[FRIAM] anthropological observations

[David Eric Smith]

Very good Nick.

You see, unfortunately it appears that the reason I was put on Earth was to be the evangelist of distributional thinking.

In one of Walter Fontana’s early papers, which I probably saw in 1998, he opened with a quote “Ever focused on objects, we something something something…(some expression of loss)”.  This was in his Lambda-calculus papers about the concreteness of realized patterns that are not objects, and their fundamental role for biology.  For as much as I like it, you would think I had remembered either the text or the source.  Cannot find it now.

But, to your point:

I think where the discussion happens is not about knowledge, or even regularity, but rather how wide and how flexible a scope you are willing to cast for what counts as an “object of knowledge”.  Or even “objects in knowledge”.

Yes, the values taken at events can be very good things to have found out about.  They inhabit the past, and our sense of knowing them is heavily wrapped up in both the senses of “the past” and of “knowledge".  It is a very small set of cases that are so constrained that the future may as well be in the past.  Nonetheless, the longing for it seems to be an eternal wellspring for delusions.  The Popol Vu has something about, for the adepts, ’The future and the past are laid out before them [like symmetric spatial dimensions]’ or something to that effect.  Lakoff probably can cite no end of metaphors by which people have mapped between the two, conceiving of time as having the same symmetric availability as space.  I expect it is a human cognitive and cultural universal.

But what happens when the future really is different from the past?  Do we insist that every “real” object of knowledge about the future must have a model in only the most singular of things archived from the past?  I would say no.  There are lots of cases in which the outcome delivered by an event not yet performed is not available for knowing.  How you plan to sample, though, and features of the distribution from which you will sample, may be very good things to know.  Back in Ancient Greece, we could have argued interminably about whether a distribution is less privileged as an “object” of knowledge than the particular value yielded by a sample from the distribution.

But a lot has happened since Ancient Greece, and today we have many many reasons to see them as deserving peers, and even to be cautious that we may not be able to tell them apart.

Entropy in thermodynamics is a distributional concept, yet it does very very much of the work in the world that we used to ascribe to Newtonian objects.

In high-energy physics, post Gell-Mann/Wilson (so 1954 Gell-Mann and Lowe, Wilson 1974), we have learned that everything we used to think _were_ objects, turned out to be distributions.  In hindsight this was of crucial conceptual importance.  If objects had been primary, and distributions had been mere step-children when we could not pin things down, and that had been _all_ there was to our science, we would have suffered an infinite regress.  Until we had a Theory of Everything, or a bottoming out of the well of smallness, we could never know if the science was predictively closed.  But now with some understanding of phase transitions, we know that the world could as well be distributions all the way down forever (or it might not be; it might have a bottom), and the foundation of _any_ of the predictive science we currently use would not be any worse in one case than in another.  They are not currently “exactly” closed, but we can put bounds on how closed they must be.  Everything is Probably Approximately Correct (Leslie Valiant), and that was all we had ever had.  It was more valuable to learn that there are ceilings and floors in the scope of influence of variations within distributions, than whether there is any smallest level of objects, or even any need for a concept of “object” distinct from what we can do with distributions.  A short incantation that I use to ward off the vampires who mis-use the word “reductionism” is that “Only with a theory of emergence did reductionist science become well-founded."

Biology has been conceptually impaired by too literalist a view of objects, whether organisms for Darwin, genes for Williams and Dawkins, or whatever other “unit of selection” you want to use as a shibboleth.  People fret over whether “viruses are alive”, having already committed that “alive” must a predicate defined over objects, and they worry whether there “really are” any individuals, since material is always coming and going and there are more bacterial cells in my gut than human cells in the rest of me.  Habits of understanding that determinism can dwell in the distribution opens a treasure chest of methods but also styles of thought, with which all these “not-even-wrong” frets simply dissipate the same way we no longer agonize over Zeno paradoxes.

I have no gripe with object-oriented thinking, or event-outcome-oriented thinking; we can do much with those, and they account for a lot of our animal habit and our “folk physics”.  But to put it up as a gold standard is very limiting.  We know lots of things that cannot be done within that frame, but that can be done, and some things where we thought it was the right frame and we were wrong.  

There was a source I thought of putting on the list early in this thread, here:
https://philpapers.org/rec/ROTLOB <https://philpapers.org/rec/ROTLOB>
I have seen a copy of this, but I don’t know where to get a legally distributable copy and this is either paywalled or not even electronic.  Some of you may have it already.

It was when Dave gave the assertion that the rural people are actually the careful balanced thinkers, and Frank put up an article as “another perspective, or perhaps David will see it as confirming evidence”.

I know probably most of you have read Heidegger, and Husserl, and Fink, and lots of others.  I had not.  So I found Rota’s notes, structured by Heidegger but drawing in many of their good parts on Husserl, helpful to sort-of recognize what the phenomenologists are on about.

