[FRIAM] Newborn Heart Rate

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

I thought the conversation about probability, category errors, and crossing boundaries between levels of organization was interesting and I was sorry I had to leave it.   I want to say that to speak a die as having a probability of 1/6 of coming up 6 on a single throw is a category error because it is not a property that can be displayed on a single throw.  It’s the same worry that I have often deployed about the calculus.  If we take the idea of a category error seriously, then acceleration is just not the sort of thing an object can have at an instant.    But just as clearly as this argument is too strong – lots of very nice longstanding bridges have been built with the calculus – so the argument is also too strong with respect to probability – lots of nice atom bombs have been built with probability theory … or something.  

 

I care about this because my standard account of such concepts as “wanting” is that they are properties of the population of responses to an object, not properties of any one of those responses.   We encounter the same problem with anecdotes and newspaper photographs designed to illustrate some general fact.  If the generally fact is that “very few of the immigrants at the southern border are well treated” a single photograph looking peaked or hungry is irrelevant.  Equally irrelevant would be a picture of a bright eyed kid sitting in the lap of a border patrol officer eating a hot-fudge sundae.  

 

This makes me wonder about one of the foundations of psychological research, the statistics of inference, which I think Peirce invented.   Let a coin be thrown 10 times and each time come up heads.  What I think Peirce would  have me conclude is that that coin is unlikely to be drawn from a population of fair throws of a fair coin.   But, of coure, what we are likely to conclude is that “this coin is not fair.”    But that could be as misguided, couldn’t it, as concluding that the kid in the lap of the border patrol officers is being mistreated.   

 

I apologize, once more, for sharing my comfusions with you. 

 

n

 

Nick Thompson

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Friday, October 1, 2021 6:46 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] Newborn Heart Rate

 


https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/61/1/119

 

This is for those who attended this morning's vFriam meeting.  I was Schachter's colleague, among a couple of others.

 

 

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

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