Re: [FRIAM] Reasons why we elect narcissists

[lrudolph]

> "I can't help but feel you're waiting to pop out of the horse and hit me
> with something that falsifies my faith in the foxes."

A fox one's faith in which can be falsified is a faux-fox.



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Re: [FRIAM] words RE: words

[lrudolph]

> Emergent: hexagonality of snowflakes.  Can we predict that from water
> vapor and cold?

And something about (maybe just the existence of) nuclei?

But predicting the hexagonality doesn't seem (to me) nearly enough to
predict the (not always, but very often) near-symmetry well past the level
of merely dihedral.




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Re: [FRIAM] words RE: words

[lrudolph]

Nick thinks:

> As I think Lee would say (dammit, Lee, where are you?), don't ask a fish
> about water; he knows nothing of it.

I would not say that; I have always thought it was a particularly silly
thing to say.  Since there are approximately 30 more messages to work
through, I won't expand on why I think it's silly unless necessary, and in
any case later.  (But I was quite serious in my earlier four-term analogy
to the effect that "water" is to "fish" as whatever it was--emergence?--is
to whatever they were--coders?)



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Re: [FRIAM] words RE: words

[lrudolph]

> I only kinda like it because I would prefer something like: emergence
> exists when the post-map language has a different expressibility than the
> pre-map language.

Surely not *simply* "different"?  If the post-map language has strictly
less expressibility than the pre-map language, does "emergence exist"? 
Well, maybe.  What if (the extreme case) it has NO expressibility?

Either of those would fit under that other proposed description, "phase
transition", but (to me) the informal notion of "emergence" just can't
include the extreme case, and probably shouldn't include the "strictly
less" case (but maybe I could be argued out of that "shouldn't").



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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

[lrudolph]

> It's as
> if I ran into God on the street and I said, "God, I have always
> wondered:  How did you do this creation thing?  And God answered "What
> creation thing?"

God:creation::fish:water



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Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

[lrudolph]

Dave writes in relevant part:

> also, if the Turing machine, the programmer, and the 'user' form an
> appropriate triad, might it be said that the Turing machine 'knows' what
> the programmer programmed and the user observes? None of the three
> elements "possess" that knowledge in isolation, but 'triadically' they
> all do.

I really like this formulation, except that I would go all the way and say
that it's the triad (rather than any one or two of "Turing machine",
"programmer", "user") that "knows" [something].  At least, with "Turing
machine" replaced by something like "partly formalized proof", it can
happen (and has happened to me more than once, sometimes with me in the
role of "programmer"="formulator of partly formalized proof", and
sometimes with me in the role of "user"="understander of partly formalized
proof"--where the latter has, again more than once, been either
"myself-at-later-time-stage-of-formulator" or
"myself-as-different-person-than-formulator") that the second of these two
triads "knows" something other than what the first knew (specifically,
that the proof actually proved more than what it was claimed to prove; of
course, the other case, where it didn't prove what it claimed, also
happens but then it may not be fair to say "know" for the earlier state of
affairs, depending on whether or not you epistemology insists that only
truths can be known).  Of course a "partly formalized proof" is not a
Turing machine, but some of the programs people have been creating lately
for doing various mathematical tasks (theorem verification, theorem
generation) really are TMs, and I see no reason why similar phenomena
couldn't happen there as well.




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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

[lrudolph]

> Thanks, Marcus.
>
> How often are proofs with errors published in refereed articles or
> textbooks?

Some years ago, when you guys in Santa Fe were reading Ruben Hersh's "18
Unconventional Essays on the Nature of Mathematics", I took the
opportunity to download a copy for myself.  Assuming you(-all) still have
your copies too, I recommend that you read (or reread) the
philosopher-of-mathematics Jody Azzouni's chapter, "How and why
mathematics is unique as a social practice", where he elaborates an idea
he calls "the benign fixation of mathematical practice".Here's a brief
passage from that chapter (asterisks indicate italicized matter):
===begin===
Let’s turn to the second (*unnoticed*) way that mathematics
*shockingly* differs from other group practices. *Mistakes are ubiquitous
in mathematics.* [...] What makes mathematics difficult is (1) that it’s
*so easy* to blunder in; and (2) that it’s *so easy* for others (or
oneself) to see
—when they’re pointed out—that blunders have been made. (pp. 204 and 205
of Hersh's book)
===end===
If the claims in that passage are true (and they ring true to me), then
even the informal refereeing (from colleagues, friends, or students) to
which a proposed proof is subjected at the blackboard or in pre-print form
is likely to turn up mistakes, and even less-than-diligent formal
refereeing to which a proof submitted for publication is subjected most of
the time, are likely to lead to corrections before eventual publication;
and if errors persist (as they often do), then unless the publication goes
unread (as many do...) they too will likely be corrected, eventually.

None of this quantifies the "how often" question, but it is consistent
with the general consensus "not often (but sometimes), and eventually
corrected (unless no one gives a good goddamn about the result)".

For more on this, read the chapter by me at the following link (I may have
sent the list, or some subset of it, this chapter once before; sorry about
that), which (incidentally relevant to an earlier subthread) has a
footnote mentioning computations with unreliable oracles.

https://clarkuedu-my.sharepoint.com/personal/lrudolph_clarku_edu/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?id=%2Fpersonal%2Flrudolph%5Fclarku%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2Flogics%5Ffor%5Farxiv%2Epdf=%2Fpersonal%2Flrudolph%5Fclarku%5Fedu%2FDocuments=2d17a63c-3b2f-4b08-ada5-7f384570ef5a




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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

[lrudolph]

> Russell writes:
>
> < However, conversely, there appear to interesting results that indicate
> P=NP for random oracle machines. There is some controversy over this,
> though, and personally, I've never been able to follow the proofs in the
> area :). >
>
> Minimally, why is LaTeX the preferred format and not, say, Mathematica?
> At least the latter makes it complete and computable.

Not everyone can afford Mathematica.  I can, but am not motivated enough
both to pay for it and to learn to use it well, given that very little of
the mathematics I want to do is very amenable to what it seems designed to
be best at.  Clark's mathematics department *couldn't* afford it while I
was there--Matlab was apparently enough cheaper, or perhaps more
appropriate to the research interests of the most likely user.  For the
occasional investigation of some example or other that comes up in my
work, free wxMaxima has mostly been adequate (but I could never persuade
any of the undergraduate math majors who were working with me and one of
our CS faculty on some geometric problems in motion planning that it was
something it was worth *their* trouble to learn in the hopes of 
furthering our research: I  have no evangelical talents to be applied to
those who have not already been touched by the appropriate version of the
Holy Spirit).



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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

[lrudolph]

Frank writes:
> I would hate to have to demonstrate that a modern computer is an instance
> of a Turing Machine.  Among other things they usually have multiple
> processors as well as memory hierarchies.  But I suppose it could be done,
> theoretically.

First a passage from a chapter I contributed to a book edited by a
graduate student Nick knows (Zack Beckstead); I have cut out a bit in the
middle which aims at a different point not under consideration here.
===begin===
If talk of “machines” in the context of the human sciences seems out of
place, note that Turing (1936) actually introduces his “automatic machine”
as a formalization (thoroughly mathematical, though described in
suggestive mechanistic terms like “tape” and “scanning”) of “an idealized
*human* calculating agent” (Soare, 1996, p. 291; italics in the original),
called by Turing a “computer”. [...] As Turing remarks, “It is always
possible for the computer to break off from his work, to go away and
forget all about it, and later to come back and go on with it” (1936, p.
253). It seems to me that then it must also be “always possible for the
computer to break off” and never “come back” (in fact, this often happens
in the lives, and invariably upon the deaths, of non-idealized human
calculating agents).
===end===
Of course Turing's idealization of "an idealized *human* calculating
agent" also idealizes away the fact that human computers sometimes make
errors. A Turing machine doesn't make errors.  But both the processors and
the memory of a modern computer can, and *must* make errors (however
rarely, and however good the error-detection).  To at least that extent,
then, they are not *perfect* instantiations of Turing machines.  On the
other hand, that very fact about them makes them (in some sense) *more*
like (actual) human calculating agents.

So, Nick, why are you asking what Turing machines think, instead of what
modern computers think?  (Be careful how you answer that...)



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Re: [FRIAM] A question for tomorrow

[lrudolph]

Maybe I've missed it, but has no one pointed out that a "Turing Machine"
is a mathematical formalism?  I may be a stick in the mud, but I refuse to
extend the definition of "know" so far as to make "A Turing Machine knows
[something]" a meaningful statement.  You might as well ask what a Goedel
Enumeration knows, or what The Classification of Finite Simple Groups
knows.  Hell, what does the integer 1 know???

Now maybe in you-alls' circles, "Turing Machine" is used to refer to some
kinds of physical implementations of particular Turing Machines.  But
that's a pernicious identification that can only lead to tears.



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Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 190, Issue 1

[lrudolph]

The latest on the Neuroskeptic blog: "The Driver is the Brain of the Car".

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2019/04/06/the-driver-is-the-brain-of-the-car/



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Re: [FRIAM] new studies confirm existence galaxies almost-no-dark-matter

[lrudolph]

>  https://grammarist.com/usage/dwarfs-dwarves/ tells me it's a neologism

or, perhaps, a neoarchaeologism?

> popularized by Tolkien.

The OED's only record of it (in a usage citation for "dwarf, n.") is "1818
  W. Taylor in Monthly Mag. 46 26   The history of Laurin, king of the
dwarves."



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Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 189, Issue 40

[lrudolph]

> An equation that captures the theory of
> the adjacent possible is available.

I have recently been reminded that Quine, in "On What There Is", posed the
question (presumably rhetorical and/or tendentious; my reminder came in
the form of just the following sentence with attribution but no other
context, and I haven't yet been moved to actually look up that context)
"How many possible men are there in that doorway?"  However many there
are, I presume some are more adjacent than others.  Perhaps Quine's
question should be revived to be about possible girls-next-door.



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Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

[lrudolph]

Nick says, in relevant part:

> For instance, when
> sociobiologists use the notion of selfish gene, they may legitimately
> disclaim the idea that genes consciously choose between self-regarding and
> other-regarding options, but they cannot legitimately disclaim the idea
> that a gene has the power to make any choice but the self-regarding one
> And that idea is patently false.  Genes do not make choices, they ARE
> choices and the choice is made at the level of the phenotype or at the
> level of the population, depending on how one thinks about the matter.
> My position is that I favor each and every one of us taking whatever
> responsibility for understanding our own "convex hull" of
> capability/knowledge/intuition as we are capable of and "managing" it to
> the best of our ability.

Although I am always happy to impugn the integrity of sociobiologists, and
in particular have no doubt that they are (perhaps not deliberately with
malice aforethought) equivocating on the meanings of "selfish", there
*are* two such meanings in common usage, which lead to two possible
readings of the phrase "selfish gene".  (1) The first meaning of "selfish"
(in the nearest dictionary) is "concerned chiefly or only with oneself"),
and using that one, the phrase "selfish gene" deserves all the scorn and
deprecation you have for it, precisely because the reading of the phrase
enforced by that definition of the adjective forces "self"-hood on the
gene.  (2) However, the second meaning of "selfish" is "arising from,
characterized by, or showing selfishness" (where "selfishness", not
explicitly defined in this dictionary, has to be taken as implicitly
defined by (1) in what might loosely be called a recursive manner); the
example phrase, "a selfish whim", illustrate that the "self" to which 
"selfishness" is ascribed need not (and I would say, generally is not) the
noun directly modified by "selfish" ("whim" or "gene"), but is rather some
other (actual or metaphorical) agent (the person whose whim it is or the
population/phenotype which has--metaphorically--"chosen", i.e., actually
*evolved*, the gene).

To the extent sociobiologists carelessly equivocate between those
meanings, they are to be corrected; to the extent that they do so
tendentiously, they are to be deplored (as well as corrected); but perhaps
some of them (with whom you are not familiar, or who you have possibly
misread) make it explicit that they are using meaning (2)?  *Those*
sociobiologists ought to be commended!



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Re: [FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

[lrudolph]

Nick et al., "surplus meaning" was the term I was misremembering.

Further replies to Nick's further questions later.



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[FRIAM] excess meaning alert? (was, Re: are we how we behave?)

[lrudolph]

Steve writes in relevant part:

> My position is that I favor each and every one of us taking whatever
> responsibility for understanding our own "convex hull" of
> capability/knowledge/intuition as we are capable of and "managing" it to
> the best of our ability.

The quotation marks around the phrase 'convex hull' and the word
'managing' presumably signal that they are being used non-literally, and
(I guess) metaphorically.  I would particularly like Steve, if he is
willing, to delve into the intended metaphor in the first case.  On the
one hand, lots of my work uses more or less geometry; on the other, in
lots of my other work I use metaphor; and I even think and write about
metaphor.  So it's likely that I'm taking the metaphor more seriously than
intended.

With that disclaimer: in the technical contexts I'm familiar with, to pass
from something X to the convex hull of X has the effect of (1) 'filling in
holes in X', in a well-defined manner that is (2) as economical as
possible and (3) (therefore) unique. Which (if any) of those properties
are reflected, and how, in the case that X is our
"capability/knowledge/intuition"?  ... I could ramble on a lot more but
will start with that.






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Re: [FRIAM] are we how we behave?

[lrudolph]

I predict with great confidence that the stimulus "are we how we behave?"
will quickly evoke a response from Nick.



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[FRIAM] abduction at the arxiv tonight

[lrudolph]

https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05479

I have not looked at the paper.



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Re: [FRIAM] The fruits of abduction

[lrudolph]

> The problem is that Born’s rule was not really more than a smart guess
> —
>> there was no fundamental reason that led Born to propose it. “It was
>> an
>> intuition without a precise justification,” said Adán Cabello
>> , a quantum theorist at the
>> University of Seville in Spain.

Isn't that what an "Ansatz" is?  (A quick Googling suggests maybe not. 
But it seems similar to me...)



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Re: [FRIAM] Photos of popped balloon

[lrudolph]

> I think they were cylinders, not spheres, so there were two holes. This
> is where we start talking about homology groups.

We don't absolutely *have* to.  The theories of Riemann surfaces and
algebraic functions got pretty far just having the (proto-homological, but
very ungroupy) notions of "simple connectivity" vs. "multiple
connectivity".

[For those readers, possibly consisting of Nick alone, here's what that
means. Suppose you produce a thin sheet of copper by electroplating onto
some or all of the surface of a solid piece of wax that you then melt
away.  For instance, you get a cylindrical surface if you start with a
solid wax cylinder and only electroplate onto its lateral surface, leaving
the round disks at its two ends unplated; and it will be possible to melt
the wax away without cutting a hole in the copper.  On the other hand, you
get a spherical surface if you start with a solid round ball of wax and
electroplate onto its entire surface (let's not worry about how you do
that...); in that case, you'll have to puncture the sphere (maybe cutting
out a little disk around the south pole) to let the melted wax escape.  
Just make one hole!  (And don't worry about possible difficulties draining
out all the wax, okay?)  For a third example, start with a piece of wax in
the shape of a donut (a so-called "solid torus" or, in a charmingly
antique idiom, an "anchor ring"); the resulting copper surface is a
"torus" plain and simple.  Again, a single hole will suffice to drain the
(idealized) wax; again, don't make any others.

Now take your pair of metal shears and start cutting somewhere on an edge
of the copper sheet.  In the cylinder example, you have two edges, each of
them a circle at one end of the cylinder.  In the sphere and torus
examples, you have a single (circular) edge, around the hole you drained
the wax through.

It is a fact (which I hope you can imagine visually with no trouble,
because all this electroplating would be expensive and difficult) that no
matter how you the sphere-with-one-hole with your shears, starting and
ending at edge points, you will cut the copper into two pieces.  It is
also a fact that on both the cylinder and the once-punctured (i.e.,
drained) torus, there are *some* ways to cut from an edge point to another
edge point that do *not* cut the copper into two pieces.  (On the
cylinder, you have to start somewhere on one of the two circular edges and
end somewhere on the other: when you've done that you can unroll the
cylinder flat onto a table.  On the once-punctured torus, there are many
very different ways to make such a "non-separating" cut.)

Riemann and Co. described this qualitative distinction between the surface
of a sphere and the (lateral) surface of a cylinder (and torus, etc.,
etc.) by calling a sphere "simply connected" and the others "multiply
connected".  "Simple" here is like 0, and "multiple" like "a strictly
positive integer", which began the process of refining the qualitative
distinction into a quantitative distinction.  Very soon the quantitative
distinction was refined much more by making the various positive integers
distinct (so the "cut number" of the sphere is 0, the cut number of the
cylinder is 1, and--as it turns out--the cut number of the torus is 2).

Rather later, this quantitative distinction became more refined. 
Eventually it became *so* refined that "homology groups" appeared as the
best way to describe the refinements.

It is quite possible that the mathematical physicist John Baez, Joan's
younger cousin, wrote all this stuff up very clearly 15 or 20 years ago. 
If so, it would be findable with Google.]



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Re: [FRIAM] FW: Math emojis

[lrudolph]

Nick:
> Well, Ok.  I can see that it's sort of like Carl Tollander's
>
> "Let there be a spherical cow," which always makes me smile.
>
> Or
>
> Even the micro economists',
>
> "Let there be a fully informed consumer."

I don't claim to be a native speaker of PhysicsEng, much less of EconoEng,
but I've frequently hung out with some of the former, and I've always seen
it stated "Assume a spherical cow".  Further, if either of those
one-liners were to be expanded to a longer
joke-about-jargon-and/or-idealization, my strong intuition suggests that
they would have to be expanded to something along the lines of "Let X be a
spherical cow", "Let C be a fully informed consumer", followed by some
fanciful bloviation (or bovination) about X and C, using fancy jargon (or
pseudojargon; for instance, somewhere around here I have a very old
photocopy of a parody astrophysics article, typeset in the style of--I
believe--the Astrophysical Review, purporting to be "On the
Imperturbability  of Elevator Operators" by Chandrasekharan: the joke in
the title rests on the facts that "operators" and "perturbation" are
standard jargon in mathematical physics, and could quite reasonably appear
near each other in MathPhysEng, but "elevator operators" is just a bit of
slapstick).  Just plain "Let there be", without providing a place-holding
name for the assumed cow or consumer, rings very false.  But (as before)
this is empirical stuff, and if you've really heard them that way (and can
prove it...), then they can occur that way and my skepticism is
unwarranted.  On the other hand, if you're *recreating* the material in
quotation marks *as a representation of what you understood to be the
joke*, then I think you're in the position of the (typically) British man
who, in a meta-joke, tries to re-tell an American joke and gets it
hilariously wrong.

