[FRIAM] observability and randomness

[∄ uǝlƃ]

I have such trouble slicing out content of your posts. Pfft. They hang together too well. The story of the productive reviewer is well-taken. My own story was with an anonymous reviewer who *seriously* trashed one of our papers. The secret was that this reviewer thought almost exactly like me. Every criticism they raised was something I'd raised with my team at some earlier point, only to be kneaded into submission for the morale of the team. So the reviewer did me a great favor. I didn't get the paper rewritten into a form that would satisfy either of us. But we addressed all their points well enough to satisfy the reviewer (or so they just gave up because we were so willing to make changes even if we didn't do it "right" 8^). But this was just a paper. I can't even imagine the amount of work it would take to write a (credibly sourced) book. I've started one with a set of essays, only to leave them languishing in some dark corner of the cloud.

I have to take issue with your inference that I argue for intellectual independence. I strongly believe whatever it is that goes on inside people's bodies is *private*. But it is also completely dependent on whatever signals have impinged on them over their lifetime. The structure/meaning of whatever's inside may not map at all to the structure inside someone else. But that structure is a slavish representation of the events that built that person. So, I can't argue for independence. But I can argue for pluralism because the *only* way to get to where we are is to do it all over again, in every detail of every ontogenic event. Any shortcuts/metaphors one makes between one part and another will be ignorant abstractions that humiliate the things being mapped.

Regardless, I think you're right to call that dependence on ontogeny (of the collective as well as the individual) "Baconian" because staying close to the data, close to the evidence, in an intimate and intertwined relationship with the world is the only way we could ever map our structures, find common ground. The common ground comes only through rapid, regular, check-ins with a world we're both intimate with.

And this is one reason I like papers better than books (and criticism better than praise). Books are abstracted from the intimate world relationship in 2 ways: 1) they don't age well and 2) they're not (usually) peer/critically reviewed. (BTW, I'm not including "panning" or the sneerclub's disdain for this or that idiom or subculture. That's not what I mean by "critical", if it wasn't obvious.) Papers maintain a participative intimacy with the world that books can't. Books are for ideologues who want to retreat from the world ... argue with tame versions of themselves.

But, having said all that, I do see how your compositions of naturfacts (things you didn't invent yourself) tell an ontogenic story about the historical trace of signals that impinged upon you! And I do find that to be much less abstracting/humiliating than typical books. I haven't seen your book, yet. But my guess is it tells a more interactive story than something like Horney's book for 2 reasons: 1) Horney's book is fairly old by now and I would have a hard time hunting for the evidence I'd need to evaluate any claims she made and 2) my truck with biology, physics, and math, while impoverished compared to most of the people on this list, is much better than with psychodynamics.

As for the truth-concept being built? I remain skeptical. The only truth there can be will resist any abstraction or separation into a *concept*. The only way to stick to, to follow with an epsilon delay, a coherent truth is an intimate relationship with the world.

On 6/29/20 5:58 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> We did recommend people (at least some of the 5 came from our list; perhaps not all of them, and there are 3 whom I couldn’t immediately identify by style).  I warned the publisher that they were people we knew, but told him I believed we were acting in good faith in choosing them because we knew them to care about the subject and expected that they would be both critical and constructive as they saw serving it.  The place we were lucky is in having a community in which such people are even possible.
> 
> One of the publisher’s comments (I said “editor” before, but should have said “publisher”) was that he had never witnessed a reviewer willing to put so much effort into making someone else’s product better.  This was a guy for whom our book was one of his last projects before retiring from a decades-long highly productive career.  And that was entirely in character for this reviewer, whom I have seen to do that repeatedly.  I offered him to be credited when we used his clearer and more economical framing to rewrite the preface (to your point about reducing verbiage), and he said there wasn’t a need to do that; if we included him in the ordinary list of acknowledged people that would be plenty.  
> 
> There is a profound point in your exchange with Frank, though, on how much of Bacon we want to keep, and where we want to deviate from him.  My gripe about papers — which I try to put in immoderate terms for the same reasons you do — is that they are a product of the MTV generation.  Anything that doesn’t fit into the 1/3-second attention frame is excluded.  My great distress is that, whereas I once read a fair amount of book-length material, now I nearly never read books, and can barely keep up with papers, not by choice but just by being perpetually cornered.  I understand that there are others, currently including probably most very-successful researchers, for whom papers are the vastly preferred medium, even if they have the choice.
> 
> The place it touches Bacon is that, if facts really were self-interpreting, then it would never be correct to say that the whole is more or less than the sum of the parts.  There would only be parts, and whoever can eat the most parts wins.  That way of putting it of course munges many things that are not equivalent, such as the role of interpretation, versus just searching, selecting and sorting: the latter kinds of things Leslie Valiant calls out in his distinction between merely “learning” and “teaching” (both meant to be computer science concepts).  The idea of intellectual independence in science, which I hear you defending in many of your diatribes, is that we mostly want to stay close to Bacon, because we can re-triangulate on the lower-level observations and both save time and claw free of errors imposed by selectors, sorters, or interpreters, in various ways.
> 
> Whereas for me, there are very few new facts I have to offer, and much of what I do offer that people sometimes consider beneficial is carried in the selection, assembly, and ordering of facts in what I think make a more likely preponderence-of-evidence story.  It is miserable, in that kind of writing, to decide whether one has ever contributed _anything at all_.  The people who reject my papers are comfortable saying “no” and not wasting a lot of time to decide it.  And yet for me as a consumer of other people’s work, it is almost the entire difference between feeling lost and feeling oriented.  The authors who can present an extended construction and make good choices of selection and ordering along its length save me an enormous time wandering aimlessly, to arrive at what would have been substantively the same choices as theirs.  Much of my effort goes into building the equivalent in the places where there don’t seem to be any such good writers working, and inevitably that is much of what I have available to offer for print.
> 
> As on so many other threads, I can’t escape coming back to the question what kind of truth-concept builds out of the various parts.

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