Er, I guess I should say its strictly /not/ an attempt at a simplified description, but a minimal description which can still account for everything...
Voltairina
Karma: 259
Whatever the bottom level of our understanding of the map, even a one-level map is still above the territory, so there’re still levels below that which carry back to, presumedly, territory. We find some fields-and-forces model that accounts for all the data we’re aware of. But, its always going to be possible—less likely the more data we get—that something flies along and causes us to modify it. So, if we wanted to continue the reductionistic approach about the model we’re making about our world, stripping away higher level abstractions, we’d say that its an in-process unifying simplification of and minimal inferences from the results of many experiments, which correspond to measurements of the world at certain levels of sensitivity by different means.
Like, I can draw a picture of a face in increasingly finer and finer detail down to “all the detail I see” but its still going to contain unifying assumptions—like a vector representation of a face, versus the data, which may be pixellated—made up of specific individual measurement events. Or I can show a chart of where and how all the nerves are excited in my eyes, which are the ‘raw data’ level stuff that I have access to about what’s ‘out there’, for which the simplest explanation is most probably a face. Actually its kind of interesting to think of it that way because a lot of our raw mental data is ‘vectored’ already. But, whenever we do a linear regression of a dataset, that’s also a reduction-to-a-vector of something.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ” “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
-Charles Dodgeson(Lewis Carrol), Through the Looking Glass
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
Winston Churchill
Thank you, I’ve rewritten it now.
At first when I posted it I think I was thinking of it as kind of endorsing a pragmatic approach to language usage. I mean, it hurts communication to change the meanings of words without telling anyone, but occasionally it might be useful to update meanings when old ones are no longer useful. It used to be that a “computer” was a professional employed to do calculations, then it became a device to do calculations with, now its a device to do all sorts of things with.
But I feel like that’s kind of a dodge—you’re absolutely right when you say changing the meanings arbitrarily (or possibly to achieve a weird sense of anthropomorphic dominance over it) harms communication, and should be avoided, unless the value of updating the sense of the word outweighs this.
There might be other equilibria in which the past and future adjust to form a new symmetry. So you kill your grandfather, say, but you’re no longer related to him. Oh yeah… rationality. Haven’t a clue:/. Its a nice quote.
“It’s the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.”
― Cory Doctorow, For The Win
I interpret this to mean that often times questions are overlooked because the possibility of them being true seems absurd. Similar to the Sherlock Holmes saying, “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
A Rationality Lab Notebook/Workbook/Vade Mecum
For the record (or whatever) I used to keep a set of composition notebooks like paper-machine describes. They got to be a really huge number, some of them redundant, most of them mostly empty or only a third full. A few of them got to the point of being all the way full and spread into a second volume. They mostly contained lecture notes from my college classes, sometimes I’d get up the energy to add additional notes from studying into them. I threw them out sadly, a few moves ago, when I was depressed and cutting down on my possessions to try to get more control over fewer of them. That was my rationale at the time, anyways. There wasn’t much of a system of organization to them though, except that it would be one subject per notebook, summaries of whatever I was studying on one thick column and notes about it or things that popped into my head while I was listening or reading in the other column.
...and my axe;)
Seems fair. The Holmes saying seems a bit funny to me now that I think about it, because the probability of an unlikely event changes to become more likely when you’ve shown that reality appears constrained from the alternatives. I mean, I guess that’s what he’s trying to convey in his own way. But, by the definition of probability, the likelihood of the improbable event increases as constraints appear preventing the other possibilities. You’re going from P(A) to P(A|B) to P(A|(B&C)) to.. etc. You shouldn’t be simultaneously aware that an event is improbable and seeing that no other alternative is true at the same time, unless you’re being informed of the probability, given the constraints, by someone else, which means that yes, they appear to be considering more candidate possibilities (or their estimate was incorrect. Or something I haven’t thought of...).
Ok. [edit]
re: utilitarianism, the usual sort of thing that pops into my mind is weighing of some minor discomfort versus a significant one, like one person getting their eye poked out with a pen versus an equivalent amount of displeasure spread among thousands of people stepping in something sticky, plus one more person stepping in something sticky. The utility seems higher if we agree to poke the person’s eye out, but its intuitively unsatisfying, at least to me, which makes me think that whatever rules makes things seem “bad” or “good” that I’m currently running on aren’t strictly utilitarian. I might be thinking of raw pain for pain though, and not adding enough people-stepping-in-sticky-stuff to account for the person who’s been poked in the eye suffering in other ways, like losing depth perception, not being able to see out of half of their original visual field, etc.
I have a similar thing with a friend. Only, in my situation, I’m paranoid that they’re the flinchee, and it makes me avoid them because I don’t want to make them uncomfortable. But I’m also not sure how to be less awkward, or whether they want to connect more at all. I feel as though I bore them, a bit, too.
Hrm. Okay, I see your point, I think. I think there’s some benefit in devoting a small portion of your efforts to pursuing outlying hypotheses. Probably proportional to the chance of them being true, I guess, depending on how divisible the resources are. If by “stupid”, Doctorow means “basic”, he might be talking about overlooked issues everyone assumed had already been addressed. But I guess probabilistically that’s the same thing—its unlikely after a certain amount of effort that basic issues haven’t been addressed, so its an outlying hypothesis, and should again get approximately as much attention as its likelihood of being true, depending on resources and how neatly they can be divided up. And maybe let the unlikely things bubble up in importance if the previously-thought-more-likely things shrink due to apparently conflicting evidence… A glaring example to me seems the abrahamic god’s nonexplanatory abilities going unquestioned for as long as they did. Like, treating god as a box to throw unexplained things in and then hiding god behind “mysteriousness” begs the question of why there’s a god clouded in mysteriousness hanging around.
One way of tracing the uhm, data I guess might be to say, we see, naively, a chair. And know that underneath the chair out there is, at the bottom level we’re aware of, energy fields and fundamental forces. And those concepts, like the chair, correspond to a physics model, which is in turn a simplification/distillation of vast reams of recorded experimental data into said rules/objects, which is in turn actual results of taking measurements during experiments, which in turn are the results of actual physical/historical events. So the reductionist model—fields and forces—I think is still a map of experimental results tagged with like, interpretations that tie them together, I guess.