[FRIAM] What's so bad about Scientism?

[Nick Thompson]

Glen, GLEN,

I was making FUN of the trolley game.  I don't want to play it any more than you do!

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2018 11:50 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What's so bad about Scientism?

This brings to mind the dimensionality of the space of possible actions.  I don't play the Trolley Game Nick wants to play because the space is absurdly, artificially small ... presented by sophists who care little about the real world.  The real world (usually) presents a very high dimensional space of possible actions.  And those actions are (usually) not atomic, but composite.  So, when presented with a situation where computing the likely first-order consequences is too expensive, rather than wait it out, one can chop up the potential (composite) actions into their first-executed action-lets, then sense and go again.  Or, perhaps if you've done the pre-processing, you can take the action-lets that have been identified as "critical path".  If some action will be required *anyway*, common to a wide array of potential actions and consequences, then do that.

This sort of agility is more common than pure rationalists/analyists/idealists would have us believe.

On 07/11/2018 08:39 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> There’s another type of paralysis that does not involve doubt but computation cost in resolving or characterizing doubt:
> 
> A soon as it takes more time to compute the likely first-order consequences of various potential actions (even using coarse-graining or surrogate models or whatever simplification) than just waiting for time to pass, action is arbitrary.   One could have precise information about all the aspects of a decision but putting it together into a recommendation for action could be too hard.  One could probably even prove it is impossible in some cases.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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