Re: [FRIAM] IS: Rhetoric in scientific arguments WAS: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

[Vladimyr Burachynsky]

Eric,

 

I doubt an idea before I ever apply for a grant. Then I deceptively claim to be 
trying to replicate an authorities claims. But the devil within me recalls that 
at least once maybe more often , I have noticed

that the authority’s prediction failed. That knowledge is my group’s secret 
until publication. Then it becomes everyone’s knowledge.

 

I have in my memory a perfect “Black Swan” event. I suppose that I have more 
faith in water birds than in statisticians. Perhaps we often hide behind 
obscure math to shield our superstitious insights.

Some times using the math first reveals an outcome that is used as a gloss to 
hide the unknown. For instance the Griffith’s Crack Theory  widely held in 
Classic Mechanics. Exactly what is the use of a singularity zone

when a crack propagates in wild directions? The material does not use it but 
then at that scale the material uses Quantum Mechanics but the engineer favours 
The Classic Mechanics. So indeed certain materials do emit light

from crack tips. At the edges of any discipline anomalies will define limits or 
boundaries for paradigms. Without doubt and secret devilish memories Science 
would not evolve so quickly.

 

At this point I am reminded of an eminent chemist , Polanyi? who received the 
Nobel Prize and afterward became a philosopher who suspected something like 
superstition, drives many scientists much like

Isaac Newton.

I think as civilized people we prefer to stick with conduct rules knowing 
perfectly well how to violate them and the consequences of doing so. 

vib

I guess we should never believe the whole of PR.

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: March-02-17 1:04 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] IS: Rhetoric in scientific arguments WAS: FW: Fractal 
discussion Landscape-bird songs

 

Glen, 

To "Peirce-up" the discussion of doubt a touch. To doubt something is to be 
unable to act as-if-it-were-true without reservation. So, for example, you do 
not doubt Newtonian mechanics under a wide range of conditions (you are willing 
to act as if it is true under many circumstances), however, there are 
conditions under which you would be nervous acting as if they were true. Your 
doubt is not absolute, and the "caveats" you refer to, could be expressed as a 
description of the circumstances under which you start to get nervous. 

 

Your description of replication is good, but non-typical (particularly among 
the chemists, which are Peirce's favorite scientist). We now think of 
replication as part of the falsification process, but that is actually a weird 
way to think about (a symptom of the degenerate state of many current fields). 
The most natural reasons to replicate a research report is a) because the 
outcome is itself useful or b) because you intend to build upon it. For 
example, if someone publishes a novel synthesis for artificial rubber, I would 
probably try to replicate it because I need artificial rubber, or because I 
intended to start with that artificial rubber and try to synthesize something 
new. Under those conditions, anyone trying to replicate would be very 
frustrated by a failure (given some tolerance for first attempts). 

 

Nick, 

I think Glen is prodding, in his second part at an extremely important point, 
and one that I have been wrestling with quite a bit lately. It is quite unclear 
why "trusting the work of other scientists" - as currently practiced - is not 
simply another deference to authority. The current resurgence of assertions 
that people shouldn't argue with scientists (e.g., that we should care what an 
astrophysicists thinks about vaccines, or what a geneticist thinks about 
psychology) is bad, and "science-skeptics" are not wrong when they attach a 
negative valence to such examples. Let us ignore those flagrant examples, 
however. How do I determine how much weight to give to a report in a "top 
journal" in psychology? Does it matter that I know full well most articles in 
top journals turn out to have problems (as flashy reports of unexpected results 
are prone to do)? And if I am suspicious of that, what do I make of the opinion 
of a Harvard full professor of psychology vs. a bartender who has been helping 
people with their problem for 5 decades? Etc. etc. etc. I think there is a very 
deep issue here, which I'm not sure I've ever seen explained well. I think, in 
part, it is a challenge that was not as prevalent even 50 years ago, but that 
may just be imagined nostalgia. 

