[FRIAM] Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

Wed May 27 15:03:39 EDT 2020

All--

Glen wrote: 

I have been dope-slapped for not listening patiently to the arguments of others, but there are moments when I cannot, cannot, FOLLOW what you guys are saying, and, at that point, I behave like my dog used to behave when on a walk together I became too interested in a bird or an anthill: he would go off down the trail a hundred feet, lie in the sun, and wait for me.   Meanwhile,  as I lie here in the sun, I reflect on Steve’s: 

I first encountered the idea of a "strawman" NOT as something that an adversary would create as an easily taken apart effigy for your real argument, but rather as an armature for consensual building of an idea.   More like a stick figure with the general proportions of a final sculpture that 2 or more would build together.

I think this is a marvelous demonstration of the intentionality of metaphors.  I think it’s quite possible that not only are we working with different definitions of strawman, we are working with different understandings of metaphor.   “Strawman” is a metaphor, right?  To me, a metaphor is a powerful approximation whose power arises from the fact that it momentarily substitutes for the confusing facts before us a clear and integrated “image” of how things are.  If we “get” a metaphor, we INSTANTLY and paradoxically grasp two things about it: first, that it is pentratingly RIGHT; and second, that it is obviously WRONG in some regards.  A metaphor becomes a scientific model when (1) we carefully lay out what the “image” is, 2, explicitly lay out which of its entailments we take to be right and which we take to be wrong.  There is a third step, which is much harder to describe in which we some how agree that the first two steps have been taken fairly.  Some entailments cannot be denied, others are properly expendable.  For instance, one could argue that Darwin’s Pigeon-coop selection model can be deployed without the entailment of a “breeder”, picking and choosing individual pidgeons for breeding, but cannot be deployed without the entailment of a “flock in a coop”, i.e., a bunch of birds so isolated from other bunches of birds that the effects of the breeders choices can accumulate.   

The example of “strawman” is a wonderful example of a failure of a metaphor at the first state.  We did not all get the same “image” when it was first deployed.  That failure is instructive for me because it reminds me that the familiar assertion that M is a metaphor for X is incomplete.  Explictly, or implicitly, there must always be a third argument.  For 0bservor O, M is a metaphor for X.  In other words, we must be humble in our use of metaphors.  

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 u?l? ?
Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2020 12:14 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] privacy games

On 5/27/20 10:36 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

> I think I'm getting more of the gist.   It seems to me that you could be talking about iterative or superposive compositing of multiple encoders?   Iterative, however, would not allow for decoding by *either* but instead would require decoding by *both* (and in the correct order).   Superposive would be more like encoding the signal with two distinct encoders and then combining (shuffling, concatenating, ???) the two resulting signals such that applying either of the decoders would yield a combination of signal and (apparent) noise.   If the combining method were simple/obvious like concatenation then the decoded signal would be half signal and half-gibberish, otherwise, the combining method itself might stand in for it's own *encoding*, complicating things further.

Yes, in 2nd order, I'm suggesting parallel/orthogonal/side-by-side composition, not serial/recursive composition. But given the parallelism theorem (anything parallel can be simulated serially), I don't see any reason why the *sequential* [†] application couldn't produce the same result as simultaneous/side-by-side application. The data would have to be [quasi]independent for that to happen, though.

> With this example in hand, I'm trying to sort out my own question/observation above.   In the case of Zen++ and Pirsig,  I would say that his encoding method was in fact functionally very composable, probably hierarchical. [...]   As I reread what I write here, I wonder if this is a particularly bad example.   To the extent that this fits what you are talking about, it is an extremely rich/layered/convoluted example.

I don't think it's a bad example, at all. It's definitely a critical example which might be used to tear my whole structure down. So, that means it's a good one. But given Jon's digestion of EricS's contributions as *eidetic* (I suppose in the sense of fully-detailed, concrete, and vivid), it strikes me that Pirsig's presentation is inherently particular. So, I think it's more an example of 1st order privacy. I think 1st order is well-exemplified by R. Rosen's defn of complexity (no largest model), von Neumann's claim about Gödel's incompleteness (|descriptions| > |described|), etc. Pirsig is providing a vivid description of a *thing* and any (presumably finite) thing can yield infinite descriptions.

> Interesting that Pirsig harps on his own definition of "quality" (not unlike Alexander's "Quality Without a Name") throughout.   I'm not sure if you mean it in the same sense though?

I'm not sure. It's been a long time since I looked at Pirsig. I was deflated by Lila.

> This brings up a struggle I have that might be worth sharing in this 

> venue on the off-chance that others here struggle with the same.  When you first started using the term "straw man" or "strawman" I took it to mean something modestly different than you intended.   I first encountered the idea of a "strawman" NOT as something that an adversary would create as an easily taken apart effigy for your real argument, but rather as an armature for consensual building of an idea.   More like a stick figure with the general proportions of a final sculpture that 2 or more would build together.

> 

> I see your throwdown here of 1,2,3rd order privacies as *that kind of* strawman and the process for the rest of us being to offer adjustments/additions/modifications to it to try to shape it into a more elaborated "figure" that we might all come to share not only an understanding of, but a stake in.

I call those "skeletons" or "scaffolds", not "straw men". but you're right that I surreptitiously switched rhetorical modes. My 1st step was to steelman the EricC/Nick principle by yapping about the information content of a surface as a representation of what goes on beyond the surface. My 2nd step was to provide scaffolding for how we can demonstrate privacy *without* violating the steelmanned principle.

The tack is to (somewhat constructively) show EricC/Nick that they should not argue against (weak forms of) privacy.

> Reading reviews of your book reference (Magus), I am reminded of Jim 

> Dodge's book "Stone Junction" which I also read twice (1990 and 2015) with less distance of understanding but  definitely *additional* if not significantly *different* decoders.

> 

> [...]

> "A post-psychedelic coming-of-age fable [...]

Now *that* catches my eyeballs.

[†] I've never been entirely clear on sequential vs. serial. But I tend to think of serial as implying some kind of closure property ... things that went before are somehow similar to the things that come after. Sequential seems to me to be more about iterative application with fewer restrictions on what's produced. So, e.g. if the process is *open* (or the domain is the entire universe) the result of f() need not be similar the result of g(f()). So, serial would be more like recursion and sequential would be more like iteration (in general). But I'm happy to be corrected.

--

☣ uǝlƃ

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