anthropological observations

[Gary Schiltz-4]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 10:53 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

...
2) There are always ways to ameliorate the Absolute Law. Those ways differ by culture. Edward Hall compared how and where amelioration differs between US and Mexican cultures. In the US the cop has latitude as to when and with what to cite you, in Mexico it is the judge that has the discretion. A Mexico born and raised man was appointed traffic officer in a small US town and cited people for going 1-2 miles above the speed limit. Anger and violence ensued. Americans cited for traffic offenses in Mexico were enraged when they went to court and saw the judge dismiss cases against relatives and friends of the judge while being held guilty.
...
davew

I've never lived in Mexico, but having lived here in Ecuador for a dozen years now, I can point to a third way of ameliorating Absolute Law that I believe is common throughout Latin America and probably throughout the third world - bribery. Especially when we first moved here in 2008, before "21st Century Socialism" as promoted by Chavez (Venezuela), Morales (Bolivia) and Correa (Ecuador) swept northern South America, bribery was rampant, unchecked, and rather accepted as just how business is done. Five or ten dollars slipped discretely to a traffic cop was an acceptable, perhaps even honorable, way of avoiding a fine, it was sort of a gratuity to help an underpaid cop and his family. If it needed to go to a judge, it would probably cost more than the fine to pay him off. When Correa came to power, he made a show of cleaning up corruption, so it was no longer acceptable to bribe a low level official. Of course, what it really did is just push the corruption higher up the food chain. 

 

On Tue, Apr 14, 2020, at 12:10 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> My experience is that the cops have a LOT of preferential enforcement
> power. And my black friends seem to agree (inverse experiences). And
> it's not clear to me that this selective enforcement stops at the
> sheriffs and beat cop layer. I think many places have the leeway to
> "decriminalize" things like low volume marijuana possession up to
> federal attorneys general choosing not to focus on some categories like
> RICO or whatever.
>
> As our SCOTUS demonstrates on a regular basis, despite being a country
> of laws, the interpretation of such laws is convoluted at best. We may
> *think* we fetishize the law, but it's delusional because a law isn't a
> law until it's challenged in court. And even then, it's subject to
> revision later ... depending on how many beers Brett Kavanaugh had last
> night.
>
> On 4/14/20 9:41 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> > Venturing an opinion —
> >
> > The State put a traffic signal at an intersection because (anthropomorphizing here) The State determined that a number of factors (sight lines, traffic volume, ...) made it advisable to regulate the flow of traffic.
> >
> > The State also made an assumption about the typical driver — they are incapable of making an evaluative decision with regard all those factors and therefore their behavior must be controlled by mandating stopping at a red light.
> >
> > The State also makes the assumption that the average highway patrol person either lacks the right (only judges may interpret the law) or the capability to decide if issuing a ticket at 3 am is reasonable. The Law is the Law. This is Fetishizing the Law.
> >
> > In the case of the traffic signal, the assumptions made about typical drivers and highway patrol persons are probably not unreasonable.
> >
> > In the case of off-label meds, it would seem much more reasonable to assume that the typical physician IS capable of making an evaluative decision and should therefore be supplied with as much information as possible in support of that decision. This is what I believe I observed in Europe.
> >
> > In contrast, what I believe I am seeing in the US response nothing more than "The Law Is The Law."
>
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[Prof David West]

True, it does advance an argument for a rational process (i.e. guidelines). But it also states that such a process can never be other than an idealization (as you note).

There could be value in after-the-fact faking of a rational process, if the fake was used to inform and "improve" the process such that it became a closer approximation to the ideal.

If you establish a continuum

1. hacking ---> 2. ad hoc heuristics / best practices ----> 3. informed heuristics / best practices ---> 4. rational process

then my interpretation of the paper seemed to suggest that faking the rational process could lead to iterative improvement and move the profession to stage three of the continuum.

But, everything I have read about Parnas, and especially when he was in charge of the SDI, seemed to be to be very pessimistic about the profession/practice ever getting beyond stage 2.  His resignation letter from the SDI project stated that such a project mandated the use of something much closer to a rational process than was achievable in the foreseeable future.

I don't know if CPSR has any archives of the papers / communications from the early years when Parnas continued this argument and generalized it to most "mission critical" software. I read them at the time but do not have them in my files.

I don't think I am arguing against your point, but I am highly skeptical and deeply cynical about its being realized.

We have had very different careers in software development. Mine started in 1968 as a COBOL and Burroughs Assembler programmer and reached CIO before I returned to graduate school.  All of that experience was in corporate or government software development organizations. Ninety-five percent of the students I taught at St. Thomas had professional experience in the same kind of organization and they shared their experiences and observations with me. There were a few students, and I had a few consulting encounters, with development processes that were reasonably formal — at Medtronic, IBM, CDC, and Cray for example.

From that experience I concluded that formal, scientific, engineering approaches were nearly useless for developing the kind of software business/governmental organizations and teams were charged with. Clearly, there is some software that is amenable to and enhanced by engineering approaches. It is a matter of the nature of the underlying problem domain and the degree to which that domain is itself substantially a formal system.

The 2006 DoD funded Ultra-Large Scale Systems Study Report — Linda Northrop, lead, SEI at Carnegie-Mellon — confirmed my cynicism when they noted that software engineering was not and could not be the means for developing software for a complex domain like Ultra-large-scale-complex-adaptive-systems.

davew



On Wed, Apr 15, 2020, at 12:24 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> That paper:
>
> https://users.ece.utexas.edu/~perry/education/SE-Intro/fakeit.pdf
>
> argues *for* guidelines for software development. So, it validates my
> point in the most direct sense. It *also* argues against inferring from
> Nick's idea that there might be such a thing as Laws of Software
> Development Procedure, in that the ideal is never met. So, it validates
> my point about heuristics and best practices from that perspective, too.
>
> Did you intend to say that this paper is contrary to Nick's point? Or
> contrary to my point?
>
> On 4/15/20 8:02 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> > A contrarian position: David Parnas, "The Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It."
>
> > On Wed, Apr 15, 2020, at 8:43 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> >> No guidelines for how much to ship to any given hospital. No guidelines
> >> on dosage. No guidelines. We don't build bridges that way. We don't
> >> write software that way. We don't cook food that way. Etc. Why should
> >> we "treat" patients that way?
>
>
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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Of course, hacking is in fact #5.  

On 4/15/20, 1:34 PM, "Friam on behalf of Prof David West" <[hidden email] on behalf of [hidden email]> wrote:

    True, it does advance an argument for a rational process (i.e. guidelines). But it also states that such a process can never be other than an idealization (as you note).
   
    There could be value in after-the-fact faking of a rational process, if the fake was used to inform and "improve" the process such that it became a closer approximation to the ideal.
   
    If you establish a continuum
   
    1. hacking ---> 2. ad hoc heuristics / best practices ----> 3. informed heuristics / best practices ---> 4. rational process
   
    then my interpretation of the paper seemed to suggest that faking the rational process could lead to iterative improvement and move the profession to stage three of the continuum.
   
    But, everything I have read about Parnas, and especially when he was in charge of the SDI, seemed to be to be very pessimistic about the profession/practice ever getting beyond stage 2.  His resignation letter from the SDI project stated that such a project mandated the use of something much closer to a rational process than was achievable in the foreseeable future.
   
    I don't know if CPSR has any archives of the papers / communications from the early years when Parnas continued this argument and generalized it to most "mission critical" software. I read them at the time but do not have them in my files.
   
    I don't think I am arguing against your point, but I am highly skeptical and deeply cynical about its being realized.
   
    We have had very different careers in software development. Mine started in 1968 as a COBOL and Burroughs Assembler programmer and reached CIO before I returned to graduate school.  All of that experience was in corporate or government software development organizations. Ninety-five percent of the students I taught at St. Thomas had professional experience in the same kind of organization and they shared their experiences and observations with me. There were a few students, and I had a few consulting encounters, with development processes that were reasonably formal — at Medtronic, IBM, CDC, and Cray for example.
   
    From that experience I concluded that formal, scientific, engineering approaches were nearly useless for developing the kind of software business/governmental organizations and teams were charged with. Clearly, there is some software that is amenable to and enhanced by engineering approaches. It is a matter of the nature of the underlying problem domain and the degree to which that domain is itself substantially a formal system.
   
    The 2006 DoD funded Ultra-Large Scale Systems Study Report — Linda Northrop, lead, SEI at Carnegie-Mellon — confirmed my cynicism when they noted that software engineering was not and could not be the means for developing software for a complex domain like Ultra-large-scale-complex-adaptive-systems.
   
    davew
   
   
   
    On Wed, Apr 15, 2020, at 12:24 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
    > That paper:
    >
    > https://users.ece.utexas.edu/~perry/education/SE-Intro/fakeit.pdf
    >
    > argues *for* guidelines for software development. So, it validates my
    > point in the most direct sense. It *also* argues against inferring from
    > Nick's idea that there might be such a thing as Laws of Software
    > Development Procedure, in that the ideal is never met. So, it validates
    > my point about heuristics and best practices from that perspective, too.
    >
    > Did you intend to say that this paper is contrary to Nick's point? Or
    > contrary to my point?
    >
    > On 4/15/20 8:02 AM, Prof David West wrote:
    > > A contrarian position: David Parnas, "The Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It."
    >
    > > On Wed, Apr 15, 2020, at 8:43 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
    > >> No guidelines for how much to ship to any given hospital. No guidelines
    > >> on dosage. No guidelines. We don't build bridges that way. We don't
    > >> write software that way. We don't cook food that way. Etc. Why should
    > >> we "treat" patients that way?
    >
    >
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    >
   
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[gepr]

I've quote-included what I think is the most important part of Dave's rant below your comment on consolidation of local outlets by right-leaning organizations. Dave's comment about "hard data" showing the model *extrapolations* being 20-50% higher than the numbers shown in local media.

To my eye, this seems similar to Nick's comments about the data at the IHME's site <https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america>. That *huge* shaded area on each of those graphs seems to be totally ignored.

And this inability to grok uncertainty seems similar to our inability to grok exponential growth. Those of us who deal with such things (statistical power vs significance, confidence intervals vs error, standard deviation vs coefficient of variation, even median vs mean -- not implying *I* do so, but some of us do) MUST have an intuition about such things that prevents them from ignoring the uncertainty bands around the center/trend.

I also suppose the underlying cause of such judgement problems drives climate deniers' conflation of meteorology with climate science (or meteorologists vs climate scientists).

My own failure to grok large-scale, systemic iteration/evolution slapped me in the face in the form of an assertion I once made to a biologist friend, something like 20 years ago(?). I see/saw the democratization of music production (including the emergence of things like Acid Loops or LMMS <http://lmms.io/>, dub/rap/glitch/noise/circuit-bending/algorithmic music, as well as the emergence of the celebrity-not-a-musician-at-all musician/pop-star) as a sign that our music landscape was diversifying. The biologist retorted something like "Maybe *your* friends are making their own music. But that doesn't imply that more people are making their own music." And, over the years since he made that retort, I now *see* a drastic dearth of diversity all around me (though, again, in *my* circles, there's an increase in diversity ... it's just swamped by the homogeneity surrounding it).


Had Dave (or Nick) *mentioned* that -50% was well within the cone of uncertainty, along with condemning *both* the over-simplifying nature of local and national media, his assertion of "hard data" would have been credible. Hard data is always accompanied by a statement of how soft/hard it actually is. A claim of "hard data" (or optimism) with no accompanying claim of relative hardness is not credible. But what can we do? It's the nature of specialization and social trust that expert knowledge has to be simplified in order to percolate out.

On 4/14/20 3:48 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>  3. I have some experience (working in local Radio in the early 70's and investigative journalism in the late 70's) and basis to believe that Local Media is no less biased nor more given to reporting facts than the National Media.   At *best*, a local bias (aligned with local ownership and/or local advertisers, real or aspirational) replaces the national bias.  I believe bias is always nearly invisible to those who share the bias in place.  At *worst* the local bias is in lock-step with the national bias which is often not just handed down from the affiliated network/syndication but in fact through a media conglomerate consolidation which has gobbled up a huge portion of the local print and broadcast media.  This often comes without the change of ownership being made strongly evident to the consumers of that media.  My personal bias/opinion is that the Right has done a bang-up job of gathering up local media around the country in the last decade or three to the purpose of
>     subtly influencing public opinion, in a similar way to the way they have tried to hijack social media.  https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/media-consolidation-means-less-local-news-more-right-wing-slant

> On 4/12/20 11:51 AM, Prof David West wrote:
>> 2) Models, projections and actual. In Europe I encountered almost none of the "the models predict and hence we are doomed unless ..." kind of articles that seem to dominate US mainstream media. Instead, "spreadsheet models" with data were published in tables by date, country, and raw number. European readers were left to make their own conclusions about how Netherlands data compared to Italian (for example) and make projections or draw conclusions as appropriate.
>>
>> In local newspapers in Nevada, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Nebraska I saw articles that compared projected numbers from the models touted by CDC, Fauci, et.al. with actual local numbers. Local numbers varied from national model projections by as much as -50% and never less than -20%. (That is actual was dramatically lower than projected.)
>>
>> I saw and heard numerous editorial commentaries with regard the discrepancy between what the 'experts" were saying and what was locally observed and questioning why the variance. This leads immediately to questions about "hidden agendas" on the part of the Federal government and the "experts."
>>
>> CONCLUSION: A population that already mistrusts the Federal government and the"intelligentsia" is given one more reason, backed by hard data, for that mistrust. Also very clear — the population is NOT anti-science but IS very mistrustful of "authoritarian scientists" — those prone to saying "you wouldn't understand, but I do and you should trust me."


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[thompnickson2]

Hi, everybody,

 

This is Cranky-Nick, talking.

 

This conversation is reminding me of 538's constant reiteration that they actually accurately predicted Hillary's election in  2016.  It's just that the electoral college didn't play along.  If expert X tells me that the expected value of variable A is K, then, when it's all over and the data are in, and A did not equal K, I expect that expert to admit that what he expected did not happen.  Only after that confession has been made, should a conversation begin about whether the expert’s prediction process was faulted or not.  It seems to me that the shaded area is part of that second conversation. 

 

But all of that is moot because I think IHME’s optimistic predictions have largely panned out.  New York sent ventilators of Maryland yesterday!!!!  I certainly would never have expected that, but I think it follows from IHME’s optimistic predictions.   The were right to predict “K”, and I was wrong to doubt them.

 

Can I apologize for being cranky today.  I realize I am riding for a fall.  Thompson’s First Law: He  falls hardest who falls from his highest horse. 

 

But while I am being cranky, let me make a huge confession.  I must be a determinist at heart because I instinctively believe that to say an event is random is to confess one’s ignorance, one’s laziness, or both.  >>Pause for moaning, eye-rolling, and temple-pressing by all quantum-enthusiasts on the list.<<  I am pretty sure that what I just said contradicts my Peirce-worship, but there it is!  So when 538 says, our model was wonderful, we just got unlucky, The Leetle Voice In My Head, that voice that my behaviorism denies me, says back, “No, Son; you just didn’t work hard enough.” 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2020 11:37 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

I've quote-included what I think is the most important part of Dave's rant below your comment on consolidation of local outlets by right-leaning organizations. Dave's comment about "hard data" showing the model *extrapolations* being 20-50% higher than the numbers shown in local media.

 

To my eye, this seems similar to Nick's comments about the data at the IHME's site <https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america>. That *huge* shaded area on each of those graphs seems to be totally ignored.

