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anthropological observations

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thompnickson2

Re: anthropological observations

Jon,

Can you explain to me what in thunderation Eric’s comments on objects has to do with my comments on contingencies. I am sure there IS a connection, but I just can’t see it.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 9:46 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

Eric,

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

Jon

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gepr

Re: anthropological observations

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

I think it's interesting that you seemed to have *flipped* your thinking within the same post. You restate my point about conceptual metaphors by saying models/computation merely *justifies* decisions/rhetoric. Then a few paragraphs later, you suggest that's conflating language with thought.

My diatribe to Nick was that he *uses* metaphors/models simply to impute his conceptual structure onto Nate. Nick's decision is already made and he wants Nate's work to justify it. And the way he *imputes* his conceptual structure into Nate's work is through the sloppy use of metaphor. Then when Nate tells Nick (indirectly) that Nick's wrong about what Nate's done, Nick rejects Nate's objection.

I'm picking on Nick, of course. We all do it. I wish we all did it much less.

On 4/18/20 6:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:

> 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.
>
> [...]
>
> 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).

--
☣ uǝlƃ

.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ...
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: anthropological observations

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

I think the point is that the relations or contingencies you mention can be cast as posterior probabilities from observed many-body correlations. Distributional thinking works fine in that case too, it is just that some of those conditional probabilities get very close to 1. Others relations are softer, only giving slightly favorable odds. Still others can be modeled, having surprising behavior.

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Saturday, April 18, 2020 at 9:07 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

Jon,

Can you explain to me what in thunderation Eric’s comments on objects has to do with my comments on contingencies. I am sure there IS a connection, but I just can’t see it.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 9:46 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

Eric,

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

Jon

Stephen Guerin-5

Fontana 1996: Barrier to Objects (was Re: anthropological observations)

In reply to this post by David Eric Smith

Eric,

Even if your quote wasn't from Barrier to Objects, it was fun for me to pull it back up. I worked through that one pretty closely in 2000 and I'm reading it in a new light this morning. I remember how beautiful the tutorial appendix (https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/walterfontana/files/object.appendices.pdf) was as well and do remember this quote had an impact on me which impelled me to focus decentralized architectures on processes over functions.

The world of functions and the world of processes emphasize the halting problem
differently. While termination is a desideratum for functions or algorithms, the
opposite is typically true for processes. There one looks for conditions under
which a community of processes is guaranteed never to dead-lock, as there are
many situations where ongoing communication or interactivity is required. Examples
include operating systems, whether in air traffic control systems, computer
systems, mobile telephone networks, or...living and cognizing systems. The focus
on the absence of dead-lock shifts the attention from computation to organization.
This clearly locates concurrency very close to our project.

There was a distinct lunch I remember with Bill Macready and Mohammed El-Beltagy (cc'd) in 2000 where Bill was describing the one instance of getting muli-level emergence in a computational system via a pi-calculus implementation but said he never wrote it up. 20 years later, I still consider this a grail. Mohammed, did you ever see an implementation from Bill?

The tutorial also was another encouragement to read Milner but never fully digested. Also thought of diving into OCaml but never could focus enough attention. Mohammed, you messed around with it more that I as I recall. I've always been too focused on deployability. That said, a lot of our thinking around our work on "Acequia", a decentralized network as a distributed graph passing Javascript functions through WebRTC ports with network graph rewriting topologies takes a lot of inspiration from this description in Walter's Barrier to Objects appendix and Milner's book.:

-Stephen

_______________________________________________________________________
[hidden email]

CEO, Simtable http://www.simtable.com

1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505

office: (505)995-0206 mobile: (505)577-5828

twitter: @simtable

zoom.com/j/5055775828

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:59 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

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

thompnickson2

Re: anthropological observations

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen,

I admittedly way out of my depth here and so deserve to be picked on. You guys are kind to let me play in your sandbox.

Ok, to be completely honest, I listen to a LOT of Nate Silver and he says a LOT of different things. So, at the very minimum, I am probably guilty of cherry-picking. BUT ...wait or it! … I think there is a case to be made, in the variety of the things he has said, for his ambivalence about what it success at prediction means. He wants to live in two worlds at once, the world in which he miraculously predicted Obama’s election in 08 (was it?) and the world in which he miraculously predicted Clinton’s election in 16. He has a claim on both, but they aren’t the same sort of success. At core, I am an old-fashioned falsificationist. The one thing that is absolutely essential in a prediction is that you should, when the data are in, be able to know when you’ve been wrong. That’s what got me so riled up about Epstein’s bit of flatulence in JASSS.

So, if Silver says (or anybody says of him) that he got the 2016 election RIGHT, what WOULD HAVE BEEN the conditions where he, or his advocate, would have admitted that he got it wrong? If he has clearly stated those, and held to them, then I deserve to be picked on.

By the way: I was the youngest in my family. Truth was when you didn’t get your ears boxed.

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: Saturday, April 18, 2020 10:17 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

My diatribe to Nick was that he *uses* metaphors/models simply to impute his conceptual structure onto Nate. Nick's decision is already made and he wants Nate's work to justify it. And the way he *imputes* his conceptual structure into Nate's work is through the sloppy use of metaphor. Then when Nate tells Nick (indirectly) that Nick's wrong about what Nate's done, Nick rejects Nate's objection.

