gjm

• gjm 11 Aug 2020 15:52 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: curi’s comment on: The Law of Least Effort Con­tributes to the Con­junc­tion Fallacy

  It seems like you’re say­ing that it’s … some­how im­proper to write some­thing that im­plies doubt about your premises? (I don’t think I’m as­sum­ing con­trary premises to yours, though I don’t see any par­tic­u­lar rea­son why that would be a prob­lem, but I am in­deed not sim­ply as­sum­ing that your premises are right.) If I’ve un­der­stood right, then I don’t un­der­stand what prob­lem you see. If not, then maybe you could ex­plain what your ob­jec­tion ac­tu­ally is?

  I’m also not sure quite what those “ex­ten­sive other rea­sons” are. You say “LoLE hasn’t been tested in a con­trol­led, blinded sci­en­tific set­ting”. You tell us that it’s been ex­ten­sively de­bated and has stood up to crit­i­cism in (what you don’t quite say ex­plic­itly but I’m pretty sure is) the pickup-artist com­mu­nity. I don’t think LW should adopt a norm of ac­cept­ing things merely be­cause some­one tells us they have stood up to crit­i­cism among pickup artists.

  (Rea­son 1: it’s just one small­ish group of peo­ple; such groups can eas­ily de­velop bi­ases of many kinds, and it’s not hard to imag­ine ways in which that could hap­pen in that group in par­tic­u­lar. Rea­son 2: we don’t even know that LoLE has stood up to crit­i­cism in that com­mu­nity; all we know is that you say it has.)

  Imag­ine that some­one comes here and writes an ar­ti­cle about how some cog­ni­tive bias is ex­plained by the Law Of X, which is well known among { Trot­sky­ites | evan­gel­i­cal Chris­ti­ans | rad­i­cal fem­i­nists | bur­glars }. I don’t think it would be rea­son­able for that per­son to re­spond to crit­i­cism of the ar­ti­cle by say­ing: “it’s not ap­pro­pri­ate to ques­tion the truth and ap­pli­ca­bil­ity of the Law of X—it’s well es­tab­lished, as { Trot­sky­ites | evan­gel­i­cal Chris­ti­ans | rad­i­cal fem­i­nists | bur­glars } can at­test”. Why is this case differ­ent?

• gjm 11 Aug 2020 15:33 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: curi’s comment on: The Law of Least Effort Con­tributes to the Con­junc­tion Fallacy

  What do you mean by “it’s already a ma­jor part of our cul­ture”? Speci­fi­cally, do you mean (1) that con­serv­ing visi­ble effort is a thing peo­ple do a lot in our cul­ture (i.e., LoLE is right) or (2) that the idea that peo­ple con­serve visi­ble effort is well es­tab­lished in our cul­ture (i.e., LoLE is well known)? (To me, “LoLE is a ma­jor part of our cul­ture” means #2, but it sounds as if you may mean #1.)

• gjm 11 Aug 2020 15:28 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: curi’s comment on: The Law of Least Effort Con­tributes to the Con­junc­tion Fallacy

  In or­der to ex­plain the con­junc­tion fal­lacy (or other bi­ases) LoLE is only any use if it does lead to ac­tu­ally con­serv­ing effort. (On the spe­cific mat­ter at hand; of course they may put effort into other things.) The alleged pat­tern is (un­less I’ve badly mi­s­un­der­stood):

  • You ask me “which of these two things is more likely?”

  • If I think care­fully through the op­tions, I will see that it’s more likely that Linda is a librar­ian sim­plic­iter than that she’s a fem­i­nist librar­ian.

  • But I don’t do that, be­cause I want to look like I’m do­ing ev­ery­thing effortlessly.

  • In­stead I use some sim­ple quick heuris­tic that lets me look effortless.

  • Un­for­tu­nately that leads me to the wrong an­swer.

  And in this se­quence of events, it’s es­sen­tial that I ac­tu­ally do put in less effort. If in­stead I had some way of look­ing as if I’m mak­ing no effort while ac­tu­ally do­ing the care­ful think­ing that would get me the right an­swer, then I would get the right an­swer.

