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 > ============================================================ > 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
============================================================ 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
