Eric -
> Cranky Nick, you really need to join a church.
I think Nick's church IS this mail-list/congregation... and he
(reluctantly) stands-in as a lay-preacher, though I think he spends more
time trying to recruit others to that role. It functions a bit like a
UU church in some ways (a lot of "more tolerant than though") and in
others like a Quaker congregation ("speaking from the silence") and very
occasionally a "poetry slam".
> What Nate gave you is a sample estimator for a probability
> distribution (each of those words means something specific; they are
> not an evocative construction within common vernacular).
An excellent example of very precise language (and a parenthetical
explication and contrast OF that precision vs what is found in
"evocative construction within common vernacular"). The source domain
in your description is very precisely that of mathematical statistics
and therefore has high "utility" if not broad familiarity.
> He didn’t even give you the “actual” probability distribution for the
> underlying process, because, as Pierce saith both rightly and
> interestingly, the “actual” probability distribution is something we
> don’t have access to. What we have, and all we ever have, are sample
> estimators to probability distributions.
key distinction, well reminded.
> Nate’s estimator includes biases. Some of these, like method biases
> in polling, are things he can also try to estimate and correct for.
> Others, like systematic biases in the relation between sampling and
> underlying correlations — as in the really interesting and exactly
> relevant link Marcus sent — are things Nate (et al. of course) haven’t
> identified. The acknowledgement of those, too, was in the advertising.
>
> So, the sample estimator for a probability distribution, with known
> biases described and correction methods listed, and unknown biases
> acknowledged, is what Nate gave you, and in the only sense that
> “right” can be applied — which is an accurate rendering of methods —
> it was right.
Well said.
>
> If someone gives me a revolver with two filled chambers, and in the
> afterlife I protest that I didn’t pull one of the empty ones, well, we
> know what we think of my judgment, and we don’t spend a lot of time on
> this list putting that out as a philosophical problem.
>
>
> I don’t actually write this note to be nasty -- because of course I
> know you know all this as well as your interlocutors do — but to be
> colorful to make a different point. It has to do with liking the fact
> that learning is not most interesting when one accretes an
> acquaintance with new facts, but when one realizes new ways of using
> words are necessary as a vehicle to taking on new frames of mind.
I am left to ponder this point... I think it is fundamental and well
stated (but also tightly packed) here. It matches what I learned
decades ago about Piaget's concrete and formal operational stages of
development.
> And Dave did it in his post of long questions some weeks ago — which
> at the time I didn’t want to respond to because my responses are sort
> fo dull and unhelpful — when he said most physicists are realists but
> quantum physicists are anti-realists. What the quantum physicists say
> is that the old classical assumption that “observables” and “states”
> are the same kind of thing turned out to be wrong. They are different
> kinds fo things. States can be real, and can even evolve
> deterministically, but may not be associated with any definite values
> for observables, because observables, when formalized and fully
> expressed through the formalization, are different kinds of things
> (they are a kind of operator, which one can think of as a rule for
> making a mapping) than states or than particular numbers that the
> observables can yield as their output from some states. So to claim
> that the quantum physicists are anti-realists is to scope “real” as
> coextensive with interpreting “observables” not as operators but as
> simple definite numbers. That is, to adopt the frame of classical
> mechanics. So Dave’s “anti-realist” actually means
> “anti-classical-mechanics-assumptionist”, which of course is exactly
> right, but never the scope I would use for the word “real”. Anyone
> who insists that is the only way it is allowed to be used has just
> dictated rules for conversation in which there is no way I can engage
> and still work for sense-making.
Once again, I don't have the capacity or focus to begin to do this
justice but I'm feeling a resonance around the attenuated? discussion of
Wofram's recent announcement...
> Anyway, the whole tenor of the discussion is fine. I enjoy all the
> parts of it, including your stubbornness for its own sake.
> Wittgenstein was reportedly impossible in that way, though I forget
> the reference and source. Some fellow-philosopher complaining that
> “it was impossible to get Wittgenstein to admit there was not a
> rhinoceros in the room."
The room is full of rhinocerii, and elephants... and 400lb Gorillas.
Oh, and I think a cigar or two, one of which is apparently "just a cigar".
- Steve
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