  What am I miss­ing here?

  [EDITED to add:] Also: if the ques­tion at hand is why psy­chol­o­gists don’t ap­peal to the LoLE as an ex­pla­na­tion for the con­junc­tion fal­lacy, and the an­swer (as I sug­gest) is that they already have what looks like an ob­vi­ous ex­pla­na­tion in terms of ac­tu­ally con­serv­ing effort, then it doesn’t re­ally mat­ter that much whether the LoLE in­volves ac­tual effort-con­ser­va­tion or merely ap­par­ent effort-con­ser­va­tion, no?

• gjm 10 Aug 2020 9:29 UTC

  5 points

  on: The Law of Least Effort Con­tributes to the Con­junc­tion Fallacy

  You sug­gest that the “law of least effort” has been ig­nored by aca­demic re­searchers be­cause they dis­ap­prove of peo­ple as­so­ci­ated with it. It looks to me as if some­thing differ­ent is go­ing on.

  I had a look at some writ­ing about fal­la­cies, heuris­tics and bi­ases. I didn’t find any­thing about the LoLE, but I like­wise didn’t find any other spec­u­la­tion about par­tic­u­lar rea­sons why our brains tend to pre­fer low-effort ap­prox­i­mate solu­tions most of the time.

  That doesn’t look to me like ig­nor­ing the LoLE, it looks like ig­nor­ing the ques­tion to which it’s an an­swer: what are the fac­tors that make us mostly avoid effort and hard con­cen­tra­tion?

  The two most likely rea­sons for this ig­nor­ing seem to me to be

  • that if what you’re re­search­ing is what de­ci­sions peo­ple tend to make in par­tic­u­lar situ­a­tions, then the de­tails of the un­der­ly­ing mechanisms might be in­ter­est­ing but aren’t di­rectly rele­vant and one might rea­son­ably leave them for some­one else to figure out; and

  • that it tends to feel like a ques­tion whose an­swer is so ob­vi­ous (and maybe soe triv­ial) that it doesn’t need look­ing into fur­ther: of course we con­serve effort; what else would any liv­ing thing do? If the ques­tion were ex­plic­itly raised, I sus­pect many would just mut­ter some­thing about effi­ciency and evolu­tion and move on.

  Nei­ther of those has any­thing to do with the per­ceived skeev­i­ness of the peo­ple as­so­ci­ated with a par­tic­u­lar other view.

  In­ci­den­tally, in Kah­ne­man’s “Think­ing, fast and slow” you will find the fol­low­ing sen­tence: “This is how the law of least effort comes to be a law”. Kah­ne­man’s LoLE is not the same as yours. He just means that peo­ple con­serve effort so far as they can. And the “this is how” just amounts to stat­ing that effort is dis­agree­able. I’m pretty sure this is the sec­ond of my rea­sons above: it sim­ply hasn’t oc­curred to Kah­ne­man that “why do our brains pre­fer to con­serve effort?” is a ques­tion that needs ask­ing at all.

  My feel­ing—which of course I have no con­crete ev­i­dence for—is that if it’s true that the pickup-artists’ LoLE is ig­nored by psy­chol­o­gists even when they do con­sider the ac­tual ques­tion it pur­ports to be an an­swer to—and I have no idea whether that’s true, not hav­ing seen much con­sid­er­a­tion of that ac­tual ques­tion—then the more likely ex­pla­na­tion is that they haven’t thought of it at all, rather than that they’ve thought of it and dis­missed it be­cause they don’t like the peo­ple ad­vo­cat­ing it.

• gjm 10 Aug 2020 8:56 UTC

  2 points

  on: The Law of Least Effort Con­tributes to the Con­junc­tion Fallacy

  Although the ti­tle of this post is “The Law of Least Effort Con­tributes to the Con­junc­tion Fal­lacy”, al­most all of the ac­tual post is ded­i­cated to ex­plain­ing what the LOLE is, to sug­gest­ing that it’s ne­glected be­cause of prej­u­dice against the peo­ple it’s as­so­ci­ated with, and so forth.

