[FRIAM] observability and randomness

[David Eric Smith]

Yes Glen,

Wonderful way to put the question.

We did recommend people (at least some of the 5 came from our list; perhaps not all of them, and there are 3 whom I couldn’t immediately identify by style).  I warned the publisher that they were people we knew, but told him I believed we were acting in good faith in choosing them because we knew them to care about the subject and expected that they would be both critical and constructive as they saw serving it.  The place we were lucky is in having a community in which such people are even possible.

One of the publisher’s comments (I said “editor” before, but should have said “publisher”) was that he had never witnessed a reviewer willing to put so much effort into making someone else’s product better.  This was a guy for whom our book was one of his last projects before retiring from a decades-long highly productive career.  And that was entirely in character for this reviewer, whom I have seen to do that repeatedly.  I offered him to be credited when we used his clearer and more economical framing to rewrite the preface (to your point about reducing verbiage), and he said there wasn’t a need to do that; if we included him in the ordinary list of acknowledged people that would be plenty.  

There is a profound point in your exchange with Frank, though, on how much of Bacon we want to keep, and where we want to deviate from him.  My gripe about papers — which I try to put in immoderate terms for the same reasons you do — is that they are a product of the MTV generation.  Anything that doesn’t fit into the 1/3-second attention frame is excluded.  My great distress is that, whereas I once read a fair amount of book-length material, now I nearly never read books, and can barely keep up with papers, not by choice but just by being perpetually cornered.  I understand that there are others, currently including probably most very-successful researchers, for whom papers are the vastly preferred medium, even if they have the choice.

The place it touches Bacon is that, if facts really were self-interpreting, then it would never be correct to say that the whole is more or less than the sum of the parts.  There would only be parts, and whoever can eat the most parts wins.  That way of putting it of course munges many things that are not equivalent, such as the role of interpretation, versus just searching, selecting and sorting: the latter kinds of things Leslie Valiant calls out in his distinction between merely “learning” and “teaching” (both meant to be computer science concepts).  The idea of intellectual independence in science, which I hear you defending in many of your diatribes, is that we mostly want to stay close to Bacon, because we can re-triangulate on the lower-level observations and both save time and claw free of errors imposed by selectors, sorters, or interpreters, in various ways.

Whereas for me, there are very few new facts I have to offer, and much of what I do offer that people sometimes consider beneficial is carried in the selection, assembly, and ordering of facts in what I think make a more likely preponderence-of-evidence story.  It is miserable, in that kind of writing, to decide whether one has ever contributed _anything at all_.  The people who reject my papers are comfortable saying “no” and not wasting a lot of time to decide it.  And yet for me as a consumer of other people’s work, it is almost the entire difference between feeling lost and feeling oriented.  The authors who can present an extended construction and make good choices of selection and ordering along its length save me an enormous time wandering aimlessly, to arrive at what would have been substantively the same choices as theirs.  Much of my effort goes into building the equivalent in the places where there don’t seem to be any such good writers working, and inevitably that is much of what I have available to offer for print.

As on so many other threads, I can’t escape coming back to the question what kind of truth-concept builds out of the various parts.

Best,

Eric



> On Jun 30, 2020, at 7:56 AM, ∄ uǝlƃ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Ha! "Present company excluded" obviously. 8^D I used to be careful to apply that caveat when I went around willy-nilly insulting whole swaths of people. Marcus is right; I am getting old and going down denying it all the way.
> 
> Do you think you were *lucky* to get such constructive feedback? Or did you, perhaps, recommend people to review it, knowing they would be knowledgeable and interested?
> 
> On 6/29/20 3:40 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>> Hey!
>> 
>>> On Jun 30, 2020, at 7:38 AM, ∄ uǝlƃ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Ha! Nah. Books are for people who can't handle peer review
>> 
>> We got peer reviewed, by five people.  One of the reviews was 35 pages long.  The editor said he had never received anything like it.  Parts of it were so useful we used them to rewrite the preface.
>> 
>> 
>>> ... or ... what's the aphorism? I would have written a shorter letter if I'd had the time? ... something like that. Books are for people who can't think clear enough to keep the verbiage down.
>>> 
> 
> -- 
> ☣ uǝlƃ
> 
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