[FRIAM] anthropological observations

[Eric Charles]

-------- Nick says --------- 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. -----------------


Well... so this connects a lot with poker, which I am in the process of
teaching the 10 year old... If I recall, Nate was giving Trump a 1/3 chance
of victory, which was much higher than most of the other models at the
time. You can hardly fault someone because something happened that they
said would happen 2/3 of the time.


If a poker player has a model that predicts a given play to be the best
option, because it will work 2/3 of the time, and this one time it doesn't
work, that isn't grounds to say the model failed.


 YOU want the modelers to have models that rarely give anything close to
even odds. So do I, so I'm sympathetic. But the modeler might prefer a more
honest model, that includes more uncertainty, for a wide variety of
reasons.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>


On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it's interesting that you seemed to have *flipped* your thinking
> within the same post. You restate my point about conceptual metaphors by
> saying models/computation merely *justifies* decisions/rhetoric. Then a few
> paragraphs later, you suggest that's conflating language with thought.
>
> My diatribe to Nick was that he *uses* metaphors/models simply to impute
> his conceptual structure onto Nate. Nick's decision is already made and he
> wants Nate's work to justify it. And the way he *imputes* his conceptual
> structure into Nate's work is through the sloppy use of metaphor. Then when
> Nate tells Nick (indirectly) that Nick's wrong about what Nate's done, Nick
> rejects Nate's objection.
>
> I'm picking on Nick, of course. We all do it. I wish we all did it much
> less.
>
> On 4/18/20 6:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> > But frankly as often as not, I saw
> > them use our work to *justify* the decision they had already made or
> > were leaning heavily toward, *apparently* based on larger strategic
> > biases.
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > As for your gut-level (and often well articulated) mistrust of
> > "metaphorical thinking",  you may conflate a belief (such as mine) that
> > language is metaphorical at it's base with being a "metaphorical
> > thinker".    Metaphor gets a bad rap/rep perhaps because of the
> > "metaphorical license" often taken in creative arts (albeit for a
> > different and possibly higher purpose).
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ...
> .... . ...
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/FRIAM-COMIC>
> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200418/7e0769e1/attachment.html>