Unmediated perception - sheldrake

[Marcus G. Daniels]

My own instinct is that the `serious' communication between people, factored from rhetoric or not, is mostly about entertainment.   It's code that matters.

On 9/17/19, 1:22 PM, "Friam on behalf of Nick Thompson" <[hidden email] on behalf of [hidden email]> wrote:

    Sorry.  I thought the name of my new company would be obvious:
   
    "Rhetor Rooter"
   
    I suppose it also could be the name of a person who cheers on rhetoricians.
   
    Nick
   
   
   
    Nicholas S. Thompson
    Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
    Clark University
    http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
   
    -----Original Message-----
    From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
    Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2019 3:03 PM
    To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
    Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake
   
    This instinct taken to an extreme might explain how someone would end-up at a Trump rally and not an Obama rally.
    Fear of those that can tell a complex and convincing story and cut corners in hard-to-detect ways.   Individuals having such fear might be more at ease with someone that does not have these skills.   Someone that makes them feel relatively good about themselves.
   
    On 9/17/19, 10:06 AM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" <[hidden email] on behalf of [hidden email]> wrote:
   
        Ha! "Rhetor". It's fantastic how you assembled those words so that "rhetor" seems so distasteful. I'm going to start using "rhetor" as a username for those throwaway logins I'm always having to create.
       
        On 9/17/19 9:46 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
        > My favorite and perhaps most  disillusioning was a
        > talk he gave at Google, where with maybe six people
        > in the room, I had the privilege to observe what a
        > rhetor he was capable of being. Now, I almost
        > never think about him or his theory.
       
       
        --
        ☣ uǝlƃ
       
        ============================================================
        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
        archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
        FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
       
   
    ============================================================
    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
    archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
    FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
   
   
    ============================================================
    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
    archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
    FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
   

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Nick Thompson]

"all about entertainment"

That seems an over-aggressive reduction to me.  Like "all action is self-interested" or "all natural selection is at the genetic level".  

Perhaps the largest personality difference I can think of among people concerns what entertains them.  I am entertained by rhetoric.  Other people think it's boring.  So, there you have it.  

All the best,

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2019 4:26 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

My own instinct is that the `serious' communication between people, factored from rhetoric or not, is mostly about entertainment.   It's code that matters.

On 9/17/19, 1:22 PM, "Friam on behalf of Nick Thompson" <[hidden email] on behalf of [hidden email]> wrote:

    Sorry.  I thought the name of my new company would be obvious:
   
    "Rhetor Rooter"
   
    I suppose it also could be the name of a person who cheers on rhetoricians.
   
    Nick
   
   
   
    Nicholas S. Thompson
    Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
    Clark University
    http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
   
    -----Original Message-----
    From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
    Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2019 3:03 PM
    To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
    Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake
   
    This instinct taken to an extreme might explain how someone would end-up at a Trump rally and not an Obama rally.
    Fear of those that can tell a complex and convincing story and cut corners in hard-to-detect ways.   Individuals having such fear might be more at ease with someone that does not have these skills.   Someone that makes them feel relatively good about themselves.
   
    On 9/17/19, 10:06 AM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" <[hidden email] on behalf of [hidden email]> wrote:
   
        Ha! "Rhetor". It's fantastic how you assembled those words so that "rhetor" seems so distasteful. I'm going to start using "rhetor" as a username for those throwaway logins I'm always having to create.
       
        On 9/17/19 9:46 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
        > My favorite and perhaps most  disillusioning was a
        > talk he gave at Google, where with maybe six people
        > in the room, I had the privilege to observe what a
        > rhetor he was capable of being. Now, I almost
        > never think about him or his theory.
       
       
        --
        ☣ uǝlƃ
       
        ============================================================
        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
        archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
        FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
       
   
    ============================================================
    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
    archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
    FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
   
   
    ============================================================
    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
    archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
    FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
   

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove


============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Sure, it's an instinct, a sub-conscious driver just below the surface.  It is not something I would really try to defend.
It would go something like, "Look, here you are [random academic sucking up resources on the backs of struggling families] writing all these papers that almost no one reads.   Why don't you make something that _works_ and go the last 70% of the way?   Not only do your oration and presentation skills fill me with suspicion and impatience, the very fact you are doing research without development just clogs up digital repositories with mostly useless crap.  Get a real job and get off my lawn!"   :-)

On 9/17/19, 2:20 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

    "all about entertainment"
   
    That seems an over-aggressive reduction to me.  Like "all action is self-interested" or "all natural selection is at the genetic level".  
   
    Perhaps the largest personality difference I can think of among people concerns what entertains them.  I am entertained by rhetoric.  Other people think it's boring.  So, there you have it.  
   
    All the best,
   
    Nick
   
    Nicholas S. Thompson
    Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
    Clark University
    http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
   
   
    -----Original Message-----
    From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
    Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2019 4:26 PM
    To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
    Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake
   
    My own instinct is that the `serious' communication between people, factored from rhetoric or not, is mostly about entertainment.   It's code that matters.
   
    On 9/17/19, 1:22 PM, "Friam on behalf of Nick Thompson" <[hidden email] on behalf of [hidden email]> wrote:
   
        Sorry.  I thought the name of my new company would be obvious:
       
        "Rhetor Rooter"
       
        I suppose it also could be the name of a person who cheers on rhetoricians.
       
        Nick
       
       
       
        Nicholas S. Thompson
        Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
        Clark University
        http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
       
        -----Original Message-----
        From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
        Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2019 3:03 PM
        To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
        Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake
       
        This instinct taken to an extreme might explain how someone would end-up at a Trump rally and not an Obama rally.
        Fear of those that can tell a complex and convincing story and cut corners in hard-to-detect ways.   Individuals having such fear might be more at ease with someone that does not have these skills.   Someone that makes them feel relatively good about themselves.
       
        On 9/17/19, 10:06 AM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" <[hidden email] on behalf of [hidden email]> wrote:
       
            Ha! "Rhetor". It's fantastic how you assembled those words so that "rhetor" seems so distasteful. I'm going to start using "rhetor" as a username for those throwaway logins I'm always having to create.
           
            On 9/17/19 9:46 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
            > My favorite and perhaps most  disillusioning was a
            > talk he gave at Google, where with maybe six people
            > in the room, I had the privilege to observe what a
            > rhetor he was capable of being. Now, I almost
            > never think about him or his theory.
           
           
            --
            ☣ uǝlƃ
           
            ============================================================
            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
            archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
            FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
           
       
        ============================================================
        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
        archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
        FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
       
       
        ============================================================
        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
        archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
        FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
       
   
    ============================================================
    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
    archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
    FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
   
   
    ============================================================
    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
    archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
    FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
   

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[gepr]

But, of course, the benefit of finding hard-to-detect corners to cut, accompanied (or not) by complicated, convincing rhetoric, is *scaffolding* ... aka the convexity of the search space. It may not be so easy for, say, pre-language humanity to understand (eg) transistors unless they've gone through all the twisty little rhetorical paths we've taken. And, if they can't understand it, then they can't build devices that exploit it.

So, some parts of the search space *are* convex, i.e. complicated rhetoric turns out to be unnecessary. But other parts *might* be convoluted and require all the cumulative mental gymnastics facilitated by rhetoric. The trick is that many/most of us can't *tell* whether we're on a necessary or unnecessary path, in a convex or convoluted region of the space. Even if I suspect what I'm doing is useless busy-ness, it's still difficult to be sure enough to abandon that path.

On 9/17/19 2:36 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Sure, it's an instinct, a sub-conscious driver just below the surface.  It is not something I would really try to defend.
> It would go something like, "Look, here you are [random academic sucking up resources on the backs of struggling families] writing all these papers that almost no one reads.   Why don't you make something that _works_ and go the last 70% of the way?   Not only do your oration and presentation skills fill me with suspicion and impatience, the very fact you are doing research without development just clogs up digital repositories with mostly useless crap.  Get a real job and get off my lawn!"   :-)

--
☣ uǝlƃ

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Glen writes:

< But, of course, the benefit of finding hard-to-detect corners to cut, accompanied (or not) by complicated, convincing rhetoric, is *scaffolding* ... aka the convexity of the search space. >

A potential objection is that an orator may be to blame for promulgating simple maps for convoluted regions.   If that draws others into the region and better maps are developed then it is all for the best.   It might just as well do the opposite.    Easier to read the editorials instead of the reporting and easier to read the reporting than do the investigation.  

