are and what makes data possible, don't understand what measurement is and what makes it possible, and don't understand observation and what makes it possible.
Thanks! I should've been more careful about the point of my comment, though. Your post explains the respect in which data aren't enough. I thought I'd supplement your approach with an approach from below: complicating the dataist's concept of data.
That's valuable, and I agree that that's what Brooks was getting on about. There's a sense in which yours is quite the fundamental point. Should we write about this more? :)
It should be written about more! I only briefly mentioned something about it in my guest post: that what gets called "data" is actually better described as "capta." Givens are often takens that, for the sake of exploring and thinking, we pretend aren't takens.
Leaving aside that the foundations of philosophy you commendably still were made aware of are just the fairly young and immature Western tradition, dataism is IMHO really just a tool to achieve the real aim of Western culture (which by now is more a fanatical religion in the way it functions socially) - which is supremacy and the power to exploitat - and, sorry to say this, the entrepreneurial role is part of that. Real wisdom (which philosophy set out to be about) is antithetical to this cultural orientation - and so philosophy effectively died - at best surviving as ideology (to legitimize the new religion) - which is another tool to the same end - highly benefitting from dataism.
Hi Martin. Yes, I very much agree. The entrepreneurial question is a bit tricky, though. In its broad interpretation it would cover the wheel and saddles on horses (maybe not the wheel, but certainly tires). That said, we have something of a capture by monopolistic companies in the technology space this decade, but it's been coming (and recurring) for many decades. We need clean sources of energy, better batteries, better fertilizer, and cures for dozens of forms of cancer. All this is discovery and invention or innovation, and "entrepreneurs" working in large organizations or in startups may indeed play a substantive role. So that part is a longer discussion in my opinion. However I'm well aware that the role can be part of a larger problem, and today I do see that as well. Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
I agree - and hasten to clarify that I meant "entrepreneurial" not in the general sense of innovation but in the specific sense it has taken on within capitalism - accepting it's basic tenets of endless economic growth (to what and whose benefit? and detriment?) and legitimacy of exploitation (of other people - and nature).
“…by and large, everyone is already talking about it, and it’s entirely unclear I have something novel to say.” - I André Gide pointed out that “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” Also, I find you have a fresh way of expressing familiar issues, which typically re-frames them for me and gets me thinking.
This piece was a case in point - the takedown of logical positivism and the limitations of observation without inference. Fresh! Thank you.
"Dataism" is a good way of describing this epistemological framework. However, as I wrote in response to a previous post, my view is that these intellectual problems are deeper than what you’re describing.
After World War II, there was a collective and somewhat unconscious move towards “information theory” as a foundational construct for handling difficult questions about cognition, representation, form, and subjectivity. Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication was a centerpiece of this new framework, with important contributions by Turing, the folks who discovered DNA and others. Of course, some of this work was a genuine and very useful intellectual innovation, and not something we need to discard. What happened was that certain ideas were extended into something like a metaphysics: in any situation where we’d want to draft an intellectual model, we could point at some piece of “information” that specified, for some object or process, its structure and behavior and reason for being – as if it were really there, in a physical sense, and not just as a modeling convenience for the person representing it to himself. Another way of thinking about it: the new metaphysics surmises that we could, through inference, decode a “message” about a thing or process that is its essential order of being, and the act of decoding this message is tantamount to the possession of knowledge about the thing; our ability, as human subjects, to parse such “information” selectively, then, is taken as proof of its independent reality, rather than as an act of personal cognition. At its most abstract, “information” is basically mathematical, and so we end up with the prejudice that a good scientific theory can only consist in some kind of functional, quantitative formulation (because the current mathematical paradigm is largely functional and quantitative). With respect to “artificial intelligence”: any machine that can parse “information” according to this scheme would have the same “intelligence” as a human being; alternatively, humans are just computers doing the same computer stuff that everything in the world does according to our peculiar, hyper-complicated programming.
This metaphysical innovation is an end run around “Descartes’ Demon,” the problem that kicked off the European philosophical tradition almost 400 years ago. How can a person be certain that what he thinks he knows is “true” or that anything happening out there is “real?” Descartes decided that it was his self-conscious subjectivity that could act as a foundation for knowledge; of course, for Descartes, this subjectivity would have been molded in the image of God, and occupied a place somehow liminal from the physical world, so it didn’t have to be accounted for descriptively. Information theory kicks all subjectivity to the curb. What matters about phenomena is not that they are “real” or subjects in human experience, but that they are exponents of “information” that has been decoded by some process of selection. Any question of “who” is doing the decoding is verboten; and, anyways, what does divinity have to do with science?