 

 

 

 

 





---
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 4:13 PM, glen ☣  wrote:


Heh, your lack of social salve has left me unclear on whether I should respond 
or which parts to respond to. >8^D  So, I'll just respond to what I think is 
the most important point.

>  That implies that what you say below supports arguments from authority. 
> [

Re: [FRIAM] IS: Rhetoric in scientific arguments WAS: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

[glen ☣]

On 03/02/2017 11:04 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
> To "Peirce-up" the discussion of doubt a touch. To doubt something is to be 
> unable to act as-if-it-were-true without reservation. So, for example, you do 
> not doubt Newtonian mechanics under a wide range of conditions (you are 
> willing to act as if it is true under many circumstances),

Personally, I don't think this is true.  It's not doubt that gives one pause.  
It's the expected consequences.  But that requires a disambiguation of types of 
uncertainty.  Regardless, I do low-consequence things without reservation every 
day all day, independent of any doubt I have about a) the truth of my 
conceptions or b) whether my actions will pay off.  I think you make the point 
about consequences nicely in your discussion of replication.

To be concrete, let's say we're all in certain agreement that chopping off our 
ear trumpets will help us hear better.  My guess is most of us won't do it, not 
because we doubt the truth of our theory, but because it _hurts_.  Compare that 
to, say, typing log(0) into your calculator.  It's irrelevant whether you doubt 
the makers of the calculator as to whether you'll do it or not.

-- 
☣ glen


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Re: [FRIAM] IS: Rhetoric in scientific arguments WAS: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

[Eric Charles]

Glen,
To "Peirce-up" the discussion of doubt a touch. To doubt something is to be
unable to act as-if-it-were-true without reservation. So, for example, you
do not doubt Newtonian mechanics under a wide range of conditions (you are
willing to act as if it is true under many circumstances), however, there
are conditions under which you would be nervous acting as if they were
true. Your doubt is not absolute, and the "caveats" you refer to, could be
expressed as a description of the circumstances under which you start to
get nervous.

Your description of replication is good, but non-typical (particularly
among the chemists, which are Peirce's favorite scientist). We now think of
replication as part of the falsification process, but that is actually a
weird way to think about (a symptom of the degenerate state of many current
fields). The most natural reasons to replicate a research report is a)
because the outcome is itself useful or b) because you intend to build upon
it. For example, if someone publishes a novel synthesis for artificial
rubber, I would probably try to replicate it because I need artificial
rubber, or because I intended to start with that artificial rubber and try
to synthesize something new. Under those conditions, anyone trying to
replicate would be very frustrated by a failure (given some tolerance for
first attempts).

Nick,
I think Glen is prodding, in his second part at an extremely important
point, and one that I have been wrestling with quite a bit lately. It is
quite unclear why "trusting the work of other scientists" - as currently
practiced - is not simply another deference to authority. The current
resurgence of assertions that people shouldn't argue with scientists (e.g.,
that we should care what an astrophysicists thinks about vaccines, or what
a geneticist thinks about psychology) is bad, and "science-skeptics" are
not wrong when they attach a negative valence to such examples. Let us
ignore those flagrant examples, however. How do I determine how much weight
to give to a report in a "top journal" in psychology? Does it matter that I
know full well most articles in top journals turn out to have problems (as
flashy reports of unexpected results are prone to do)? And if I am
suspicious of that, what do I make of the opinion of a Harvard full
professor of psychology vs. a bartender who has been helping people with
their problem for 5 decades? Etc. etc. etc. I think there is a very deep
issue here, which I'm not sure I've ever seen explained well. I think, in
part, it is a challenge that was not as prevalent even 50 years ago, but
that may just be imagined nostalgia.