Further is it really scaffolding, or just a way that many otherwise independent agents get collapsed into a few degrees of freedom and then never really use or want a scaffolding?

Marcus

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[gepr]

Ack, good point. Since we're talking about some sort of weird Hebbian co-constructed universe, though, maybe they're the same thing? I'm reminded of Frank Tipler's idea [¿] that life might save the universe from a big crunch by migrating (and moving their masses with them?) into a 'ring', thereby creating a Taub Universe ... slowing the collapse at the ring so that it *seems* to take an infinite amount of time. If the number of investigators studying a given region of space *causes* the space to convolute (or simplify), then scaffolding and collapse are two outcomes of the same process.

[¿] At least I learned it from him, whether or not it's his idea.

On 9/17/19 3:10 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Further is it really scaffolding, or just a way that many otherwise independent agents get collapsed into a few degrees of freedom and then never really use or want a scaffolding?

--
☣ uǝlƃ

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Steve Smith]

And at their retail/service storefront, you are greeted with "Donner,
party of two?" and a toothy grin?


On 9/17/19 12:43 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> Because I'm a fan of all things fake (fake news, homeopathy, numerology, speculations about consciousness, etc.), I can't help but be interested in fad diets and pop culture ideas about eating and weight loss. One of the things I learned from my lymphoma, consisting of "immortal" lymphocytes, is that it's *normal* for us to eat ourselves ... which is why diets like "keto" and "intermittent fasting" are so rhetorically successful.
>
> By which I mean to introduce my name for such a company: Phagocytes Inc. -- We eat you so you don't have to eat yourself.
>
> On 9/17/19 11:32 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>> A rhetor is just a teacher of writing, right?  But I want to pursue this idea of a Rhetor as villain.  I think it has legs.  So, suppose I start a company whose job is to go into companies and identify and fire all the people who are picky about writing.  What would we name such a company?  
>>
>> I have idea, in case somebody else doesn’t think of it.  

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Steve Smith]

Glen_who_can_be_such_a_rhetor -

I had the pleasure (no scare quotes) of working with a statistician at
LANL who was a trained "rhetoritician"...  I don't think I would want to
imply anything distasteful about him or his work... it was often obscure
to me but a powerful theme in the larger theme of "lies, damn lies, and
statistics".   He was *much* more responsible (or more explicitely?)
than his peers in the persuasive use of his work-product.

On 9/17/19 11:06 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> Ha! "Rhetor". It's fantastic how you assembled those words so that "rhetor" seems so distasteful. I'm going to start using "rhetor" as a username for those throwaway logins I'm always having to create.
>
> On 9/17/19 9:46 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
>> My favorite and perhaps most  disillusioning was a
>> talk he gave at Google, where with maybe six people
>> in the room, I had the privilege to observe what a
>> rhetor he was capable of being. Now, I almost
>> never think about him or his theory.
>


============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Prof David West]

Steve,

Have not read Mae-Wan Ho's work, but will in next couple of weeks. Did read something about 'secret life of water' that was more mystical and more like homeopathy but those books too are at home and I do not remember authors or titles.

It seems like the ideas that seem to capture my imagination - Sheldrake, quantum consciousness among them - tend to be labeled as "pseudo." This is annoying, first because my hermeneutical hackles bristle whenever anyone tries to  assert their interpretation as privileged over someone else's; and because there seem to be so many cross-connections that afford all within the net to gain plausibility simply from being in the net.

 Neat book with a homeopathy element along with lots of mysticism and references to scholars with interests in other  "psuedo domains": The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas. Really fun read.

davew

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019, at 4:40 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

Dave -

It felt a strange coincidence, but in the early days of SFx, we were holding a "blender" on the topic of morphometrics at the same time that Sheldrake was visiting SFe to speak at a "Science of Consciousness" conference.  This was the meeting at which he was stabbed by a 'fan' who was apparently disturbed going in but more disturbed by Sheldrake's ideas?

https://boingboing.net/2008/04/09/biologist-rupert-she.html

Our "morphometrics" was an acutely more mundane conversation about the practicalities of starting with laser scans of paleontological  and archaelogical artifacts and doing statistical analysis to try to reveal "hidden" correlations.  For example, we were hoping to be able to recognize the "hand" in objects such as flaked lithic tools or hand-formed ceramics.   

It is interesting to me that you bring up homeopathic "dilution to nothing" based on the assumption that the water's quasi-crystalline structure somehow holds something meaningful from the original inoculant which had been titered into oblivion.

Are you familiar with Mae-Wan Ho's work in quasi-crystals in water and water emulsions?   I understand that where she (and others more acutely) have taken her research to fundamentally vitalistic places in a way that is hard to not dismiss as pseudo-science, but the underlying science seems pretty sound?   My daughter who is a molecular biologist has been unable to provide either confirmation nor refutation of the application of this work in her own domain (flavivirii).

I naively discarded a personal/professional correspondence (typed letter on letterhead ca 1984) from Roger Penrose in response to a tiny bit of work I did in pre-quantum consciousness (:Cellular automata in cytoskeletal lattices" : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0167278984902598).  Penrose was postulating that it was aperiodic tilings (surprise!) that were at the root of consciousness (in human brains).   This was some years before his "Emperor's New Mind" and pursuit of "Quantum Consciousness" (with my co-author Stuart Hameroff).   I am unable to get sufficient traction on contemporary QC work including Penrose's nor Stu Kauffman's to know what I believe on the topic.  I am most sympathetic with the Pibram/Bohm perspective, but that is more intuitive than anything.

I understand that Marcus' has moved from LANL to a day-job in full-up Quantum Computing.   I don't know that Q computing has any implications for Q consciousness, but it would seem that it can't help but lead to more experience with quantum effects translated into human scales of time and space.  

- Steve

On 9/16/19 12:20 AM, Prof David West wrote:

Yes, Sheldrake,yearns for a kind of metaphysical reality and scientific validity that still eludes him. I think that have have reached, and are at risk of blending with, homeopathy and the like cure like, the dilution of "stuff" til there is no stuff left, but the "water has memory."

All based, of course on shared resonance.

Not sure about the data set. Most of it is from him or true believers and suffers from finding what you are looking for. But, because no one is really taking him seriously, no one is presenting data sets that might prove him wrong. Also, not a statistician so can't comment on methodology or significance.

Another of those connection things — a few years back, in a Quantum Consciousness type book, there was a discussion of resonance starting from the vibrating strings of physics fame to aggregates of strings creating blended vibrations to larger aggregates creating "harmonies" and feedback from "observers" blending everything — and when I was reading that it seemed to "resonate with Sheldrake." Being quite vague here, because the book is back home, but when I return I will pick it up and look at it again.

davew

On Sun, Sep 15, 2019, at 11:56 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

Geez, Steve,

 

I didn’t know that morphs COULD resonate.

 

What on earth are you talking about?

What Dave just said in description of Sheldrake's theory of "morphic resonance"...   a resonant coupling amongst things which have the same morphology  (shape).  In your case, you and Dave apparently have similar "intellectual resonant chambers" which, in this treatment "begin to resonate" as you spend enough time "coupling" (in conversation).  

Following the analogy (stronger/more-formal than a metaphor I propose), when you "couple" with others who you end up disagreeing with, I suspect it starts out  a bit like a barbershop quartet... one member hitting a tone and another following by hitting the same tone, but as the progression gets more  complex, the *differences* in your tonality starts to expose itself as dissonances.   I credit you "harmonizing" with Dave in this (and perhaps other) instance to Dave for *trying* to help you find the same note (as I am here).  

The Nick and Frank show (e.g. recent analogy to train conductors) seems to be a deliberate study/applicatoin in dissonance... one of you hits a note  and the other intuitively (or with great intellectual effort) factors the composing frequencies of that note and responds with a new note that has *none* or *few* of the same composing frequencies, generating a complex set of beat frequencies anew.   I don't know how much this type of deliberate dissonance is used in echolocating creatures (bats, cetaceans, ???) but finding *dissonance* seems potentially *more useful* than resonance in some cases?

- Steve

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Sunday, September 15, 2019 5:32 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

 

 

Interesting, David.  With most people I find that if we talk long enough, we disagree; with you it mostly works the other way.  Thank you.

 

Nick

 

Looks like a case of morphic resonance to me!

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================

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

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================

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

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Prof David West]

Nick,

There I was conversing along without an experiential care in the world, when WHAM, a speed bump — Signs all the way down" slams my head into the roof — massive headache.

