março 18, 2024

Then we are doing science.

The truth lies directly before us in the reality surrounding us. However, we cannot use it as it is. An unbroken description of reality would be simultaneously the truest and most useless thing in the world, and it would certainly not be science. If we want to make reality and therefore truth useful to science, we must do violence to reality. We must introduce the distinction, which does not exist in nature, between essential and inessential. In nature, everything is equally essential. By seeking out the relationships that seem essential to us, we order the material in a surveyable way at the same time. Then we are doing science.

— Jakob von Uexküll

março 12, 2024

In the end

In the end,
we will remember
not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

março 09, 2024

no moral guarantees

The correct decision, given a trolley problem, is to switch the track, then wonder for the rest of your life whether you made the right decision. Anyone who could confidently switch the track and then never think about it again is a sociopath, as is anyone who fails to switch the track and believes his decision entirely exculpates him. Trolleys and certain deaths don't reflect moral decisions in the real world. Not only do you not know precisely the consequences of your actions ahead of time, you certainly don't know the consequences of the counterfactual. [...] The universe offers no moral guarantees. We make decisions, and live with them, and never know the results of the decisions we didn't make. This is the best we're offered. -- Andreas Schou

março 04, 2024

Applied Stoicism

Stallone turned down the huge sum of money [for another actor to be Rocky] because he had "establish[ed] business relations with poverty," as the Stoic philosopher Seneca put it.  "The trick is,” Tom Rothman (CEO of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group) says, “to be fiscally responsible so you can be creatively reckless."

"If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid… Money’s the cheapest thing. Liberty, freedom is the most expensive.” Bill Cunningham 

-- Billy Oppenheimer [link]

fevereiro 29, 2024

Ecology, not Economy

The earth has, in principle, unlimited resources. They are just limited in the rate of sustainable extraction. And, of course, extraction costs put a limit on useful access to mineral resources -- Charles St Pierre

fevereiro 26, 2024

Fascism

Fascism is a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place. -- The School for Dictators, Ignazio Silone

fevereiro 22, 2024

School

School is mostly about indoctrination into the national identity. It is also about child care, and for older children, about keeping them out of the labour force. If we were honest we could talk about education policy with this in mind, though no one does (okay, there are some exceptions) -- Cameron K. Murray

fevereiro 18, 2024

Assertions

People have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy -- Echopraxia, Peter Watts 

fevereiro 13, 2024

Internalities

«Externalities» is a funny econ word that unintentionally identifies the root of the problem, imagining that there's an outside, external world upon which society acts, rather than being embedded in, a component of, even an expression of, the Earth's biogeochemical systems -- Peter Brennan

fevereiro 08, 2024

Words matter

There has been a lot of discussion using words like «war», «terrorism», «war crimes», «human shields» [...] The problem I wish to highlight is that words matter and, when discussing those topics, the vocabulary many of us have has been bent, twisted, and manipulated by various forces for their own benefit.

I’d like you to stop using fungible terms like «war crime», «ethnic cleansing», «collateral damage», etc., and stick strictly to the vocabulary used in International Humanitarian Law (IHL). There’s a simple reason for that: the vocabulary of IHL is extremely clear and deliberately freed of nuance and gray areas.

When does international humanitarian law apply?  
International humanitarian law applies only to armed conflict; it does not cover internal tensions or disturbances such as isolated acts of violence. The law applies only once a conflict has begun, and then equally to all sides regardless of who started the fighting.

This wording is extremely carefully made. There is no reference to aggressor or invader or any of the terms that might indicate who started it. Because who started it is invariably a topic of discussion when someone is trying to minimize their side’s crimes against humanity, i.e.: those noncombatants wouldn't have gotten hurt if we hadn't had to do this awful thing.

