Re: [FRIAM] On old question

On 10/24/18 2:58 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > First of all, the a priori distinction between the real and the modeling > world is indefensible. As a person who *simulates* the real world for money, that's just plain offensive! 8^) Were I to go into, say, NASA or somewhere and claim that my simu

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

Oh! And I forgot to mention my other favorite *vein* of possible counter examples: Hewitt's "Inconsistency Robustness". I particularly like John Woods' contribution to attempts to formalize abduction. On 10/24/18 2:49 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote: > My opinion is probably the least

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

My opinion is probably the least credible. But here it is anyway. Rosen's achievement was just like every other theoretician's achievement. He formulated hypotheses that *may* be testable. The Mikulecky paper Steve posted states one of them fairly well: Mikulecky wrote: > The functional com

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

So ... Rosen's openness to material flow, closure to operational flow, allows *both* endo- and exothermic sub-systems. But his (M,R)-systems focus on maintaining organization using energy-material harvested from the gradient, ignoring sub-systems that produce energy-material? On 10/24/18 9:20

[FRIAM] students can register at home or school

https://makemyvotematter.com/ > Students can choose to vote in either their home town OR their college town, > making them a powerful force in swing districts. Of the 20.4 million students > currently enrolled in college: -- ☣ uǝlƃ

Re: [FRIAM] Open Letter

I swore to myself I'd stay quiet. But because I'm obsessed with the neoreaction (https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/blog/on-neoreaction.html), I've failed. If we buy the premise put forth by "bias bubbles" ("echo chambers", "safe zones", "political correctness", whatever your favorite postm

Re: [FRIAM] Complexity Returns to the Mother Church (or v.v?).

On 10/12/18 3:46 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > 5. ... From the strength of the triangle one can infer something about the > parts that make it up, but from the parts themselves, lacking information > about their arrangement, one cannot determine that the triangle will be > strong. UNLESS! The info

[FRIAM] apophenia!

Something's Going on Here: Psychological Predictors of Belief in Conspiracy Theories https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3176533 > Finally, there may be a set of cognitive tendencies that combine with or > augment the > association between broader or more motivation- and emotion-

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

Same as it ever was. Death is already *mostly* voluntary. Anyone can commit suicide any time they want. That the overwhelming majority of us *choose* not to is important. The particular alternatives we continually choose to engage define us. Would you rather ingest engineered cells? Or per

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

I've failed to understand how that changes anything I wrote or how it might change my opinion that animals (but not plants) psychologize. Can you elaborate how your experiment is supposed to change my opinion? On 09/19/2018 11:51 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > /Au contraire! /This is totally magica

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

On 09/19/2018 10:25 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > I don’t think you comments below (see larding) take adequate account of the > arguments found in my /Many Perils of Ejective Anthropomorphism > , > /whe

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

Glutamate triggers long-distance, calcium-based plant defense signaling http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6407/1112 > Animals require rapid, long-range molecular signaling networks to integrate > sensing and response throughout their bodies. The amino acid glutamate acts > as an excitato

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

But, really, all you're doing is dickering about the definition. It doesn't make me grumpy at all. In fact, I can agree wholeheartedly with you and still believe in qualia, because what you describe *is* what the word means: self-perception. No amount of sophist-icated, hermeneutics will make

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

In an attempt to avoid a descent into arguing about the meanings of words, it seems reasonable enough to say that whatever plants may or may not feel, what they feel will result in wildly different qualia than what we experience. Right? So, we don't have to argue about whether plants feel pain

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

Redundancy in a neural network can allow for something like abstraction, which I suppose is "psychological". E.g. let's say you have two sub-networks of input edges, where only 1 of the sub-networks must be activated in order to trigger a given pattern in the next layer. If the 2 sub-networks

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

I agree that taking data is good. My argument was against intervening too much or too often. One of the suggestions I give to people who ... uh ... take offense ... when you talk about how much they drink, is to simply *count* their drinks. That data, like weighing yourself, shouldn't make yo