Two aspirins you might provide:

1) a concise explanation of how Peircian semiotics differs from the semiotics I came to know and love;

and 2) an essence preservation transformation of the simple narrative to follow into "experience all the way down" and then into "signs all the way down."

Hatha Yoga 101

- breathing.

- attempt to precisely regulate breathing, i.e. five seconds in, five seconds hold, five seconds exhale.

- intense resistance (lizard brain / aka autonomous nervous system) "objects" "tries to wrest control"

- repeated practice —> success as "conscious habit" —> success as "non-conscious" habit —> success as, apparently, retrained lizard brain

- increased energy

- REM brain waves, but no "awareness" of dreaming, nor residual "memory" of same

davew

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019, at 7:13 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Steve,

 

This is one of those moments when I have to be grateful you-guys let me participate here because it is so obvious to me that I am out of my depth in this conversation.  But …

 

You have my shroedinger (what is life?) crystal humming AND my Peirce (it’s signs all the way down) crystal humming.  The proposition, “It’s signs all the way down” has to be understood as the proposition that a sign is a certain kind of relation in which something stands in for something for something else.  Full stop.  So all basic biological processes (think enzymes) are sign systems.  Another way to think of a sign system is as a relation èto a relationç.  So is the sorting of the pebbles on a beach a sign relation?  What about the tendency of slush to maintain a 32 degree temperature?  Fill in your favorite example, here. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Monday, September 16, 2019 10:41 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Dave -

It felt a strange coincidence, but in the early days of SFx, we were holding a "blender" on the topic of morphometrics at the same time that Sheldrake was visiting SFe to speak at a "Science of Consciousness" conference.  This was the meeting at which he was stabbed by a 'fan' who was apparently disturbed going in but more disturbed by Sheldrake's ideas?

https://boingboing.net/2008/04/09/biologist-rupert-she.html

Our "morphometrics" was an acutely more mundane conversation about the practicalities of starting with laser scans of paleontological  and archaelogical artifacts and doing statistical analysis to try to reveal "hidden" correlations.  For example, we were hoping to be able to recognize the "hand" in objects such as flaked lithic tools or hand-formed ceramics.   

It is interesting to me that you bring up homeopathic "dilution to nothing" based on the assumption that the water's quasi-crystalline structure somehow holds something meaningful from the original inoculant which had been titered into oblivion.

Are you familiar with Mae-Wan Ho's work in quasi-crystals in water and water emulsions?   I understand that where she (and others more acutely) have taken her research to fundamentally vitalistic places in a way that is hard to not dismiss as pseudo-science, but the underlying science seems pretty sound?   My daughter who is a molecular biologist has been unable to provide either confirmation nor refutation of the application of this work in her own domain (flavivirii).

I naively discarded a personal/professional correspondence (typed letter on letterhead ca 1984) from Roger Penrose in response to a tiny bit of work I did in pre-quantum consciousness (:Cellular automata in cytoskeletal lattices" : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0167278984902598).  Penrose was postulating that it was aperiodic tilings (surprise!) that were at the root of consciousness (in human brains).   This was some years before his "Emperor's New Mind" and pursuit of "Quantum Consciousness" (with my co-author Stuart Hameroff).   I am unable to get sufficient traction on contemporary QC work including Penrose's nor Stu Kauffman's to know what I believe on the topic.  I am most sympathetic with the Pibram/Bohm perspective, but that is more intuitive than anything.

I understand that Marcus' has moved from LANL to a day-job in full-up Quantum Computing.   I don't know that Q computing has any implications for Q consciousness, but it would seem that it can't help but lead to more experience with quantum effects translated into human scales of time and space.  

- Steve

On 9/16/19 12:20 AM, Prof David West wrote:

Yes, Sheldrake,yearns for a kind of metaphysical reality and scientific validity that still eludes him. I think that have have reached, and are at risk of blending with, homeopathy and the like cure like, the dilution of "stuff" til there is no stuff left, but the "water has memory."

 

All based, of course on shared resonance.

 

Not sure about the data set. Most of it is from him or true believers and suffers from finding what you are looking for. But, because no one is really taking him seriously, no one is presenting data sets that might prove him wrong. Also, not a statistician so can't comment on methodology or significance.

 

Another of those connection things — a few years back, in a Quantum Consciousness type book, there was a discussion of resonance starting from the vibrating strings of physics fame to aggregates of strings creating blended vibrations to larger aggregates creating "harmonies" and feedback from "observers" blending everything — and when I was reading that it seemed to "resonate with Sheldrake." Being quite vague here, because the book is back home, but when I return I will pick it up and look at it again.

 

davew

 

 

On Sun, Sep 15, 2019, at 11:56 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

 

Geez, Steve,

 

I didn’t know that morphs COULD resonate.

 

What on earth are you talking about?

What Dave just said in description of Sheldrake's theory of "morphic resonance"...   a resonant coupling amongst things which have the same morphology  (shape).  In your case, you and Dave apparently have similar "intellectual resonant chambers" which, in this treatment "begin to resonate" as you spend enough time "coupling" (in conversation).  

Following the analogy (stronger/more-formal than a metaphor I propose), when you "couple" with others who you end up disagreeing with, I suspect it starts out  a bit like a barbershop quartet... one member hitting a tone and another following by hitting the same tone, but as the progression gets more  complex, the *differences* in your tonality starts to expose itself as dissonances.   I credit you "harmonizing" with Dave in this (and perhaps other) instance to Dave for *trying* to help you find the same note (as I am here).  

The Nick and Frank show (e.g. recent analogy to train conductors) seems to be a deliberate study/applicatoin in dissonance... one of you hits a note  and the other intuitively (or with great intellectual effort) factors the composing frequencies of that note and responds with a new note that has *none* or *few* of the same composing frequencies, generating a complex set of beat frequencies anew.   I don't know how much this type of deliberate dissonance is used in echolocating creatures (bats, cetaceans, ???) but finding *dissonance* seems potentially *more useful* than resonance in some cases?

- Steve

 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Sunday, September 15, 2019 5:32 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

 

 

Interesting, David.  With most people I find that if we talk long enough, we disagree; with you it mostly works the other way.  Thank you.

 

Nick

 

Looks like a case of morphic resonance to me!

 

============================================================

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

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================

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

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

 

============================================================

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

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================

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

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Prof David West]

Would rather see Dr. Rhetor engage with Dr. Dialog (aka Quentin Tarantino, prior to his latest effort Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). Power of formally constructed words and power of artfully constructed words.

davew


On Tue, Sep 17, 2019, at 7:38 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> Could Dr. Rhetor be in a mortal combat with Dr. Strangelove?  
>
> Marvel Comics where are you when we need you!?
>
> N
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of u?l? ?
> Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2019 1:06 PM
> To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake
>
> Ha! "Rhetor". It's fantastic how you assembled those words so that
> "rhetor" seems so distasteful. I'm going to start using "rhetor" as a
> username for those throwaway logins I'm always having to create.
>
> On 9/17/19 9:46 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> > My favorite and perhaps most  disillusioning was a talk he gave at
> > Google, where with maybe six people in the room, I had the privilege
> > to observe what a rhetor he was capable of being. Now, I almost never
> > think about him or his theory.
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> ============================================================
> 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
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>
>
> ============================================================
> 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
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Frank Wimberly-2]

For some reason I am seeing Nick's comments only when he is quoted by others.

Dave, your description of Buddhist breathing reminded me of when my father-in-law tried to teach me transcendental meditation. He was a retired attorney whose volunteer work was to teach TM to prisoners at the Indiana State Prison. I decided to try what he taught me the other day to see if I could get any benefit from it. The way he taught it to me was you try to remove all thoughts from your mind while silently repeating a word which, he said, didn't matter what it was. Anyway when I tried it recently I discovered that it was very difficult to keep thoughts out of my mind. The way I experienced it, I would think I was keeping thoughts out of my mind but then I would remember that I had had thoughts a few moments ago. This reminds me of my discussions with Nick about whether people think. If you try transcendental meditation you will realize that people can't not think.

Frank

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 3:51 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

There I was conversing along without an experiential care in the world, when WHAM, a speed bump — Signs all the way down" slams my head into the roof — massive headache.

Two aspirins you might provide:

1) a concise explanation of how Peircian semiotics differs from the semiotics I came to know and love;

and 2) an essence preservation transformation of the simple narrative to follow into "experience all the way down" and then into "signs all the way down."

Hatha Yoga 101

- breathing.

- attempt to precisely regulate breathing, i.e. five seconds in, five seconds hold, five seconds exhale.

