Thanks Joyce! I did receive the message you forwarded to me.  I think I’m set.

Jim

On Dec 6, 2013, at 1:50 PM, Eric Smith <desm...@santafe.edu> wrote:

> 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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