are we how we behave?

[lrudolph]

Nick says, in relevant part:

> For instance, when
> sociobiologists use the notion of selfish gene, they may legitimately
> disclaim the idea that genes consciously choose between self-regarding and
> other-regarding options, but they cannot legitimately disclaim the idea
> that a gene has the power to make any choice but the self-regarding one
> And that idea is patently false.  Genes do not make choices, they ARE
> choices and the choice is made at the level of the phenotype or at the
> level of the population, depending on how one thinks about the matter.
> My position is that I favor each and every one of us taking whatever
> responsibility for understanding our own "convex hull" of
> capability/knowledge/intuition as we are capable of and "managing" it to
> the best of our ability.

Although I am always happy to impugn the integrity of sociobiologists, and
in particular have no doubt that they are (perhaps not deliberately with
malice aforethought) equivocating on the meanings of "selfish", there
*are* two such meanings in common usage, which lead to two possible
readings of the phrase "selfish gene".  (1) The first meaning of "selfish"
(in the nearest dictionary) is "concerned chiefly or only with oneself"),
and using that one, the phrase "selfish gene" deserves all the scorn and
deprecation you have for it, precisely because the reading of the phrase
enforced by that definition of the adjective forces "self"-hood on the
gene.  (2) However, the second meaning of "selfish" is "arising from,
characterized by, or showing selfishness" (where "selfishness", not
explicitly defined in this dictionary, has to be taken as implicitly
defined by (1) in what might loosely be called a recursive manner); the
example phrase, "a selfish whim", illustrate that the "self" to which
"selfishness" is ascribed need not (and I would say, generally is not) the
noun directly modified by "selfish" ("whim" or "gene"), but is rather some
other (actual or metaphorical) agent (the person whose whim it is or the
population/phenotype which has--metaphorically--"chosen", i.e., actually
*evolved*, the gene).

To the extent sociobiologists carelessly equivocate between those
meanings, they are to be corrected; to the extent that they do so
tendentiously, they are to be deplored (as well as corrected); but perhaps
some of them (with whom you are not familiar, or who you have possibly
misread) make it explicit that they are using meaning (2)?  *Those*
sociobiologists ought to be commended!


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[Nick Thompson]

Lee,

Hmmmm!  As I wrote the post down, I was having nervous feelings, which you
now confirm.  A selfish act does not need to be in the interest of that act
itself, but of the actor.  So if we think of the gene as a kind of act, and
we think of the population as choosing the act for its own benefit, then
perhaps the metaphor survives.  I still think Dawkins use of the metaphor
fails, because he wants to claim that the level of selection IS the gene.  

In short, point taken.

Nick

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


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of
[hidden email]
Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2019 5:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

Nick says, in relevant part:

> For instance, when
> sociobiologists use the notion of selfish gene, they may legitimately
> disclaim the idea that genes consciously choose between self-regarding
> and other-regarding options, but they cannot legitimately disclaim the
> idea that a gene has the power to make any choice but the
> self-regarding one And that idea is patently false.  Genes do not make
> choices, they ARE choices and the choice is made at the level of the
> phenotype or at the level of the population, depending on how one thinks
about the matter.
> My position is that I favor each and every one of us taking whatever
> responsibility for understanding our own "convex hull" of
> capability/knowledge/intuition as we are capable of and "managing" it
> to the best of our ability.

Although I am always happy to impugn the integrity of sociobiologists, and
in particular have no doubt that they are (perhaps not deliberately with
malice aforethought) equivocating on the meanings of "selfish", there
*are* two such meanings in common usage, which lead to two possible readings
of the phrase "selfish gene".  (1) The first meaning of "selfish"
(in the nearest dictionary) is "concerned chiefly or only with oneself"),
and using that one, the phrase "selfish gene" deserves all the scorn and
deprecation you have for it, precisely because the reading of the phrase
enforced by that definition of the adjective forces "self"-hood on the gene.
(2) However, the second meaning of "selfish" is "arising from, characterized
by, or showing selfishness" (where "selfishness", not explicitly defined in
this dictionary, has to be taken as implicitly defined by (1) in what might
loosely be called a recursive manner); the example phrase, "a selfish whim",
illustrate that the "self" to which "selfishness" is ascribed need not (and
I would say, generally is not) the noun directly modified by "selfish"
("whim" or "gene"), but is rather some other (actual or metaphorical) agent
(the person whose whim it is or the population/phenotype which
has--metaphorically--"chosen", i.e., actually *evolved*, the gene).

To the extent sociobiologists carelessly equivocate between those meanings,
they are to be corrected; to the extent that they do so tendentiously, they
are to be deplored (as well as corrected); but perhaps some of them (with
whom you are not familiar, or who you have possibly
misread) make it explicit that they are using meaning (2)?  *Those*
sociobiologists ought to be commended!


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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Steve Smith]

On 3/28/19 1:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Steve, ‘n all,

 

Just to be cranky, I want to remind everybody that ALL language use, except perhaps tautological expressions, is metaphorical.

I ascribe to this idea as well, following Lakoff and Johnson in their 1980 _Metaphors we Live by_ .

  So then, the question is not, “Is this a metaphor”, but what kind of a metaphor is it and is it pernicious.

I believe that ultimately conceptual metaphor is no more nor less than the intuitive application of a model, and as is often mentioned "all models are wrong, some are useful".    You use the term pernicious which suggests *harmful*, I presume either intentionally so or more from sloppiness or ignorance.

My own view is that in any “tense” conversation – one in which the parties feel the words really matter – it behooves a metaphor-user to define the limits of the metaphor.

I agree that "tense" conversations are different than "casual" ones if that is your distinction.  Unfortunately, outside of Science/Engineering contexts, I find that "tense" conversations are at their root political or at least rhetorical.   One or both sides are really *serious* about being believed.   If not believed in fact ("I believe what you just said") then in principle ("I believe that you believe what you just said").

I think that political/rhetorical dialog would *benefit*  by careful disclosure of all metaphors being used, but one mode of such dialog is for one or both sides to attempt to interject equivocal meanings... to use a term (or in this case set of terms belonging to a metaphorical domain) to weave an *apparently* logical argument, which is only superficially logical but falls apart when the "correct" meaning of the term(s) are applied.  

So, for instance, much mischief has arisen in evolutionary biology from a failure of theorists to define the limits of their use of such metaphors as “natural selection” and “ adaptation”.  When limits are defined, the surplus meaning of a metaphor is separated into two parts, initially, that which the metaphor-user embraces and that which s/he disclaims.  The embraced part goes on to become the positive heuristic of the metaphor, the “wet edge” along which science develops.

From this line of discussion, I take you to be on the branch of the fault-tree I implied above as a Scientific dialog where *both* sides of the discussion are honestly trying to come to mutual understanding and perhaps advance understanding by combining differing perspectives on the same phenomena.

The disclaimed part, must be further divided into that which was legitimately [logically] disclaimed and that which was disclaimed fraudulently.  For instance, when sociobiologists use the notion of selfish gene, they may legitimately disclaim the idea that genes consciously choose between self-regarding and other-regarding options, but they cannot legitimately disclaim the idea that a gene has the power to make any choice but the self-regarding one.

When Dawkins coined "Selfish Gene",  I felt that the *value* of the metaphor invoked was in the challenge it presents:

  And that idea is patently false.  Genes do not make choices

Patently Genes do not make choices in the sense that we usually mean "make choices", yet the strong implication is that the phenomena functions *as if* they do, in "all other ways".   There may be (useful) hairsplitting between "all other ways" and "many other ways" which is an important aspect of analogical thinking. 

, they ARE choices and the choice is made at the level of the phenotype or at the level of the population, depending on how one thinks about the matter.  So the metaphor ‘selfish gene’ is pernicious in evolutionary biology, because it creates confusion on the very point that it purports to clarify – the level at which differential replication operates to generate long term phenotypic change in a population.

I would challenge this as I think my verbage above outlines.   I do not believe that the metaphor *purports* to clarify what you say it does.  It *strives* to provide a cognitive shortcut and to establish a fairly strong metaphor which deserves careful dissection to understand the particulars of the *target domain*.   An important question in the target domain becomes "why does the shortcut of thinking of genes as selfish actually have some level of accuracy as a description of the phenomena when in fact the mechanisms involved do not support that directly?"

For all I know, EB has entirely debunked the concept and there is NO utility in the idea of a "selfish gene"... 

Bruce Sherwood likes to make the point that the analogy of hydraulic systems for DC circuits is misleading.   I forget the specifics of where he shows that the analogy breaks down, but it is well below (or above?) the level of "normal" DC circuit understanding and manipulation.   For the kinds of problems I work with using DC circuits, a "battery" is a "tank of water at some height", the Voltage out of the battery is the water Pressure, the amount of Current is the Volume of water, a Diode is a one-way valve,  a resistor is any hydraulic element which conserves water but reduces pressure through what is nominally friction, etc.    As you point out, there is plenty of "excess meaning" around hydraulics as source domain, and "insufficient meaning" around DC circuits as target domain, and if one is to use the analogy effectively one must either understand those over/under mappings, or be operating within only the smaller apt-portion of the domains.   For example, I don't know what the equivalent of an anti-hammer stub (probably a little like a capacitor in parallel?) is but that is no longer describing a simple DC circuit.

A farmer buying his first tractor may try to understand it using the source domain of "draft animal" and can't go particularly wrong by doing things like "giving it a rest off and on to let it cool down", "planning to feed it well before expecting it to work", "putting it away, out of the elements when not in use", etc.  your "excess meaning" would seem to be things like the farmer going out and trying to top off the fuel every day even when he was not using the tractor, or maybe taking it out for a spin every day to keep it exercised and accustomed to being driven.   The farmer *might* understand "changing the oil" and "cleaning the plugs" and "adjusting the points" vaguely like "deworming" and "cleaning the hooves" but the analogy is pretty wide of the mark beyond the simple idea that "things need attending to".

 

PS – Is anybody on this list (among the handful that have gotten this far in this post) familiar with the work of Douglas Walton?

I just took a look and his work does sound interesting (and relevant).

He seems perhaps to have written a lot about misunderstandings in AI systems … i.e., how does Siri know what we mean? 

By AI, it seems you mean (the subset of) Natural Language Understanding?

I am also reminded by reading the Wikipedia article on his work that I haven't responded to Glen's question about the "theorem dependency project".

I came to this work through my interest in abduction, which may be described as the process by which we identify (ascribe meaning to?) experiences.  Walton seems to suggest that you-guys are way ahead of the rest of us on the process of meaning ascription, and we all should go to school with you.  Please tell me where and when you offer the class.

I assume the "you-guys" referred to here are the hard core CS/Modeling folks (e.g. Glen, Marcus, Dave, ...).  I do think that the challenges of "explaining things to a machine" do require some rigor, as does formal mathematics and systems like the aforementioned "theorem dependency project".

- Steve

PS.  It has been noted that my long-winded explanation of my (poorly adhered to) typographical conventions for around "reserved terms" and the  like was perhaps defensive.  I didn't mean to sound defensive, I just wanted to be more precise and complete to (possibly) reduce misunderstandings.   I don't imagine many read the entireity of my missives, but as often as not,  when people do read and respond, I sense that some of my conventions are not recognized.

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Nick Thompson]

Steve,

 

We were doing SO WELL until we got to … oh, see my “HORSEFEATHERS!” below.