When I speak and write about these issues, I try hard, in my words, to stick to simple concepts. There are no «terrorists», or «freedom fighters» and I barely acknowledge the existence of states – there are just combatants and noncombatants and their actions are either legal or they are crimes against humanity. [...] Noncombatants' actions are always legal, because they are not engaging in violence. Combatants' actions are extremely problematic, especially when combatants begin killing noncombatants as a matter of operations – then we're down to arguing whether the death was necessary or justified and that is extremely problematic. -- It's Just Words Marcus Ranum

fevereiro 01, 2024

a deal with humanity

You do not get to target civilians because somebody else has targeted civilians. It’s nonreciprocal because your obligations are to the civilians. It’s not a deal between fighters. It’s a deal with humanity. -- Sari Bashi

janeiro 29, 2024

Why the universe wasn't full of mysteries, but now it is

 Psychologists have a name for this tendency to think we understand things better than we do: the «illusion of explanatory depth». [...] Think of it this way: for most of human history, we didn't know why things fall down. People trip, cups spill, buildings topple, and nobody had any good explanations for this, or at least not any true ones. If you didn't have an illusion of explanatory depth, you'd spend your days dumbfounded: “Why do things fall?? Why do you return to earth when you jump?? What's up with clouds—they don't seem to fall at all!!

You can't live your life if you're always getting stuck on mysteries like this. You'd get so mesmerized by the inexplicability of your porridge falling into your bowl and bubbles rising in your water that you'd forget to eat or drink and you'd die. That's why we need the illusion of explanatory depth: most things have to feel like they make sense, even if they don't, so that we can get on with the business of living.

And indeed, people born before the discovery of gravity understood this whole falling business exactly as well as they needed in order to survive. They knew that they'd fall and die if they walked off a cliff, that the things they throw in the air will fall down on people's heads, and that houses tip over if they aren't built properly. Maybe they thought they understood it better than they actually did, but for their purposes, they understood it perfectly well. [...] Okay, so an illusion of explanatory depth is extremely important to staying alive. It does, unfortunately, have a downside: it fools you into thinking the universe isn't full of mysteries.

This, I think, explains the curious course of our scientific discovery. You might think that we discover things in order from most intuitive to least intuitive. No, thanks to the illusion of explanatory depth, it often goes the opposite way: we discover the least obvious things first, because those are things that we realize we don't understand. That would fit with our incredible ancient progress in mathematics, because math is not obvious. -- On the importance of staring directly into the sun Adam Mastroianni

janeiro 25, 2024

Stilts everywhere

It is often said that experiments should be made without preconceived ideas. This is impossible. -- Science and Hypothesis, Henri Poincaré

janeiro 17, 2024

Coping

There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe. -- Robert A. Heinlein

janeiro 09, 2024

Where the buck stops

Nothing can be soundly understood
If daylight itself needs proof.

-- Imām al-Ḥaddād (trans. Moṣṭafā al-Badawī), "The Sublime Treasures: Answers to Sufi Questions"

janeiro 05, 2024

Unmixing the unmixable

What is more important in determining an (individual) organism's phenotype, its genes or its environment? Any developmental biologist knows that this is a meaningless question. Every aspect of an organism's phenotype is the joint product of its genes and its environment. To ask which is more important is like asking, Which is more important in determining the area of a rectangle, the length or the width? Which is more important in causing a car to run, the engine or the gasoline? Genes allow the environment to influence the development of phenotypes. -- Tooby and Cosmides

janeiro 03, 2024

Analogy Rot

It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name 'common sense', our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating. -- E. W. Dijkstra

dezembro 28, 2023

Out of the Boxes

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark, "Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think," surprise you? -- Richard Hamming

dezembro 21, 2023

Uniforms

In many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army. -- Mencius Moldbug

dezembro 14, 2023

Science vs. Scientists

Let me differentiate between scientific method and the neurology of the individual scientist. Scientific method has always depended on feedback [or flip-flopping as the Tsarists call it]; I therefore consider it the highest form of group intelligence thus far evolved on this backward planet. The individual scientist seems a different animal entirely. The ones I've met seem as passionate, and hence as egotistic and prejudiced, as painters, ballerinas or even, God save the mark, novelists. My hope lies in the feedback system itself, not in any alleged saintliness of the individuals in the system. -- Robert Anton Wilson

dezembro 10, 2023

Mapping

No map represents all of its intended territory [...] Every map is at least a map of the map-maker (his assumptions, world-view...)