In one of the late lectures, Rota explains the phenomenologists strong emphasis that no mere events in our existence have any particular meaning.  There can be the sequence of lines in a proof, or a recipe for doing an experiment.  By themselves, they are just artifacts, inscribed in a library somewhere.  Even read through, or performed, they may just be motions in nature.  They become “a proof” or “evidence”, when they are experienced as evidence-for a truth or a bit of knowledge.  This concept of “perceiving-as” or “evidence-for”, the phenomenologists claim, is simply different in kind from any of the procedures in which it occurs.  If I understand them, they assert that the moment of experiencing something “as” in fact defines an experiential notion of the temporal present that is different entirely in kind from the notations of either the past or the future.  

It is a bit of a digression from this post, but I will remark, that this position makes the world look pretty hopeless to me, since anyone can experience anything “as” evidence for anything.  And there is a part of reality-building in those moments for them, that nobody else outside them has any grip on.

But in a more positive note, and on the point of this post, I feel like it is a Husserlian/Heideggerian shift in the occupancy of the temporal present, to find it as normal to experience distributionally-defined patterns as objects, as event-outcome-defined patterns.  They just do different things.

Anyway, sorry.  Big long TLDR to state the obvious.

Eric






> On Apr 18, 2020, at 12:36 PM, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Cranky Eric, 
>  
> When Peirce writes, countering determinism, that “everything is just about as random as it could be” he is referring to contingencies amongst events, I think.  At the risk of quoting myself: 
>  
> Considering all the events that are going on at any one moment -- the ticking of the clock, the whuffing of the wind in the eaves, the drip of the faucet, the ringing of the telephone, the call from the seven-year-old upstairs who cannot find his shoes, the clunking in the heating pipes as the heat comes on, the distant sound of the fire engine passing the end of the street, the entry of the cat through the pet door, the skitter of mouse-feet behind the wainscoting -- most will be likely unrelated to the fact that the egg timer just went off. Perhaps not all, however. Perhaps the cat anticipates cleaning up the egg dishes. Perhaps the same stove that is boiling the egg water has lit a fire in the chimney. But whatever relations we might discover amongst all these events, we can find an infinite number of other temporally contiguous events that are not related to them. Thus, as Peirce says, events are just about as random as anybody could care them to be. 
>  
> But – and here is the main point – to the extent that events are related, these relations would be useful. They would, for instance allow the cat to predict that there would be food in a few moments, the mouse to predict that the cat has entered the house, and you to predict, among other things, that your eggs are ready. For this reason, on Peirce’s account, organisms are designed to ferret out these few regularities and take action based on them.  This, and only this, is the reason that the world appears regular. 
> So, I stipulate the ubiquity of randomness.  
>  
> What I am less certain about is whether randomness should – note the use of modal language – should ever be offered as the reason for anything.  If we regard science as an extension of this animal propensity for ferreting out regularities, then to declare that anything occurred because it was random is a kind of copping out.  It is like ferrets giving up on the idea that borrows contain prairie dogs.  That’s just NOT what we ferrets DO!  It’s certainly not what we do if we ever expect to catch any prairie dogs. 
>  
> Oh, and:  The problem is not that I need a religion; the problem is I already HAVE one and I don’t know what it is.  
>  
> Oh, and #2.  “Enjoy these conversations” is, for me, vastly understate the case.  They are literally keeping me alive, particularly these days, when, it appears, for the first time in 50 years, I won’t have a garden in the Mosquito Infested Swamp.   
>  
> CrankyNick
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/>
>  
>  
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
> Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 6:08 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations
>  
> Cranky Nick, you really need to join a church.
>  
>> Now, what most people wanted to know from Nate Silver is whether Clinton was going to win the election.  Nate constantly says that making such predictions is, strictly speaking, not his job.  As long as what happens falls within the error of his prediction, he feels justified in having made it.   He will say things like, "actually we were right."  I would prefer him to say, "Actually we were wrong, but I would make the same prediction under the same circumstances the next time.”  In other words, the right procedure produced, on this occasion, a wrong result.  
>  
> The thing you say here that “most people want to know” of course, you know full-well, doesn’t exist.  So you need to join a church because they are the ones who will tell you they are giving it to you, when at least you, and maybe even they, know it doesn’t exist.
>  
> What Nate gave you is a sample estimator for a probability distribution (each of those words means something specific; they are not an evocative construction within common vernacular).  He didn’t even give you the “actual” probability distribution for the underlying process, because, as Pierce saith both rightly and interestingly, the “actual” probability distribution is something we don’t have access to.  What we have, and all we ever have, are sample estimators to probability distributions.  Nate’s estimator includes biases.  Some of these, like method biases in polling, are things he can also try to estimate and correct for.  Others, like systematic biases in the relation between sampling and underlying correlations — as in the really interesting and exactly relevant link Marcus sent — are things Nate (et al. of course) haven’t identified.  The acknowledgement of those, too, was in the advertising.
>  
> So, the sample estimator for a probability distribution, with known biases described and correction methods listed, and unknown biases acknowledged, is what Nate gave you, and in the only sense that “right” can be applied — which is an accurate rendering of methods — it was right.