I'm picking on Nick, of course. We all do it. I wish we all did it much less.

On 4/18/20 6:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:

> 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.

> [...]

> 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).

☣ uǝlƃ

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gepr

Re: anthropological observations

I agree. Nate's not much more rigorous than the rest of us. And just like Justin Bieber or Britney Spears, he was probably ill-equipped to handle the steep increase in fame. Morlocks don't handle that sort of thing very well. We can get confused about who we are and what we do, maybe even listening too seriously to the imputations of others ... telling us what it is we do, defining it for us. Then, when things go a bit South, or we're allowed to toil in darkness for awhile, we remember what it is we do and how it's different from what they told us we were doing.

The trick is whether one wants to *tell* Nate what he does or *listen* to him describe what he does. If his story changes too much, then he's an unreliable narrator and we're free to ignore his narrative. But if there's an underlying stability, then that's the thing to understand.

And I'm totally with you on falsification. It's a debugging staple. Before you can tell whether something's doing what it's supposed to do, you have to well-formulate what it's *supposed* to do. If you can't formulate what you think should happen, then you'll have no idea if what happened should have happened. And I think you could have easily *predicted* that anyone who guesses "heads", then the coin lands on "heads", tends to think they "got it right". And if it lands on "tails", they don't think "I got it wrong". They think "do it again". Nate's no different.

I'm pretty sure I disagree with you about Epstein's argument, though. But that's a story for the other thread that Eric's tugged loose. I'll give my take on it if I can formulate it in under 300 words.

On 4/18/20 9:53 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> I admittedly way out of my depth here and so deserve to be picked on. You guys are kind to let me play in your sandbox.
>
> Ok, to be completely honest, I listen to a LOT of Nate Silver and he says a LOT of different things. So, at the very minimum, I am probably guilty of cherry-picking. BUT .../wait or it! … /I think there is a case to be made, in the variety of the things he has said, for his ambivalence about what it success at prediction means. He wants to live in two worlds at once, the world in which he miraculously predicted Obama’s election in 08 (was it?) and the world in which he miraculously predicted Clinton’s election in 16. He has a claim on both, but they aren’t the same sort of success. At core, I am an old-fashioned falsificationist. The one thing that is absolutely essential in a prediction is that you should, when the data are in, be able to know when you’ve been wrong. That’s what got me so riled up about Epstein’s bit of flatulence in JASSS <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/12/1/9.html>.
>
> So, if Silver says (or anybody says of him) that he got the 2016 election RIGHT, what WOULD HAVE BEEN the conditions where he, or his advocate, would have admitted that he got it wrong? If he has clearly stated those, and held to them, then I deserve to be picked on.
>
> By the way: I was the youngest in my family. Truth was when you didn’t get your ears boxed.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ...
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Fontana 1996: Barrier to Objects (was Re: anthropological observations)

In reply to this post by Stephen Guerin-5

Since then, linear logic has made its way into the practice of software engineering: Rust’s linear types, and Mercury’s uniqueness modes and Idris uniqueness types. It goes back quite a ways, at least to Linear Lisp. It makes sense for variables that are actually reactants.

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Saturday, April 18, 2020 at 9:44 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>, "Mohammed@Optomatica. Com" <[hidden email]>
Subject: [FRIAM] Fontana 1996: Barrier to Objects (was Re: anthropological observations)

Eric,

The world of functions and the world of processes emphasize the halting problem

differently. While termination is a desideratum for functions or algorithms, the

opposite is typically true for processes. There one looks for conditions under

which a community of processes is guaranteed never to dead-lock, as there are

many situations where ongoing communication or interactivity is required. Examples

include operating systems, whether in air traffic control systems, computer

systems, mobile telephone networks, or...living and cognizing systems. The focus

on the absence of dead-lock shifts the attention from computation to organization.

This clearly locates concurrency very close to our project.

-Stephen

_______________________________________________________________________
[hidden email]

CEO, Simtable http://www.simtable.com

1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505

office: (505)995-0206 mobile: (505)577-5828

twitter: @simtable

zoom.com/j/5055775828

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:59 AM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

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

Eric Charles-2

Re: anthropological observations

In reply to this post by gepr

-------- Nick says --------- 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. -----------------

Well... so this connects a lot with poker, which I am in the process of teaching the 10 year old... If I recall, Nate was giving Trump a 1/3 chance of victory, which was much higher than most of the other models at the time. You can hardly fault someone because something happened that they said would happen 2/3 of the time.

If a poker player has a model that predicts a given play to be the best option, because it will work 2/3 of the time, and this one time it doesn't work, that isn't grounds to say the model failed.

YOU want the modelers to have models that rarely give anything close to even odds. So do I, so I'm sympathetic. But the modeler might prefer a more honest model, that includes more uncertainty, for a wide variety of reasons.

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

[hidden email]

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think it's interesting that you seemed to have *flipped* your thinking within the same post. You restate my point about conceptual metaphors by saying models/computation merely *justifies* decisions/rhetoric. Then a few paragraphs later, you suggest that's conflating language with thought.

