Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
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I think I'm always channeling Douglas Adams. Thanks for asking.
--Doug
On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
Doug Roberts
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Re: Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
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In reply to this post by Steve Smith
Steve Smith wrote at 04/05/2013 10:54 AM:
> 1. How do we define/recognize valid measures of evidence? > 2. Is the current "exponential" growth in tech divergent or convergent? > > 1. I have worked on several projects involving the formal management of > evidence and belief which makes me cynical when people suggest that > there is "one true form of evidence". Most of it ended up off in > high dimensional pareto fronts with multiple measures of > confidence. The underlying theory (much just beyond my grasp to > regurgitate) is based in variants of Dempster-Shaffer and Fuzzy > Sets/Intervals. There is always a Bayesian in the crowd that > starts "Baying" (sorry) about how "Bayesian Methods are the *only* > thing anyone ever needs". This specific example in statistics and > probability theory is but one. Similarly, it took a long time for > anyone to accept far-from-equilibrium systems as being worth > studying simply because their tools didn't work there. Like > looking for your lost keys under the streetlamp because the "light > is too bad in the alley where you dropped them". Well, the first thing to cover is that the definition won't necessarily be pre-statable. In order for it to be an accurate measure, it will have to evolve with the thing(s) being measured. The second consideration is whatever you mean by "valid". If I give you the benefit of the doubt, I assume you mean "trustworthy" or "credentialed" in some sense. And, again, I'd settle that by tying trustworthiness to the thing being measured. I typically do this by asking the participants in a domain whether any given measure of their domain is acceptable/irritating. Measures of local hacker spaces is a good anecdote for me, lately. With the growth of the maker community, it's informative to ask various participants what they think of things like techshop vs. dorkbot (or our local variants). Both these suggest skepticism toward the _unification_ of validity or trustworthiness. Evidence boils down to a context-sensitive aggregation, which is why Bayesian methods are so attractive. But I'm sure they aren't the only way to install context sensitivity. Recently, I've been trying to understand Feferman's "schematic axiom systems" http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/godelnagel.pdf and how a schema might be extracted from a formal system in such a way as to provide provide reasoning structures that are sensitive to application. (My complete and embarrassing ignorance slows my progress, of course.) > 2. [...] What I'm equally interested in is if there is a > similar divergence in thinking. [...] I believe > that humans have a natural time constant around belief (and as a > consequence, understanding, knowledge, paradigms?) on the order of > years if not decades or a full lifetime. That time-constant may be > shrinking, but I rarely believe someone when they claim during or > after an arguement to have "changed their mind"... at best, they are > acknowledging that a seed has sprouted which in a few years or > decades might grow into a garden. Obviously, I'm still not convinced that _thinking_ is all that important. It strikes me that _doing_ is far more important. My evidence for this lies mostly in the (apparent) decoupled relationship between what people say and what they do. I can see fairly strong maps between immediate, short-term thoughts like "Ice cream is good" and actions like walking to the freezer, scooping some out, and eating it. But I see fairly convoluted maps between, e.g., "Logging your data is good" and what bench scientists actually end up writing in their logs. -- =><= glen e. p. ropella All the lies I tell myself ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
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In reply to this post by glen ropella
Well, you may all soon tire of my attempt to channel the classical
pragmatist, C.S Peirce, but it is an interesting perspective, one that has had broad influence on our thought, but whose foundations have gotten trampled into the intellectual midden in the last 100 years, and therefore, I think, worth digging up and dusting off. I think the classical pragmatic answer to Glen's comment would be, whatever produces consensus in the very long run is science. So, as glen would point out, this does not, by itself, produce demarcations between good thought ... experimental thought, in the broadest sense ... and the other kinds. But Peirce was much taken by the period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in which a tremendous amount of opinion was settled ... a consensus was reached ... on the nature of the elements, a consensus that mainly endures until today. So I think he would advise us to turn to the methods of that period and say, use these as a guide to conduct our search for the truth in the future. He would agree that such advice is provisional ... fallible is the term he would use ... but he is contemptible of anything that smacked of Cartesian skeptism. Nobody, he would say, is skeptical as a matter of fact. Doubt is not something we entertain (except as sophists); it is something that is forced upon us and it is a painful state that we try to resolve in favor of belief. So, it is important to talk not about what we "can" doubt, but what we "do" doubt. And when we do that, when we look at which methods we have confidence in and which we actually doubt, we will see that we have ways of