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Friday, March 29, 2019 9:39 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

 

On 3/28/19 1:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Steve, ‘n all,

 

Just to be cranky, I want to remind everybody that ALL language use, except perhaps tautological expressions, is metaphorical.

I ascribe to this idea as well, following Lakoff and Johnson in their 1980 _Metaphors we Live by_ .

  So then, the question is not, “Is this a metaphor”, but what kind of a metaphor is it and is it pernicious.

I believe that ultimately conceptual metaphor is no more nor less than the intuitive application of a model, and as is often mentioned "all models are wrong, some are useful".    You use the term pernicious which suggests *harmful*, I presume either intentionally so or more from sloppiness or ignorance.

My own view is that in any “tense” conversation – one in which the parties feel the words really matter – it behooves a metaphor-user to define the limits of the metaphor.

I agree that "tense" conversations are different than "casual" ones if that is your distinction.  Unfortunately, outside of Science/Engineering contexts, I find that "tense" conversations are at their root political or at least rhetorical.   One or both sides are really *serious* about being believed.   If not believed in fact ("I believe what you just said") then in principle ("I believe that you believe what you just said").

I think that political/rhetorical dialog would *benefit*  by careful disclosure of all metaphors being used, but one mode of such dialog is for one or both sides to attempt to interject equivocal meanings... to use a term (or in this case set of terms belonging to a metaphorical domain) to weave an *apparently* logical argument, which is only superficially logical but falls apart when the "correct" meaning of the term(s) are applied.  

So, for instance, much mischief has arisen in evolutionary biology from a failure of theorists to define the limits of their use of such metaphors as “natural selection” and “ adaptation”.  When limits are defined, the surplus meaning of a metaphor is separated into two parts, initially, that which the metaphor-user embraces and that which s/he disclaims.  The embraced part goes on to become the positive heuristic of the metaphor, the “wet edge” along which science develops.

From this line of discussion, I take you to be on the branch of the fault-tree I implied above as a Scientific dialog where *both* sides of the discussion are honestly trying to come to mutual understanding and perhaps advance understanding by combining differing perspectives on the same phenomena.

The disclaimed part, must be further divided into that which was legitimately [logically] disclaimed and that which was disclaimed fraudulently.  For instance, when sociobiologists use the notion of selfish gene, they may legitimately disclaim the idea that genes consciously choose between self-regarding and other-regarding options, but they cannot legitimately disclaim the idea that a gene has the power to make any choice but the self-regarding one.

When Dawkins coined "Selfish Gene",  I felt that the *value* of the metaphor invoked was in the challenge it presents:

  And that idea is patently false.  Genes do not make choices

Patently Genes do not make choices in the sense that we usually mean "make choices", yet the strong implication is that the phenomena functions *as if* they do, in "all other ways".   There may be (useful) hairsplitting between "all other ways" and "many other ways" which is an important aspect of analogical thinking. 

, they ARE choices and the choice is made at the level of the phenotype or at the level of the population, depending on how one thinks about the matter.  So the metaphor ‘selfish gene’ is pernicious in evolutionary biology, because it creates confusion on the very point that it purports to clarify – the level at which differential replication operates to generate long term phenotypic change in a population.

I would challenge this as I think my verbage above outlines.   I do not believe that the metaphor *purports* to clarify what you say it does. 

[NST==> HORSEFEATHERS! One or two generations of sociobiologists were directed away from group level explanations by this pernicious metaphor.  <==nst]

It *strives* to provide a cognitive shortcut and to establish a fairly strong metaphor which deserves careful dissection to understand the particulars of the *target domain*.   An important question in the target domain becomes "why does the shortcut of thinking of genes as selfish actually have some level of accuracy as a description of the phenomena when in fact the mechanisms involved do not support that directly?"

[NST==>I don’t think it does.  I think it’s a subtle and largely successful attempt to import Spenserian ideology in to evolutionary biology.  <==nst]

For all I know, EB has entirely debunked the concept and there is NO utility in the idea of a "selfish gene"... 

Bruce Sherwood likes to make the point that the analogy of hydraulic systems for DC circuits is misleading.   I forget the specifics of where he shows that the analogy breaks down, but it is well below (or above?) the level of "normal" DC circuit understanding and manipulation.   For the kinds of problems I work with using DC circuits, a "battery" is a "tank of water at some height", the Voltage out of the battery is the water Pressure, the amount of Current is the Volume of water, a Diode is a one-way valve,  a resistor is any hydraulic element which conserves water but reduces pressure through what is nominally friction, etc.    As you point out, there is plenty of "excess meaning" around hydraulics as source domain, and "insufficient meaning" around DC circuits as target domain, and if one is to use the analogy effectively one must either understand those over/under mappings, or be operating within only the smaller apt-portion of the domains.   For example, I don't know what the equivalent of an anti-hammer stub (probably a little like a capacitor in parallel?) is but that is no longer describing a simple DC circuit.

[NST==>I think I am back to heartily agreeing. <==nst]

A farmer buying his first tractor may try to understand it using the source domain of "draft animal" and can't go particularly wrong by doing things like "giving it a rest off and on to let it cool down", "planning to feed it well before expecting it to work", "putting it away, out of the elements when not in use", etc.  your "excess meaning" would seem to be things like the farmer going out and trying to top off the fuel every day even when he was not using the tractor, or maybe taking it out for a spin every day to keep it exercised and accustomed to being driven.   The farmer *might* understand "changing the oil" and "cleaning the plugs" and "adjusting the points" vaguely like "deworming" and "cleaning the hooves" but the analogy is pretty wide of the mark beyond the simple idea that "things need attending to".

[NST==>OoooooH.  I like the above!  May I plaigiarise it some day?  Do you by any chance know Epamanondas from your childhood.  Very politically incorrect, now, I fear, but endlessly instructive on the perils of over using metaphors.  <==nst]

 

PS – Is anybody on this list (among the handful that have gotten this far in this post) familiar with the work of Douglas Walton?

I just took a look and his work does sound interesting (and relevant).

He seems perhaps to have written a lot about misunderstandings in AI systems … i.e., how does Siri know what we mean? 

By AI, it seems you mean (the subset of) Natural Language Understanding?

I am also reminded by reading the Wikipedia article on his work that I haven't responded to Glen's question about the "theorem dependency project".

I came to this work through my interest in abduction, which may be described as the process by which we identify (ascribe meaning to?) experiences.  Walton seems to suggest that you-guys are way ahead of the rest of us on the process of meaning ascription, and we all should go to school with you.  Please tell me where and when you offer the class.

I assume the "you-guys" referred to here are the hard core CS/Modeling folks (e.g. Glen, Marcus, Dave, ...).  I do think that the challenges of "explaining things to a machine" do require some rigor, as does formal mathematics and systems like the aforementioned "theorem dependency project".

- Steve

PS.  It has been noted that my long-winded explanation of my (poorly adhered to) typographical conventions for around "reserved terms" and the  like was perhaps defensive.  I didn't mean to sound defensive, I just wanted to be more precise and complete to (possibly) reduce misunderstandings.   I don't imagine many read the entireity of my missives, but as often as not,  when people do read and respond, I sense that some of my conventions are not recognized.

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Gillian Densmore]

I'm totes most my moods and it ain't that deep!

Today I was tanked out from adulting.

Now I'm recharged more.

It's fucking awesome out. So I am happyer do to fucking bad ass weather. Spring I am nesaulgic.

I have a poor sense of social skill.

I am often sore after a jog or a work out bat the gym.

Seems to me just not that deep. In my opinion.

On Fri, Mar 29, 2019, 9:29 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Steve,

 

We were doing SO WELL until we got to … oh, see my “HORSEFEATHERS!” below.

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Friday, March 29, 2019 9:39 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

 

On 3/28/19 1:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Steve, ‘n all,

 

Just to be cranky, I want to remind everybody that ALL language use, except perhaps tautological expressions, is metaphorical.

I ascribe to this idea as well, following Lakoff and Johnson in their 1980 _Metaphors we Live by_ .

  So then, the question is not, “Is this a metaphor”, but what kind of a metaphor is it and is it pernicious.

I believe that ultimately conceptual metaphor is no more nor less than the intuitive application of a model, and as is often mentioned "all models are wrong, some are useful".    You use the term pernicious which suggests *harmful*, I presume either intentionally so or more from sloppiness or ignorance.

My own view is that in any “tense” conversation – one in which the parties feel the words really matter – it behooves a metaphor-user to define the limits of the metaphor.

I agree that "tense" conversations are different than "casual" ones if that is your distinction.  Unfortunately, outside of Science/Engineering contexts, I find that "tense" conversations are at their root political or at least rhetorical.   One or both sides are really *serious* about being believed.   If not believed in fact ("I believe what you just said") then in principle ("I believe that you believe what you just said").

I think that political/rhetorical dialog would *benefit*  by careful disclosure of all metaphors being used, but one mode of such dialog is for one or both sides to attempt to interject equivocal meanings... to use a term (or in this case set of terms belonging to a metaphorical domain) to weave an *apparently* logical argument, which is only superficially logical but falls apart when the "correct" meaning of the term(s) are applied.  

So, for instance, much mischief has arisen in evolutionary biology from a failure of theorists to define the limits of their use of such metaphors as “natural selection” and “ adaptation”.  When limits are defined, the surplus meaning of a metaphor is separated into two parts, initially, that which the metaphor-user embraces and that which s/he disclaims.  The embraced part goes on to become the positive heuristic of the metaphor, the “wet edge” along which science develops.

From this line of discussion, I take you to be on the branch of the fault-tree I implied above as a Scientific dialog where *both* sides of the discussion are honestly trying to come to mutual understanding and perhaps advance understanding by combining differing perspectives on the same phenomena.

The disclaimed part, must be further divided into that which was legitimately [logically] disclaimed and that which was disclaimed fraudulently.  For instance, when sociobiologists use the notion of selfish gene, they may legitimately disclaim the idea that genes consciously choose between self-regarding and other-regarding options, but they cannot legitimately disclaim the idea that a gene has the power to make any choice but the self-regarding one.

When Dawkins coined "Selfish Gene",  I felt that the *value* of the metaphor invoked was in the challenge it presents:

  And that idea is patently false.  Genes do not make choices

Patently Genes do not make choices in the sense that we usually mean "make choices", yet the strong implication is that the phenomena functions *as if* they do, in "all other ways".   There may be (useful) hairsplitting between "all other ways" and "many other ways" which is an important aspect of analogical thinking. 

, they ARE choices and the choice is made at the level of the phenotype or at the level of the population, depending on how one thinks about the matter.  So the metaphor ‘selfish gene’ is pernicious in evolutionary biology, because it creates confusion on the very point that it purports to clarify – the level at which differential replication operates to generate long term phenotypic change in a population.

I would challenge this as I think my verbage above outlines.   I do not believe that the metaphor *purports* to clarify what you say it does. 

[NST==> HORSEFEATHERS! One or two generations of sociobiologists were directed away from group level explanations by this pernicious metaphor.  <==nst]

It *strives* to provide a cognitive shortcut and to establish a fairly strong metaphor which deserves careful dissection to understand the particulars of the *target domain*.   An important question in the target domain becomes "why does the shortcut of thinking of genes as selfish actually have some level of accuracy as a description of the phenomena when in fact the mechanisms involved do not support that directly?"

