[FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

[Prof David West]

glen,

Much of what passes for "scientific visualization" is what you assert, pretty pictures and little else. I have all four of Tufte's books on visualization and find maybe half dozen examples that I think are actually profound and meaningful. The Menard map of Napoleon's invasion and retreat from Moscow, is one.

But I am thinking visualization more in terms of how imagery can convey information, often more efficiently, than prose. All those "squiggles" that you see in math texts, or Kekule's "sticks and letters" visualization of chemical bonds, are what I would hope for from visualization.

If there is a useful connection between a "visualized experience," a dream of Ouroboros, and a practical result, benzene ring model, would there be any kind of value in a technique that could "parse" the visualization for useful/suggestive content?

davew


On Fri, Mar 6, 2020, at 3:45 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> I hate visualization in the same way I hate poetry. In my work, I'm 
> constantly fighting the "kids" who want visualizations for everything. 
> I tell them once they understand the data, then they're free to 
> visualize it any way they see fit ... like your mom telling you to eat 
> your vegetables before dessert. 
> 
> A visualization takes lots of stuff (often high-dimensional data, but 
> sometimes just lots of garbage that bears no resemblance to any kind of 
> well-formed *space*) and funges it into an artistic thing that appeals 
> to our (human) senses. It's like poetry in that some yahoo, maybe in 
> the middle of eating a sandwich in New York City, goes into a fugue 
> state, has some "high-dimensional" experience, then works like hell to 
> put it into words. Then some other yahoo on the other side of the 
> world, while doing gods know what, reads those words and has a 
> different experience. How similar are the 2 experiences? Who knows?
> 
> Now, if you take identical twins, who grew up as siblings, in the same 
> small town, went to the same schools, married similar people, etc. Then 
> one of them writes a poem and the other one reads it, my guess is their 
> experiences will be similar.
> 
> If a biologist writes a poem and another biologist reads the poem, my 
> guess is they will have similar experiences. Any other configuration 
> and all bets are off.
> 
> On 3/6/20 12:59 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> > Now, if I were a cellular biologist could I make use of this vision?
> > 
> > Since I am not a cellular biologist and have no understanding of inter-cellular structures/dynamics/chemistry, nor any DNA knowledge, where did the imagery come from and why did it hang together so well?
> > 
> > Was this experience just an amusing bit of entertainment" Or, is there an insight of some sort lurking there?
> 
> -- 
> ☣ uǝlƃ
> 
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>