 

And this inability to grok uncertainty seems similar to our inability to grok exponential growth. Those of us who deal with such things (statistical power vs significance, confidence intervals vs error, standard deviation vs coefficient of variation, even median vs mean -- not implying *I* do so, but some of us do) MUST have an intuition about such things that prevents them from ignoring the uncertainty bands around the center/trend.

 

I also suppose the underlying cause of such judgement problems drives climate deniers' conflation of meteorology with climate science (or meteorologists vs climate scientists).

 

My own failure to grok large-scale, systemic iteration/evolution slapped me in the face in the form of an assertion I once made to a biologist friend, something like 20 years ago(?). I see/saw the democratization of music production (including the emergence of things like Acid Loops or LMMS <http://lmms.io/>, dub/rap/glitch/noise/circuit-bending/algorithmic music, as well as the emergence of the celebrity-not-a-musician-at-all musician/pop-star) as a sign that our music landscape was diversifying. The biologist retorted something like "Maybe *your* friends are making their own music. But that doesn't imply that more people are making their own music." And, over the years since he made that retort, I now *see* a drastic dearth of diversity all around me (though, again, in *my* circles, there's an increase in diversity ... it's just swamped by the homogeneity surrounding it).

 

 

Had Dave (or Nick) *mentioned* that -50% was well within the cone of uncertainty, along with condemning *both* the over-simplifying nature of local and national media, his assertion of "hard data" would have been credible. Hard data is always accompanied by a statement of how soft/hard it actually is. A claim of "hard data" (or optimism) with no accompanying claim of relative hardness is not credible. But what can we do? It's the nature of specialization and social trust that expert knowledge has to be simplified in order to percolate out.

 

On 4/14/20 3:48 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

>  3. I have some experience (working in local Radio in the early 70's and investigative journalism in the late 70's) and basis to believe that Local Media is no less biased nor more given to reporting facts than the National Media.   At *best*, a local bias (aligned with local ownership and/or local advertisers, real or aspirational) replaces the national bias.  I believe bias is always nearly invisible to those who share the bias in place.  At *worst* the local bias is in lock-step with the national bias which is often not just handed down from the affiliated network/syndication but in fact through a media conglomerate consolidation which has gobbled up a huge portion of the local print and broadcast media.  This often comes without the change of ownership being made strongly evident to the consumers of that media.  My personal bias/opinion is that the Right has done a bang-up job of gathering up local media around the country in the last decade or three to the purpose of

>     subtly influencing public opinion, in a similar way to the way

> they have tried to hijack social media. 

> https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/media-consolidation-means-less-l

> ocal-news-more-right-wing-slant

 

> On 4/12/20 11:51 AM, Prof David West wrote:

>> 2) Models, projections and actual. In Europe I encountered almost none of the "the models predict and hence we are doomed unless ..." kind of articles that seem to dominate US mainstream media. Instead, "spreadsheet models" with data were published in tables by date, country, and raw number. European readers were left to make their own conclusions about how Netherlands data compared to Italian (for example) and make projections or draw conclusions as appropriate.

>>

>> In local newspapers in Nevada, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Nebraska I

>> saw articles that compared projected numbers from the models touted

>> by CDC, Fauci, et.al. with actual local numbers. Local numbers varied

>> from national model projections by as much as -50% and never less

>> than -20%. (That is actual was dramatically lower than projected.)

>>

>> I saw and heard numerous editorial commentaries with regard the discrepancy between what the 'experts" were saying and what was locally observed and questioning why the variance. This leads immediately to questions about "hidden agendas" on the part of the Federal government and the "experts."

>>

>> CONCLUSION: A population that already mistrusts the Federal government and the"intelligentsia" is given one more reason, backed by hard data, for that mistrust. Also very clear — the population is NOT anti-science but IS very mistrustful of "authoritarian scientists" — those prone to saying "you wouldn't understand, but I do and you should trust me."

 

 

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

< This conversation is reminding me of 538's constant reiteration that they actually accurately predicted Hillary's election in  2016.  >

 

Possibly of interest..

 

https://journals.jps.jp/doi/full/10.7566/JPSJ.88.061009

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Friday, April 17, 2020 at 2:59 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Hi, everybody,

 

This is Cranky-Nick, talking.

 

This conversation is reminding me of 538's constant reiteration that they actually accurately predicted Hillary's election in  2016.  It's just that the electoral college didn't play along.  If expert X tells me that the expected value of variable A is K, then, when it's all over and the data are in, and A did not equal K, I expect that expert to admit that what he expected did not happen.  Only after that confession has been made, should a conversation begin about whether the expert’s prediction process was faulted or not.  It seems to me that the shaded area is part of that second conversation. 

 

But all of that is moot because I think IHME’s optimistic predictions have largely panned out.  New York sent ventilators of Maryland yesterday!!!!  I certainly would never have expected that, but I think it follows from IHME’s optimistic predictions.   The were right to predict “K”, and I was wrong to doubt them.

 

Can I apologize for being cranky today.  I realize I am riding for a fall.  Thompson’s First Law: He  falls hardest who falls from his highest horse. 

 

But while I am being cranky, let me make a huge confession.  I must be a determinist at heart because I instinctively believe that to say an event is random is to confess one’s ignorance, one’s laziness, or both.  >>Pause for moaning, eye-rolling, and temple-pressing by all quantum-enthusiasts on the list.<<  I am pretty sure that what I just said contradicts my Peirce-worship, but there it is!  So when 538 says, our model was wonderful, we just got unlucky, The Leetle Voice In My Head, that voice that my behaviorism denies me, says back, “No, Son; you just didn’t work hard enough.” 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2020 11:37 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

I've quote-included what I think is the most important part of Dave's rant below your comment on consolidation of local outlets by right-leaning organizations. Dave's comment about "hard data" showing the model *extrapolations* being 20-50% higher than the numbers shown in local media.

 

To my eye, this seems similar to Nick's comments about the data at the IHME's site <https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america>. That *huge* shaded area on each of those graphs seems to be totally ignored.

 

And this inability to grok uncertainty seems similar to our inability to grok exponential growth. Those of us who deal with such things (statistical power vs significance, confidence intervals vs error, standard deviation vs coefficient of variation, even median vs mean -- not implying *I* do so, but some of us do) MUST have an intuition about such things that prevents them from ignoring the uncertainty bands around the center/trend.

 

I also suppose the underlying cause of such judgement problems drives climate deniers' conflation of meteorology with climate science (or meteorologists vs climate scientists).

 

My own failure to grok large-scale, systemic iteration/evolution slapped me in the face in the form of an assertion I once made to a biologist friend, something like 20 years ago(?). I see/saw the democratization of music production (including the emergence of things like Acid Loops or LMMS <http://lmms.io/>, dub/rap/glitch/noise/circuit-bending/algorithmic music, as well as the emergence of the celebrity-not-a-musician-at-all musician/pop-star) as a sign that our music landscape was diversifying. The biologist retorted something like "Maybe *your* friends are making their own music. But that doesn't imply that more people are making their own music." And, over the years since he made that retort, I now *see* a drastic dearth of diversity all around me (though, again, in *my* circles, there's an increase in diversity ... it's just swamped by the homogeneity surrounding it).

 

 

Had Dave (or Nick) *mentioned* that -50% was well within the cone of uncertainty, along with condemning *both* the over-simplifying nature of local and national media, his assertion of "hard data" would have been credible. Hard data is always accompanied by a statement of how soft/hard it actually is. A claim of "hard data" (or optimism) with no accompanying claim of relative hardness is not credible. But what can we do? It's the nature of specialization and social trust that expert knowledge has to be simplified in order to percolate out.

 

On 4/14/20 3:48 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

>  3. I have some experience (working in local Radio in the early 70's and investigative journalism in the late 70's) and basis to believe that Local Media is no less biased nor more given to reporting facts than the National Media.   At *best*, a local bias (aligned with local ownership and/or local advertisers, real or aspirational) replaces the national bias.  I believe bias is always nearly invisible to those who share the bias in place.  At *worst* the local bias is in lock-step with the national bias which is often not just handed down from the affiliated network/syndication but in fact through a media conglomerate consolidation which has gobbled up a huge portion of the local print and broadcast media.  This often comes without the change of ownership being made strongly evident to the consumers of that media.  My personal bias/opinion is that the Right has done a bang-up job of gathering up local media around the country in the last decade or three to the purpose of

>     subtly influencing public opinion, in a similar way to the way

> they have tried to hijack social media. 

> https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/media-consolidation-means-less-l

> ocal-news-more-right-wing-slant

 

> On 4/12/20 11:51 AM, Prof David West wrote:

>> 2) Models, projections and actual. In Europe I encountered almost none of the "the models predict and hence we are doomed unless ..." kind of articles that seem to dominate US mainstream media. Instead, "spreadsheet models" with data were published in tables by date, country, and raw number. European readers were left to make their own conclusions about how Netherlands data compared to Italian (for example) and make projections or draw conclusions as appropriate.

>>

>> In local newspapers in Nevada, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Nebraska I

>> saw articles that compared projected numbers from the models touted

>> by CDC, Fauci, et.al. with actual local numbers. Local numbers varied

>> from national model projections by as much as -50% and never less

>> than -20%. (That is actual was dramatically lower than projected.)

>>

>> I saw and heard numerous editorial commentaries with regard the discrepancy between what the 'experts" were saying and what was locally observed and questioning why the variance. This leads immediately to questions about "hidden agendas" on the part of the Federal government and the "experts."

>>

>> CONCLUSION: A population that already mistrusts the Federal government and the"intelligentsia" is given one more reason, backed by hard data, for that mistrust. Also very clear — the population is NOT anti-science but IS very mistrustful of "authoritarian scientists" — those prone to saying "you wouldn't understand, but I do and you should trust me."

 

 

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[gepr]

Again, though, you seem to be allowing your metaphor to run away with you. When someone who does quantitative modeling says "expected value", they do NOT mean what the layperson means when they say "I expect X". We can pick apart your statement and accuse you of an ambiguity fallacy if we want.

Your first use of "expected value" relies on the jargonal definition. Then you switcheroo on us and your 2nd use of "I expect that" relies on the vernacular concept. Up to this point, we can give you the benefit of the doubt. We all munge things a bit when talking/thinking. But *then*, on your 3rd use of "what he expected", you explicitly switched the meaning from jargon to vernacular.

I don't think you do this on purpose. (If you do, I laud you as a fellow troll! >8^) I think it's  an artifact of your being a "metaphorical thinker", whatever that means.

FWIW, I only had to pull a little on the Sabine Hossenfelder thread to find that she tweeted this, as well:

Embracing the Uncertainties
While the unknowns about coronavirus abound, a new study finds we ‘can handle the truth.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/coronavirus-uncertainty-scientific-trust.html?smid=tw-share

The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7672.abstract

If they're right, then the right-leaning local media might band together with the clickbaity national media and give it to us straight ... or they might simply skew their "expected value" reporting to continue serving their politics. Pfft.


On 4/17/20 2:58 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> If expert X tells me that the expected value of variable A is K, then, when it's all over and the data are in, and A did not equal K, I expect that expert to admit that /what he expected did not happen./  Only after that confession has been made, should a conversation begin about whether the expert’s prediction process was faulted or not.  It seems to me that the shaded area is part of that second conversation. 

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Nick writes:

 

< I must be a determinist at heart because I instinctively believe that to say an event is random is to confess one’s ignorance, one’s laziness, or both. >

 

Deterministic systems can behave in an apparently random fashion with tiny differences in initial conditions.  (Or consider the ubiquitous Mersenne Twister random number generator with a period of 2¹⁹⁹³⁷ − 1.)    But to get infinite precision on initial conditions one can require infinite resources, as can propagating exact arithmetic.    How do these infinite resources fit in a finite system?

 

Marcus

 

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[thompnickson2]

Glen,

 

Well, I think that all thinking is metaphorical (as does Dave), but let that go.  I agree that statements of the form "everything is X" really aren't awfully useful.

 

I think an obsessively metaphorical thinker is one who has the arrogance to suppose that s/he has some familiar experience by which s/he can model any experience of another person.  I actually don't believe that that is true, but I think it is true enough that I feel it is my obligation to try.   

 

I am deeply suspicious of modal talk of any form because it is so often used in human interactions to manipulate other people.  "I probably will return your tools tomorrow".   My colleagues used to say, "I think the Department should improve its teaching."  So often in human affairs, modal language has no practicial consequences whatsoever except to confuse and lull the audience. 

 

Now, what most people wanted to know from Nate Silver is whether Clinton was going to win the election.  Nate constantly says that making such predictions is, strictly speaking, not his job.  As long as what happens falls within the error of his prediction, he feels justified in having made it.   He will say things like, "actually we were right."  I would prefer him to say, "Actually we were wrong, but I would make the same prediction under the same circumstances the next time.”  In other words, the right procedure produced, on this occasion, a wrong result. 

 

That’s all,

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 4:45 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Again, though, you seem to be allowing your metaphor to run away with you. When someone who does quantitative modeling says "expected value", they do NOT mean what the layperson means when they say "I expect X". We can pick apart your statement and accuse you of an ambiguity fallacy if we want.

 

Your first use of "expected value" relies on the jargonal definition. Then you switcheroo on us and your 2nd use of "I expect that" relies on the vernacular concept. Up to this point, we can give you the benefit of the doubt. We all munge things a bit when talking/thinking. But *then*, on your 3rd use of "what he expected", you explicitly switched the meaning from jargon to vernacular.

 

I don't think you do this on purpose. (If you do, I laud you as a fellow troll! >8^) I think it's  an artifact of your being a "metaphorical thinker", whatever that means.

 

FWIW, I only had to pull a little on the Sabine Hossenfelder thread to find that she tweeted this, as well:

 

Embracing the Uncertainties

While the unknowns about coronavirus abound, a new study finds we ‘can handle the truth.’

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/coronavirus-uncertainty-scientific-trust.html?smid=tw-share

 

The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7672.abstract

 

If they're right, then the right-leaning local media might band together with the clickbaity national media and give it to us straight ... or they might simply skew their "expected value" reporting to continue serving their politics. Pfft.

 

 

On 4/17/20 2:58 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> If expert X tells me that the expected value of variable A is K, then,

> when it's all over and the data are in, and A did not equal K, I expect that expert to admit that /what he expected did not happen./  Only after that confession has been made, should a conversation begin about whether the expert’s prediction process was faulted or not.  It seems to me that the shaded area is part of that second conversation.

 

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[gepr]

So, if you're serious about *your* attempt to model Nate Silver, then you would find something in your experience that *means* something similar to what Nate means. And jargonal "expected value" <=> vernacular "I expect" isn't that thing.

Your last paragraph comes closer. But you chose to frame it as something you would prefer him to say, as opposed to using your own words to restate what he's actually saying.

To me, I think what he's actually saying is "It's my job to collect and clean some data, often based on heuristics, then run that data through some (admittedly biased) algorithms, present the result to you, and engage in some light-handed (also biased) interpretation of that data." Then he might go on to say something like "What you infer from that output data is your own business. But don't tell me what I implied simply based on your (mistaken) inference."

That's *my* rewording because it's analogous to experiences I have every single day building and running models for (often computationally incompetent) people. It has nothing to do with prediction and *everything* to do with putting computational power into the hands of people who, without me, wouldn't ordinarily have that power. Nate's a (horizontal) technologist. It's regrettable that he's being thought of as some sort of oracle. (Even if he ends up getting off on the attention.)