[NST==>I don’t think it does.  I think it’s a subtle and largely successful attempt to import Spenserian ideology in to evolutionary biology.  <==nst]

For all I know, EB has entirely debunked the concept and there is NO utility in the idea of a "selfish gene"... 

Bruce Sherwood likes to make the point that the analogy of hydraulic systems for DC circuits is misleading.   I forget the specifics of where he shows that the analogy breaks down, but it is well below (or above?) the level of "normal" DC circuit understanding and manipulation.   For the kinds of problems I work with using DC circuits, a "battery" is a "tank of water at some height", the Voltage out of the battery is the water Pressure, the amount of Current is the Volume of water, a Diode is a one-way valve,  a resistor is any hydraulic element which conserves water but reduces pressure through what is nominally friction, etc.    As you point out, there is plenty of "excess meaning" around hydraulics as source domain, and "insufficient meaning" around DC circuits as target domain, and if one is to use the analogy effectively one must either understand those over/under mappings, or be operating within only the smaller apt-portion of the domains.   For example, I don't know what the equivalent of an anti-hammer stub (probably a little like a capacitor in parallel?) is but that is no longer describing a simple DC circuit.

[NST==>I think I am back to heartily agreeing. <==nst]

A farmer buying his first tractor may try to understand it using the source domain of "draft animal" and can't go particularly wrong by doing things like "giving it a rest off and on to let it cool down", "planning to feed it well before expecting it to work", "putting it away, out of the elements when not in use", etc.  your "excess meaning" would seem to be things like the farmer going out and trying to top off the fuel every day even when he was not using the tractor, or maybe taking it out for a spin every day to keep it exercised and accustomed to being driven.   The farmer *might* understand "changing the oil" and "cleaning the plugs" and "adjusting the points" vaguely like "deworming" and "cleaning the hooves" but the analogy is pretty wide of the mark beyond the simple idea that "things need attending to".

[NST==>OoooooH.  I like the above!  May I plaigiarise it some day?  Do you by any chance know Epamanondas from your childhood.  Very politically incorrect, now, I fear, but endlessly instructive on the perils of over using metaphors.  <==nst]

 

PS – Is anybody on this list (among the handful that have gotten this far in this post) familiar with the work of Douglas Walton?

I just took a look and his work does sound interesting (and relevant).

He seems perhaps to have written a lot about misunderstandings in AI systems … i.e., how does Siri know what we mean? 

By AI, it seems you mean (the subset of) Natural Language Understanding?

I am also reminded by reading the Wikipedia article on his work that I haven't responded to Glen's question about the "theorem dependency project".

I came to this work through my interest in abduction, which may be described as the process by which we identify (ascribe meaning to?) experiences.  Walton seems to suggest that you-guys are way ahead of the rest of us on the process of meaning ascription, and we all should go to school with you.  Please tell me where and when you offer the class.

I assume the "you-guys" referred to here are the hard core CS/Modeling folks (e.g. Glen, Marcus, Dave, ...).  I do think that the challenges of "explaining things to a machine" do require some rigor, as does formal mathematics and systems like the aforementioned "theorem dependency project".

- Steve

PS.  It has been noted that my long-winded explanation of my (poorly adhered to) typographical conventions for around "reserved terms" and the  like was perhaps defensive.  I didn't mean to sound defensive, I just wanted to be more precise and complete to (possibly) reduce misunderstandings.   I don't imagine many read the entireity of my missives, but as often as not,  when people do read and respond, I sense that some of my conventions are not recognized.

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Gillian Densmore]

[hidden email]

 

Just my opinion it's not that deep as to if we are how we behave My friend who's class fell appart she was frustrated and depressed that something she enjoys doing fell appart. So what was she? depressed and frustrated.

I go through bouts of depression. So how do I act? frustrated, moody, and people for the most part say you(me in this care) are fragile or down, or what have you.

Or the other extreme: after a work out I feel fantastic. Seems like I uncously act and just are a bit more peppy then.

On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 9:29 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Steve,

 

We were doing SO WELL until we got to … oh, see my “HORSEFEATHERS!” below.

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Friday, March 29, 2019 9:39 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

 

On 3/28/19 1:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Steve, ‘n all,

 

Just to be cranky, I want to remind everybody that ALL language use, except perhaps tautological expressions, is metaphorical.

I ascribe to this idea as well, following Lakoff and Johnson in their 1980 _Metaphors we Live by_ .

  So then, the question is not, “Is this a metaphor”, but what kind of a metaphor is it and is it pernicious.

I believe that ultimately conceptual metaphor is no more nor less than the intuitive application of a model, and as is often mentioned "all models are wrong, some are useful".    You use the term pernicious which suggests *harmful*, I presume either intentionally so or more from sloppiness or ignorance.

My own view is that in any “tense” conversation – one in which the parties feel the words really matter – it behooves a metaphor-user to define the limits of the metaphor.

I agree that "tense" conversations are different than "casual" ones if that is your distinction.  Unfortunately, outside of Science/Engineering contexts, I find that "tense" conversations are at their root political or at least rhetorical.   One or both sides are really *serious* about being believed.   If not believed in fact ("I believe what you just said") then in principle ("I believe that you believe what you just said").

I think that political/rhetorical dialog would *benefit*  by careful disclosure of all metaphors being used, but one mode of such dialog is for one or both sides to attempt to interject equivocal meanings... to use a term (or in this case set of terms belonging to a metaphorical domain) to weave an *apparently* logical argument, which is only superficially logical but falls apart when the "correct" meaning of the term(s) are applied.  

So, for instance, much mischief has arisen in evolutionary biology from a failure of theorists to define the limits of their use of such metaphors as “natural selection” and “ adaptation”.  When limits are defined, the surplus meaning of a metaphor is separated into two parts, initially, that which the metaphor-user embraces and that which s/he disclaims.  The embraced part goes on to become the positive heuristic of the metaphor, the “wet edge” along which science develops.

From this line of discussion, I take you to be on the branch of the fault-tree I implied above as a Scientific dialog where *both* sides of the discussion are honestly trying to come to mutual understanding and perhaps advance understanding by combining differing perspectives on the same phenomena.

The disclaimed part, must be further divided into that which was legitimately [logically] disclaimed and that which was disclaimed fraudulently.  For instance, when sociobiologists use the notion of selfish gene, they may legitimately disclaim the idea that genes consciously choose between self-regarding and other-regarding options, but they cannot legitimately disclaim the idea that a gene has the power to make any choice but the self-regarding one.

When Dawkins coined "Selfish Gene",  I felt that the *value* of the metaphor invoked was in the challenge it presents:

  And that idea is patently false.  Genes do not make choices

Patently Genes do not make choices in the sense that we usually mean "make choices", yet the strong implication is that the phenomena functions *as if* they do, in "all other ways".   There may be (useful) hairsplitting between "all other ways" and "many other ways" which is an important aspect of analogical thinking. 

, they ARE choices and the choice is made at the level of the phenotype or at the level of the population, depending on how one thinks about the matter.  So the metaphor ‘selfish gene’ is pernicious in evolutionary biology, because it creates confusion on the very point that it purports to clarify – the level at which differential replication operates to generate long term phenotypic change in a population.

I would challenge this as I think my verbage above outlines.   I do not believe that the metaphor *purports* to clarify what you say it does. 

[NST==> HORSEFEATHERS! One or two generations of sociobiologists were directed away from group level explanations by this pernicious metaphor.  <==nst]

It *strives* to provide a cognitive shortcut and to establish a fairly strong metaphor which deserves careful dissection to understand the particulars of the *target domain*.   An important question in the target domain becomes "why does the shortcut of thinking of genes as selfish actually have some level of accuracy as a description of the phenomena when in fact the mechanisms involved do not support that directly?"

[NST==>I don’t think it does.  I think it’s a subtle and largely successful attempt to import Spenserian ideology in to evolutionary biology.  <==nst]

For all I know, EB has entirely debunked the concept and there is NO utility in the idea of a "selfish gene"... 

Bruce Sherwood likes to make the point that the analogy of hydraulic systems for DC circuits is misleading.   I forget the specifics of where he shows that the analogy breaks down, but it is well below (or above?) the level of "normal" DC circuit understanding and manipulation.   For the kinds of problems I work with using DC circuits, a "battery" is a "tank of water at some height", the Voltage out of the battery is the water Pressure, the amount of Current is the Volume of water, a Diode is a one-way valve,  a resistor is any hydraulic element which conserves water but reduces pressure through what is nominally friction, etc.    As you point out, there is plenty of "excess meaning" around hydraulics as source domain, and "insufficient meaning" around DC circuits as target domain, and if one is to use the analogy effectively one must either understand those over/under mappings, or be operating within only the smaller apt-portion of the domains.   For example, I don't know what the equivalent of an anti-hammer stub (probably a little like a capacitor in parallel?) is but that is no longer describing a simple DC circuit.

[NST==>I think I am back to heartily agreeing. <==nst]

A farmer buying his first tractor may try to understand it using the source domain of "draft animal" and can't go particularly wrong by doing things like "giving it a rest off and on to let it cool down", "planning to feed it well before expecting it to work", "putting it away, out of the elements when not in use", etc.  your "excess meaning" would seem to be things like the farmer going out and trying to top off the fuel every day even when he was not using the tractor, or maybe taking it out for a spin every day to keep it exercised and accustomed to being driven.   The farmer *might* understand "changing the oil" and "cleaning the plugs" and "adjusting the points" vaguely like "deworming" and "cleaning the hooves" but the analogy is pretty wide of the mark beyond the simple idea that "things need attending to".

[NST==>OoooooH.  I like the above!  May I plaigiarise it some day?  Do you by any chance know Epamanondas from your childhood.  Very politically incorrect, now, I fear, but endlessly instructive on the perils of over using metaphors.  <==nst]

 

PS – Is anybody on this list (among the handful that have gotten this far in this post) familiar with the work of Douglas Walton?

I just took a look and his work does sound interesting (and relevant).

He seems perhaps to have written a lot about misunderstandings in AI systems … i.e., how does Siri know what we mean? 

By AI, it seems you mean (the subset of) Natural Language Understanding?

I am also reminded by reading the Wikipedia article on his work that I haven't responded to Glen's question about the "theorem dependency project".

I came to this work through my interest in abduction, which may be described as the process by which we identify (ascribe meaning to?) experiences.  Walton seems to suggest that you-guys are way ahead of the rest of us on the process of meaning ascription, and we all should go to school with you.  Please tell me where and when you offer the class.

I assume the "you-guys" referred to here are the hard core CS/Modeling folks (e.g. Glen, Marcus, Dave, ...).  I do think that the challenges of "explaining things to a machine" do require some rigor, as does formal mathematics and systems like the aforementioned "theorem dependency project".

- Steve

PS.  It has been noted that my long-winded explanation of my (poorly adhered to) typographical conventions for around "reserved terms" and the  like was perhaps defensive.  I didn't mean to sound defensive, I just wanted to be more precise and complete to (possibly) reduce misunderstandings.   I don't imagine many read the entireity of my missives, but as often as not,  when people do read and respond, I sense that some of my conventions are not recognized.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Steve Smith]

Nick -

Thank you for your kind words.

We were doing SO WELL until we got to … oh, see my “HORSEFEATHERS!” below.