> But how do we tell the jokes from the foundational insights:
>
> Like: "Let there be a number which when multiplied by itself equals -1.
>
> Or that howler of mathematical howlers: "Think of a number greater than
> any
> number you can think of."
>
> Or Knewton's  Knee-slapper: "Calculate the acceleration at an instant."

Well, we do have the proverb "Many a true word is spoken in jest", and
"kidding on the square" is an old and honorable idiom, whereas "kidding on
the square of the hypotenuse" is just a quip, and "kidding on the
hypothesis" might be a translation of "Hypothesis non fingo" but not a
very good one. From your point of view as a pragmatist (Jamesian or
Pierceian, take your pick), what should it *matter* whether we can or
can't "tell the jokes from the foundational insights"?  J: an insight that
sees no inwardness is no insight. P:
If something (a discourse fragment; a stone; a dream--well, not one of
those, in your case) is a "foundational insight", that will (eventually)
be found to be the case *because it became a foundation of something* in
the long run.  If something is a "joke", *that* will (eventually) be found
to be the case because it made you laugh, most often--but not always--in
the short run (and, yes, I have at least several times in my life suddenly
"gotten" a joke decades after hearing or seeing or reading it, as I bet
you have, too; conversely, I've more than several times realized that
something an earlier "I" found to be a real side-splitter wasn't funny at
all).






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Re: [FRIAM] FW: Math emojis

[lrudolph]

The joke (such as it is) is a discourse joke, playing upon the fact
(incontestable to all fluent writers/speakers of MathEng, i.e.,
mathematicians' English) that the fragment of MathEng "For every \epsilon
< 0"  is perfectly well formed both syntactically and semantically, but
violates the established pragmatics of MathEng. (Excuse the TeX, but when
I try to paste the Greek letter epsilon into this window, hijinx ensue;
imagine it's there, instead of \epsilon.) [Added before mailing: it occurs
to me that you, as an expert on "pragmatism", may not be familiar with the
linguists' term-of-art "pragmatics", which I learned long ago from my
daughter Susanna, whom you met in Santa Fe.  The first definition Google
gives is what I mean: "the branch of linguistics dealing with language in
use and the contexts in which it is used, including such matters as
deixis, the taking of turns in conversation, text organization,
presupposition, and implicature." In particular, the "joke" in question
depends on presuppositions and implicatures.]

Even as a hopeless non-fluent occasional witness of MathEng, Nick, you can
easily acquire evidence in favor of my claim about syntax by browsing
mathematical papers for fragments of the form "For every [glyph] <
[glyph]" until you are convinced of the proposition that the MathEng
discourse community accepts such a fragment as well-formed.

With perhaps more work than you can be expected to do, you might also
acquire evidence in favor of my claim about semantics by browsing for
contexts that convince you of several propositions about MathEng: (1) very
generally, the glyph (here expanded as) \epsilon is used in MathEng to
denote a "real number"; (2) the glyph 0, in both MathEng and colloquial
English, is used to denote the (real) number zero; (3) the glyph < is used
in MathEng to denote a relationship that two real numbers may or may not
bear to each other, namely, the string of glyphs p < q is used to denote
that p is less than (and not equal to) q; (4) there *are* real numbers
less than 0; ... and perhaps more; whence "For every \epsilon < 0" is a
meaningful fragment of MathEng.

*However*, without sufficient exposure to MathEng discourses (and
certainly exposure more than you have had, or would tolerate having in the
present or future) it would be unlikely that you could figure out on your
own that IN PRESENT PRACTICE within the MathEng discourse community all
the following propositions are true.  (A) The glyph \epsilon is nearly
always used to denote a "small" real number (or an "arbitrary" real number
that "becomes" small), where in the context of "the real number system"
(among others) "small" means "close to 0".  (B) More specifically, in many
(but not all) such contexts, "small" means "close to 0 BUT LARGER THAN 0".
 (C) The most common context of type (B)--at least for mathematics
students and most, but probably not all, more fully-fledged Working
Mathematicians)--are the MathEng discourse fragments "For every \epsilon >
0", "For every sufficiently small \epsilon > 0", and their variants with
"every" replaced by "all". [This is an empirical claim.  I have not done
anything to test it (although if you have read those Book Fragments I sent
you, you will see there several examples where I *have* accumulated strong
empirical evidence, from exhaustive queries of extensive corpora of
MathEng, for other claims about MathEng: which should convince you, I
hope, that my MathEng intuitions are not invariably pulled out of my ass).
 I will bet you a shiny new dime that it's true.] THEREFORE, in the
actually existing community of contemporary fluent users of MathEng, the
syntactically and semantically impeccable fragment "For every \epsilon <
0" is pragmatically defective: nobody would say that!

If that hasn't explained any slightest \epsilon of humor out of the joke,
I don't know why not.  Perhaps you could respond with a Peircean analysis
of the semiotics of the joke, and *really* kill it dead.

Lee






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Re: [FRIAM] Motives - Was Abduction

[lrudolph]

Nick writes, in relevant part:

> I am not sure what monads and monism have to do with each other, other
> than that they share a linguistic root.  Honest.  I have trouble seeing
> the connection.
...
> I don't have much of a grip on MonADism.  As I understand monads, they
> are irreduceable "atoms" of existence.  They have no innards.

The "monads" of category theory did not arise under that name, and they
absolutely have "innards".  Why Saunders MacLane renamed them (as I just
learned by checking Wikipedia) that is probably known to many, but not to
me; as an instance of the "working mathematician" to whom his book
"Categories for the Working Mathematician" was purportedly addressed (J.
Frank Adams has a reference in one of his books to "Categories for the
Idle Mathematician"), I have a long experience of observing category
theorists' whimsy (e.g., Peter Freyd's "kittygory" for a "small category",
Peter Johnstone's "pointless topology", etc., etc.), and I suspect that
MacLane was mostly indulging in that rather than riffing on antique
philosophy.  Certainly the word is short and snappy, and that's sufficient
to explain why it caught on.

To the extent that it can be useful and accurate to describe some bit of
mathematics (or a name for that bit of mathematics) by applying to it the
term "metaphor" borrowed from rhetoric, it will almost always be MORE
useful and MORE accurate (if harder for Nick to deal with) to apply to it
another term borrowed from rhetoric, "conceit". Consulting Wikipedia, I
find that "modern literary criticism", damn its collective eyes, has
redefined that good old word for its own malign ends.  What *I* mean by it
is (I find by consulting the rather pre-modern Princeton Encyclopedia of
Poetry and Poetics) a generalization away from literature of the
"metaphysical conceit" (as contrasted with the "Petrarchian conceit"; and
named for the Metaphysical Poets, not for William James's coterie): "An
intricate [...] metaphor [...] in which the [...] qualities or functions
of the described entity are presented by means of a vehicle which shares
no physical features with the entity" (of course the "physical features"
business is not part of *my* meaning).

That is, a conceit is a metaphor that pays serious attention to the
multi-level *structures* and *functions* involved on both sides of the
trope.  A simple metaphor need have no innards; a conceit can be
jam-packed with them, but not arbitrarily jam-packed.  (The part of the
preceding sentence before the semi-colon is itself a pretty simple
metaphor.  The part after the semi-colon at least tends towards conceit. 
If I started to distinguish different kinds and functions of innards that
bodies can have--bones, muscles, vital and less-vital organs, etc.--and
likewise to distinguish different substructures that metaphors can have,
along with functions that they perform in the service of metaphorical
communication, and THEN set up a correspondence between the bodily innards
and the metaphorical substructures that "respected" their respective
functions...that would be a conceit.  Which I don't intend to work on any
further at the moment.)

The category-theorists among us may think I'm describing morphisms etc.
etc.  If they do, then they're committing metaphor (or thinking that I
am).  If they go further, and try to make sense about rhetorical
activities by applying category theory, then they're committing conceit.

Enough for now.

Lee








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Re: [FRIAM] Motives - Was Abduction

[lrudolph]

>We spend all this faith-based energy believing that individuals
> have thoughts and intentions, when perhaps we're merely *tools*.

Cf. Fort's maxim, "A social growth cannot find out the use of steam
engines, until comes steam-engine-time."



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Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

[lrudolph]

Glen says to Nick:

> I have no idea why you used the word "duality".

I am very afraid that Nick's use (is metaphorical and) can probably be
traced back to having read/heard someone writing about "the wave/particle
duality" or the like.

I'm not sure what *you* mean by duality: the rest of your post, which I
excised without thinking, makes it clear you have a definite, and precise,
and *not* metaphorical meaning for it, but I don't think it's a meaning I
know; and I'm doubtful that Nick, even if he's seen/heard you using it and
has had it explained to him, can explain it to *me* so that I'd understand
it...would you mind doing so (you can point me towards a reference instead
of rehashing it yourself!)?



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[FRIAM] Learning curves (was, Abduction)

[lrudolph]

Nick wrote, in relevant part,
> This reminds me of the misuse of the "learning curve"
> metaphor.  People speak of a steep learning curve as something to be
> feared.  In fact, people who learn quickly have a steep learning curve.

Behold, complete with ASCII art (so be ready to view this in a monospaced
font, or forever hold your peace), an ancient USENET post of mine to
alt.usage.english, from 1995 (!):

===begin===
Robert L Rosenberg (rros...@osf1.gmu.edu):
>: A learning curve should be the graph of a non-decreasing function (time
>: on the horizontal axis, knowledge of the topic on the vertical axis).  A
>: fast learner would have a generally steeper learning curve than a slow
>: learner.  At least that's the way I've always pictured it.

kci...@cpcug.digex.net (Keith Ivey) writes:
>I agree that this makes sense, but it doesn't seem to correspond with
>the way the phrase is used.  In my experience, something that is hard
>to learn is said to have a steep learning curve.

Rosenberg's explanation not only makes sense, it accords with the
original use by rat-runners and other operant conditioners (cf.,
e.g., _Psychology_ by James D. Laird and Nicholas S. Thompson, p. 164:
"The ... steeper the curve, the faster the animal is learning").
More precisely, *during an interval of time where the curve is
steep, the animal is learning quickly*.

The present use is muddled; as Ivey points out, "something
that is hard to learn is said to have a steep learning curve."
Here's how I unmuddle it (but I don't know what, if anything, is
going on in the heads of most people who use the phrase): by the
Mean Value Theorem, or common intuition, if a (smooth) nondecreasing
function f(t) with f(0)=0 and f(1)=1 is "steep" (has large derivative)
somewhere, then it MUST be "flat" (have small derivative) somewhere
else.  Typical learning curves (I gather from the illustrations in
Laird and Thompson) look either like Figure A or like Figure B:

xo
x
   xo
   x
 xo

   xo
o
 o
  xo

  FIGURE A  FIGURE B

In the first case, you learn almost everything in a short period of
time near the beginning of the training, then reach a plateau and learn
the rest very slowly.  In the second case, you learn very slowly for a long
time, then take off near the end of the training.

So the question is reduced to another one: which of Figures A and B is
a "steep" curve to the average speaker?

Lee Rudolph

===end===




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Re: [FRIAM] Was: Abduction; Is Now: Dionysian and Apollonian Lives

[lrudolph]

I'm not sure what you're buying with your move to "continuous" rather than
(merely) "infinite-valued".  I mean, though your discretized values {0..n}
are integers, they are (in my small experience of many-valued logics,
which does not include any actually *working* with them as logics) merely
nominal labels--the order, and the arithmetic for that matter, are
irrelevant semantically: the flavors 1, 2, 3 of not-true aren't such that
2 is more not-true than 1 but less not-true than 3, and certainly aren't
such that 2 is exactly half-way from 1 to 3 in not-trueness.

And, from another point of view, contrary to most people's "intuition" (as
formed by what turns out to be bad pedagogy, not anything in the
foundation of either physics or mathematics), "continuity" doesn't require
infinitude.  Way back in the early 1960 a couple of mathematicians
independently (Bob Stong was one of them, I forget the other) noticed that
all the algebraic topology that can be done with (finite) "simplicial
complexes" (e.g., polyhedra) in Euclidean space  (so, in particular, all
the algebraic topology of compact differentiable manifolds) can be
faithfully rephrased in terms of *finite* topological spaces (I mean,
literally finite: only finitely many points, where in particular a
one-element set does not have to be closed), if you don't insist that the
topology be Hausdorff (but do impose one very weak "separation property"
which I'm currently blanking on).  Much more recently, a pair of
Argentinians, J. Barmak & E. Minian, have published a series of papers
(all available at the arXiv) extending and clarifying that.  Logics with
*that* kind of a continuum of values has, I think, already be done (the
finite topological spaces in question can be reinterpreted as finite
posets / finite lattices / etc., and at least "lattice-valued logics" has
a familiar sound to me; but, again, I'm blanking on any details).


> Since one of my dead horses is artificial discretization, I've always
> wondered what it's like to work in many-valued logics.  So, proof by
> contradiction would change from [not-true => false] to [not-0 =>
> {1,2,..,n}], assuming a discretized set of values {0..n}.  But is there a
> continuous "many valued" logic, where any proposition can be evaluated to
> take on some sub-region of a continuous set?  So, proof by contradiction
> would become something like [not∈{-∞,0} => ∈{0+ε,∞}]?




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Re: [FRIAM] g-conjecture?

[lrudolph]

> I'm sure most of you know more about this than me.  But since I'm in a kind 
> of pseudo-holiday state between work and doing nothing, perhaps you are too:
> 
> Amazing: Karim Adiprasito proved the g-conjecture for spheres!
> https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2018/12/25/amazing-karim-adiprasito-proved-the-g-conjecture-for-spheres/

Huh.  I saw the abstract as I was perusing math/new at the ArXiV yesterday 
night (mostly 
looking for math.GT, Geometric Topology being my general field, and knot theory 
my specialty) 
and declined to download the paper.  Now that I've read the blog post there I 
may have to 
reconsider; while I appreciate that computability classes are important, 
generally speaking I 
am not personally interested in computing knot invariants (efficiently or 
otherwise); I'm more 
interested in discovering them, and relating them to each other.  

My article in the Handbook of Knot Theory (Elsevier, 2004) has a bit of 
(entirely 
justifiable!) snark near the beginning, attached as a footnote to a few 
sentences that I think 
still provide a useful distinction (or three):


In the past several decades, knot theory in general has seen much progress and 
many changes. 
"Classical knot theory"-the study of knots as objects in their own right-has 
taken great 
strides, documented throughout this Handbook [blah, blah]. Simultaneously, 
there have been 
extraordinarily wide and deep developments in what might be called "modern knot 
theory": the 
study of knots and links in the presence of extra structure, for instance, 
[blah blah]
[footnote] Some observers have also detected "postmodern knot theory": the 
study of extra
structure in the absence of knots.


What I do is "modern knot theory".  But so is this new paper (and the various 
older papers one 
discovers by clicking links in the blog post), and as such I'm all for it.  On 
the other hand, 
_even if_ detecting the unknot (say) is in P (and even if, also, P equals NP), 
that doesn't 
mean you'll ever be able to *do* it (decide whether a particular knot diagram 
is a diagram of 
the unknot) for every knot that you might want to, no matter how fast computers 
get and how 
efficient those polynomial-time/polynomial-space unknot detection algorithms 
get: because 
"every knot that you might want to", if your wants are like mine, will always 
include 
_infinite families of knots_.  I like theorems of the form "if X belongs to 
(infinite family) 
F, then X has property G."  (By that token, I should, and do, like theorems 
that say such-and-
such is not algorithmically decideable at all!  For instance, it's quite 
comforting, in its 
way, to know that there's no algorithm that can tell you, given any two 
four-dimensional 
closed manifolds, whether or not they are the same; and likewise, that there 
*are* such 
algorithms for three-dimensional closed manifolds.)

But there's still plenty of post-modern knot theory out there, and I still 
don't approve of 
it.


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Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

[lrudolph]

Glen wrote, in relevant part, "Like mathematicians, maybe we have to ultimately 
commit to the 
ontological status of our parsing methods?"  I wish to question the implicit 
assumption that 
mathematicians _do_ (or even _ought to_) "ultimately commit to the ontological 
status" of 
_anything_ in particular.

I wrote (some time ago, and not here) something I will still stand by.  It 
appears at the 
beginning of a me-authored chapter in a me-edited book, "Qualitative 
Mathematics for the
Social Sciences: Mathematical models for research on cultural dynamics"; the 
"our" and "we" in 
the first sentence refer to me and my coauthor in an introductory chapter, not 
to me-and-a-
mouse-in-my-pocket.  (Note that I am a mathematician, _not_ a social scientist, 
and only very 
occasionally a mathematical modeler of any sort.) I have edited out some 
footnotes, etc., but 
in return have expanded some of the in-line references {inside curly braces}.

===begin===

In our Introduction (p. 17) we quoted "three statements, by mathematicians 
{Ralph Abraham; 
three guys named Bohle-Carbonell, Booß, Jensen, who I'd not heard of before 
working on the 
book; and Phil Davis} on mathematical modeling". Here is a fourth.

(D) Mathematics has its own structures; the world (as we perceive and cognize 
it) is, or 
appears to be, structured; mathematical modeling is a reciprocal process in 
which we 
_construct/discover/bring into awareness_ correspondences between mathematical 
structures and 
structures `in the world´, as we _take actions that get meaning from, and give 
meaning to,_ 
those structures and correspondences. 

