[FRIAM] Newborn Heart Rate

Mon Oct 4 12:55:09 EDT 2021

I'm not making an anti-reductionist argument ... or, at least, not the typical one. That's why I wanted to use "linguistic salience bias". It's a *bias*, that's all. But it's a bias that overwhelms some people (e.g. Nick) to harp on and on about some tiny little concept (like monism) that has zero impact on anything anyone ever does. We don't have to pick on Nick. But it's fun and he doesn't seem to mind. We could pick on the logicbros <https://overland.org.au/2019/07/how-to-deal-with-the-logicbros-ben-burgis-give-them-an-argument/>. Or the lefty "journalists" who like to point out contradictions in anti-masker rhetoric <https://youtu.be/I6H7urz-HgA>. Or whatever. The people we could pick on for this salience bias are never ending.

A more productive route is to focus not on contradiction but on completeness. And I'm using "focus on" ... I'm not saying *ignore* consistency. Simply spend more time trying to cover the ground that needs covering.

On 10/4/21 9:34 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> In what way is it inadequate to fission features into sub-features?  The wall of a cell is one feature of a cell.   Explain why there are walls, variations in the types of walls, how they arise.   Proliferate features but with a consistent model until exceptions are found to that model.  Rinse and repeat.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> Sent: Monday, October 4, 2021 9:14 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Newborn Heart Rate
> 
> Well, yeah, I agree. But even that dichotomy isn't clean. Humans are computers, at least a large share of what those bodies do each moment is computation. And, I'd argue that computers are human, at least a large share of the programmed-in sensibilities we see in our applications orbit humanity/humanness. When dogs finally get around to designing computers, that may not be the case. But so far, it is. Or, i.e., we can infer quite a bit about the tool maker from the tool.
> 
> It's that tendency to assume clean dichotomies, predicates, partitions, XOR, that's an artifact of consistency thinking. [ζ] Completeness thinking facilitates constructs like analog computing, even if only slightly. Consistency thinking tends to devolve into sophistry (both the good type like paradox and the bad type).
> 
> I suppose this is why things like quantum woo are so attractive. Or even why it's so easy for middle aged fat men to preach all day about how best to play american football. It's all about where the tight focus butts up against the loose focus. For some reason, this evokes foam and high dimensional, irregular tessellation for me.
> 
> [ζ] Which argues that attempts to isolate, reduce, essentialize what it is humans do that computers don't or vice versa is equivalently fraught ... like that discussion we had recently about whether (or how to make) computers feel. If nothing else, that isolation/essentialism/reductionism of "the hard problem" is, itself, the problem. Our myopia (aka focusable attention) is the problem. We spend lots of time tightening the focus down to things like coherent light, and too little time defocusing out to the universe as a whole.
> 
> On 10/4/21 8:50 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> I don’t see it that way.  Consistency is work for computers and creativity is work for humans.  Want the best of both..
>>
>>> On Oct 4, 2021, at 8:11 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> So, here again, we seem to be dancing around the hegemony [ξ] of consistency. EricS brings in "coherence", which I like better. But I think it's the same concept. Monism, "not being self-contradictory", objective Bayesian priors, coherence, the ontological status of actual infinities, integrated personality, value alignment, partition/predicate crispness, XOR choices, etc. all target the same fundamental bogey: 
>>>
>>>   inconsistency
>>>
>>> And that's fine. But it seems, to my biased eye, that we usually leave "completeness" to take care of itself ... as part of the negative space in the picture. The best definition I've seen of completeness is from a presentation by Greg Restall (paraphrasing): "If X models A completely, then we can derive A from X." I like this because it smells like reachability, "can we get there from here". When we harp too much on not being inconsistent, we end up in some sort of word game ... like some wak logicbro trying to pwn the libs. But when we talk about completeness, we talk about what is *sayable* in our language ... It's less about what we can't say and more about what we can say.
>>>
>>> That makes consistency the spastic little sibling of completeness. Yes, mom told me I have to take it along with me on the bike ride. But everyone hates it because it never shuts up and always says stupid stuff.
>>>
>>> [ξ] I wanted to use a new phrase, "linguistic salience bias", in place of "hegemony". But my epistemic status for the use of that phrase is 50%. Hegemony has a nice political tone, too. I kinda like dominance or tyranny. Maybe I should have gone with "gravity well" to indicate that consistency is a kind of least common denominator ... the type of thing people like grammar nazis and logicbros focus on. But I'd rather highlight the more accurate state of affairs, which is that those who study expressibility are underclass citizens compared to those who study correctness. Sure, when the expressors finally "make it" (such that nobody can deny their impact --- think Tom Waits, not Elon Musk), we all gather round and use them as an excuse to party. But we never go back and knead the tortuous pipeline of consistency they *survived* to get there.
>>>
>>>> On 10/3/21 9:41 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>> A compiler for a programming language with an advanced type system can essentially reject loose talk, but also give powerful tools for
>>>> automated reasoning about consistency.   Getting past this merciless editor gives one confidence, or even a certification, that one is not being self-contradictory.
>>>
>>>> On 10/3/21 2:43 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>>> ... and when they got comfortable that they had a constructive 
>>>> language whose propositions would carry some weight and not break into inconsistencies, they stopped protesting against taking limits.  So one could dig back into all that laborious history, which ... Then we can go round and round about the axiom of choice and so forth, versus Voevodsky and univalent foundations, or Brouwer and intuitionism.  There were a few turns of that wheel of samsara here a few months ago, but I think people ran out of things to comment on and drifted away.
>>>>
>>>> ... and still be coherent.  
>>>>
>>>> ... there is no “objective Bayesianism”.  ... then chooses however one will.  The point is not to ask God to save you from making a choice.  The point is to acknowledge and embrace that you will make a choice, and then accept that all the consequences of it are yours as well.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
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