> But like many of Nick's riddles, I have no idea what he intended.
A popular topic in psychology is Theory of Mind, and much of what (little bit)
I read on it is around child development. When does it “dawn on” the child,
that the fact that he knows something or wants something, doesn’t suffice to
give some other child what that one needs, in order to know or to want the same
thing?
One could conjecture that one of the attributes of any practice that involves
rather long chains of formal extension between inputs and outputs is that it
brings with it a new regime of theory of mind, which people not in the field
don’t realize exists. So they believe they have “asked a question” or “posed a
problem”, while practitioners think they may have recited a rune, but that is
all. The round and round and round and round, about entropy, or various
phenomena in gas dynamics, had that aspect, and the question “what is the
completion of” some finite sequence, which has no unambiguous answer by an
infinite degeneracy, re-enters the terrain.
I had an interesting and good conversation with an SFI postdoc maybe two weeks
ago, who is interested the nature of empiricism in general, and empiricism in
science as a sub-topic. Also interested in metaphor, and other immediately
relevant themes to the former. Smart person, critical and seemingly
well-educated; I can see how she got an SFI offer. The conversation left me
wondering whether the distinctness of the {science, math} aggregate as a whole,
within the wider field of human cultural inheritances, is a “more is different”
kind of thing. Much of its sense of truth and meaning, and its notion of
empiricism, is a direct continuation of the commonsense (or “everyday”) notions
of the competent auto mechanic or farmer. But the number of moves on the
formal gameboard that the scientist or mathematician is permitted to make,
between empirical “check-ins” with some kind of natural validation, is far, far
more than we engage in, in traditional “everyday” activities. One of the
preconditions, it seems to me, for science and math to be possible as practices
within cultures is a kind of “tolerance” or “indulgence” for such long
digressions into reasoning, which (from experience within my family)
people-in-general are _not_ inclined to grant. Normally they want to
peremptorily cut that off, and blame the person trying to do it, as something
they regard as a “waste of time” or a “distraction from what people should be
doing” (piling up stones, digging the earth, engaging in aggression and
domination competitions, chasing tail?).
So in olden times, it was relatively small priesthoods given that luxury, to
engage in what the common man would resentfully call useless activity, and
indulged only in limited areas like calendrics or astronomy, or something that
the Ruler could employ in people-control, so the priests lived under his
protection. The idea that such practices could become widespread and consume a
lot of the time of a broad range of people seems to have coincided (as a global
social premise) with the rise of industrialization and the appearance of luxury
power from resources like fossil fuels of the various generations. (The spread
of the premise itself has a snowball effect: when it is allowed in very few
areas, there are few successes to suggest that it might be applicable more
generally, and thus less argument to make to the common man that he should
tolerate it. As it is tried a little more widely, and more things get figured
out, the argument for indulging in a little further exploration gets a bit
easier; and so on.)
But the main conjecture is a Terry Deacon-ish argument: that only the
domesticated magpies had enough selection pressure lifted from mating, to
become true, combinatorially-inventive songbirds; their wild cousins were under
such ruthless mating selection that they stayed rigidly canalized with
formulaic squawks, which people put in the lower complexity class of
“non-songbirds”. (Obviously, there is much I leave out here, including the
whole thesis of Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian, about Vedic temple
culture, and a similar argument that could be made for the Jewish rabbinical
tradition, but FRIAM is just a mailing list…)
In the vein of “Big History”, I wonder whether the sunset of cheap fossil
energy will take with it this tolerance for any activity that the “common man”
doesn’t regard as legitimate. I won’t credit the current crop of fascists with
being harbingers of such large changes; they are just irresponsible crooks and
bullies, with a truncated worldview that doesn’t even include any real picture
of what the world will be like that they are working to create, and how
unlikely even they are to escape having it fall on them. But on longer terms —
from arguments like Bill Rees’s Real Green New Deal (I know, tiresome that I
keep using it as a reference point, but hey, he’s Canadian) — are there causal
links between luxury power and the ability of societies to maintain whole
regimes of activity? Kind of like Melanie Moses found that people continue the
allometric scaling curve of fertility from the rest of the animals, but only if
you include our built-environment power consumption as part of their
“metabolism”.
And when it is let go, all the theories of mind that it brought into existence
will also drop off and fade from cultural memory. And people will understand
each other’s riddles again, because we will all be mostly the same.
Eric
> On Sep 10, 2025, at 22:08, glen <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I figured it was one of these:
>
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2foeis.org%2fsearch%3fq%3d1%252C3%252C4%252C6%252C8%252C9%252C10%252C13%252C15%26language%3denglish%26go%3dSearch&c=E,1,7bPYo_1tWU_zSLcfsx5T99Pk9hSPtTx4cdk8GnOG6x5oFOpN745vHivBKBWf0CbXDiCCMMlN92AOPRYzX998ET4qm3q1Heo7howjfIgllXd_WLg,&typo=1
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2foeis.org%2fsearch%3fq%3d1%252C3%252C5%252C6%252C8%252C10%252C12%252C13%252C15%26language%3denglish%26go%3dSearch&c=E,1,pyGGrVThFrXJF_tqGP81iyJzH7ROwFMQZtCpNBgDbzBhVLo9_4mKcAkCozGwo4FB7JeRsopFCNvQkcWfGkkMeFP7NrYLmjRePDPjsYYxuxnSbA,,&typo=1
>
> Were it so, we'd need the next number {16,17} to tell the difference. But
> like many of Nick's riddles, I have no idea what he intended.
>
>
> On 9/9/25 8:40 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
>> Sorry, 22. I needed to constrain the two systems. Too much linear algebra to
>> want to explain, but yeah, Vandermonde and all that.
>> On Tue, Sep 9, 2025 at 9:22 PM Jon Zingale <[email protected]
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> It's 29.
>> I am assuming you are thinking of a polynomial that generates each
>> sequence. Unfortunately, it's a 6th degree polynomial and so solving for the
>> coefficients is a pain. You construct a Vandermonde matrix (V) a vector of
>> dummy coefficients a = [a0, a1, ..., a6]. Then you solve for the
>> coefficients relative to your sequence (S), V * a = S.
>> Python helped nicely:
>> import numpy as np
>> n1 = np.array([0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6])
>> y1 = np.array([1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12])
>> coeffs1 = np.polyfit(n1, y1, 6)
>> sol1 = np.polyval(coeffs, 7)
>> n2 = np.array([0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6])
>> y2 = np.array([1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10])
>> coeffs2 = np.polyfit(n2, y2, 6)
>> sol2 = np.polyval(coeffs, 7)
>> =>29
>> On Tue, Sep 9, 2025 at 3:17 PM Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> Sry. Should be all commas.
>> Sent from my Dumb Phone
>> On Sep 9, 2025, at 1:19 PM, Nicholas Thompson
>> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>
>> Here are two mathematical series
>> 1,3,5,6,8,10.12, __
>> 1.3.4,6,8,9,10, __
>> Both have the same next number.
>> Why, and what are we talking about here?
>> I predict that only Jon will guess the answer.
>> Please dont trouble yourself with this if you have anything better to
>> do.
>
>
> --
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