Technologists, like scientists, struggle a LOT with packaging what they do and how their produce can be used. And *always* ... always always always, there's some non-tech person somewhere imputing things that are not there (or ignoring things that are there). It would help a lot if you "soft skilled" people would actually use your soft skills and make a real effort to understand what's being said without imputing what you want to hear. (To be clear, I'm not making accusations against you or anyone here, right now... just venting a little. ... Just this morning a fellow technologist was telling me how his executives renamed a relatively straightforward machine learning tool with some high-falutin' misleading references to "virtuality" and AI. Arg. You metaphor people make our lives so difficult.)

On 4/17/20 4:08 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> I think an obsessively metaphorical thinker is one who has the arrogance to suppose that s/he has */some/* familiar experience by which s/he can model any experience of another person.  I actually don't believe that that is true, but I think it is true enough that I feel it is my obligation to try.   
>
> I am deeply suspicious of modal talk of any form because it is so often used in human interactions to manipulate other people.  "I probably will return your tools tomorrow".   My colleagues used to say, "I think the Department should improve its teaching."  So often in human affairs, modal language has no practicial consequences whatsoever except to confuse and lull the audience. 
>
> Now, what most people wanted to know from Nate Silver is whether Clinton was going to win the election.  Nate constantly says that making such predictions is, strictly speaking, not his job.  As long as what happens falls within the error of his prediction, he feels justified in having made it.   He will say things like, "actually we were right."  I would prefer him to say, "Actually we were wrong, /but I would make the same prediction under the same circumstances the next time.”  /In other words, the right procedure produced, on this occasion, a wrong result. 

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[David Eric Smith]

Cranky Nick, you really need to join a church.

Now, what most people wanted to know from Nate Silver is whether Clinton was going to win the election.  Nate constantly says that making such predictions is, strictly speaking, not his job.  As long as what happens falls within the error of his prediction, he feels justified in having made it.   He will say things like, "actually we were right."  I would prefer him to say, "Actually we were wrong, but I would make the same prediction under the same circumstances the next time.”  In other words, the right procedure produced, on this occasion, a wrong result.  

The thing you say here that “most people want to know” of course, you know full-well, doesn’t exist.  So you need to join a church because they are the ones who will tell you they are giving it to you, when at least you, and maybe even they, know it doesn’t exist.

What Nate gave you is a sample estimator for a probability distribution (each of those words means something specific; they are not an evocative construction within common vernacular).  He didn’t even give you the “actual” probability distribution for the underlying process, because, as Pierce saith both rightly and interestingly, the “actual” probability distribution is something we don’t have access to.  What we have, and all we ever have, are sample estimators to probability distributions.  Nate’s estimator includes biases.  Some of these, like method biases in polling, are things he can also try to estimate and correct for.  Others, like systematic biases in the relation between sampling and underlying correlations — as in the really interesting and exactly relevant link Marcus sent — are things Nate (et al. of course) haven’t identified.  The acknowledgement of those, too, was in the advertising.

So, the sample estimator for a probability distribution, with known biases described and correction methods listed, and unknown biases acknowledged, is what Nate gave you, and in the only sense that “right” can be applied — which is an accurate rendering of methods — it was right.

If someone gives me a revolver with two filled chambers, and in the afterlife I protest that I didn’t pull one of the empty ones, well, we know what we think of my judgment, and we don’t spend a lot of time on this list putting that out as a philosophical problem.

I don’t actually write this note to be nasty -- because of course I know you know all this as well as your interlocutors do — but to be colorful to make a different point.  It has to do with liking the fact that learning is not most interesting when one accretes an acquaintance with new facts, but when one realizes new ways of using words are necessary as a vehicle to taking on new frames of mind.

The claim that “right/wrong” are only allowed to be applied to certain and definite values, and are _not_ allowed to be applied to more composite deliverables such as sample estimators for probability distributions, is where terminology nazis close off conversation by insisting on a language in which terms that are needed to express the pertinent ideas are disallowed.  We see it in every field.  Stanley Miller ruled out metabolism as being a concept that could be presaged in geochemistry by “defining” metabolism as chemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes within a cell.  Historical linguists did it for a century insisting that absolutely regular sound correspondences (none of which ever actually exist) were the only signatures of genetic relatedness among languages, and probabilistic fingerprints had no interpretation.  The Stochastic Thermodynamics cabal do it when the say that thermodynamic laws for non-equilibrium processes that don’t come from Boltzmann/Gibbs free energies have “no physical meaning”, thereby scoping “physical” to refer to equilibrium thermodynamic states, the narrowest of special cases.  

And Dave did it in his post of long questions some weeks ago — which at the time I didn’t want to respond to because my responses are sort fo dull and unhelpful — when he said most physicists are realists but quantum physicists are anti-realists.  What the quantum physicists say is that the old classical assumption that “observables” and “states” are the same kind of thing turned out to be wrong.  They are different kinds fo things.  States can be real, and can even evolve deterministically, but may not be associated with any definite values for observables, because observables, when formalized and fully expressed through the formalization, are different kinds of things (they are a kind of operator, which one can think of as a rule for making a mapping)  than states or than particular numbers that the observables can yield as their output from some states.  So to claim that the quantum physicists are anti-realists is to scope “real” as coextensive with interpreting “observables” not as operators but as simple definite numbers.  That is, to adopt the frame of classical mechanics.  So Dave’s “anti-realist” actually means “anti-classical-mechanics-assumptionist”, which of course is exactly right, but never the scope I would use for the word “real”.  Anyone who insists that is the only way it is allowed to be used has just dictated rules for conversation in which there is no way I can engage and still work for sense-making.

Anyway, the whole tenor of the discussion is fine.  I enjoy all the parts of it, including your stubbornness for its own sake.  Wittgenstein was reportedly impossible in that way, though I forget the reference and source.  Some fellow-philosopher complaining that “it was impossible to get Wittgenstein to admit there was not a rhinoceros in the room."

Eric

 

That’s all, 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 4:45 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Again, though, you seem to be allowing your metaphor to run away with you. When someone who does quantitative modeling says "expected value", they do NOT mean what the layperson means when they say "I expect X". We can pick apart your statement and accuse you of an ambiguity fallacy if we want.

 

Your first use of "expected value" relies on the jargonal definition. Then you switcheroo on us and your 2nd use of "I expect that" relies on the vernacular concept. Up to this point, we can give you the benefit of the doubt. We all munge things a bit when talking/thinking. But *then*, on your 3rd use of "what he expected", you explicitly switched the meaning from jargon to vernacular.

 

I don't think you do this on purpose. (If you do, I laud you as a fellow troll! >8^) I think it's  an artifact of your being a "metaphorical thinker", whatever that means.

 

FWIW, I only had to pull a little on the Sabine Hossenfelder thread to find that she tweeted this, as well:

 

Embracing the Uncertainties

While the unknowns about coronavirus abound, a new study finds we ‘can handle the truth.’

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/coronavirus-uncertainty-scientific-trust.html?smid=tw-share

 

The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7672.abstract

 

If they're right, then the right-leaning local media might band together with the clickbaity national media and give it to us straight ... or they might simply skew their "expected value" reporting to continue serving their politics. Pfft.

 

 

On 4/17/20 2:58 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> If expert X tells me that the expected value of variable A is K, then, 

> when it's all over and the data are in, and A did not equal K, I expect that expert to admit that /what he expected did not happen./  Only after that confession has been made, should a conversation begin about whether the expert’s prediction process was faulted or not.  It seems to me that the shaded area is part of that second conversation.

 

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[gepr]

And just in case it's not obvious, I enjoy these conversations, too ... however much of a jerk I may seem. They often provide a much needed break from whatever useless toil I end up in. "Oh! There's some lovely filth down here!"

On April 17, 2020 5:07:36 PM PDT, David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
> I enjoy all the
>parts of it, including your stubbornness for its own sake.
>Wittgenstein was reportedly impossible in that way, though I forget the
>reference and source.  Some fellow-philosopher complaining that “it was
>impossible to get Wittgenstein to admit there was not a rhinoceros in
>the room."

--
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[thompnickson2]

Dear Cranky Eric,

 

When Peirce writes, countering determinism, that “everything is just about as random as it could be” he is referring to contingencies amongst events, I think.  At the risk of quoting myself:

 

Considering all the events that are going on at any one moment -- the ticking of the clock, the whuffing of the wind in the eaves, the drip of the faucet, the ringing of the telephone, the call from the seven-year-old upstairs who cannot find his shoes, the clunking in the heating pipes as the heat comes on, the distant sound of the fire engine passing the end of the street, the entry of the cat through the pet door, the skitter of mouse-feet behind the wainscoting -- most will be likely unrelated to the fact that the egg timer just went off. Perhaps not all, however. Perhaps the cat anticipates cleaning up the egg dishes. Perhaps the same stove that is boiling the egg water has lit a fire in the chimney. But whatever relations we might discover amongst all these events, we can find an infinite number of other temporally contiguous events that are not related to them. Thus, as Peirce says, events are just about as random as anybody could care them to be.

 

But – and here is the main point – to the extent that events are related, these relations would be useful. They would, for instance allow the cat to predict that there would be food in a few moments, the mouse to predict that the cat has entered the house, and you to predict, among other things, that your eggs are ready. For this reason, on Peirce’s account, organisms are designed to ferret out these few regularities and take action based on them.  This, and only this, is the reason that the world appears regular.

So, I stipulate the ubiquity of randomness. 

 

What I am less certain about is whether randomness should – note the use of modal language – should ever be offered as the reason for anything.  If we regard science as an extension of this animal propensity for ferreting out regularities, then to declare that anything occurred because it was random is a kind of copping out.  It is like ferrets giving up on the idea that borrows contain prairie dogs.  That’s just NOT what we ferrets DO!  It’s certainly not what we do if we ever expect to catch any prairie dogs.

 

Oh, and:  The problem is not that I need a religion; the problem is I already HAVE one and I don’t know what it is. 

 

Oh, and #2.  “Enjoy these conversations” is, for me, vastly understate the case.  They are literally keeping me alive, particularly these days, when, it appears, for the first time in 50 years, I won’t have a garden in the Mosquito Infested Swamp.   

 

CrankyNick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 6:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Cranky Nick, you really need to join a church.

 

Now, what most people wanted to know from Nate Silver is whether Clinton was going to win the election.  Nate constantly says that making such predictions is, strictly speaking, not his job.  As long as what happens falls within the error of his prediction, he feels justified in having made it.   He will say things like, "actually we were right."  I would prefer him to say, "Actually we were wrong, but I would make the same prediction under the same circumstances the next time.”  In other words, the right procedure produced, on this occasion, a wrong result.  

 

The thing you say here that “most people want to know” of course, you know full-well, doesn’t exist.  So you need to join a church because they are the ones who will tell you they are giving it to you, when at least you, and maybe even they, know it doesn’t exist.

 

What Nate gave you is a sample estimator for a probability distribution (each of those words means something specific; they are not an evocative construction within common vernacular).  He didn’t even give you the “actual” probability distribution for the underlying process, because, as Pierce saith both rightly and interestingly, the “actual” probability distribution is something we don’t have access to.  What we have, and all we ever have, are sample estimators to probability distributions.  Nate’s estimator includes biases.  Some of these, like method biases in polling, are things he can also try to estimate and correct for.  Others, like systematic biases in the relation between sampling and underlying correlations — as in the really interesting and exactly relevant link Marcus sent — are things Nate (et al. of course) haven’t identified.  The acknowledgement of those, too, was in the advertising.

 

So, the sample estimator for a probability distribution, with known biases described and correction methods listed, and unknown biases acknowledged, is what Nate gave you, and in the only sense that “right” can be applied — which is an accurate rendering of methods — it was right.

 

If someone gives me a revolver with two filled chambers, and in the afterlife I protest that I didn’t pull one of the empty ones, well, we know what we think of my judgment, and we don’t spend a lot of time on this list putting that out as a philosophical problem.

 

 

I don’t actually write this note to be nasty -- because of course I know you know all this as well as your interlocutors do — but to be colorful to make a different point.  It has to do with liking the fact that learning is not most interesting when one accretes an acquaintance with new facts, but when one realizes new ways of using words are necessary as a vehicle to taking on new frames of mind.

 

The claim that “right/wrong” are only allowed to be applied to certain and definite values, and are _not_ allowed to be applied to more composite deliverables such as sample estimators for probability distributions, is where terminology nazis close off conversation by insisting on a language in which terms that are needed to express the pertinent ideas are disallowed.  We see it in every field.  Stanley Miller ruled out metabolism as being a concept that could be presaged in geochemistry by “defining” metabolism as chemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes within a cell.  Historical linguists did it for a century insisting that absolutely regular sound correspondences (none of which ever actually exist) were the only signatures of genetic relatedness among languages, and probabilistic fingerprints had no interpretation.  The Stochastic Thermodynamics cabal do it when the say that thermodynamic laws for non-equilibrium processes that don’t come from Boltzmann/Gibbs free energies have “no physical meaning”, thereby scoping “physical” to refer to equilibrium thermodynamic states, the narrowest of special cases.  

 

And Dave did it in his post of long questions some weeks ago — which at the time I didn’t want to respond to because my responses are sort fo dull and unhelpful — when he said most physicists are realists but quantum physicists are anti-realists.  What the quantum physicists say is that the old classical assumption that “observables” and “states” are the same kind of thing turned out to be wrong.  They are different kinds fo things.  States can be real, and can even evolve deterministically, but may not be associated with any definite values for observables, because observables, when formalized and fully expressed through the formalization, are different kinds of things (they are a kind of operator, which one can think of as a rule for making a mapping)  than states or than particular numbers that the observables can yield as their output from some states.  So to claim that the quantum physicists are anti-realists is to scope “real” as coextensive with interpreting “observables” not as operators but as simple definite numbers.  That is, to adopt the frame of classical mechanics.  So Dave’s “anti-realist” actually means “anti-classical-mechanics-assumptionist”, which of course is exactly right, but never the scope I would use for the word “real”.  Anyone who insists that is the only way it is allowed to be used has just dictated rules for conversation in which there is no way I can engage and still work for sense-making.

 

Anyway, the whole tenor of the discussion is fine.  I enjoy all the parts of it, including your stubbornness for its own sake.  Wittgenstein was reportedly impossible in that way, though I forget the reference and source.  Some fellow-philosopher complaining that “it was impossible to get Wittgenstein to admit there was not a rhinoceros in the room."

 

Eric

 

 

 

 

That’s all, 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 4:45 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Again, though, you seem to be allowing your metaphor to run away with you. When someone who does quantitative modeling says "expected value", they do NOT mean what the layperson means when they say "I expect X". We can pick apart your statement and accuse you of an ambiguity fallacy if we want.

 

Your first use of "expected value" relies on the jargonal definition. Then you switcheroo on us and your 2nd use of "I expect that" relies on the vernacular concept. Up to this point, we can give you the benefit of the doubt. We all munge things a bit when talking/thinking. But *then*, on your 3rd use of "what he expected", you explicitly switched the meaning from jargon to vernacular.

 

I don't think you do this on purpose. (If you do, I laud you as a fellow troll! >8^) I think it's  an artifact of your being a "metaphorical thinker", whatever that means.

 

FWIW, I only had to pull a little on the Sabine Hossenfelder thread to find that she tweeted this, as well:

 

Embracing the Uncertainties

While the unknowns about coronavirus abound, a new study finds we ‘can handle the truth.’

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/coronavirus-uncertainty-scientific-trust.html?smid=tw-share

 

The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7672.abstract

 

If they're right, then the right-leaning local media might band together with the clickbaity national media and give it to us straight ... or they might simply skew their "expected value" reporting to continue serving their politics. Pfft.