I'll see your HORSEFEATHERS and raise you a CONFLATION ALERT!

 

[NST==> HORSEFEATHERS! One or two generations of sociobiologists were directed away from group level explanations by this pernicious metaphor.  <==nst]

Just to split hairs, I will claim that Dawkins wasn't "striving" (nor was his metaphor by extension) to direct sociobiologists away from anything, he was merely offering another way of looking at the problem.  You of course are in a much better position than I to know how he conducted himself during this time.  As an entirely outside outsider, I have no idea what he was pushing the community for.   At the time, I just saw him as a disruptor with a significantly novel metaphor to be offered.

At our "Salon" at Jenny's 2 summers ago, we rambled on about metaphor quite a bit for a couple hours in the cool shade of her arbor with cool drinks in hand.   Dave West, as I remember, was mostly incensed at the way the AI community had gone astray for more than a while by taking the "Machine Metaphor for Mind" too literally.   It seems to me that might be what the sociobiology community did?

We often conflate what something was intended to do/be with what we hope/fear most from it.   I offer that might be what happened in both cases, actually granting the worsh(ish) case more power over the imagination than appropriate, then *blaming* the source of the "pernicuous idea" for being more "pernicous" than it really was (intended)?

In any case, even if Dawkins *was* dead set on ramming the Selfish Gene Metaphor through the hearts of all more mature models,  I guess I'm calling out a "group phenomena" where the actual disruptive idea or person ends up being given more power (like a boogeyman) than it deserves, *thereby* participating in a self-fulfilling prophecy?

I think Trumpism is one of those... He was just trying to tweak up his brand and now he's halfway to being the world-dictator, and we helped do it by under-estimating the hope/fear we carry around the topics he tweaked in us?

It *strives* to provide a cognitive shortcut and to establish a fairly strong metaphor which deserves careful dissection to understand the particulars of the *target domain*.   An important question in the target domain becomes "why does the shortcut of thinking of genes as selfish actually have some level of accuracy as a description of the phenomena when in fact the mechanisms involved do not support that directly?"

[NST==>I don’t think it does.  I think it’s a subtle and largely successful attempt to import Spenserian ideology in to evolutionary biology.  <==nst]

I have to admit to having a nearly belligerent (maybe only willfully) naive view of ulterior motives in the Sciences.  I know that competition of this type exists and that it may well be pervasive, but I have to admit to not thinking in those terms until prompted.  

For all I know, EB has entirely debunked the concept and there is NO utility in the idea of a "selfish gene"... 

Bruce Sherwood likes to make the point that the analogy of hydraulic systems for DC circuits is misleading.   I forget the specifics of where he shows that the analogy breaks down, but it is well below (or above?) the level of "normal" DC circuit understanding and manipulation.   For the kinds of problems I work with using DC circuits, a "battery" is a "tank of water at some height", the Voltage out of the battery is the water Pressure, the amount of Current is the Volume of water, a Diode is a one-way valve,  a resistor is any hydraulic element which conserves water but reduces pressure through what is nominally friction, etc.    As you point out, there is plenty of "excess meaning" around hydraulics as source domain, and "insufficient meaning" around DC circuits as target domain, and if one is to use the analogy effectively one must either understand those over/under mappings, or be operating within only the smaller apt-portion of the domains.   For example, I don't know what the equivalent of an anti-hammer stub (probably a little like a capacitor in parallel?) is but that is no longer describing a simple DC circuit.

[NST==>I think I am back to heartily agreeing. <==nst]

A farmer buying his first tractor may try to understand it using the source domain of "draft animal" and can't go particularly wrong by doing things like "giving it a rest off and on to let it cool down", "planning to feed it well before expecting it to work", "putting it away, out of the elements when not in use", etc.  your "excess meaning" would seem to be things like the farmer going out and trying to top off the fuel every day even when he was not using the tractor, or maybe taking it out for a spin every day to keep it exercised and accustomed to being driven.   The farmer *might* understand "changing the oil" and "cleaning the plugs" and "adjusting the points" vaguely like "deworming" and "cleaning the hooves" but the analogy is pretty wide of the mark beyond the simple idea that "things need attending to".

[NST==>OoooooH.  I like the above!  May I plaigiarise it some day?  Do you by any chance know Epamanondas from your childhood.  Very politically incorrect, now, I fear, but endlessly instructive on the perils of over using metaphors.  <==nst]

Plagiarize at will. 

I do not know Epaminondas and as I look him up (thanks to the pervasive and at-my-fingertips interwebs) I don't quite get the connection with Metaphor nor Political Incorrectness?

https://www.ancient.eu/Epaminondas/

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Tweaked in them.

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Steven A Smith <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Saturday, March 30, 2019 at 8:52 AM
To: "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

I think Trumpism is one of those... He was just trying to tweak up his brand and now he's halfway to being the world-dictator, and we helped do it by under-estimating the hope/fear we carry around the topics he tweaked in us?

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Nick Thompson]

Hi Steve,

 

Larding below …

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2019 8:52 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

 

Nick -

Thank you for your kind words.

We were doing SO WELL until we got to … oh, see my “HORSEFEATHERS!” below.

I'll see your HORSEFEATHERS and raise you a CONFLATION ALERT!

 

[NST==> HORSEFEATHERS! One or two generations of sociobiologists were directed away from group level explanations by this pernicious metaphor.  <==nst]

Just to split hairs, I will claim that Dawkins wasn't "striving" (nor was his metaphor by extension) to direct sociobiologists away from anything, he was merely offering another way of looking at the problem.  You of course are in a much better position than I to know how he conducted himself during this time. 

[NST==>Well, I did know Dawkins, a bit: he was not one to “merely offer.”  <==nst]

 As an entirely outside outsider, I have no idea what he was pushing the community for.   At the time, I just saw him as a disruptor with a significantly novel metaphor to be offered.

At our "Salon" at Jenny's 2 summers ago, we rambled on about metaphor quite a bit for a couple hours in the cool shade of her arbor with cool drinks in hand.   Dave West, as I remember, was mostly incensed at the way the AI community had gone astray for more than a while by taking the "Machine Metaphor for Mind" too literally.   It seems to me that might be what the sociobiology community did?

We often conflate what something was intended to do/be with what we hope/fear most from it.   I offer that might be what happened in both cases, actually granting the worsh(ish) case more power over the imagination than appropriate, then *blaming* the source of the "pernicuous idea" for being more "pernicous" than it really was (intended)?

In any case, even if Dawkins *was* dead set on ramming the Selfish Gene Metaphor through the hearts of all more mature models,  I guess I'm calling out a "group phenomena" where the actual disruptive idea or person ends up being given more power (like a boogeyman) than it deserves, *thereby* participating in a self-fulfilling prophecy?

I think Trumpism is one of those... He was just trying to tweak up his brand and now he's halfway to being the world-dictator, and we helped do it by under-estimating the hope/fear we carry around the topics he tweaked in us?

It *strives* to provide a cognitive shortcut and to establish a fairly strong metaphor which deserves careful dissection to understand the particulars of the *target domain*.   An important question in the target domain becomes "why does the shortcut of thinking of genes as selfish actually have some level of accuracy as a description of the phenomena when in fact the mechanisms involved do not support that directly?"

[NST==>I don’t think it does.  I think it’s a subtle and largely successful attempt to import Spenserian ideology in to evolutionary biology.  <==nst]

I have to admit to having a nearly belligerent (maybe only willfully) naive view of ulterior motives in the Sciences.  I know that competition of this type exists and that it may well be pervasive, but I have to admit to not thinking in those terms until prompted.  

[NST==>Dawkins became a vigorous and narrow minded anti-religionist.  I forgive him because, after all, “it takes all kinds”, but I don’t think we should be in any doubt about what the “kind” is, in this case. <==nst]

For all I know, EB has entirely debunked the concept and there is NO utility in the idea of a "selfish gene"... 

Bruce Sherwood likes to make the point that the analogy of hydraulic systems for DC circuits is misleading.   I forget the specifics of where he shows that the analogy breaks down, but it is well below (or above?) the level of "normal" DC circuit understanding and manipulation.   For the kinds of problems I work with using DC circuits, a "battery" is a "tank of water at some height", the Voltage out of the battery is the water Pressure, the amount of Current is the Volume of water, a Diode is a one-way valve,  a resistor is any hydraulic element which conserves water but reduces pressure through what is nominally friction, etc.    As you point out, there is plenty of "excess meaning" around hydraulics as source domain, and "insufficient meaning" around DC circuits as target domain, and if one is to use the analogy effectively one must either understand those over/under mappings, or be operating within only the smaller apt-portion of the domains.   For example, I don't know what the equivalent of an anti-hammer stub (probably a little like a capacitor in parallel?) is but that is no longer describing a simple DC circuit.

[NST==>I think I am back to heartily agreeing. <==nst]

A farmer buying his first tractor may try to understand it using the source domain of "draft animal" and can't go particularly wrong by doing things like "giving it a rest off and on to let it cool down", "planning to feed it well before expecting it to work", "putting it away, out of the elements when not in use", etc.  your "excess meaning" would seem to be things like the farmer going out and trying to top off the fuel every day even when he was not using the tractor, or maybe taking it out for a spin every day to keep it exercised and accustomed to being driven.   The farmer *might* understand "changing the oil" and "cleaning the plugs" and "adjusting the points" vaguely like "deworming" and "cleaning the hooves" but the analogy is pretty wide of the mark beyond the simple idea that "things need attending to".

[NST==>OoooooH.  I like the above!  May I plaigiarise it some day?  Do you by any chance know Epamanondas from your childhood.  Very politically incorrect, now, I fear, but endlessly instructive on the perils of over using metaphors.  <==nst]

Plagiarize at will. 

I do not know Epaminondas and as I look him up (thanks to the pervasive and at-my-fingertips interwebs) I don't quite get the connection with Metaphor nor Political Incorrectness?

[NST==>Try https://www.uexpress.com/tell-me-a-story/2010/8/29/epaminondas-and-his-aunt-an-american  As I read the text, it’s not inherently racist, except that every publication represented E. as a black child.  In that context, it does make me cringe.  In any case, reading it, I think you will see it as I do as a story about the misapplication of metaphors.  <==nst]

https://www.ancient.eu/Epaminondas/

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Steve Smith]

Aha! 

No, that was not in my childhood training-through-parable, though my mother did read quite a bit to us from "Wind in the Willows" and  the "Uncle Remus" corpii.   Like "Little Black Sambo", both did demonstrate some of the racism (sambo was Indian, not African BTW) of the era in which it was created, often hidden within the choice of animal-characters and their affects.   Fortunately my mother made a point to point some of that out gently and let my sister and I know that it was (intended to be) in the past, and not a pattern for the present or future.

I don't ever intend to discount that metaphor (analogical thinking) can be abused...  and I believe that the more colorful the metaphor, the more seductive it's misuse.

I also appreciate your first-hand knowledge of Dawkins and do recognize that he became a rabid anti-religionist somewhere down the line, and your point that he would never "merely" state anything is relevant to this conversation.

With that, I have to ask:  "can we separate the message from the messenger?" and "to what extent?"

- Steve

Hi Steve,

 

Larding below …

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2019 8:52 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

 

Nick -

Thank you for your kind words.

We were doing SO WELL until we got to … oh, see my “HORSEFEATHERS!” below.

