Nick -
Arlo,
You are bit by bit dragging me out on thin ice here (statistics and
probability) which is fine, so long as you are prepared to rescue me.
Grin... this is what we keep youth around for... first we pretend to
teach them how to stay only on thick ice whilst trusting that at some
point they will lure us onto the thin, trusting that they will, in turn,
be able to rescue us when it begins to crack under the weight of our
ponderous wisdom.
As for your suggestions to Gil regarding what traps the elders can set
(and bait) for the yungers, there are many... I appreciate that someone
(you) with better "elderly" credentials than mine own can be so direct
(and honest?) about those traps.
I think, as a matter of practice, that the strength of an inference is
determined */a priori/* when you define your population and select
your sample size.
I liked the parts about grue, green and bleen
<http://www-math.mit.edu/%7Etchow/grue.html> better... but from my
remembrances of the works of Brothers Grimm, I thought that grue (as in
gruesome) was a somewhat greasy and rancid stew made of human body
parts, usually by ogres or trolls or some similarly untrustworthy sort.
I can find no objective evidence that this is the case for anyone else.
Strictly (yet another) a phenomena of my own private universe I suspect.
- Steve
Does that sound right?
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
*From:*Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Arlo Barnes
*Sent:* Wednesday, December 04, 2013 10:18 PM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Why I was wrong about the nuclear option
The adjective "weak" seems to relate to how much money you should
be willing to bet on it. In this case, with the sample size at
one, and the population at billions, Peirce would advise you to
bet very little if anything, until you had a much larger sample.
So is strength of an inference something we can only determine /a
posteriori/? Or can we infer it based off previous inferences?
I agree with you that there are traps for the young lurking in the
enthusiasm and nostalgia with which the elderly often approach
guiding the young. Even worse than "you can do anything you can
put your mind to" is "all I want is for you to be happy." Both
set one up for blaming the victim when life screws one over, which
it inevitably will. I do believe that "being happy" is a behavior
and a skill that comes only to those who work at it, but alas, I
see no evidence that it comes to everybody who works at it.
I think probably the only advice which does not make irresponsible
assumptions is "do stuff; try it, you will like it", which is not very
helpful. So any more complex advice is valuable but only if treated
skeptically, in the positive sense of that word, rather than merely
taken to heart.
No value comes to a child from blaming his or her parents.
I would furthermore posit that blame is a valueless activity much akin
to making decisions based on what is moral. It leads to
misunderstanding a system much more often than it aids the thinker,
and understanding a [social, physical, economic] system to some
critical degree is vital in avoiding bad experiences in the future.
New-Clear options? In what context?
Somebody pointed out that society had moved forward because in the
recent debate <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_option> not just
a few but many politicians succeeded in not pronouncing it
"new-queue-lur".
Do any of you know about grue and green.
I know that when it is light out one is liable to be eaten by a bleen.
-Arlo
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