“Dataism” is information theory’s dead end. It has no grasp on how knowledge has been built up through history, or how the mind operates beyond its most self-conscious representations, or what it means to move through the world as a spirit.
It’s good to point this out. However, if you really want to move forward, you have to go back and interrogate the metaphysics that sent us in this direction, and then come up with something new and better that addresses the foundational problem, which is, basically, the “hard problem of consciousness.” A new foundational concept will give rise to a different research program, and, after some time, “dataism” will seem stupid in retrospect. I have my ideas about this, but it has been my experience that we’re so deep in this paradigm that people just aren’t seeing at all why we need to go back and have first-principles conversations.
I have no doubt that the intellectual problems are deeper. I also have no doubt that the folks promoting "Dataism" in response to the growth of the web/machine learning/AI are not thinking about Shannon or anything very deep at all! Dataism in the context I'm describing is essentially the ahistorical and somewhat mindless view I've written about--that is actually my point, that it is NOT deep. To not see this would be to miss my point. Our deeper problems as you've so expertly adumbrated are, in a very real sense, an entirely separate discussion. I'd love to have that different discussion as well.
I'm not criticizing your article -- I hope you don't think that. I agree that "dataism" is a real thing and you've done a good job of describing it and articulating why it's pernicious. So, bravo!
I guess my sense is that the specifics of "dataism" are not all that important in the larger scheme of things. Or at least I view them as stupid and disruptive, but not, exactly, tragic and lamentable. Or permanent. In my telling, they're the predictable, and perhaps inevitable, outgrowth of the foundational assumptions I described here relating to information theory. For me the point you're making about "dataism" is interesting because it highlights the foolishness of the underlying metaphysics and how so much discourse seems to intentionally avoid the most important things within the topics we're discussing.
But, then, the next thing that comes to my mind: okay, so how do we start a real public conversation about these deeper problems? Because that leads somewhere.
PS. "Dataism" is Dadaism without a sense of humor.
But, then, the next thing that comes to my mind: okay, so how do we start a real public conversation about these deeper problems? Because that leads somewhere.
"
100% on board. And not sure how this deeper discussion should go! As a writer I try to capture "broad stupidities" you might say (somewhat tongue in cheek of course). But how to solve confusions is quite a different beast. My focus with the latter is on inference--how we draw conclusions from what we already know and what we observe. Eric Dane Walker made some interesting points that have to do with how we see data, and pointed out that I'm talking about how we use data in broader inference/discovery. And you're doing a deep dive into where these concepts came from and how they've veered off course. It would be great to combine all this great thinking!
In my job as a software engineer, I often read books about video decoding/encoding. In one book, the author makes the point that data and information are not the same, but people often think that they are. Information has meaning, whereas data does not necessarily have any meaning. For example, a pseudo random number generator can generate millions of bytes of data, but there is very little information contained in all of that data. If you want to transmit the information represented by the data, you just have to send the simple equation of the pseudo random number generator, not the data. The receiver can then generate data identical to the transmitter. That's the basic idea behind video compression. It allows you to transmit video information using far fewer bytes than just the raw pixel data.
This is why theory is necessary. Without it, data has no meaning. And with no meaning, there is no useful information, just a lot of noise.
Oh, I want to add here Gabriel, that Harari specifically conflates data and information. He uses them interchangeably. I noticed this in his writing about "Dataism" but chose not to highlight it in the piece, as in my view it's one of his more dismissable errors. Thanks again.
Yes, it's really all just semantics. But I think for many people the distinction between data and information is good way of understanding your point about dataism. I mean, the advent of the internet promised us the Information Age but instead we got Big Data!
I totally agree. I would add that, in this case "data-ism" both in Brooks's sense and Harari's and Barabasi's isn't sensitive to the technical differences between "data" and "information" (I spent years studying this stuff, and let's not forget "knowledge"!). The point of the piece is that the average "person on the street" sees data as just the stuff you provide to your computer and the stuff your computer spits back at you and the stuff that serves as input to AI. They're not attempting to carve out necessary and sufficient conditions for "data," and in this case (that is, it serving as a worldview) I'm not sure that technical exercise would matter much. We could change from the English word "data" to "the stuff that's crunched and manipulated" by computers. A Shakespearean sonnet is simply data--it's converted into tokens and digits and then projected into a multidimensional space--with large language models--then reconstructed into what we see as English words and displayed as output. It's this idea that, to put it bluntly (but that's the proper way to put it) "what the computer crunches is what's real" that underlies the silly modern idea of Dataism.