- intense resistance (lizard brain / aka autonomous nervous system) "objects" "tries to wrest control"

- repeated practice —> success as "conscious habit" —> success as "non-conscious" habit —> success as, apparently, retrained lizard brain

- increased energy

- REM brain waves, but no "awareness" of dreaming, nor residual "memory" of same

davew

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019, at 7:13 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Steve,

 

This is one of those moments when I have to be grateful you-guys let me participate here because it is so obvious to me that I am out of my depth in this conversation.  But …

 

You have my shroedinger (what is life?) crystal humming AND my Peirce (it’s signs all the way down) crystal humming.  The proposition, “It’s signs all the way down” has to be understood as the proposition that a sign is a certain kind of relation in which something stands in for something for something else.  Full stop.  So all basic biological processes (think enzymes) are sign systems.  Another way to think of a sign system is as a relation èto a relationç.  So is the sorting of the pebbles on a beach a sign relation?  What about the tendency of slush to maintain a 32 degree temperature?  Fill in your favorite example, here. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Monday, September 16, 2019 10:41 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Dave -

It felt a strange coincidence, but in the early days of SFx, we were holding a "blender" on the topic of morphometrics at the same time that Sheldrake was visiting SFe to speak at a "Science of Consciousness" conference.  This was the meeting at which he was stabbed by a 'fan' who was apparently disturbed going in but more disturbed by Sheldrake's ideas?

https://boingboing.net/2008/04/09/biologist-rupert-she.html

Our "morphometrics" was an acutely more mundane conversation about the practicalities of starting with laser scans of paleontological  and archaelogical artifacts and doing statistical analysis to try to reveal "hidden" correlations.  For example, we were hoping to be able to recognize the "hand" in objects such as flaked lithic tools or hand-formed ceramics.   

It is interesting to me that you bring up homeopathic "dilution to nothing" based on the assumption that the water's quasi-crystalline structure somehow holds something meaningful from the original inoculant which had been titered into oblivion.

Are you familiar with Mae-Wan Ho's work in quasi-crystals in water and water emulsions?   I understand that where she (and others more acutely) have taken her research to fundamentally vitalistic places in a way that is hard to not dismiss as pseudo-science, but the underlying science seems pretty sound?   My daughter who is a molecular biologist has been unable to provide either confirmation nor refutation of the application of this work in her own domain (flavivirii).

I naively discarded a personal/professional correspondence (typed letter on letterhead ca 1984) from Roger Penrose in response to a tiny bit of work I did in pre-quantum consciousness (:Cellular automata in cytoskeletal lattices" : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0167278984902598).  Penrose was postulating that it was aperiodic tilings (surprise!) that were at the root of consciousness (in human brains).   This was some years before his "Emperor's New Mind" and pursuit of "Quantum Consciousness" (with my co-author Stuart Hameroff).   I am unable to get sufficient traction on contemporary QC work including Penrose's nor Stu Kauffman's to know what I believe on the topic.  I am most sympathetic with the Pibram/Bohm perspective, but that is more intuitive than anything.

I understand that Marcus' has moved from LANL to a day-job in full-up Quantum Computing.   I don't know that Q computing has any implications for Q consciousness, but it would seem that it can't help but lead to more experience with quantum effects translated into human scales of time and space.  

- Steve

On 9/16/19 12:20 AM, Prof David West wrote:

Yes, Sheldrake,yearns for a kind of metaphysical reality and scientific validity that still eludes him. I think that have have reached, and are at risk of blending with, homeopathy and the like cure like, the dilution of "stuff" til there is no stuff left, but the "water has memory."

 

All based, of course on shared resonance.

 

Not sure about the data set. Most of it is from him or true believers and suffers from finding what you are looking for. But, because no one is really taking him seriously, no one is presenting data sets that might prove him wrong. Also, not a statistician so can't comment on methodology or significance.

 

Another of those connection things — a few years back, in a Quantum Consciousness type book, there was a discussion of resonance starting from the vibrating strings of physics fame to aggregates of strings creating blended vibrations to larger aggregates creating "harmonies" and feedback from "observers" blending everything — and when I was reading that it seemed to "resonate with Sheldrake." Being quite vague here, because the book is back home, but when I return I will pick it up and look at it again.

 

davew

 

 

On Sun, Sep 15, 2019, at 11:56 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

 

Geez, Steve,

 

I didn’t know that morphs COULD resonate.

 

What on earth are you talking about?

What Dave just said in description of Sheldrake's theory of "morphic resonance"...   a resonant coupling amongst things which have the same morphology  (shape).  In your case, you and Dave apparently have similar "intellectual resonant chambers" which, in this treatment "begin to resonate" as you spend enough time "coupling" (in conversation).  

Following the analogy (stronger/more-formal than a metaphor I propose), when you "couple" with others who you end up disagreeing with, I suspect it starts out  a bit like a barbershop quartet... one member hitting a tone and another following by hitting the same tone, but as the progression gets more  complex, the *differences* in your tonality starts to expose itself as dissonances.   I credit you "harmonizing" with Dave in this (and perhaps other) instance to Dave for *trying* to help you find the same note (as I am here).  

The Nick and Frank show (e.g. recent analogy to train conductors) seems to be a deliberate study/applicatoin in dissonance... one of you hits a note  and the other intuitively (or with great intellectual effort) factors the composing frequencies of that note and responds with a new note that has *none* or *few* of the same composing frequencies, generating a complex set of beat frequencies anew.   I don't know how much this type of deliberate dissonance is used in echolocating creatures (bats, cetaceans, ???) but finding *dissonance* seems potentially *more useful* than resonance in some cases?

- Steve

 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Sunday, September 15, 2019 5:32 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

 

 

Interesting, David.  With most people I find that if we talk long enough, we disagree; with you it mostly works the other way.  Thank you.

 

Nick

 

Looks like a case of morphic resonance to me!

 

============================================================

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

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================

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

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

 

============================================================

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

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================

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

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Steve Smith]

Dave -

It seems like the ideas that seem to capture my imagination - Sheldrake, quantum consciousness among them - tend to be labeled as "pseudo." This is annoying, first because my hermeneutical hackles bristle whenever anyone tries to  assert their interpretation as privileged over someone else's; and because there seem to be so many cross-connections that afford all within the net to gain plausibility simply from being in the net.

Thanks for making this point and sharing this predilection.   I find a duality in this experience myself which can be a challenge to manage.  I deeply share your suspicion/resentment of "privileged interpretation".   I also am deeply suspicious of persuasive modes of communication (NLP as an extreme example, bad but conventional rhetoric second to that).  I have been a direct "victim" of this in my life from time to time, but more chronically I have *observed* others being persuaded to believe things for which there is either shaky evidence or which is highly contradicted by the evidence available.   My judgement of this can sound or feel like my own positioning with "privileged interpretation" which is what makes manipulative rhetoric so insidious.   I agree that all that is labeled "pseudo" is not false or flimsy, or is only *contingently* so. 

On the other hand, one of the common tools I've seen in this type of manipulative rhetoric is to *claim* that dismissal by the mainstream is nearly "proof" of truthiness.  For example, Climate Denial, AntiVax, ChemTrails, UFOlogy, etc.  seem to hold up as their prime (or at least significant) evidence the simple fact that the "mainstream" or the "establishment" dismisses them.   The apparent bias of many to believe anything wrapped up in the trappings of a "conspiracy".

On the other other hand, new or changing or revolutionary paradigms in knowledge are *naturally* strongly or fundamentally counter to the common/standard "truth".   Copernicus and Galileo and their move from geocentric to heliocentric astronomical models.

You use the phrase "capture my imagination" which I find *also* holds a dualism for me.   On the one hand, I believe that intuition is a critical element in my own understanding and knowledge of the world.  On the other, I find that my "imagination" is vulnerable to "whimsy" and a carefully constructed "whimsy" can be as compelling in it's own way as the biases of "conspiracy".   The carrot to go with the stick.

Being trained formally in Science and Mathematics, I have a deep respect for the methods and sensibilities of those domains.   Working in "Big Science" among a broad cross-cutting set of disciplines (27 years at LANL) also gave me a deep suspicion of "received wisdom".   While the largest portion of the work I observed stood on it's own merits, the largest portion of the *funding* for the work seemed to follow the biases of "privileged interpretation" and "received wisdom".   I also felt that *publication* of scientific work went through a similar but not as extreme biased filter.   Peer review and reproduction of results are central to scientific progress, so this can be problematic. On the other, other, other hand, irresponsible publication of "hooey" without proper peer review seems somewhat pervasive and corrupts the process in it's own insidious way.