  The por­tion that ac­tu­ally pur­ports to link the LOLE to the con­junc­tion fal­lacy just says this:

  LoLE en­courages peo­ple to try to look ca­sual, chill, low effort, even a lit­tle care­less—the op­po­site of try­hard. The ex­per­i­men­tal re­sults of Con­junc­tion Fal­lcy re­search fit these themes.

  And, sure, some­thing like that might be true, but you need to do bet­ter than that to be con­vinc­ing. E.g., come up with some ex­per­i­men­tal de­sign where, if your the­ory is right, the LoLE should have a stronger effect on some par­ti­ci­pants than oth­ers, and look for sys­tem­atic cor­re­la­tion be­tween ex­pected-LoLE-ness and con­junc­tion effect. (If your the­ory is right then it seems like this should ap­ply to many other “effort-con­serv­ing” fal­la­cies be­sides the con­junc­tion effect, so maybe those should be tested for too.) And then ac­tu­ally do the ex­per­i­ment or per­suade some­one else to do it.

  [EDITED to fix a typo.]

• gjm 10 Aug 2020 8:49 UTC

  2 points

  on: The Law of Least Effort Con­tributes to the Con­junc­tion Fallacy

  Your ar­gu­ment is that the “Law of Least Effort” mo­ti­vates peo­ple not to try very hard, and not try­ing very hard pro­duces con­junc­tion-fal­lacy-like effects.

  It seems to me that

  • this is an over­com­pli­cated ex­pla­na­tion, in that we don’t need the “Law of Least Effort” to mo­ti­vate peo­ple not to try very hard (con­serv­ing re­sources is valuable in it­self, and effort is usu­ally dis­agree­able), and

  • it doesn’t ex­plain why we get the con­junc­tion fal­lacy in par­tic­u­lar; it’s not ob­vi­ous that this par­tic­u­lar sort of wrong an­swer is lower-effort than the right an­swer.

• gjm 8 Aug 2020 16:50 UTC

  6 points

  on: How to Re­spond to a Black Hole Astronomer’s Gish Gallop

  It’s flat­ter­ing that you call me a “black hole as­tronomer” (since it im­plies that what I’ve writ­ten about black hole as­tron­omy looks like it’s writ­ten by some­one who works in the field), but I am not one.

  Every­thing in my com­ment is in re­sponse to things you wrote. That makes it the ex­act re­verse of a Gish gal­lop.

  I do not have any sock pup­pets. (I can think of ex­actly one on­line thing where I have more than one ac­count. It’s an in­ter­net chess server that can serve you up puz­zles and give you a nu­mer­i­cal in­di­ca­tion of how you’re do­ing at solv­ing them. I wanted two ac­counts so that I could use one for try­ing to solve the puz­zles in limited time and an­other where I would think for as long as I needed be­fore try­ing a move. I emailed the peo­ple who run the server to check they didn’t mind. I men­tion all this just as an in­di­ca­tion that I am un­usu­ally scrupu­lous about this sort of thing.)

  So far as I can see, this ar­ti­cle con­sists of (1) a lit­tle bit of “fram­ing”, (2) lengthy quo­ta­tions from some­thing I wrote, your re­sponse to it, and my re­sponse to that, and your (very short) re­sponse to that, and (3) a self-con­grat­u­la­tory re­mark about what a great job you did re­spond­ing to me. I am at a loss to un­der­stand what you think that will achieve.

• gjm 5 Aug 2020 11:40 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: nixtaken’s comment on: The New Scien­tific Method

  If some­one shows ev­i­dence of (1) be­ing gen­er­ally clue­ful and (2) hav­ing read what you wrote, and they “have missed the points I was mak­ing”, then I sug­gest that you might find it ad­vis­able to ex­plain what they mi­s­un­der­stood and how your in­ten­tion differs from what they thought you said. Just say­ing “you mi­s­un­der­stood me” achieves noth­ing. (Un­less your only goal is to at­tack some­one who has dis­agreed with you, I sup­pose. There may be places where that’s an effec­tive tac­tic, but I think that here it’s un­likely to make any­one think bet­ter of you or worse of them.)