I'll see your HORSEFEATHERS and raise you a CONFLATION ALERT!

 

[NST==> HORSEFEATHERS! One or two generations of sociobiologists were directed away from group level explanations by this pernicious metaphor.  <==nst]

Just to split hairs, I will claim that Dawkins wasn't "striving" (nor was his metaphor by extension) to direct sociobiologists away from anything, he was merely offering another way of looking at the problem.  You of course are in a much better position than I to know how he conducted himself during this time. 

[NST==>Well, I did know Dawkins, a bit: he was not one to “merely offer.”  <==nst]

 As an entirely outside outsider, I have no idea what he was pushing the community for.   At the time, I just saw him as a disruptor with a significantly novel metaphor to be offered.

At our "Salon" at Jenny's 2 summers ago, we rambled on about metaphor quite a bit for a couple hours in the cool shade of her arbor with cool drinks in hand.   Dave West, as I remember, was mostly incensed at the way the AI community had gone astray for more than a while by taking the "Machine Metaphor for Mind" too literally.   It seems to me that might be what the sociobiology community did?

We often conflate what something was intended to do/be with what we hope/fear most from it.   I offer that might be what happened in both cases, actually granting the worsh(ish) case more power over the imagination than appropriate, then *blaming* the source of the "pernicuous idea" for being more "pernicous" than it really was (intended)?

In any case, even if Dawkins *was* dead set on ramming the Selfish Gene Metaphor through the hearts of all more mature models,  I guess I'm calling out a "group phenomena" where the actual disruptive idea or person ends up being given more power (like a boogeyman) than it deserves, *thereby* participating in a self-fulfilling prophecy?

I think Trumpism is one of those... He was just trying to tweak up his brand and now he's halfway to being the world-dictator, and we helped do it by under-estimating the hope/fear we carry around the topics he tweaked in us?

It *strives* to provide a cognitive shortcut and to establish a fairly strong metaphor which deserves careful dissection to understand the particulars of the *target domain*.   An important question in the target domain becomes "why does the shortcut of thinking of genes as selfish actually have some level of accuracy as a description of the phenomena when in fact the mechanisms involved do not support that directly?"

[NST==>I don’t think it does.  I think it’s a subtle and largely successful attempt to import Spenserian ideology in to evolutionary biology.  <==nst]

I have to admit to having a nearly belligerent (maybe only willfully) naive view of ulterior motives in the Sciences.  I know that competition of this type exists and that it may well be pervasive, but I have to admit to not thinking in those terms until prompted.  

[NST==>Dawkins became a vigorous and narrow minded anti-religionist.  I forgive him because, after all, “it takes all kinds”, but I don’t think we should be in any doubt about what the “kind” is, in this case. <==nst]

For all I know, EB has entirely debunked the concept and there is NO utility in the idea of a "selfish gene"... 

Bruce Sherwood likes to make the point that the analogy of hydraulic systems for DC circuits is misleading.   I forget the specifics of where he shows that the analogy breaks down, but it is well below (or above?) the level of "normal" DC circuit understanding and manipulation.   For the kinds of problems I work with using DC circuits, a "battery" is a "tank of water at some height", the Voltage out of the battery is the water Pressure, the amount of Current is the Volume of water, a Diode is a one-way valve,  a resistor is any hydraulic element which conserves water but reduces pressure through what is nominally friction, etc.    As you point out, there is plenty of "excess meaning" around hydraulics as source domain, and "insufficient meaning" around DC circuits as target domain, and if one is to use the analogy effectively one must either understand those over/under mappings, or be operating within only the smaller apt-portion of the domains.   For example, I don't know what the equivalent of an anti-hammer stub (probably a little like a capacitor in parallel?) is but that is no longer describing a simple DC circuit.

[NST==>I think I am back to heartily agreeing. <==nst]

A farmer buying his first tractor may try to understand it using the source domain of "draft animal" and can't go particularly wrong by doing things like "giving it a rest off and on to let it cool down", "planning to feed it well before expecting it to work", "putting it away, out of the elements when not in use", etc.  your "excess meaning" would seem to be things like the farmer going out and trying to top off the fuel every day even when he was not using the tractor, or maybe taking it out for a spin every day to keep it exercised and accustomed to being driven.   The farmer *might* understand "changing the oil" and "cleaning the plugs" and "adjusting the points" vaguely like "deworming" and "cleaning the hooves" but the analogy is pretty wide of the mark beyond the simple idea that "things need attending to".

[NST==>OoooooH.  I like the above!  May I plaigiarise it some day?  Do you by any chance know Epamanondas from your childhood.  Very politically incorrect, now, I fear, but endlessly instructive on the perils of over using metaphors.  <==nst]

Plagiarize at will. 

I do not know Epaminondas and as I look him up (thanks to the pervasive and at-my-fingertips interwebs) I don't quite get the connection with Metaphor nor Political Incorrectness?

[NST==>Try https://www.uexpress.com/tell-me-a-story/2010/8/29/epaminondas-and-his-aunt-an-american  As I read the text, it’s not inherently racist, except that every publication represented E. as a black child.  In that context, it does make me cringe.  In any case, reading it, I think you will see it as I do as a story about the misapplication of metaphors.  <==nst]

https://www.ancient.eu/Epaminondas/

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[Steve Smith]

Marcus -

I commend you for your ability to remain distant from the subject...   I do believe there is an analogy to the Observer Effect in quantum theory which suggests that one *never* decouples entirely from anything,  though such invocation might represent an abuse of the metaphor and risks indulging in "excess meaning", etc.

Tweaked in them.

 

I think Trumpism is one of those... He was just trying to tweak up his brand and now he's halfway to being the world-dictator, and we helped do it by under-estimating the hope/fear we carry around the topics he tweaked in us?

"Sometimes the most you can do is nothing" - Anonymous friend full of Aphorisms

"To know your enemy, you must become your enemy" - Sun Tzu

"The biggest risk in a confrontation is to *become* your enemy in the process"

"He who must not be named" - JK Rowling

"I just call him 45, I won't reinforce his brand/name"  Anecdotally pervasive

"To be IN the world but not OF the world" - Sufism

"the Observer Effect" - Quantum Theory

- Steve

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[Steve Smith]

Nick -

"Little Black Sambo"

BTW... did you know that the author of the above was the grandmother of the Physicist who discovered the Higgs Boson (and the Higgs-Kibbel mechanism)?

I don't ever intend to discount that metaphor (analogical thinking) can be abused...  and I believe that the more colorful the metaphor, the more seductive it's misuse.

In the "excess meaning" department:

Seems like a personal question, but: "What color is your Metaphor" and "does your wife know you have been seduced by it?"

- Steve

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[Merle Lefkoff-2]

For whatever it's worth, Nick, I'm now using this thread in the work we're doing on the adjacent possible.

On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 9:29 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Steve,

 

We were doing SO WELL until we got to … oh, see my “HORSEFEATHERS!” below.

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Friday, March 29, 2019 9:39 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

 

On 3/28/19 1:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Steve, ‘n all,

 

Just to be cranky, I want to remind everybody that ALL language use, except perhaps tautological expressions, is metaphorical.

I ascribe to this idea as well, following Lakoff and Johnson in their 1980 _Metaphors we Live by_ .

  So then, the question is not, “Is this a metaphor”, but what kind of a metaphor is it and is it pernicious.

I believe that ultimately conceptual metaphor is no more nor less than the intuitive application of a model, and as is often mentioned "all models are wrong, some are useful".    You use the term pernicious which suggests *harmful*, I presume either intentionally so or more from sloppiness or ignorance.

My own view is that in any “tense” conversation – one in which the parties feel the words really matter – it behooves a metaphor-user to define the limits of the metaphor.

I agree that "tense" conversations are different than "casual" ones if that is your distinction.  Unfortunately, outside of Science/Engineering contexts, I find that "tense" conversations are at their root political or at least rhetorical.   One or both sides are really *serious* about being believed.   If not believed in fact ("I believe what you just said") then in principle ("I believe that you believe what you just said").

I think that political/rhetorical dialog would *benefit*  by careful disclosure of all metaphors being used, but one mode of such dialog is for one or both sides to attempt to interject equivocal meanings... to use a term (or in this case set of terms belonging to a metaphorical domain) to weave an *apparently* logical argument, which is only superficially logical but falls apart when the "correct" meaning of the term(s) are applied.  

So, for instance, much mischief has arisen in evolutionary biology from a failure of theorists to define the limits of their use of such metaphors as “natural selection” and “ adaptation”.  When limits are defined, the surplus meaning of a metaphor is separated into two parts, initially, that which the metaphor-user embraces and that which s/he disclaims.  The embraced part goes on to become the positive heuristic of the metaphor, the “wet edge” along which science develops.

From this line of discussion, I take you to be on the branch of the fault-tree I implied above as a Scientific dialog where *both* sides of the discussion are honestly trying to come to mutual understanding and perhaps advance understanding by combining differing perspectives on the same phenomena.

The disclaimed part, must be further divided into that which was legitimately [logically] disclaimed and that which was disclaimed fraudulently.  For instance, when sociobiologists use the notion of selfish gene, they may legitimately disclaim the idea that genes consciously choose between self-regarding and other-regarding options, but they cannot legitimately disclaim the idea that a gene has the power to make any choice but the self-regarding one.

When Dawkins coined "Selfish Gene",  I felt that the *value* of the metaphor invoked was in the challenge it presents:

  And that idea is patently false.  Genes do not make choices

Patently Genes do not make choices in the sense that we usually mean "make choices", yet the strong implication is that the phenomena functions *as if* they do, in "all other ways".   There may be (useful) hairsplitting between "all other ways" and "many other ways" which is an important aspect of analogical thinking. 

, they ARE choices and the choice is made at the level of the phenotype or at the level of the population, depending on how one thinks about the matter.  So the metaphor ‘selfish gene’ is pernicious in evolutionary biology, because it creates confusion on the very point that it purports to clarify – the level at which differential replication operates to generate long term phenotypic change in a population.

I would challenge this as I think my verbage above outlines.   I do not believe that the metaphor *purports* to clarify what you say it does. 

[NST==> HORSEFEATHERS! One or two generations of sociobiologists were directed away from group level explanations by this pernicious metaphor.  <==nst]

It *strives* to provide a cognitive shortcut and to establish a fairly strong metaphor which deserves careful dissection to understand the particulars of the *target domain*.   An important question in the target domain becomes "why does the shortcut of thinking of genes as selfish actually have some level of accuracy as a description of the phenomena when in fact the mechanisms involved do not support that directly?"

[NST==>I don’t think it does.  I think it’s a subtle and largely successful attempt to import Spenserian ideology in to evolutionary biology.  <==nst]

For all I know, EB has entirely debunked the concept and there is NO utility in the idea of a "selfish gene"... 

Bruce Sherwood likes to make the point that the analogy of hydraulic systems for DC circuits is misleading.   I forget the specifics of where he shows that the analogy breaks down, but it is well below (or above?) the level of "normal" DC circuit understanding and manipulation.   For the kinds of problems I work with using DC circuits, a "battery" is a "tank of water at some height", the Voltage out of the battery is the water Pressure, the amount of Current is the Volume of water, a Diode is a one-way valve,  a resistor is any hydraulic element which conserves water but reduces pressure through what is nominally friction, etc.    As you point out, there is plenty of "excess meaning" around hydraulics as source domain, and "insufficient meaning" around DC circuits as target domain, and if one is to use the analogy effectively one must either understand those over/under mappings, or be operating within only the smaller apt-portion of the domains.   For example, I don't know what the equivalent of an anti-hammer stub (probably a little like a capacitor in parallel?) is but that is no longer describing a simple DC circuit.