<ramble off>

- 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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Nick Thompson]

Steve,

 

If you had money to invest on research, and were hoping to make 5 percent on your money, would you give it to an nsf vetted project, or to a random project?  The former, surely.  Yet, if everybody invests that way, all the money ends up being piled up in the middle and nothing novel is ever tried.  We need the loonies, and we need some crazy people who have faith in loonies.  They are the equivalent to “sports” in a breeding program.  Without loonies and their cronies, there is no variation for selection to work on.  Unfortunately, most people who bet on loonies loose.  Yes, a few win big, but most lose.  So, on average, it doesn’t pay to be a loonie-croney.  That’s the paradox.  This leads me to the conclusion that madness is a form of altruism. 

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 11:35 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Dave -

 

It seems like the ideas that seem to capture my imagination - Sheldrake, quantum consciousness among them - tend to be labeled as "pseudo." This is annoying, first because my hermeneutical hackles bristle whenever anyone tries to  assert their interpretation as privileged over someone else's; and because there seem to be so many cross-connections that afford all within the net to gain plausibility simply from being in the net.

 

Thanks for making this point and sharing this predilection.   I find a duality in this experience myself which can be a challenge to manage.  I deeply share your suspicion/resentment of "privileged interpretation".   I also am deeply suspicious of persuasive modes of communication (NLP as an extreme example, bad but conventional rhetoric second to that).  I have been a direct "victim" of this in my life from time to time, but more chronically I have *observed* others being persuaded to believe things for which there is either shaky evidence or which is highly contradicted by the evidence available.   My judgement of this can sound or feel like my own positioning with "privileged interpretation" which is what makes manipulative rhetoric so insidious.   I agree that all that is labeled "pseudo" is not false or flimsy, or is only *contingently* so. 

On the other hand, one of the common tools I've seen in this type of manipulative rhetoric is to *claim* that dismissal by the mainstream is nearly "proof" of truthiness.  For example, Climate Denial, AntiVax, ChemTrails, UFOlogy, etc.  seem to hold up as their prime (or at least significant) evidence the simple fact that the "mainstream" or the "establishment" dismisses them.   The apparent bias of many to believe anything wrapped up in the trappings of a "conspiracy".

On the other other hand, new or changing or revolutionary paradigms in knowledge are *naturally* strongly or fundamentally counter to the common/standard "truth".   Copernicus and Galileo and their move from geocentric to heliocentric astronomical models.

You use the phrase "capture my imagination" which I find *also* holds a dualism for me.   On the one hand, I believe that intuition is a critical element in my own understanding and knowledge of the world.  On the other, I find that my "imagination" is vulnerable to "whimsy" and a carefully constructed "whimsy" can be as compelling in it's own way as the biases of "conspiracy".   The carrot to go with the stick.

Being trained formally in Science and Mathematics, I have a deep respect for the methods and sensibilities of those domains.   Working in "Big Science" among a broad cross-cutting set of disciplines (27 years at LANL) also gave me a deep suspicion of "received wisdom".   While the largest portion of the work I observed stood on it's own merits, the largest portion of the *funding* for the work seemed to follow the biases of "privileged interpretation" and "received wisdom".   I also felt that *publication* of scientific work went through a similar but not as extreme biased filter.   Peer review and reproduction of results are central to scientific progress, so this can be problematic. On the other, other, other hand, irresponsible publication of "hooey" without proper peer review seems somewhat pervasive and corrupts the process in it's own insidious way.

<ramble off>

- 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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Marcus G. Daniels]

I wouldn’t invest it in research, I’d invest it in development and then hire a team that understood research.   There is $5k spent per person (all persons) by venture capital in San Francisco alone.   That’s not like the ~ $500k per person at a DOE government lab, but the total amount in the region is about like the combined DOE and NSF budgets, of which only a fraction goes to research anyway.

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 at 9:07 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Steve,

 

If you had money to invest on research, and were hoping to make 5 percent on your money, would you give it to an nsf vetted project, or to a random project?  The former, surely.  Yet, if everybody invests that way, all the money ends up being piled up in the middle and nothing novel is ever tried.  We need the loonies, and we need some crazy people who have faith in loonies.  They are the equivalent to “sports” in a breeding program.  Without loonies and their cronies, there is no variation for selection to work on.  Unfortunately, most people who bet on loonies loose.  Yes, a few win big, but most lose.  So, on average, it doesn’t pay to be a loonie-croney.  That’s the paradox.  This leads me to the conclusion that madness is a form of altruism. 

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 11:35 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Dave -

 

It seems like the ideas that seem to capture my imagination - Sheldrake, quantum consciousness among them - tend to be labeled as "pseudo." This is annoying, first because my hermeneutical hackles bristle whenever anyone tries to  assert their interpretation as privileged over someone else's; and because there seem to be so many cross-connections that afford all within the net to gain plausibility simply from being in the net.

 

Thanks for making this point and sharing this predilection.   I find a duality in this experience myself which can be a challenge to manage.  I deeply share your suspicion/resentment of "privileged interpretation".   I also am deeply suspicious of persuasive modes of communication (NLP as an extreme example, bad but conventional rhetoric second to that).  I have been a direct "victim" of this in my life from time to time, but more chronically I have *observed* others being persuaded to believe things for which there is either shaky evidence or which is highly contradicted by the evidence available.   My judgement of this can sound or feel like my own positioning with "privileged interpretation" which is what makes manipulative rhetoric so insidious.   I agree that all that is labeled "pseudo" is not false or flimsy, or is only *contingently* so. 

On the other hand, one of the common tools I've seen in this type of manipulative rhetoric is to *claim* that dismissal by the mainstream is nearly "proof" of truthiness.  For example, Climate Denial, AntiVax, ChemTrails, UFOlogy, etc.  seem to hold up as their prime (or at least significant) evidence the simple fact that the "mainstream" or the "establishment" dismisses them.   The apparent bias of many to believe anything wrapped up in the trappings of a "conspiracy".

On the other other hand, new or changing or revolutionary paradigms in knowledge are *naturally* strongly or fundamentally counter to the common/standard "truth".   Copernicus and Galileo and their move from geocentric to heliocentric astronomical models.

You use the phrase "capture my imagination" which I find *also* holds a dualism for me.   On the one hand, I believe that intuition is a critical element in my own understanding and knowledge of the world.  On the other, I find that my "imagination" is vulnerable to "whimsy" and a carefully constructed "whimsy" can be as compelling in it's own way as the biases of "conspiracy".   The carrot to go with the stick.

Being trained formally in Science and Mathematics, I have a deep respect for the methods and sensibilities of those domains.   Working in "Big Science" among a broad cross-cutting set of disciplines (27 years at LANL) also gave me a deep suspicion of "received wisdom".   While the largest portion of the work I observed stood on it's own merits, the largest portion of the *funding* for the work seemed to follow the biases of "privileged interpretation" and "received wisdom".   I also felt that *publication* of scientific work went through a similar but not as extreme biased filter.   Peer review and reproduction of results are central to scientific progress, so this can be problematic. On the other, other, other hand, irresponsible publication of "hooey" without proper peer review seems somewhat pervasive and corrupts the process in it's own insidious way.

<ramble off>

- 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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Steve Smith]

Nick -

As a neo-socialist of sorts, I would not invest money in anything looking for a monetary return.   I would invest what "excess resource" I might command in things that I believed would make a better world according to my best idea of such.  This "best" would include plenty of thoughtful care about unintended consequences, etc.  (and still be fraught with such risks).  

When I was young, I felt strongly in favor of "because it is there" as an excuse to climb a mountain or pursue the answer to various questions about the (presumably) objective world and how it works.  I was also in favor of "progress for progress' sake".  I was a bit of a technotopian, believing that the very simple fact of increasing human's ability to manipulate the physical world, was equivalent to providing for "better living" or "the greatest good for the greatest number" or somesuch.   I understand that to have been naive in many ways.  This does not make me fundamentally a technophobe, but to the average technophile it may seem so. 