• gjm 5 Aug 2020 11:37 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: The New Scien­tific Method

  Thanks for the kind words! I guess it might be worth mak­ing into an ar­ti­cle. (And I agree that if so it would be best to make it more stan­dalone and less de­bate-y, though it might be worth re­tain­ing a lit­tle con­text.) I’m on holi­day right now so no guaran­tees :-).

• gjm 5 Aug 2020 7:53 UTC

  7 points

  on: How Beliefs Change What We See in Starlight

  You write that

  In the case of grav­i­ta­tional waves, back in the 1970s, hun­dreds of in­de­pen­dent re­search groups con­structed sim­ple de­vices to mea­sure them and they all com­pared their re­sults. Each re­search group thought that it had mea­sured grav­i­ta­tional waves, but when the re­sults were com­bined, they all had to con­clude that no one had been mea­sur­ing grav­i­ta­tional waves. They had all been mea­sur­ing differ­ent sources of noise.

  So far as I can tell, this is not in fact true. E.g., this ar­ti­cle about Joseph We­ber says that We­ber claimed to have mea­sured grav­i­ta­tional waves, lots of other labs tried to repli­cate his re­sults, and they all said they hadn’t been able to. So does this one. The lat­ter cites this pa­per in Phys­i­cal Re­view Let­ters in which one pair of col­lab­o­ra­tors say ex­actly that. Here’s an­other ar­ti­cle say­ing the same. I haven’t found any­thing that claims that ev­ery­one thought they had found grav­i­ta­tional waves, or that com­bin­ing ev­ery­one’s re­sults made it plain that that wasn’t so.

  (I also re­mark that the story you tell in this para­graph is awfully similar to the one you want to de­bunk. Lots of sci­en­tific ob­ser­va­tions so noisy that you can’t get any­thing re­li­able from any of them, but when you put them to­gether you get some­thing us­able. This is ex­actly what you poke fun at at, e.g., the start of your “We­ber’s ghost” post. Surely you can’t con­sider that ap­proach valid when it says “no grav­i­ta­tional waves here” but in­valid when it says “grav­i­ta­tional waves here”...)

• gjm 5 Aug 2020 7:30 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: nixtaken’s comment on: The Ghost of Joseph Weber

  Calcu­lat­ing op­por­tu­nity costs is great, but that isn’t what you did.

• gjm 28 Jul 2020 23:52 UTC

  4 points

  on: The Con­ceited Folly of Certainty

  Ob­vi­ously this is a very tan­gen­tial is­sue, but when you say

  There may only be a sin­gle word in our lan­guage that trig­gers the thought of one spe­cific per­son: ge­nius.

  I can’t agree. I bet there are plenty of peo­ple, who when they hear “ge­nius”, think first of other peo­ple be­sides Ein­stein. Even within physics, I bet the fact that there’s a bi­og­ra­phy of Feyn­man called “Ge­nius” en­courages some to think of him rather than Ein­stein. And there will be plenty of peo­ple who will pick, say, Dante or Gauss in­stead.

  Other pos­si­bly bet­ter can­di­date words:

  • Names of schools of thought etc. Pre­sum­ably we shouldn’t al­low terms like “Marx­ism” or “Eu­clidean”, but how about e.g. “ob­jec­tivism” → Rand, “com­mu­nism” → Marx, “cy­ber­punk” → Gib­son, “cu­bism” → Pi­casso.

  • Words that hap­pen to be names of fa­mous works, or near to them. “utopia” → More, “waste­land” → Eliot (even though his poem’s name isn’t ex­actly that), “tem­pest” → Shake­speare, etc.