**

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map of the map; and so on, endlessly, a fact first noticed by [Josiah] Royce. If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must be considered only as maps. A word is not the object it represents; and languages exhibit also this peculiar self-reflexiveness, that we can analyze languages by linguistic means.

**
If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone. The only usefulness of a map or a language depends on the similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map-languages. If the structure is not similar, then the traveler or speaker is led astray, which, in serious human life-problems, must become always eminently harmful. If the structures are similar, then the empirical world becomes 'rational' to a potentially rational being, which means no more than that verbal, or map-predicted characteristics, which follow up the linguistic or map-structure, are applicable to the empirical world.
** 
[...] a language, any language, has at its bottom certain metaphysics, which ascribe, consciously or unconsciously, some sort of structure to this world. Our old mythologies ascribed an anthropomorphic structure to the world, and, of course, under such a delusion, the primitives built up a language to picture such a world and gave it a subject-predicate form.
 
-- Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski

dezembro 06, 2023

Intelligence and Wisdom

I want here to make a long aside on intelligence. I have met far too many people, particularly among the colleged elite (note: if you have a college degree, you are a kind of elite; most people do not have one), who treat intelligence as a moral virtue or – God help us – the only moral virtue. This is extraordinarily foolish and I use that word (as you will see) carefully. Intelligence, as a trait, is a mix of inborn factors and perhaps early upbringing – again, I don’t want to descend into the swamps here; the key thing is that by the time we are mature enough to understand it, it isn’t susceptible to much change. Consequently, intelligence isn’t a virtue (in the moral sense) at all but simply an attribute about a person, like an attractive face, red hair, height and so on. Being intelligent does not make one a better person; it is merely the luck of birth. It carries all of the moral virtue of being good at basketball or League of Legends; less, really, since one has to show discipline and practice in those things (though for the already intelligent, there is a strong element of intellectual training necessary to really harness that inborn trait, much like natural talent at sports or e-sports). If you had the luck to be born smart, you ought – in my view – to feel obliged to give back just as if you had had the luck to have been born rich or beautiful.

Here I think it is crucial to separate intelligence from wisdom; the moral virtue lies in the latter. Intelligence is one’s ability to think through complex problems; it is an inherent ability with no moral value (but it does, of course, have use-value). Wisdom concerns one’s judgement and consequent code of conduct. I have seen too many students berate themselves – often quite cruelly – as being ‘stupid,’ because they have made some mistake (in situations, by the by, where I can be almost perfectly certain that said students, by virtue of being in my classroom, were in the top 25%, probably the top 15%, of the intelligence distribution). And on the one hand, I cringe because the self-criticism I hear from them is one that elevates intelligence to a moral virtue (they are a ‘bad person’ for being ‘stupid’) and at the same time an in-born, immutable trait that they cannot change. They are declaring (they think) not only that they have no worth (which is not true) but also the impossibility of worth. But of course they haven’t been stupid, but rather they have been foolish. The difference is that wisdom and foolishness is about choices and judgement; we can make the choice to be wiser in the future. A single foolish decision doesn’t make a fool. We have not yet found a way to make a stupid person intelligent, but we have refined many paths for the foolish person to reach to wisdom; indeed, all children are fools and must become wise as they mature.