My daughter works on the deeper mechanisms of flavivirii (e.g. w nile, dengue, zika), partly because the molecular machinery at this level is what she knows well, but also because she believed (going into it) that relieving some of the most acute health-challenges in the third world was a worthy cause to dedicate her life to. These diseases are not acutely challenging to first world peoples with modern medical support.  From what I know of Sci/Tech salaries, her income as a senior researcher is roughly half what I am used to seeing in the world of hard(er) sciences and technology development.   *She* is investing at least that amount in making a better world (by her view of that).   She came to the awareness at some point that while her work is meaningful and important, it perhaps pales in comparison to "yet softer" remedies to the suffering in these places.   First off, I think she told me that the money dedicated (via NIH?) to flavivirus research far exceeds the cost of providing mosquito nets to the people who suffer the most from these mosquito borne viruses...  and that the demand always exceeds the availability in spite of costing roughly $2.50 each and lasting 3-5 years.  Her personal lab budget might not buy everyone a net, but it sounds as if her whole lab's budget in this area might.  I think she *does* send her own personal "tithe" in that direction (nets).

Age/experience and also an exploding sphere of scientific and technical frontiers has lead me to realize (now that I no longer feel I can scale the highest mountains of that landscape,  even in a highly supported expedition) that it was never up to me (or any one individual) to focus on the highest mountains, but that the deepest value includes the mundane of gently exploring and documenting the whole landscape, and remaining open to appreciating the smallest of grottos to be found there, rather than only seeking or valuing "the highest summits".   The summits will be pursued as a consequence of any gradient ascent strategy coupled with a certain amount of random walk driven by pure curiosity.

No longer a technophile, assertedly not a technophobe, but maybe a techno-meh?

- Steve

I wouldn’t invest it in research, I’d invest it in development and then hire a team that understood research.   There is $5k spent per person (all persons) by venture capital in San Francisco alone.   That’s not like the ~ $500k per person at a DOE government lab, but the total amount in the region is about like the combined DOE and NSF budgets, of which only a fraction goes to research anyway.

 

From: Friam [hidden email] on behalf of Nick Thompson [hidden email]
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Date: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 at 9:07 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Steve,

 

If you had money to invest on research, and were hoping to make 5 percent on your money, would you give it to an nsf vetted project, or to a random project?  The former, surely.  Yet, if everybody invests that way, all the money ends up being piled up in the middle and nothing novel is ever tried.  We need the loonies, and we need some crazy people who have faith in loonies.  They are the equivalent to “sports” in a breeding program.  Without loonies and their cronies, there is no variation for selection to work on.  Unfortunately, most people who bet on loonies loose.  Yes, a few win big, but most lose.  So, on average, it doesn’t pay to be a loonie-croney.  That’s the paradox.  This leads me to the conclusion that madness is a form of altruism. 

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 11:35 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Dave -

 

It seems like the ideas that seem to capture my imagination - Sheldrake, quantum consciousness among them - tend to be labeled as "pseudo." This is annoying, first because my hermeneutical hackles bristle whenever anyone tries to  assert their interpretation as privileged over someone else's; and because there seem to be so many cross-connections that afford all within the net to gain plausibility simply from being in the net.

 

Thanks for making this point and sharing this predilection.   I find a duality in this experience myself which can be a challenge to manage.  I deeply share your suspicion/resentment of "privileged interpretation".   I also am deeply suspicious of persuasive modes of communication (NLP as an extreme example, bad but conventional rhetoric second to that).  I have been a direct "victim" of this in my life from time to time, but more chronically I have *observed* others being persuaded to believe things for which there is either shaky evidence or which is highly contradicted by the evidence available.   My judgement of this can sound or feel like my own positioning with "privileged interpretation" which is what makes manipulative rhetoric so insidious.   I agree that all that is labeled "pseudo" is not false or flimsy, or is only *contingently* so. 

On the other hand, one of the common tools I've seen in this type of manipulative rhetoric is to *claim* that dismissal by the mainstream is nearly "proof" of truthiness.  For example, Climate Denial, AntiVax, ChemTrails, UFOlogy, etc.  seem to hold up as their prime (or at least significant) evidence the simple fact that the "mainstream" or the "establishment" dismisses them.   The apparent bias of many to believe anything wrapped up in the trappings of a "conspiracy".

On the other other hand, new or changing or revolutionary paradigms in knowledge are *naturally* strongly or fundamentally counter to the common/standard "truth".   Copernicus and Galileo and their move from geocentric to heliocentric astronomical models.

You use the phrase "capture my imagination" which I find *also* holds a dualism for me.   On the one hand, I believe that intuition is a critical element in my own understanding and knowledge of the world.  On the other, I find that my "imagination" is vulnerable to "whimsy" and a carefully constructed "whimsy" can be as compelling in it's own way as the biases of "conspiracy".   The carrot to go with the stick.

Being trained formally in Science and Mathematics, I have a deep respect for the methods and sensibilities of those domains.   Working in "Big Science" among a broad cross-cutting set of disciplines (27 years at LANL) also gave me a deep suspicion of "received wisdom".   While the largest portion of the work I observed stood on it's own merits, the largest portion of the *funding* for the work seemed to follow the biases of "privileged interpretation" and "received wisdom".   I also felt that *publication* of scientific work went through a similar but not as extreme biased filter.   Peer review and reproduction of results are central to scientific progress, so this can be problematic. On the other, other, other hand, irresponsible publication of "hooey" without proper peer review seems somewhat pervasive and corrupts the process in it's own insidious way.

<ramble off>

- 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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Roger Critchlow-2]

Read a blog post at https://stratechery.com/2019/day-two-to-one-day/ yesterday which was examining Amazon's balance of harvesting (twiddling the search engine to maximize Amazon's profits) versus investing (putting up $800 million to achieve single day deliveries) against the stated Bezos principles of how Amazon should work.  That's the same exploit/explore tradeoff that reinforcement learning tries to automate, it's the decision between optimizing the bottom line or attempting to grow the area of the plane that the bottom line rests upon, it's searching where the light is good versus exploring the shadows, wandering around with your favorite hammer looking for nail-like problems versus browsing a yard sale and finding a new tool.

Nick's assertion that investing in fringes never pays off on average seems highly suspect.  Much of what we take for granted in our world was so far on the fringe that it didn't even exist in 1819.  So, no, for an individual making investment decisions being a looney-croney rarely pays off, but for the economy as a whole the loonies have run the table time and time again.

-- rec --

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 11:21 AM Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

I wouldn’t invest it in research, I’d invest it in development and then hire a team that understood research.   There is $5k spent per person (all persons) by venture capital in San Francisco alone.   That’s not like the ~ $500k per person at a DOE government lab, but the total amount in the region is about like the combined DOE and NSF budgets, of which only a fraction goes to research anyway.

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 at 9:07 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Steve,

 

If you had money to invest on research, and were hoping to make 5 percent on your money, would you give it to an nsf vetted project, or to a random project?  The former, surely.  Yet, if everybody invests that way, all the money ends up being piled up in the middle and nothing novel is ever tried.  We need the loonies, and we need some crazy people who have faith in loonies.  They are the equivalent to “sports” in a breeding program.  Without loonies and their cronies, there is no variation for selection to work on.  Unfortunately, most people who bet on loonies loose.  Yes, a few win big, but most lose.  So, on average, it doesn’t pay to be a loonie-croney.  That’s the paradox.  This leads me to the conclusion that madness is a form of altruism. 

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 11:35 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Dave -

 

It seems like the ideas that seem to capture my imagination - Sheldrake, quantum consciousness among them - tend to be labeled as "pseudo." This is annoying, first because my hermeneutical hackles bristle whenever anyone tries to  assert their interpretation as privileged over someone else's; and because there seem to be so many cross-connections that afford all within the net to gain plausibility simply from being in the net.

 

Thanks for making this point and sharing this predilection.   I find a duality in this experience myself which can be a challenge to manage.  I deeply share your suspicion/resentment of "privileged interpretation".   I also am deeply suspicious of persuasive modes of communication (NLP as an extreme example, bad but conventional rhetoric second to that).  I have been a direct "victim" of this in my life from time to time, but more chronically I have *observed* others being persuaded to believe things for which there is either shaky evidence or which is highly contradicted by the evidence available.   My judgement of this can sound or feel like my own positioning with "privileged interpretation" which is what makes manipulative rhetoric so insidious.   I agree that all that is labeled "pseudo" is not false or flimsy, or is only *contingently* so. 

On the other hand, one of the common tools I've seen in this type of manipulative rhetoric is to *claim* that dismissal by the mainstream is nearly "proof" of truthiness.  For example, Climate Denial, AntiVax, ChemTrails, UFOlogy, etc.  seem to hold up as their prime (or at least significant) evidence the simple fact that the "mainstream" or the "establishment" dismisses them.   The apparent bias of many to believe anything wrapped up in the trappings of a "conspiracy".