I could not agree more, too, that theory is necessary, as you put it! Data has no meaning without it, indeed! Thank you for your comment.
Hi Martin,
As I sit here waiting on my Jeep to get inspected ... endless economic growth yes I really understand this pain point. I've spent embarrassing amounts of time trying to come to terms with the fact that we can't stop consumerism "once it starts." People simply don't give up the latest "innovations," barring I suppose the Unabomber. The "entrepreneurs" in this narrower and quite troubling sense are simply responding to demand--or creating it, but the difference is increasingly beside the point. I don't know what to say about this--we have eight billion people on the planet largely because we can feed orders of magnitude more people per acre. Some small percentage after benefitting economically from the very society they despise can f-off to Alaska or what have you (count me in). But the vast majority need their cell phones for their bosses and their day to day. No one is REALLY eschewing technology, anymore than no hunter gatherer insisted fire was the devil and he'd eat his Musk Ox raw, thank you very much. Complaining about tech and consumerism is a full time sport. Changing anything is a fiction novel. Argh I feel your pain. Really. It's very very difficult anymore to opt out or to change let's call it rampant consumerism and Wall Street values. I have friends who tell me they're moving to Idaho and two weeks later tell me they got their investment and are opening offices in Seattle. No one is--really can be anymore--truly serious about opting out. I have European friends who are energetically confronting the "American experiment"... using Silicon Valley technology. I don't blame them and am somewhat of a Europhile myself, but it again highlights the fundamental Sysophysian challenge. Perhaps it's a harbinger of the end of times, and THIS is the exact problem I want to discuss, so thank you. I might add: I wrote a book for Harvard and now turn to saying what I say here. And it's better. Harvard is part of the problem, though I very much respect my ex editor(s). It's all hands on deck. Erik
Hi Erik,
I appreciate your making the effort to comprehend an off-beat perspective and taking the time to answer. A I said elsewhere, I grew up with IT and technology in general (starting university in 1979) and was "pro-establishment" in orientation - understanding that as a call to cooperate in joint civilizational development - and so was always quite leery of naive utopists and system-critics. It's just that I made the very personal experience in my somewhat successful career as engineering-manager in automotive-industry while having a family "on the side" - that it was actually the human element (cooperating on meaningful and enjoyable things - in professional and private life) that was the most satisfying - and that my 3 daughters were really the achievement of my life - despite my having spent so little time with/on them. It makes me feel sad to have set the wrong priorities in my life - for lack of deeper understanding - "following the herd" instead. Having come this far, I now see that the herd (=culture) I dropped out of keeps going, getting faster and faster - and, yes, it might be rushing toward the end of times because ATEOTD climate-catastrophe and nuclear Armageddon are looming - and one cannot but recognize that these huge risks are direct outcomes of modern culture (including innovation and technology in the service of capitalism). That's the irony: when I was young and energetic I believed in the culture, now I am old and wise and recognize it is not only meaningless but suicidal - and can't be stopped - and am actually happy that my daughters don't realize that - lacking an alternative for them.
Martin
Dataism's metaphysics envisions data as given and envisions givenness as the mark of the objectively real. Something given, it is thought, is something whose existence and character no mind, no will, could alter. And something thusly unalterable, it is thought, is something objectively real.
Brooks was on to something: with data, dataists assume they have a window onto untouched, mind- and will-independent reality.
Which suggests that dataists don't understand what data are and what makes data possible, don't understand what measurement is and what makes it possible, and don't understand observation and what makes it possible.
Thanks for another thought-provoking post!
Thanks, Eric! Thanks for another thought provoking comment!
Thanks! I should've been more careful about the point of my comment, though. Your post explains the respect in which data aren't enough. I thought I'd supplement your approach with an approach from below: complicating the dataist's concept of data.
That's valuable, and I agree that that's what Brooks was getting on about. There's a sense in which yours is quite the fundamental point. Should we write about this more? :)
It should be written about more! I only briefly mentioned something about it in my guest post: that what gets called "data" is actually better described as "capta." Givens are often takens that, for the sake of exploring and thinking, we pretend aren't takens.
That's hugely important, and I think the "capta" would really focus the point.