My diatribe to Nick was that he *uses* metaphors/models simply to impute his conceptual structure onto Nate. Nick's decision is already made and he wants Nate's work to justify it. And the way he *imputes* his conceptual structure into Nate's work is through the sloppy use of metaphor. Then when Nate tells Nick (indirectly) that Nick's wrong about what Nate's done, Nick rejects Nate's objection.

I'm picking on Nick, of course. We all do it. I wish we all did it much less.

On 4/18/20 6:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> 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.
>
> [...]
>
> 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).

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gepr

Re: anthropological observations

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Now Marcus is just being sadistic. >8^D

My own guess at a summary of Eric's stance is that where we see qualities, we can, at will, invert the vision and see quantities. Fontana is a great source for distinguishing construction from evolution. But for me, BC Smith [†] is better for maintaining an agnostic flippability (Necker cube) between objects vs fields, nodes vs edges, nouns vs verbs. The conflation Nick began with between expected value (an algorithmic reduction from a distribution to a singular thing/object) and a *quality* ... a qualitative feature of the world, parsed (registered in BC Smith's domain) from the ambience of the world is not inherently a bad thing. That conflation is not inherently bad because they're similar. They're both transformations from a field to a thing. The key is to be able to flip it back again, from a thing to a field.

It is our nature as pattern-recognizers to parse the ambience into things ... at least that *was* our nature before the modern math/physics *field* techniques began to seep into our intuition. Some of us who deal with fields/ambience/distributions all the time have begun to relax the harsh and immediate parsing. Engineers tend to simply be a bit lazy about it. The parsing happens, but they talk of approximations and epsilon as it goes to ∞ or 0. Mathematicians talk of duals, congruence, bisimulation, isomorphism, comutation, etc.

But I think it can all be adequately understood in terms of qualities vs quantities. Qualities like "wetness" are precisely the same as things like "frozen pond". Quantities like 32°F are precisely the same as processes like "if I walk on that, I'll slip and fall". The language each of us uses to grok this stuff is a choice. Eric provided a nice swath across several domains. Maybe too many. We're faced with the tyranny of choice. I'd treat it like a cafeteria. Pull the thread you understand best.

Bah! 316 words ... close enough, I say!

[†] On the Origin of Objects or, better yet Philosophy of Mental Representation ed Hugh Clapin.

On 4/18/20 9:25 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I think the point is that the relations or contingencies you mention can be cast as posterior probabilities from observed many-body correlations. Distributional thinking works fine in that case too, it is just that some of those conditional probabilities get very close to 1. Others relations are softer, only giving slightly favorable odds. Still others can be modeled, having surprising <http://cds.cern.ch/record/154856/files/pre-27827.pdf> behavior.

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

thompnickson2

Re: anthropological observations

In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2

So, Eric [Charles],

What exactly were the practicial consequences of declaring that Hillary was “probably” going to win the election or that a full house was probably going to win the pot given she lost and the dealer held a strait flush?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 12:06 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

If a poker player has a model that predicts a given play to be the best option, because it will work 2/3 of the time, and this one time it doesn't work, that isn't grounds to say the model failed.

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think it's interesting that you seemed to have *flipped* your thinking within the same post. You restate my point about conceptual metaphors by saying models/computation merely *justifies* decisions/rhetoric. Then a few paragraphs later, you suggest that's conflating language with thought.

My diatribe to Nick was that he *uses* metaphors/models simply to impute his conceptual structure onto Nate. Nick's decision is already made and he wants Nate's work to justify it. And the way he *imputes* his conceptual structure into Nate's work is through the sloppy use of metaphor. Then when Nate tells Nick (indirectly) that Nick's wrong about what Nate's done, Nick rejects Nate's objection.

I'm picking on Nick, of course. We all do it. I wish we all did it much less.

On 4/18/20 6:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:

> 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.
>
> [...]
>
> 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).

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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Steve Smith

Re: anthropological observations

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen -
> I think it's interesting that you seemed to have *flipped* your thinking within the same post. You restate my point about conceptual metaphors by saying models/computation merely *justifies* decisions/rhetoric. Then a few paragraphs later, you suggest that's conflating language with thought.

I didn't say "models/computation merely *justifies*
decisions/rhetoric", I said (meant) that that *particular* audience was
prone to seeking that justification and I didn't want to be (overly)
complicit in that.   Be extension, it is common TO use models (formal or
informal-metaphor) for that post-hoc justification. In fact, we might
agree that a great deal of what we think of as forward/creative
thinking/judgement is post-hoc. Perhaps you (some) would claim *all* is
post-hoc?

In the second part, I suggested that your broad criticism (skepticism?)
of metaphorical thinking may well be justified (especially when
metaphors are used "too loosely") but that a sweeping judgement (if in
fact you are making such a sweeping judgement) that *language* (and by
extension, the mentation and communication) we do with it is rooted
(what root? Is it a plant?) in.

I will try to respond separately to Eric's extremely well articulated
description of some of this...   I think the crossing of your two (you
and eric) lines of fire offer some useful parallax, even if it is Nick
who is the victim (ok... I AM prone to over-use figurative speech with
blatantly colorful metaphors (what? Metaphors have color? Highly
saturated color? How can you saturate a color, is a color a sponge or a
a tincture?))