On the other other hand, new or changing or revolutionary paradigms in knowledge are *naturally* strongly or fundamentally counter to the common/standard "truth".   Copernicus and Galileo and their move from geocentric to heliocentric astronomical models.

You use the phrase "capture my imagination" which I find *also* holds a dualism for me.   On the one hand, I believe that intuition is a critical element in my own understanding and knowledge of the world.  On the other, I find that my "imagination" is vulnerable to "whimsy" and a carefully constructed "whimsy" can be as compelling in it's own way as the biases of "conspiracy".   The carrot to go with the stick.

Being trained formally in Science and Mathematics, I have a deep respect for the methods and sensibilities of those domains.   Working in "Big Science" among a broad cross-cutting set of disciplines (27 years at LANL) also gave me a deep suspicion of "received wisdom".   While the largest portion of the work I observed stood on it's own merits, the largest portion of the *funding* for the work seemed to follow the biases of "privileged interpretation" and "received wisdom".   I also felt that *publication* of scientific work went through a similar but not as extreme biased filter.   Peer review and reproduction of results are central to scientific progress, so this can be problematic. On the other, other, other hand, irresponsible publication of "hooey" without proper peer review seems somewhat pervasive and corrupts the process in it's own insidious way.

<ramble off>

- 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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Nick Thompson]

Roger,

 

That was exactly my point.  That’s what makes it “altruistic” in some sense to be a looney- croney, i.e.,, to be somebody who invests in a single looney.  Unless all looney-cronies take out a common insurance policy, most are going to lose.  Yet, it is the loonies that explore new spaces, and thus, with their individual sacrifices, benefit the whole.  So you don’t need to be dubious, any more. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 2:03 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Read a blog post at https://stratechery.com/2019/day-two-to-one-day/ yesterday which was examining Amazon's balance of harvesting (twiddling the search engine to maximize Amazon's profits) versus investing (putting up $800 million to achieve single day deliveries) against the stated Bezos principles of how Amazon should work.  That's the same exploit/explore tradeoff that reinforcement learning tries to automate, it's the decision between optimizing the bottom line or attempting to grow the area of the plane that the bottom line rests upon, it's searching where the light is good versus exploring the shadows, wandering around with your favorite hammer looking for nail-like problems versus browsing a yard sale and finding a new tool.

 

Nick's assertion that investing in fringes never pays off on average seems highly suspect.  Much of what we take for granted in our world was so far on the fringe that it didn't even exist in 1819.  So, no, for an individual making investment decisions being a looney-croney rarely pays off, but for the economy as a whole the loonies have run the table time and time again.

 

-- rec --

 

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 11:21 AM Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

I wouldn’t invest it in research, I’d invest it in development and then hire a team that understood research.   There is $5k spent per person (all persons) by venture capital in San Francisco alone.   That’s not like the ~ $500k per person at a DOE government lab, but the total amount in the region is about like the combined DOE and NSF budgets, of which only a fraction goes to research anyway.

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 at 9:07 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Steve,

 

If you had money to invest on research, and were hoping to make 5 percent on your money, would you give it to an nsf vetted project, or to a random project?  The former, surely.  Yet, if everybody invests that way, all the money ends up being piled up in the middle and nothing novel is ever tried.  We need the loonies, and we need some crazy people who have faith in loonies.  They are the equivalent to “sports” in a breeding program.  Without loonies and their cronies, there is no variation for selection to work on.  Unfortunately, most people who bet on loonies loose.  Yes, a few win big, but most lose.  So, on average, it doesn’t pay to be a loonie-croney.  That’s the paradox.  This leads me to the conclusion that madness is a form of altruism. 

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 11:35 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Dave -

 

It seems like the ideas that seem to capture my imagination - Sheldrake, quantum consciousness among them - tend to be labeled as "pseudo." This is annoying, first because my hermeneutical hackles bristle whenever anyone tries to  assert their interpretation as privileged over someone else's; and because there seem to be so many cross-connections that afford all within the net to gain plausibility simply from being in the net.

 

Thanks for making this point and sharing this predilection.   I find a duality in this experience myself which can be a challenge to manage.  I deeply share your suspicion/resentment of "privileged interpretation".   I also am deeply suspicious of persuasive modes of communication (NLP as an extreme example, bad but conventional rhetoric second to that).  I have been a direct "victim" of this in my life from time to time, but more chronically I have *observed* others being persuaded to believe things for which there is either shaky evidence or which is highly contradicted by the evidence available.   My judgement of this can sound or feel like my own positioning with "privileged interpretation" which is what makes manipulative rhetoric so insidious.   I agree that all that is labeled "pseudo" is not false or flimsy, or is only *contingently* so. 

On the other hand, one of the common tools I've seen in this type of manipulative rhetoric is to *claim* that dismissal by the mainstream is nearly "proof" of truthiness.  For example, Climate Denial, AntiVax, ChemTrails, UFOlogy, etc.  seem to hold up as their prime (or at least significant) evidence the simple fact that the "mainstream" or the "establishment" dismisses them.   The apparent bias of many to believe anything wrapped up in the trappings of a "conspiracy".

On the other other hand, new or changing or revolutionary paradigms in knowledge are *naturally* strongly or fundamentally counter to the common/standard "truth".   Copernicus and Galileo and their move from geocentric to heliocentric astronomical models.

You use the phrase "capture my imagination" which I find *also* holds a dualism for me.   On the one hand, I believe that intuition is a critical element in my own understanding and knowledge of the world.  On the other, I find that my "imagination" is vulnerable to "whimsy" and a carefully constructed "whimsy" can be as compelling in it's own way as the biases of "conspiracy".   The carrot to go with the stick.

Being trained formally in Science and Mathematics, I have a deep respect for the methods and sensibilities of those domains.   Working in "Big Science" among a broad cross-cutting set of disciplines (27 years at LANL) also gave me a deep suspicion of "received wisdom".   While the largest portion of the work I observed stood on it's own merits, the largest portion of the *funding* for the work seemed to follow the biases of "privileged interpretation" and "received wisdom".   I also felt that *publication* of scientific work went through a similar but not as extreme biased filter.   Peer review and reproduction of results are central to scientific progress, so this can be problematic. On the other, other, other hand, irresponsible publication of "hooey" without proper peer review seems somewhat pervasive and corrupts the process in it's own insidious way.

<ramble off>

- 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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Roger Critchlow-2]

Pay it forward, bet on the loonie.

-- rec --

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 2:23 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Roger,

 

That was exactly my point.  That’s what makes it “altruistic” in some sense to be a looney- croney, i.e.,, to be somebody who invests in a single looney.  Unless all looney-cronies take out a common insurance policy, most are going to lose.  Yet, it is the loonies that explore new spaces, and thus, with their individual sacrifices, benefit the whole.  So you don’t need to be dubious, any more. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 2:03 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Read a blog post at https://stratechery.com/2019/day-two-to-one-day/ yesterday which was examining Amazon's balance of harvesting (twiddling the search engine to maximize Amazon's profits) versus investing (putting up $800 million to achieve single day deliveries) against the stated Bezos principles of how Amazon should work.  That's the same exploit/explore tradeoff that reinforcement learning tries to automate, it's the decision between optimizing the bottom line or attempting to grow the area of the plane that the bottom line rests upon, it's searching where the light is good versus exploring the shadows, wandering around with your favorite hammer looking for nail-like problems versus browsing a yard sale and finding a new tool.

 

Nick's assertion that investing in fringes never pays off on average seems highly suspect.  Much of what we take for granted in our world was so far on the fringe that it didn't even exist in 1819.  So, no, for an individual making investment decisions being a looney-croney rarely pays off, but for the economy as a whole the loonies have run the table time and time again.

 

-- rec --

 

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 11:21 AM Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

I wouldn’t invest it in research, I’d invest it in development and then hire a team that understood research.   There is $5k spent per person (all persons) by venture capital in San Francisco alone.   That’s not like the ~ $500k per person at a DOE government lab, but the total amount in the region is about like the combined DOE and NSF budgets, of which only a fraction goes to research anyway.

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 at 9:07 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Steve,

 

If you had money to invest on research, and were hoping to make 5 percent on your money, would you give it to an nsf vetted project, or to a random project?  The former, surely.  Yet, if everybody invests that way, all the money ends up being piled up in the middle and nothing novel is ever tried.  We need the loonies, and we need some crazy people who have faith in loonies.  They are the equivalent to “sports” in a breeding program.  Without loonies and their cronies, there is no variation for selection to work on.  Unfortunately, most people who bet on loonies loose.  Yes, a few win big, but most lose.  So, on average, it doesn’t pay to be a loonie-croney.  That’s the paradox.  This leads me to the conclusion that madness is a form of altruism. 