It may be the case that it is easier for intelligent people to be wise, because they can more rapidly puzzle out life’s problems and find helpful solutions; I am unconvinced, having known a great many terribly smart, terribly foolish people (I mean, I went to graduate school in history – none of us there could have had very much sense) who in their foolishness thought they were smart enough to live without wisdom. It is certainly the case that there are great stores of wisdom, quite clearly labeled as such, available to anyone without the ability or inclination to puzzle out the basic principles of wisdom on their own. To be honest, I would advise the intelligent to use those stores as well; attempting to think one’s way to wisdom is a path full of peril, hubris and error. I have met many people who achieved a real measure of wisdom through these stores and who were often quite a bit wiser than some of the super-smart people I have known (and, as an aside, being an academic plays absolute havoc with your ability to assess normal intelligence when your entire peer-group is very smart; I suggest avoiding ever descending entirely into an academic bubble – maintain non-academic friends!).

Intelligence is an important, but quite frankly, overrated thing in our society; in almost any relationship, we ought to prefer the wise person to the intelligent one. link Bret Devereaux  

novembro 30, 2023

Language Corrections

Essentially PC [Politic Correctness] is a correction from language that developed in an oppressive context and achieved mainstream usage, Doublespeak must be corrected in order to understand what is really being said. Both concepts can be said to use euphemism as their mechanism, but there's an important distinction. PC uses value neutral terms to replace inherently and unfairly derogatory ones. Doublespeak uses ironic terms to hide their motives and cynically cast them as the opposite. If I speak of sex workers rather than "whores" it is not because I am trying to hide any truth about them. It is that the "acceptable" term holds no deeper truth and only insult. If I speak of "creative bookkeeping" rather than theft, I am trying to hide or minimize guilt. @absurdistwords

novembro 23, 2023

The Razor

Generations of writers opined vaguely that 'simple hypotheses are more plausible' without giving any logical reason for it. We suggest that this should be turned around: we should say rather that 'more plausible hypotheses tend to be simpler'. An hypothesis that we consider simpler is one that has fewer equally plausible alternatives. (p.606)

Actual scientific practice does not really obey Ockham's razor, either in its previous 'simplicity' form or in our revised 'plausibility' form. As so many of us have deplored, the attractive new hypothesis or model, which accounts for the facts in such a neat, plausible way that you want to believe it at once, is usually pooh-poohed by the official Establishment in favor of some drab, complicated, uninteresting one; or, if necessary, in favor of no alternative at all. The progress of science is carried forward mostly by the few fundamental dissenting innovators, such as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Laplace, Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, Boltzmann, Einstein, Wegener, Jeffreys – all of whom had to undergo this initial rejection and attack. In the cases of Galileo, Laplace, and Darwin, these attacks continued for more than a century after their deaths. This is not because their new hypotheses were faulty – quite the contrary – but because this is part of the sociology of science (and, indeed, of all scholarship). In any field, the Establishment is seldom in pursuit of the truth, because it is composed of those who sincerely believe that they are already in possession of it. Progress is delayed also by another aspect of this. Scholars who failed to heed the teachings of William of Ockham about issues amenable to reason and issues amenable only to faith, were – and still are – doomed to a lifetime of generating nonsense. (p.613) Probability Theory, The Logic of Science, E.T.Jaynes

novembro 16, 2023

Reifying Ghosts

Belief in the existence of 'stochastic processes' in the real world; i.e. that the property of being 'stochastic' rather than 'deterministic' is a real physical property of a process, that exists independently of human information, is another example of the mind projection fallacy: attributing one's own ignorance to Nature instead. The current literature of probability theory is full of claims to the effect that a 'Gaussian random process' is fully determined by its first and second moments. If it were made clear that this is only the defining property for an abstract mathematical model, there could be no objection to this; but it is always presented in verbiage that implies that one is describing an objectively true property of a real physical process. To one who believes such a thing literally, there could be no motivation to investigate the causes more deeply than noting the first and second moments, and so the real processes at work might never be discovered. (p.506) Probability Theory, The Logic of Science, E.T.Jaynes

novembro 09, 2023

scientific discovery is not a one-step process

To counter this universal tendency of the untrained mind to see causal relations and trends where none exist, responsible science requires a very skeptical attitude, which demands cogent evidence for an effect; particularly one which has captured the popular imagination. Thus we can easily understand and sympathize with the orthodox conservatism in accepting new effects. There is another side to this; skepticism can be carried too far. The orthodox bias against a real effect does help to hold irresponsibility in check, but today it is also preventing recognition of effects that are real and important. 