Later (p. 24 ff.) we briefly viewed modeling from the standpoint of 
"evolutionary 
epistemology" in the style of Konrad Lorenz (1941) {Kant´s doctrine of the a 
priori in the 
light of contemporary biology}. In this chapter, I view modeling from the 
standpoint 
informally staked out by (D), which I propose to call "evolutionary ontology." 
My discussion 
is sketchy (and not very highly structured), but may help make sense of this 
volume and 
perhaps even mathematical modeling in general.

Behind (D) is my conviction that there is no need to adopt any particular 
ontological 
attitude(s) towards "structures", in the world at large and/or in mathematics, 
in order to 
proceed with the project of modeling the former by the latter and drawing 
inspiration for
the latter from the former. It is, I claim, possible for someone simultaneously 
to adhere to a 
rigorously `realist´ view of mathematics (say, naïve and unconsidered 
Platonism) and to take 
the world to be entirely insubstantial and illusory (say, by adopting a crass 
reduction of the 
Buddhist doctrine of Maya), _and still practice mathematical modeling in good 
faith_ if not 
with guaranteed success. Other (likely or unlikely) combinations of attitudes 
are (I claim) 
just as possible, and equally compatible with the practice of modeling.  

I have the impression that many practitioners, if polled (which I have not 
done), would 
declare themselves to be both mathematical `formalists´ and physical 
`realists´. I also have 
the impression that a large, overlapping group of practitioners, observed in 
action (which
I have done, in a small and unsystematic way), can reasonably be described to 
_behave_ like 
thoroughgoing ontological agnostics.  Mathematical modeling _as human behavior_ 
is based, I am 
claiming, on acts of pattern-matching (or Gestalt-making)-which is to say,in 
other language, 
on creation/recognition/awareness of `higher order structures´ relating some 
`lower order 
structures´-that one performs (or that occur to one) independently of one´s 
ontological 
stances. That is not all there is to it, as behavior; but that is its basis.

===end===

To take Glen's question in (perhaps) a different direction, I note that Imre 
Lakatos also used 
the word "ultimate" about mathematicians, as follows: "But why on earth have 
`ultimate´ tests, 
`final authority´? Why foundations, if they are admittedly subjective?  Why not 
honestly admit 
mathematical fallibility, and try to defend the dignity of fallible knowledge 
from cynical 
scepticism, rather than delude ourselves that we can invisibly mend the latest 
tear in the 
fabric of our "ultimate" intuitions?" As I have learned from Nick, Peirce is 
also committed to 
the defense of "the dignity of fallible knowledge" (at least, I *think* I've 
learned that from 
Nick; but I might be wrong...).


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Re: [FRIAM] Winter Solstice Feature

[lrudolph]

Dear Nick et al.,

Here's my contribution to your Soltice gaiety, such as it is: a 
follow-the-bouncing-ball-style 
MP4 (prepared on the cheap with Wondershare Filmora's screen-capture) of my C 
"Solstice 
Song" (rendered, both as score and MIDI performance, by the excellent freeware 
MuseScore), 
with the vocal line--which should of course be a high-and-lonesome human 
voice--covered by 
harmonica, over rhythm and bass guitar parts.  I assume no one under 50 would 
understand (from 
their own experience, anyway) the operative metaphors in the two non-refrain 
choruses, but 
presumably that is irrelevant here...

Cheers, Lee Rudolph


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Re: [FRIAM] two books

[lrudolph]

Jon Zingale writes, in relevant part:

> In modern mathematics, one encounters categories whose
> `points` have an internal structure which can be more
> complicated than one's initial intuition would provide.
> There is a sense that what the interested physicist is doing
> by exploring the duality is attempting to understand the nature
> of 'physical points'. How is a physical point like a point in
> Euclidean geometry? To what extent can there be a consistent
> formal description which matches our knowledge of these points?
>
> Perhaps from some phenomenological perspective, we should
> understand these physical points as founding all experience
> regarding points and waves. After all, assuming the present
> quantum mechanical presentation, all of the classical
> experiences of  wave-like nature and particle-like nature
> are derived from interactions of these underlying primitive
> objects.

Here, modulo reformatting for ASCII e-mail, is part of one section of one
of my editorial chapters ("Functions of Structure in Mathematics and
Modeling") in my widely unread edited book "Qualitative Mathematics for
the Social Sciences" (Routledge, 2013; get your local libraries to order
dozens!), which (at least) obliquely talks to the issues Jon raises here,
and handles the issue of "more complicated than one's initial intuition"
somewhat head-on (though probably pitched above the head of most of the
social scientists who were the purported audience).

===begin===

ON MATHEMATICAL SPACES

The preceding discussion of projective planes provides not just explicit
examples of how set-theoretical definitions are used mathematically, but
also many examples (there not drawn explicitly to attention) of how (parts
of) such definitions can acquire or give meaning in the course of their
mathematical and para-mathematical interactions with other structures
(some mathematical but having definitions that remain out of attention,
others ‘in the world’ and defined—if at all—non-mathematically). In this
section I pick up just one of those dropped threads.

Many mathematical structures have been called ‘spaces’ (usually with some
modifier) since at least the discovery of non-Euclidean
geometries—notably, the real projective plane RP2 and the real hyperbolic
plane—early in the 19th century, and well before there were any
set-theoretical “foundations of mathematics”. By mid 20th century,
mathematical ‘spaces’ were common not only in geometry but in algebra
(‘vector spaces’), mathematical analysis (‘Hilbert spaces’, ‘Banach
spaces’, ‘Hardy spaces’, and many other kinds of vector spaces with extra
structure, as well as ‘metric spaces’ and ‘measure
spaces’), abstract algebra (‘representation spaces’, ‘prime ideal
spaces’), probability theory (‘probability spaces’), mathematical physics
(‘phase spaces’), and especially topology—the quintessential mathematics
of the 20th century—in its many manifestations: point-set, combinatorial,
algebraic, geometric, and differential. No single strictly mathematical
property is shared by these many kinds of ‘spaces’, but mathematicians in
general seem content to agree that the metaphor is broadly appropriate.

Typically, when mathematicians call some mathematical structure S a space
(here to be called a mathematical space in the hopes of averting
confusion), they understand it to share, in some sense and to some degree,
the following rather general pre-mathematical properties of the ordinary
space of our daily experience. [Footnote 15: Many presuppositions are
packed into the phrase “the ordinary space of our daily experience” and
its variants, and most if not all of them are probably unjustifiably
broad, particularly if “daily experience” is read so as to naïvely ignore
or tendentiously suppress the considerable role of linguistic framings
(cultural and sub-cultural, semi-permanent and evanescent) in that
“experience”. Still, the phrase and its variants have a reasonably well
delimited denotation that is widely understood (until it is examined
overly closely), so I take the risk of using it here.]
(1) A mathematical space is like a box that can ‘contain’ other sorts of
‘things’.
(2) A mathematical space is like a stage on which various ‘events’ can
‘happen’ (e.g., ‘things’ can ‘move’) in the course of time. [Footnote 16:
Somewhat confusingly, “time” is very often thought of as a mathematical
space by mathematicians. See Chap. 10, p. 308, and Rudolph (2006a).]
Properties (1) and (2) are essentially extrinsic to a candidate S for
‘spacehood’: they depend almost entirely not on what S is but on how S is
used.[Footnote 17: In particular, one and the same mathematical structure
S can be called a ‘space’ or not depending on the use to which it is being
put.] In contrast, a third general property is chiefly intrinsic.
(3) A mathematical space ‘has extent’, and can (usually) be ‘subdivided’;
a ‘piece’ of a mathematical space, though (usually) of smaller ‘extent’,
still has in its own right the quality of 

Re: [FRIAM] two books (perhaps a bit more)

[lrudolph]

You might also enjoy his "The Nature of the Chemical Bond".  I acquired my
copy an age or two ago from The Library of Science (remember that???) but
only dipped into to it for the first time about 3 years ago.  The book's
contribution to the lucidity of my interaction it far exceeded mine,
unfortunately (I'm a mathematician who never took a course in physics, or
any lab science, after a disastrously poor high school course--although I
still managed somehow to learn, only one age ago, about the Legendre
polynomial/spherical harmonic relationship, not that I've ever had
occasion to make any use of it in my own work!), but even so I came away
with some curiosities satisfied, and I'm sure your experience would be
much better.

> Thanks for the recommendation. Sarah had
> bought a copy of Pauling's 'Introduction to
> Quantum Mechanics' and it had sat at my
> periphery until the other night when I read
> your post. In one of those few moments of
> invincible lucidity, I managed to read the
> first 120 pages, deeply satisfying many of
> my curiosities. Pauling's exposition was
> surprisingly clear, though I must mention
> that he also does not mention the direct
> connection between Legendre polynomials
> and spherical harmonics (thanks wiki!).




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Re: [FRIAM] firefox and memory

[lrudolph]

> We haven't heard a lot of from you, lately.  Any bursr do you  under your
> saddle you'ld like to talk about?  

Given that he seems to be posting from a British university, he very well 
*could* have a 
bursar under his saddle.


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Re: [FRIAM] firefox and memory

[lrudolph]

Since 57.0.2 installed itself on my (4 year old W7Professional) machine, 
Firefox has run 
*much* *slower*.  Bah, humbug.

> Did you get v57, Quantum?  It should be much faster..
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> On Dec 7, 2017, at 9:42 PM, Nick Thompson 
> > wrote:
> 
> Hi, everybody,
> 
> Recently Firefox updated itself and since that time my machine - an elderly 
> W7 -- has been running slow.  In the resource manager I noticed that where it 
> used to open one process, sometimes as large as half a gig, it now opens 
> several processes, the total of which can easily exceed 1 G.  At that point, 
> my machine runs like molasses.  Is Firefox no longer browser to the stars?
> 
> N
> 
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
> 
> 
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> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove




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Re: [FRIAM] organizations

[lrudolph]

I regularly caught skunks in our  Hav-a-Hart trap (bought and intended for 
woodchucks).
Never attached a long (or short) cord to the release mechanism, but I always 
opened the cage 
wearing a bathing suit (or less).  One time, the damned skunk really didn't 
want to leave; I 
think it was about to become a mother, but for whatever reason, it had spent 
the night 
carefully tearing up dried grass from underneath the cage and making a nice 
little nest for 
itself.  Eventually I cautiously tilted the closed end of the trap up and 
evenually the 
inhabitant found the angle uncomfortable enough to walk out the closed end.  At 
which point I 
ran back to the house.  But no spraying happened, nor was the nest reinhabited.


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Re: [FRIAM] Fractals/Chaos/Manifolds

[lrudolph]

The word, as a term of Mathematical English (which is of course quite a 
distinct dialect of 
English) is a calque of the Mathematical German word "Mannigfaltigkeit".  
Franklin Becher, in
the first paragraph of the lead article in the October, 1896, issue of the 
American 
Mathematical Monthly, "MATHEMATICAL INFINITY AND THE DIFFERENTIAL", doesn't 
quite use the word 
yet, but makes its origin clear enough. 

---begin---
Mathematics, as defined by the great mathematician, Benjamin Pierce, is the 
science which 
draws necessary conclusions. In its broadest sense, it deals with conceptions 
from which 
necessary conclusions are drawn. A mathematical conception is any conception 
which, by means 
of a finite number of specified elements, is precisely and completely defined 
and determined. 
To denote the dependence of a mathematical conception on its elements, the word 
"manifoldness," introduced by Riemann, has been recently adopted.
--end-- 

In his article on the foundations of geometry, available at  
http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Riemann/Geom/Geom.html , 
Riemann distinguished two types of "Mannigfaltigkeit", the discrete and the 
continuous:

---begin---
cat

Grössenbegriffe sind nur da möglich, wo sich ein allgemeiner Begriff vorfindet, 
der 
verschiedene Bestimmungsweisen zulässt. Je nachdem unter diesen 
Bestimmungsweisen von einer zu 
einer andern ein stetiger Uebergang stattfindet oder nicht, bilden sie eine 
stetige oder 
discrete Mannigfaltigkeit;

| Google Translate >

Size terms are only possible where there is a general concept, which allows 
different modes of 
determination. According as, according to these modes of determination from one 
to another, a 
continuous transition takes place or not, they form a continuous or discrete 
manifoldness;
---end---

In Riemann's (eventual) context, those sentences would be understood now (at 
least by 
topologists of my sort, which is to say, geometric topologists, cf. 
http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/math.GT) as sketching the modern concept of a 
(topological or 
differentiable) manifold as a "mathematical conception" that can "precisely and 
completely 
defined and determined" by a collection [called an "atlas"] of "modes of 
determination" 
[called "charts"] among (some pairs of) which there are also given "continuous" 
(i.e., 
topological) or perhaps *smooth* (i.e., differentiable) coordinate changes.

I dispute, incidentally, the claim that 3-manifolds are too hard to understand; 
they're *just* 
at the edge of that, but not over it (whereas 4- and higher dimensional 
manifolds are 
DEFINITELY over that edge, in various well-defined mathematical ways; e.g., the 
problem of 
determining whether two explicitly-given n-manifolds, n greater than 3, has 
been known for a 
long time to be computationally intractable [you can embed the word problem for 
groups into 
the manifold classification problem for n greater than 3], and much more 
recently has been 
shown to be doable in dimension 3).

The French word for (something a little more general than a) manifold is 
"variet", by 
the way; same sort of reason, I assume.




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Re: [FRIAM] Unix Nightmare

[lrudolph]

Frank writes:

> Nick,
> 
> Well, sometimes when I'm thinking about a dream, I suddenly remember some
> detail that I had completely forgotten.  But more often I fall back to
> sleep.  In my old age, I seldom remember dreams.

in reply to Nick:

> > Good lord, Frank.  Surely you are teasing me.  How could your memory of a
> > dream not be accurate?!

I thought it was widely believed by Psychologists (as it is certainly believed 
by *me*) that 
one commits an error (a category error, perhaps? or an error of attribution?) 
if one thinks of 
"a dream" as some thing that existed--or some act that was undertaken--before 
one awakes, 
which can thereafter be "remembered"; rather, the behavior that one (mis)names 
"remembering 
the dream I just awoke from" is actually the conjunction of two 
behaviors--"dreaming while 
half-awake" and "attributing the quality of 'rememberance of the past' to 
'awareness of an on-
going behavior'" (pardon the awkward phrasings).  Of course, often one also 
"thinks about a 
dream" when one is fully awake (or going back to sleep), and that behavior may 
be (or 
incorporate) actually remembering an earlier behavior of the previous type.  

In particular, to say that "I suddenly remember some detail that I had 
completely forgotten" 
*may* be begging the question: how can you know (and why should you suppose) 
that you are not 
simply (sic!) creating that detail anew, and simultaneously attributing 
pastness (and 
veridicality) to it?  And I do mean to ask, literally, *how* can you know 
something like that?

On an account like mine, Nick's question becomes vacuous; but maybe Nick 
phrased the question 
exactly as a succinct way of stating my more rambling account.  

Lee 


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Re: [FRIAM] speaking of analytics

[lrudolph]

Nick asks:

> How does thinking of data as
> encased in a non-dynamic subterranean matrix shape our (your) thinking for 
> good
> or ill?  

I'm astounded that *that* is the (most) salient part of the metaphor to your 
mind.  I'd sooner 
know, "how does talking of data as  something that is susceptible not only to 
extraction but 
to BEING USED UP shape your BEHAVIOR for good or ill?"  

It occurs to me just now, typing, that the originators of the damned phrase 
might not have 
been thinking of mining coal (say), but rather of jewels or gold--in which case 
the product 
isn't used up, it is simply re-sequestered from its subterranean matrix to some 
other matrix; 
or maybe of ore, in which case some "useful" knowledge will be refined and used 
for probably 
private good or public ill, at--even more so than for coal, perhaps--enormous 
public expense 
in the form of mine tailings, cyanide-poisoned water supplies, etc., etc.  

You may not have noticed that I've always despised this metaphor.  But I never 
did give it 
even this much (a couple of minutes) of thought, to see perhaps why.  So 
thanks, I guess.


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Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

[lrudolph]

Re: your dental pain.  Patsy had to have a tooth pulled a couple of weeks ago; 
her dentist, 
instead of prescribing opioids, told her to take 2 ibuprofen and 2 
acetominipehn (sp.?), 
together, every four hours.  It worked great.

No doubt not recommended for long term use or if you have liver problems, etc., 
etc.

My father used to say, when I complained of pain, "What pain?  I can't feel a 
thing."  Ha, ha, 
ha.  (This is presumably relevant to the FRIAM thread, come to think of it.)


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Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

[lrudolph]

> Dreams and hallucinations are experiences that don't, in the long run, pan
> out. 

Speak for yourself, man! 




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Re: [FRIAM] metaphor and talking across skill levels

[lrudolph]

Okay, the test worked!  So:

Carl Tollander writes:

 This may throw something (light?) on the issue.
 
 http://cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk/morality/morality.pdf
 
 The reason I'm tossing this in may not become apparent until a ways into 
 it, when mathematical morality notions are used to address abstraction.

Apparently I seem not to have received every message in this thread (and some 
of the ones I 
have gotten suggest that there are others in the same boat).  That may be why, 
even after 
reading all the way through, I'm still not sure how/why light (or cold water, 
or whatever) is 
thrown on the issue by this paper (because I'm not sure what the issue is).

That said, I think the paper's very interesting.  It's been decades since I've 
moved in 
mathematical circles where morally was used, but it comes back to me very 
distinctly, and I 
agree with much of what the author says.  Where I think she goes wrong is just 
at the point 
where, having described mathematical activity as moving around belief, 
understanding and 
knowledge, and even having illustrated this with a circle of two-headed arrows 
joining each 
pair of those three, she states It's widely believed that the big aim of doing 
maths is to 
prove theorems ie move things into the `proved' area. But I think the aim is to 
get things 
into the `believed' area--believed by as many mathematicians as possible.  NO! 
 The aim is to 
get things UNDERSTOOD (by as many mathematicians as possible)!!!  [Well, all 
three are aims, 
but understanding is primus inter pares.]  And she never comes back to 
(specifically 
mathematical) understanding again.

Typical category-theorist (grumble, grumble).

And as long as we're passing around PDFs, I attach a chapter on (among other 
things) the 
*in*formal logic of mathematics.  Only the last three pages of the text (pp. 
63-65) address 
(one) metaphor directly.  Like Cheng (and like Jody Azzouni, whose work I quote 
and possibly 
misuse liberally in the chapter--work I would never have read if it hadn't been 
for the 
semester FRIAM spent with Ruben Hersh) I'm trying to get at some aspects of the 
actual 
behavior of mathematicians.

Lee


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[FRIAM] test message

[lrudolph]

Sorry for the noise (if the experiment works; if not, no worries.)


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Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames

[lrudolph]

Nick,

Don't apologize--take the tack that Wayne O'Neil took in his lexicographic 
introduction to (at least the first edition of) the American Heritage 
dictionary: 
English spelling includes a *lot* of useful information about the history and
otherwise-hidden relationships of our words.  (I'd quote some examples but all 
our copies of that dictionary are on another floor and I'm too lazy at the 
moment.)
Teach the kids that spelling is a fascinating key to hidden history!  I'm sure
they're smart enough to catch on to that, given the hint.  Make it a game!

As to blatant irrationality: 

English orthography is only irrational if (as you, despite my urgings, appear
to continue to believe) the single measure of rationality is faithfully 
reflects 
pronunciation--meaning *your* pronunciation and not necessarily that of the 
guys in 
the next state, or the previous half-millennium.  Think of all those dropped 
Rs
that most of our fellow Massachusettsians have in their non-rhotic speech: would
you really want your grandchildren to drop the rs from their spelling when and
if they move to the East Coast?  What about the wh digraph?  In my dialect, 
the
first sound in words like what and when is aspirated (and the written h 
shows that the dialect of the people who froze English spelling was, in that
respect, like mine--though now that aspiration is quite rare): what/watt 
and 
when/wen are so-called minimal pairs in my speech.  Witch side, in your
model of rationality, whins that match? ... And so on for all the many other 
examples in all the many other dialects.

I admit that there are cases where more phonetic spelling would elucidate
facts about English grammar that are largely obscure.  For instance, there are
*two* verbs have in English (historically, of course, they're one verb):
the auxiliary have is pronounced either v (as in I've been there) or
haff (as in I have to go now), while the true verb meaning possess is
pronounced havv (as in I havv three copies of the American Heritage 
Dictionary).  Similar statements apply to used and other auxiliaries.
Would *that* group of spelling reforms make you happier or sadder?

 Lee, 
 
 I just want to be able to teach my grandchildren to write and spell without
 having to apologize every third sentence for the blatant irrationality of
 the language they are learning.  
 
 N
 
 Nicholas S. Thompson
 Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
 Clark University
 http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
 
 -Original Message-
 From: lrudo...@meganet.net [mailto:lrudo...@meganet.net] 
 Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 6:57 PM
 To: Nick Thompson; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
 Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames
 
 Nick asks:
 
  How come other people can standardize their spellings and we can't 
  standardize ours.
  
   
  
  Damn!
 
 Well, in the first place, the case of actual Spanish-as-she-is-spoke,
 including all its dialectal differences, isn't quite as clean as the
 official Castilian standard that Frank has cited.  For instance, Galician is
 (I am assured) mutually intelligible with Portuguese (specifically, the
 dialect of Portuguese spoken in the nearby parts of Portugal), and
 Portuguese is famous for the difficulty of decoding the written language
 into (any of the many and various dialects of) the spoken language.  
 
 In the second place, two desiderata are incompatible.  It is evidently
 desirable to many, including you, Nick, to be able to have a written
 language that encodes the spoken language in a faithful manner.  But it is
 also desirable to many (including, I hope, you) to be able to read texts
 written in one's language in earlier periods, when the pronunciation is
 *very* likely to have been (often, *very*) different.  In one European
 country (I forget which one; it was either the Netherlands or one of the
 continental Scandinavian countries) a fairly recent spelling reform,
 designed to fulfil the first desideratum, reportedly made texts from even a
 hundred years ago totally unreadable (in their original form) by modern
 schoolchildren.
 We can at least recognize Shakespeare--and certainly Dickens!--as writing in
 something like our English, even if many of his rhymes and jokes don't work
 for us.  (Busy as a bee was a better joke when busy was pronounced as
 we'd pronounce buzzy.)
 
 




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Re: [FRIAM] QRE: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

[lrudolph]

Nick:

 Nyaaah! Nyaaah!   As we used to say when we were six.  

In 1968, my then-girlfriend (long since become a Mad Bomber at Los Alamos--her 
graduate degree was in astrophysics) provided what is has just now become fresh
evidence of something-or-other relevant to this thread: having learned that 
expression only from books (no, she wasn't any kind of funny furriner; she was 
a good Irish-descended girl from Maryland, who had gone to Mt. Holyoke before 
graduate school at Columbia) she pronounced that as nie-ah, nie-ah.


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Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames

[lrudolph]

Nick asks:

 How come other people can standardize their spellings and we can't
 standardize ours.  
 
  
 
 Damn!

Well, in the first place, the case of actual Spanish-as-she-is-spoke, including 
all its 
dialectal differences, isn't quite as clean as the official Castilian standard 
that Frank has 
cited.  For instance, Galician is (I am assured) mutually intelligible with 
Portuguese 
(specifically, the dialect of Portuguese spoken in the nearby parts of 
Portugal), and 
Portuguese is famous for the difficulty of decoding the written language into 
(any of the many 
and various dialects of) the spoken language.  

In the second place, two desiderata are incompatible.  It is evidently 
desirable to many, 
including you, Nick, to be able to have a written language that encodes the 
spoken language in 
a faithful manner.  But it is also desirable to many (including, I hope, you) 
to be able to 
read texts written in one's language in earlier periods, when the pronunciation 
is *very* 
likely to have been (often, *very*) different.  In one European country (I 
forget which one; 
it was either the Netherlands or one of the continental Scandinavian countries) 
a fairly 
recent spelling reform, designed to fulfil the first desideratum, reportedly 
made texts from 
even a hundred years ago totally unreadable (in their original form) by modern 
schoolchildren.
We can at least recognize Shakespeare--and certainly Dickens!--as writing in 
something like 
our English, even if many of his rhymes and jokes don't work for us.  (Busy as 
a bee was a 
better joke when busy was pronounced as we'd pronounce buzzy.)




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[FRIAM] illusions

[lrudolph]

Nick writes, incidentally to Frank's comments about [his] argumentative style:

 As for the inner life thing, I
 don't think I am dishonest when I say that I don't believe in an inner life.
 I admit that I have something like that as an experience, but think it must
 be an illusion.  

The following is a brief version (not that any longer version exists, yet or 
perhaps ever) of 
my take on illusions--specifically perceptual illusions in the passage 
(quoted from Jaan's 
and my introduction to my book on mathematical modeling in the social sciences; 
it's me 
writing here, except for all but the first sentence of the first paragraph, 
which is Jaan) but 
applicable more generally.

===begin

Mathematics has been described as the study of pattern (Whitehead, 1941, pp. 
674, 680) and 
(not necessarily more ambitiously) as the science of patterns (Devlin, 1997; 
Resnik, 1997; 
Steen, 1988). It is usual and natural for humans to perceive patterns, even 
patterns that are 
not `really there´; our perceptual systems create perceptual illusions of 
wholes from 
configurations of points, corners (Kanizsa, 1969) or sounds (Benussi, 1913). 
Furthermore, the 
human mind can contemplate objects that do not exist-a round triangle is an 
example that has 
fascinated thinkers since the 1880s when Alexius Meinong attempted to 
understand the nature of 
such objects in his Gegenstandstheorie (Meinong, 1907, passim; 1915, p. 14).

In this connection, the traditional use of the word illusion is tendentious; 
it can be 
disputed along the following lines (see also Carini, 2007). Start with the 
axiom that a 
`whole´ that is perceived is ipso facto `correctly´ perceived. Then, for the 
person who 
perceives a whole, what is-or may be-`illusory´ is not the whole: it is the 
felt need or 
imposed demand to identify the perceptually present and correctly perceived 
whole as something 
else, namely, a certain unperceived whole that is perceptually and physically 
absent from
the present situation of the perceiver (and might even be physically absent 
from the entire 
universe, past, present, and future-if, say, it is a round triangle). 
Contrariwise, for 
a(nother, or the same) person (perhaps a psychologist) who is observing the 
situation,
what is illusory is the conviction that the `whole´ known to the perceiver is 
in some manner 
or degree less (or more) `real´ than the `unwhole´ known to the observer, which 
the perceiver
*somehow should and would* be perceiving-were not the universe (or the 
observer) somehow 
setting successful snares. On this view, the ascription of `illusion´ is a 
category error, a 
failure of the ascriber´s (formal or informal) ontology and epistemology to 
adequately fit the 
phenomena of construction by the human mind (starting with the human perceptual 
system).

==end==

In the present case, I would say that the something like an inner life that 
you have as 
an experience is not illusory: rather, you are committing a category error 
when you ascribe 
to this *actual experience* (a certain bundle of behaviors at various levels of 
organization) 
a fictitious quality of innerness and/or lifelike ness.  

Lee

[I am trying to send this to the list, but that's only intermittently 
successful for me; so if 
you only get it once, and think it would be of wider interest, please reply to 
the list--
otherwise only to me (or not at all, of course)]


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Re: [FRIAM] Most Distant Galaxy - What's wrong with this statement?

[lrudolph]

  From the BBC at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24637890 
 (today)
 
 /Because it takes light so long to travel from the outer edge of the 
 Universe to us, the galaxy appears as it was 13.1 billion years ago (its 
 distance from Earth of 30 billion light-years is because the Universe is 
 expanding)./

I don't see much wrong with it (though I don't know if it's a true statement).
Galaxy X was 13.1 billion light-years from here-and-now, along a light-like
geodesic, when it emitted the radiation we are presently detecting.  The 
present 
location of Galaxy X (assuming the truth of present physical theories, etc.) is,
partly because the Universe has been expanding, 30 billion light-years from 
here-and-now, in the sense that (with the same disclaimer) radiation we are 
presently emitting will be detectable at Galaxy X in 30 billion years. Does
my attempt at paraphrase go beyond, or not as far as, the original?  If not,
what's wrong with the paraphrase?

Lee Rudolph



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Re: [FRIAM] Most Distant Galaxy - What's wrong with this statement?

[lrudolph]

And so?  Matter/energy can't move faster than 1 light year per year, but the 
expansion of the 
universe isn't making any matter/energy move in its local frame, it's just 
putting more space-
time between the local frames of various different bits of matter/energy.

I mean, consider the size and state of the universe in the immediate aftermath 
of the Big 
Bang.  Whole lotta space appearing, stuff all over the place getting separated 
from other 
stuff at supraluminal velocities without contradiction.  Not so?  (I don't even 
play an 
astrophysicist on TV, but I roomed with one for two years of college, and later 
dated another 
[long since moved to Los Alamos to do goodness knows what besides marrying a 
lawyer, but 
probably not astrophysics; maybe fusion?].  So I'm just talking.  But it sounds 
good to me.)


  (30-13.1) / 13.1 = 1.29 light-years / year.
 
 -- rec --
 
 
 On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 3:25 PM, lrudo...@meganet.net wrote:
 
From the BBC at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24637890
   (today)
  
   /Because it takes light so long to travel from the outer edge of the
   Universe to us, the galaxy appears as it was 13.1 billion years ago (its
   distance from Earth of 30 billion light-years is because the Universe is
   expanding)./
 
  I don't see much wrong with it (though I don't know if it's a true
  statement).
  Galaxy X was 13.1 billion light-years from here-and-now, along a
  light-like
  geodesic, when it emitted the radiation we are presently detecting.  The
  present
  location of Galaxy X (assuming the truth of present physical theories,
  etc.) is,
  partly because the Universe has been expanding, 30 billion light-years from
  here-and-now, in the sense that (with the same disclaimer) radiation we are
  presently emitting will be detectable at Galaxy X in 30 billion years.
  Does
  my attempt at paraphrase go beyond, or not as far as, the original?  If
  not,
  what's wrong with the paraphrase?
 
  Lee Rudolph
 
 
  
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Re: [FRIAM] Notions of entropy

[lrudolph]

Nick to Owen:

...
 Yet, just as you could never get the world to
 agree that emotionality was just the number of fecal  boluses left by a rat
 in an open field maze, you will never get the world to agree that entropy is
 just the output of a mathematical formula.  They might say, that is a
 useful measure of entropy, but that is not what it IS.   To put the matter
 more technically, no matter how much reliability a definition buys you, it
 still does not necessarily buy you validity.  The same point might be made
 about f=ma.  (I fear being flamed by Bruce, at this point, but let it go.)
 Non fingo hypotheses and all that.  One could, like a good positivist,
 simply assert that a thing IS that which most reliably measures it, but few
 people outside your field will be comfortable with that, and everybody, even
 including your closest colleagues, will continue to use the word in some
 other sense at cocktail parties.  It was my position that the lab bench
 meaning and the cocktail meaning have some common core that we have some
 responsibility to try to find.  

This is a very pure example of the semantic drift that drives me crazy,
in that the lab bench meaning was the *first* meaning: the word DID NOT
EXIST before it was coined (in its adjectival form, in German, by composing
badly-understood-by-its-coiner morphemes from Greek, by the physicist Clausius) 
in 1865. Tait (an early knot theorist and somewhat of a religious nut, as well
as a thermodynamic theorist) brought it into English three years later, but 
changed its sign (more or less).  By 1875 Maxwell had changed it back to what
it now is.  During this period of time the concept expressed by entropy
became clearer, as did the whole field of thermodynamics, and eventually a
good mathematical formalism for it developed--good in the sense that it 
made sense of results from the lab bench by reducing downwards (if I 
have your phrase right? I dunno, maybe upwards, or both ways?) so as to
(1) define entropy of a macroscopic system in terms of the statistical 
behavior of the ensemble of microscopic entities participating in that 
system, and (2) facilitate calculations (some exact, some asymptotic) 
of the entropy (and similar thermodynamic quantities) which (3) often
agreed with lab bench observations.  

When Shannon came along to study signals and noise in communication 
channels, he had the insight to see that *the same mathematical formalism*
could be applied.  He did *not* have the insight (or dumb luck) of Clausius,
so he overloaded the already-existing Common English word information with
a new, technical, mathematical meaning.  *That* rather quickly allowed 
visionaries, hucksters, and cocktail partiers to talk about information 
theory without understanding much or any of its technicalities.  It also
(I suspect; but here I am arguing ahead of what data I happen to have around,
so this may merely be my default Enraged Bloviator talking) encouraged the
same gangs of semantic vandals to appropriate the word entropy to their
various malign uses.  (For what it's worth, the OED doesn't have citations
of non-specialist uses of thermodynamic entropy until the mid 1930s--by 
Freud [as translated by a pair of Stracheys, not by Jones] and a Christian 
apologist; non-specialist uses of information-theoretic entropy appear 
to hold off until the mid 1960s.)

So, to whatever extent the vernacular (cocktail party) meaning(s) of 
entropy has or have a common core with the technical (lab bench) 
meaning(s), it is because that core REMAINS FROM THE TECHNICAL MEANING
after the semantic shift, and not because (as I *think* you mean to 
imply in your sentence containing the word positivist) there is 
some (common core) concept which BOTH the technical AND the
vernacular meanings are INDEPENDENT ATTEMPTS to reliably measure. 
If we have a responsibility to try to find anything, I think it 
is to try to find *why* some people insist on (1) glomming onto bits 
of jargon with very well-defined in-domain meanings, (2) ignoring much 
or all of those meanings while re-applying the jargon (often without 
ANY definition to speak of) in a new domain, while (3) refusing to 
let go of some (or all) of the Impressive Consequences derived in 
the original domain by derivations that (4) depend on the jettisoned
definitions (and the rest of the technical apparatus of the original
domain).

Grrrh.

 


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Re: [FRIAM] Notions of entropy

[lrudolph]

Nick writes, in relevant part: 

 I am, I think, a bit of what
 philosophers call an essentialist.  In other words, I assume that when
 people use the same words for two things, it aint for nothing, that there is
 something underlying the surface that makes those two things the same.  So,
 underlying all the uses of the word entropy is a common core, and 

I'm not going to go anywhere near the mathematical question here.  What 
I want to do is challenge your In other words sentence (which, by the 
way, I *hope* is not what philosophers would mean by calling you an 
essentialist).

One thing I have learned in the last three or four years, much of 
which I have spent trawling through huge corpora of scholarly (and 
less scholarly) writing, including Google Scholar (and just plain 
Google Books), JStor, MUSE, PsycInfo, Mathematical Reviews, etc., 
is that when people use the same words for two things,
it's distressingly common that it IS for nothing, or nearly 
nothing--either two or more different groups of scholars have 
adopted a word from Common English into their own jargons, with 
no (ac)knowledge(ment) of the other groups' jargon, or two or 
more different groups of scholars have independently *coined* 
a word (most usually from New Latin or New Greek roots that are 
part of scholars' common store).

Actually, the first case of this that I really noticed was several 
years before I got involved professionally.  In a social newsgroup,
a linguist of my acquaintance happened to use the word assonance.  
And he used it WRONG.  That is, he used it entirely inconsistently
with the meaning that it has had for eons in the theory of prosody, 
and that every poet learns (essentially, assonance in prosody is 
vowel harmony).  When I challenged him on this, my friend said that 
the word had been introduced to linguistics by the (very eminent, 
now very dead) Yale linguist Dwight Bollinger.  And he implied 
that the linguists weren't about to change.  Tant pis, said I.

Then I got involved in the Kitchen Seminar (FRIAMers, you can 
ignore that; it's a note to Nick), and began to hear psychologists 
(but not Nick!) use the phrase dynamic system (or occasionally 
dynamical system). As a mathematician I knew what that phrase
meant, and they were WRONG.  

After some years in the Kitchen, I began work on my book on 
mathematical modeling for psychology; eventually I saw I 
needed to write a chapter clarifying the uses of those phrases.   
Three or four years of work on _The Varieties of Dynamic(al) 
Experience_ later, I had accumulated *enormous* amounts of
textual evidence that there had been NO cross-pollination: 
the two phrases arose entirely independently.  (Then, 
unfortunately, hapless psychologists and other human 
scientists started appropriating [what they badly understood 
of] the mathematical results that can be proved about 
mathematicians' dynamical systems to draw ENTIRELY 
UNSUBSTANTIATED conclusions about psychologists' dynamic 
systems.)

Most recently, I've been going through the same exercise 
(again for a chapter, now not in a book of my own) for 
recursion and recursive.  Again, I have accumulated 
(and documented) enormous amounts of textual evidence 
(from all those corpora); here is a brief outline of 
the situation (with examples and all, the whole thing
is about 25 pages at the moment, interlarded with another
25 pages on infinity and topped off--I mean, bottomed
off--with 15 pages of references).  Before the outline, 
however, I will quote four practitioners of various 
human sciences who have had cause to complain of the 
present mess.

==a sociologist of law:==
In the context of causal analysis, as carried on in empirical research 
(e.g. path analysis) nonrecursive models are employed, to denote the 
case of mutual influencing of variables. When the autopoesis literature 
speaks of recursive processes, it is presumably those nonrecursive 
models of causal analysis that are meant. What a tower of Babel! 
(Rottleuthner, 1988, p. 119) 

==a physicist turned cognitive scientist (via LOGO):==
One is led to wonder if all authors are talking about and experimenting 
with the same notion and, if not, what this notion could be. As it 
happens, a careful reading shows that it is not so and that, unless a 
very loose and rather useless definition of the term [recursive] is 
assumed, it could be worthwhile to separate this confusing braid into 
its constituent strands [...]. (Vitale, 1989, p. 253)

==an evolutionary linguist:==
Definitions of recursion found in the linguistics and computer science 
literatures suffer from inconsistency and opacity (Kinsella, 2010, p. 
179)

==a political scientist:==
The term `recursive´ [...] has multiple uses in the political science 
literature. [... Political scientists should address] [t]he problem of 
divergent meaning [...] through a survey of potential for reconciliation 
or possible substitute terminology (Towne, 2010, p. 259) ===

Now, the outline.

o  

Re: [FRIAM] How do forces work?

[lrudolph]

Russ asks:

 Is there a mechanistic-type explanation for how forces work? For example,
 two electrons repel each other. How does that happen? Other than saying
 that there are force fields that exert forces, how does the electromagnetic
 force accomplish its effects. What is the interface/link/connection between
 the force (field) and the objects on which it acts. Or is all we can say is
 that it just happens: it's a physics primitive?

I have the impression that the best you can say is that fields act on fields; 
fields are (the 
only) first-class objects, and what you're calling objects are at best 
second-class--they 
are epiphenomena of fields (or, of *the* field).

There is (or was when I last tried to look into this, about 40 years ago) a 
concept of 
current (which I suppose is a generalization of our familiar electric 
current, but if so 
is such a generalization that I was unable to see the connection at all) which 
was in some way 
involved with interactions of fields.  Maybe a Google search on current and 
Jakiw would turn 
up something useful, but probably not.


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Re: [FRIAM] offline:] Isomorphism between computation and philosophy

[lrudolph]

 You mean, I got wise because I retired?  Not sure I follow.  Nick

Yup.  What an *awful* environment, in many ways, Clark was.  Of course maybe 
the good things 
were only possible because of the bad things?  


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Re: [FRIAM] Isomorphism between computation and philosophy

[lrudolph]

Nick asks Owen:
 
 So, Owen, you meet a beautiful woman at a cocktail party.  She seems
 intelligent, not a person to be fobbed off, but has no experience with
 either Maths or Computer Science.  She looks deep into your eyes, and asks
 And what, Mr. Densmore, is the halting problem?  You find yourself torn
 between two impulses.  One is to use the language that would give you
 credibility in the world of your mentors and colleagues.  But you realize
 that that language is going to be of absolutely no use to her, however ever
 much it might make you feel authoritative to use it.  She expects an answer.
 Yet you hesitate.  What language do you use?  
 
 You would start, would you not, with the idea of a problem.  A problem is
 some sort of difficulty that needs to be surmounted.  There is a goal and
 something that thwarts that goal.  What are these elements in the halting
 PROBLEM?And why is HALTING a problem?  

Nick, Owen may well disagree, but from my point of view you've already staked a 
dubious claim, 
by assuming (defensably) that problem in the MathEng phrase Halting Problem 
can and should 
be understood to be the same word as problem in your dialect of English.  But 
this is, I 
think, a false assumption.  Now, at least, whatever the case was when the 
Halting Problem 
got its original name (in MathGerman, I think), the meaning that Halting 
Problem conveys in 
MathEng is the same (or nearly the same) as that conveyed by Halting 
Question.  Problem is 
there for historical reasons, just as, in geometric topology, a certain 
question of 
considerable interest and importance (which has been answered for fewer decades 
than has the 
Halting Problem) is still called--even in MathEng!--the Hauptvermutung.  
The framing in 
terms of a goal and something that thwarts is delusive.  There is, rather, 
a question 
and--if you must be florid--a quest for an answer.  Note, *an* answer.  Of 
course, at an 
extreme level (I can't decide whether it's the highest or the lowest: I *hate* 
level talk 
precisely for this kind of reason) there is *the* answer (no).  But that 
isn't, in itself, 
very interesting (any more: of course it was before it was known to be the 
answer).  *How* 
you get to no is interesting, and there are (by now) many different hows 
(for the Halting 
Question, the Hauptvermutung, Poincare's Conjecture, and so forth and so on), 
each of which 
is *an* answer (as are many of the not hows).  


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Re: [FRIAM] Tautologies and other forms of circular reasoning.

[lrudolph]

 In my (leetle) world, referential opacity refers to ambiguities that arise
 in intentional utterances ... utterances of the form, Jones believes
 (wants, thinks, hopes, etc.) that X is the case.   They are opaque in that
 they tell us nothing about the truth of X.  So, for instance, Jones
 believes that there are unicorns in central park  tells us neither that
 such a thing as a horse with a horn in its forehead exists (because Jones
 may confuse unicorns with squirrels) or that there are any unicorns in
 central park, whatever Jones may conceive them to be (because Jones may be
 misinformed).  
 
  
 
 What does the computer community think referential opacity means. 

If they're at all like whatever community W. V. O. Quine belonged to 
(mathematical logicians? 
empiricist philosophers?), they think it means something quite other than what 
you wrote 
above. --Actually, all I know for sure is that what Quine meant by opacity of 
reference was 
quite incompatible with your meaning of referential opacity.  His standard 
example of 
opacity of reference was the pair of phrases the morning star, the evening 
star, both of 
which *in fact* refer to precisely the same celestial body, viz., Venus, 
although the 
facticity of that fact may be opaque to any given speaker of the two phrases.  


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Re: [FRIAM] Isomorphism between computation and philosophy

[lrudolph]

Nick:

 It's probably a good thing that I retired before I got wise. 

I think I hear the sound of the Arrow of Causality twanging in the bullseye.


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Re: [FRIAM] Systems, State, Recursion, Iteration.

[lrudolph]

Nick,

 I guess I would call this a functional state.   Or perhaps a disposition.  

You could also (and equally well--or equally badly) use Lewin's phrase the 
field at the 
present time.  Or rather, since we do want to talk about existents that 
persist in time but 
may have different states at different times (or the same state at different 
times), the 
field at some time.  Or just the field.

My vote on my first parenthesis, by the way, is equally badly.

Lee


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Re: [FRIAM] Just sent this to the Google Device Support Team

[lrudolph]

Nick,

Even a former English major ought to be able to faithfully transcribe a short 
phrase from the 
second line of the first sentence of a two-paragraph, three-sentence e-mail 
that is actually 
included a few inches below the locus of his transcription...
 
On the other hand, if it weren't for the long history of paleography, scribal 
errors, and 
variorum editions, the structure that for hundreds of years supported the 
English major (and 
other literature majors) might never have existed in the form the former 
English major may 
have encountered stumbling about on its last legs, before it was finally 
utterly replaced by 
the Higher Nonsense.

Lee Rudolph

P.S. No one should forget the old high-byte--at least, no one who ever dealt 
with WordStar.

 You are absolutely correct.  higher-order bit it is.  Even better.  Can
 you imagine what a former English major's imagination did with that?  
 
  
 
 n
 
  
 
 From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Joshua Thorp
 Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2013 3:01 PM
 To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
 Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Just sent this to the Google Device Support Team
 
  
 
 Also I doubt Owen ever said top bit,  I imagine it was probably
 high-order bit.
 
  
 
 I like the question though, can a bug be on purpose.  Seems like it would be
 in the eye of the beholder, one person's bug might be another's feature.
 
  
 
 --joshua
 
  
 
 On Mar 24, 2013, at 2:57 PM, Douglas Roberts d...@parrot-farm.net wrote:
 
 
 
 
 
 Nick's counselling session will be scheduled shortly...
 
  
 
 --Doug (Who can tell when his chain is being yanked.)
 
  
 
 On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 2:53 PM, Nicholas Thompson
 nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote:
 
 Now you all know, that, ever since Owen first used the word top bit in my
 presence, nearly a decade ago, I have followed, with rapt attention, the use
 of language on this list.  So,  you guys.  I need to understand this better.
 Can a bug be on purpose?  It sounds to me like Google has sabotaged its
 own product, right.  Therefore, if I understand the language, any Nexus
 phone thatactually  worked, would be buggy., by definition.  I am sorry to
 bother you about this, but these are the kinds of things that keep me awake
 at night.  N
 
  
 
 From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts
 Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2013 1:44 PM
 To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
 Subject: [FRIAM] Just sent this to the Google Device Support Team
 
  
 
 Hi, Google Device Support Team.
 
  
 
 It's  been a while since we spoke, but I recently discovered that someone in
 your organization has been (I hope inadvertently) disseminating inaccurate
 information about this Nexus 4
 https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/mobile/l4uYRMVHnHY/rHpsXdwNGPc
 J  bug, and I thought you'd want to know about it right away.  
 
  
 
 Here's the deal: you see, we all know that the Nexus 4 was not designed on
 purpose to prevent wifi and bluetooth from being used at the same time.  We
 all know that it is a bug.  Well, all of us except for Steve, apparently.
 Here, read for yourselves:  
 
  
 
 http://things-linux.blogspot.com/2013/03/translated.html
 
  
 
 Now, we all have the utmost confidence that someone in your organization
 will immediately take Steve aside for a private little counselling session
 about the inappropriateness of, shall we say, bending the truth regarding
 this particular flaw in the Nexus 4 product.
 
  
 
 Thanks for your prompt attention to this matter.
 
  
 
 Best,
 
  
 
 --Doug
 
  
 
 -- 
 
 Doug Roberts
 d...@parrot-farm.net
 
  http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins
 http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins
 
 
 505-455-7333 - Office
 505-672-8213 - Mobile
 
 
 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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 -- 
 
 Doug Roberts
 d...@parrot-farm.net
 
  http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins
 http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins
 
 
 505-455-7333 - Office
 505-672-8213 - Mobile
 
 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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Re: [FRIAM] Against Kierkegaard (was Re: Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services)

[lrudolph]

 No, not IMAP.  I want my own cloud.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvKj8lTuVtk

inevitably will lead to

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq3YdpB6N9M


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Re: [FRIAM] Windows Resource Monitor

[lrudolph]

Nick says, in relevant part:
 
 The response to this inquiry has led me wonder some wonderings about the
 folks on the list.  Is it the case that:
 (1)I am the only person on this list that owns a PC

You have been in the presence of both Eric and me when we have been using our 
PCs, and I even 
recall that you and I once (briefly) discussed Win7 when we first got our 
(respective) present 
PCs.

 (2)I am the only person on this list that owns a PC who has had this
 sort of problem (=resource leakage?).

I'm not sure I'd say I've had anything as bad a case of it as you have.  
However, one 
suggestion I haven't seen (but may have missed) is that, instead of/in addition 
to focussing 
on the Resource Monitor, you use the (still there in Win7, though somewhat 
gussied up) good 
old msconfig.exe to find--and rout out--all sorts of cruft that has been 
installed behind your 
back.  

For instance, if you've had occasion to install anything from HP, you will find 
that any 
number of most-of-the-time-useless, all-of-the-time-resource-intensive, 
programs have been co-
installed silently.  I have *never* found that deleting them from the Startup 
routine causes 
me problems: every one of them that is actually necessary to perform something 
I occasionally 
do (e.g., scanning with my HP All-In-One device) will load perfectly happily, 
and perform as 
adequately as HP is capable of making it perform, at the time when I choose to 
do the task.  
(Then I can, if it's causing slowdowns, kill it afterward with the Task 
Manager.)

Much software from non-HP sources is as bad, if not worse, when it comes to 
sneaking undesired 
extras into your Startup.  (Adobe is another source of such, IME.)

 (3) I am the only person on this list that owns a PC who is too cheap to
 pay the 200 bucks to get it fixed by an expert. 

Those experts are in the same class as the expert audiologists who spam the 
snail-mail of 
everybody over (apparently) 65 with come-ons for free hearing tests (which 
will, of course, 
diagnose the need for hearing aids), or the expert waterline insurers who 
just sent everyone 
in my town a snail-mail offer to buy a $150/year Waterline Insurance Policy 
(there is one 
small strip of our town, where leaking service-station gas reservoirs polluted 
the aquifer 
beyond remediation, that has city water--piped from the actual city, Fall 
River, next door; 
everyone else in town has private wells), or ... you get the idea.  

 (4)I am the only person on this list that owns a PC who is too cheap to
 pay the 200 bucks to get it fixed by an expert and who also too dumb to know
 how to use the resource monitor to fix it, myself.  

See above: the resource monitor plus msconfig (plus, if you really want to get 
down and dirty, 
services.exe, which used I think to be services.msc?) is probably all you need. 
 In fact, I 
suspect that you would be better served by not trying to find out everything 
you need to make 
use of all the information that the resource monitor tells you, but rather just 
going to the 
(expanded, Win7 version of the) Task Manager, and consulting the various tabs 
there that tell 
you an often more useful proper subset of the resource monitor's information.

Lee



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Re: [FRIAM] WAS:: Cliques, public, private. IS: Preserving email correspondence

[lrudolph]

Nick writes:

 Larding is the
 practice of distributing ones response in the text. 

Larding is not a problem, it is best practice (in my highly considered 
opinion): it simulates 
(somewhat) a naturally structured conversation, between or among a group of 
people, on one 
topic or several related topics; the most common alternative, attaching an 
entire response-
post to the entire stimulus-post, doesn't simulate conversation--it simulates a 
pair (or more) 
of windbags lecturing to each other in sequence, or (essentially equivalently) 
the dreary 
academic custom (in some fields, notably the humanities) of having 
respondents read aloud, 
one after another, pre-written papers about the respondee's just-previously 
read-aloud paper.

Now, hypertextual tools *might* improve larding.  I would have to see them 
well-implemented to 
form a considered opinion.  (My unconsidered opinion is that they'd be a net 
negative.)


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Re: [FRIAM] Preserving email correspondence

[lrudolph]

Nick,

I have avoided larding by quoting nothing whatever.

That should help my concentrate your attention on the point that I think is 
most important, 
which I have not seen you address at all (but I may have missed it): WHAT IS 
YOUR END-IN-VIEW?

My previous claim, that (larded) e-mail correspondences are very like (properly 
conducted, if 
somewhat anarchic) conversations, suggests an ancillary--and 
behavioral!--question for you to 
consider to aid you in responding to the question above: what would you do (and 
why, or why 
not, would you want to), to achieve that end-in-view, if instead of an e-mail 
correspondence 
you had a recorded (or transcribed) conversation?


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Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

[lrudolph]

Nick speaks for himself:

 We are, by immigration, probably a nation of former thieves,
 cutpurses, embezzlers, for whom the choice was the docks or the stocks. 

You, sir, I believe, are from a sub-nation of former religious fanatics.  I am 
partly that, 
but mostly from the (large!) sub-nation of former German-dialect-speaking 
peasants for whom 
the choice was starvation, with an admixture of the sub-nation of former 
draft-dodgers for 
whom the choice was death in some interminable intra-tribal war promoted by 
German-dialect-
speaking aristocrats and largely suffered and fought by German-dialect-speaking 
peasants.  And 
so forth and so on.

Are you sure you haven't confused the U-S-of-God-fearin'-A with Australia?



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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

[lrudolph]

Nick avers:

 I guess I am a behaviorist about shame.   If my behavior makes me blush than
 it was shameful.

Alternatively, someone has slipped you a large dose of niacin, which has made 
you blush, which 
you have felt as shame.  

I suggested this several times to Jim Laird as a worthwhile experiment in his 
framework, but 
he never got off his butt to (have his undergradutes) do it.  Now *there's* a 
crying shame. 


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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

[lrudolph]

Why stop at jam the camera?  *Spoof* the camera (feed it false but plausible 
data, perhaps 
inculpating someone else, or perhaps just showing an uppity empty Naugahyde 
`:chair): a real-
time, animated analogue of the photoshopped stills we now have learned to 
expect everywhere.

 Ah.  The equivalent of the bank Robbers mask.  Jam the camera.  N
 
  
 
 From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Parks, Raymond
 Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2013 3:26 PM
 To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
 Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data
 
  
 
 Nick, 
 
  
 
   My point is that there are things we do not want to be public that are not
 illegal nor shameful.  An example of such a thing is a behavior or statement
 that seems to contradict one's relationship with another human.  It's
 perfectly reasonable, but that other human can and frequently does feel
 emotional pain if they find out about it.  Another example was brought up in
 the thread of how humans manipulate their social environment to prevent
 social pressure or improve their social situation.
 
