[FRIAM] Celeste Kidd - How to Know

[Roger Critchlow]

Physical vs Metaphysical is probably dragging my own deviant concept of
Objective vs Subjective into the foreground, as well as my rhetorical
style.

I think that concrete vs. abstract is identifying categories of conceived
object, while perceptual vs. higher-level is identifying the amount of
reasoning involved in the conception.

The Daxxy experiment was directly manipulating the perceptual vs.
higher-level contrast, measuring certainty and performance as the rules
varied from the purely perceptual (Daxxy is Red) to higher-level
distinctions (Daxxy is (Red and Square and Small) or (Green and Triangular
and Large)), and found that certainty was a good guide to performance at
perceptual level and increasingly a crap shoot as rules got more
convoluted.

The "Is X more like Y or Z?" experiment looked for variance in
conceptions.  They thought they would find less variance in concepts of
everyday objects than in concepts of political leadership.  I'd like to see
that paper, but it's still in preparation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01NHcTM5IA4

I don't think Dr. Kidd is anywhere near resolving all these issues, many
more entertaining experiments are coming.

-- rec --

On Tue, Dec 31, 2019 at 9:19 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm struggling to reconcile something she said from the presentation with
> what's said in the paper. In the presentation, she said (my probably flawed
> transcription) "The original vision was: we'd ask about concrete things.
> And we'd ask about abstract things. And we were expecting to see more
> agreement for things like cups and bowls and maybe more disagreement for
> abstract concepts like love and war. Instead what we found was a surprising
> amount of variance for both abstract and concrete concepts, though people
> do agree more for some concepts than others. ... even in the same context,
> people's concepts can vary quite a bit."
>
> And in the paper they say something like "Thus, while our certainty might
> be a useful guide with regard to perceptual decisions, such as trying to
> locate a friend yelling for help in the middle of the woods, it may be
> misleading in higher-level domains, such as deciding whether to see a
> chiropractor versus a medical doctor."
>
> So, in the talk, the contrast is between concrete and abstract, whereas in
> the paper, the contrast is between perceptual versus higher-level.
>
> I worry that your contrast (physical vs. metaphysical) might well be
> orthogonal to both of those other contrasts. Even if by "physical", you
> intend something like "perceptual", your contrast with metaphysical evokes
> the abstract (e.g. Platonic forms or whatever). Since I don't really
> understand what your contrast means, my question is more about her 2:
>
>   1) concrete vs. abstract, and
>   2) perceptual vs. higher-level.
>
> In the talk, she says there's similar concept-mismatching variation across
> (1). In the paper, they say accuracy of certainty is distinct within (2)
> (more accurate with perceptual concepts). This is either something
> paradoxical and I'm missing the resolution. *Or* there's a counter
> intuitive result lurking. According to (1), my certainty about your concept
> of "cup" should be just as inaccurate as my certainty about your concept of
> "centroid". But according to (2), the former should be more accurate than
> the latter. What am I missing?
>
> On 12/30/19 1:53 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> > The sub-fact I liked, which might be in the Daxxy paper, is that people
> are very good at evaluating their certainty with respect to facts about the
> physical environment, but that same feeling of certainty is all over the
> place respecting the metaphysical environment.  I guess we've known that
> for a while.
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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