  • Words closely as­so­ci­ated with su­per-duper-fa­mous peo­ple. If you want to make peo­ple think of Ein­stein, I sus­pect “rel­a­tivity” does bet­ter than “ge­nius”. If you want to make peo­ple think of Je­sus and “Chris­ti­an­ity” is cheat­ing, “gospel” and “re­s­ur­rec­tion” prob­a­bly work well.

  I’m pretty sure all of these work bet­ter than (“ge­nius”, Ein­stein) if the ques­tion is “if asked to as­so­ci­ate a per­son with this word, what frac­tion of peo­ple will pick the per­son I have in mind?”. I think some of them also work bet­ter if the ques­tion is “if you just say this word, what frac­tion of peo­ple will im­me­di­ately think of the per­son I have in mind?”.

• gjm 27 Jul 2020 21:47 UTC

  13 points

  on: Why You Might Want a New Way to Vi­su­al­ize Biases

  I think there’s a ter­minolog­i­cal is­sue. What you have here is a new graph­i­cal no­ta­tion for (cer­tain kinds of state­ments about /​ struc­tures in­volv­ing) bi­ases, not a way to vi­su­al­ize them. To me, at least, vi­su­al­iz­ing some­thing means dis­play­ing the thing in a way that lets you see that thing it­self more clearly; but here, the point isn’t to see the bi­ases more clearly—what you’re try­ing to clar­ify is a larger struc­ture in which the bi­ases are largely-un­analysed el­e­ments.

  The crit­i­cism you got was mostly say­ing “this so-called way of vi­su­al­iz­ing bi­ases doesn’t ac­tu­ally show you any­thing about the bi­ases”—which is cor­rect but, if I’m un­der­stand­ing you right, largely misses the point be­cause the goal was never to provide a tool for un­der­stand­ing bi­ases bet­ter; what you want to un­der­stand is bad habits, case his­to­ries, and the like. Bi­ases are com­po­nents of those things; you want a no­ta­tion that in­cludes a way of rep­re­sent­ing bi­ases; but this isn’t a vi­su­al­iza­tion of bi­ases any more than the usual no­ta­tion for elec­tri­cal cir­cuits is a vi­su­al­iza­tion of (say) re­sis­tors.

• gjm 24 Jul 2020 16:13 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: nixtaken’s comment on: The Ghost of Joseph Weber

  Your de­scrip­tions of what I said in the com­ments on “The New Scien­tific Method” are not ac­cu­rate. They are like your pur­ported quo­ta­tions from Katie Bouman’s talk (though at least you didn’t put them in quo­ta­tion marks this time): in con­dens­ing what I ac­tu­ally said into a brief and quotable form, you have ap­par­ently at­tempted to make it sound as silly as pos­si­ble rather than sum­ma­riz­ing as ac­cu­rately as pos­si­ble. I think you shouldn’t do that.

  (My de­scrip­tion in terms of “weird­ness” was meant to help to clar­ify what is go­ing on in an al­gorithm that you crit­i­cized but ap­par­ently hadn’t un­der­stood well. It turns out that it was a mis­take to try to be as clear and helpful as pos­si­ble, rather than writ­ing defen­sively so as to make it as difficult as pos­si­ble for some­one mal­i­cious to pick things that sound silly.)

  I already told you (in com­ments on that other post) what mo­ti­vates me: bad sci­ence, and es­pe­cially pros­ely­tiz­ing bad sci­ence, makes me sad. It makes me es­pe­cially sad when it hap­pens on Less Wrong, which aims to be a home for good clear think­ing. Hav­ing seen the pre­vi­ous iter­a­tion of Less Wrong badly harmed by poli­ti­cal cranks who ex­ploited the (very praise­wor­thy) lo­cal cul­ture of tak­ing ideas se­ri­ously even when they are non­stan­dard or ap­pear bad at a first glance, I am not keen to leave un­crit­i­cized a post that is con­fi­dently wrong about so many things.