arriving at consensus ... in the long run ... about which methods to use. And yes that is quasi-tautological. Nick The Village Pragmatist -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 9:12 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/04/2013 10:03 PM: > Again, acting in my capacity as the Village Pragmatist, I would assert > that science is the only procedure capable of producing lasting > consensus. The other methods .... various forms of torture, mostly > ... do not produce such enduring results. N While I agree with you in the abstract, it still doesn't address the meaning of "scientific evidence". My assertion is that the variance exhibited by the many meanings of evidence within science is wide enough to cast doubt on the stability (or perhaps even coherence) of the term in science. And if that's the case, then claims for the superiority of scientific evidence over other meanings of evidence are suspicious claims ... deserving of at least as much skepticism as anecdotal evidence or even personal epiphany. Rather than assume an oversimplified projection onto a one dimensional partial order, perhaps there are as many different types of evidence as there are foci of attention, a multi-dimensional space, with an orthogonal partial ordering in each dimension. -- =><= glen e. p. ropella This body of mine, man I don't wanna turn android ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
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In reply to this post by Roger Critchlow-2
Roger, Speaking in my role as the Village Pragmatist, I think I would insist that your implication is incorrect that there is no purchase on the slipperly slope you describe. Your despair is premature. From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow And given exponential growth in science, who knows first hand what the variance in accepted scientific evidence actually is? Any claims to know what science "is" and what scientists "do", for the purposes of distinguishing between science and non-science, are claims to a revealed truth, not something that anyone has established empirically. Ouch. -- rec -- On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 9:12 AM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote: Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/04/2013 10:03 PM: > Again, acting in my capacity as the Village Pragmatist, I would assert that While I agree with you in the abstract, it still doesn't address the
This body of mine, man I don't wanna turn android
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Re: Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
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In reply to this post by glen ropella
Glen -
> Steve Smith wrote at 04/05/2013 10:54 AM: >> 1. How do we define/recognize valid measures of evidence? >> 2. Is the current "exponential" growth in tech divergent or convergent? >> ... > Well, the first thing to cover is that the definition won't necessarily > be pre-statable. In order for it to be an accurate measure, it will > have to evolve with the thing(s) being measured. This is an important point that I'd like to hear more about... I have my own views and ideas on it but get the feeling you may have a more formal or specific idea about this? > > Both these suggest skepticism toward the _unification_ of validity or > trustworthiness. Evidence boils down to a context-sensitive > aggregation, which is why Bayesian methods are so attractive. But I'm > sure they aren't the only way to install context sensitivity. Recently, > I've been trying to understand Feferman's "schematic axiom systems" > http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/godelnagel.pdf and how a > schema might be extracted from a formal system in such a way as to > provide provide reasoning structures that are sensitive to application. > (My complete and embarrassing ignorance slows my progress, of course.) arrogant ignorance (thanks for the succinct description of this state Doug!) doesn't bog me down even worse, I'll try to respond to that under separate cover. >> 2. [...] What I'm equally interested in is if there is a >> similar divergence in thinking. [...] I believe >> that humans have a natural time constant around belief (and as a >> consequence, understanding, knowledge, paradigms?) on the order of >> years if not decades or a full lifetime. That time-constant may be >> shrinking, but I rarely believe someone when they claim during or >> after an arguement to have "changed their mind"... at best, they are >> acknowledging that a seed has sprouted which in a few years or >> decades might grow into a garden. > Obviously, I'm still not convinced that _thinking_ is all that > important. It strikes me that _doing_ is far more important. My > evidence for this lies mostly in the (apparent) decoupled relationship > between what people say and what they do. I can see fairly strong maps > between immediate, short-term thoughts like "Ice cream is good" and > actions like walking to the freezer, scooping some out, and eating it. > But I see fairly convoluted maps between, e.g., "Logging your data is > good" and what bench scientists actually end up writing in their logs. thinking (or talking or posturing or gesturing) and take it painfully to heart. My prolificness (prolificacy? wot?) here suggests that I prefer to talk and think to do. That is not *completely* true, as a lot of my "doing" happens at the same keyboard and screen as my "talking" and "thinking".... on the other hand, the new heating element to my dryer came in yesterday and I *still* haven't installed it. And Spring is springing and I *still* haven't bled the brakes on my dumptruck to go get my usual Springtime loads of manure and woodchips... and I am *still* yammering away here as April 15 looms over the horizon and my P&L records are still woefully