  
 
   BTW, I find it interesting if not ironic that the very systems that allow
 for ubiquitous surveillance are the same systems that allow for
 indiscriminate self-exposure - computers.  Here's a prediction - someday
 there will be an app that will turn off surveillance cameras as one passes
 by them.  That may be a black-market app - but it will exist.  It's harder
 but not impossible to do the same for UAVs/RPAs/regular aircraft.  The
 hardest type of surveillance to turn off is satellite - but it's also the
 easiest to predict.
 
  
 
 Ray Parks
 
 Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
 
 V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
 
 NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
 
 SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
 
 JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)
 
  
 
  
 
  
 
 On Jan 17, 2013, at 12:12 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
 
 
 
 
 
 Sorry.  I wasn't asking whether we lie or not.  Or even whether it eases
 some social situations.  I was asking for a theory of why lying greases
 social situations.  Why is the NET effect of small lies positive?  I can
 think of some reasons.  Like chimpanzees, we live in a fision-fusion
 situation.  The size of the lie that one can honestly tell probably
 depends in many cases on the frequency with which one sees the person one is
 lying to.   And then there is the distinction between speech as stroking and
 speech as conveying of information.  I get that wrong, a lot. 
 
  
 
 I am having a hard time thinking how this is related to my original question
 about whether there should be a law against using public data to track
 individual behavior.  I know that I opened up the subthread about shame and
 guilt, so I stipulate that it is my fault that we are talking about it.  And
 I actually think it is related.  I just can't state the relation.   I am
 thinking we might be moving toward a belief that truth is like arousal .
 life goes best when one has a moderate level of it.  There was a wonderful
 study done some years ago about he relation between truth and the best
 marriages.  Married folk were asked to play The Dating Game together ..
 i.e., guess what spouses answers to personal questions would be,
 preferences, what have you.  Three categories of respondents were
 identified: spouse pairs that had an unrealistical enhanced view of one
 another, spouse pairs that had an unrealistically jaundiced view of one
 another, and spouse pairs that had a realistic view of one another.  As you
 might expect, the first group maintained the most enduring marriages.
 
  
 
 But this just brings me back to the need for a theory of why a society is
 better is there is just a bit less truth in it.  A pragmatic notion, but
 not, I fear, a Pragmatic one. 
 
  
 
 Nick  
 
  
 
 




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Re: [FRIAM] How to avoid shootings

[lrudolph]

 Dear Lee and Marcus, 
 
 I am afraid I fell for a Liberal meme.  It may, of course, be true, but at
 least so far as I can determine from a quick scan of the web, there is no
 consensus on the causality that I implied. 
 
 So, at the moment, I guess it just comes down to values.  I hate the damned
 things.  

Oh, you're not alone--I hate values too!

...I also am perfectly willing to ban as many guns as possible.  My 
father, who won medals for the US Marine Corps on its sharpshooting 
team in the 1920s and 1930s and used those skills lethally as a 
horse Marine during the Second Nicaraguan Campaign, got rid of all 
his guns when I was born.  I am sure that if he hadn't, at some 
point one of us would have shot the other dead.

I just wanted to keep you honest, flow-of-causation-wise.


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[FRIAM] FRIAM archives?

[lrudolph]

The shirt-tail appended to all FRIAM posts ends lectures, archives, 
unsubscribe, maps at 
http://www.friam.org;.  However, I a 404 Not Found error when trying to 
connect to that URL. 
Is it defunct, or just temporarily out of order?  If the former, is there an 
alternative URL 
for lectures, archives (I don't need unsubscribe, maps, thanks.)  If the 
latter, is there 
a fix in the offing?

Lee Rudolph



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Re: [FRIAM] faith

[lrudolph]

Nick to Robert (or perhaps to Russ, I got confused):

 I guess its fair to
 say that in matters of small f faith, you are a catholic 
 and I am a quaker.  I  really don't care about what the 
 minister has to say;  I want to hear from the
 congregation.

Trusting (did you-all already differentiate trust from
faith and belief?  I may have missed it) that, when 
(a member of) the congregation speak, it *is* because
the spirit moved him/her/them to speak?  That is,
I think, integral to large-Q Quakerism.  As an apparently
small-q quaker, is it problematic to you, or neutral, or 
whatever the opposite of problematic may be?

Digression: etymologically, a problem is what is in
front of you.  I suppose that would make its opposite
that which is behind you--if you're Luther, the Devil 
(in a mass of details and a mess of ink).

Lee



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Re: [FRIAM] Unsolved Problems in Psychology

[lrudolph]

I like John Archibald Wheeler's brief description of the situation 
(which appears in print as marginalia in his book _Gravity_ with 
Misner and Thorne):  Matter tells space how to curve.  Space tells 
matter how to move.

Agent-based modeling (with message-passing, even!), you might say.

 Bruce,
 
 Did not Einstein put action at a distance wrt gravity to rest with his 
 general theory? Did he not theorize that gravity is a force that curves 
 space-time nearby rather than acting on other masses at a distance?
 
 Just askin'
 Grant



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[FRIAM] on the limits of inductive reasoning

[lrudolph]

From the AP wire, April 22, 2012.

...
   McKay says that a day before the killings, on Julia
   Hudson's birthday, Balfour told her, If you ever
   leave me, I'm going to kill you, but I'm going to
   kill your family first. She didn't take him seriously,
   McKay said, because Balfour hadn't acted on the threats
   before.
...

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/04/23/us/ap-us-jennifer-hudson-
slayings.html

Lee Rudolph



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Re: [FRIAM] a further tangent

[lrudolph]

Nick, I didn't (and wouldn't) use the noun remediation (at least, 
not to mean remedy).  As verbs, remediate and remedy have 
different senses to me (and to the OED).  In particular, the OED says 
(and I agree--though I don't claim this was in my mind) that 
remediate includes the sense of counteract, and remedy doesn't.

 This is a great idea.  But ONLY if we think of it as a remedy, not as a
 remediation.  I would always argue for the minimalification of latinate
 suffixes.  
 
 But it really is a great idea. 
 
 Nick 
 
 -Original Message-
 From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf 
 Of
 lrudo...@meganet.net Sent: Monday, March 26, 2012 3:29 PM To: 
 friam@redfish.com
 Subject: [FRIAM] a further tangent
 
 I asked a (non-rhetorical) question:
 
 But you might think it is, so I ask you, do you?  If not, how might it 
 be remediated (practically or impractically)?




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[FRIAM] tangents upon tangents!

[lrudolph]

 With apologies to everyone but Lee:
 
 The word remediation could be two entirely different words, one arising
 from remedy and the other arising from mediate.   The first mediation
 failed, so we agreed to remedy the situation by conducting a remediation is
 a perfectly intelligible sentence without any redundancy.  Bugger the OED.
 It's full of latinate obfuscation.  
 
 Nick 

I don't read sports pages often, but once I was *very* pleased to 
learn from a baseball article in the Boston Globe that a certain 
manager was going to resign, rather than resign. 

ObModeling (not agent-based)/ObFuscation: the proper setting for 
mechanics is the tangent bundle of the tangent bundle... 


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[FRIAM] a tangent from Re: Just as a bye-the-way

[lrudolph]

Glen wrote:

 Nick and Doug are both being flippant because a mailing
 list is not a conducive forum to rigorous conversation.  They seemingly
 enjoy their lack of empathy toward the other, at least here ... probably not
 face-to-face.  So, the likelihood either will assume the other has completely
 thought through the context in which they made their assertions is low.
 
 I.e. neither Doug nor Nick will assume the context is (adequately) included.
 (Indeed none of us are likely to assume that.  That's one of the problems with
 e-mail and other online fora.)

My experience with mailing lists, e-mail and other online fora 
has not been as uniformly bad as yours appears to have been.  
Specifically, I have participated (and continue to participate) in 
several of each that *have been* (and are) conducive...to rigorous 
conversation.  In the face of those good experiences, I am always 
puzzled by people (you are not necessarily one; see below) who 
generalize from their (presumably) bad experiences to the conclusion 
that e-mail and other online fora are irremediably flawed, and who 
further (I definitely don't think you're one of these) use that 
conclusion as a basis for actively undercutting those such fora that 
they are involved with.  (Nick and I have been through just that 
experience on one forum, at that time local to us, which was 
eventually destroyed by one very malignant person in a position of 
power. [Nick might disagree with my version of events.])

I said that you're not *necessarily* concluding that the FRIAM forum 
(in particular) is *irremediably* flawed (you do, after all, continue 
to participate non-trivially).  But you might think it is, so I ask 
you, do you?  If not, how might it be remediated (practically or 
impractically)?

One reason, by the way, that I think mailing lists, e-mail, and 
newsgroups (e.g., Usenet--but not Google Groups, god forbid) actually 
are *more* conducive...to rigorous conversation than many face-to-
face fora is their asynchronicity.  (Chat, by contrast, has all 
the disadvantages of face-to-faceness without any of its 
advantages, for me.  There's nothing about the onlineness that 
makes them work--for me; an exchange of paper letters, if it could be 
done at the speed that used to be normal in London, with two 
deliveries a day, would be just as good.  And phone calls are teh 
sux0r.) 

Lee Rudolph 


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[FRIAM] a further tangent

[lrudolph]

I asked a (non-rhetorical) question:

But you might think it is, so I ask you, do you?  If not, how might 
it be remediated (practically or impractically)?

It occurred to me that maybe this is something that could be 
investigated using ... AGENT BASED MODELING!  (Indeed, maybe it has 
been.)  That is, what qualities of an asynchronous distributed 
network of agents, passing messages about a changing collection of 
diverse-but-usually-though-not-always-somewhat-aligned topics (or 
maybe more specifically goals) are conducive to rigorous 
conversation (however that may be modeled), which qualities are 
neutral to it, and which qualities are anti-conducive to it?  

Anyone up to the challenge of investigating a toy example?  
(Alternatively, anyone know where in the literature the whole thing 
has been done, or shown to be undoable?)


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Re: [FRIAM] Just as a bye-the-way

[lrudolph]

Nick,

 I sent this response at 9.39. did you not get it. I think the 
server
 throws away one in five of my messages, just for fun. 

FWIW, I also didn't get it then.  Do you know Auden's Domesday 
Song?  It begins, 

 Jumbled in the common box
 Of their dumb mortality,
 Orchid, swan, and Caesar lie.
 Time that tires of everyone
 Has corroded all the locks,
 Thrown away the key for fun.

Now, back to your (of course very standard) definition:

 Inductive reasoning consists of inferring general principles or 
rules from
 specific facts. 

I wish to use this discussion to give another brief push to a new 
item on my agenda, viz., plugging my new catchphrase evolutionary 
ontology (which is supposed to be part of a matched pair with the 
evolutionary epistemology that has been getting a bit of a run 
lately, and which was arguably presaged by Konrad Lorenz in that 
hard-to-find article on Kantian A-Priorism in the Light of 
Contemporary [i.e., c. 1944] Biology that I sent you--in the vain 
hope of eliciting a response--months and months ago).  

One of the traditional problems in justifying inductive reasoning 
(sometimes explicitly observed to be a problem, sometimes hidden 
under the rug) is that (seemingly) to have *any* hope of *validly* 
(even in the sense of it's a good bet) inferring general 
principles or rules from specific facts, the (necessarily, I think, 
several) specific facts have to be recognized (by the inferring 
agent) as specific facts that are 'of the same kind' (or 'about 
things of the same kind', or 'about events of the same kind', etc.).  


But it is very, very hard (which doesn't stop some philosophers and 
others from trying) to make serious sense of any notion of 'sameness 
of kind' (or 'kind' itself) that is at all independent of an 
observing/inferring agent.  The simple-minded solution (which I am 
entitled to propose because I am *not* a philosopher, or even trying 
to do philosophy) is to embrace the observing/inferring agent and 
declare that 'kinds' (and 'sameness' or difference thereof) are 
properties, not of 'things' or 'events', but of a *system* that 
comprises 'things'/'events'/'environments' together with an 
observing/inferring agent.  

The evolutionary ontology slogan now comes in as a catchy way to 
summarize a hypothesis (which seems eminently reasonable to me) 
that, in an uncatchy and confused way, should run something like an 
organism recognizes [or tends to recognize] *as* 'things'/'events' 
that which it has evolved to so recognize; it recognizes *as* 
'things'/'events' 'of the same kind' those collections of 
'things'/'events' which it has evolved to so recognize; etc.  In 
the William James version of pragmatism, this is a sort of converse 
to the notion that a difference that makes no difference is no 
difference--that is, it says differences are differences because 
they make differences.  Theories of reasoning by induction then 
begin to look like, at worst, _post hoc_ rationalizations of the 
favorable outcomes of evolved behaviors, and, at best, as attempts 
to emulate (and if possible improve the ratio of favorable to 
unfavorable outcomes) such behavior in a (more or less) formal, or 
formalizable, way (that might possibly be performed by an artificial 
agent or algorithm).

Coming back to Auden, orchid, swan, and Caesar lie jumbled in the 
common box of their dumb stupidity only because Auden (disguising 
himself, as he often did at that period in his poetic career, as 
Time) has put them their: they are not (absent his agency) members 
of a 'natural kind'; no one would apply inductive reasoning to 
them (until Auden has provided the prompt). 

Lee Rudolph






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Re: [FRIAM] The Grand Design, Philosophy is Dead, and Hubris

[lrudolph]

Bruce Sherwood writes, in relevant part:

 On the other hand, I can recommend highly the popular science book
 The Dance of the Photons by Anton Zeilinger
[...]
 At
 one point in the book he appropriately celebrates measurements that
 quantitatively address certain aspects of reality that have long been
 major issues in philosophy (and physics). These recent measurements
 actually rule out some plausible philosophical stances with respect to
 reality. It's intriguing that a physical measurement could do that.

Surely it's more than intriguing, it's impossible.  Any measurement
is embedded in a theory (including, at a bare minimum, a theory about
how the device that performs the measurement functions); all that a
measurement can do (and it's quite enough, and sometimes--very likely
in this case--both intriguing and well worth celebrating), with
regard to a philosophical stance, is provide evidence (possibly,
as you seem to me to suggest here, categorical evidence) that the
philosophical stance S and the theory T in which the measurement 
is embedded are incompatible (I want to say incompossible but I 
don't think I have the proper credentials to use that word in
public).  

That, at least, is what I think is the correct position to take,
based on what I've read (and come to believe) about the foundations
of measurement.  But I'm neither a physicist nor a philosopher...

Lee Rudolph  




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Re: [FRIAM] Bourbon, Manic Monologs, Soliloquys, and Square Marbles

[lrudolph]

 Tory -
 
 You are most welcome... Doug sums up what you said about our house 
 simply by referring to it as a Hobbit House.   He (nor you for that 
 matter) never actually saw the house we lived in before, an eclectic 
 adobe built by an old hippy friend in the 60s while he was probably on 
 Acid or Peyote or Datura or maybe just bad black light posters. Hobbit 
 all the way.  

Since you bring up Datura...yesterday I had the radio on, 
heard Gene Autry singing Back in the Saddle Again, and
was astounded to hear a line about cattle eating Jimson
weed (not followed by a line about them going crazy).  
Do they really?

  


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Re: [FRIAM] Google+ Circles and Social Networks

[lrudolph]

 Is anyone on Google+ already? I think 
 it is definitely a step in the right direction.
 The circle concept is interesting. 

...as Dante said to Virgil.


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[FRIAM] The One-and-a-Half (Plus or Minus One-Half) Cultures, again

[lrudolph]

I was engaged in a (so far not unexpectedly fruitless) search
for any evidence that any working scientist (as contrasted
with aged eminences grises who begin to take up Philosophy
in their declining years) has ever committed to print any
suggestion that her or his work has ever been in the slightest
degree influenced by Tarski's definition of truth, when I
found M. Delbrück's 1970 Nobel prize lecture, and found in 
it, as its last section, some thoughts that may be relevant to 
this list's recent entanglement in rogue vortices.  In any case
they're relevant to the studio offer which I (if I weren't in 
Massachusetts) would certainly take up.

==begin==

Artist versus Scientist

Twenty years ago the Connecticut Academy of the Arts
and Sciences had a jubilee meeting and on that occasion
invited a poet, a composer, and two scientists to
``create'' and ``perform.''  It was a very fine affair.
Hindemith, conducting a composition for trumpet and
percussion, and Wallace Stevens, reading a set of poems
entitled ``An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,'' were 
enjoyed by everybody, perhaps most by the scientists.
In contrast, the scientists' performances were attended
by scientists only.  To my feeling this irreciprocity
was fitting, although perhaps not intended by the 
organizers.  It is quite rare that scientists are asked
to meet with artists and are challenged to match the 
others' creativeness.  Such an experience may well humble
the scientist.  The medium in which he works does not lend
itself to the delight of the listener's ear.  When he 
designs his experiments or executes them with devoted
attention to the details he may say to himself, ``This
is my composition; the pipette is my clarinet.'' And the
orchestra may include instruments of the most subtle
design.  To others, however, his music is as silent as
the music of the spheres.  He may say to hiomself, ``My
story is an everlasting possession, not a prize composition
which is heard and forgotten,'' but he fools only himself.
The books of the great scientists are gathering dust on the
shelves of learned libraries.  And rightly so.  The scientist
addresses an infinitesimal audience of fellow composers.  His
message is not devoid of universality but its universality is
disembodied and anonymous. While the artist's communication
is linked forever with its original form, that of the scientist
is modified, amplified, fused with the ideas and results of 
others, and melts into the stream of knowledge and ideas which
forms our culture. The scientist has in common with the artist
only this: that he can find no better retreat from the world
than his work and also no stronger link with the world than his
work.