[NST==>I think I am back to heartily agreeing. <==nst]

A farmer buying his first tractor may try to understand it using the source domain of "draft animal" and can't go particularly wrong by doing things like "giving it a rest off and on to let it cool down", "planning to feed it well before expecting it to work", "putting it away, out of the elements when not in use", etc.  your "excess meaning" would seem to be things like the farmer going out and trying to top off the fuel every day even when he was not using the tractor, or maybe taking it out for a spin every day to keep it exercised and accustomed to being driven.   The farmer *might* understand "changing the oil" and "cleaning the plugs" and "adjusting the points" vaguely like "deworming" and "cleaning the hooves" but the analogy is pretty wide of the mark beyond the simple idea that "things need attending to".

[NST==>OoooooH.  I like the above!  May I plaigiarise it some day?  Do you by any chance know Epamanondas from your childhood.  Very politically incorrect, now, I fear, but endlessly instructive on the perils of over using metaphors.  <==nst]

 

PS – Is anybody on this list (among the handful that have gotten this far in this post) familiar with the work of Douglas Walton?

I just took a look and his work does sound interesting (and relevant).

He seems perhaps to have written a lot about misunderstandings in AI systems … i.e., how does Siri know what we mean? 

By AI, it seems you mean (the subset of) Natural Language Understanding?

I am also reminded by reading the Wikipedia article on his work that I haven't responded to Glen's question about the "theorem dependency project".

I came to this work through my interest in abduction, which may be described as the process by which we identify (ascribe meaning to?) experiences.  Walton seems to suggest that you-guys are way ahead of the rest of us on the process of meaning ascription, and we all should go to school with you.  Please tell me where and when you offer the class.

I assume the "you-guys" referred to here are the hard core CS/Modeling folks (e.g. Glen, Marcus, Dave, ...).  I do think that the challenges of "explaining things to a machine" do require some rigor, as does formal mathematics and systems like the aforementioned "theorem dependency project".

- Steve

PS.  It has been noted that my long-winded explanation of my (poorly adhered to) typographical conventions for around "reserved terms" and the  like was perhaps defensive.  I didn't mean to sound defensive, I just wanted to be more precise and complete to (possibly) reduce misunderstandings.   I don't imagine many read the entireity of my missives, but as often as not,  when people do read and respond, I sense that some of my conventions are not recognized.

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--

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[Nick Thompson]

M.,

 

Is that like “nudge”?

 

N.

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2019 1:04 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

For whatever it's worth, Nick, I'm now using this thread in the work we're doing on the adjacent possible.

 

On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 9:29 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Steve,

 

We were doing SO WELL until we got to … oh, see my “HORSEFEATHERS!” below.

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Friday, March 29, 2019 9:39 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

 

On 3/28/19 1:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Steve, ‘n all,

 

Just to be cranky, I want to remind everybody that ALL language use, except perhaps tautological expressions, is metaphorical.

I ascribe to this idea as well, following Lakoff and Johnson in their 1980 _Metaphors we Live by_ .

  So then, the question is not, “Is this a metaphor”, but what kind of a metaphor is it and is it pernicious.

I believe that ultimately conceptual metaphor is no more nor less than the intuitive application of a model, and as is often mentioned "all models are wrong, some are useful".    You use the term pernicious which suggests *harmful*, I presume either intentionally so or more from sloppiness or ignorance.

My own view is that in any “tense” conversation – one in which the parties feel the words really matter – it behooves a metaphor-user to define the limits of the metaphor.

I agree that "tense" conversations are different than "casual" ones if that is your distinction.  Unfortunately, outside of Science/Engineering contexts, I find that "tense" conversations are at their root political or at least rhetorical.   One or both sides are really *serious* about being believed.   If not believed in fact ("I believe what you just said") then in principle ("I believe that you believe what you just said").

I think that political/rhetorical dialog would *benefit*  by careful disclosure of all metaphors being used, but one mode of such dialog is for one or both sides to attempt to interject equivocal meanings... to use a term (or in this case set of terms belonging to a metaphorical domain) to weave an *apparently* logical argument, which is only superficially logical but falls apart when the "correct" meaning of the term(s) are applied.  

So, for instance, much mischief has arisen in evolutionary biology from a failure of theorists to define the limits of their use of such metaphors as “natural selection” and “ adaptation”.  When limits are defined, the surplus meaning of a metaphor is separated into two parts, initially, that which the metaphor-user embraces and that which s/he disclaims.  The embraced part goes on to become the positive heuristic of the metaphor, the “wet edge” along which science develops.

From this line of discussion, I take you to be on the branch of the fault-tree I implied above as a Scientific dialog where *both* sides of the discussion are honestly trying to come to mutual understanding and perhaps advance understanding by combining differing perspectives on the same phenomena.

The disclaimed part, must be further divided into that which was legitimately [logically] disclaimed and that which was disclaimed fraudulently.  For instance, when sociobiologists use the notion of selfish gene, they may legitimately disclaim the idea that genes consciously choose between self-regarding and other-regarding options, but they cannot legitimately disclaim the idea that a gene has the power to make any choice but the self-regarding one.

When Dawkins coined "Selfish Gene",  I felt that the *value* of the metaphor invoked was in the challenge it presents:

  And that idea is patently false.  Genes do not make choices

Patently Genes do not make choices in the sense that we usually mean "make choices", yet the strong implication is that the phenomena functions *as if* they do, in "all other ways".   There may be (useful) hairsplitting between "all other ways" and "many other ways" which is an important aspect of analogical thinking. 

, they ARE choices and the choice is made at the level of the phenotype or at the level of the population, depending on how one thinks about the matter.  So the metaphor ‘selfish gene’ is pernicious in evolutionary biology, because it creates confusion on the very point that it purports to clarify – the level at which differential replication operates to generate long term phenotypic change in a population.

I would challenge this as I think my verbage above outlines.   I do not believe that the metaphor *purports* to clarify what you say it does. 

[NST==> HORSEFEATHERS! One or two generations of sociobiologists were directed away from group level explanations by this pernicious metaphor.  <==nst]

It *strives* to provide a cognitive shortcut and to establish a fairly strong metaphor which deserves careful dissection to understand the particulars of the *target domain*.   An important question in the target domain becomes "why does the shortcut of thinking of genes as selfish actually have some level of accuracy as a description of the phenomena when in fact the mechanisms involved do not support that directly?"

[NST==>I don’t think it does.  I think it’s a subtle and largely successful attempt to import Spenserian ideology in to evolutionary biology.  <==nst]

For all I know, EB has entirely debunked the concept and there is NO utility in the idea of a "selfish gene"... 

Bruce Sherwood likes to make the point that the analogy of hydraulic systems for DC circuits is misleading.   I forget the specifics of where he shows that the analogy breaks down, but it is well below (or above?) the level of "normal" DC circuit understanding and manipulation.   For the kinds of problems I work with using DC circuits, a "battery" is a "tank of water at some height", the Voltage out of the battery is the water Pressure, the amount of Current is the Volume of water, a Diode is a one-way valve,  a resistor is any hydraulic element which conserves water but reduces pressure through what is nominally friction, etc.    As you point out, there is plenty of "excess meaning" around hydraulics as source domain, and "insufficient meaning" around DC circuits as target domain, and if one is to use the analogy effectively one must either understand those over/under mappings, or be operating within only the smaller apt-portion of the domains.   For example, I don't know what the equivalent of an anti-hammer stub (probably a little like a capacitor in parallel?) is but that is no longer describing a simple DC circuit.

[NST==>I think I am back to heartily agreeing. <==nst]

A farmer buying his first tractor may try to understand it using the source domain of "draft animal" and can't go particularly wrong by doing things like "giving it a rest off and on to let it cool down", "planning to feed it well before expecting it to work", "putting it away, out of the elements when not in use", etc.  your "excess meaning" would seem to be things like the farmer going out and trying to top off the fuel every day even when he was not using the tractor, or maybe taking it out for a spin every day to keep it exercised and accustomed to being driven.   The farmer *might* understand "changing the oil" and "cleaning the plugs" and "adjusting the points" vaguely like "deworming" and "cleaning the hooves" but the analogy is pretty wide of the mark beyond the simple idea that "things need attending to".

[NST==>OoooooH.  I like the above!  May I plaigiarise it some day?  Do you by any chance know Epamanondas from your childhood.  Very politically incorrect, now, I fear, but endlessly instructive on the perils of over using metaphors.  <==nst]

 

PS – Is anybody on this list (among the handful that have gotten this far in this post) familiar with the work of Douglas Walton?

I just took a look and his work does sound interesting (and relevant).

He seems perhaps to have written a lot about misunderstandings in AI systems … i.e., how does Siri know what we mean? 

By AI, it seems you mean (the subset of) Natural Language Understanding?

I am also reminded by reading the Wikipedia article on his work that I haven't responded to Glen's question about the "theorem dependency project".

I came to this work through my interest in abduction, which may be described as the process by which we identify (ascribe meaning to?) experiences.  Walton seems to suggest that you-guys are way ahead of the rest of us on the process of meaning ascription, and we all should go to school with you.  Please tell me where and when you offer the class.

I assume the "you-guys" referred to here are the hard core CS/Modeling folks (e.g. Glen, Marcus, Dave, ...).  I do think that the challenges of "explaining things to a machine" do require some rigor, as does formal mathematics and systems like the aforementioned "theorem dependency project".

- Steve

PS.  It has been noted that my long-winded explanation of my (poorly adhered to) typographical conventions for around "reserved terms" and the  like was perhaps defensive.  I didn't mean to sound defensive, I just wanted to be more precise and complete to (possibly) reduce misunderstandings.   I don't imagine many read the entireity of my missives, but as often as not,  when people do read and respond, I sense that some of my conventions are not recognized.

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]
mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

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

[Merle Lefkoff-2]

N.

No. 

On Sat, Mar 30, 2019 at 1:30 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

M.,

 

Is that like “nudge”?

 

N.

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2019 1:04 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

For whatever it's worth, Nick, I'm now using this thread in the work we're doing on the adjacent possible.

 

On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 9:29 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Steve,

 

We were doing SO WELL until we got to … oh, see my “HORSEFEATHERS!” below.

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Friday, March 29, 2019 9:39 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

 

On 3/28/19 1:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Steve, ‘n all,

 

Just to be cranky, I want to remind everybody that ALL language use, except perhaps tautological expressions, is metaphorical.

I ascribe to this idea as well, following Lakoff and Johnson in their 1980 _Metaphors we Live by_ .

  So then, the question is not, “Is this a metaphor”, but what kind of a metaphor is it and is it pernicious.

I believe that ultimately conceptual metaphor is no more nor less than the intuitive application of a model, and as is often mentioned "all models are wrong, some are useful".    You use the term pernicious which suggests *harmful*, I presume either intentionally so or more from sloppiness or ignorance.

My own view is that in any “tense” conversation – one in which the parties feel the words really matter – it behooves a metaphor-user to define the limits of the metaphor.