under-attended... and ... well, you get the picture. Talk *is* (relatively) cheap, though not without a price. I also appreciate what you probably *really* intended to illuminate... that what we *do* says more than what we *say*. But the two *are* duals... even if some of us *say* one thing and *do* another, there is a correlation. In fact, those of us who protest most loudly about this or that might be the best suspects for acting differently. Anecdotally it is a given that rabid homophobes are likely to be gay and it is easy enough for me to believe that those who proselytize most grandly might be compensating for their own lack of belief. But the point I was trying to make, independent of the measure (I think) is that human time scales, the time between beginning to accept/understand/experience/act differently and a "full embrace" of it can be quite long. This feels like a bit of a ceiling (more aptly "floor") to constrain any runaway acceleration of thinking OR action? I could be arguing for your point (even more than intended) as I know that if I can encode an idea into an action and an action into a habit, it often doesn't take long for me to shift from one mode to another... there is a power of tactile/embodied habituation that mere thinking/talking doesn't touch. Thanks - Steve ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
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In reply to this post by glen ropella
It think the Village Pragmatist would insist, contra Roger, that even as
there is an explosion of small doubts at the periphery of our collective understanding, so also there is an explosion of the stuff that we have come to agree about. Nick -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 10:58 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending Roger Critchlow wrote at 04/05/2013 08:23 AM: > And given exponential growth in science, who knows first hand what the > variance in accepted scientific evidence actually is? That's a great point. It may help me articulate my objection to the concept of "the singularity", the sense that technology will soon (has) outstrip(ped) purely human intelligence/understanding. It seems more like an explosion of effect[ors] than a "super intelligence" or anything cognitive, thought-based like that. Even if we constrain ourselves to the maker community (3d printers, arduino, etc.) and the recent pressure for open access to publications, it's difficult for me to imagine any kind of convergence, to "science" or anything else. It just feels more like a divergence to me. I wonder if there is a way to measure this? In absolute terms, we can't really use a "count the people who participate in domain X" measure. The ratio of the poor and starving to those who have their basic needs met well enough to participate is too high. It would swamp that absolute measure. We'd have to normalize it. To some extent, exploratory science has always been pursued most effectively by the 1% and those they patronize. Perhaps a measure of the variation in standards of evidence would correlate fairly well with the waxing and waning of the middle class? > Any claims to know what science "is" and what scientists "do", for the > purposes of distinguishing between science and non-science, are claims > to a revealed truth, not something that anyone has established > empirically. Ouch. Absolutely! (Sorry, I had to slip in a contradictory affirmation.) This goes directly back to Popper, I think. There is no entry exam for science. Every speculation is welcome. -- =><= glen e. p. ropella Me and myself got a world to save ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
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Unfortunately I think I am coming into this a bit too late to read through the whole thread and respond, but I would like to present a couple of related topics and see what people think.
The first is in response to 'would I like people to burst my placebo/nocebo bubble?': the latest issue of Science magazine has an article on recommendations by the American College of Medicine of whether people should be told without being asked that they have alleles that indicate an elevated risk of disease when looking at genes related to common diseases (mostly cancers and tissue defects) as a course of a full-genome analysis for another disease/syndrome/disorder (pointing out that people may already be in an emotionally fragile state from said disease). Link here. Secondly, I agree that how likable a belief is relies not on how close to reality it is (although that helps) but how 'humble' it is, how willing to admit that it could be wrong (put another way, beliefs that come with an accurate measure of where they came from and therefore how widely they can be applied). So there is likable woo (cold fusion or the new cold fusion, LENR; based on my [admittedly minor] perusing of websites and documents the proponents seem to welcome outside experimentation/verification, and open-source device plans. That doesn't mean the device works as advertised, though) and dislikable woo (iridology?) with chemtrails in between (while it seems very paranoid, I wouldn't put it past refineries that produce jet fuel to get rid of waste chemicals through their product; and although neither that nor any other intentional human activity [unless we can count GHG emissions as intentional just through negligence now?] has effectively controlled the weather, it is not for lack of trying. Contemporary benign activities like silver iodide cloud seeding, speak to this) along with homeopathy (my school tutor keeps recommending this method, whatever that means in practice, and I just politely change the subject; While I don't understand the fractionation thing, the idea that it contains the cause of what it is treating gets some mental preparation from the idea of vaccines).