The Nobel ceremonies are of a nature similar to the one I referred
to.  Here, too, scientists are brought together with a writer.
Again the scientists can look back on a life during which their 
work addressed a diminutive audience, while the writer, in the 
present instance Samuel Beckett, has had the deepest impact on
men in all walks of life.  We find, however, a strange inversion
when we come to talking about our worki.  While the scientists 
seem elated to the point of garrulousness at the chance of talking
about themselves and their work, Samuel Beckett, for good and valid
reasons, finds it necessary to maintain a total silence with 
respect to himself, his work, and his critics.  Even though I was
more thrilled by the award of the Nobel prize to him than about 
the award to me and momentarily looked forward with intense
anticipation to hearing his lecture, I now realize that he is 
acting in accordance with the rules laid down by the old witch
at the end of marionette play entitled ``The Revenge of Truth''
[by Isak Dinesen].

The truth, my children is that we are all of us
acting in a marionette comedy.  What is important
more than anything else in a marionette comedy is
keeping the ideas of the author clear.  This is 
the real happiness in life and now that I have at
last come into a marionette play, I will never go
out of it again.  But you, my fellow actors, keep 
the ideas of the author clear.  Aye, drive them to
the utmost consequences.

==end==

Lee Rudolph


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Re: [FRIAM] Experiment and Interpretation

[lrudolph]

Nick writes, in relevant part:

 AS for the discussion with Doug and Peter, I am, I guess, 
 an incurable amateur.   I think of the world as arrayed in 
 layers [of abstraction]; for me, there always is [should be?
 -note the use of modal language!] a level of abstraction at 
 which it is appropriate for somebody to explain something to
 somebody else.  For instance, if somebody asks me a question 
 based on the mother earth fallacy (gaia hypothesis, whatever)
 (which drives me WILD),  I try to answer it at the level of 
 the abstraction, rather than at the level of the fact.  The 
 good answer is something like, I will try to answer your 
 factual answer in a moment, but first I need to understand 
 the assumptions behind it: Why is it that you suppose that 
 nature is beneficent?  

I won't try to answer your factual question (much less your
factual answer!) in a moment, if ever, but first I need to
understand the assumptions behind it: Why is it that you (as
it seems to me) suppose that Doug and Peter *could*, if they
only *would*, explain to you the complexities of fluid dynamics
(or even just the particular complexities involved with water 
draining from a basin, supposing--which appears to be false--
that those particular complexities can be sensibly disentangled 
from the general complexities of that very complex subject, 
which is by no means satisfactorily mathematized [see 
http://www.claymath.org/millennium/Navier-Stokes_Equations/]), 
in your present state of understanding of physics (and 
mathematics)?

To put it another way, given that the best explanation I've
seen for what Eugene Wigner called the unreasonable effectiveness
of mathematics in the physical sciences is that the human capacity
to think *mathematically* (and therefore *effectively*) about the
physical world is an evolutionary consequence of the comparative
*ineffectiveness* of thinking *unmathematically*, why do ... oh,
hell, I can't finish that sentence.  But I'll leave it, as an
opening for you to divert the conversation to *your* expertise,
and give me a chance to play the goat (rather than the let's you
and him fight bystander, with a side order of Physical Ignoramus,
Second Class) for a while.

Lee Rudolph


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Re: [FRIAM] Experiment and Interpretation

[lrudolph]

Peter Lissaman writes, in relevant part:

 Incidentally, with reference to some discussions of high and low 
 pressures at surfaces: ALL free surfaces for ANY fluid motion with
 stationary air as the contiguous external fluid are at the same
 CONSTANT pressure. How could they be otherwise? 

But, with discontiguous bodies of stationary air (e.g., 
(1) the large body containing the air in the kitchen or 
bathroom where Nick has his sink, along with most of the 
rest of the terrestrial atmosphere, and (2) the air 
trapped between either (a1) the plug, or (a2) the lower
surface of the water in Nick's sink, at the moment 
when he pulls the plug, and (b) one of the two free 
surfaces of the standing fluid--greasy water--in 
the U-bend of the grease trap), there can be (for
a while) DIFFERENT constant pressures at different
internal/external fluid interfaces--no?  

This is (what I would call) a question asked personally
(though not privately), but if I receive neither a private
nor a public answer, I will simply conclude that you draw 
the distinction between personally and privately
differently than I do.

Lee Rudolph
 

 



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Re: [FRIAM] Experiment and Interpretation

[lrudolph]

Nick replies to Douglas Roberts:

 First, It says something kind of funny about physics . 
 that it will never
 explain anything that any of us are curious about

unless we first learn enough about it (physics) that
we can understand the explanation (in physical terms)?

 Second, it seems to say that there is no educational advantage to . nothing
 to be learned from . trying to connect principle to vernatcular experience

without making the connections in a principled (rather
than vernacular???) way?





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Re: [FRIAM] Household vortices, redux

[lrudolph]

Nick and all,

If the following comment has already been made (and disposed of),
please accept my apologies (the house was full of visitors for a
while and I stopped keeping up with my mail).

One thing that leaps to my eye in the description of the 
empirical experiment made by Nick, and suggested to Steve
by Nick, is the opacity of the pull the plug part--
both figurative and literal opacity, since (I am assuming) 
Nick hasn't got one of those nifty all-glass_
sinks that used to show up in commercials for Drano).  
Is it possible that there is some structure of a 
vorticial sort located (just) out of sight, within 
the water that is exiting the basin (and the drain
pipe through which it is exiting), and that the 
energy/organization/whatever of *that* part of the 
total water/basin/drain pipe system is closely
(though obscurely) coupled to the visible vortice(s),
in such a way that the observed phenomena follow more
obviously from the facts-including-the-hidden-subsystem
than they seem to be doing from only the facts-not-
including-the-hidden-subsystem?  (Peter L., does that
sound even remotely reasonable from your informed
perspective on fluid flow?)




 
  
 
 You and I are the only two participants in that discussion to have presented
 any empirical evidence.  In the spirit of experimental collegiality, would
 you try my experiment, and report back to me.  Fill a basin with water   Set
 it to spinning in a concerted way.  Be careful not to impose any more
 turbulence than you have to.  Just help the water to decide which way it is
 going to spin.  Now pull the plug.  Watch the water level fall while also
 watching the organization of the vortex.  At some point the natural vortex
 will fall in line with the artificial vortex you have imposed, or vv.  When
 that happens, the rate at which the water line moves down the basin wall
 will slow dramatically while the vortex  spins ferociously.  You will think
 for a moment  this could go on forever  and then it doesn´t.  If the
 gradient is the water, above, no water below gradient, AND the gradient
 dissipation consists of moving the water downward (all suspicious
 assumptions), then the vortex is certainly slowing the dissipation of that
 gradient.  If, on the other hand, the gradient has something to do with
 energy, which I don´t understand, obviously¸ then somebody like SG might
 argue that the very ferocity of the ineffectually spinning vortex is
 nature´s way of working off the energy gradient, like somebody exercising
 after a large thanksgiving dinner.  The idea would be that a ferociously
 spinning vortex is a better way to dissipate the potential energy in the
 water than having the water flow down through the drain.  So nature chooses
 that path.  Thus, the same facts (the formation of the vortex slows the
 draining of the water) could be seen as supporting or countering the theory
 that dissipative structures hasten dissipation.   Which means I have to
 have a better idea of what is being dissipated by a dissipatory structure.  
 
  
 
  
 
 Nicholas S. Thompson
 
 Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
 
 Clark University
 
 http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
 
 http://www.cusf.org http://www.cusf.org/ 
 
  
 
  
 
 




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Re: [FRIAM] Household vortices, redux

[lrudolph]

 Are you asking why does a vortex form at all?  

No.  

 Are you assuming that the
 drain is rifled in some sense and that a vortex wouldn't form without the
 rifling.  

No, that hadn't occurred to me, and I don't think
(having done my share of household-level plumbing)
that drains are rifled in any sense.

Like Isaac Newton (not Abraham Lincoln's secretary 
of agriculture, who should be better known than he
is for having written there is no logic so irresistible 
as the logic of statistics; some other guy of the same
name), I am not feigning (or framing) hypotheses on
these matters, at the moment anyway.  I was mainly 
pointing out that your reported observation, about
the (great) slowness to drain of a vortex-infested
sinkful of water, *is* an observation *about a sink
full of water*, not (just) about the visible part
of the water, or even (just) about the water and the 
visible surfaces of the sink.  At least part of the 
water that is already out of sight (at any particular 
time during the process of draining the sink) is most
definitely mechanically involved with whatever is 
happening, as is at least part of the sink (the top
bits of the drainpipe) that is out of sight during
the whole experiment, because that water (rather, 
the outer layers thereof) is touching that part 
of the sink.  

Like the man said, no system is an island, entire 
of itself; every system is a subsystem of the 
Universe, a part of the main ... And therefore 
never send to know for whom entropy increases;
it increases for thee. 

--Not that I'm framing any hypotheses about 
order or disorder, mind you.


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[FRIAM] thought experiments

[lrudolph]

Nick having expressed some outrage at what he perceives
as (nefarious?) thread hijacking (what I prefer to 
think of as thread drift, but, hey), I'm starting a
new thread.

It seems to me that thought experiment (and its
German original) is a misleading phrase; further,
it seems to me that Nick, of all people, ought to
agree with me when I say that the phrase is misleading
because it suggests that a thought experiment is
a particular sort of experiment, and that the 
particular sort that it is, is one performed upon
reified thoughts on the stage of the Cartesian
Theatre.  

What one is actually *doing* (I claim), when conducting
a thought experiment, is much more analogous to 
calculating than it is to experimentation.  (I realize
that in a group so loaded with simulators, them's likely
to be fighting words; sorry, guys.)  It is, in other
(maybe better) words, a more-or-less systematic and
more-or-less rigorous contemplation of the axioms one
has adopted (more or less explicitly), and/or of the  
formal model one has designed, that is performed with 
the particular end-in-view of discovering necessary 
consequences of the axioms/formalities that were not 
obvious, and that may be surprising or paradoxical.
This description seems to me to fit Einstein's 
elevator Gedankenexperiment (which I take to be 
the archetype of thought experiments) perfectly.

It fits what Nick called his own thought experiment,
about vortices, less well perhaps--how well it fits
depends on how much (if at all) Nick sees in his 
account of that thought experiment what *I* saw
jumping out of it, namely, that among his (implicit)
axioms are some bits of intuition about physical
systems (not too explicitly acknowledged as such)
that, coupled with his (more or less) formal model,
seem to lead ineluctibly to counter-factual predictions
about some actual physical systems.  

Of course when I put things like that, I can see why
someone who has the key experiment (is that the phrase?
something like it) paradigm always clearly in mind (which
I don't), in which the essence of an experiment is that
it can torpedo a purported theory, might want to say 
Yes, a 'thought experiment' is *precisely* a 'type 
of experiment', you bozo!  Yet I still feel that 
thought experiments are closer to just-so stories
(except without the negative connotation) than they
are to real experiments (which *my* intuition says
should involve smells, and if possible explosions
and huge voltages).

Thoughts?

Experiments?

Lee Rudolph


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Re: [FRIAM] Modeling obfuscation (was - Terrorosity and it's Fruits)

[lrudolph]

Eric, Mohammed, et al.:

Alex Poddiakov, in Moscow, has done work that seems to me like it 
*might* be related to this question; for instance, on what he calls 
Trojan horse learning.  I refer you to his website, where various 
manuscripts (some in Russian, some in Russglish) are available and 
others are at least pointed to. http://epee.hse.ru/Poddiakov

Lee Rudolph

 I can't see that this posted, sorry if it is a duplicate 
 
 Mohammed,
 Being totally unqualified to help you with this problem... it
 seems interesting to me because most models I know of this sort (social 
 systems
 models) are about information acquisition and deployment. That is, the modeled
 critters try to find out stuff, and then they do actions dependent upon what
 they find. If we are modeling active obfuscation, then we would be doing the
 opposite - we would be modeling an information-hiding game. Of course, there 
 is
 lots of game theory work on information hiding in two critter encounters (I'm
 thinking evolutionary-game-theory-looking-at-deception). I haven't seen
 anything, though, looking at distributed information hiding. 
 
 The idea
 that you could create a system full of autonomous agents in which information
 ends up hidden, but no particular individuals have done the hiding, is kind of
 cool. Seems like the type of thing encryption guys could get into (or already
 are into, or have already moved past).
 
 Eric
 
 On Fri, May  6, 2011
 10:05 PM, Mohammed El-Beltagy moham...@computer.org
 wrote:
 
 
 I have a question I would like to pose to the group in that regard:
 
 Can we model/simulate how in a democracy that is inherently open (as
 stated in the constitution: for the people, by the people etc..) there
 emerges decision masking  structures emerge that actively obfuscate
 the participatory nature of the democratic decision making for their
 ends?
 
 
 
 
 




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[FRIAM] monkeys, Shakespeare, and Venn

[lrudolph]

Recent talk of memes and original sources reminds me that, just the 
other day, I was reading John Venn's book on logic (published 5 years 
before he wrote the paper which gave the name Venn diagrams to the
familiar diagrams that had been around much longer), and discovered 
that he spends about 3 pages discussing the probability of producing 
the plays of Shakespeare (he doesn't mention the sonnets...) by 
random-drawing-with-replacement from a bag (not an urn) with the 
latin letters in it (he doesn't mention whitespace, either).  The 
typewriter had only been invented about 5 years before *that*, and no 
monkeys are involved (though an idiot shows up shortly thereafter, 
when he points out that by a *systematic* mechanism (essentially, a 
recursive enumeration of all finite strings of letters) that even an 
idiot (viz., Turing's idealized human computing agent) could do, 
the plays would *surely* be produced eventually.  (Venn further 
points out that, in either case, to actually separate the wheat from 
the chaff you would more or less have to have a Shakespeare on hand 
to read the output and give it a thumbs up or thumbs down.)

A cursory search with Google found no indication either of an earlier 
instance of this (proto-)meme, or of anyone before me ever having 
left a written (and Google-ized) record of noticing it for what it 
was.  In particular, the Wikipedia article on what they call the 
infinite monkey theorem doesn't mention Venn (or anyone earlier, for 
that matter).  Anyone know anything?

Lee Rudolph

P.S. No monkeys were harmed in the preparation of this message.


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Re: [FRIAM] Assistance sought: The meaning of constraints

[lrudolph]

[my comment follows Russ's]

Russ Abbot writes:
 
 As I understand it, work is defined as the change in kinetic energy
 resulting from the application of a force. Normally that means work is force
 times distance. So if there is no distance (no motion) there is no change in
 kinetic energy and hence no work.  A tug-of-war between two absolutely
 balanced teams results in no work even though both sides are pulling as hard
 as they can. But is that what you are really interested in? That gets us
 somewhat far afield from a more general notion of constraint. Perhaps it
 would be helpful if you would clarify what you care about in this context.

In what it is that Nick cares about, is there *any*
reason to believe that there is *any* conservation
principle for *anything* (in his system[s] of
interest) that plays a role like that of energy?
Only if there is such a principle, it seems to me,
is there any principled way for him (or you or us
or me) to distinguish some analogues of kinetic 
energy and potential energy; and (again, as it
seems to me) without an analogue of kinetic 
energy (principled or not), the definition of 
work from physics (that you quote above) begins
to drift into inanaloguizability even before we
tax it by asking what's 'force' in Nick's context? 
(already under discussion), much less what's 
distance/motion in Nick's context? (only recently 
mooted).  

Lee Rudolph


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Re: [FRIAM] Work! Fer Gawd and Newton's sake!

[lrudolph]

I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never acted,
or if it was, not above once; for the play, I remember, pleas'd not
the million, 'twas caviare to the general.

 In general, I agree.
 
 -R
 
 On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 12:34 PM, Douglas Roberts d...@parrot-farm.netwrote:
 
  In the true spirit of FRIAM, I propose that we generalize what we mean by
  generalize.
 
  And then we could perhaps steer the discussion in the direction of how to
  produce a generalizable ABM.
 
  Said ABM could be made aware of it's computing host, therefore further
  generalizing its computation capability, accordingly.  (Depending on what
  was meant by computation, of course).
 
  Just a thought.
 
  --Doug
 
 
  On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 12:23 PM, plissa...@comcast.net wrote:
 
  Come on, Peoples!  Work is DEFINED in Newtonian mechanics as being done
  when a force moves its point of application.  Thass all - and plenty
  enuff!  So you lift a box up to a shelf - you doing work, as defined by
  Isaac, the Laborers Union and most Plain Folks.  You put a whiskey jigger 
  on
  a pool table - it and the table move, a very leetle bit, and work be done 
  by
  gravity.
 
  Railroad lines represent useful constraints to freight cars.  Thanks to
  them the car becomes an object that moves in predestinate grooves!  The
  car is subject to acceleration due to all forces acting on it, but the 
  rails
  try to keep it from cross track motion.  They does their best -  to the
  extent that they are capable.
 
  You may generalize the technical terms force, work and constraint as
  far as you like.  After all, they had meaning in language long before they
  were defined by Newton and La Grange for specific mechanical concepts.
  St. Paul (2 nd Corinthians III, 14) said: The love of Christ constraineth
  us.  I dunno what he meant, but the nice thing about the Bible is that you
  can choose for yourself what it means!
 
  It seems helpful to note that the tracks constrain the response of the
  cars to applied forces (more or less!).  It's useful and human to employ 
  the
  word in a more general sense, and it probably means roughly the same thing
  to most people. And if not, who cares?  What's in a name? as someone 
  said!
  Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures
 
  Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for.
 
  1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505,USA
  tel:(505)983-7728
 
 
 
  
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Re: [FRIAM] Assistance sought: The meaning of constraints

[lrudolph]

Dear Nick,

I am also reviewing a book--actually, two booklets 
and a book chapter--in the sense that I am working 
mightily to incorporate into a book I am editing 
and partly writing (on mathematical models for use 
in psychology) a discussion of their virtues
and vices.  In my case, the matter being reviewed is
not by a psychologist but by a historian, Henry Adams.  
Adams spent much of his life trying (and conspicuously 
failing) to do what *I* would call making a mathematical
model of history, though he only occasionally spoke of
mathematics and mathematicians and much more often 
of physics and physicists (19th century in all cases).
Sometimes (as in the booklets A Letter to American 
Teachers of History and The Rule of Phase as Applied
to History) he tried to adapt thermodynamics to his
purposes; at other times (as in _The Education of 
Henry Adams_, particularly the chapter The Dynamo
and the Virgin) he talked in terms of dynamics
more generally.