I agree that "tense" conversations are different than "casual" ones if that is your distinction.  Unfortunately, outside of Science/Engineering contexts, I find that "tense" conversations are at their root political or at least rhetorical.   One or both sides are really *serious* about being believed.   If not believed in fact ("I believe what you just said") then in principle ("I believe that you believe what you just said").

I think that political/rhetorical dialog would *benefit*  by careful disclosure of all metaphors being used, but one mode of such dialog is for one or both sides to attempt to interject equivocal meanings... to use a term (or in this case set of terms belonging to a metaphorical domain) to weave an *apparently* logical argument, which is only superficially logical but falls apart when the "correct" meaning of the term(s) are applied.  

So, for instance, much mischief has arisen in evolutionary biology from a failure of theorists to define the limits of their use of such metaphors as “natural selection” and “ adaptation”.  When limits are defined, the surplus meaning of a metaphor is separated into two parts, initially, that which the metaphor-user embraces and that which s/he disclaims.  The embraced part goes on to become the positive heuristic of the metaphor, the “wet edge” along which science develops.

From this line of discussion, I take you to be on the branch of the fault-tree I implied above as a Scientific dialog where *both* sides of the discussion are honestly trying to come to mutual understanding and perhaps advance understanding by combining differing perspectives on the same phenomena.

The disclaimed part, must be further divided into that which was legitimately [logically] disclaimed and that which was disclaimed fraudulently.  For instance, when sociobiologists use the notion of selfish gene, they may legitimately disclaim the idea that genes consciously choose between self-regarding and other-regarding options, but they cannot legitimately disclaim the idea that a gene has the power to make any choice but the self-regarding one.

When Dawkins coined "Selfish Gene",  I felt that the *value* of the metaphor invoked was in the challenge it presents:

  And that idea is patently false.  Genes do not make choices

Patently Genes do not make choices in the sense that we usually mean "make choices", yet the strong implication is that the phenomena functions *as if* they do, in "all other ways".   There may be (useful) hairsplitting between "all other ways" and "many other ways" which is an important aspect of analogical thinking. 

, they ARE choices and the choice is made at the level of the phenotype or at the level of the population, depending on how one thinks about the matter.  So the metaphor ‘selfish gene’ is pernicious in evolutionary biology, because it creates confusion on the very point that it purports to clarify – the level at which differential replication operates to generate long term phenotypic change in a population.

I would challenge this as I think my verbage above outlines.   I do not believe that the metaphor *purports* to clarify what you say it does. 

[NST==> HORSEFEATHERS! One or two generations of sociobiologists were directed away from group level explanations by this pernicious metaphor.  <==nst]

It *strives* to provide a cognitive shortcut and to establish a fairly strong metaphor which deserves careful dissection to understand the particulars of the *target domain*.   An important question in the target domain becomes "why does the shortcut of thinking of genes as selfish actually have some level of accuracy as a description of the phenomena when in fact the mechanisms involved do not support that directly?"

[NST==>I don’t think it does.  I think it’s a subtle and largely successful attempt to import Spenserian ideology in to evolutionary biology.  <==nst]

For all I know, EB has entirely debunked the concept and there is NO utility in the idea of a "selfish gene"... 

Bruce Sherwood likes to make the point that the analogy of hydraulic systems for DC circuits is misleading.   I forget the specifics of where he shows that the analogy breaks down, but it is well below (or above?) the level of "normal" DC circuit understanding and manipulation.   For the kinds of problems I work with using DC circuits, a "battery" is a "tank of water at some height", the Voltage out of the battery is the water Pressure, the amount of Current is the Volume of water, a Diode is a one-way valve,  a resistor is any hydraulic element which conserves water but reduces pressure through what is nominally friction, etc.    As you point out, there is plenty of "excess meaning" around hydraulics as source domain, and "insufficient meaning" around DC circuits as target domain, and if one is to use the analogy effectively one must either understand those over/under mappings, or be operating within only the smaller apt-portion of the domains.   For example, I don't know what the equivalent of an anti-hammer stub (probably a little like a capacitor in parallel?) is but that is no longer describing a simple DC circuit.

[NST==>I think I am back to heartily agreeing. <==nst]

A farmer buying his first tractor may try to understand it using the source domain of "draft animal" and can't go particularly wrong by doing things like "giving it a rest off and on to let it cool down", "planning to feed it well before expecting it to work", "putting it away, out of the elements when not in use", etc.  your "excess meaning" would seem to be things like the farmer going out and trying to top off the fuel every day even when he was not using the tractor, or maybe taking it out for a spin every day to keep it exercised and accustomed to being driven.   The farmer *might* understand "changing the oil" and "cleaning the plugs" and "adjusting the points" vaguely like "deworming" and "cleaning the hooves" but the analogy is pretty wide of the mark beyond the simple idea that "things need attending to".

[NST==>OoooooH.  I like the above!  May I plaigiarise it some day?  Do you by any chance know Epamanondas from your childhood.  Very politically incorrect, now, I fear, but endlessly instructive on the perils of over using metaphors.  <==nst]

 

PS – Is anybody on this list (among the handful that have gotten this far in this post) familiar with the work of Douglas Walton?

I just took a look and his work does sound interesting (and relevant).

He seems perhaps to have written a lot about misunderstandings in AI systems … i.e., how does Siri know what we mean? 

By AI, it seems you mean (the subset of) Natural Language Understanding?

I am also reminded by reading the Wikipedia article on his work that I haven't responded to Glen's question about the "theorem dependency project".

I came to this work through my interest in abduction, which may be described as the process by which we identify (ascribe meaning to?) experiences.  Walton seems to suggest that you-guys are way ahead of the rest of us on the process of meaning ascription, and we all should go to school with you.  Please tell me where and when you offer the class.

I assume the "you-guys" referred to here are the hard core CS/Modeling folks (e.g. Glen, Marcus, Dave, ...).  I do think that the challenges of "explaining things to a machine" do require some rigor, as does formal mathematics and systems like the aforementioned "theorem dependency project".

- Steve

PS.  It has been noted that my long-winded explanation of my (poorly adhered to) typographical conventions for around "reserved terms" and the  like was perhaps defensive.  I didn't mean to sound defensive, I just wanted to be more precise and complete to (possibly) reduce misunderstandings.   I don't imagine many read the entireity of my missives, but as often as not,  when people do read and respond, I sense that some of my conventions are not recognized.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]
mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

--

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Nick Thompson]

M

 

Alright, then.  What IS the adjacent possible?

 

N

 

PS – Given your work with the Irish Peace Process, this Dog’s Brexit t must be driving you nuts.  Have you heard the Donald Tusk quote about “the special place in Hell that awaits those who floated Brexit without a trace of a plan” .  Nothing more than that.  Just that.   

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2019 1:35 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

N.

 

No. 

 

On Sat, Mar 30, 2019 at 1:30 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

M.,

 

Is that like “nudge”?

 

N.

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2019 1:04 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

For whatever it's worth, Nick, I'm now using this thread in the work we're doing on the adjacent possible.

 

On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 9:29 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Steve,

 

We were doing SO WELL until we got to … oh, see my “HORSEFEATHERS!” below.

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Friday, March 29, 2019 9:39 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

 

On 3/28/19 1:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Steve, ‘n all,

 

Just to be cranky, I want to remind everybody that ALL language use, except perhaps tautological expressions, is metaphorical.

I ascribe to this idea as well, following Lakoff and Johnson in their 1980 _Metaphors we Live by_ .

  So then, the question is not, “Is this a metaphor”, but what kind of a metaphor is it and is it pernicious.

I believe that ultimately conceptual metaphor is no more nor less than the intuitive application of a model, and as is often mentioned "all models are wrong, some are useful".    You use the term pernicious which suggests *harmful*, I presume either intentionally so or more from sloppiness or ignorance.

My own view is that in any “tense” conversation – one in which the parties feel the words really matter – it behooves a metaphor-user to define the limits of the metaphor.

I agree that "tense" conversations are different than "casual" ones if that is your distinction.  Unfortunately, outside of Science/Engineering contexts, I find that "tense" conversations are at their root political or at least rhetorical.   One or both sides are really *serious* about being believed.   If not believed in fact ("I believe what you just said") then in principle ("I believe that you believe what you just said").

I think that political/rhetorical dialog would *benefit*  by careful disclosure of all metaphors being used, but one mode of such dialog is for one or both sides to attempt to interject equivocal meanings... to use a term (or in this case set of terms belonging to a metaphorical domain) to weave an *apparently* logical argument, which is only superficially logical but falls apart when the "correct" meaning of the term(s) are applied.  

So, for instance, much mischief has arisen in evolutionary biology from a failure of theorists to define the limits of their use of such metaphors as “natural selection” and “ adaptation”.  When limits are defined, the surplus meaning of a metaphor is separated into two parts, initially, that which the metaphor-user embraces and that which s/he disclaims.  The embraced part goes on to become the positive heuristic of the metaphor, the “wet edge” along which science develops.

From this line of discussion, I take you to be on the branch of the fault-tree I implied above as a Scientific dialog where *both* sides of the discussion are honestly trying to come to mutual understanding and perhaps advance understanding by combining differing perspectives on the same phenomena.

The disclaimed part, must be further divided into that which was legitimately [logically] disclaimed and that which was disclaimed fraudulently.  For instance, when sociobiologists use the notion of selfish gene, they may legitimately disclaim the idea that genes consciously choose between self-regarding and other-regarding options, but they cannot legitimately disclaim the idea that a gene has the power to make any choice but the self-regarding one.

When Dawkins coined "Selfish Gene",  I felt that the *value* of the metaphor invoked was in the challenge it presents:

  And that idea is patently false.  Genes do not make choices

Patently Genes do not make choices in the sense that we usually mean "make choices", yet the strong implication is that the phenomena functions *as if* they do, in "all other ways".   There may be (useful) hairsplitting between "all other ways" and "many other ways" which is an important aspect of analogical thinking. 

, they ARE choices and the choice is made at the level of the phenotype or at the level of the population, depending on how one thinks about the matter.  So the metaphor ‘selfish gene’ is pernicious in evolutionary biology, because it creates confusion on the very point that it purports to clarify – the level at which differential replication operates to generate long term phenotypic change in a population.

I would challenge this as I think my verbage above outlines.   I do not believe that the metaphor *purports* to clarify what you say it does. 

[NST==> HORSEFEATHERS! One or two generations of sociobiologists were directed away from group level explanations by this pernicious metaphor.  <==nst]

It *strives* to provide a cognitive shortcut and to establish a fairly strong metaphor which deserves careful dissection to understand the particulars of the *target domain*.   An important question in the target domain becomes "why does the shortcut of thinking of genes as selfish actually have some level of accuracy as a description of the phenomena when in fact the mechanisms involved do not support that directly?"

[NST==>I don’t think it does.  I think it’s a subtle and largely successful attempt to import Spenserian ideology in to evolutionary biology.  <==nst]

For all I know, EB has entirely debunked the concept and there is NO utility in the idea of a "selfish gene"... 