<May be unrelated: the discovery of the sodium layer, and the ICE [Ionosphere Communication Experiment] Station Otto [Not to be confused with Ice Station Zebra], outside Vaughn, NM.>
Similarly, there is likable and dislikable skepticism. I think the best part of science is the experimentation itself rather than the results per se (although obviously the fruitful part for society is the resulting tech or best practices); perhaps this is related to Feynman's pleasure of finding things out (I believe it was that book in which he stirs a pot of jello that he is holding out a window to see if it will congeal faster in the cold, or the one in which he and a classmate realise they have different ways of counting, one auditory, one visual). When this turns into ridiculing people, however justified, it becomes just no fun anymore. -Arlo James Barnes ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
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prescience: piles of random woo science: linear woo woo trains unity: fractal woos within woos = WOO ! Rich
On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 8:42 PM, Arlo Barnes <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
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Compare Urban Dictionary: woot.
-Arlo James Barnes ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
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Urban Dictionary: woot.
and there's wood, would, woof, Wookie, wool... On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 9:49 PM, Arlo Barnes <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
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I thought woo was a FRIAM local-ism for the Santa Fe local-ism woo woo now in urban usage: Dean Gerber From: Rich Murray <[hidden email]> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]> Sent: Friday, April 5, 2013 11:13 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending Urban Dictionary: woot.
and there's wood, would, woof, Wookie, wool... On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 9:49 PM, Arlo Barnes <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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Re: Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
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On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 10:30 PM, Dean Gerber <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
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I thought "woo woo" was simply the sound made by the Crazy Train.
Perhaps I should seeking better evidence for the _true_ origin of the term. (* tongue firmly planted in cheek *)
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In reply to this post by Nick Thompson
Steve's mention of Peirce and abduction reminded me that I intended to respond to this. I'm intrigued by your use of "quasi-tautological". I'm not a big fan of consensus, obviously. So, I could criticize that, even pragmatically, if you'd like. But I care more about the (truly) tautological nature of justificationism and why you identify a convergence onto what we "do" doubt and what we have confidence in as quasi-tautological. To be clear, I usually claim that all deduction is tautology, a constructive, reversible walk from premise to conclusion. (This disallows proof by contradiction, which requires getting at least one's toes wet with meta concepts like paradox, consistency, completeness, abduction, etc.) A convergence like the consensus you lay out, however, requires an inductive extrapolation from what the many of us do/think to what is trustworthy (if not true). Why is this quasi-tautological rather than (truly) tautological? Is it because you give some credit to the complicatedness of deduction (i.e. that we can walk from premises to conclusion doesn't automatically imply that the conclusions are the same as the premises)? Or is it because induction somehow injects something more into the result, over and above whatever info was embedded/implied in the premises? Or is there some other reason? Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/05/2013 12:10 PM: > Well, you may all soon tire of my attempt to channel the classical > pragmatist, C.S Peirce, but it is an interesting perspective, one that has > had broad influence on our thought, but whose foundations have gotten > trampled into the intellectual midden in the last 100 years, and therefore, > I think, worth digging up and dusting off. > > I think the classical pragmatic answer to Glen's comment would be, whatever > produces consensus in the very long run is science. So, as glen would point > out, this does not, by itself, produce demarcations between good thought ... > experimental thought, in the broadest sense ... and the other kinds. But > Peirce was much taken by the period in the late 18th and early 19th > centuries in which a tremendous amount of opinion was settled ... a > consensus was reached ... on the nature of the elements, a consensus that > mainly endures until today. So I think he would advise us to turn to the > methods of that period and say, use these as a guide to conduct our search > for the truth in the future. He would agree that such advice is provisional > ... fallible is the term he would use ... but he is contemptible of anything > that smacked of Cartesian skeptism. Nobody, he would say, is skeptical as a > matter of fact. Doubt is not something we entertain (except as sophists); > it is something that is forced upon us and it is a painful state that we try > to resolve in favor of belief. So, it is important to talk not about what > we "can" doubt, but what we "do" doubt. And when we do that, when we look > at which methods we have confidence in and which we actually doubt, we will > see that we have ways of arriving at consensus ... in the long run ... about > which methods to use. And yes that is quasi-tautological. > > Nick > The Village Pragmatist > > -----Original Message----- > From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen > Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 9:12 AM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED > Controversy is Sending > > Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/04/2013 10:03 PM: >> Again, acting in my capacity as the Village Pragmatist, I would assert >> that science is the only procedure capable of producing lasting >> consensus. The other methods .... various forms of torture, mostly >> ... do not produce such enduring results. N > > While I agree with you in the abstract, it still doesn't address the meaning > of "scientific evidence". My assertion is that the variance exhibited by > the many meanings of evidence within science is wide enough to cast doubt on > the stability (or perhaps even coherence) of the term in science. > > And if that's the case, then claims for the superiority of scientific > evidence over other meanings of evidence are suspicious claims ... > deserving of at least as much skepticism as anecdotal evidence or even > personal epiphany. > > Rather than assume an oversimplified projection onto a one dimensional > partial order, perhaps there are as many different types of evidence as > there are foci of attention, a multi-dimensional space, with an orthogonal > partial ordering in each dimension. -- =><= glen e. p. ropella But now I'm living on the profits of pride ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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Glen, I missed Steve's reference to "abduction". I found one in one of your messages wherein you mentioned a book, Gabbay & Woods in "The Reach of Abduction", and a bunch of bafflegab quoted therefrom. In my experience, Abduction has been used to refer to two quite different things. A very specific logical move, as laid out in Peirce's early work OR as others, used it, including the later Peirce, any old sloppy thinking that scientists use that sometimes proves fruitful in the generation of useful hypotheses. What Popper might have called “bold conjectures”. I guess I should look at the Gabbay and Woods book, but from the sample of their prose given, I would suspect it is from that latter tradition. But if you think I ought to have a look at it, I will. In general, I am a fan of Peirce’s earlier usage, that seemed to give hope that we could work out in some detail the right thinking by which fruitful conjectures are arrived at. In short, I don’t think that abduction is a post-modernist crap shoot. You have nailed me on a misuse of the term tautological. I should have written "quasi-circular". Indeed, as you summarize, Tautological relations are only those circular arguments that are true by definition. If an MA student proposed to you to do a piece of research to demonstrate that all bachelors are unmarried, you would advise the student that no research on his part was necessary because his assertion, while true, is analytical, and therefore above any facts that the student might discover. I have a long history with this tautology business, and always screw it up. I was brought into it because early in my career, it was often asserted that the Law of Effect in experimental psychology (that reinforcement strengthens learning) and the principle of natural selection in biology (that natural selection favors adapted organisms) were tautologies. I fell for it. A marvelous philosopher, Peter Lipton, took me under his wing and helped me straighten all of this out. I attach a copy of our paper. It argues that a form of quasi-circular thinking, “recursive theory,” is useful in the development of a science so long is one is scrupulous in avoiding its pitfalls. Both natural selection and reinforcement theory are examples of what Peter called “filter” theories, in which the thing to be explained appears in a filter frame. So, we might say that the coffee has no grounds in it because it went through a “grounds-filter”. If we stopped there, it would be stupid; but in wise hands, we would be led to explore exactly that it is that the filter is excluding … say, particles larger than the size of the smallest coffee ground particle. At the early stages of development, many scientific theories have that character … think about how in the history of aids research, the description of the cause of aids has metamorphosed from an unknown cause to a virus to a particular virus. The problem with this sort of circularity arises when people stop, a fault we called Molierizing a theory. In the play, Malade Imaginaire, somebody explains the sleep inducing effects of morphine by its having a dormative virtue. Notice that this is circular, because the word “sleep” appears both in the explanation and the thing to be explained. But the explanation is not empty because the word “virtue” rules out many possible reasons for morphine’s putting people to sleep … placebo effects, for instance. So, in the right hands, this quasi circular explanation would lead to a more precise description of the properties of morphine that put people to sleep. Peter died last year, despite being many years my junior, and since I cannot be trusted, on my own, to get these things right, I attach a link to the abstract . Once you have the abstract on your screen, clicking on it will download the paper. But thanks for catching the error. Nick -----Original Message----- Steve's mention of Peirce and abduction reminded me that I intended to respond to this. I'm intrigued by your use of "quasi-tautological". I'm not a big fan of consensus, obviously. So, I could criticize that, even pragmatically, if you'd like. But I care more about the (truly) tautological nature of justificationism and why you identify a convergence onto what we "do" doubt and what we have confidence in as quasi-tautological. To be clear, I usually claim that all deduction is tautology, a constructive, reversible walk from premise to conclusion. (This disallows proof by contradiction, which requires getting at least one's toes wet with meta concepts like paradox, consistency, completeness, abduction, etc.) A convergence like the consensus you lay out, however, requires an inductive extrapolation from what the many of us do/think to what is trustworthy (if not true). Why is this quasi-tautological rather than (truly) tautological? Is it because you give some credit to the complicatedness of deduction (i.e. that we can walk from premises to conclusion doesn't automatically imply that the conclusions are the same as the premises)? Or is it because induction somehow injects something more into the result, over and above whatever info was embedded/implied in the premises? Or is there some other reason? Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/05/2013 12:10 PM: > Well, you may all soon tire of my attempt to channel the classical > pragmatist, C.S Peirce, but it is an interesting perspective, one that > has had broad influence on our thought, but whose foundations have > gotten trampled into the intellectual midden in the last 100 years, > and therefore, I think, worth digging up and dusting off. > > I think the classical pragmatic answer to Glen's comment would be, > whatever produces consensus in the very long run is science. So, as > glen would point out, this does not, by itself, produce demarcations between good thought ... > experimental thought, in the broadest sense ... and the other kinds. > But Peirce was much taken by the period in the late 18th and early > 19th centuries in which a tremendous amount of opinion was settled ... > a consensus was reached ... on the nature of the elements, a consensus > that mainly endures until today. So I think he would advise us to > turn to the methods of that period and say, use these as a guide to > conduct our search for the truth in the future. He would agree that > such advice is provisional ... fallible is the term he would use ... > but he is contemptible of anything that smacked of Cartesian skeptism. > Nobody, he would say, is skeptical as a matter of fact. Doubt is not > something we entertain (except as sophists); it is something that is > forced upon us and it is a painful state that we try to resolve in > favor of belief. So, it is important to talk not about what we "can" > doubt, but what we "do" doubt. And when we do that, when we look at > which methods we have confidence in and which we actually doubt, we > will see that we have ways of arriving at consensus ... in the long run ... about which methods to use. And yes that is quasi-tautological. > > Nick > The Village Pragmatist > > -----Original Message----- > From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen > Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 9:12 AM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that > the TED Controversy is Sending > > Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/04/2013 10:03 PM: >> Again, acting in my capacity as the Village Pragmatist, I would >> assert that science is the only procedure capable of producing >> lasting consensus. The other methods .... various forms of torture, >> mostly ... do not produce such enduring results. N > > While I agree with you in the abstract, it still doesn't address the > meaning of "scientific evidence". My assertion is that the variance > exhibited by the many meanings of evidence within science is wide > enough to cast doubt on the stability (or perhaps even coherence) of the term in science. > > And if that's the case, then claims for the superiority of scientific > evidence over other meanings of evidence are suspicious claims ... > deserving of at least as much skepticism as anecdotal evidence or even > personal epiphany. > > Rather than assume an oversimplified projection onto a one dimensional > partial order, perhaps there are as many different types of evidence > as there are foci of attention, a multi-dimensional space, with an > orthogonal partial ordering in each dimension. -- =><= glen e. p. ropella But now I'm living on the profits of pride ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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On 04/09/2013 11:13 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> But if you think I ought to have > a look at it, I will. In general, I am a fan of Peirce's earlier usage, > that seemed to give hope that we could work out in some detail the right > thinking by which fruitful conjectures are arrived at. In short, I don't > think that abduction is a post-modernist crap shoot. No, I don't think you should look at "The Reach of Abduction". It's a good book and it helps me understand the subject, because it's a more formal/technical treatment without all the prosaic gymnastics others use to talk about it. > It argues that a form of quasi-circular thinking, "recursive theory," > is useful in the development of a science so long is one is > scrupulous in avoiding its pitfalls.[...] So, in the right hands, this > quasi circular explanation would lead to a more precise description > of the properties of morphine that put people to sleep. > > > Peter died last year, despite being many years my junior, and since I cannot > be trusted, on my own, to get these things right, I attach a link to the > abstract <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/id33.html> Thanks. I'll take a look at that. As you know, I'm a fan of circularity, especially when it can be formalized as in Aczel's non-well-founded sets. But I'm worried that a "recursive" rhetoric might come a bit too close to confirmation bias or motivated reasoning, which can be consequences of the type of long term consensus you're arguing for. -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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Glen, I have yet to integrate my thinking about "convergence" (preferable to "consensus", I think) with the stuff about recursion, which was near-30 years ago. It was the sort of thing that I though Peter Lipton and I might do when we were old. Not sure I am man enough to do it alone. I think Peirce would say ... particularly the later Peirce ... that in recursive explanations lurks a form of "right-thinking" that cannot be described in the terms of formal logic Remember that a click on the abstract gets you the whole paper, should you be curious. By the way, there is a truly excellent summary of Peirce's thought, called On Peirce ... just a hundred pages ... and expensive for all of that ... just a pamphlet, really, .... but worth every penny, by Cornelis DeWaal (Wadsworth). My Peirce mentor also approves of it. N -----Original Message----- On 04/09/2013 11:13 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > But if you think I ought to have > a look at it, I will. In general, I am a fan of Peirce's earlier > usage, that seemed to give hope that we could work out in some detail > the right thinking by which fruitful conjectures are arrived at. In > short, I don't think that abduction is a post-modernist crap shoot. No, I don't think you should look at "The Reach of Abduction". It's a good book and it helps me understand the subject, because it's a more formal/technical treatment without all the prosaic gymnastics others use to talk about it. > It argues that a form of quasi-circular thinking, "recursive theory," > is useful in the development of a science so long is one is scrupulous > in avoiding its pitfalls.[...] So, in the right hands, this quasi > circular explanation would lead to a more precise description of the > properties of morphine that put people to sleep. > > > Peter died last year, despite being many years my junior, and since I > cannot be trusted, on my own, to get these things right, I attach a > link to the abstract > <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/id33.html> Thanks. I'll take a look at that. As you know, I'm a fan of circularity, especially when it can be formalized as in Aczel's non-well-founded sets. But I'm worried that a "recursive" rhetoric might come a bit too close to confirmation bias or motivated reasoning, which can be consequences of the type of long term consensus you're arguing for. -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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On 04/10/2013 09:17 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> I have yet to integrate my thinking about "convergence" (preferable to > "consensus", I think) with the stuff about recursion, which was near-30 > years ago. It was the sort of thing that I though Peter Lipton and I might > do when we were old. Not sure I am man enough to do it alone. I think > Peirce would say ... particularly the later Peirce ... that in recursive > explanations lurks a form of "right-thinking" that cannot be described in > the terms of formal logic I actually distrust consensus and convergence, equally, I think. This is for the same reason I think the "singularity" concept is suspicious. It implies a closedness that I don't believe in. The universe seems open to me, which implies that any process (including explanation) _wanders_ significantly. I will admit constraints, though. Although any process may wander, it may do so within some hard boundaries ... like a sandwiched series that forever oscillates without actually converging. Anyway, re your paper: The concept of filter explanations may end up being quite useful to me for the same reason that abduction is useful to me. For most of my career, I've tried to explain to my fellow simulants that any particular snapshot of a modeling effort is not very useful. I.e. any particular _model_ is not very useful (with an anti-authoritarian prejudice against the much-abused "all models are wrong, some are useful" aphorism -- I actually think that aphorism has done more damage to the proper way to use simulation than any other concept). But the whole modeling and simulation (M&S) effort (trajectory or bundle of trajectories, given model forking) _is_ useful. The distinction I would draw is that I don't think of these efforts or the filter explanations you describe in the paper as recursive so much as _iterative_. Recursion, to me, implies a kind of "normalized" data, just like your "distinguishes X's that are Y from X's that are not-Y". Iteration doesn't usually take advantage of it's more general nature. But it's still there. You can perform the same process regardless of the type of the thing to which it's applied. Recursion implies that the result of applying the process will produce something that can be processed by the process. In other words, iteration is "doing it again" and recursion is "doing it to the result of the last time you did it", making recursion more specific. Hence, recursion targets a more closed type chain. This is important to me because my work is multi-formalism, the model produced in one iteration can be wildly different from the model produced in prior or subsequent iterations, different in generating structure and dynamics as well as phenomenal attributes. Hence I like the concept of filter explanations better than that of recursive explanations, where the filter can co-evolve with the stuff being filtered. > By the way, there is a truly excellent summary of Peirce's thought, called > On Peirce ... just a hundred pages ... and expensive for all of that ... > just a pamphlet, really, .... but worth every penny, by Cornelis DeWaal > (Wadsworth). My Peirce mentor also approves of it. Thanks. I've added it to my Powell's wishlist. -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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Wow. This is one of those wonderful cases where a body doesn't know what he