 

 

On 4/17/20 2:58 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> If expert X tells me that the expected value of variable A is K, then, 

> when it's all over and the data are in, and A did not equal K, I expect that expert to admit that /what he expected did not happen./  Only after that confession has been made, should a conversation begin about whether the expert’s prediction process was faulted or not.  It seems to me that the shaded area is part of that second conversation.

 

--

☣ uǝlƃ

 

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[David Eric Smith]

Very good Nick.

You see, unfortunately it appears that the reason I was put on Earth was to be the evangelist of distributional thinking.

In one of Walter Fontana’s early papers, which I probably saw in 1998, he opened with a quote “Ever focused on objects, we something something something…(some expression of loss)”.  This was in his Lambda-calculus papers about the concreteness of realized patterns that are not objects, and their fundamental role for biology.  For as much as I like it, you would think I had remembered either the text or the source.  Cannot find it now.

But, to your point:

I think where the discussion happens is not about knowledge, or even regularity, but rather how wide and how flexible a scope you are willing to cast for what counts as an “object of knowledge”.  Or even “objects in knowledge”.

Yes, the values taken at events can be very good things to have found out about.  They inhabit the past, and our sense of knowing them is heavily wrapped up in both the senses of “the past” and of “knowledge".  It is a very small set of cases that are so constrained that the future may as well be in the past.  Nonetheless, the longing for it seems to be an eternal wellspring for delusions.  The Popol Vu has something about, for the adepts, ’The future and the past are laid out before them [like symmetric spatial dimensions]’ or something to that effect.  Lakoff probably can cite no end of metaphors by which people have mapped between the two, conceiving of time as having the same symmetric availability as space.  I expect it is a human cognitive and cultural universal.

But what happens when the future really is different from the past?  Do we insist that every “real” object of knowledge about the future must have a model in only the most singular of things archived from the past?  I would say no.  There are lots of cases in which the outcome delivered by an event not yet performed is not available for knowing.  How you plan to sample, though, and features of the distribution from which you will sample, may be very good things to know.  Back in Ancient Greece, we could have argued interminably about whether a distribution is less privileged as an “object” of knowledge than the particular value yielded by a sample from the distribution.

But a lot has happened since Ancient Greece, and today we have many many reasons to see them as deserving peers, and even to be cautious that we may not be able to tell them apart.

Entropy in thermodynamics is a distributional concept, yet it does very very much of the work in the world that we used to ascribe to Newtonian objects.

In high-energy physics, post Gell-Mann/Wilson (so 1954 Gell-Mann and Lowe, Wilson 1974), we have learned that everything we used to think _were_ objects, turned out to be distributions.  In hindsight this was of crucial conceptual importance.  If objects had been primary, and distributions had been mere step-children when we could not pin things down, and that had been _all_ there was to our science, we would have suffered an infinite regress.  Until we had a Theory of Everything, or a bottoming out of the well of smallness, we could never know if the science was predictively closed.  But now with some understanding of phase transitions, we know that the world could as well be distributions all the way down forever (or it might not be; it might have a bottom), and the foundation of _any_ of the predictive science we currently use would not be any worse in one case than in another.  They are not currently “exactly” closed, but we can put bounds on how closed they must be.  Everything is Probably Approximately Correct (Leslie Valiant), and that was all we had ever had.  It was more valuable to learn that there are ceilings and floors in the scope of influence of variations within distributions, than whether there is any smallest level of objects, or even any need for a concept of “object” distinct from what we can do with distributions.  A short incantation that I use to ward off the vampires who mis-use the word “reductionism” is that “Only with a theory of emergence did reductionist science become well-founded."

Biology has been conceptually impaired by too literalist a view of objects, whether organisms for Darwin, genes for Williams and Dawkins, or whatever other “unit of selection” you want to use as a shibboleth.  People fret over whether “viruses are alive”, having already committed that “alive” must a predicate defined over objects, and they worry whether there “really are” any individuals, since material is always coming and going and there are more bacterial cells in my gut than human cells in the rest of me.  Habits of understanding that determinism can dwell in the distribution opens a treasure chest of methods but also styles of thought, with which all these “not-even-wrong” frets simply dissipate the same way we no longer agonize over Zeno paradoxes.

I have no gripe with object-oriented thinking, or event-outcome-oriented thinking; we can do much with those, and they account for a lot of our animal habit and our “folk physics”.  But to put it up as a gold standard is very limiting.  We know lots of things that cannot be done within that frame, but that can be done, and some things where we thought it was the right frame and we were wrong.  

There was a source I thought of putting on the list early in this thread, here:

https://philpapers.org/rec/ROTLOB

I have seen a copy of this, but I don’t know where to get a legally distributable copy and this is either paywalled or not even electronic.  Some of you may have it already.

It was when Dave gave the assertion that the rural people are actually the careful balanced thinkers, and Frank put up an article as “another perspective, or perhaps David will see it as confirming evidence”.

I know probably most of you have read Heidegger, and Husserl, and Fink, and lots of others.  I had not.  So I found Rota’s notes, structured by Heidegger but drawing in many of their good parts on Husserl, helpful to sort-of recognize what the phenomenologists are on about.

In one of the late lectures, Rota explains the phenomenologists strong emphasis that no mere events in our existence have any particular meaning.  There can be the sequence of lines in a proof, or a recipe for doing an experiment.  By themselves, they are just artifacts, inscribed in a library somewhere.  Even read through, or performed, they may just be motions in nature.  They become “a proof” or “evidence”, when they are experienced as evidence-for a truth or a bit of knowledge.  This concept of “perceiving-as” or “evidence-for”, the phenomenologists claim, is simply different in kind from any of the procedures in which it occurs.  If I understand them, they assert that the moment of experiencing something “as” in fact defines an experiential notion of the temporal present that is different entirely in kind from the notations of either the past or the future.  

It is a bit of a digression from this post, but I will remark, that this position makes the world look pretty hopeless to me, since anyone can experience anything “as” evidence for anything.  And there is a part of reality-building in those moments for them, that nobody else outside them has any grip on.

But in a more positive note, and on the point of this post, I feel like it is a Husserlian/Heideggerian shift in the occupancy of the temporal present, to find it as normal to experience distributionally-defined patterns as objects, as event-outcome-defined patterns.  They just do different things.

Anyway, sorry.  Big long TLDR to state the obvious.

Eric

On Apr 18, 2020, at 12:36 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Cranky Eric, 

 

When Peirce writes, countering determinism, that “everything is just about as random as it could be” he is referring to contingencies amongst events, I think.  At the risk of quoting myself: 

 

Considering all the events that are going on at any one moment -- the ticking of the clock, the whuffing of the wind in the eaves, the drip of the faucet, the ringing of the telephone, the call from the seven-year-old upstairs who cannot find his shoes, the clunking in the heating pipes as the heat comes on, the distant sound of the fire engine passing the end of the street, the entry of the cat through the pet door, the skitter of mouse-feet behind the wainscoting -- most will be likely unrelated to the fact that the egg timer just went off. Perhaps not all, however. Perhaps the cat anticipates cleaning up the egg dishes. Perhaps the same stove that is boiling the egg water has lit a fire in the chimney. But whatever relations we might discover amongst all these events, we can find an infinite number of other temporally contiguous events that are not related to them. Thus, as Peirce says, events are just about as random as anybody could care them to be. 

 

But – and here is the main point – to the extent that events are related, these relations would be useful. They would, for instance allow the cat to predict that there would be food in a few moments, the mouse to predict that the cat has entered the house, and you to predict, among other things, that your eggs are ready. For this reason, on Peirce’s account, organisms are designed to ferret out these few regularities and take action based on them.  This, and only this, is the reason that the world appears regular. 

So, I stipulate the ubiquity of randomness.  

 

What I am less certain about is whether randomness should – note the use of modal language – should ever be offered as the reason for anything.  If we regard science as an extension of this animal propensity for ferreting out regularities, then to declare that anything occurred because it was random is a kind of copping out.  It is like ferrets giving up on the idea that borrows contain prairie dogs.  That’s just NOT what we ferrets DO!  It’s certainly not what we do if we ever expect to catch any prairie dogs. 

 

Oh, and:  The problem is not that I need a religion; the problem is I already HAVE one and I don’t know what it is.  

 

Oh, and #2.  “Enjoy these conversations” is, for me, vastly understate the case.  They are literally keeping me alive, particularly these days, when, it appears, for the first time in 50 years, I won’t have a garden in the Mosquito Infested Swamp.   

 

CrankyNick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 6:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Cranky Nick, you really need to join a church.

 

Now, what most people wanted to know from Nate Silver is whether Clinton was going to win the election.  Nate constantly says that making such predictions is, strictly speaking, not his job.  As long as what happens falls within the error of his prediction, he feels justified in having made it.   He will say things like, "actually we were right."  I would prefer him to say, "Actually we were wrong, but I would make the same prediction under the same circumstances the next time.”  In other words, the right procedure produced, on this occasion, a wrong result.  

 

The thing you say here that “most people want to know” of course, you know full-well, doesn’t exist.  So you need to join a church because they are the ones who will tell you they are giving it to you, when at least you, and maybe even they, know it doesn’t exist.

 

What Nate gave you is a sample estimator for a probability distribution (each of those words means something specific; they are not an evocative construction within common vernacular).  He didn’t even give you the “actual” probability distribution for the underlying process, because, as Pierce saith both rightly and interestingly, the “actual” probability distribution is something we don’t have access to.  What we have, and all we ever have, are sample estimators to probability distributions.  Nate’s estimator includes biases.  Some of these, like method biases in polling, are things he can also try to estimate and correct for.  Others, like systematic biases in the relation between sampling and underlying correlations — as in the really interesting and exactly relevant link Marcus sent — are things Nate (et al. of course) haven’t identified.  The acknowledgement of those, too, was in the advertising.

 

So, the sample estimator for a probability distribution, with known biases described and correction methods listed, and unknown biases acknowledged, is what Nate gave you, and in the only sense that “right” can be applied — which is an accurate rendering of methods — it was right.

 

If someone gives me a revolver with two filled chambers, and in the afterlife I protest that I didn’t pull one of the empty ones, well, we know what we think of my judgment, and we don’t spend a lot of time on this list putting that out as a philosophical problem.

 

 

I don’t actually write this note to be nasty -- because of course I know you know all this as well as your interlocutors do — but to be colorful to make a different point.  It has to do with liking the fact that learning is not most interesting when one accretes an acquaintance with new facts, but when one realizes new ways of using words are necessary as a vehicle to taking on new frames of mind.

 

The claim that “right/wrong” are only allowed to be applied to certain and definite values, and are _not_ allowed to be applied to more composite deliverables such as sample estimators for probability distributions, is where terminology nazis close off conversation by insisting on a language in which terms that are needed to express the pertinent ideas are disallowed.  We see it in every field.  Stanley Miller ruled out metabolism as being a concept that could be presaged in geochemistry by “defining” metabolism as chemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes within a cell.  Historical linguists did it for a century insisting that absolutely regular sound correspondences (none of which ever actually exist) were the only signatures of genetic relatedness among languages, and probabilistic fingerprints had no interpretation.  The Stochastic Thermodynamics cabal do it when the say that thermodynamic laws for non-equilibrium processes that don’t come from Boltzmann/Gibbs free energies have “no physical meaning”, thereby scoping “physical” to refer to equilibrium thermodynamic states, the narrowest of special cases.  

 

And Dave did it in his post of long questions some weeks ago — which at the time I didn’t want to respond to because my responses are sort fo dull and unhelpful — when he said most physicists are realists but quantum physicists are anti-realists.  What the quantum physicists say is that the old classical assumption that “observables” and “states” are the same kind of thing turned out to be wrong.  They are different kinds fo things.  States can be real, and can even evolve deterministically, but may not be associated with any definite values for observables, because observables, when formalized and fully expressed through the formalization, are different kinds of things (they are a kind of operator, which one can think of as a rule for making a mapping)  than states or than particular numbers that the observables can yield as their output from some states.  So to claim that the quantum physicists are anti-realists is to scope “real” as coextensive with interpreting “observables” not as operators but as simple definite numbers.  That is, to adopt the frame of classical mechanics.  So Dave’s “anti-realist” actually means “anti-classical-mechanics-assumptionist”, which of course is exactly right, but never the scope I would use for the word “real”.  Anyone who insists that is the only way it is allowed to be used has just dictated rules for conversation in which there is no way I can engage and still work for sense-making.

 

Anyway, the whole tenor of the discussion is fine.  I enjoy all the parts of it, including your stubbornness for its own sake.  Wittgenstein was reportedly impossible in that way, though I forget the reference and source.  Some fellow-philosopher complaining that “it was impossible to get Wittgenstein to admit there was not a rhinoceros in the room."

 

Eric

 

 

 

 

That’s all, 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 4:45 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Again, though, you seem to be allowing your metaphor to run away with you. When someone who does quantitative modeling says "expected value", they do NOT mean what the layperson means when they say "I expect X". We can pick apart your statement and accuse you of an ambiguity fallacy if we want.

 

Your first use of "expected value" relies on the jargonal definition. Then you switcheroo on us and your 2nd use of "I expect that" relies on the vernacular concept. Up to this point, we can give you the benefit of the doubt. We all munge things a bit when talking/thinking. But *then*, on your 3rd use of "what he expected", you explicitly switched the meaning from jargon to vernacular.

 

I don't think you do this on purpose. (If you do, I laud you as a fellow troll! >8^) I think it's  an artifact of your being a "metaphorical thinker", whatever that means.

 

FWIW, I only had to pull a little on the Sabine Hossenfelder thread to find that she tweeted this, as well:

 

Embracing the Uncertainties

While the unknowns about coronavirus abound, a new study finds we ‘can handle the truth.’

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/coronavirus-uncertainty-scientific-trust.html?smid=tw-share

 

The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7672.abstract

 

If they're right, then the right-leaning local media might band together with the clickbaity national media and give it to us straight ... or they might simply skew their "expected value" reporting to continue serving their politics. Pfft.

 

 

On 4/17/20 2:58 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> If expert X tells me that the expected value of variable A is K, then, 

> when it's all over and the data are in, and A did not equal K, I expect that expert to admit that /what he expected did not happen./  Only after that confession has been made, should a conversation begin about whether the expert’s prediction process was faulted or not.  It seems to me that the shaded area is part of that second conversation.

 

--

☣ uǝlƃ

 

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[Stephen Guerin-5]

Eric, 

Was it Barrier to Objects? 

https://scholar.harvard.edu/walterfontana/publications/barrier-objects-dynamical-systems-bounded-organizations

That was the constructivist lambda calculus paper. Bill Mckelvey extended to pi calculus 

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 12:36 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Very good Nick.

You see, unfortunately it appears that the reason I was put on Earth was to be the evangelist of distributional thinking.

In one of Walter Fontana’s early papers, which I probably saw in 1998, he opened with a quote “Ever focused on objects, we something something something…(some expression of loss)”.  This was in his Lambda-calculus papers about the concreteness of realized patterns that are not objects, and their fundamental role for biology.  For as much as I like it, you would think I had remembered either the text or the source.  Cannot find it now.

But, to your point:

I think where the discussion happens is not about knowledge, or even regularity, but rather how wide and how flexible a scope you are willing to cast for what counts as an “object of knowledge”.  Or even “objects in knowledge”.

