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

[Marcus Daniels]

Piedmont, for example, has a higher per capita income than Beverly Hills.
On the other hand if one wants to drag a newspaper dispenser into the street and use it as a shield from rubber bullets, that’s an option too.   Oakland has got it all!

I mentioned this hackery.   Fun.

https://www.berkeleyside.com/2019/09/09/whos-been-hacking-digital-traffic-signs-in-berkeley

I saw someone on MSNBC tonight dreading the “global anarchists”.   Seriously?

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Date: Friday, May 29, 2020 at 10:03 PM
To: "friam at redfish.com" <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

I think I just saw Marcus blocking 880 in Oakland!

Nick, for the record, and this will not change from my end:

Your right to be interested in whatever you are interested in is sacrosanct, here or in any other forum.  I don’t think there are thread boundaries on that, though there are all the normal courtesies which I see more clearly for a while after I transgress one.

Eric



On May 30, 2020, at 1:03 PM, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:

All –

I feel norm formation going on here, and it is making me a bit nervous.  I am not sure what follows from that, but there it is.  I thing that we at FriAM have long worked the boundary between work and play.  I think that’s where the best work is done.

But this is my thread, right?  Can a man bust his own thread?  I  d o n t  t h I n k  s o.  I want to talk about metaphor.  And it’s relation to models.  And it’ relation to the concept of intentionality.  The question is, To what extent do our norms allow me to bring those concerns to other threads.  And the answer I am hearing from many of you is, “Less than I have been”.

Well, I will do my best.  But, for instance, I think the “work” we did on “strawman” was tremendously important.  In my introductory graduate lectures at Berkeley, where, one by one, the the grey-backed gorillas  of the department laid down the law.  Somebody, I think David Krech, announced that if “I say that the number of rat turds left by a rat in an open field maze is “anxiety”, then that is what anxiety IS for the purposes of my research, and there’s no more discussion to be had.”  And even in the tenuous position of a first year graduate student I knew that was wrong.  Meanings have momentum.   Words have meaning that is independent of their users. I have fought for 50 years to rescue ‘teleonomy’ (=natural design) from the dualistic thieves that abducted it.  And SteveG and I could be thought of as battling for nigh a decade and half about which specification of the metaphor of natural selection is best for the purposes of understanding natural design.  (I thought we made a lot of progress on that issue today.)   Much of what we do in scientific discourse is fight over metaphors and we need to develop methods for fighting fairly, skillfully, and expeditiously.

I don’t think I have EVER introduced the idea of metaphor in a conversation where I didn’t think a clarification or specification of the metaphors implicit in our conversation might move the discussion forward.  I may be playing with words but I am not just playing with words.  God knows, I may have been WRONG in many cases, but I absolutely defend the idea that attention to the metaphors at play in a conversation is often essential to any development of understanding or convergence of opinion.

Is it always?  No.  Of course not.  And I will try to be more careful about that.

Thanks, as always, for all your thoughts.   My life would not be half of what it is without them.   Really.  It’s perhaps pathetic for me to admit that, but it’s true.

Nick



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


From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2020 9:11 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

Hi Jon,

No, actually not any issue with any of what you had posted, as also just affirmation toward various historical posts by Glen.

Yes, sorry about a thread-rudeness.  I had sort of dropped a chunk of something that had been accumulating for a week in the middle of your thread which was in the coarse of solving other problems, where it didn’t belong.  Partly this was because yours had been the latest snapshot, partly it was because the overall frame you and Glen and Steve are building is one that I would like to think of my own additions as finding a place in, and partly I was probably using the measured tone of this sub-thread as cover, since my own was rather crabby and aggressive.  Strange that it seemed formally impolite to me, to use your thread as a point of departure and not direct the salutation to you, while I blew past the fact that it was substantively rude to use the thread, rather than to participate in it.

Very good.  Thanks for calling me on this,


Eric





On May 30, 2020, at 9:43 AM, Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com<mailto:jonzingale at gmail.com>> wrote:

Eric,

I am not sure that I disagree with you anywhere, but I am
unsure whether you are taking issue with me? The proliferation
of threads are sometimes hard for me to follow, inevitably I mis-
determine who is talking to whom. Are there places in my writing
that you would suggest I revisit and reconsider? Pointing things
out to another can be an expensive and thankless task, so thank
you in advance.

Jon
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