---
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician
U.S. Marine Corps


On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 4:13 PM, glen ☣  wrote:

>
> Heh, your lack of social salve has left me unclear on whether I should
> respond or which parts to respond to. >8^D  So, I'll just respond to what I
> think is the most important point.
>
> >  That implies that what you say below supports arguments from authority.
> [NST==>I don’t think we can EVER escape arguments from authority.  Science
> is locked in a matrix of trust.  Doubt in science is really important, but
> it has to be relatively rare, or we would never know which of a million
> doubts to take seriously.  <==nst]
>
> I think you use "doubt" differently than I do.  Even if we replace "doubt"
> with "falsified", it's not a binary thing.  When I doubt something an
> authority says, I'm not refuting, denying, or rejecting it.  I'm simply
> expressing that the saying probably has caveats, some of which I might know
> about, some of which I might not.  The same is true of (critical
> rationalist) falsification.  Even though we know Newtonian physics isn't
> end-all, be-all True with a capital T.  It's satisficing in most
> circumstances.  To (When I) say it's been falsified simply means it has
> caveats.
>
> And, in this sense of the two terms, doubt and falsification are _rampant_
> in science.  When you try to replicate some other lab's experiment, you
> must doubt, say, the methods section in their paper, usually because you
> don't have the exact same equipment and the exact same people ... doubt is
> what promotes reproducibility to replicability. ... at least in this
> non-scientist's opinion.
>
> >  I.e. we can't treat a lack of salve as an assertion of objectivity
> without implicitly asserting that every statement without such salve is
> fallacious. [NST==>Yep.  All statements are more or less fallacious.  So
> does that render all statements the same?  If I flip the coin once and it
> comes up heads, what evidence do I have that the coin is biased.   None.
> If I flip it twice, a little.  If I get a hundred heads, the probability
> that the coin flips represent a population of fair coin-flips is finite,
> but vanishingly small.  I’ld bet on it, wouldn’t you?  All statements of
> certainly of that character.  <==nst]
>
> No, not all fallacies are the same.  Di

[FRIAM] Re fractality: A complex birdsong example

[Nick Thompson]

Hi, everybody, 

 

 

http://www2.clarku.edu/faculty/nthompson/1-websitestuff/Texts/2000-2005/Vari
ation_in_the_bout_structure.pdf

 

I thought that before you mathematicians completely ran off with my birds'
songs, you ought to have a concrete example in front of you.  

 

Nick 


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Re: [FRIAM] Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

[glen ☣]

Yes, that makes perfect sense now that you've explained it.  Self-similarity is 
a tricky thing and would intuitively be sensitive to the delay.  One of the 
interesting ideas in that paper I posted yesterday was the "Menzerath-Altmann 
law", which leads to several different "fractal dimension" values, one 
associated with the size of each word (perhaps analogous to the delay in this 
context).  I'm not sure I dig the idea of averaging them to aggregate them into 
a fractal dimension of the text as a whole, though.  I have vague feelings of 
overhearing conversations about state space reconstruction touching on 
aggregation over different delay choices ... but it's all lost in the haze at 
this point.  I suspect there are people on this list who've actually worked on 
or near the topic.

On 03/01/2017 04:09 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> Thank you for the cool image and for
> diving into the code. To answer your
> question, I am using Euler's method to
> compute the trajectories of the Lorenz
> equations. `Eball` denotes the step size
> of the integration. In theory, making the
> Eball param smaller ought give better
> numerical solutions while increasing
> ought give less accurate solutions.
> 
> Takens' method, seems to rely heavily on an
> appropriate choice of delay time. I utilize a
> BBD  style delay line,
> @delay in code.
> 
> In my investigations so far, a step size of 0.003
> seems best paired with a delay of 30 steps. A
> step size of 0.009 seems to benefit from a shorter
> delay of 10 steps. Decreasing the step size to
> 0.0009,  I have been able to increase delay times
> to 100 steps with satisfying result.
> 
> I suspect that by weakening the accuracy of the
> integration, longer delay times force Takens' method
> to rely on less accurate information and the
> reconstruction suffers. I am open to additional
> thoughts and theories.

-- 
☣ glen


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