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 11:35 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Dave -

 

It seems like the ideas that seem to capture my imagination - Sheldrake, quantum consciousness among them - tend to be labeled as "pseudo." This is annoying, first because my hermeneutical hackles bristle whenever anyone tries to  assert their interpretation as privileged over someone else's; and because there seem to be so many cross-connections that afford all within the net to gain plausibility simply from being in the net.

 

Thanks for making this point and sharing this predilection.   I find a duality in this experience myself which can be a challenge to manage.  I deeply share your suspicion/resentment of "privileged interpretation".   I also am deeply suspicious of persuasive modes of communication (NLP as an extreme example, bad but conventional rhetoric second to that).  I have been a direct "victim" of this in my life from time to time, but more chronically I have *observed* others being persuaded to believe things for which there is either shaky evidence or which is highly contradicted by the evidence available.   My judgement of this can sound or feel like my own positioning with "privileged interpretation" which is what makes manipulative rhetoric so insidious.   I agree that all that is labeled "pseudo" is not false or flimsy, or is only *contingently* so. 

On the other hand, one of the common tools I've seen in this type of manipulative rhetoric is to *claim* that dismissal by the mainstream is nearly "proof" of truthiness.  For example, Climate Denial, AntiVax, ChemTrails, UFOlogy, etc.  seem to hold up as their prime (or at least significant) evidence the simple fact that the "mainstream" or the "establishment" dismisses them.   The apparent bias of many to believe anything wrapped up in the trappings of a "conspiracy".

On the other other hand, new or changing or revolutionary paradigms in knowledge are *naturally* strongly or fundamentally counter to the common/standard "truth".   Copernicus and Galileo and their move from geocentric to heliocentric astronomical models.

You use the phrase "capture my imagination" which I find *also* holds a dualism for me.   On the one hand, I believe that intuition is a critical element in my own understanding and knowledge of the world.  On the other, I find that my "imagination" is vulnerable to "whimsy" and a carefully constructed "whimsy" can be as compelling in it's own way as the biases of "conspiracy".   The carrot to go with the stick.

Being trained formally in Science and Mathematics, I have a deep respect for the methods and sensibilities of those domains.   Working in "Big Science" among a broad cross-cutting set of disciplines (27 years at LANL) also gave me a deep suspicion of "received wisdom".   While the largest portion of the work I observed stood on it's own merits, the largest portion of the *funding* for the work seemed to follow the biases of "privileged interpretation" and "received wisdom".   I also felt that *publication* of scientific work went through a similar but not as extreme biased filter.   Peer review and reproduction of results are central to scientific progress, so this can be problematic. On the other, other, other hand, irresponsible publication of "hooey" without proper peer review seems somewhat pervasive and corrupts the process in it's own insidious way.

<ramble off>

- 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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Prof David West]

Jewish proverb"

" A whole fool is half a prophet."

My friend Avraham (non FRIAM) recently mentioned that my description of how and why I want to totally reinvent the manner in which most software is developed as "prophetic."

davew

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019, at 2:33 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:

Pay it forward, bet on the loonie.

-- rec --

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 2:23 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Roger,

 

That was exactly my point.  That’s what makes it “altruistic” in some sense to be a looney- croney, i.e.,, to be somebody who invests in a single looney.  Unless all looney-cronies take out a common insurance policy, most are going to lose.  Yet, it is the loonies that explore new spaces, and thus, with their individual sacrifices, benefit the whole.  So you don’t need to be dubious, any more. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 2:03 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Read a blog post at https://stratechery.com/2019/day-two-to-one-day/ yesterday which was examining Amazon's balance of harvesting (twiddling the search engine to maximize Amazon's profits) versus investing (putting up $800 million to achieve single day deliveries) against the stated Bezos principles of how Amazon should work.  That's the same exploit/explore tradeoff that reinforcement learning tries to automate, it's the decision between optimizing the bottom line or attempting to grow the area of the plane that the bottom line rests upon, it's searching where the light is good versus exploring the shadows, wandering around with your favorite hammer looking for nail-like problems versus browsing a yard sale and finding a new tool.

 

Nick's assertion that investing in fringes never pays off on average seems highly suspect.  Much of what we take for granted in our world was so far on the fringe that it didn't even exist in 1819.  So, no, for an individual making investment decisions being a looney-croney rarely pays off, but for the economy as a whole the loonies have run the table time and time again.

 

-- rec --

 

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 11:21 AM Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

I wouldn’t invest it in research, I’d invest it in development and then hire a team that understood research.   There is $5k spent per person (all persons) by venture capital in San Francisco alone.   That’s not like the ~ $500k per person at a DOE government lab, but the total amount in the region is about like the combined DOE and NSF budgets, of which only a fraction goes to research anyway.

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>

Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Date: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 at 9:07 AM

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Steve,

 

If you had money to invest on research, and were hoping to make 5 percent on your money, would you give it to an nsf vetted project, or to a random project?  The former, surely.  Yet, if everybody invests that way, all the money ends up being piled up in the middle and nothing novel is ever tried.  We need the loonies, and we need some crazy people who have faith in loonies.  They are the equivalent to “sports” in a breeding program.  Without loonies and their cronies, there is no variation for selection to work on.  Unfortunately, most people who bet on loonies loose.  Yes, a few win big, but most lose.  So, on average, it doesn’t pay to be a loonie-croney.  That’s the paradox.  This leads me to the conclusion that madness is a form of altruism. 

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 11:35 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

 

Dave -

 

It seems like the ideas that seem to capture my imagination - Sheldrake, quantum consciousness among them - tend to be labeled as "pseudo." This is annoying, first because my hermeneutical hackles bristle whenever anyone tries to  assert their interpretation as privileged over someone else's; and because there seem to be so many cross-connections that afford all within the net to gain plausibility simply from being in the net.

 

Thanks for making this point and sharing this predilection.   I find a duality in this experience myself which can be a challenge to manage.  I deeply share your suspicion/resentment of "privileged interpretation".   I also am deeply suspicious of persuasive modes of communication (NLP as an extreme example, bad but conventional rhetoric second to that).  I have been a direct "victim" of this in my life from time to time, but more chronically I have *observed* others being persuaded to believe things for which there is either shaky evidence or which is highly contradicted by the evidence available.   My judgement of this can sound or feel like my own positioning with "privileged interpretation" which is what makes manipulative rhetoric so insidious.   I agree that all that is labeled "pseudo" is not false or flimsy, or is only *contingently* so. 

On the other hand, one of the common tools I've seen in this type of manipulative rhetoric is to *claim* that dismissal by the mainstream is nearly "proof" of truthiness.  For example, Climate Denial, AntiVax, ChemTrails, UFOlogy, etc.  seem to hold up as their prime (or at least significant) evidence the simple fact that the "mainstream" or the "establishment" dismisses them.   The apparent bias of many to believe anything wrapped up in the trappings of a "conspiracy".

On the other other hand, new or changing or revolutionary paradigms in knowledge are *naturally* strongly or fundamentally counter to the common/standard "truth".   Copernicus and Galileo and their move from geocentric to heliocentric astronomical models.

You use the phrase "capture my imagination" which I find *also* holds a dualism for me.   On the one hand, I believe that intuition is a critical element in my own understanding and knowledge of the world.  On the other, I find that my "imagination" is vulnerable to "whimsy" and a carefully constructed "whimsy" can be as compelling in it's own way as the biases of "conspiracy".   The carrot to go with the stick.

Being trained formally in Science and Mathematics, I have a deep respect for the methods and sensibilities of those domains.   Working in "Big Science" among a broad cross-cutting set of disciplines (27 years at LANL) also gave me a deep suspicion of "received wisdom".   While the largest portion of the work I observed stood on it's own merits, the largest portion of the *funding* for the work seemed to follow the biases of "privileged interpretation" and "received wisdom".   I also felt that *publication* of scientific work went through a similar but not as extreme biased filter.   Peer review and reproduction of results are central to scientific progress, so this can be problematic. On the other, other, other hand, irresponsible publication of "hooey" without proper peer review seems somewhat pervasive and corrupts the process in it's own insidious way.

<ramble off>

- 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

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================

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

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================

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

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove