[FRIAM] Unmediated perception - sheldrake

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But, of course, the benefit of finding hard-to-detect corners to cut, accompanied (or not) by complicated, convincing rhetoric, is *scaffolding* ... aka the convexity of the search space. It may not be so easy for, say, pre-language humanity to understand (eg) transistors unless they've gone through all the twisty little rhetorical paths we've taken. And, if they can't understand it, then they can't build devices that exploit it.

So, some parts of the search space *are* convex, i.e. complicated rhetoric turns out to be unnecessary. But other parts *might* be convoluted and require all the cumulative mental gymnastics facilitated by rhetoric. The trick is that many/most of us can't *tell* whether we're on a necessary or unnecessary path, in a convex or convoluted region of the space. Even if I suspect what I'm doing is useless busy-ness, it's still difficult to be sure enough to abandon that path.

On 9/17/19 2:36 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Sure, it's an instinct, a sub-conscious driver just below the surface.  It is not something I would really try to defend.
> It would go something like, "Look, here you are [random academic sucking up resources on the backs of struggling families] writing all these papers that almost no one reads.   Why don't you make something that _works_ and go the last 70% of the way?   Not only do your oration and presentation skills fill me with suspicion and impatience, the very fact you are doing research without development just clogs up digital repositories with mostly useless crap.  Get a real job and get off my lawn!"   :-) 

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