[FRIAM] A longer response to Dave's question

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Glen, I really want to punt this to Eric, but I have one question for you.

What, a priori, constitutes an "edge".  How do we know where "edges" are?
To take an absurd example, imagine that we had a way of flying an airplane
above 1,000 mph and below 600 mph without ever passing through 740 mph.  So,
somebody says, "We've never tried 740; let's try that!"  Would that be an
edge?  So, "edginess" is defined only by paucity of data?  Or is there
something else to it?  

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2020 4:56 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A longer response to Dave's question

You used the word 'credence'. So maybe what I'm gonna say is irrelevant. But
edge cases *do* present high value, low N, experimental opportunites. One
set that comes to mind are the twins, where one went to space and the other
didn't. The same could be said of rare *people* like the autistic, or those
with other conditions that aren't squarely within 1 sigma of the mean.

To suggest, which you didn't quite do, 
[NST===>] But I did, so your comment is important to me, anyway. 
that the rare is no *more* insightful than the common, would be a conflation
of different *types* of insight.
[NST===>] I am interested in the notion of types of insight and why the
scare-asterisks, or are they emphasis-asterisks. Can you say more?  

In fact, I'd argue that a complete study of the edge cases is MORE important
than yet another study of the normal cases. Taking massive doses of LSD is
no different from flying your new plane at 6 G's. What you learn will
probably be more significant than hanging with the old men at the Denny's or
flying your 737 on typical flight plans (if you don't die, of course).

On February 22, 2020 1:41:55 PM PST, Eric Charles
<eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> wrote:
>   5. There is no *a priori *reason to discount the insights one
>   experiences under "altered states of consciousness", but also no *a
>   priori* reason to give them special credence.
>   6. The degree to which a someone has a sense of certainty about 
>something is not generally a reliable measure of how likely that thing 
>is to hold up in the long run, unless many, many, many other 
>assumptions are
>   met.
>   7. There is likely good reason to think that altered states of
>   consciousness are less reliable in general than "regular" states.
>   8. There are many examples that suggest certain 
>insights-that-turn-out-to-hold-up-pretty-well, which were first 
>experienced when under an altered state, were unlikely to have been 
>experienced without
>   that altered state.
--
glen

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