Hi Nick (who started the thread, regarding induction, but teasing with current 
events), and Arlo who has kept it alive,

For days I have been trying not to respond, but …

This is about the nuclear option, not about induction.  

Malcolm Gladwell had a piece in the New Yorker about David and Goliath a few 
years ago:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell
A team of under-skilled basketball players makes it to the semifinals by 
pushing the full court press on every play, every game.

One story gets most of the time here, and it is Gladwell's message.  Pure 
determination and the self-discipline to be more fit and stronger than your 
opponents can overcome large differentials in gifts.  Maybe gifts aren't so 
much earned as bestowed by luck of the draw, whereas conditioning is earned 
with suffering, and so is more noble, etc.  Okay. 

Let me acknowledge that there is a lot in this half of the story that I admire 
and agree with, and Gladwell tells good stories. 

There is another part of the story that does get mentioned, but not in more 
than a sentence or two.  Many of the girls in the other teams, who were hoping 
to win by skill, were not only frustrated but somewhat embittered at being 
beaten through sheer unrelenting obstruction.  Gladwell does not demean this, 
but he doesn't give it a lot of space either, as it is different from the story 
he is here to tell. 

A different take on the same story, however, might be that the purpose of sport 
isn't (or shouldn't be) principally to provide a chance to declare winners; it 
should be to use competition to bring out a certain form of excellence, or 
skill, or beauty, or momentarily attaining a state of grace, or whatever you 
want to call it.  David Rudisha's 800 or McKayla Maroney's Amanar.  Not 
everybody who feels entitled to win and gets beaten by a more determined 
opponent is mourning the loss of these things, but some do, and if enough 
didn't, what would be left of anything, except a kind of uniform grey siege?

I can't stand the republican obstructionism, because if there is any good faith 
behind any of it, in any rare individual, it is so far buried beneath the pure 
meanness that all I can see left is doing a dance around the "bonfire" as Rome 
burns.  We have much to lose, and I can't see any difference of moral worth 
between people who are gleeful at its loss, and the most degraded Taliban 
mentality, in which nothing is left but the saboteur.  

But it's just the full court press, on every play, in every game.  

So why doesn't -- why shouldn't (unless you believe it should) -- everything 
degenerate to a simple siege?  What had ever maintained anything of enough 
worth that there could be a "nuclear option" to threaten to take it away?  I 
think I mean this as a science question.  

I guess, said another way, by the time you are down to being limited by the 
rules, most hope is lost.  The role of rules must be, it seems, to function as 
catalysts within a system that is much more complicated than the rules 
themselves, and what they catalyze is the preservation of honor (or other 
value) by the system.  The preservation of things that can only be preserved by 
more complicated systems than rules.  But without well-designed rules as 
catalysts, the larger system could not be counted on to maintain these things 
on its own.  What is the larger system?  What is its natural language?  How do 
we worry about it in the right way (meaning, a productive way) when we should 
worry?

There is a kind of meanness or cynicism that likes to see hope dashed and 
beauty destroyed, and this meanness answers me by saying that if it isn't in 
the rules enforced with a gun, it isn't real, and only patsies fail to know 
that.  

I think that is an error, but it would be nice to have satisfying ways to get 
at the thought, at some level closer to the precision we can bring to bear when 
thinking about rules. 

For a group of girls to win a season of basketball through a lot of guts and 
planning is okay, and basketball will survive.  To lose a norm of honor in the 
senate (already as wondrous as a snowball in hell) is not okay.  

Eric







On Dec 6, 2013, at 2:50 PM, Arlo Barnes wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Does that sound right?
> 
> The ice is as thin for me as for you but I would think that the probable 
> maximum strength of an inference is determined by the nature of the sample 
> (that can be measured within just the sample). So we can only make very weak 
> inferences concerning life on other planets, because we have a sample size of 
> one. But if the first exoplanet we find with life on it has only hominids, 
> then an inference that 'dominant' lifeforms can only be hominids would appear 
> to double in strength but might not actually be stronger than before at all 
> if it turns out just to be luck.
> I may revise this opinion upon further rumination, though, as I feel like my 
> analytical skills are not at their strongest currently.
> -Arlo
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