[FRIAM] quotes and questions

[Marcus Daniels]

Another thing that rubs me the wrong way about some folks with a "conviction for the ineffable" is the suggestion that those with a lack of conviction don't experience the world in just a rich of way.   It is just a sort of character assassination to suggest that those that are disciplined enough not to get mired in woo-woo are soulless individuals living on the autism spectrum.    Some think it is useful to make sharp contrasts (e.g. believe in the thing a while) and then shoot them down as evidence arrives.   Others like to behave that way socially and accuse people of things until they vindicate themselves.   My preference is for continuous vectors spaces like colors, recognizing that optimizations can be non-convex.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2022 11:28 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] quotes and questions

Glen -
>
> [⛧] "Pretending" isn't the best word, here. I mean something more like 
> "suspending disbelief" or "steelmanning". But I'm using "pretend"
> because it evokes the *play* we do, especially as children. When 
> Renee's granddaughter pretends her Barbie dolls are real people, she's 
> not "faking it", "posturing", "suspending disbelief", or anything of 
> the sort. She's actually inside the domain, living inside the pretension.

A tangent here from your tangent...   slipsliding around in thesaurus/semantic space I like "acting as if" in this place.   It implies both a certain level of commitment while preserving an understanding that the pretension is both real/not-real perhaps... as with living in Barbie and Ken Land.  I always wanted Malibu Barbie's dune buggy but didn't want to have to have Ken's hair and genitals to enjoy it.  Mary and I both surprised one another by discovering that we (at only 9 months apart in age) had a special "thing" for troll-dolls and rabbit's feet as children.  She came with several in her relatively sparse belongings (one pickup-load only from Wisconsin)  and I had one placed strategically under my outdoor stairs.  Recently I gifted a recently-homed homeless man some useful things and he responded by handing me a blue-haired troll doll (who now stands guard outside with the pink haired one under the stairs).   I don't know that Troll dolls come with the same elaborate cosmogeny/cosmology that Barbie and Ken (and didn't Barbie have a friend or little sister in the mix?) do, but somehow the spare version each of us (Mary and I had) which seemed to be spontaneously generated from the artifacts themselves overlap a LOT. They don't say much but every appearance and gesture they make seems to be laden with meaning.   Someday, AI/AL will understand Troll Doll Cosmology deeply and then i will be more convinced that it has arrived.

What we shared about rabbits feet was a naive fondness that turned abruptly into a nightmare when we realized actually that a *rabbits
foot* was in fact the severed/dessicated *foot* of a *rabbit*!   I am focused mildy on things deemed "lucky" as we are in LImerick today and yesterday still jet-lagged but in a hotel across the street from a Leprechaun-themed casino (we thought we left the Casino neighborhoods when we left NM nearly a week ago).   Reading about the *abject* poverty of the Irish and countryside (Mary is focused on McCort's "Angela's Ashes" right now) and the contrast with the (mild) poverty on the plains of Nebraska she grew up in 3 generations away from her Chaulk ancestors who left here for the Americas.  Here they were starving, freezing, dying of scurvy and worse.  In NE it was merely a question of keeping the phone and electric turned on month to month.

Marcus -

I share the skepticism evoked when a claim is not obviously subject to scrutiny.  That doesn't stop me from believing such things but does blunt any aspirations I have of convincing others.

DaveW -

I share your intuition that there is something about "the ineffable" 
that many (especially reductionists) want to sweep under the carpet. It feels as if Godel woud have had something more precise to say about this though somehow someone smarter than I might be able to derive what I'm mumbling about here from halting/incompleteness/numbering.   FWIW GNumbering seems to be the ultimate/parsimonious description of my recent ramblings about dimension reduction.

>
> On 5/17/22 09:18, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> A problem I have with accepting Dave’s view is that it allows the 
>> person making a claim to not be subject to scrutiny,  Because, well, 
>> they feel that way so it must be true.   That there is some point at 
>> which precision impedes accuracy.  It is a recipe for the 
>> proliferation of cult leaders.
>>
>>> On May 17, 2022, at 7:55 AM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Right. This is why the wet monkey theory (along with many other 
>>> false but useful for manipulation heuristics) fails to capture 
>>> anything important about "groupthink". We can re-orient Dave's 
>>> no-largest-model objection toward any just-so manipulative rhetoric.
>>> Of course the choice of language biases the description written in 
>>> it! Sheesh. And, yes, it's important to make that clear to any 
>>> novice entering whatever domain. Pluralism (or parallax) of 
>>> languages is one mitigation tactic. But another common one is basic 
>>> error-checking, the social process of saying out loud your 
>>> construction and listening as others criticize, deconstruct, or 
>>> outright ridicule it. Spend too much time stewing in your own juices 
>>> and your constructs become private. Spend too much time socializing 
>>> with those who agree and your constructs become groupthink. Nick 
>>> likes to say he's grateful for anyone who reads his writing. But the 
>>> actual good faith action is to criticize it. Reading it is like 
>>> nodding politely with the occasional "ah", "yes", "uh-huh" while 
>>> someone tells you their boring story. Engagement is the real 
>>> objective. Reading is a mere means to that end. And disagreement is 
>>> demonstrative engagement.
>>>
>>> But [dis]agreement isn't well-covered by "contrarian", 
>>> "oppositional", or "adversarial". Dualism is just one form of 
>>> foundationalism. Monism < dualism < trialism < quadrialism < ?. 4 
>>> forces? 17 objects? 3 types of object? Who cares? Those particular 
>>> numbers are schematic in the larger discipline of disagreement. The 
>>> foundation is important. But getting hung up on the particular 
>>> number/value misses the forest for the trees. Arguing over the 
>>> number of things in the foundation is akin to arguing about the 
>>> meanings of words. In the spirit of "not even wrong", it's not even 
>>> sophistry.
>>>
>>>> On 5/16/22 14:41, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>> Glen writes:
>>>> < Of course, we *could* be working our way into a fictitious 
>>>> corner. (E.g. the just-so story of the wet monkey thing 
>>>> <https://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2009/08/wet-monkey
>>>> -theory/>, where all the kids who believe in the ability of 
>>>> formalism(s) to capture the world are simply thinking inside the 
>>>> box.) But what's the likelihood of that? I claim vanishingly small. 
>>>> > Using the Standard Model, applied physicists and engineers build 
>>>> careers and do useful work.   Are they thinking in a box?
>>>> Perhaps.  But there are also physicists who are obsessed with 
>>>> poking holes in it and generalizing it.
>
>