His failure to get anywhere at all (as I see it) 
started with his (predictable?) failure to make any
sense *at all* of forces in his context.

I would (not only, but largely, therefore) caution
you, Nick, against importing any notion of force
into your explication of your psychologist's distinction
between constraints and causes; forces are not needed
to explicate constraints (or causes) as far as I'm
concerned, and they carry an awful lot of misleading
and potentially destructive excess meaning (to use
your term).

So, then, what are constraints in my lexicon (that of
a mathematical modeler who is enlightened to the extent
that physics is *not* taken as the unique, or prefered,
domain for models and model-prototypes)?  _The constraints
on a particular system are whatever specifies it among
all systems of the same general type._  Of course, all
the nouns and adjectives in that last sentence are open
to contentious negotiation: what's a system? what's
the type of a system, what do particular and 
general and same mean? what (even) does all
mean? I hope we don't have to go all the way there.

Here is an example (drawn from theoretical robotics, not 
from psychology or history).  A robot hand can be 
mathematically modeled (to a first, but useful, 
approximation) as a system of line segments (the 
bones of the fingers and thumbs) located in ordinary
3D space.  To model a hand at all, those line segments
need to meet up in certain ways (e.g., the segments
that represent the bones of a single phalange have to
form a chain in which successive segments have one
endpoint--a joint--in common).  To model a humanoid hand, 
the line segments have to be appropriately limited in 
number (e.g., if -oid is taken fairly strictly, not
too many to a chain, and not too many chains altogether),
and their degrees of freedom have to be specified
as well (e.g., the inter-segment joints are R joints,
with one degree of angular freedom; maybe there's a
thumb with an S joint, having two degrees of angular
freedom, at one of its two loose ends; the lengths of
the line segments should be specified, at least by
giving a range of possible lengths).  

Everything in the last paragraph after 3D space 
could be read as giving (some of) those constraints 
on a (general) linkage system that make it a 
robot hand linkage system, if one's focus of interest
were so wide that it included both general linkage
systems and robot hand linkage systems.  On the other
hand, if one's focus narrows only to robot hand
linkage systems, then you might not want to call
*those* descriptors constraints; rather, within
the universe-of-discourse that covers only robot
hand linkage systems, the constraints would be
(in part) *specific* lengths for joints, *specific*
range restrictions on the angular degrees of freedom,
and (if you want to make life hard for yourself) 
further specifications, for instance, the requirement
that segments cannot pass through each other during
any motion of the system.

There are no forces in sight.  One way to explain
their absence is to say that what has been described, 
so far,is a kinematics model of the robot hand; and 
that, if you want to actually be an engineer and make 
(or plan to make) a physical robot hand, you will have 
to put in some physics--meaning (here) forces (as well 
as materials specifications [which could, reductively,
be phrased exclusively in terms of forces: but with 
a huge expansion in verbiage and diminution in human
understandability])--and then do dynamics.  Some of
the dynamics you do will explain, retrospectively, 
why you can successfully ignore the forces in the
kinematics model: they are doing no work.  

In the psychological case, where you-all already are 
(if I've been following) in a quandary as to what,
if anything, plays the role in a satisfactory
description of causes of feelings that is
analogous to force in a satisfactory description
of causes of motions of billiard balls (etc.), 
I think that to push the analogy with physics (which 
is 

Re: [FRIAM] Assistance sought: The meaning of constraints

[lrudolph]

On 13 Mar 2011 at 15:31, Victoria Hughes wrote:

 Well, I know this is another one of my out-of-left-field questions,  
 but out of curiousity is gravity a constraint or a force?

On Newton's account of things (if not in his language?)
it's a force; I think also in Special Relativity.
In General Relativity, I think I ought to say it's
a constraint, but I don't know what Real Physicists
say.  Some witty physicist (John Archibald Wheeler,
if Google can be trusted) put it nicely as Matter 
tells space how to curve, and space tells matter 
how to move. Force being, more or less by definition, 
what tells matter how to move (more precisely and 
correctly: how to *change* how it is moving), here 
we see gravity in its avatar as the shape of space: 
which sure seems to me like it should be called a 
constraint.

I have no idea what the Einstein's gravitational
constant (that the cosmologists claim is not actually,
you know, *constant*) means for this style of 
explanation. 

 Does it  
 depend on where you measure it? What about at planetary distances?
 Really I am just curious and not attempting to poke or provoke.
 Thank you-
 Victoria
 
 
 [ ps so is my ignorance a constraint or a force, and what changes that?
 
 
 On Mar 13, 2011, at 9:45 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
 
  Eric and Lee have nice discussions.  The only thing I would add as  
  something of a generalization is that constraints have to do with  
  the structure of something--in Lee's case, the way the hand is  
  structured and how it's held together at the joints and in Eric's  
  case the structure created by the bumpers on the alley. Forces  
  become important when one discusses the expenditure of energy--in  
  Lee's case the use of energy to move the hand given the constraints  
  and in Eric's case the energy that imparted momentum to the ball.
 
  One thing that makes this more difficult is that many social (and  
  biological) systems expend energy to maintain structure: a police  
  force is an example as is a government more generally. In Lee's and  
  Eric's examples, we imagine the structures being maintained  
  statically (and indefinitely) by whatever holds the pieces in place.  
  In social and biological organizations many of the structures would  
  fall apart were it not for the continual expenditure of energy.
 
  -- Russ Abbott
  _
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles
 
Google voice: 747-999-5105
blog: http://russabbott.blogspot.com/
vita:  http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
  _
 
 
 
  On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 7:57 AM, ERIC P. CHARLES e...@psu.edu wrote:
  I suspect that outside the context of a specific example, this is  
  not really possible to answer. Throwing your own pet distinction  
  back at you, we need to know what we are trying to explain, so we  
  can avoid slipping levels of analysis. I have not read the author in  
  question, but suspect an example (with slippage) would go something  
  like this:
 
  Imagine a child bowling with bumpers. The child causes the ball to  
  roll down the lane, and to hit the pins. The bumpers constrain the  
  path of the ball to be in the direction of the pins. That is, the  
  overall path of the ball is roughly: /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\X (our lucky  
  kid rolls a strike), and when asked to explain that macro-movement -  
  the child causes, the bumpers constrain. If that is correct, it is  
  going to be a big problem if we slip our level of analysis to the  
  details of the path of the ball. If, instead of explaining the  
  overall pattern, we ask about a single jag (a single \) then the  
  bumper has a causal roll, in that it applied force to the ball (or  
  redirected force applied to it by the ball). So, what we find from  
  our example is that all constraints are causes at another level  
  of analysis - which would be terribly confusing if not specified.
 
  For a more flippant example: Does my cable TV subscription constrain  
  what I watch, or cause it? When I am flipping through the channels,  
  it constrains it. When I stay on the same channel, whatever is on,  
  it causes it.
 
  Another thought: This is the same silly distinction made by people  
  who are not willing to commit fully to epigenetic development. They  
  say things like genes create the constrains that the environment  
  works within. (The most obvious reason it is silly is because one  
  could just as easily reverse the terms.)
 
  Hope something in that helps,
 
  Eric
 
 
  On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 01:45 AM, Nicholas Thompson 
  nickthomp...@earthlink.net 
   wrote:
  Dear anybody,
 
 
 
 
 
 
  I am reviewing a book by a psychologist in which the author makes a  
  distinction between constraints and causes.   Now perhaps I am over  
  thinking this, but this distinction seems to parallel one made by  
  Feynman in his famous physics text, where he defines a 

Re: [FRIAM] does classical mechanics always fail to predict or retrodict for 3 or more Newtonian gravity bodies? Rich Murray 20

[lrudolph]

With particular regard to computer simulations of
celestial mechanics, Gerry Sussman wrote a paper
sometime in (IIRC) the late 1970s, about the 
ultimate instability of the solar system (one
of the classical motivations for celestial 
mechanics in general and the 3-body problem
in particular).

I could be vaguer if I tried.  

Lee Rudolph

 Yes, the n-body system with n2 is known to be chaotic, but subject to
 the constraints of the KAM theorem
 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser_theorem), ie
 there exist quasi-periodic orbits for certain initial conditions.
 
 This was certainly known stuff when I studied dynamical systems as an
 undergrad in the early '80s.
 
 On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 08:17:37PM -0700, Rich Murray wrote:
  does classical mechanics always fail to predict or retrodict for 3 or
  more Newtonian gravity bodies? Rich Murray 2011.02.18
  
  Hello Steven V Johnson,
  
  Can I have a free copy of the celestial mechanics software to run on
  my Vista 64 bit PC?
  
  In fall, 1982, I wrote a 200-line program in Basic for the
  Timex-Sinclair $100 computer with 20KB RAM that would do up to 4
  bodies in 3D space or 5 in 2D space, about 1000 steps in an hour,
  saving every 10th position and velocity -- I could set it up to
  reverse the velocities after the orbits became chaotic after 3 1/2
  orbits from initial perfect symmetry as circles about the common
  center of gravity, finding that they always maintained chaos, never
  returning to the original setup -- doubling the number of steps while
  reducing the time interval by half never slowed the the evolution of
  chaos by 3 1/2 orbits -- so I doubted that there is any mathematical
  basis for the claim that classical mechanics predicts the past or
  future evolution of any system with over 2 bodies, leading to a
  conjecture that no successful algorithm exists, even without any close
  encounters.
  
  Has this been noticed by others?
  
  Rich Murray rmfor...@gmail.com  505-819-7388
  1943 Otowi Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505
  
  On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 4:30 PM,
  OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson svj.orionwo...@gmail.com wrote:
  
   Just a brief side-comment...
  
   Some of this lingo is fascinating stuff to me. Having performed a
   lot of theoretical computer simulation work on my own using good'ol
   fashion Newtonian based Celestial Mechanics algorithms, where
   typically I use a = 1/r^2, I noticed orbital pattern behavior
   transforms into something RADICALLY different, such as if I were to
   change the classical algorithm to something like a = 1/r^3. You can
   also combine both of them like a = 1/r^2 +/-  1/r^3 within the same
   computer algorithm. That produces interesting side effects too. I'm
   still trying to get a handle on it all.
  
   Regards
   Steven Vincent Johnson
   www.OrionWorks.com
   www.zazzle.com/orionworks
  
  
  FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
  Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
  lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
 
 -- 
 
 
 Prof Russell Standish  Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
 Mathematics
 UNSW SYDNEY 2052   hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
 Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au
 
 
 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
 lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org




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Re: [FRIAM] A question for your Roboteers out there

[lrudolph]

On 5 Feb 2011 at 12:29, Nicholas  Thompson wrote:

 At what point in the complexity of a robot (or any other control system)
 does it begin to seem useful to parse input into information about the
 system itself and information about other things?

From the beginning, it's useful to parse input into 
information about what you know how to modify
and information about what you can't modify or don't
know how to.  It seems to me that self/other builds
(possibly destructively) on that prior distinction,
at least among the robot(icist)s I've seen.  Nick,
did I ever tell you about the emergence of 
pointing behavior in a robot they run out at
UMass?  

Now I *will* run.  More later no doubt.



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Re: [FRIAM] Daphnia's jeans

[lrudolph]

On 4 Feb 2011 at 14:33, Nicholas  Thompson wrote:

 I bet you somebody will post something in the next day claiming that humans 
 have fewer genes because they have a larger brain instead.  

As the saying goes, what counts isn't the size of your
genome, it's how you use it.

To a first order approximation, if you (a species)
are making a living, you're using your genome just fine.

To second order, perhaps, how *long* (in years? generations?)
you've been makiung a living might come in.

But to first order, humans and Daphnia are tied (along
with a bunch of other stuff).


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Re: [FRIAM] The decline effect

[lrudolph]

On 12 Dec 2010 at 0:46, Nicholas  Thompson wrote:

 At least until recently, when the NY-er writes about science, they try very
 hard not to write anything stupid. 

What??? Have you forgotten the whole disgraceful 
Paul Brodeur episode?  Refresh your memory by reading
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN10/wn121010.html.
Worse than stupid, verging on criminal, given the 
amount of money it's caused to be thrown away and
the amount of anxiety it's generated or caused to
be misplaced.

I haven't yet read the decline effect article, and
am not commenting on it, just on your quoted sentence
above.



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[FRIAM] Tinbergen on mathematics, mathematical model, and novels

[lrudolph]

[Note to Nick: This is Jakob, the economist, brother of
your Tinbergen.]

  There are also a number of misunderstandings
  about mathematics. Sometimes it is
  believed that only certain very simple and
  therefore rigid relations are representative
  by mathematics and that reality is more flexible,
  or however it may be expressed. This is
  to underestimate the power of mathematics:
  more advanced mathematics is able to express
  also much more complicated and flexible relations
  and partly to handle them. On the other
  hand it is sometimes forgotten that arguments
  against the most general types of mathematics
  are just arguments against science in general,
  i.e., against the assumption that we can understand
  connections between phenomena - in
  this case economic phenomena - in some general
  way. If determinacy - in whatever loose
  form - is not accepted at all, there is no economics:
  no mathematical economics and no
  literary economics. Perhaps there would remain
  economic novels; personally I would prefer
  other novels then.

(from The Functions of Mathematical Treatment, 
J. Tinbergen, The Review of Economics and Statistics, 
Vol. 36, No. 4 (Nov., 1954), pp. 365-369)



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[FRIAM] Elisabeth Pisani article on long history of data mining

[lrudolph]

http://www.wisdomofwhores.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/12/Prospect_Big_data.pdf

(that URL should be all on one line)


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[FRIAM] pond scum update

[lrudolph]

Here is a report from someone on another list to
which I forwarded Nick's original usb microscope
question; the list had been kicking it around for
a while, and this guy took action.

===begin===
http://www.celestron.com/c3/product.php?ProdID=516

These are pretty good photos!  How easy is it to follow moving 
things
with that stage?

I don't know yet.  I'll file a report when I'm up and running.

My report:

I e-ordered some well slides and coverslips from:
http://www.microscopeworld.com/

I inserted a 4GB SDHC card into the LCD/Camera head
of the scope. That worked, and I'm using that mechanism
for file transfer.  The stills are JPEGs, the videos
are 3gp (whatever that is, but miraculously both my linux
boxes could display it, so kudos to Celestron for choosing
that format).

I went down to a pond in Tilden Park and collected
some samples.  Here are my first attempts at capturing images:
http://www.panix.com/~bks/Pix/Micro/

The two minute video is pretty cool for a first go.  I am
definitely a microscope tyro.  Some of the little guys are
zipping around too fast to follow, and most are too small
to make out much detail.  If you stick with it till the
end you'll see another large critter go zooming by.

The still pictures of pond scum thingees are not great but
for larger objects, like the prepared section of a stem of
a plant, they're pretty good.

The verniers on the stage are pretty good for such an
inexpensive instrument.  It sure beats using your fingers
to move the slide around.

More in the future.  Mostly this makes me want a better
setup.  But as that would be between 10x and 100x more
expensive, I'll wait.
===end===


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Re: [FRIAM] Peer review

[lrudolph]

I am told that in economics these days, some journals
do pay referees (which I presume means peer reviewers)
an honorarium that diminishes by some set amount every
day from the receipt of the paper (not dipping below $0,
though; that *would* get my attention).

This might be an Academic Urban Legend, however.
And I don't really like to *talk* to economists...
it always makes me feel poor, nasty, brutish, and 
short-tempered.

 Russell, 
 
 Money for doing peer reviews!?  Oh, gosh.  If the world were thus!
 
 Nick
 
 -Original Message-
 From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf
 Of Russell Standish
 Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2010 3:31 PM
 To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
 Subject: [FRIAM] Peer review
 
 On Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 10:18:26AM -0800, glen e. p. ropella wrote:
  
  On a tangent, however, I found this article interesting:
  
  Citizens Against Peer Review
  http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2010/12/03/citizens-aga
  inst-peer-review/
  
  
  But it does bring up the point that we humans do as little work as we 
  can get away with.  We're lazy.  We won't dig into any subject unless 
  we must, for whatever reason.  The reviewers will dig in deeper than 
  the lay person (mostly) because it's their job/profession to do so.  
  Oh sure, they may have chosen that job/profession based on some 
  inherent energy or curiosity about the domain; but in the end, they 
  have groceries to buy on the way home, yards to rake, burnt out light 
  bulbs to change, etc.  So, they really do have to commit to work like
 this.
  
 
 I weas fine with this, until I got to this bit. No scientist will do peer
 review for the sake of paying bills. In fact it seems to be the fashion not
 to do any work for peer reviewing, and just make snap judgements, as it
 takes you away from the 'real science' (ie writing research grant proposals
 to lure the grad students). They'll do it because they're fundamentally
 interested in science, and want to give back to the scientific community by
 returning the courtesy some other reviewer has given them. But career
 scientists don't, so the peer review process is often just a waste of time,
 or sometimes even positively catty. Sorry for the snarky comments :(.
 
 -- 
 
 
 Prof Russell Standish  Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
 Mathematics
 UNSW SYDNEY 2052   hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
 Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au
 
 
 
 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives,
 unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
 
 
 
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 Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] Updike Vs the Bard

[lrudolph]

On 1 Dec 2010 at 13:12, Nicholas  Thompson wrote:

 I Always wondered how Hamlet knew what an angel 
 looked like.  Let alone, God. 
...

Nick, you are being an uncareful reader.  Here's
the text from Hamlet, again:

 What a piece of work is a man!  
 How noble in reason!  How infinite in faculty!  
 In form, in moving, how express and admirable! 
 In action how like an angel!  
 In apprehension how like a God!

No claims there about how an angel or a God looks:
just about how the first acts and the Latter apprehends.


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[FRIAM] the nine circles of scientific hell

[lrudolph]

http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2010/11/9-circles-of-scientific-
hell.html



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