means until he has learned all the ways in which he can be mis understood. When Peter and I wrote that, I don't think either of us had much of a notion of recursion in the computer sense. We just meant that the explanation refers back to the question that demands it. We wanted to distinguish that sort of explanation from explanations which were fully circular .... i.e., those that refer ONLY to that which they explain. You know, the kind of thing you say to a three year old after the 33rd why-question. "Because that's how many horns unicorns have, Dear. Now go to sleep." Your mention of modeling reminds me of a kerfuffle I got into with Joshua Epstein (Well, he got into it with me, anyway; I don't think he paid any attention to me) concerning modeling and explanation. It's at http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/12/1/9.html Please disregard the abstract, in this case. There's something screwy about it. I can't figure out from your comments below whether you will love it or hate it. Nick -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen e p ropella Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2013 1:04 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] scientific evidence On 04/10/2013 09:17 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > I have yet to integrate my thinking about "convergence" (preferable to > "consensus", I think) with the stuff about recursion, which was near-30 > years ago. It was the sort of thing that I though Peter Lipton and I might > do when we were old. Not sure I am man enough to do it alone. I think > Peirce would say ... particularly the later Peirce ... that in > recursive explanations lurks a form of "right-thinking" that cannot be > described in the terms of formal logic I actually distrust consensus and convergence, equally, I think. This is for the same reason I think the "singularity" concept is suspicious. It implies a closedness that I don't believe in. The universe seems open to me, which implies that any process (including explanation) _wanders_ significantly. I will admit constraints, though. Although any process may wander, it may do so within some hard boundaries ... like a sandwiched series that forever oscillates without actually converging. Anyway, re your paper: The concept of filter explanations may end up being quite useful to me for the same reason that abduction is useful to me. For most of my career, I've tried to explain to my fellow simulants that any particular snapshot of a modeling effort is not very useful. I.e. any particular _model_ is not very useful (with an anti-authoritarian prejudice against the much-abused "all models are wrong, some are useful" aphorism -- I actually think that aphorism has done more damage to the proper way to use simulation than any other concept). But the whole modeling and simulation (M&S) effort (trajectory or bundle of trajectories, given model forking) _is_ useful. The distinction I would draw is that I don't think of these efforts or the filter explanations you describe in the paper as recursive so much as _iterative_. Recursion, to me, implies a kind of "normalized" data, just like your "distinguishes X's that are Y from X's that are not-Y". Iteration doesn't usually take advantage of it's more general nature. But it's still there. You can perform the same process regardless of the type of the thing to which it's applied. Recursion implies that the result of applying the process will produce something that can be processed by the process. In other words, iteration is "doing it again" and recursion is "doing it to the result of the last time you did it", making recursion more specific. Hence, recursion targets a more closed type chain. This is important to me because my work is multi-formalism, the model produced in one iteration can be wildly different from the model produced in prior or subsequent iterations, different in generating structure and dynamics as well as phenomenal attributes. Hence I like the concept of filter explanations better than that of recursive explanations, where the filter can co-evolve with the stuff being filtered. > By the way, there is a truly excellent summary of Peirce's thought, > called On Peirce ... just a hundred pages ... and expensive for all of that ... > just a pamphlet, really, .... but worth every penny, by Cornelis > DeWaal (Wadsworth). My Peirce mentor also approves of it. Thanks. I've added it to my Powell's wishlist. -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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Heh. Sorry. I don't think I misunderstood you (and Lipton) at all. 8^) When I use "recursion", I don't mean it in specifically a "computer sense". I mean it in the more general logical or perhaps mathematical sense. Your filter explanations do fit that definition. The part "2 There is a process which distinguishes X's that are Y from X's which are not Y and selects the former" on page 221 argues that this is recursion, not iteration, quite clearly. The subsequent several paragraphs and sections talk directly about how these recursive explanations "exclude" causes. This also directly addresses how much more specific the operands for recursion are than for the more general iteration. But I _disagree_ with the paper in the sense that I think _explanations_, at least in the hands of normal people, including evolutionists, who don't think too much about this sort of thing, do not use recursive explanation so much as iterative explanation. If you allow for multiple or evolving filters, then you escape from the more specific recursion into the more general iteration. I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me why/how you think I've misunderstood. On 04/10/2013 03:49 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > Wow. This is one of those wonderful cases where a body doesn't know what he > means until he has learned all the ways in which he can be mis understood. > When Peter and I wrote that, I don't think either of us had much of a notion > of recursion in the computer sense. We just meant that the explanation > refers back to the question that demands it. We wanted to distinguish that > sort of explanation from explanations which were fully circular .... i.e., > those that refer ONLY to that which they explain. You know, the kind of > thing you say to a three year old after the 33rd why-question. "Because > that's how many horns unicorns have, Dear. Now go to sleep." -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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