Leaving aside that the foundations of philosophy you commendably still were made aware of are just the fairly young and immature Western tradition, dataism is IMHO really just a tool to achieve the real aim of Western culture (which by now is more a fanatical religion in the way it functions socially) - which is supremacy and the power to exploitat - and, sorry to say this, the entrepreneurial role is part of that. Real wisdom (which philosophy set out to be about) is antithetical to this cultural orientation - and so philosophy effectively died - at best surviving as ideology (to legitimize the new religion) - which is another tool to the same end - highly benefitting from dataism.
Hi Martin. Yes, I very much agree. The entrepreneurial question is a bit tricky, though. In its broad interpretation it would cover the wheel and saddles on horses (maybe not the wheel, but certainly tires). That said, we have something of a capture by monopolistic companies in the technology space this decade, but it's been coming (and recurring) for many decades. We need clean sources of energy, better batteries, better fertilizer, and cures for dozens of forms of cancer. All this is discovery and invention or innovation, and "entrepreneurs" working in large organizations or in startups may indeed play a substantive role. So that part is a longer discussion in my opinion. However I'm well aware that the role can be part of a larger problem, and today I do see that as well. Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
I agree - and hasten to clarify that I meant "entrepreneurial" not in the general sense of innovation but in the specific sense it has taken on within capitalism - accepting it's basic tenets of endless economic growth (to what and whose benefit? and detriment?) and legitimacy of exploitation (of other people - and nature).
I think rho = M/V …
Hey! I didn't catch that! You are absolutely right it didn't render correctly. Certainly is M/V. Thank you!
Hey Roberto! You found it? I couldn't find it using Wayback or anything else!
Nope, It was just a suggestion.
It's weird it's not there, also kinda sad, I would hike to read it
“…by and large, everyone is already talking about it, and it’s entirely unclear I have something novel to say.” - I André Gide pointed out that “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” Also, I find you have a fresh way of expressing familiar issues, which typically re-frames them for me and gets me thinking.
This piece was a case in point - the takedown of logical positivism and the limitations of observation without inference. Fresh! Thank you.
"Dataism" is a good way of describing this epistemological framework. However, as I wrote in response to a previous post, my view is that these intellectual problems are deeper than what you’re describing.
After World War II, there was a collective and somewhat unconscious move towards “information theory” as a foundational construct for handling difficult questions about cognition, representation, form, and subjectivity. Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication was a centerpiece of this new framework, with important contributions by Turing, the folks who discovered DNA and others. Of course, some of this work was a genuine and very useful intellectual innovation, and not something we need to discard. What happened was that certain ideas were extended into something like a metaphysics: in any situation where we’d want to draft an intellectual model, we could point at some piece of “information” that specified, for some object or process, its structure and behavior and reason for being – as if it were really there, in a physical sense, and not just as a modeling convenience for the person representing it to himself. Another way of thinking about it: the new metaphysics surmises that we could, through inference, decode a “message” about a thing or process that is its essential order of being, and the act of decoding this message is tantamount to the possession of knowledge about the thing; our ability, as human subjects, to parse such “information” selectively, then, is taken as proof of its independent reality, rather than as an act of personal cognition. At its most abstract, “information” is basically mathematical, and so we end up with the prejudice that a good scientific theory can only consist in some kind of functional, quantitative formulation (because the current mathematical paradigm is largely functional and quantitative). With respect to “artificial intelligence”: any machine that can parse “information” according to this scheme would have the same “intelligence” as a human being; alternatively, humans are just computers doing the same computer stuff that everything in the world does according to our peculiar, hyper-complicated programming.
This metaphysical innovation is an end run around “Descartes’ Demon,” the problem that kicked off the European philosophical tradition almost 400 years ago. How can a person be certain that what he thinks he knows is “true” or that anything happening out there is “real?” Descartes decided that it was his self-conscious subjectivity that could act as a foundation for knowledge; of course, for Descartes, this subjectivity would have been molded in the image of God, and occupied a place somehow liminal from the physical world, so it didn’t have to be accounted for descriptively. Information theory kicks all subjectivity to the curb. What matters about phenomena is not that they are “real” or subjects in human experience, but that they are exponents of “information” that has been decoded by some process of selection. Any question of “who” is doing the decoding is verboten; and, anyways, what does divinity have to do with science?
“Dataism” is information theory’s dead end. It has no grasp on how knowledge has been built up through history, or how the mind operates beyond its most self-conscious representations, or what it means to move through the world as a spirit.
It’s good to point this out. However, if you really want to move forward, you have to go back and interrogate the metaphysics that sent us in this direction, and then come up with something new and better that addresses the foundational problem, which is, basically, the “hard problem of consciousness.” A new foundational concept will give rise to a different research program, and, after some time, “dataism” will seem stupid in retrospect. I have my ideas about this, but it has been my experience that we’re so deep in this paradigm that people just aren’t seeing at all why we need to go back and have first-principles conversations.