Bruce Sherwood likes to make the point that the analogy of hydraulic systems for DC circuits is misleading.   I forget the specifics of where he shows that the analogy breaks down, but it is well below (or above?) the level of "normal" DC circuit understanding and manipulation.   For the kinds of problems I work with using DC circuits, a "battery" is a "tank of water at some height", the Voltage out of the battery is the water Pressure, the amount of Current is the Volume of water, a Diode is a one-way valve,  a resistor is any hydraulic element which conserves water but reduces pressure through what is nominally friction, etc.    As you point out, there is plenty of "excess meaning" around hydraulics as source domain, and "insufficient meaning" around DC circuits as target domain, and if one is to use the analogy effectively one must either understand those over/under mappings, or be operating within only the smaller apt-portion of the domains.   For example, I don't know what the equivalent of an anti-hammer stub (probably a little like a capacitor in parallel?) is but that is no longer describing a simple DC circuit.

[NST==>I think I am back to heartily agreeing. <==nst]

A farmer buying his first tractor may try to understand it using the source domain of "draft animal" and can't go particularly wrong by doing things like "giving it a rest off and on to let it cool down", "planning to feed it well before expecting it to work", "putting it away, out of the elements when not in use", etc.  your "excess meaning" would seem to be things like the farmer going out and trying to top off the fuel every day even when he was not using the tractor, or maybe taking it out for a spin every day to keep it exercised and accustomed to being driven.   The farmer *might* understand "changing the oil" and "cleaning the plugs" and "adjusting the points" vaguely like "deworming" and "cleaning the hooves" but the analogy is pretty wide of the mark beyond the simple idea that "things need attending to".

[NST==>OoooooH.  I like the above!  May I plaigiarise it some day?  Do you by any chance know Epamanondas from your childhood.  Very politically incorrect, now, I fear, but endlessly instructive on the perils of over using metaphors.  <==nst]

 

PS – Is anybody on this list (among the handful that have gotten this far in this post) familiar with the work of Douglas Walton?

I just took a look and his work does sound interesting (and relevant).

He seems perhaps to have written a lot about misunderstandings in AI systems … i.e., how does Siri know what we mean? 

By AI, it seems you mean (the subset of) Natural Language Understanding?

I am also reminded by reading the Wikipedia article on his work that I haven't responded to Glen's question about the "theorem dependency project".

I came to this work through my interest in abduction, which may be described as the process by which we identify (ascribe meaning to?) experiences.  Walton seems to suggest that you-guys are way ahead of the rest of us on the process of meaning ascription, and we all should go to school with you.  Please tell me where and when you offer the class.

I assume the "you-guys" referred to here are the hard core CS/Modeling folks (e.g. Glen, Marcus, Dave, ...).  I do think that the challenges of "explaining things to a machine" do require some rigor, as does formal mathematics and systems like the aforementioned "theorem dependency project".

- Steve

PS.  It has been noted that my long-winded explanation of my (poorly adhered to) typographical conventions for around "reserved terms" and the  like was perhaps defensive.  I didn't mean to sound defensive, I just wanted to be more precise and complete to (possibly) reduce misunderstandings.   I don't imagine many read the entireity of my missives, but as often as not,  when people do read and respond, I sense that some of my conventions are not recognized.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]
mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]
mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Merle Lefkoff-2]

Nick, yes, we're very worried about the new "hard border" emerging between N. Ireland and the Republic.  Another stupid consequence of Brexit.  The Good Friday Agreement has always been fragile.

We're having a meeting soon in Santa Fe about the adjacent possible, and attached is what Stu Kauffman and I wrote about the intention of the meeting.  I combine Western and Native science because some of our international Indigenous network has expressed interest in being included in the meeting. Steve Guerin can tell you more about the adjacent possible.

On Sat, Mar 30, 2019 at 9:24 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

M

 

Alright, then.  What IS the adjacent possible?

 

N

 

PS – Given your work with the Irish Peace Process, this Dog’s Brexit t must be driving you nuts.  Have you heard the Donald Tusk quote about “the special place in Hell that awaits those who floated Brexit without a trace of a plan” .  Nothing more than that.  Just that.   

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2019 1:35 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

N.

 

No. 

 

On Sat, Mar 30, 2019 at 1:30 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

M.,

 

Is that like “nudge”?

 

N.

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2019 1:04 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

For whatever it's worth, Nick, I'm now using this thread in the work we're doing on the adjacent possible.

 

On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 9:29 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Steve,

 

We were doing SO WELL until we got to … oh, see my “HORSEFEATHERS!” below.

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Friday, March 29, 2019 9:39 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

 

 

On 3/28/19 1:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Steve, ‘n all,

 

Just to be cranky, I want to remind everybody that ALL language use, except perhaps tautological expressions, is metaphorical.

I ascribe to this idea as well, following Lakoff and Johnson in their 1980 _Metaphors we Live by_ .

  So then, the question is not, “Is this a metaphor”, but what kind of a metaphor is it and is it pernicious.

I believe that ultimately conceptual metaphor is no more nor less than the intuitive application of a model, and as is often mentioned "all models are wrong, some are useful".    You use the term pernicious which suggests *harmful*, I presume either intentionally so or more from sloppiness or ignorance.

My own view is that in any “tense” conversation – one in which the parties feel the words really matter – it behooves a metaphor-user to define the limits of the metaphor.

I agree that "tense" conversations are different than "casual" ones if that is your distinction.  Unfortunately, outside of Science/Engineering contexts, I find that "tense" conversations are at their root political or at least rhetorical.   One or both sides are really *serious* about being believed.   If not believed in fact ("I believe what you just said") then in principle ("I believe that you believe what you just said").

I think that political/rhetorical dialog would *benefit*  by careful disclosure of all metaphors being used, but one mode of such dialog is for one or both sides to attempt to interject equivocal meanings... to use a term (or in this case set of terms belonging to a metaphorical domain) to weave an *apparently* logical argument, which is only superficially logical but falls apart when the "correct" meaning of the term(s) are applied.  

So, for instance, much mischief has arisen in evolutionary biology from a failure of theorists to define the limits of their use of such metaphors as “natural selection” and “ adaptation”.  When limits are defined, the surplus meaning of a metaphor is separated into two parts, initially, that which the metaphor-user embraces and that which s/he disclaims.  The embraced part goes on to become the positive heuristic of the metaphor, the “wet edge” along which science develops.

From this line of discussion, I take you to be on the branch of the fault-tree I implied above as a Scientific dialog where *both* sides of the discussion are honestly trying to come to mutual understanding and perhaps advance understanding by combining differing perspectives on the same phenomena.

The disclaimed part, must be further divided into that which was legitimately [logically] disclaimed and that which was disclaimed fraudulently.  For instance, when sociobiologists use the notion of selfish gene, they may legitimately disclaim the idea that genes consciously choose between self-regarding and other-regarding options, but they cannot legitimately disclaim the idea that a gene has the power to make any choice but the self-regarding one.

When Dawkins coined "Selfish Gene",  I felt that the *value* of the metaphor invoked was in the challenge it presents:

  And that idea is patently false.  Genes do not make choices

Patently Genes do not make choices in the sense that we usually mean "make choices", yet the strong implication is that the phenomena functions *as if* they do, in "all other ways".   There may be (useful) hairsplitting between "all other ways" and "many other ways" which is an important aspect of analogical thinking. 

, they ARE choices and the choice is made at the level of the phenotype or at the level of the population, depending on how one thinks about the matter.  So the metaphor ‘selfish gene’ is pernicious in evolutionary biology, because it creates confusion on the very point that it purports to clarify – the level at which differential replication operates to generate long term phenotypic change in a population.

I would challenge this as I think my verbage above outlines.   I do not believe that the metaphor *purports* to clarify what you say it does. 

[NST==> HORSEFEATHERS! One or two generations of sociobiologists were directed away from group level explanations by this pernicious metaphor.  <==nst]

It *strives* to provide a cognitive shortcut and to establish a fairly strong metaphor which deserves careful dissection to understand the particulars of the *target domain*.   An important question in the target domain becomes "why does the shortcut of thinking of genes as selfish actually have some level of accuracy as a description of the phenomena when in fact the mechanisms involved do not support that directly?"

[NST==>I don’t think it does.  I think it’s a subtle and largely successful attempt to import Spenserian ideology in to evolutionary biology.  <==nst]

For all I know, EB has entirely debunked the concept and there is NO utility in the idea of a "selfish gene"... 

Bruce Sherwood likes to make the point that the analogy of hydraulic systems for DC circuits is misleading.   I forget the specifics of where he shows that the analogy breaks down, but it is well below (or above?) the level of "normal" DC circuit understanding and manipulation.   For the kinds of problems I work with using DC circuits, a "battery" is a "tank of water at some height", the Voltage out of the battery is the water Pressure, the amount of Current is the Volume of water, a Diode is a one-way valve,  a resistor is any hydraulic element which conserves water but reduces pressure through what is nominally friction, etc.    As you point out, there is plenty of "excess meaning" around hydraulics as source domain, and "insufficient meaning" around DC circuits as target domain, and if one is to use the analogy effectively one must either understand those over/under mappings, or be operating within only the smaller apt-portion of the domains.   For example, I don't know what the equivalent of an anti-hammer stub (probably a little like a capacitor in parallel?) is but that is no longer describing a simple DC circuit.

[NST==>I think I am back to heartily agreeing. <==nst]

A farmer buying his first tractor may try to understand it using the source domain of "draft animal" and can't go particularly wrong by doing things like "giving it a rest off and on to let it cool down", "planning to feed it well before expecting it to work", "putting it away, out of the elements when not in use", etc.  your "excess meaning" would seem to be things like the farmer going out and trying to top off the fuel every day even when he was not using the tractor, or maybe taking it out for a spin every day to keep it exercised and accustomed to being driven.   The farmer *might* understand "changing the oil" and "cleaning the plugs" and "adjusting the points" vaguely like "deworming" and "cleaning the hooves" but the analogy is pretty wide of the mark beyond the simple idea that "things need attending to".

[NST==>OoooooH.  I like the above!  May I plaigiarise it some day?  Do you by any chance know Epamanondas from your childhood.  Very politically incorrect, now, I fear, but endlessly instructive on the perils of over using metaphors.  <==nst]

 

PS – Is anybody on this list (among the handful that have gotten this far in this post) familiar with the work of Douglas Walton?

I just took a look and his work does sound interesting (and relevant).

He seems perhaps to have written a lot about misunderstandings in AI systems … i.e., how does Siri know what we mean? 

By AI, it seems you mean (the subset of) Natural Language Understanding?

I am also reminded by reading the Wikipedia article on his work that I haven't responded to Glen's question about the "theorem dependency project".

I came to this work through my interest in abduction, which may be described as the process by which we identify (ascribe meaning to?) experiences.  Walton seems to suggest that you-guys are way ahead of the rest of us on the process of meaning ascription, and we all should go to school with you.  Please tell me where and when you offer the class.

I assume the "you-guys" referred to here are the hard core CS/Modeling folks (e.g. Glen, Marcus, Dave, ...).  I do think that the challenges of "explaining things to a machine" do require some rigor, as does formal mathematics and systems like the aforementioned "theorem dependency project".

- Steve

PS.  It has been noted that my long-winded explanation of my (poorly adhered to) typographical conventions for around "reserved terms" and the  like was perhaps defensive.  I didn't mean to sound defensive, I just wanted to be more precise and complete to (possibly) reduce misunderstandings.   I don't imagine many read the entireity of my missives, but as often as not,  when people do read and respond, I sense that some of my conventions are not recognized.

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Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]
mobile:  [phone]
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

[hidden email]
mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

--

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove