[FRIAM] flat v thick

[glen]

And then there are descriptions whose mechanistic effect are diametrically opposed or entirely orthogonal to the mechanism they purport to describe:

Joe Rogan Doesn't Understand Graphs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1bMJekCiBw

OK. OK. Rogan's an idiot. We already know that. But there's also this:

The specious art of single-cell genomics
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011288

But we *must* metaphor, right? We have no choice but to map this to that, that to the other, forever lost in a maelstrom of nonsense. Maybe that's all we are is big bags of apophenic mapping sauce. Nobody wants to actually RTFM. Just have ChatGPT do that while you vibe your way around town. [sigh]

Anyway, there is some hope, I think. This guy (who I learned about from Hinternet) seems to be on to something:

Attention Machines and Future Politics
https://jacmullen.substack.com/p/attention-machines-and-future-politics

Going back to Rollie's complaints about Joe, of course it seems reasonable those of us who *can* read might make fun of (or complain about) those of us who cannot. But Rollie needs to check his privilege! Poor old Joe's just doing his best to metaphor himself around. Never mind that the mechanistic effect of his Bad Takes massively outweighs that of their targets.

On 8/11/25 3:00 PM, glen wrote:
> I'd like to focus a bit on the categorical distinction: description vs mechanism.
> 
> One of my favorite concepts is from Art Burks' (von Neumann's) Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata: "I am twisting a logical theorem a little, but it's a perfectly good logical theorem. It's a theorem of Gödel that the next logical step, the description of an object, is one class type higher than the object and is therefore asymptotically [?] infinitely longer to describe."
> 
> If this were true (I believe it!), then there's something "dead" (or "thin", or "flat", or any of a dozen other tokens) about descriptions ... something they can't describe. It's a recurrent itch (like from skin cancer or something) that was triggered this morning by the DtG guys criticizing Gary Stevenson w.r.t. his abdication of "graphs and data" (cf https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/a-return-to-gary-world). At about hour 2, they discuss "dumbing things down". And similar to Hilary's two positions, one private, one public, Gary's argument is right.
> 
> As toxic as demagogues like Trump are, it's both a pragmatic and perhaps in principle fact that descriptions cannot be mechanisms, or at least the mechanistic effect of a description cannot be entirely faithful to the mechanism(s) it describes. You can't really coerce every single one of your acolytes into truly understanding some complex subject so that they'll come around and give you the political will you need to, e.g., shut down the government or Eat the Rich.
> 
> Yes, I know. It sounds like all I'm saying is "the map is not the territory" yaddayadda. But I'm trying to get at formalization and the ontological status of formalisms. The enemy of my enemy is NOT my friend; they're merely analogous to a friend, of instrumental and ephemeral use. The same *might* be true of any logic we extrude biology through.
> 
> It's in this context, I discovered these 2 papers:
> 
> Thermodynamics of evolution and the origin of life
> https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2120042119
> 
> Toward a theory of evolution as multilevel learning
> https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2120037119
> 
> Claude's zombie assessment rings true to me:
> "While intellectually stimulating, this work appears more like theoretical physics applied to biology rather than a biologically-grounded evolutionary theory. The mathematical sophistication doesn't compensate for the lack of biological detail and empirical validation. Most evolutionary biologists would likely view this as an interesting but ultimately unconvincing attempt to replace well-established, empirically-supported theory with an abstract mathematical framework.
> The real test would be whether this approach generates novel, testable predictions that advance our understanding beyond current evolutionary theory. So far, that case has not been made convincingly."
> 
> But I would love to hear the thoughts from you live intelligences.
> 
> On 8/9/25 2:36 PM, Santafe wrote:
>> [... violently snipped for capricious reasons ...]
>> Here I would now make a category distinction:  Replication is a _mechanism_ — meaning: a particular architecture for sequences of events — that can subsume part of the event-organization in reproductive processes.
>> Reproduction is a class of object-generation processes, any one of them employing events jointly carried out within many interacting architectures, and realizable by many differently-organized overall processes.
>> The two words are not substitutes for one another.
>>
>> [ ... ]
>> 2. A summary statistic is a quantity that can be computed from each realized instance of some population process — WITHOUT REFERENCE TO ANY CAUSAL MODEL FOR THE PROCESS, AND FOR EACH TYPE WITHOUT REFERENCE TO ANY OF THE OTHER TYPES.  The mess of not getting these categories straight has led to a standard language among selectionists that distinguishes “realized fitness” (meaning, the summary statistic) from “the propensity interpretation” (meaning a set of parameters in an imputed generating model) — [ ... ]
>> 3. If some replication mechanism exists, we would certainly expect that any hierarchy of nested reproductive cycles (and non-cycles, which aren’t strictly “re-productive”, but can still be “productive”) to make use of the replication mechanism to aid the robustness of the whole tower, and simplify its demands on information-retaining control systems.
>> — NOTE: Point 3 is big in my world: being an entropy-kind-of-guy, one of my premises is that things that aren’t _easy enough_ and _robust enough_ to do, to enable you to mostly complete them in a world of noise, disruption, and interruption, end up not characterizing the world we live in.  There is way more causal understanding to be extracted from quantifying the robustness-conferring roles of these things at the small scale, as the source of our observed phenomena, than we have yet made use of; so lots of areas for good work yet to be done.
>> 4. The replicator abstraction presumes an enormous amount of structured context that it does not itself in any way give an account for.  The abstraction isn’t even set up to provide such accounts, so to speak of its “failing” to do so is close to a non-sequitur; it isn’t even “about” that context.
>> 5. So to think you are going to have a “theory of evolution” — meaning: some encompassing theory of whatever variety of causation it is that we want to call distinctively “evolutionary” and not already subsumed in one of our previously-formalized notions of cause” — built just out of the abstraction of replicators, is to be so negligent about categories as to be almost silly.
>>
>> Let me say this in a little more everyday way that people seem to think must not matter because it is so anodyne.  Corn plants and people reproduce.  Neither of them replicates.  (I will let you find the place online where one of my colleagues stood on a stage and said that she can’t replicate by herself, she needs her husband’s help to do that.)  Yet when corn plants reproduce, they make new corn plants; and people produce new people.  There is no “gene for being a corn-plant” or “gene for being a person”.  Nor any allelic variation that can cause offspring, stochastically, to sometimes come out as corn plants and sometimes as people.  Even scientists have not been so demented as to claim or imply such possibilities.
>>
>> So if you want to do evolutionary biology, you need concept terms and good categories for whatever it is that generates all these higher-order “types” (corn-plants, people, etc.) which are plenty stable and identifiable, even if they have odd variations in the tails of their distributions, and toward which the concept of replicator is simply irrelevant; its work is elsewhere in the event architecture.
>>
>> And then, if you want to look at other kinds of patterns —including but not limited to “groups” thought of as collectives of “objects”; though I would say that the pattern of relations and stereotyped events is every bit as much an attribute of the group as its object-membership — you can ask what kinds of categories you need to talk about their cascades of production.  Being a little analogistic, just as the cycles of reproduction can make use of replication within the architectures to tidy up much of the organization, the cascades of ongoing “production” (a.k.a. open-ended evolution) can make heavy use of the stereotyped re-production within lifecycles as a robust central tendency to carry and maintain much of its order.  It’s not one kind of thing.  It’s as rich as the whole biosphere.  There can be recurring motifs that we see at work, and they are good to recognize.  But there is also room for enormous novelty across cases, because the combinatorics is very large and 
>> leaves room for many different versions to survive and matter.
> 
> 

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