> My diatribe to Nick was that he *uses* metaphors/models simply to impute his conceptual structure onto Nate. Nick's decision is already made and he wants Nate's work to justify it. And the way he *imputes* his conceptual structure into Nate's work is through the sloppy use of metaphor. Then when Nate tells Nick (indirectly) that Nick's wrong about what Nate's done, Nick rejects Nate's objection.
I do acknowledge the risks (propensity for) of imputing one's own
conceptual structure onto another's words/intentions/explanations.
> I'm picking on Nick, of course. We all do it. I wish we all did it much less.

I appreciate Nick for his willingness and ability to "draw fire"
(returning to the metaphor of cross-fire) to help illuminate the balance
of power on the battlefield (there I go again! Almost as if I were
trolling?).

- Steve

>
> On 4/18/20 6:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> 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).

Eric Charles-2

Re: anthropological observations

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

If, over his career, Nate's site gives a 2/3 vs 1/3 split 1,000 ti mes, and something near 333 times the 1/3 split wins, I think he gets to declare himself accurate.

Similarly, a modern poker pro isn't trying to guess what the opponent has. The modern player is trying to put the opponent on a spread of possible hands under the circumstances. The outcome of any given hand doesn't matter, and there is an expected amount of variance in performance even under a game-theoretic perfect strategy. The question is whether the strategy pays out in the long run, and whether the player has a deep enough bankroll (in comparison to the stakes they are playing at) to ride out the variance. If you think the pro is doing something else, you probably are still a very long way from getting to that level.

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

[hidden email]

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 2:32 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

So, Eric [Charles],

What exactly were the practicial consequences of declaring that Hillary was “probably” going to win the election or that a full house was probably going to win the pot given she lost and the dealer held a strait flush?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 12:06 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

-------- Nick says --------- 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. -----------------

Well... so this connects a lot with poker, which I am in the process of teaching the 10 year old... If I recall, Nate was giving Trump a 1/3 chance of victory, which was much higher than most of the other models at the time. You can hardly fault someone because something happened that they said would happen 2/3 of the time.

If a poker player has a model that predicts a given play to be the best option, because it will work 2/3 of the time, and this one time it doesn't work, that isn't grounds to say the model failed.

YOU want the modelers to have models that rarely give anything close to even odds. So do I, so I'm sympathetic. But the modeler might prefer a more honest model, that includes more uncertainty, for a wide variety of reasons.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
I think it's interesting that you seemed to have *flipped* your thinking within the same post. You restate my point about conceptual metaphors by saying models/computation merely *justifies* decisions/rhetoric. Then a few paragraphs later, you suggest that's conflating language with thought.

My diatribe to Nick was that he *uses* metaphors/models simply to impute his conceptual structure onto Nate. Nick's decision is already made and he wants Nate's work to justify it. And the way he *imputes* his conceptual structure into Nate's work is through the sloppy use of metaphor. Then when Nate tells Nick (indirectly) that Nick's wrong about what Nate's done, Nick rejects Nate's objection.

I'm picking on Nick, of course. We all do it. I wish we all did it much less.

On 4/18/20 6:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:

> 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.
>
> [...]
>
> 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).

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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thompnickson2

Re: anthropological observations

But Eric,

If, over his career, Nate's site gives a 2/3 vs 1/3 split 1,000 ti mes, and something near 333 times the 1/3 split wins, I think he gets to declare himself accurate

How is that practicial? I.e., how can we base a practice on it? Nate’s career isn’t over yet?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 1:59 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

If, over his career, Nate's site gives a 2/3 vs 1/3 split 1,000 ti mes, and something near 333 times the 1/3 split wins, I think he gets to declare himself accurate.

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 2:32 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

So, Eric [Charles],

What exactly were the practicial consequences of declaring that Hillary was “probably” going to win the election or that a full house was probably going to win the pot given she lost and the dealer held a strait flush?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 12:06 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

-------- Nick says --------- 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. -----------------

Well... so this connects a lot with poker, which I am in the process of teaching the 10 year old... If I recall, Nate was giving Trump a 1/3 chance of victory, which was much higher than most of the other models at the time. You can hardly fault someone because something happened that they said would happen 2/3 of the time.

If a poker player has a model that predicts a given play to be the best option, because it will work 2/3 of the time, and this one time it doesn't work, that isn't grounds to say the model failed.

YOU want the modelers to have models that rarely give anything close to even odds. So do I, so I'm sympathetic. But the modeler might prefer a more honest model, that includes more uncertainty, for a wide variety of reasons.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
I think it's interesting that you seemed to have *flipped* your thinking within the same post. You restate my point about conceptual metaphors by saying models/computation merely *justifies* decisions/rhetoric. Then a few paragraphs later, you suggest that's conflating language with thought.

My diatribe to Nick was that he *uses* metaphors/models simply to impute his conceptual structure onto Nate. Nick's decision is already made and he wants Nate's work to justify it. And the way he *imputes* his conceptual structure into Nate's work is through the sloppy use of metaphor. Then when Nate tells Nick (indirectly) that Nick's wrong about what Nate's done, Nick rejects Nate's objection.

I'm picking on Nick, of course. We all do it. I wish we all did it much less.

On 4/18/20 6:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:

> 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.
>
> [...]
>
> 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).

--
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Steve Smith

Re: anthropological observations

In reply to this post by gepr

This list/thread(s) has been so prolific and pithy of late, I can hardly begin to respond to one thing before another (dozen shiny objects) catches my eye.

☣ ƃlǝu (reads like "blau"?) thus wroteth:

Now Marcus is just being sadistic. >8^D

My own guess at a summary of Eric's stance is that where we see qualities, we can, at will, invert the vision and see quantities. Fontana is a great source for distinguishing construction from evolution. But for me, BC Smith [†] is better for maintaining an agnostic flippability (Necker cube) between objects vs fields, nodes vs edges, nouns vs verbs.

Guerin and I spend more than a little time bantering around the head and shoulders (I can't resist trolling uǝlƃ ☣ with various (in)apt(ept) and mixed/mangled metaphors at every turn here) what he refers to as (his?) dual-field theory. This duality (if you are willing to call the things you flip) seems pervasive. It is in fact the vernacular foreground/background I think, only moreso? We tend to struggle with the agent-field (turtle-patch in his netlogo vernacular) or perhaps graph/field, projector-camera, or discrete/continuous aspects. And I have to ask (@Stephen) <tongue-in-cheek> "is it Turtles or is it Patches all the way down?" And why the preference for down... why not up?

 The conflation Nick began with between expected value (an algorithmic reduction from a distribution to a singular thing/object) and a *quality* ... a qualitative feature of the world, parsed (registered in BC Smith's domain) from the ambience of the world is not inherently a bad thing. That conflation is not inherently bad because they're similar. They're both transformations from a field to a thing. The key is to be able to flip it back again, from a thing to a field.

To crispify the fuzzy and fuzzify the crisp? Sounds downright quantum wave-function collapse? How in the world did something like THAT get into language? Did I impute that?

It is our nature as pattern-recognizers to parse the ambience into things ... at least that *was* our nature before the modern math/physics *field* techniques began to seep into our intuition.

And I wonder at *when* that started. It seems as if aether and phlogisten were proto-field-like-things... a struggle of the post/meta-alchemist to remain in a familar domain of "stuffness" whilst the abstractions of "fields" were starting to have more traction (what how can an idea have "traction", what is it a tractor?) ?

 Some of us who deal with fields/ambience/distributions all the time have begun to relax the harsh and immediate parsing. Engineers tend to simply be a bit lazy about it.

Or self-proclaimedly *pragmatic* about it (engineers)?

 The parsing happens, but they talk of approximations and epsilon as it goes to ∞ or 0. Mathematicians talk of duals, congruence, bisimulation, isomorphism, comutation, etc.

Nick loves it when you talk dirty. (many of us do).

But I think it can all be adequately understood in terms of qualities vs quantities. Qualities like "wetness" are precisely the same as things like "frozen pond". Quantities like 32°F are precisely the same as processes like "if I walk on that, I'll slip and fall".

I don't know if they are precisely the same... there is a dualism (in language?) like your former noun/verb. We *can* verbize any noun it seems. There is the quantification of a quality (how "wet" is the frozen pond?) and a domain-specific judgement about it ("is it slippery?"), which I contend is not "precisely the same", as the context for each is different. 32°F is not "precisely the same as" 0°C, at least in it's context? 0°C and 100°C were *defined* in the context of (pure) water's freezing/boiling (under standard atmospheric pressure) points. But °F are only deferential to water in the sense that they require only 2-3 digits to cover the range of water's phase-changes? °K is less deferential to water, and if not not entirely out of the context of all matter, at least not registered to any particular element (what does °K imply for condensed matter or gluons?).

 The language each of us uses to grok this stuff is a choice.

A choice (partly) made by our parents, our teachers, our embedded context. It has been said (at least in inherited disease) that "it is important to choose our parents well". We all got to be the way we are *somehow*, though I still cling (myself) to the illusion of free-will (perhaps a precondition to imagining there is a self, a "here here"?)

Eric provided a nice swath across several domains. Maybe too many. We're faced with the tyranny of choice. I'd treat it like a cafeteria. Pull the thread you understand best.

Or get out your darning egg and needle and try to weave them back into the stocking, lest your toes or heel or knee pokes through?

Bah! 316 words ... close enough, I say!

From whence (or wherest?) did you get your 300 word target? And mightest-not a syllable-weighted count be better? (preferring short words?). Or would that be too antidisestablishmentarian?

- Snarf

Steve Smith

Re: anthropological observations

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Nick-

Interesting (apt?) choice of poker-hands to attribute to "the Hillary" and to "the Donald".

- Sieve

On 4/18/20 12:31 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

So, Eric [Charles],

What exactly were the practicial consequences of declaring that Hillary was “probably” going to win the election or that a full house was probably going to win the pot given she lost and the dealer held a strait flush?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 12:06 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

-------- Nick says --------- 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. -----------------

Well... so this connects a lot with poker, which I am in the process of teaching the 10 year old... If I recall, Nate was giving Trump a 1/3 chance of victory, which was much higher than most of the other models at the time. You can hardly fault someone because something happened that they said would happen 2/3 of the time.