>  
> If someone gives me a revolver with two filled chambers, and in the afterlife I protest that I didn’t pull one of the empty ones, well, we know what we think of my judgment, and we don’t spend a lot of time on this list putting that out as a philosophical problem.
>  
>  
> I don’t actually write this note to be nasty -- because of course I know you know all this as well as your interlocutors do — but to be colorful to make a different point.  It has to do with liking the fact that learning is not most interesting when one accretes an acquaintance with new facts, but when one realizes new ways of using words are necessary as a vehicle to taking on new frames of mind.
>  
> The claim that “right/wrong” are only allowed to be applied to certain and definite values, and are _not_ allowed to be applied to more composite deliverables such as sample estimators for probability distributions, is where terminology nazis close off conversation by insisting on a language in which terms that are needed to express the pertinent ideas are disallowed.  We see it in every field.  Stanley Miller ruled out metabolism as being a concept that could be presaged in geochemistry by “defining” metabolism as chemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes within a cell.  Historical linguists did it for a century insisting that absolutely regular sound correspondences (none of which ever actually exist) were the only signatures of genetic relatedness among languages, and probabilistic fingerprints had no interpretation.  The Stochastic Thermodynamics cabal do it when the say that thermodynamic laws for non-equilibrium processes that don’t come from Boltzmann/Gibbs free energies have “no physical meaning”, thereby scoping “physical” to refer to equilibrium thermodynamic states, the narrowest of special cases.  
>  
> And Dave did it in his post of long questions some weeks ago — which at the time I didn’t want to respond to because my responses are sort fo dull and unhelpful — when he said most physicists are realists but quantum physicists are anti-realists.  What the quantum physicists say is that the old classical assumption that “observables” and “states” are the same kind of thing turned out to be wrong.  They are different kinds fo things.  States can be real, and can even evolve deterministically, but may not be associated with any definite values for observables, because observables, when formalized and fully expressed through the formalization, are different kinds of things (they are a kind of operator, which one can think of as a rule for making a mapping)  than states or than particular numbers that the observables can yield as their output from some states.  So to claim that the quantum physicists are anti-realists is to scope “real” as coextensive with interpreting “observables” not as operators but as simple definite numbers.  That is, to adopt the frame of classical mechanics.  So Dave’s “anti-realist” actually means “anti-classical-mechanics-assumptionist”, which of course is exactly right, but never the scope I would use for the word “real”.  Anyone who insists that is the only way it is allowed to be used has just dictated rules for conversation in which there is no way I can engage and still work for sense-making.
>  
> Anyway, the whole tenor of the discussion is fine.  I enjoy all the parts of it, including your stubbornness for its own sake.  Wittgenstein was reportedly impossible in that way, though I forget the reference and source.  Some fellow-philosopher complaining that “it was impossible to get Wittgenstein to admit there was not a rhinoceros in the room."
>  
> Eric
>  
>  
>  
> 
> 
>>  
>> That’s all, 
>>  
>> Nick 
>>  
>> Nicholas Thompson
>> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>> Clark University
>> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/>
>>  
>>  
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
>> Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 4:45 PM
>> To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations
>>  
>> Again, though, you seem to be allowing your metaphor to run away with you. When someone who does quantitative modeling says "expected value", they do NOT mean what the layperson means when they say "I expect X". We can pick apart your statement and accuse you of an ambiguity fallacy if we want.
>>  
>> Your first use of "expected value" relies on the jargonal definition. Then you switcheroo on us and your 2nd use of "I expect that" relies on the vernacular concept. Up to this point, we can give you the benefit of the doubt. We all munge things a bit when talking/thinking. But *then*, on your 3rd use of "what he expected", you explicitly switched the meaning from jargon to vernacular.
>>  
>> I don't think you do this on purpose. (If you do, I laud you as a fellow troll! >8^) I think it's  an artifact of your being a "metaphorical thinker", whatever that means.
>>  
>> FWIW, I only had to pull a little on the Sabine Hossenfelder thread to find that she tweeted this, as well:
>>  
>> Embracing the Uncertainties
>> While the unknowns about coronavirus abound, a new study finds we ‘can handle the truth.’
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/coronavirus-uncertainty-scientific-trust.html?smid=tw-share <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/coronavirus-uncertainty-scientific-trust.html?smid=tw-share>
>>  
>> The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7672.abstract <https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7672.abstract>
>>  
>> If they're right, then the right-leaning local media might band together with the clickbaity national media and give it to us straight ... or they might simply skew their "expected value" reporting to continue serving their politics. Pfft.
>>  
>>  
>> On 4/17/20 2:58 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > If expert X tells me that the expected value of variable A is K, then, 
>> > when it's all over and the data are in, and A did not equal K, I expect that expert to admit that /what he expected did not happen./  Only after that confession has been made, should a conversation begin about whether the expert’s prediction process was faulted or not.  It seems to me that the shaded area is part of that second conversation.
>>  
>> --
>> ☣ uǝlƃ
>>  
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