  I don’t know what any­one else may have done, but I at least have not down­voted all your com­ments and posts. I have down­voted some spe­cific things that seem to me badly wrong; that’s what down­vot­ing is meant for. (As it hap­pens, it looks to me as if you have down­voted all my com­ments on your posts.)

• gjm 24 Jul 2020 15:57 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: nixtaken’s comment on: The Ghost of Joseph Weber

  Dustin’s point, as I un­der­stand it, is not that you over­es­ti­mated or that you un­der­es­ti­mated, nor that you didn’t give a de­tailed ac­count­ing of all the fa­cil­ities in­volved, it’s that you’re con­fus­ing two com­pletely differ­ent ques­tions. (1) How much did the EHT pro­ject cost? (2) How much did the telescopes used by the EHT pro­ject cost to build and run? You made a claim about #1 and when challenged on it offered some num­bers re­lat­ing to #2.

  You do say one thing that pur­ports to link them: ”… if EHT kept the telescopes in op­er­a­tion when they would’ve oth­er­wise lost fund­ing …”. But that’s one heck of a big if and I know of no rea­son to think that EHT kept any telescopes in op­er­a­tion that would oth­er­wise have lost fund­ing. And even if it did, that wouldn’t jus­tify in­clud­ing the cost of build­ing the telescopes in your es­ti­mate of the cost of EHT, un­less the telescopes in ques­tion were never used for any­thing other than EHT.

  (One jour­nal­is­tic out­let has given a con­crete es­ti­mate for the cost of the EHT pro­ject. They say 50 to 60 mil­lion dol­lars. I don’t know where they got that es­ti­mate or how much to trust it, but it sounds much much more be­liev­able to me than your “billions of dol­lars”.)

• gjm 19 Jul 2020 14:55 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: Alan Light’s comment on: Swiss Poli­ti­cal Sys­tem: More than You ever Wanted to Know (I.)

  This ap­pears to be en­tirely un­true.

  Here’s a link to a point-by-point com­par­i­son of the two con­sti­tu­tions, wherein you can read­ily search for “supreme” and find e.g. that III.1 is ex­actly the same in the two: “The ju­di­cial power of the Con­fed­er­ate States shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such in­fe­rior courts as the Congress may, from time to time, or­dain and es­tab­lish. The judges, both of the Supreme and in­fe­rior courts, shall hold their offices dur­ing good be­hav­ior, and shall, at stated times, re­ceive for their ser­vices a com­pen­sa­tion which shall not be diminished dur­ing their con­tinu­ance in office.”

• gjm 18 Jul 2020 19:05 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: nixtaken’s comment on: The New Scien­tific Method

  No, we pointed out the blatant er­rors in what you wrote.

  You’ve claimed in a cou­ple of places, now, that I am en­gag­ing in mis­lead­ing rhetoric, but so far the only thing you’ve said about that that’s con­crete enough to eval­u­ate is that I wrote a lot … in my re­sponse to some­thing you wrote that was longer. If there are spe­cific things I have writ­ten that you find mis­lead­ing, I would be in­ter­ested to know what they are and what in them you ob­ject to. I’m not try­ing to pull any rhetor­i­cal tricks, but of course that’s no guaran­tee of not hav­ing writ­ten some­thing mis­lead­ing, and if so I would like to fix it.

• gjm 18 Jul 2020 16:14 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: The New Scien­tific Method

  Just for fun, I im­proved the al­gorithm a bit. Here’s what it does now:

  

  Still not perfect—there’s some resi­d­ual band­ing that is never go­ing to be 100% re­mov­able but could be made much bet­ter with more un­der­stand­ing of the statis­tics of typ­i­cal images, and some­thing at the right-hand side that seems like the ex­ist­ing al­gorithm ought to be do­ing bet­ter and I’m not quite sure why it doesn’t. But I don’t feel like tak­ing a lot more time to de­bug it.

  You’re see­ing its perfor­mance on the same in­put image that I used for test­ing it, so it’s always pos­si­ble that there’s some overfit­ting. I doubt there’s much, though; ev­ery­thing it does is still rather generic.