Yes, the values taken at events can be very good things to have found out about.  They inhabit the past, and our sense of knowing them is heavily wrapped up in both the senses of “the past” and of “knowledge".  It is a very small set of cases that are so constrained that the future may as well be in the past.  Nonetheless, the longing for it seems to be an eternal wellspring for delusions.  The Popol Vu has something about, for the adepts, ’The future and the past are laid out before them [like symmetric spatial dimensions]’ or something to that effect.  Lakoff probably can cite no end of metaphors by which people have mapped between the two, conceiving of time as having the same symmetric availability as space.  I expect it is a human cognitive and cultural universal.

But what happens when the future really is different from the past?  Do we insist that every “real” object of knowledge about the future must have a model in only the most singular of things archived from the past?  I would say no.  There are lots of cases in which the outcome delivered by an event not yet performed is not available for knowing.  How you plan to sample, though, and features of the distribution from which you will sample, may be very good things to know.  Back in Ancient Greece, we could have argued interminably about whether a distribution is less privileged as an “object” of knowledge than the particular value yielded by a sample from the distribution.

But a lot has happened since Ancient Greece, and today we have many many reasons to see them as deserving peers, and even to be cautious that we may not be able to tell them apart.

Entropy in thermodynamics is a distributional concept, yet it does very very much of the work in the world that we used to ascribe to Newtonian objects.

In high-energy physics, post Gell-Mann/Wilson (so 1954 Gell-Mann and Lowe, Wilson 1974), we have learned that everything we used to think _were_ objects, turned out to be distributions.  In hindsight this was of crucial conceptual importance.  If objects had been primary, and distributions had been mere step-children when we could not pin things down, and that had been _all_ there was to our science, we would have suffered an infinite regress.  Until we had a Theory of Everything, or a bottoming out of the well of smallness, we could never know if the science was predictively closed.  But now with some understanding of phase transitions, we know that the world could as well be distributions all the way down forever (or it might not be; it might have a bottom), and the foundation of _any_ of the predictive science we currently use would not be any worse in one case than in another.  They are not currently “exactly” closed, but we can put bounds on how closed they must be.  Everything is Probably Approximately Correct (Leslie Valiant), and that was all we had ever had.  It was more valuable to learn that there are ceilings and floors in the scope of influence of variations within distributions, than whether there is any smallest level of objects, or even any need for a concept of “object” distinct from what we can do with distributions.  A short incantation that I use to ward off the vampires who mis-use the word “reductionism” is that “Only with a theory of emergence did reductionist science become well-founded."

Biology has been conceptually impaired by too literalist a view of objects, whether organisms for Darwin, genes for Williams and Dawkins, or whatever other “unit of selection” you want to use as a shibboleth.  People fret over whether “viruses are alive”, having already committed that “alive” must a predicate defined over objects, and they worry whether there “really are” any individuals, since material is always coming and going and there are more bacterial cells in my gut than human cells in the rest of me.  Habits of understanding that determinism can dwell in the distribution opens a treasure chest of methods but also styles of thought, with which all these “not-even-wrong” frets simply dissipate the same way we no longer agonize over Zeno paradoxes.

I have no gripe with object-oriented thinking, or event-outcome-oriented thinking; we can do much with those, and they account for a lot of our animal habit and our “folk physics”.  But to put it up as a gold standard is very limiting.  We know lots of things that cannot be done within that frame, but that can be done, and some things where we thought it was the right frame and we were wrong.  

There was a source I thought of putting on the list early in this thread, here:

https://philpapers.org/rec/ROTLOB

I have seen a copy of this, but I don’t know where to get a legally distributable copy and this is either paywalled or not even electronic.  Some of you may have it already.

It was when Dave gave the assertion that the rural people are actually the careful balanced thinkers, and Frank put up an article as “another perspective, or perhaps David will see it as confirming evidence”.

I know probably most of you have read Heidegger, and Husserl, and Fink, and lots of others.  I had not.  So I found Rota’s notes, structured by Heidegger but drawing in many of their good parts on Husserl, helpful to sort-of recognize what the phenomenologists are on about.

In one of the late lectures, Rota explains the phenomenologists strong emphasis that no mere events in our existence have any particular meaning.  There can be the sequence of lines in a proof, or a recipe for doing an experiment.  By themselves, they are just artifacts, inscribed in a library somewhere.  Even read through, or performed, they may just be motions in nature.  They become “a proof” or “evidence”, when they are experienced as evidence-for a truth or a bit of knowledge.  This concept of “perceiving-as” or “evidence-for”, the phenomenologists claim, is simply different in kind from any of the procedures in which it occurs.  If I understand them, they assert that the moment of experiencing something “as” in fact defines an experiential notion of the temporal present that is different entirely in kind from the notations of either the past or the future.  

It is a bit of a digression from this post, but I will remark, that this position makes the world look pretty hopeless to me, since anyone can experience anything “as” evidence for anything.  And there is a part of reality-building in those moments for them, that nobody else outside them has any grip on.

But in a more positive note, and on the point of this post, I feel like it is a Husserlian/Heideggerian shift in the occupancy of the temporal present, to find it as normal to experience distributionally-defined patterns as objects, as event-outcome-defined patterns.  They just do different things.

Anyway, sorry.  Big long TLDR to state the obvious.

Eric

On Apr 18, 2020, at 12:36 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Cranky Eric, 

 

When Peirce writes, countering determinism, that “everything is just about as random as it could be” he is referring to contingencies amongst events, I think.  At the risk of quoting myself: 

 

Considering all the events that are going on at any one moment -- the ticking of the clock, the whuffing of the wind in the eaves, the drip of the faucet, the ringing of the telephone, the call from the seven-year-old upstairs who cannot find his shoes, the clunking in the heating pipes as the heat comes on, the distant sound of the fire engine passing the end of the street, the entry of the cat through the pet door, the skitter of mouse-feet behind the wainscoting -- most will be likely unrelated to the fact that the egg timer just went off. Perhaps not all, however. Perhaps the cat anticipates cleaning up the egg dishes. Perhaps the same stove that is boiling the egg water has lit a fire in the chimney. But whatever relations we might discover amongst all these events, we can find an infinite number of other temporally contiguous events that are not related to them. Thus, as Peirce says, events are just about as random as anybody could care them to be. 

 

But – and here is the main point – to the extent that events are related, these relations would be useful. They would, for instance allow the cat to predict that there would be food in a few moments, the mouse to predict that the cat has entered the house, and you to predict, among other things, that your eggs are ready. For this reason, on Peirce’s account, organisms are designed to ferret out these few regularities and take action based on them.  This, and only this, is the reason that the world appears regular. 

So, I stipulate the ubiquity of randomness.  

 

What I am less certain about is whether randomness should – note the use of modal language – should ever be offered as the reason for anything.  If we regard science as an extension of this animal propensity for ferreting out regularities, then to declare that anything occurred because it was random is a kind of copping out.  It is like ferrets giving up on the idea that borrows contain prairie dogs.  That’s just NOT what we ferrets DO!  It’s certainly not what we do if we ever expect to catch any prairie dogs. 

 

Oh, and:  The problem is not that I need a religion; the problem is I already HAVE one and I don’t know what it is.  

 

Oh, and #2.  “Enjoy these conversations” is, for me, vastly understate the case.  They are literally keeping me alive, particularly these days, when, it appears, for the first time in 50 years, I won’t have a garden in the Mosquito Infested Swamp.   

 

CrankyNick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 6:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Cranky Nick, you really need to join a church.

 

Now, what most people wanted to know from Nate Silver is whether Clinton was going to win the election.  Nate constantly says that making such predictions is, strictly speaking, not his job.  As long as what happens falls within the error of his prediction, he feels justified in having made it.   He will say things like, "actually we were right."  I would prefer him to say, "Actually we were wrong, but I would make the same prediction under the same circumstances the next time.”  In other words, the right procedure produced, on this occasion, a wrong result.  

 

The thing you say here that “most people want to know” of course, you know full-well, doesn’t exist.  So you need to join a church because they are the ones who will tell you they are giving it to you, when at least you, and maybe even they, know it doesn’t exist.

 

What Nate gave you is a sample estimator for a probability distribution (each of those words means something specific; they are not an evocative construction within common vernacular).  He didn’t even give you the “actual” probability distribution for the underlying process, because, as Pierce saith both rightly and interestingly, the “actual” probability distribution is something we don’t have access to.  What we have, and all we ever have, are sample estimators to probability distributions.  Nate’s estimator includes biases.  Some of these, like method biases in polling, are things he can also try to estimate and correct for.  Others, like systematic biases in the relation between sampling and underlying correlations — as in the really interesting and exactly relevant link Marcus sent — are things Nate (et al. of course) haven’t identified.  The acknowledgement of those, too, was in the advertising.

 

So, the sample estimator for a probability distribution, with known biases described and correction methods listed, and unknown biases acknowledged, is what Nate gave you, and in the only sense that “right” can be applied — which is an accurate rendering of methods — it was right.

 

If someone gives me a revolver with two filled chambers, and in the afterlife I protest that I didn’t pull one of the empty ones, well, we know what we think of my judgment, and we don’t spend a lot of time on this list putting that out as a philosophical problem.

 

 

I don’t actually write this note to be nasty -- because of course I know you know all this as well as your interlocutors do — but to be colorful to make a different point.  It has to do with liking the fact that learning is not most interesting when one accretes an acquaintance with new facts, but when one realizes new ways of using words are necessary as a vehicle to taking on new frames of mind.

 

The claim that “right/wrong” are only allowed to be applied to certain and definite values, and are _not_ allowed to be applied to more composite deliverables such as sample estimators for probability distributions, is where terminology nazis close off conversation by insisting on a language in which terms that are needed to express the pertinent ideas are disallowed.  We see it in every field.  Stanley Miller ruled out metabolism as being a concept that could be presaged in geochemistry by “defining” metabolism as chemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes within a cell.  Historical linguists did it for a century insisting that absolutely regular sound correspondences (none of which ever actually exist) were the only signatures of genetic relatedness among languages, and probabilistic fingerprints had no interpretation.  The Stochastic Thermodynamics cabal do it when the say that thermodynamic laws for non-equilibrium processes that don’t come from Boltzmann/Gibbs free energies have “no physical meaning”, thereby scoping “physical” to refer to equilibrium thermodynamic states, the narrowest of special cases.  

 

And Dave did it in his post of long questions some weeks ago — which at the time I didn’t want to respond to because my responses are sort fo dull and unhelpful — when he said most physicists are realists but quantum physicists are anti-realists.  What the quantum physicists say is that the old classical assumption that “observables” and “states” are the same kind of thing turned out to be wrong.  They are different kinds fo things.  States can be real, and can even evolve deterministically, but may not be associated with any definite values for observables, because observables, when formalized and fully expressed through the formalization, are different kinds of things (they are a kind of operator, which one can think of as a rule for making a mapping)  than states or than particular numbers that the observables can yield as their output from some states.  So to claim that the quantum physicists are anti-realists is to scope “real” as coextensive with interpreting “observables” not as operators but as simple definite numbers.  That is, to adopt the frame of classical mechanics.  So Dave’s “anti-realist” actually means “anti-classical-mechanics-assumptionist”, which of course is exactly right, but never the scope I would use for the word “real”.  Anyone who insists that is the only way it is allowed to be used has just dictated rules for conversation in which there is no way I can engage and still work for sense-making.

 

Anyway, the whole tenor of the discussion is fine.  I enjoy all the parts of it, including your stubbornness for its own sake.  Wittgenstein was reportedly impossible in that way, though I forget the reference and source.  Some fellow-philosopher complaining that “it was impossible to get Wittgenstein to admit there was not a rhinoceros in the room."

 

Eric

 

 

 

 

That’s all, 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 4:45 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Again, though, you seem to be allowing your metaphor to run away with you. When someone who does quantitative modeling says "expected value", they do NOT mean what the layperson means when they say "I expect X". We can pick apart your statement and accuse you of an ambiguity fallacy if we want.

 

Your first use of "expected value" relies on the jargonal definition. Then you switcheroo on us and your 2nd use of "I expect that" relies on the vernacular concept. Up to this point, we can give you the benefit of the doubt. We all munge things a bit when talking/thinking. But *then*, on your 3rd use of "what he expected", you explicitly switched the meaning from jargon to vernacular.

 

I don't think you do this on purpose. (If you do, I laud you as a fellow troll! >8^) I think it's  an artifact of your being a "metaphorical thinker", whatever that means.

 

FWIW, I only had to pull a little on the Sabine Hossenfelder thread to find that she tweeted this, as well:

 

Embracing the Uncertainties

While the unknowns about coronavirus abound, a new study finds we ‘can handle the truth.’

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/coronavirus-uncertainty-scientific-trust.html?smid=tw-share

 

The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7672.abstract

 

If they're right, then the right-leaning local media might band together with the clickbaity national media and give it to us straight ... or they might simply skew their "expected value" reporting to continue serving their politics. Pfft.

 

 

On 4/17/20 2:58 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> If expert X tells me that the expected value of variable A is K, then, 

> when it's all over and the data are in, and A did not equal K, I expect that expert to admit that /what he expected did not happen./  Only after that confession has been made, should a conversation begin about whether the expert’s prediction process was faulted or not.  It seems to me that the shaded area is part of that second conversation.

 

--

☣ uǝlƃ

 

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[David Eric Smith]

I don’t know, Steve, 

I looked at that one, and at all the early ones I could find, and in quick skimming I didn’t find what I thought was a quote in the epigraph position.  I am beginning to wonder if it was a draft of something that never got published in the manuscript version I saw.  A pity if so.

I also looked for poetic quotes on “Ever focused on objects”, but the only google hits I got were a bunch of studies on autistic kids.  Poetic in a different sense, but now what I was looking for.

Also, it turns out I put in a dud link to Rota’s phenomenology lectures; apologies.  A link that at least goes to a first page is here:

https://www.pdcnet.org/nyppp/content/nyppp_2008_0008_0225_0319

You are up either very early, or very late.

Best,

E

On Apr 18, 2020, at 3:55 PM, Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric, 

Was it Barrier to Objects? 

https://scholar.harvard.edu/walterfontana/publications/barrier-objects-dynamical-systems-bounded-organizations

That was the constructivist lambda calculus paper. Bill Mckelvey extended to pi calculus 

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 12:36 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Very good Nick.

You see, unfortunately it appears that the reason I was put on Earth was to be the evangelist of distributional thinking.

In one of Walter Fontana’s early papers, which I probably saw in 1998, he opened with a quote “Ever focused on objects, we something something something…(some expression of loss)”.  This was in his Lambda-calculus papers about the concreteness of realized patterns that are not objects, and their fundamental role for biology.  For as much as I like it, you would think I had remembered either the text or the source.  Cannot find it now.

But, to your point:

I think where the discussion happens is not about knowledge, or even regularity, but rather how wide and how flexible a scope you are willing to cast for what counts as an “object of knowledge”.  Or even “objects in knowledge”.

Yes, the values taken at events can be very good things to have found out about.  They inhabit the past, and our sense of knowing them is heavily wrapped up in both the senses of “the past” and of “knowledge".  It is a very small set of cases that are so constrained that the future may as well be in the past.  Nonetheless, the longing for it seems to be an eternal wellspring for delusions.  The Popol Vu has something about, for the adepts, ’The future and the past are laid out before them [like symmetric spatial dimensions]’ or something to that effect.  Lakoff probably can cite no end of metaphors by which people have mapped between the two, conceiving of time as having the same symmetric availability as space.  I expect it is a human cognitive and cultural universal.

But what happens when the future really is different from the past?  Do we insist that every “real” object of knowledge about the future must have a model in only the most singular of things archived from the past?  I would say no.  There are lots of cases in which the outcome delivered by an event not yet performed is not available for knowing.  How you plan to sample, though, and features of the distribution from which you will sample, may be very good things to know.  Back in Ancient Greece, we could have argued interminably about whether a distribution is less privileged as an “object” of knowledge than the particular value yielded by a sample from the distribution.

But a lot has happened since Ancient Greece, and today we have many many reasons to see them as deserving peers, and even to be cautious that we may not be able to tell them apart.

Entropy in thermodynamics is a distributional concept, yet it does very very much of the work in the world that we used to ascribe to Newtonian objects.

In high-energy physics, post Gell-Mann/Wilson (so 1954 Gell-Mann and Lowe, Wilson 1974), we have learned that everything we used to think _were_ objects, turned out to be distributions.  In hindsight this was of crucial conceptual importance.  If objects had been primary, and distributions had been mere step-children when we could not pin things down, and that had been _all_ there was to our science, we would have suffered an infinite regress.  Until we had a Theory of Everything, or a bottoming out of the well of smallness, we could never know if the science was predictively closed.  But now with some understanding of phase transitions, we know that the world could as well be distributions all the way down forever (or it might not be; it might have a bottom), and the foundation of _any_ of the predictive science we currently use would not be any worse in one case than in another.  They are not currently “exactly” closed, but we can put bounds on how closed they must be.  Everything is Probably Approximately Correct (Leslie Valiant), and that was all we had ever had.  It was more valuable to learn that there are ceilings and floors in the scope of influence of variations within distributions, than whether there is any smallest level of objects, or even any need for a concept of “object” distinct from what we can do with distributions.  A short incantation that I use to ward off the vampires who mis-use the word “reductionism” is that “Only with a theory of emergence did reductionist science become well-founded."

Biology has been conceptually impaired by too literalist a view of objects, whether organisms for Darwin, genes for Williams and Dawkins, or whatever other “unit of selection” you want to use as a shibboleth.  People fret over whether “viruses are alive”, having already committed that “alive” must a predicate defined over objects, and they worry whether there “really are” any individuals, since material is always coming and going and there are more bacterial cells in my gut than human cells in the rest of me.  Habits of understanding that determinism can dwell in the distribution opens a treasure chest of methods but also styles of thought, with which all these “not-even-wrong” frets simply dissipate the same way we no longer agonize over Zeno paradoxes.

I have no gripe with object-oriented thinking, or event-outcome-oriented thinking; we can do much with those, and they account for a lot of our animal habit and our “folk physics”.  But to put it up as a gold standard is very limiting.  We know lots of things that cannot be done within that frame, but that can be done, and some things where we thought it was the right frame and we were wrong.  

There was a source I thought of putting on the list early in this thread, here:

https://philpapers.org/rec/ROTLOB

I have seen a copy of this, but I don’t know where to get a legally distributable copy and this is either paywalled or not even electronic.  Some of you may have it already.

It was when Dave gave the assertion that the rural people are actually the careful balanced thinkers, and Frank put up an article as “another perspective, or perhaps David will see it as confirming evidence”.

I know probably most of you have read Heidegger, and Husserl, and Fink, and lots of others.  I had not.  So I found Rota’s notes, structured by Heidegger but drawing in many of their good parts on Husserl, helpful to sort-of recognize what the phenomenologists are on about.

In one of the late lectures, Rota explains the phenomenologists strong emphasis that no mere events in our existence have any particular meaning.  There can be the sequence of lines in a proof, or a recipe for doing an experiment.  By themselves, they are just artifacts, inscribed in a library somewhere.  Even read through, or performed, they may just be motions in nature.  They become “a proof” or “evidence”, when they are experienced as evidence-for a truth or a bit of knowledge.  This concept of “perceiving-as” or “evidence-for”, the phenomenologists claim, is simply different in kind from any of the procedures in which it occurs.  If I understand them, they assert that the moment of experiencing something “as” in fact defines an experiential notion of the temporal present that is different entirely in kind from the notations of either the past or the future.  

It is a bit of a digression from this post, but I will remark, that this position makes the world look pretty hopeless to me, since anyone can experience anything “as” evidence for anything.  And there is a part of reality-building in those moments for them, that nobody else outside them has any grip on.

But in a more positive note, and on the point of this post, I feel like it is a Husserlian/Heideggerian shift in the occupancy of the temporal present, to find it as normal to experience distributionally-defined patterns as objects, as event-outcome-defined patterns.  They just do different things.

Anyway, sorry.  Big long TLDR to state the obvious.

Eric

On Apr 18, 2020, at 12:36 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Cranky Eric, 

 

When Peirce writes, countering determinism, that “everything is just about as random as it could be” he is referring to contingencies amongst events, I think.  At the risk of quoting myself: 

 

Considering all the events that are going on at any one moment -- the ticking of the clock, the whuffing of the wind in the eaves, the drip of the faucet, the ringing of the telephone, the call from the seven-year-old upstairs who cannot find his shoes, the clunking in the heating pipes as the heat comes on, the distant sound of the fire engine passing the end of the street, the entry of the cat through the pet door, the skitter of mouse-feet behind the wainscoting -- most will be likely unrelated to the fact that the egg timer just went off. Perhaps not all, however. Perhaps the cat anticipates cleaning up the egg dishes. Perhaps the same stove that is boiling the egg water has lit a fire in the chimney. But whatever relations we might discover amongst all these events, we can find an infinite number of other temporally contiguous events that are not related to them. Thus, as Peirce says, events are just about as random as anybody could care them to be. 

 

But – and here is the main point – to the extent that events are related, these relations would be useful. They would, for instance allow the cat to predict that there would be food in a few moments, the mouse to predict that the cat has entered the house, and you to predict, among other things, that your eggs are ready. For this reason, on Peirce’s account, organisms are designed to ferret out these few regularities and take action based on them.  This, and only this, is the reason that the world appears regular. 

So, I stipulate the ubiquity of randomness.  

 

What I am less certain about is whether randomness should – note the use of modal language – should ever be offered as the reason for anything.  If we regard science as an extension of this animal propensity for ferreting out regularities, then to declare that anything occurred because it was random is a kind of copping out.  It is like ferrets giving up on the idea that borrows contain prairie dogs.  That’s just NOT what we ferrets DO!  It’s certainly not what we do if we ever expect to catch any prairie dogs. 

 

Oh, and:  The problem is not that I need a religion; the problem is I already HAVE one and I don’t know what it is.  

 

Oh, and #2.  “Enjoy these conversations” is, for me, vastly understate the case.  They are literally keeping me alive, particularly these days, when, it appears, for the first time in 50 years, I won’t have a garden in the Mosquito Infested Swamp.   

 

CrankyNick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 6:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Cranky Nick, you really need to join a church.

 

Now, what most people wanted to know from Nate Silver is whether Clinton was going to win the election.  Nate constantly says that making such predictions is, strictly speaking, not his job.  As long as what happens falls within the error of his prediction, he feels justified in having made it.   He will say things like, "actually we were right."  I would prefer him to say, "Actually we were wrong, but I would make the same prediction under the same circumstances the next time.”  In other words, the right procedure produced, on this occasion, a wrong result.  

 

The thing you say here that “most people want to know” of course, you know full-well, doesn’t exist.  So you need to join a church because they are the ones who will tell you they are giving it to you, when at least you, and maybe even they, know it doesn’t exist.

 

What Nate gave you is a sample estimator for a probability distribution (each of those words means something specific; they are not an evocative construction within common vernacular).  He didn’t even give you the “actual” probability distribution for the underlying process, because, as Pierce saith both rightly and interestingly, the “actual” probability distribution is something we don’t have access to.  What we have, and all we ever have, are sample estimators to probability distributions.  Nate’s estimator includes biases.  Some of these, like method biases in polling, are things he can also try to estimate and correct for.  Others, like systematic biases in the relation between sampling and underlying correlations — as in the really interesting and exactly relevant link Marcus sent — are things Nate (et al. of course) haven’t identified.  The acknowledgement of those, too, was in the advertising.

 

So, the sample estimator for a probability distribution, with known biases described and correction methods listed, and unknown biases acknowledged, is what Nate gave you, and in the only sense that “right” can be applied — which is an accurate rendering of methods — it was right.

 

If someone gives me a revolver with two filled chambers, and in the afterlife I protest that I didn’t pull one of the empty ones, well, we know what we think of my judgment, and we don’t spend a lot of time on this list putting that out as a philosophical problem.

 

 

I don’t actually write this note to be nasty -- because of course I know you know all this as well as your interlocutors do — but to be colorful to make a different point.  It has to do with liking the fact that learning is not most interesting when one accretes an acquaintance with new facts, but when one realizes new ways of using words are necessary as a vehicle to taking on new frames of mind.

 

The claim that “right/wrong” are only allowed to be applied to certain and definite values, and are _not_ allowed to be applied to more composite deliverables such as sample estimators for probability distributions, is where terminology nazis close off conversation by insisting on a language in which terms that are needed to express the pertinent ideas are disallowed.  We see it in every field.  Stanley Miller ruled out metabolism as being a concept that could be presaged in geochemistry by “defining” metabolism as chemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes within a cell.  Historical linguists did it for a century insisting that absolutely regular sound correspondences (none of which ever actually exist) were the only signatures of genetic relatedness among languages, and probabilistic fingerprints had no interpretation.  The Stochastic Thermodynamics cabal do it when the say that thermodynamic laws for non-equilibrium processes that don’t come from Boltzmann/Gibbs free energies have “no physical meaning”, thereby scoping “physical” to refer to equilibrium thermodynamic states, the narrowest of special cases.  

 

And Dave did it in his post of long questions some weeks ago — which at the time I didn’t want to respond to because my responses are sort fo dull and unhelpful — when he said most physicists are realists but quantum physicists are anti-realists.  What the quantum physicists say is that the old classical assumption that “observables” and “states” are the same kind of thing turned out to be wrong.  They are different kinds fo things.  States can be real, and can even evolve deterministically, but may not be associated with any definite values for observables, because observables, when formalized and fully expressed through the formalization, are different kinds of things (they are a kind of operator, which one can think of as a rule for making a mapping)  than states or than particular numbers that the observables can yield as their output from some states.  So to claim that the quantum physicists are anti-realists is to scope “real” as coextensive with interpreting “observables” not as operators but as simple definite numbers.  That is, to adopt the frame of classical mechanics.  So Dave’s “anti-realist” actually means “anti-classical-mechanics-assumptionist”, which of course is exactly right, but never the scope I would use for the word “real”.  Anyone who insists that is the only way it is allowed to be used has just dictated rules for conversation in which there is no way I can engage and still work for sense-making.

 

Anyway, the whole tenor of the discussion is fine.  I enjoy all the parts of it, including your stubbornness for its own sake.  Wittgenstein was reportedly impossible in that way, though I forget the reference and source.  Some fellow-philosopher complaining that “it was impossible to get Wittgenstein to admit there was not a rhinoceros in the room."

 

Eric

 

 

 

 

That’s all, 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 4:45 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Again, though, you seem to be allowing your metaphor to run away with you. When someone who does quantitative modeling says "expected value", they do NOT mean what the layperson means when they say "I expect X". We can pick apart your statement and accuse you of an ambiguity fallacy if we want.

 

Your first use of "expected value" relies on the jargonal definition. Then you switcheroo on us and your 2nd use of "I expect that" relies on the vernacular concept. Up to this point, we can give you the benefit of the doubt. We all munge things a bit when talking/thinking. But *then*, on your 3rd use of "what he expected", you explicitly switched the meaning from jargon to vernacular.

 

I don't think you do this on purpose. (If you do, I laud you as a fellow troll! >8^) I think it's  an artifact of your being a "metaphorical thinker", whatever that means.

 

FWIW, I only had to pull a little on the Sabine Hossenfelder thread to find that she tweeted this, as well:

 

Embracing the Uncertainties

While the unknowns about coronavirus abound, a new study finds we ‘can handle the truth.’

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/coronavirus-uncertainty-scientific-trust.html?smid=tw-share

 

The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7672.abstract

 

If they're right, then the right-leaning local media might band together with the clickbaity national media and give it to us straight ... or they might simply skew their "expected value" reporting to continue serving their politics. Pfft.

 

 

On 4/17/20 2:58 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> If expert X tells me that the expected value of variable A is K, then, 

> when it's all over and the data are in, and A did not equal K, I expect that expert to admit that /what he expected did not happen./  Only after that confession has been made, should a conversation begin about whether the expert’s prediction process was faulted or not.  It seems to me that the shaded area is part of that second conversation.

 

--

☣ uǝlƃ

 

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[Stephen Guerin-5]

Oops, weird slip. Meant Bill Macready 

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 12:55 AM Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric, 

Was it Barrier to Objects? 

https://scholar.harvard.edu/walterfontana/publications/barrier-objects-dynamical-systems-bounded-organizations

That was the constructivist lambda calculus paper. Bill Mckelvey extended to pi calculus 

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 12:36 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Very good Nick.

You see, unfortunately it appears that the reason I was put on Earth was to be the evangelist of distributional thinking.

In one of Walter Fontana’s early papers, which I probably saw in 1998, he opened with a quote “Ever focused on objects, we something something something…(some expression of loss)”.  This was in his Lambda-calculus papers about the concreteness of realized patterns that are not objects, and their fundamental role for biology.  For as much as I like it, you would think I had remembered either the text or the source.  Cannot find it now.

But, to your point:

I think where the discussion happens is not about knowledge, or even regularity, but rather how wide and how flexible a scope you are willing to cast for what counts as an “object of knowledge”.  Or even “objects in knowledge”.

Yes, the values taken at events can be very good things to have found out about.  They inhabit the past, and our sense of knowing them is heavily wrapped up in both the senses of “the past” and of “knowledge".  It is a very small set of cases that are so constrained that the future may as well be in the past.  Nonetheless, the longing for it seems to be an eternal wellspring for delusions.  The Popol Vu has something about, for the adepts, ’The future and the past are laid out before them [like symmetric spatial dimensions]’ or something to that effect.  Lakoff probably can cite no end of metaphors by which people have mapped between the two, conceiving of time as having the same symmetric availability as space.  I expect it is a human cognitive and cultural universal.

But what happens when the future really is different from the past?  Do we insist that every “real” object of knowledge about the future must have a model in only the most singular of things archived from the past?  I would say no.  There are lots of cases in which the outcome delivered by an event not yet performed is not available for knowing.  How you plan to sample, though, and features of the distribution from which you will sample, may be very good things to know.  Back in Ancient Greece, we could have argued interminably about whether a distribution is less privileged as an “object” of knowledge than the particular value yielded by a sample from the distribution.

But a lot has happened since Ancient Greece, and today we have many many reasons to see them as deserving peers, and even to be cautious that we may not be able to tell them apart.

Entropy in thermodynamics is a distributional concept, yet it does very very much of the work in the world that we used to ascribe to Newtonian objects.

In high-energy physics, post Gell-Mann/Wilson (so 1954 Gell-Mann and Lowe, Wilson 1974), we have learned that everything we used to think _were_ objects, turned out to be distributions.  In hindsight this was of crucial conceptual importance.  If objects had been primary, and distributions had been mere step-children when we could not pin things down, and that had been _all_ there was to our science, we would have suffered an infinite regress.  Until we had a Theory of Everything, or a bottoming out of the well of smallness, we could never know if the science was predictively closed.  But now with some understanding of phase transitions, we know that the world could as well be distributions all the way down forever (or it might not be; it might have a bottom), and the foundation of _any_ of the predictive science we currently use would not be any worse in one case than in another.  They are not currently “exactly” closed, but we can put bounds on how closed they must be.  Everything is Probably Approximately Correct (Leslie Valiant), and that was all we had ever had.  It was more valuable to learn that there are ceilings and floors in the scope of influence of variations within distributions, than whether there is any smallest level of objects, or even any need for a concept of “object” distinct from what we can do with distributions.  A short incantation that I use to ward off the vampires who mis-use the word “reductionism” is that “Only with a theory of emergence did reductionist science become well-founded."

Biology has been conceptually impaired by too literalist a view of objects, whether organisms for Darwin, genes for Williams and Dawkins, or whatever other “unit of selection” you want to use as a shibboleth.  People fret over whether “viruses are alive”, having already committed that “alive” must a predicate defined over objects, and they worry whether there “really are” any individuals, since material is always coming and going and there are more bacterial cells in my gut than human cells in the rest of me.  Habits of understanding that determinism can dwell in the distribution opens a treasure chest of methods but also styles of thought, with which all these “not-even-wrong” frets simply dissipate the same way we no longer agonize over Zeno paradoxes.

I have no gripe with object-oriented thinking, or event-outcome-oriented thinking; we can do much with those, and they account for a lot of our animal habit and our “folk physics”.  But to put it up as a gold standard is very limiting.  We know lots of things that cannot be done within that frame, but that can be done, and some things where we thought it was the right frame and we were wrong.  

There was a source I thought of putting on the list early in this thread, here:

https://philpapers.org/rec/ROTLOB

I have seen a copy of this, but I don’t know where to get a legally distributable copy and this is either paywalled or not even electronic.  Some of you may have it already.

It was when Dave gave the assertion that the rural people are actually the careful balanced thinkers, and Frank put up an article as “another perspective, or perhaps David will see it as confirming evidence”.

I know probably most of you have read Heidegger, and Husserl, and Fink, and lots of others.  I had not.  So I found Rota’s notes, structured by Heidegger but drawing in many of their good parts on Husserl, helpful to sort-of recognize what the phenomenologists are on about.

In one of the late lectures, Rota explains the phenomenologists strong emphasis that no mere events in our existence have any particular meaning.  There can be the sequence of lines in a proof, or a recipe for doing an experiment.  By themselves, they are just artifacts, inscribed in a library somewhere.  Even read through, or performed, they may just be motions in nature.  They become “a proof” or “evidence”, when they are experienced as evidence-for a truth or a bit of knowledge.  This concept of “perceiving-as” or “evidence-for”, the phenomenologists claim, is simply different in kind from any of the procedures in which it occurs.  If I understand them, they assert that the moment of experiencing something “as” in fact defines an experiential notion of the temporal present that is different entirely in kind from the notations of either the past or the future.  

It is a bit of a digression from this post, but I will remark, that this position makes the world look pretty hopeless to me, since anyone can experience anything “as” evidence for anything.  And there is a part of reality-building in those moments for them, that nobody else outside them has any grip on.

But in a more positive note, and on the point of this post, I feel like it is a Husserlian/Heideggerian shift in the occupancy of the temporal present, to find it as normal to experience distributionally-defined patterns as objects, as event-outcome-defined patterns.  They just do different things.

Anyway, sorry.  Big long TLDR to state the obvious.

Eric

On Apr 18, 2020, at 12:36 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Cranky Eric, 

 

When Peirce writes, countering determinism, that “everything is just about as random as it could be” he is referring to contingencies amongst events, I think.  At the risk of quoting myself: 

 

Considering all the events that are going on at any one moment -- the ticking of the clock, the whuffing of the wind in the eaves, the drip of the faucet, the ringing of the telephone, the call from the seven-year-old upstairs who cannot find his shoes, the clunking in the heating pipes as the heat comes on, the distant sound of the fire engine passing the end of the street, the entry of the cat through the pet door, the skitter of mouse-feet behind the wainscoting -- most will be likely unrelated to the fact that the egg timer just went off. Perhaps not all, however. Perhaps the cat anticipates cleaning up the egg dishes. Perhaps the same stove that is boiling the egg water has lit a fire in the chimney. But whatever relations we might discover amongst all these events, we can find an infinite number of other temporally contiguous events that are not related to them. Thus, as Peirce says, events are just about as random as anybody could care them to be. 

 

But – and here is the main point – to the extent that events are related, these relations would be useful. They would, for instance allow the cat to predict that there would be food in a few moments, the mouse to predict that the cat has entered the house, and you to predict, among other things, that your eggs are ready. For this reason, on Peirce’s account, organisms are designed to ferret out these few regularities and take action based on them.  This, and only this, is the reason that the world appears regular. 

So, I stipulate the ubiquity of randomness.  

 

What I am less certain about is whether randomness should – note the use of modal language – should ever be offered as the reason for anything.  If we regard science as an extension of this animal propensity for ferreting out regularities, then to declare that anything occurred because it was random is a kind of copping out.  It is like ferrets giving up on the idea that borrows contain prairie dogs.  That’s just NOT what we ferrets DO!  It’s certainly not what we do if we ever expect to catch any prairie dogs. 

 

Oh, and:  The problem is not that I need a religion; the problem is I already HAVE one and I don’t know what it is.  

 

Oh, and #2.  “Enjoy these conversations” is, for me, vastly understate the case.  They are literally keeping me alive, particularly these days, when, it appears, for the first time in 50 years, I won’t have a garden in the Mosquito Infested Swamp.   

 

CrankyNick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 6:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Cranky Nick, you really need to join a church.

 

Now, what most people wanted to know from Nate Silver is whether Clinton was going to win the election.  Nate constantly says that making such predictions is, strictly speaking, not his job.  As long as what happens falls within the error of his prediction, he feels justified in having made it.   He will say things like, "actually we were right."  I would prefer him to say, "Actually we were wrong, but I would make the same prediction under the same circumstances the next time.”  In other words, the right procedure produced, on this occasion, a wrong result.  

 

The thing you say here that “most people want to know” of course, you know full-well, doesn’t exist.  So you need to join a church because they are the ones who will tell you they are giving it to you, when at least you, and maybe even they, know it doesn’t exist.

 

What Nate gave you is a sample estimator for a probability distribution (each of those words means something specific; they are not an evocative construction within common vernacular).  He didn’t even give you the “actual” probability distribution for the underlying process, because, as Pierce saith both rightly and interestingly, the “actual” probability distribution is something we don’t have access to.  What we have, and all we ever have, are sample estimators to probability distributions.  Nate’s estimator includes biases.  Some of these, like method biases in polling, are things he can also try to estimate and correct for.  Others, like systematic biases in the relation between sampling and underlying correlations — as in the really interesting and exactly relevant link Marcus sent — are things Nate (et al. of course) haven’t identified.  The acknowledgement of those, too, was in the advertising.

 

So, the sample estimator for a probability distribution, with known biases described and correction methods listed, and unknown biases acknowledged, is what Nate gave you, and in the only sense that “right” can be applied — which is an accurate rendering of methods — it was right.

 

If someone gives me a revolver with two filled chambers, and in the afterlife I protest that I didn’t pull one of the empty ones, well, we know what we think of my judgment, and we don’t spend a lot of time on this list putting that out as a philosophical problem.

 

 

I don’t actually write this note to be nasty -- because of course I know you know all this as well as your interlocutors do — but to be colorful to make a different point.  It has to do with liking the fact that learning is not most interesting when one accretes an acquaintance with new facts, but when one realizes new ways of using words are necessary as a vehicle to taking on new frames of mind.

 

The claim that “right/wrong” are only allowed to be applied to certain and definite values, and are _not_ allowed to be applied to more composite deliverables such as sample estimators for probability distributions, is where terminology nazis close off conversation by insisting on a language in which terms that are needed to express the pertinent ideas are disallowed.  We see it in every field.  Stanley Miller ruled out metabolism as being a concept that could be presaged in geochemistry by “defining” metabolism as chemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes within a cell.  Historical linguists did it for a century insisting that absolutely regular sound correspondences (none of which ever actually exist) were the only signatures of genetic relatedness among languages, and probabilistic fingerprints had no interpretation.  The Stochastic Thermodynamics cabal do it when the say that thermodynamic laws for non-equilibrium processes that don’t come from Boltzmann/Gibbs free energies have “no physical meaning”, thereby scoping “physical” to refer to equilibrium thermodynamic states, the narrowest of special cases.  

 

And Dave did it in his post of long questions some weeks ago — which at the time I didn’t want to respond to because my responses are sort fo dull and unhelpful — when he said most physicists are realists but quantum physicists are anti-realists.  What the quantum physicists say is that the old classical assumption that “observables” and “states” are the same kind of thing turned out to be wrong.  They are different kinds fo things.  States can be real, and can even evolve deterministically, but may not be associated with any definite values for observables, because observables, when formalized and fully expressed through the formalization, are different kinds of things (they are a kind of operator, which one can think of as a rule for making a mapping)  than states or than particular numbers that the observables can yield as their output from some states.  So to claim that the quantum physicists are anti-realists is to scope “real” as coextensive with interpreting “observables” not as operators but as simple definite numbers.  That is, to adopt the frame of classical mechanics.  So Dave’s “anti-realist” actually means “anti-classical-mechanics-assumptionist”, which of course is exactly right, but never the scope I would use for the word “real”.  Anyone who insists that is the only way it is allowed to be used has just dictated rules for conversation in which there is no way I can engage and still work for sense-making.

 

Anyway, the whole tenor of the discussion is fine.  I enjoy all the parts of it, including your stubbornness for its own sake.  Wittgenstein was reportedly impossible in that way, though I forget the reference and source.  Some fellow-philosopher complaining that “it was impossible to get Wittgenstein to admit there was not a rhinoceros in the room."

 

Eric

 

 

 

 

That’s all, 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 4:45 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Again, though, you seem to be allowing your metaphor to run away with you. When someone who does quantitative modeling says "expected value", they do NOT mean what the layperson means when they say "I expect X". We can pick apart your statement and accuse you of an ambiguity fallacy if we want.

 

Your first use of "expected value" relies on the jargonal definition. Then you switcheroo on us and your 2nd use of "I expect that" relies on the vernacular concept. Up to this point, we can give you the benefit of the doubt. We all munge things a bit when talking/thinking. But *then*, on your 3rd use of "what he expected", you explicitly switched the meaning from jargon to vernacular.

 

I don't think you do this on purpose. (If you do, I laud you as a fellow troll! >8^) I think it's  an artifact of your being a "metaphorical thinker", whatever that means.

 

FWIW, I only had to pull a little on the Sabine Hossenfelder thread to find that she tweeted this, as well:

 

Embracing the Uncertainties

While the unknowns about coronavirus abound, a new study finds we ‘can handle the truth.’

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/coronavirus-uncertainty-scientific-trust.html?smid=tw-share

 

The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7672.abstract

 

If they're right, then the right-leaning local media might band together with the clickbaity national media and give it to us straight ... or they might simply skew their "expected value" reporting to continue serving their politics. Pfft.

 

 

On 4/17/20 2:58 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> If expert X tells me that the expected value of variable A is K, then, 

> when it's all over and the data are in, and A did not equal K, I expect that expert to admit that /what he expected did not happen./  Only after that confession has been made, should a conversation begin about whether the expert’s prediction process was faulted or not.  It seems to me that the shaded area is part of that second conversation.

 

--

☣ uǝlƃ

 

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Said the man who dropped a chainsaw through his leg..

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 18, 2020, at 12:02 AM, Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]> wrote:



Oops, weird slip. Meant Bill Macready 

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 12:55 AM Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric, 

Was it Barrier to Objects? 

https://scholar.harvard.edu/walterfontana/publications/barrier-objects-dynamical-systems-bounded-organizations

That was the constructivist lambda calculus paper. Bill Mckelvey extended to pi calculus 

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 12:36 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Very good Nick.

You see, unfortunately it appears that the reason I was put on Earth was to be the evangelist of distributional thinking.

In one of Walter Fontana’s early papers, which I probably saw in 1998, he opened with a quote “Ever focused on objects, we something something something…(some expression of loss)”.  This was in his Lambda-calculus papers about the concreteness of realized patterns that are not objects, and their fundamental role for biology.  For as much as I like it, you would think I had remembered either the text or the source.  Cannot find it now.

But, to your point:

I think where the discussion happens is not about knowledge, or even regularity, but rather how wide and how flexible a scope you are willing to cast for what counts as an “object of knowledge”.  Or even “objects in knowledge”.

Yes, the values taken at events can be very good things to have found out about.  They inhabit the past, and our sense of knowing them is heavily wrapped up in both the senses of “the past” and of “knowledge".  It is a very small set of cases that are so constrained that the future may as well be in the past.  Nonetheless, the longing for it seems to be an eternal wellspring for delusions.  The Popol Vu has something about, for the adepts, ’The future and the past are laid out before them [like symmetric spatial dimensions]’ or something to that effect.  Lakoff probably can cite no end of metaphors by which people have mapped between the two, conceiving of time as having the same symmetric availability as space.  I expect it is a human cognitive and cultural universal.

But what happens when the future really is different from the past?  Do we insist that every “real” object of knowledge about the future must have a model in only the most singular of things archived from the past?  I would say no.  There are lots of cases in which the outcome delivered by an event not yet performed is not available for knowing.  How you plan to sample, though, and features of the distribution from which you will sample, may be very good things to know.  Back in Ancient Greece, we could have argued interminably about whether a distribution is less privileged as an “object” of knowledge than the particular value yielded by a sample from the distribution.

But a lot has happened since Ancient Greece, and today we have many many reasons to see them as deserving peers, and even to be cautious that we may not be able to tell them apart.

Entropy in thermodynamics is a distributional concept, yet it does very very much of the work in the world that we used to ascribe to Newtonian objects.

In high-energy physics, post Gell-Mann/Wilson (so 1954 Gell-Mann and Lowe, Wilson 1974), we have learned that everything we used to think _were_ objects, turned out to be distributions.  In hindsight this was of crucial conceptual importance.  If objects had been primary, and distributions had been mere step-children when we could not pin things down, and that had been _all_ there was to our science, we would have suffered an infinite regress.  Until we had a Theory of Everything, or a bottoming out of the well of smallness, we could never know if the science was predictively closed.  But now with some understanding of phase transitions, we know that the world could as well be distributions all the way down forever (or it might not be; it might have a bottom), and the foundation of _any_ of the predictive science we currently use would not be any worse in one case than in another.  They are not currently “exactly” closed, but we can put bounds on how closed they must be.  Everything is Probably Approximately Correct (Leslie Valiant), and that was all we had ever had.  It was more valuable to learn that there are ceilings and floors in the scope of influence of variations within distributions, than whether there is any smallest level of objects, or even any need for a concept of “object” distinct from what we can do with distributions.  A short incantation that I use to ward off the vampires who mis-use the word “reductionism” is that “Only with a theory of emergence did reductionist science become well-founded."

Biology has been conceptually impaired by too literalist a view of objects, whether organisms for Darwin, genes for Williams and Dawkins, or whatever other “unit of selection” you want to use as a shibboleth.  People fret over whether “viruses are alive”, having already committed that “alive” must a predicate defined over objects, and they worry whether there “really are” any individuals, since material is always coming and going and there are more bacterial cells in my gut than human cells in the rest of me.  Habits of understanding that determinism can dwell in the distribution opens a treasure chest of methods but also styles of thought, with which all these “not-even-wrong” frets simply dissipate the same way we no longer agonize over Zeno paradoxes.

I have no gripe with object-oriented thinking, or event-outcome-oriented thinking; we can do much with those, and they account for a lot of our animal habit and our “folk physics”.  But to put it up as a gold standard is very limiting.  We know lots of things that cannot be done within that frame, but that can be done, and some things where we thought it was the right frame and we were wrong.  

There was a source I thought of putting on the list early in this thread, here:

https://philpapers.org/rec/ROTLOB

I have seen a copy of this, but I don’t know where to get a legally distributable copy and this is either paywalled or not even electronic.  Some of you may have it already.

It was when Dave gave the assertion that the rural people are actually the careful balanced thinkers, and Frank put up an article as “another perspective, or perhaps David will see it as confirming evidence”.

I know probably most of you have read Heidegger, and Husserl, and Fink, and lots of others.  I had not.  So I found Rota’s notes, structured by Heidegger but drawing in many of their good parts on Husserl, helpful to sort-of recognize what the phenomenologists are on about.

In one of the late lectures, Rota explains the phenomenologists strong emphasis that no mere events in our existence have any particular meaning.  There can be the sequence of lines in a proof, or a recipe for doing an experiment.  By themselves, they are just artifacts, inscribed in a library somewhere.  Even read through, or performed, they may just be motions in nature.  They become “a proof” or “evidence”, when they are experienced as evidence-for a truth or a bit of knowledge.  This concept of “perceiving-as” or “evidence-for”, the phenomenologists claim, is simply different in kind from any of the procedures in which it occurs.  If I understand them, they assert that the moment of experiencing something “as” in fact defines an experiential notion of the temporal present that is different entirely in kind from the notations of either the past or the future.  

It is a bit of a digression from this post, but I will remark, that this position makes the world look pretty hopeless to me, since anyone can experience anything “as” evidence for anything.  And there is a part of reality-building in those moments for them, that nobody else outside them has any grip on.

But in a more positive note, and on the point of this post, I feel like it is a Husserlian/Heideggerian shift in the occupancy of the temporal present, to find it as normal to experience distributionally-defined patterns as objects, as event-outcome-defined patterns.  They just do different things.

Anyway, sorry.  Big long TLDR to state the obvious.

Eric

On Apr 18, 2020, at 12:36 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Cranky Eric, 

 

When Peirce writes, countering determinism, that “everything is just about as random as it could be” he is referring to contingencies amongst events, I think.  At the risk of quoting myself: 

 

Considering all the events that are going on at any one moment -- the ticking of the clock, the whuffing of the wind in the eaves, the drip of the faucet, the ringing of the telephone, the call from the seven-year-old upstairs who cannot find his shoes, the clunking in the heating pipes as the heat comes on, the distant sound of the fire engine passing the end of the street, the entry of the cat through the pet door, the skitter of mouse-feet behind the wainscoting -- most will be likely unrelated to the fact that the egg timer just went off. Perhaps not all, however. Perhaps the cat anticipates cleaning up the egg dishes. Perhaps the same stove that is boiling the egg water has lit a fire in the chimney. But whatever relations we might discover amongst all these events, we can find an infinite number of other temporally contiguous events that are not related to them. Thus, as Peirce says, events are just about as random as anybody could care them to be. 

 

But – and here is the main point – to the extent that events are related, these relations would be useful. They would, for instance allow the cat to predict that there would be food in a few moments, the mouse to predict that the cat has entered the house, and you to predict, among other things, that your eggs are ready. For this reason, on Peirce’s account, organisms are designed to ferret out these few regularities and take action based on them.  This, and only this, is the reason that the world appears regular. 

So, I stipulate the ubiquity of randomness.  

 

What I am less certain about is whether randomness should – note the use of modal language – should ever be offered as the reason for anything.  If we regard science as an extension of this animal propensity for ferreting out regularities, then to declare that anything occurred because it was random is a kind of copping out.  It is like ferrets giving up on the idea that borrows contain prairie dogs.  That’s just NOT what we ferrets DO!  It’s certainly not what we do if we ever expect to catch any prairie dogs. 

 

Oh, and:  The problem is not that I need a religion; the problem is I already HAVE one and I don’t know what it is.  

 

Oh, and #2.  “Enjoy these conversations” is, for me, vastly understate the case.  They are literally keeping me alive, particularly these days, when, it appears, for the first time in 50 years, I won’t have a garden in the Mosquito Infested Swamp.   

 

CrankyNick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 6:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Cranky Nick, you really need to join a church.

 

Now, what most people wanted to know from Nate Silver is whether Clinton was going to win the election.  Nate constantly says that making such predictions is, strictly speaking, not his job.  As long as what happens falls within the error of his prediction, he feels justified in having made it.   He will say things like, "actually we were right."  I would prefer him to say, "Actually we were wrong, but I would make the same prediction under the same circumstances the next time.”  In other words, the right procedure produced, on this occasion, a wrong result.  

 

The thing you say here that “most people want to know” of course, you know full-well, doesn’t exist.  So you need to join a church because they are the ones who will tell you they are giving it to you, when at least you, and maybe even they, know it doesn’t exist.

 

What Nate gave you is a sample estimator for a probability distribution (each of those words means something specific; they are not an evocative construction within common vernacular).  He didn’t even give you the “actual” probability distribution for the underlying process, because, as Pierce saith both rightly and interestingly, the “actual” probability distribution is something we don’t have access to.  What we have, and all we ever have, are sample estimators to probability distributions.  Nate’s estimator includes biases.  Some of these, like method biases in polling, are things he can also try to estimate and correct for.  Others, like systematic biases in the relation between sampling and underlying correlations — as in the really interesting and exactly relevant link Marcus sent — are things Nate (et al. of course) haven’t identified.  The acknowledgement of those, too, was in the advertising.

 

So, the sample estimator for a probability distribution, with known biases described and correction methods listed, and unknown biases acknowledged, is what Nate gave you, and in the only sense that “right” can be applied — which is an accurate rendering of methods — it was right.

 

If someone gives me a revolver with two filled chambers, and in the afterlife I protest that I didn’t pull one of the empty ones, well, we know what we think of my judgment, and we don’t spend a lot of time on this list putting that out as a philosophical problem.

 

 

I don’t actually write this note to be nasty -- because of course I know you know all this as well as your interlocutors do — but to be colorful to make a different point.  It has to do with liking the fact that learning is not most interesting when one accretes an acquaintance with new facts, but when one realizes new ways of using words are necessary as a vehicle to taking on new frames of mind.

 

The claim that “right/wrong” are only allowed to be applied to certain and definite values, and are _not_ allowed to be applied to more composite deliverables such as sample estimators for probability distributions, is where terminology nazis close off conversation by insisting on a language in which terms that are needed to express the pertinent ideas are disallowed.  We see it in every field.  Stanley Miller ruled out metabolism as being a concept that could be presaged in geochemistry by “defining” metabolism as chemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes within a cell.  Historical linguists did it for a century insisting that absolutely regular sound correspondences (none of which ever actually exist) were the only signatures of genetic relatedness among languages, and probabilistic fingerprints had no interpretation.  The Stochastic Thermodynamics cabal do it when the say that thermodynamic laws for non-equilibrium processes that don’t come from Boltzmann/Gibbs free energies have “no physical meaning”, thereby scoping “physical” to refer to equilibrium thermodynamic states, the narrowest of special cases.  

 

And Dave did it in his post of long questions some weeks ago — which at the time I didn’t want to respond to because my responses are sort fo dull and unhelpful — when he said most physicists are realists but quantum physicists are anti-realists.  What the quantum physicists say is that the old classical assumption that “observables” and “states” are the same kind of thing turned out to be wrong.  They are different kinds fo things.  States can be real, and can even evolve deterministically, but may not be associated with any definite values for observables, because observables, when formalized and fully expressed through the formalization, are different kinds of things (they are a kind of operator, which one can think of as a rule for making a mapping)  than states or than particular numbers that the observables can yield as their output from some states.  So to claim that the quantum physicists are anti-realists is to scope “real” as coextensive with interpreting “observables” not as operators but as simple definite numbers.  That is, to adopt the frame of classical mechanics.  So Dave’s “anti-realist” actually means “anti-classical-mechanics-assumptionist”, which of course is exactly right, but never the scope I would use for the word “real”.  Anyone who insists that is the only way it is allowed to be used has just dictated rules for conversation in which there is no way I can engage and still work for sense-making.

 

Anyway, the whole tenor of the discussion is fine.  I enjoy all the parts of it, including your stubbornness for its own sake.  Wittgenstein was reportedly impossible in that way, though I forget the reference and source.  Some fellow-philosopher complaining that “it was impossible to get Wittgenstein to admit there was not a rhinoceros in the room."

 

Eric

 

 

 

 

That’s all, 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 4:45 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

 

Again, though, you seem to be allowing your metaphor to run away with you. When someone who does quantitative modeling says "expected value", they do NOT mean what the layperson means when they say "I expect X". We can pick apart your statement and accuse you of an ambiguity fallacy if we want.

 

Your first use of "expected value" relies on the jargonal definition. Then you switcheroo on us and your 2nd use of "I expect that" relies on the vernacular concept. Up to this point, we can give you the benefit of the doubt. We all munge things a bit when talking/thinking. But *then*, on your 3rd use of "what he expected", you explicitly switched the meaning from jargon to vernacular.

 

I don't think you do this on purpose. (If you do, I laud you as a fellow troll! >8^) I think it's  an artifact of your being a "metaphorical thinker", whatever that means.

 

FWIW, I only had to pull a little on the Sabine Hossenfelder thread to find that she tweeted this, as well:

 

Embracing the Uncertainties

While the unknowns about coronavirus abound, a new study finds we ‘can handle the truth.’

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/coronavirus-uncertainty-scientific-trust.html?smid=tw-share

 

The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7672.abstract

 

If they're right, then the right-leaning local media might band together with the clickbaity national media and give it to us straight ... or they might simply skew their "expected value" reporting to continue serving their politics. Pfft.

 

 

On 4/17/20 2:58 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> If expert X tells me that the expected value of variable A is K, then, 

> when it's all over and the data are in, and A did not equal K, I expect that expert to admit that /what he expected did not happen./  Only after that confession has been made, should a conversation begin about whether the expert’s prediction process was faulted or not.  It seems to me that the shaded area is part of that second conversation.

 

--

☣ uǝlƃ

 

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[Steve Smith]

Glen -

Your diatribe reminds me of the way I used to frame my (rare) pitches in
DC back during my time working in the "Decision Support Systems"
division at  LANL.   I started out with "I'm here to help you NOT make a
decision".   This appalled them, becuase "by golly, by gosh, they were
Decision Makers".   About that time, in fact, the "Decider in Chief" was
coined by his own claim: "I am the Decider!".

My point was that they were, by the nature of their roles, and the
self-selection of choosing to work in those roles *decisive people*.  
They were men and women of *action*!  But to act (intentionally) they
had to Decide! and to Decide!  they had to have data and facts and
models to back up their decision.  But frankly as often as not, I saw
them use our work to *justify* the decision they had already made or
were leaning heavily toward, *apparently* based on larger strategic
biases.   Often these "larger strategic biases" are what you and I would
call "political agendas".   The military folks were less "political" in
the usual sense, but they seemed to have *much* larger biases (or maybe
the consequences of their decisions were MUCH more acute and direct?). 

Nobody seemed to truly be interested in "making a better decision" and
as a developer of such tools, I was acutely aware of the risk that some
tool I helped deliver them *might* help them make a *bad decision* with
the wrong perspective/filter/lens on the facts available.   Maybe it was
my own sense of (wanting to avoid) responsibility that had me judging
that they "weren't really using our tools to inform or make their
decision, but rather using it to justify the one they already were set
to make")

Maybe I am Pollyanna, but the work SimTable is doing (and perhaps many
others in this space) is being used by people "closer to the ground".  
Perhaps my problem at LANL was that our "customers" were
Agency/Department program managers and their high-level decision makers
(e.g. Cabinet-level or at least their staff).

As for your gut-level (and often well articulated) mistrust of
"metaphorical thinking",  you may conflate a belief (such as mine) that
language is metaphorical at it's base with being a "metaphorical
thinker".    Metaphor gets a bad rap/rep perhaps because of the
"metaphorical license" often taken in creative arts (albeit for a
different and possibly higher purpose).  

I know we've argued this back and forth (what... like tossing a ball...
or fencing with swords?) here and offline (off line?  what "line"?), so
we might be beating a dead horse (what?  there is no horse, there is no
whip, no stick, no beating going on!).  I will agree that substituting a
clever or familiar metaphor for more strict analysis is always risky,
and if what you mean by "metaphorical thinking" is retreating to trite
and over-used metaphors when something much tighter is called for, then
I agree with your dismissal (dismiss?  Can an argument be dismissed like
an unruly subordinate?)

Life is like a Simile,

 - Steve


On 4/17/20 5:50 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> So, if you're serious about *your* attempt to model Nate Silver, then you would find something in your experience that *means* something similar to what Nate means. And jargonal "expected value" <=> vernacular "I expect" isn't that thing.
>
> Your last paragraph comes closer. But you chose to frame it as something you would prefer him to say, as opposed to using your own words to restate what he's actually saying.
>
> To me, I think what he's actually saying is "It's my job to collect and clean some data, often based on heuristics, then run that data through some (admittedly biased) algorithms, present the result to you, and engage in some light-handed (also biased) interpretation of that data." Then he might go on to say something like "What you infer from that output data is your own business. But don't tell me what I implied simply based on your (mistaken) inference."
>
> That's *my* rewording because it's analogous to experiences I have every single day building and running models for (often computationally incompetent) people. It has nothing to do with prediction and *everything* to do with putting computational power into the hands of people who, without me, wouldn't ordinarily have that power. Nate's a (horizontal) technologist. It's regrettable that he's being thought of as some sort of oracle. (Even if he ends up getting off on the attention.)
>
> Technologists, like scientists, struggle a LOT with packaging what they do and how their produce can be used. And *always* ... always always always, there's some non-tech person somewhere imputing things that are not there (or ignoring things that are there). It would help a lot if you "soft skilled" people would actually use your soft skills and make a real effort to understand what's being said without imputing what you want to hear. (To be clear, I'm not making accusations against you or anyone here, right now... just venting a little. ... Just this morning a fellow technologist was telling me how his executives renamed a relatively straightforward machine learning tool with some high-falutin' misleading references to "virtuality" and AI. Arg. You metaphor people make our lives so difficult.)
>
> On 4/17/20 4:08 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
>> I think an obsessively metaphorical thinker is one who has the arrogance to suppose that s/he has */some/* familiar experience by which s/he can model any experience of another person.  I actually don't believe that that is true, but I think it is true enough that I feel it is my obligation to try.   
>>
>> I am deeply suspicious of modal talk of any form because it is so often used in human interactions to manipulate other people.  "I probably will return your tools tomorrow".   My colleagues used to say, "I think the Department should improve its teaching."  So often in human affairs, modal language has no practicial consequences whatsoever except to confuse and lull the audience. 
>>
>> Now, what most people wanted to know from Nate Silver is whether Clinton was going to win the election.  Nate constantly says that making such predictions is, strictly speaking, not his job.  As long as what happens falls within the error of his prediction, he feels justified in having made it.   He will say things like, "actually we were right."  I would prefer him to say, "Actually we were wrong, /but I would make the same prediction under the same circumstances the next time.”  /In other words, the right procedure produced, on this occasion, a wrong result. 

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[jon zingale]

Eric,

Bravo. Sure, maybe TLDR, but a wonderful read anyway.

Jon

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