[FRIAM] quotes and questions

Wed May 18 16:29:33 EDT 2022

Marcus -

I am sympathetic with your delineated point of view from both sides of 
the arguement.  I am painfully aware of the damage that "woo" peddlers 
can do and yet I also spent a career facilitating the intuition of hard 
scientists and engineers in what was often a thankless context.

My career is somewhat spotty and various but has often/mostly involved 
encoding measurement and/or simulation data into "perceptualizations" or 
more familiarly to most "visualizations", but also has involved a range 
of modeling/simulation tasks both in support of that work and as an 
extension of it.   Finding an *apt* metaphor to present data in for any 
given problem and audience is tricky business.   The pioneers in this 
domain might be the pre-historic pictographers, the cartographers, and 
the early chartists that Tufte follows so well in his great texts on the 
topic, all set the familiar paradigms.

When I first came to LANL (then LASL) in 1981 most of the physicists I 
worked with felt that they didn't even need 2D Charts to speak of... 
they insisted that they were looking (mostly) for specific numbers, 
specific thresholds, values of key variables and that was "enough"... a 
2D chart of one or more values with a threshold reference line seemed 
excessive to many, yet others in fact recognized that since they 
themselves were debugging their theory as well as method (experimental 
or algorithmic) often the detailed shape of these charts (usually fairly 
obvious physically intuitive variables against time) gave them hints 
that at least helped them deconflate theory from method errors.  Once we 
had dozens (or hundreds) of folks interested in (and now proponents for) 
2D charting with flexible interfaces so that they could 
quickly/transparently generate plots that they could look at and intuit 
from, we went on to push for various 3D and more abstract visualizations 
(see the work that grew up out of Tukey's work in presenting statistical 
results) with the same result.   There were several more such 
"revolutions" in this customer base, and I moved on through to *other* 
(in some cases more, others less) receptive audiences for this work.  At 
each cusp we suffered the accusation of being "woo peddlers" because we 
could virtually *never* articulate ahead of time the value they would 
receive from our efforts to advance their intuition-leveraging tools.   
At best, once we sold one customer, THEY would sell others and in time 
what was considered "woo" would be filled out into elaborate practice.   
I eventually became good at finding the customers who were actually 
already aware that they wanted *more* insight and were willing to risk 
some of their time to help us find it with/for them.   By the time I 
left HPC work our customers were on fire, asking us to build them a 
yet-more advance 3D immersive (CAVE) environment and put 3D stereoscopy 
on every desktop to view not only 3D models of their 
rad/hydro/engineering models but to offer encodings of derived 
quantities such as the div/curl of any/all of the fields and/or build 
interactive transfer functions for volume renders of their complex 
fields.   I/we applied yet more abstract treatments to other domains for 
significantly different customers whose problem domains were less 
directly physical or more to the point, geometric, and continued to 
fight that uphill battle.   Unfortunately in many cases, by  the time 
these folks came to appreciate what we had been trying to give them for 
years (decades) they often imagined that THEY had invented it.   The 
best way to convince someone deeply is to help them come to it on their 
own terms... that doesn't always work well if you want/need credit.

I had to look/listen away many times when skeptics tried to reduce what 
we were doing to "fancy parlor tricks" or "eye candy" or at best "good 
for sales, but not useful for insight".   In a sense they were right, if 
*they* didn't gather any insight, then it was not useful for them, 
though I would occasionally watch them use our tools for *sales* and 
during a presentation to their sponsor/customer would sometimes see a 
new anomaly in their viz/data when they were in the mode of (pretending 
to?) give over to the idiom it was being displayed in.

At some point, I realized I shouldn't try to *sell* much of anything... 
if a (potential) client didn't think they needed what I offered, I 
didn't argue with them.   Fortunately after a few decades I had 
accumulated enough "true believers" who trusted their own intuitions 
enough to help me help them follow their noses.  I still have a few of 
those clients though the tools for DIY "visualization" folks have made 
it both easier for folks to do this for themselves and yielded a lot 
more *crap* which just gives the whole business a dirtier reputation.

Following the woo/not-woo theme, when I escaped my institutionalization 
at LANL in 2008, I discovered that I would be competing with (and often 
working for) woo-peddlers, people who were ambitious 
money/reputation/power-seekers first and professionals in the field 
second (if at all) and too often "one trick ponies" who had found one 
clever sleight of hand they could do and were playing it over and over 
and over like a snake-oil salesman moving from town to town, refining 
their schtick.   I still have my own favorite recipes and even enjoy 
cooking up new ones but don't spend much if any time hawking... 
fortunately I have developed a simple enough lifestyle that I don't need 
to hawk much of my wares to feed the wolf that comes to my door from 
time to time.

We live in times of quite dire existential threats, I believe we need 
sweeping paradigm shifts to resolve them (if we can at all)... so I am 
looking to mystical/intuitive sources for inspiration on those shifts 
but don't expect to sell anyone else on them.  If I can see them as they 
emerge, maybe I can participate in the shifts, I don't expect to start 
or drive them, they will by definition have to be collective phenomena, 
complex adaptive systems, of (mostly) human beliefs/systems.

- Steve

On 5/18/22 1:48 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> 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.
>>
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