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

Hm. As usual, it depends on what you want to have happen, I suppose. Educating a zealot who wants to kill everyone will only make them more capable of killing everyone. If your desire is to avoid killing everyone, then the dogmatic group needs to be isolated or eliminated. But my guess is th

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

Well, sure. If you intend to intervene, you have to choose the type of intervention. So, the "Killing versus Letting Die" dilemma is a special form of "intervene or don't". But if you choose to intervene, you have to also choose how to intervene. One might choose to kill by positively reinfo

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

Ha! When I was in college, I distracted myself from my failings at electrical engineering ... and my failure to grok topology by reading the University of Chicago's Ethics: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/et/current. One issue had an essay on "Killing versus Letting Die". I remember re

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

"What then?" Well, my answer is we'll either be aware of our own ability to destroy the world[†] ... or we won't. Anyone who is not already aware of our ability to destroy the world is handicapped. So, those people are in sore need of an educational transformation. So what if such an educatio

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

I make a similar argument about gun control. Most of my friends are advocates of stronger regulation. They *think* I'm also an advocate of such. And, objectively, I am because I sometimes parrot a subset of their arguments. E.g. I argue that there are multiple types of cause (perhaps 4: form

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

I'm not sure I've read all 3. I will, though. I *tried* to read this: Animal Sentience: The other-minds problem https://animalstudiesrepository.org/animsent/vol1/iss1/1/ And I've read some of Harnad's other work and came away impressed. But his characterization of the "hard problem" seems

Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

I've always wondered why Peterson equates moral relativism with nihilism. The two seem fundamentally different to me. I'm re-reading this: What is complexity? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12447974 wherein Chris makes the (kindasorta obvious) point that meaning is always relative to

[FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

I ran across this paper when I typed the subject into Google: Animal rights, animal minds, and human mindreading https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2563326/ I thought I'd troll with it, here, since we've had so many discussions of monism and behaviorism. The question came up in th

Re: [FRIAM] looking for a word

Rete mirable would definitely not apply. It suffers from the same criticism I have of "plexus", the implication that the threads don't intersect but are braided. And anastomosis is wrong, too, because it's focus is on shunting, regardless of whether such shunting is large (e.g. surgical) or ti

Re: [FRIAM] looking for a word

Sorry for being vague. By "matrixification", I made an attempt to suggest something like taking a single 1-dimensional thing (a tube) and splitting it into more than one thing, each of which is still 1-dimensional, but together approaching a higher dimension (2 or 3). By "articulation", I inte

Re: [FRIAM] looking for a word

Well, I did mention "plexus" in the very first post. So, perhaps all the word needs is a champion! Anastomosis seems to be more like a shunt around the type of networked structure we're talking about. Or, at least, the etymology seems to talk about connecting two whole openings "make a hole"!

Re: [FRIAM] looking for a word

Coalescence is a very nice sidetrack, actually. It, again, takes me back to the notion of *a* filtration, in particular ascending and descending filtrations. A brief hunt for a good antonym of "coalesce" lands me on "fractionated". I like that better than the temporal implications (evoked in

Re: [FRIAM] looking for a word

Thanks, everyone! These are all excellent leads. And, yes, the reason "filtration" is evocative is because the liver filters the blood (as well as the methodological map to indexing structures). And the space-filling nature of rivers and neural and tree growth, I think, impacts such filtratio

Re: [FRIAM] looking for a word

That article paints a fantastic contrast between "speaking to" in an ungrounded state vs. "speaking to" in a grounded state. When speaking to a collection of idealists, it's relatively trivial to sidetrack them into some region where their evocative triggers are "dog whistles". But when speaki

Re: [FRIAM] looking for a word

Yes, "face validation" plays a role. But quantitative "data validation" plays a stronger one, as I implied with my reference to "pure complexity". If I could bridge the gap between counting ambiguous things like "sinusoids" and our very quantitative analog, then it would be relatively easy to

Re: [FRIAM] looking for a word

"Peneplain" is a very cool word that you just taught me. But I think that's too well-mixed. In terms of the liver, the (3D) peneplain might be simply the central vein that flows out after all the filtering is done. I want to indicate the region "just prior" to the peneplain ... or just after

Re: [FRIAM] looking for a word

Bah! If you are, as I am, a post-modernist, explanatory power reduces to evocative power. Whatever I can do to evoke a predictable response in the audience is adequate. Although I count myself a fan of Wittgenstein's STFU approach, I can't deny the power of those who just never STFU. (Witness

Re: [FRIAM] looking for a word

Interesting. Robert's mention of "fractally-associative" was attractive to me and seems similar to your [dis]assortativity. But I'm too ignorant (so far) to know whether that has any heuristic power. I now owe ~4 pints, but only have any confidence I'll have to pay up on 1. 8^) Here's the con

Re: [FRIAM] looking for a word

I *really* want to use some form of "plectic" like plexus or complex. But its explanatory power is limited. As I'll soon respond to Steve, I need something that evokes the concept of merging/confluent flow but without the overtones of generation (like Robert's growth/dynamism). Even the "filt

Re: [FRIAM] looking for a word

Excellent! I suppose the things I'm talking about would exhibit something like a persistent homology. Of course, I'm looking for a word to describe a subset of those (the particular way something like a capillary bed branches out from the large blood vessels). So, it would have to be a type o

Re: [FRIAM] looking for a word

o* have some sort of internal structure you can see when you zoom in, though. So, maybe a qualified phrase like "fractal hub" would work? On 08/17/2018 10:53 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > A hub? > > On 8/17/18, 11:47 AM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" on behalf of gep

[FRIAM] looking for a word

I need a word (or short phrase) to refer to the portion of a network where the edges converge or diverge (more than other parts of the network. Examples might be a river delta or the branching (debranching?) of blood vessels or lungs. "Plexus" or "knot" don't work because they could ambiguous

Re: [FRIAM] What is an object?

"the validator of our senses can only be our senses" waaay oversimplifies the set of experiences. If there were only 1 type of experience, then you'd be right. But there are (at least) many types of experience. And 1 experience of one type can "validate" a different experience of an entirely

Re: [FRIAM] What is an object?

Yep. That's a fantastic example of metaphysical predisposition interfering with one's ability to reason well. When I was a kid, my mom and I would argue a lot about whether animals had souls. She claimed they absolutely did not. Being young, I had no real idea what a soul was. But I would a

Re: [FRIAM] What is an object?

Ha! I made a Trump by leaving out the word "not". That should be "..., but it does not 'go without saying'." On 07/19/2018 08:42 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote: > So, no, it does NOT go without saying that one's ideas influence the > programming. It's true p

Re: [FRIAM] What is an object?

There's also a deeper objection to this than Marcus makes, that of "data driven" modeling. I fight this battle all the time at biological modeling conferences. Most modelers *do* develop models based on ideas ... or, more technically, abstract hypotheses about abstract things (e.g. lipophilici

Re: [FRIAM] What is an object?

Sorry, my reference to the "why trap" refers to teleology and the (apparent) success of science after it began focusing on "what" not "why". As a pragmatist, I ass/u/me/d you'd understand that. Mea culpa. It's *literally* irrelevant what OOP was designed to do. What matters is what it does/i

Re: [FRIAM] What is an object?

You're poking at the difference between a type/class/protocol/interface versus an object/implementation. There can be no difference in the type/class unless there's a difference in the objects that constitute that type/class. So, your 2 rats are of a type, implemented by different objects. An

Re: [FRIAM] Weird observation

OK. When you caveat it as a rare specialist with an attitude, then I'd agree with you, at least in practice. Let them do their tiny/special job and don't expect/require them to think/care about you as a whole person. But in those cases, who is in charge does matter a great deal. If they're s

Re: [FRIAM] What's so bad about Scientism?

So, to be clear, are you also making fun of reasoning like this? I ask because it's equal in idealism to the trolley problem. On 07/11/2018 07:48 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > Jones is in a gunfight > Jones Knows that his opponent has only a six shooter > Jones knows that his opponent has just fire

Re: [FRIAM] The Spectra and Dimensionality of Collaboration

I like (kinda agree with) everything you say in that last post, except the following: On 07/12/2018 09:50 AM, Steven A Smith wrote: > I think I hear the key to your reflection here being the *expectation* > of the band (or it's members) on you (the audience) or maybe more > strongly but tangenti

Re: [FRIAM] Lets try this again reaching out for advice and opinions

Well, as usual, we have to avoid any artificial discretization. Collaboration comes in a spectrum of types just like everything else. The lag time for feedback from one's recorded music (or video, books, etc.) is much longer than that of a "live" show. But that doesn't mean there is no feedba

Re: [FRIAM] Lets try this again reaching out for advice and opinions

Ha! That's a pretty funny image. The idea that there's a bunch of lurkers bobbing their heads at what someone says seems like something Trump might think. It would be an interesting experiment. When/if you post some blurb to your favorite medium, be it cocktail party, Twitter, or some mailing

Re: [FRIAM] What's so bad about Scientism?

Aha! That's good to know. Like deeply parsing Liz Phair lyrics, you *cannot* rely on me to infer what you imply. I'm just not smart enough. On 07/11/2018 12:10 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > I was making FUN of the trolley game. I don't want to play it any more than > you do! -- ☣ uǝlƃ ==

Re: [FRIAM] life, music, dance

Ha! Nice rhetorical jitsu, there. My claim was stronger. Money is bad for you, not merely the generic "Money is bad for one." But money is bad for each and every individual organism on the planet. Money is a lot like alcohol. Sure, it makes you feel good in some short-sighted, temporary wa

Re: [FRIAM] life, music, dance

Which is quite on topic for the belief/doubt thread, too! What we *want* is distinct from what is *good* for us ... sometimes even disjoint: want ∩ good = ∅ To quote Tool: "Why can't we drink forever?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hglVqACd1C8 On 07/11/2018 10:46 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: >

[FRIAM] life, music, dance

Maybe this will be interesting, Gil: Alan Watts & David Lindberg - Why Your Life Is Not A Journey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHnIJeE3LAI -- ☣ uǝlƃ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John

Re: [FRIAM] Lets try this again reaching out for advice and opinions

For what it's worth, I have nothing to contribute to many of your (Gil) questions. I know I'm a blowhard on almost everything. But I do actually try to stay quiet when I know I've got nothing of use to say. Some people are different (e.g. Renee'). She'd rather someone respond with something/

Re: [FRIAM] What's so bad about Scientism?

This brings to mind the dimensionality of the space of possible actions. I don't play the Trolley Game Nick wants to play because the space is absurdly, artificially small ... presented by sophists who care little about the real world. The real world (usually) presents a very high dimensional

[FRIAM] And now for something completely different!

How ProPublica Illinois Uses GNU Make to Load 1.4GB of Data Every Day https://www.propublica.org/nerds/gnu-make-illinois-campaign-finance-data-david-eads-propublica-illinois -- ☣ uǝlƃ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Frida

Re: [FRIAM] What's so bad about Scientism?

It wouldn't surprise me in the least if Nick were even more doubting than I am, similar to how ex-smokers become the most vehement anti-smoking zealots or how militant atheists seem to have been reared steeped in some religious tradition. Most of us "live inside our own heads". The tendency fo

Re: [FRIAM] What's so bad about Scientism?

tem. The utility of, say, the heart rate, is wayyy below my threshold for belief. On 07/09/2018 10:53 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote: > Interesting insertion of "utility", a kind of meta-variable to be considered. > To be clear, I'd say the organism believes in heartbeats, lung pumping

Re: [FRIAM] What's so bad about Scientism?

Interesting insertion of "utility", a kind of meta-variable to be considered. To be clear, I'd say the organism believes in heartbeats, lung pumping, etc. But to ask whether the organism believes in the usability/utility of (subjective) measurements of such things smacks of a hidden assumption

Re: [FRIAM] What's so bad about Scientism?

Yes, exactly! Those damn scientismists are *exactly* like Trumpians. 8^) You have to throw your drink in their face to get their attention. On 07/06/2018 01:30 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > “Given that many of my disagreements with the local atheists hinge on their > cultish and non-skeptical acce

[FRIAM] What's so bad about Scientism?

by Moti Mizrahi https://philpapers.org/archive/MIZWSB.pdf Given that many of my disagreements with the local atheists hinge on their cultish and non-skeptical acceptance of scientific results and me, therefore, accusing them of "scientism", I found this article helpful. In this forum, we talk

Re: [FRIAM] Object Oriented Ontology

I realize I'm that tool who always invites himself to these parties. But I'm intrigued enough to read along with you. At first I was skeptical because of this: https://philpapers.org/archive/BLAMSR.pdf > Harman's objectal reduction is an apodictic posit, invulnerable to empirical > testing.

Re: [FRIAM] Subject: Re: Friam Digest, Vol 180, Issue 3

Not to pile on to MySQL or anything. But I just landed on this: https://medium.com/@adamhooper/in-mysql-never-use-utf8-use-utf8mb4-11761243e434 > My [Hooper's] take-away lessons > > 1) Database systems have subtle bugs and oddities, and you can avoid a lot > of bugs by avoiding database system

[FRIAM] Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud. https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-experiment-fraud-psychology-replication Damn. Now I'm gonna have to go back to every time I've used this experiment rhetorically and figure out if it

Re: [FRIAM] Subject: Re: Friam Digest, Vol 180, Issue 3

On 06/06/2018 09:52 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > It seems silly to say that one would democratize elite bicycle racing. Exactly. It's equally silly to talk of "democratizing information" or knowledge or whatever. In fact, it may even be silly to talk of *democracy*, at all. I think this is

Re: [FRIAM] Subject: Re: Friam Digest, Vol 180, Issue 3

philpapers.org alerted me, yesterday, to the forthcoming book "Extended Epistemology" by Carter, et al. In trying to find a downloadable copy of one of the already published chapters of that book, I ran across Chalmers TedX talk on the extended mind/self, wherein he called our cognitive investme

Re: [FRIAM] Archiving Friam conversations as editable text.

Heh, I just had a friend float the idea that Hugh Everett was "laughed out of physics/academia". Now, I'm not a fan of history or biography. But that sounded wrong; so I googled it. Now that I'm an expert, I assert that Everett didn't care about academia and any insult he felt from the reject

Re: [FRIAM] Archiving Friam conversations as editable text.

Of course. It'll take the exact same plain text format of the file on the Peirce conversation I sent you awhile back. You sent a response about your tools thinking it was some weird format ("djvu"?). I responded that it was merely a plain text file, but never heard back from you. Anyway, I'v

Re: [FRIAM] Archiving Friam conversations as editable text.

The archive has been down since September of last year, which I've mentioned several times. I have my own archive, of course. I've thought about uploading them somewhere, but few of us ever refer back to previous posts. So, I infer the archives are mostly a waste of resources. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ===

Re: [FRIAM] Transforming the Postsecondary Professional Education Experience -- Campus Technology

Ha! I don't know, man. "Software development" is increasingly looking like an industry dominated by cogs and sprockets ... from the yahoo complaining about my bracket placement to the bros pitching protocol inheritance, I've "had it up to here" with people telling me how I *should* be doing wha

Re: [FRIAM] Peirce's "What Pragmatism is."

Yes, well ... I "skimmed" it anyway. I really dig the idea of mixing table look-up with math models. We used to do that all the time. It was an important part of my competitor's success when he beat me in a competition to use ANNs (him) vs. GAs (me) to detect and use ephemerises exhibited in

Re: [FRIAM] Peirce's "What Pragmatism is."

So, is it fair to say that both the tabular data (including the polynomial approximations to that tabular data) *and* those state variables partitioned out into "those that varied in a predictable, stereo-typed manner" are a kind of "shared assumption" (coherence), whereas the state variables th

Re: [FRIAM] Peirce's "What Pragmatism is."

I disagree, again. As I tried to point out with both saccade and the inverted pendulum, the person who interacts with the ground thousands of times a day does so in a very tight feedback loop, sensing, acting, sensing, acting, etc. You are free to abstract all the detail and idealistically thi

Re: [FRIAM] Peirce's "What Pragmatism is."

Very cool! We disagree completely on the meaning of the word "coupling". 8^) Having grown up (intellectually) building component-based systems, I think of "coupling" in the same sense as "coupler" and interface cables. The thicker the cable, the more coupled. The thinner the cable, the less

Re: [FRIAM] Peirce's "What Pragmatism is."

Heh, that's completely inverted. You're claiming that fewer interactions between the individual and its environment imply a tighter coupling between them. I'm claiming that more interactions between them imply a tighter coupling. Maybe think about it this way. Imagine 2 androids (no "beliefs

Re: [FRIAM] Peirce's "What Pragmatism is."

To be a little more concise, Peirce's position on "self-control" is irrelevant to this point. Where the agency lies is irrelevant. This point is that Peircian belief and Peircian doubt seem well-elaborated by the concept of the looseness and tightness of the feedback loop between reality and t

[FRIAM] The Itch Nobody Can Scratch

Speaking of our need to take "gradations of certainty" seriously: The Itch Nobody Can Scratch https://medium.com/matter/the-itch-nobody-can-scratch-4d980e3ac519 I got itchy reading it! -- ☣ uǝlƃ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group lis

[FRIAM] abduction/induction confusion

This isn't intended to be part of the digestion of "What Pragmatism Is". So, I'm using the decades-old, standard, way of citing previous text: On 03/25/2018 10:22 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > By the way, I think I finally realized how Pierce came to confuse abduction > and induction in his later y

Re: [FRIAM] Peirce's "What Pragmatism is."

OK. It's interesting that you, Eric, start your post making the same claim (that I cannot doubt everything) and repeating Peirce's criticism that we may pretend to doubt (or doubt some few things, against a system in which we largely believe). Yet you go on to say that you think Peirce is dis

[FRIAM] invention and context

Great essay: The Future-Altering Technologies We Forgot to Invent https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/gene-wolfe-a-science-fiction-legend-on-the-future-altering-technologies-we-forgot-to-invent-a3103572a352 Wolfe's been one of my favorite authors since I read his Book of the New Sun series b

Re: [FRIAM] Peirce's "What Pragmatism is."

And to fold in a little postmodernism, Peirce says: "Now, just as conduct controlled by ethical reason tends toward fixing certain habits of conduct, the nature of which, (as to illustrate the meaning, peaceable habits and not quarrelsome habits), does not depend upon any accidental circumstanc

Re: [FRIAM] Peirce's "What Pragmatism is."

I anxiously await your annotations regarding this passage: "Suffer me to add one word more on this point—for, if one cares at all to know what the pragmaticist theory consists in, one must understand that there is no other part of it to which the pragmaticist attaches quite as much importance as

[FRIAM] "colloquial complexity"

https://phylogenous.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/book-review-biologys-first-law-by-mcshea-and-brandon-2010/ > The authors spectacularly avoid what they call “colloquial complexity” – what > we normally mean when we say complexity – in favor of “pure complexity,” a > measure of “number of part types”

Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 177, Issue 4

On 03/12/2018 09:41 AM, Jon Zingale wrote: > We could always use Git. +1 Which broaches the idea that what Nick wants is *not* a tool like a software program. What he wants is a *policy* or community standard behavior for his participants. Collaborative writing is nothing like a forum and vic

Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

Well, again caveat my ignorance, many of these evolutionary justifications seem to ignore any possible eusocial effects. The idea of transgenders showing a predisposition to hair dressing BEGS us to make a spitball eusocial (or at least semiotic) evolutionary argument ... you know, the benefits

Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

Weird paper! Right off the bat, I'm not surprised by the inference that people who entertain the idea of being a different gender would test with higher IQs. But I *am* surprised by their abilities to draw! Surely the authors cherry-picked the good ones and the rest were as crappy as my own a

Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

Ah! OK. I take it that you're not looking at any of Peterson's videos, then ... only at the commentary about his videos/lectures/book, etc. I also hear you when you say you haven't seen evidence that Peterson is an evolutionary psychologist (because his Wikipedia page or whatever doesn't ment

Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

I'm confused by your use of "again". This all smacks of pseudoscience, similar to the anti-vaxxers and the hyped claims of chemicals like reseveratrol or bee pollen. Perhaps you're using a focused definition of "pseudoscience"? For me, it's basically any claim dressed up in the trappings of s

Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

That's a great way to phrase the question. It highlights, I think, that evolutionary _psychology_ is a bit strange. It's much stranger than, say, the article Roger posted, which refers to evolutionary anthropology. In this question, there are 2 concrete things: 1) the extent to which poly[and

Re: [FRIAM] Fire Stick

Because this forum is supposed to be about complexity in some sense, I'll posit that the only reason Amazon doesn't suck (now) is because there is a diversity of providers. If we all choose as you have, and centralize into a monopoly, then Amazon will (soon) suck. But more practically, Amazon

Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

OK. It's good to have you respond directly to the physiology stuff. Thanks. Yes, I tried to respond to your causal model question. My response is basically that any causal analysis should target the parts on the "critical path" ... the bottlenecks ... the "rate limiters" ... whatever your lan

Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

Hm. To be clear, I'm not only talking about the testes and adrenals. I'm talking about the parts of the system that are modulated by testosterone as well ... which, given that testosterone partly determines our gender-associated traits, seems like a "behavior of the individual organism". So,

Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

That's not at all the distinction I'm making (never mind "precisely"). 8^) All 3 of us are talking about selecting for behavior. The difference is that I'm claiming "expressing and responding to testosterone" is a behavior. On 02/22/2018 01:39 PM, Steven A Smith wrote: > I feel mildly a failur

Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

Well, since you're talking about sneezing, and because sneezing is a physiological process, whatever model of cause we use will have to involve the physiological process. I'd claim that, if not identical, very close to the exact same physiological process occurs in the body when you sneeze beca

Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

Neither, obviously. The proximal cause of sneezing is a complex of neuro-muscular behaviors. That complex has an untold number of triggers, from bright lights and sound to tickling. Any competent analysis of such causation will focus on the *bottleneck*, which is the neuro-muscular complex,

Re: [FRIAM] Socratic Trolling

I expect that I've posted this before. But still, my favorite contribution to this topic is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20070609085706/http://www.sm.luth.se/~torkel/eget/net.html On 02/21/2018 11:26 AM, Steven A Smith wrote: > In my last contribution to the EvoPsych thread I referenced t

Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

OK. But I believe I merely asked the question: Why talk about these vague behaviors like "dress for sex", when we can talk about reasonably well-defined things like hormones and neurotransmitters? What explanatory power does evopsych have that, say, evolutionary neuroscience would not have? O

Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

No, I don't agree. I had intended to reply to Dave's (twice repeated) question about the speed of evolution with this response. But I'll do it, here, anyway. Remember that I'm not a biologist. So, corrections of what I say are more than welcome. It seems to me that natural selection is mult

Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

Re: artificial distinctions -- Allergy? No. The word "allergy" implies something like an *unhealthy*, more than normal, immune response. My take would be that my (yes, abnormally high) immune response to artificial discretization is *healthy* and appropriate. Those of you who don't have such

Re: [FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?

nsulin. Or the "rush" one might get from bungie jumping or slot machines. My point being that the distinction between intra-organism vs. organism behaviors is artificial, an artifice put to good use in rhetoric like the "alpha male" or "female 'display'"

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