Hi Jeffrey,
I have no doubt that the intellectual problems are deeper. I also have no doubt that the folks promoting "Dataism" in response to the growth of the web/machine learning/AI are not thinking about Shannon or anything very deep at all! Dataism in the context I'm describing is essentially the ahistorical and somewhat mindless view I've written about--that is actually my point, that it is NOT deep. To not see this would be to miss my point. Our deeper problems as you've so expertly adumbrated are, in a very real sense, an entirely separate discussion. I'd love to have that different discussion as well.
I'm not criticizing your article -- I hope you don't think that. I agree that "dataism" is a real thing and you've done a good job of describing it and articulating why it's pernicious. So, bravo!
I guess my sense is that the specifics of "dataism" are not all that important in the larger scheme of things. Or at least I view them as stupid and disruptive, but not, exactly, tragic and lamentable. Or permanent. In my telling, they're the predictable, and perhaps inevitable, outgrowth of the foundational assumptions I described here relating to information theory. For me the point you're making about "dataism" is interesting because it highlights the foolishness of the underlying metaphysics and how so much discourse seems to intentionally avoid the most important things within the topics we're discussing.
But, then, the next thing that comes to my mind: okay, so how do we start a real public conversation about these deeper problems? Because that leads somewhere.
PS. "Dataism" is Dadaism without a sense of humor.
"
But, then, the next thing that comes to my mind: okay, so how do we start a real public conversation about these deeper problems? Because that leads somewhere.
"
100% on board. And not sure how this deeper discussion should go! As a writer I try to capture "broad stupidities" you might say (somewhat tongue in cheek of course). But how to solve confusions is quite a different beast. My focus with the latter is on inference--how we draw conclusions from what we already know and what we observe. Eric Dane Walker made some interesting points that have to do with how we see data, and pointed out that I'm talking about how we use data in broader inference/discovery. And you're doing a deep dive into where these concepts came from and how they've veered off course. It would be great to combine all this great thinking!
In my job as a software engineer, I often read books about video decoding/encoding. In one book, the author makes the point that data and information are not the same, but people often think that they are. Information has meaning, whereas data does not necessarily have any meaning. For example, a pseudo random number generator can generate millions of bytes of data, but there is very little information contained in all of that data. If you want to transmit the information represented by the data, you just have to send the simple equation of the pseudo random number generator, not the data. The receiver can then generate data identical to the transmitter. That's the basic idea behind video compression. It allows you to transmit video information using far fewer bytes than just the raw pixel data.
This is why theory is necessary. Without it, data has no meaning. And with no meaning, there is no useful information, just a lot of noise.
Oh, I want to add here Gabriel, that Harari specifically conflates data and information. He uses them interchangeably. I noticed this in his writing about "Dataism" but chose not to highlight it in the piece, as in my view it's one of his more dismissable errors. Thanks again.
Yes, it's really all just semantics. But I think for many people the distinction between data and information is good way of understanding your point about dataism. I mean, the advent of the internet promised us the Information Age but instead we got Big Data!
Lol. Yes, Gabriel! This is a great a way to put it (I really did laugh out loud).
Hi Gabriel,
I totally agree. I would add that, in this case "data-ism" both in Brooks's sense and Harari's and Barabasi's isn't sensitive to the technical differences between "data" and "information" (I spent years studying this stuff, and let's not forget "knowledge"!). The point of the piece is that the average "person on the street" sees data as just the stuff you provide to your computer and the stuff your computer spits back at you and the stuff that serves as input to AI. They're not attempting to carve out necessary and sufficient conditions for "data," and in this case (that is, it serving as a worldview) I'm not sure that technical exercise would matter much. We could change from the English word "data" to "the stuff that's crunched and manipulated" by computers. A Shakespearean sonnet is simply data--it's converted into tokens and digits and then projected into a multidimensional space--with large language models--then reconstructed into what we see as English words and displayed as output. It's this idea that, to put it bluntly (but that's the proper way to put it) "what the computer crunches is what's real" that underlies the silly modern idea of Dataism.
I could not agree more, too, that theory is necessary, as you put it! Data has no meaning without it, indeed! Thank you for your comment.
I understand you tried using the wayback machine to llok for the article, but just in case, i mention it :)
I think it's all but "gone," although I'm sure there's a hard copy around, but alas too late for this post.