  (In case any­one cares, the changes I made are: 1. At a cou­ple of points it does a differ­ent sort of in­cre­men­tal row-by-row/​column-by-column op­ti­miza­tion, that tries to make each row/​column in suc­ces­sion differ as lit­tle as pos­si­ble from (only) its pre­de­ces­sor, and doesn’t treat wrap­ping around at ²⁵⁵⁄₀ as in­di­cat­ing an ex­tra-big change. 2. There’s an an­noy­ing way for the al­gorithm to get stuck in a lo­cal min­i­mum, where there’s a row dis­con­ti­nu­ity and a column dis­con­ti­nu­ity and fix­ing one of them would push some pix­els past the ²⁵⁵⁄₀ bound­ary be­cause of the other dis­con­ti­nu­ity; to ad­dress this, there’s a step that con­sid­ers row/​column pairs and tries mak­ing e.g. a small in­crease in pixel val­ues right of the given column and a small de­crease in pixel val­ues right of the given row. Em­piri­cally, this seems to help get out of those lo­cal min­ima. 3. The reg­u­larizer (i.e., the “weird­ness”-pe­nal­iz­ing part of the al­gorithm) now tries not only to make ad­ja­cent pix­els be close in value, but also (much less vi­gor­ously) to make some other nearby pix­els be close in value.)

• gjm 18 Jul 2020 15:55 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: eapache’s comment on: The New Scien­tific Method

  Kirsten is claiming that my al­gorithm is in­valid, even though (so it seems to me) it demon­stra­bly does a de­cent job of re­con­struct­ing the origi­nal image I gave it de­spite the cor­rup­tion of the rows and columns. Of course she can still claim that the EHT team’s re­con­struc­tion al­gorithm doesn’t have that prop­erty, that it only gives plau­si­ble out­put images be­cause it’s been con­structed in such a way that it can’t do oth­er­wise, but at the mo­ment I’m not ar­gu­ing that the EHT team’s re­con­struc­tion al­gorithm is any good, I’m ar­gu­ing only that one spe­cific thing Kirsten claimed about it is flatly un­true: namely, that if the phases are cor­rupted in any­thing like the way Bouman de­scribes then there is liter­ally no way to get any ac­tual phase in­for­ma­tion from the data. The point of the image re­con­struc­tion I’m demon­strat­ing here is that you can have cor­rup­tion with a similar sort of pat­tern that’s just as se­vere but still be able to do a lot of re­con­struc­tion, be­cause al­though the in­di­vi­d­ual mea­sure­ments’ phases are hope­lessly cor­rupt (in my ex­am­ple: the in­di­vi­d­ual pix­els’ val­ues are hope­lessly cor­rupt) there is still good in­for­ma­tion to be had about their re­la­tion­ships.

  [EDITED to add:] … Or maybe I mi­s­un­der­stood? Per­haps “This method is in­valid” she means that some­how any­thing that has the same sort of shape as what I’m do­ing here is bad, even if it demon­stra­bly gives good re­sults. If so, then I guess my prob­lem is that she hasn’t en­abled me to un­der­stand why she con­sid­ers it “in­valid”. Her ob­jec­tions all seem to me like sci­ence-by-slo­gan: de­scribe some­thing in a way that makes it sound silly, and you’ve shown it’s no good. Un­for­tu­nately, all sorts of things that can be made to sound silly turn out to be not silly at all, so when faced with a claim that some­thing that demon­stra­bly works is no good I’m go­ing to need more than slo­gans to con­vince me.

• gjm 18 Jul 2020 14:04 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: The New Scien­tific Method

  Hmm, there should be two images there but only one of them is show­ing up for me. Let me try again:

  This should ap­pear af­ter “This helps a bit:”. (I’m putting this in an an­swer rather than edit­ing the pre­vi­ous com­ment be­cause if there’s some bug in image up­load­ing or dis­play then it seems like hav­ing only one image per com­ment might make it less likely to be trig­gered.)