If a poker player has a model that predicts a given play to be the best option, because it will work 2/3 of the time, and this one time it doesn't work, that isn't grounds to say the model failed.

YOU want the modelers to have models that rarely give anything close to even odds. So do I, so I'm sympathetic. But the modeler might prefer a more honest model, that includes more uncertainty, for a wide variety of reasons.

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think it's interesting that you seemed to have *flipped* your thinking within the same post. You restate my point about conceptual metaphors by saying models/computation merely *justifies* decisions/rhetoric. Then a few paragraphs later, you suggest that's conflating language with thought.

My diatribe to Nick was that he *uses* metaphors/models simply to impute his conceptual structure onto Nate. Nick's decision is already made and he wants Nate's work to justify it. And the way he *imputes* his conceptual structure into Nate's work is through the sloppy use of metaphor. Then when Nate tells Nick (indirectly) that Nick's wrong about what Nate's done, Nick rejects Nate's objection.

I'm picking on Nick, of course. We all do it. I wish we all did it much less.

On 4/18/20 6:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> 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.
>
> [...]
>
> 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).

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: anthropological observations

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Maybe ask a hedge fund?

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Saturday, April 18, 2020 at 1:16 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

But Eric,

If, over his career, Nate's site gives a 2/3 vs 1/3 split 1,000 ti mes, and something near 333 times the 1/3 split wins, I think he gets to declare himself accurate

How is that practicial? I.e., how can we base a practice on it? Nate’s career isn’t over yet?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

If, over his career, Nate's site gives a 2/3 vs 1/3 split 1,000 ti mes, and something near 333 times the 1/3 split wins, I think he gets to declare himself accurate.

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 2:32 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

So, Eric [Charles],

What exactly were the practicial consequences of declaring that Hillary was “probably” going to win the election or that a full house was probably going to win the pot given she lost and the dealer held a strait flush?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

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

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 12:06 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

-------- Nick says --------- 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. -----------------

Well... so this connects a lot with poker, which I am in the process of teaching the 10 year old... If I recall, Nate was giving Trump a 1/3 chance of victory, which was much higher than most of the other models at the time. You can hardly fault someone because something happened that they said would happen 2/3 of the time.

If a poker player has a model that predicts a given play to be the best option, because it will work 2/3 of the time, and this one time it doesn't work, that isn't grounds to say the model failed.

YOU want the modelers to have models that rarely give anything close to even odds. So do I, so I'm sympathetic. But the modeler might prefer a more honest model, that includes more uncertainty, for a wide variety of reasons.

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think it's interesting that you seemed to have *flipped* your thinking within the same post. You restate my point about conceptual metaphors by saying models/computation merely *justifies* decisions/rhetoric. Then a few paragraphs later, you suggest that's conflating language with thought.

My diatribe to Nick was that he *uses* metaphors/models simply to impute his conceptual structure onto Nate. Nick's decision is already made and he wants Nate's work to justify it. And the way he *imputes* his conceptual structure into Nate's work is through the sloppy use of metaphor. Then when Nate tells Nick (indirectly) that Nick's wrong about what Nate's done, Nick rejects Nate's objection.

I'm picking on Nick, of course. We all do it. I wish we all did it much less.

On 4/18/20 6:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> 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.
>
> [...]
>
> 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).

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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Steve Smith

Re: anthropological observations

In reply to this post by David Eric Smith

Eric -

> Cranky Nick, you really need to join a church.
I think Nick's church IS this mail-list/congregation... and he
(reluctantly) stands-in as a lay-preacher, though I think he spends more
time trying to recruit others to that role.   It functions a bit like a
UU church in some ways (a lot of "more tolerant than though") and in
others like a Quaker congregation ("speaking from the silence") and very
occasionally a "poetry slam".
> 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).
An excellent example of very precise language (and a parenthetical
explication and contrast OF that precision vs what is found in
"evocative construction within common vernacular").    The source domain
in your description is very precisely that of mathematical statistics
and therefore has high "utility" if not broad familiarity.
> 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.
key distinction, well reminded.

> 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.

Well said.

>
> 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.

I am left to ponder this point... I think it is fundamental and well
stated (but also tightly packed) here. It matches what I learned
decades ago about Piaget's concrete and formal operational stages of
development.

> 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.

Once again, I don't have the capacity or focus to begin to do this
justice but I'm feeling a resonance around the attenuated? discussion of
Wofram's recent announcement...
> 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."

The room is full of rhinocerii, and elephants... and 400lb Gorillas.
Oh, and I think a cigar or two, one of which is apparently "just a cigar".

- Steve

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David Eric Smith

Re: anthropological observations

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Yes, both Eric C. and Marcus have already answered this better than what I am about to say, because they have already abstracted it into concepts. But I will put only a particular.

I got this from the polymath Elwyn Berlekamp (who did run a hedge fund) in the kitchen on an Erdos-like visit by him to Santa Fe.

The conceptually phrased problem is: what is the deterministic response (“a practice”) to a distributional input as object?

Suppose you are playing a betting game, and you know the set of possible outcomes, and the probabilities of each. (Can be poker, though that is complicated enough to take work to describe. A simple double-or-nothing roulette would be a minimal model).

You have some money. You can put some of your money as a bet for as many outcomes as you want. Bets have some smallest denomination, so it is possible for you to lose everything for some allocations. How do you allocate?

1. If you want to maximize your expected payoff in one play, you put all your money on whichever outcome is most likely.

2. If you wish to play repeatedly, and you want to both avoid going broke and to maximize your long-term payout, you bet a fraction of your money proportional to the probability of each outcome (or as close as you can get to that with your finite denomination), in every round. I think one of the Bernoullis solved this in 1700-something, and it is widely taught. I was just raised in a woodshed, so I didn’t know about it until Elwyn came by. Your expected rate of growth of your pot is proportional to the relative entropy between your distribution of bets and the distribution of probabilities of the various outcomes. I’m pretty sure this is in Cover and Thomas’s Elements of Information Theory. If your starting pot is finite, your probability of survival to round-N is some other function, now of both distributions and how finely you can divide the money, and there is some distribution of likely survival times that can also be computed. (Remember that there is no way you can be assured to survive; if you make bad distributions and lose more than you gain in too many rounds, you will eventually have too little to be able to place nonzero bets on every outcome with your nonzero denomination, and will start to run nonzero risks of losing all.)

Ole Peters has built a whole privately-funded institute on this specific metaphor, which he packages in terms of expected utility:

http://lml.org.uk/people/ole-peters-2/

But of course endlessly more sophisticated variants are developed in almost any field I can think of.

So, for elections? Maybe something about investment in state and local organizing, how much attention the national committee gives to on-the-ground organizations and what they say their constituents are asking for, capture of congressional seats, a strategic view of what happens if legislatures won’t make laws so that court interpretations become the de facto origins of legal-precedent-as-new-law, feeding back to which elections are consequential. Stuff like that.

Of course, for all of those things, more is always better. But on a budget, how you prioritize the time/attention/work you can get out of citizens to support your projects should depend on what the mechanics of the process is through time.

Eric

On Apr 19, 2020, at 5:16 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

But Eric,

If, over his career, Nate's site gives a 2/3 vs 1/3 split 1,000 ti mes, and something near 333 times the 1/3 split wins, I think he gets to declare himself accurate

How is that practicial? I.e., how can we base a practice on it? Nate’s career isn’t over yet?

Nick
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 1:59 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

If, over his career, Nate's site gives a 2/3 vs 1/3 split 1,000 ti mes, and something near 333 times the 1/3 split wins, I think he gets to declare himself accurate.

Similarly, a modern poker pro isn't trying to guess what the opponent has. The modern player is trying to put the opponent on a spread of possible hands under the circumstances. The outcome of any given hand doesn't matter, and there is an expected amount of variance in performance even under a game-theoretic perfect strategy. The question is whether the strategy pays out in the long run, and whether the player has a deep enough bankroll (in comparison to the stakes they are playing at) to ride out the variance. If you think the pro is doing something else, you probably are still a very long way from getting to that level.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 2:32 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:
So, Eric [Charles],

What exactly were the practicial consequences of declaring that Hillary was “probably” going to win the election or that a full house was probably going to win the pot given she lost and the dealer held a strait flush?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 12:06 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

-------- Nick says --------- 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. -----------------

Well... so this connects a lot with poker, which I am in the process of teaching the 10 year old... If I recall, Nate was giving Trump a 1/3 chance of victory, which was much higher than most of the other models at the time. You can hardly fault someone because something happened that they said would happen 2/3 of the time.

If a poker player has a model that predicts a given play to be the best option, because it will work 2/3 of the time, and this one time it doesn't work, that isn't grounds to say the model failed.

YOU want the modelers to have models that rarely give anything close to even odds. So do I, so I'm sympathetic. But the modeler might prefer a more honest model, that includes more uncertainty, for a wide variety of reasons.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
I think it's interesting that you seemed to have *flipped* your thinking within the same post. You restate my point about conceptual metaphors by saying models/computation merely *justifies* decisions/rhetoric. Then a few paragraphs later, you suggest that's conflating language with thought.

My diatribe to Nick was that he *uses* metaphors/models simply to impute his conceptual structure onto Nate. Nick's decision is already made and he wants Nate's work to justify it. And the way he *imputes* his conceptual structure into Nate's work is through the sloppy use of metaphor. Then when Nate tells Nick (indirectly) that Nick's wrong about what Nate's done, Nick rejects Nate's objection.

I'm picking on Nick, of course. We all do it. I wish we all did it much less.

On 4/18/20 6:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:

> 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.
>
> [...]
>
> 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).

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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Prof David West

Re: anthropological observations

Recommended reading for background to the gambling discussion below: Geralomo Cardano (1501-1576), Liber de Ludo Aleae, "The Book of Games of Chance,"

davew

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020, at 3:35 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:

Yes, both Eric C. and Marcus have already answered this better than what I am about to say, because they have already abstracted it into concepts. But I will put only a particular.

I got this from the polymath Elwyn Berlekamp (who did run a hedge fund) in the kitchen on an Erdos-like visit by him to Santa Fe.

The conceptually phrased problem is: what is the deterministic response (“a practice”) to a distributional input as object?

Suppose you are playing a betting game, and you know the set of possible outcomes, and the probabilities of each. (Can be poker, though that is complicated enough to take work to describe. A simple double-or-nothing roulette would be a minimal model).

You have some money. You can put some of your money as a bet for as many outcomes as you want. Bets have some smallest denomination, so it is possible for you to lose everything for some allocations. How do you allocate?

1. If you want to maximize your expected payoff in one play, you put all your money on whichever outcome is most likely.

2. If you wish to play repeatedly, and you want to both avoid going broke and to maximize your long-term payout, you bet a fraction of your money proportional to the probability of each outcome (or as close as you can get to that with your finite denomination), in every round. I think one of the Bernoullis solved this in 1700-something, and it is widely taught. I was just raised in a woodshed, so I didn’t know about it until Elwyn came by. Your expected rate of growth of your pot is proportional to the relative entropy between your distribution of bets and the distribution of probabilities of the various outcomes. I’m pretty sure this is in Cover and Thomas’s Elements of Information Theory. If your starting pot is finite, your probability of survival to round-N is some other function, now of both distributions and how finely you can divide the money, and there is some distribution of likely survival times that can also be computed. (Remember that there is no way you can be assured to survive; if you make bad distributions and lose more than you gain in too many rounds, you will eventually have too little to be able to place nonzero bets on every outcome with your nonzero denomination, and will start to run nonzero risks of losing all.)

Ole Peters has built a whole privately-funded institute on this specific metaphor, which he packages in terms of expected utility:
http://lml.org.uk/people/ole-peters-2/
But of course endlessly more sophisticated variants are developed in almost any field I can think of.

So, for elections? Maybe something about investment in state and local organizing, how much attention the national committee gives to on-the-ground organizations and what they say their constituents are asking for, capture of congressional seats, a strategic view of what happens if legislatures won’t make laws so that court interpretations become the de facto origins of legal-precedent-as-new-law, feeding back to which elections are consequential. Stuff like that.

Of course, for all of those things, more is always better. But on a budget, how you prioritize the time/attention/work you can get out of citizens to support your projects should depend on what the mechanics of the process is through time.

Eric

On Apr 19, 2020, at 5:16 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

But Eric,

If, over his career, Nate's site gives a 2/3 vs 1/3 split 1,000 ti mes, and something near 333 times the 1/3 split wins, I think he gets to declare himself accurate

How is that practicial? I.e., how can we base a practice on it? Nate’s career isn’t over yet?

Nick
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 1:59 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

If, over his career, Nate's site gives a 2/3 vs 1/3 split 1,000 ti mes, and something near 333 times the 1/3 split wins, I think he gets to declare himself accurate.

Similarly, a modern poker pro isn't trying to guess what the opponent has. The modern player is trying to put the opponent on a spread of possible hands under the circumstances. The outcome of any given hand doesn't matter, and there is an expected amount of variance in performance even under a game-theoretic perfect strategy. The question is whether the strategy pays out in the long run, and whether the player has a deep enough bankroll (in comparison to the stakes they are playing at) to ride out the variance. If you think the pro is doing something else, you probably are still a very long way from getting to that level.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 2:32 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:
So, Eric [Charles],

What exactly were the practicial consequences of declaring that Hillary was “probably” going to win the election or that a full house was probably going to win the pot given she lost and the dealer held a strait flush?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 12:06 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations

-------- Nick says --------- 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. -----------------

Well... so this connects a lot with poker, which I am in the process of teaching the 10 year old... If I recall, Nate was giving Trump a 1/3 chance of victory, which was much higher than most of the other models at the time. You can hardly fault someone because something happened that they said would happen 2/3 of the time.

If a poker player has a model that predicts a given play to be the best option, because it will work 2/3 of the time, and this one time it doesn't work, that isn't grounds to say the model failed.

YOU want the modelers to have models that rarely give anything close to even odds. So do I, so I'm sympathetic. But the modeler might prefer a more honest model, that includes more uncertainty, for a wide variety of reasons.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
I think it's interesting that you seemed to have *flipped* your thinking within the same post. You restate my point about conceptual metaphors by saying models/computation merely *justifies* decisions/rhetoric. Then a few paragraphs later, you suggest that's conflating language with thought.

My diatribe to Nick was that he *uses* metaphors/models simply to impute his conceptual structure onto Nate. Nick's decision is already made and he wants Nate's work to justify it. And the way he *imputes* his conceptual structure into Nate's work is through the sloppy use of metaphor. Then when Nate tells Nick (indirectly) that Nick's wrong about what Nate's done, Nick rejects Nate's objection.

I'm picking on Nick, of course. We all do it. I wish we all did it much less.

On 4/18/20 6:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> 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.
>
> [...]
>
> 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).

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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gepr

Re: anthropological observations

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Unfortunately, after a couple of attempts to read it, I couldn't understand anything in your post except this part. My previous post was just under 300 words. So, I decided to try to make the next one under that mark as well.

On 4/18/20 1:22 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> From whence (or wherest?) did you get your 300 word target?

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

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