Subjectivity and Scientific Judgment

Claims of the subjectivity of Bayesian inference have been much debated, and I am under no illusion that I can resolve them here. But I will repeat my point made at the outset of this discussion that Bayesian probability, like frequentist probability, is except in the simplest of examples a model-based activity that is mathematically anchored by physical randomization at one end and calibration to a reference set at the other. I will also repeat the familiar, but true, argument that most of the power of a Bayesian inference typically comes from the likelihood, not the prior, and a person who is really worried about subjective model-building might profitably spend more effort thinking about assumptions inherent in additive models, logistic regressions, proportional hazards models, and the like. Even the Wilcoxon test is based on assumptions! To put it another way, I will accept the idea of subjective Bayesianism when this same subjectivity is acknowledged for other methods of inference. Until that point, I prefer to speak not of “subjectivity” but of “assumptions” and “scientific judgment. -- Bayesian Statistical Pragmatism, Andrew Gelman

Destination for Free

If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there -- George Harrison

Hidden Assumptions

Perspective

Our products must transform from high production and planned obsolescence to low production and durability. -- Herman Daly

The only sin is selfishness

The only sin is selfishness. So said the good Doctor. When she first expressed this opinion I was young enough initially to be puzzled and then to be impressed at what I took to be her profundity.

It was only later, in my middle-age, when she was long gone from us, that I began to suspect that the opposite is just as true. Arguably there is a sense in which selfishness is the only true virtue, and therefore that as opposites are given to cancelling each other out selfishness is finally neutral, indeed valueless, outside a supporting moral context. In later years still my maturity, if you will, or my old age, if you wish I have with some reluctance again come to respect the Doctor's point of view, and to agree with her, tentatively at least, that selfishness is the root of most evil, if not all.

Of course I always knew what she meant. That it is when we put our own interests before those of others that we are most likely to do wrong, and that there is a commonality of guilt whether the crime is that of a child stealing coins from his mother's purse or an Emperor ordering genocide. With either act, and all those in between, we say: Our gratification matters more to us than whatever distress or anguish may be caused to you and yours by our actions. In other words, that our desire outranks your suffering.

My middle-years objection was that only by acting on our desires, by attempting to bring about what pleases us because it feels agreeable, are we able to create wealth, comfort, happiness and what the good Doctor would have termed in that vague, generalising way of hers 'progress'.

Eventually, though, I came to admit to myself that, while my objection might be true, it is insufficiently all-embracing to cancel out the Doctor's assertion entirely, and that while it may sometimes be a virtue, selfishness by its nature is more often a sin, or a direct cause of sin.

We never like to think of ourselves as being wrong, just misunderstood. We never like to think that we are sinning, merely that we are making hard decisions, and acting upon them. Providence is the name of the mystical, divinely inhuman Court before which we wish our actions to be judged, and which we hope will agree with us in our estimation both of our own worth and the culpability or otherwise of our behaviour.

I suspect the good Doctor (you see, I judge her too in naming her so) did not believe in Providence. I was never entirely sure what she did believe in, though I was always quite convinced that she believed in something. Perhaps, despite all she said about selfishness, she believed in herself and nothing else. Perhaps she believed in this Progress that she talked about, or perhaps in some strange way, as a foreigner, she believed in us, in the people she lived with and cared for, in a way that we did not believe in ourselves. -- Inversions, Ian Banks

Fences

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’ -- The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, G.K. Chesterton 1929

a succession of formative great moments

The formation of the political culture of the European continent is the product of a succession of formative great moments: the Enlightenment and invention of modernity; the French Revolution; the development of the workers' and socialist movement and the emergence of Marxism; and the Russian Revolution. This succession of advances certainly did not ensure that the successive “lefts” produced by these moments would assume the political management of European societies. But it did form the right/left contrast on the continent. The triumphant counterrevolution imposed restorations (after the French and Russian Revolutions), a retreat from secularism, compromises with aristocracies and churches, and challenges to liberal democracy. It successfully induced the peoples concerned to support the imperialist projects of dominant capital and, to this end, mobilized the chauvinistic nationalist ideologies that experienced their greatest glory on the eve of 1914.

The succession of moments constitutive of the political culture of the United States is quite different. These moments are: the establishment in New England of anti-Enlightenment Protestant sects; control of the American Revolution by the colonial bourgeoisie, in particular by its dominant slave-holding faction; the alliance of the people with that bourgeoisie, founded on the expansion of the frontiers that, in turn, led to the genocide of the Indians; and the succession of waves of immigrants that frustrated the maturation of a socialist political consciousness and substituted «communitarianism» for it. This succession of events is strongly marked by the permanent dominance of the right, which made the United States the “surest” country for the unfolding of capitalism. -- Empire and Multitude, Samir Amin

Empire

[...] all major parts of the U.S. establishment (Democrats and Republicans) make no secret of the objectives of their plan: to monopolize access to the planet’s natural resources in order to continue their wasteful mode of life, even if this is to the detriment of other peoples; to prevent any large or mid-sized power from becoming a competitor capable of resisting Washington’s orders; and to achieve these aims by military control of the planet.

The liberal ideology specific to capitalism places the individual in the forefront. It does not matter that in its historical construction during the Enlightenment the individual in question had to be an educated and property-owning man, a bourgeois capable, as a result, of making free use of Reason. This was an indestructible liberating advance. As a movement beyond capitalism, socialism cannot be conceived of as a return to the past, as a negation of the individual. Bourgeois democracy, despite the narrow limits in which capitalism encloses it, is not “formal,” but quite real, even if it remains incomplete. Socialism will be democratic or it will not be. But I add to this phrase its necessary complement: there will be no more democratic progress without calling capitalism into question. Democracy and social progress are inseparable. The really existing socialisms of the past certainly did not respect this requirement and thought they could achieve progress without democracy or with as little democracy as in capitalism itself. But it is also necessary to add that the great majority of democracy’s defenders today are hardly more demanding and think that democracy is possible without any visible social progress, let alone calling into question the principles of capitalism. -- Empire and Multitude, Samir Amin

fingerprints

Fascism, for [Gaetano] Salvemini, meant setting aside democracy and due process in public life, to the acclamation of the street. It is a phenomenon of failed democracies, and its novelty was that, instead of simply clamping silence upon citizens as classical tyranny had done since earliest times, it found a technique to channel their passions into the construction of an obligatory domestic unity around projects of internal cleansing and external expansion. We should not use the term fascism for predemocratic dictatorships. However cruel, they lack the manipulated mass enthusiasm and demonic energy of fascism, along with the mission of «giving up free institutions» for the sake of national unity, purity, and force. -- The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton

being wrong vs. being false

The idea that all models that are wrong are necessarily all equally wrong [...] is fallacious in the extreme. Wrong does not have this black/white feature. 'Wrong' and 'false' are not the same. Of course, a wrong theory is also false, but if I'm walking to the shop, I'd rather find my location to be wrong by half a mile than by a hundred miles.

We can say that a theory is less wrong (i.e. produces smaller residuals), without implying that is is more true. 'True' and 'false' retain their black-and-white character, as I believe they must, but our knowledge of what is true is necessarily fuzzy. This is precisely why we use probabilities. As our theories get incrementally less wrong and closer to the truth, so the probabilities we are allowed to assign to them get larger. -- Parameter Estimation and the Relativity of Wrong, Tom Campbell-Ricketts

Is evolution anti-entropic?

Life, including evolution, is chemistry. Chemistry is the probabilistic re-arrangement of matter from lower entropy to higher entropy states. Aesthetic order is not relevant. A genetic chemical which mutates into a longer genetic chemical does not become the longer chemical. It combines with other chemical reactants to form the longer genetic chemical plus some other chemical products. The products have more entropy than the reactants.

A genome which causes a certain large, complicated, intricate organism to gestate does not become the organism. It interacts with a multitude of other chemical reactants to form the organism plus some other chemical products. The products have more entropy than the reactants.

An organism which reproduces itself does not become more of itself. It interacts with resources in its environment, inputting a multitude of other reactants (it itself is a reactant) and outputting a multitude of products, including offspring. The products have more entropy than the reactants.

If the organism reproduces itself better than others of its kind, it absorbs more reactants and outputs more products (including offspring) than others of its kind. Other factors being equal, this means that the new organism is succeeding because it is increasing system entropy faster than its competition.

Evolution does not in general reduce system entropy. The tendency of the system's entropy to increase (as long as you keep track of all the reactants and products) and the system's tendency towards biological evolution are the same principle.

Evolution does not require an open system. What life, evolution, or any non-boring chemistry needs is a system that is far from equilibrium.

Whether a system is open or closed is just a description of which parts of the system you're looking at. Any open system can be turned into a closed system by including its relevant surroundings; any closed system can be turned into an open system by omitting relevant parts. We can close the system of the Earth by including the Sun (as a high temperature reservoir) and the infinite void of space (as a cold temperature reservoir). Or we could closely approximate a closed system within the Earth, in which life can and does evolve, by zooming in on a hydrothermal vent and treating the vent as a high-capacity hot temperature reservoir and the rest of the ocean as a high-capacity cold temperature reservoir. -- g s @ stack exchange

Costs

Rarely is anyone thanked for the work they did to prevent the disaster that didn't happen. -- Mikko Hypponen

Two perspectives

[...] my biggest problem with Frequentist stuff is it makes an objectionable assumption that repeatedly performing an experiment is mathematically equivalent from sampling from a random sequence.

This is equivalent to a strong statement about the Kolmogorov Complexity of data coming out of your experiment. The difference between “I don’t know better than p(x) what the next x value will be” and “the universe conspires so that in repeated sampling the long term frequency of X=x is p(x)” are two completely different views of the physics of the world. Only one of them is compatible with the known facts about the world. Sometimes the frequentist viewpoint is an acceptable substitute for the “physics” (or more generally mechanistic description of a process) but that’s an assumption that should in general be tested by collecting a large sample of things.

So if you’re planning to do Frequentist statistics because you have a plethora of thousands and thousands of data points collected in a stable experimental manner and these pass at least some basic tests for randomness… then I say more power to you. This is vastly less than 1% of most science. -- Daniel Lakeland [ref]

Help

It is the poor who gives alms to the poor -- Japanese proverb

Peace

Old empires, like the Arab or the Spanish, claimed they needed to conquer so to spread their true religion and save as many souls as possible. That was doublespeak for their wish for power. Power to satisfy an unlimited desire fueled by greed, a feeling of superiority, an infantile need to dominate. These stories were made to convince their people, to gather legions, and perhaps to convince themselves. Recent empires have the same needs, the same hunger. However the discourse changed. The British wanted to spread civilization, Soviets to promote communism, Americans to deliver freedom. But these pretensions, in the end, only preceded guns, theft, and death. The desolation of imperial peace.

Preferences

How could the same people who were used to wrestling with the ethics of eugenics and torture (issues you might have imagined were more clear-cut) think that all there was to say about professor-student sex was that it was fine if consensual? Many philosophers prefer to see complexity only where it suits them. -- On (Not) Sleeping With Your Students, Amia Srinivasan

Abductive Reasoning

Summaries are measures made to tame complexity. They quickly tell something about a system by condensing its manifold dimensions into a single number. Every summary compacts the information about the system like an hydraulic press. They are used to evaluate the system's progress, even considering all the potential problems that come from excessive simplification. But why do humans have the tendency of transform them into goals? This reification of summaries, results on Goodhart's law that says when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. GDP (gross domestic product), for instance, is not just reified, but even deified. Policies are made, and societies suffer, to increase GDP. It does not matter if something is productive, or destructive, or parasitic, if the final result is the increase of overall GDP. It only knows sums, because subtractions are taboo. And everything not measurable in GDP terms, like ecological services, humans' well being, or social inequality, are seen as irrelevant zeros. Because someone said, long ago, that economies that progress had seen increases of GDP. Then, the superstitious flocks that rule economic schools, by a kind of abductive fallacy, flipped the idea to defend that because GDP grows, the economy progresses. And for that, as a sacrifice to this grotesque god, the world burns.

Context

A scientific theory always bends when faced with reality. But is the bent insufferable? And what options remain if we reject its distortions? We decide about theories not only on their merits, but also in our circumstances.

Target

Don't you see how useless it is to know the answer to the wrong question? -- Ursula K. Le Guin

Digestive System

We are creatures of meaning, we search it and find it and eat it, even when meaning is not there. It is hard to face the reality that there's no meaning outside our minds: the wandering galaxies that make the universe represent a limitless desolation. And our hunger is not easily satiated. It makes us consume randomness and chaos dressed as order, propaganda and lies as promises of plenty, bullshit as method. It is very hard to understand what to accept and what to reject. One road is trust. Trust the words of someone who does good in accordance to what she says (or said, it might be from a book of a long dead author), and use them as an anchor to trust more things. Be skeptical of parasitic meaning, which is legion, but be open to the those meanings that multiply in you. Be fruitful. A garden.

what is the proper limit to wealth?

People in our society give too much value to property, to having stuff. We have and long for too many things that tie us to debt, and work, and compromises with others. While in work, in a certain sense, we don't 'own our bodies' and must sometimes do things we don't agree or like which decreases your liberty. Seneca, in his second letter to Lucilius, said: "Do you ask what is the proper limit to wealth? It is, first, to have what is necessary, and, second, to have what is enough." We just bloat what we mean by necessary, and consider a wise position to assume that it's never enough.

ICAR

Não falha. Quando pergunto aos meus  alunos (os que se consideram religiosos) se se vêem primeiro como  cristãos ou católicos, a resposta é sempre a mesma: católicos. O que não  surpreende se pensarmos no que diz Antero na sua célebre conferência Causas da Decadência dos Povos Peninsulares: "O cristianismo é sobretudo um sentimento. O catolicismo é sobretudo uma instituição".  Ora, se pensarmos no modo como os nossos jovens vivem  institucionalizados desde que nascem, a creche, o J.I., a escola, o ATL,  a catequese, as actividades desportivas, os campos de férias, o Inglês,  a música, as explicações, os escuteiros, parece-me haver razão  suficiente para o facto de sentirem mais o peso de uma instituição do  que o de uma verdadeira religião. Tal como com o ISLA, o ISPA ou IST, o I  de igreja poderia ser de Instituto, passando assim a chamar-me  Instituto Católico Apostólico Romano. Fica naturalmente de fora o  pertinentíssimo O que bem poderia acrescentar-se no final para sugerir  como, ao contrário das verdadeiramente cristãs, falta às asas católicas  robustez para levarem as almas até ao Reino do Céus. -- José Ricardo Costa ref

All revolutions were illegal

Constitutions can’t create or destroy natural rights like self-determination. They exist only to protect such rights. Denying such right by constitutional or non-constitutional means ferments a tyranny. [...] It’s nice if constitutions make reasonable provision for secession votes but it’s not required. The natural right of self determination exists regardless of what constitutions say. -- Tyler Cowen

a sort of moral precept

I do have a sort of moral precept that I’ll stand behind, which is that you should not unilaterally reduce another person’s choices. -- Marcus J. Ranum

Answering the Fermi Paradox

Our civilization is making Earth a space-ship, by destroying ecological services and then trying to replace them with new industries and technologies. I cannot think of a more impactful stupid behavior.

Local

Some philosophies are like local shops for local people.

The food of reason

In order to reason, arguments are not enough. Without evidence, reasoning is like a blind person trying to walk straight in a desert.

Exposure

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- HL Menken

Fail-safe

The rule that human beings seem to follow is to engage the brain only when all else fails - and usually not even then. -- David Hull

Cost-effective

Mutually costly-signaled reality is reality we can rely on. -- Sister Y ‏@TheViewFromHell