The history of science offers many examples of important discoveries that had their origin in the perception of someone who saw a small unexpected thing in his data, that an orthodox significance test would have dismissed as a random error. Jeffreys (1939, p. 321) notes that there has never been a time in the history of gravitational theory when an orthodox significance test, which takes no note of alternatives, would not have rejected Newton's law and left us with no law at all. Nevertheless, Newton's law did lead to constant improvements in the accuracy of our accounting of the motions of the moon and planets for centuries, and it was only when an alternative (Einstein's law) had been stated fully enough to make very accurate known predictions of its own that a rational person could have thought of abandoning Newton's law. The discovery of argon by Lord Rayleigh and of cosmic rays by Victor Hess are examples that come to mind immediately. Of course, they did not jump to sweeping conclusions from a single observation, as do the disaster-mongers; rather, they used the single surprising observation to motivate a careful investigation that culminated in overwhelming evidence for the new phenomenon. 

It is fortunate that physicists and astronomers do not, in practice, use orthodox significance tests; their own innate common sense is a safer and more powerful reasoning tool. In other fields we must wonder how many important discoveries, particularly in medicine, have been prevented by editorial policies which refuse to publish that necessary first evidence for some effect, because the one data set that the researcher was able to obtain did not quite achieve an arbitrarily imposed significance level in an orthodox test. This could well defeat the whole purpose of scientific publication; for the cumulative evidence of three or four such data sets might have yielded overwhelming evidence for the effect. Yet this evidence may never be found unless the first data set can manage to get published. How can editors recognize that scientific discovery is not a one-step process, but a many step one, without thereby releasing a new avalanche of irresponsible, sensational publicity seekers? The problem is genuinely difficult, and we do not pretend to know the full answer. (p.504ff) Probability Theory, The Logic of Science, E.T.Jaynes

novembro 01, 2023

Perennial Madness

Man is surely mad. He cannot make a worm; yet he makes Gods by the dozen -- Montaigne

outubro 26, 2023

the pull and push of ethical systems

Intuitively, there are two basic desiderata for a system of ethics:

  • that the system prescribes behaving well toward other people, or prescribes behaving with respect for certain principles; and
  • that the system provides a rationally compelling reason to behave as it prescribes.
Satisfying either of these is notoriously easy; satisfying both at once is notoriously hard. Nozick (1981) calls these desiderata the pull and push, respectively, of ethical systems, and points out that the main theoretical problem is to connect the two. Historically, humankind has often resorted to fantasies that bridge the gap: divine incentives (usually deferred to a supposed afterlife), karma (what goes around supposedly comes around), reincarnation (in a form that depends on your prior conduct), or an exaggeration of the extent to which one’s conduct causes reciprocity. Good and Real, Gary Drescher

outubro 19, 2023

the switch cannot flip itself

Ultimately, all science is correlation. No matter how effectively it may use one variable to describe another, its equations will always ultimately rest upon the surface of a black box. (Saint Herbert might have put it most succinctly when he observed that all proofs inevitably reduce to propositions that have no proof.) The difference between Science and Faith, therefore, is no more and no less than predictive power. Scientific insights have proven to be better predictors than Spiritual ones, at least in worldly matters; they prevail not because they are true, but simply because they work
 
***

We know what rapture is: a glorious malfunction, a glitch in the part of the brain that keeps track of where the body ends and everything else begins. When that boundary dissolves the mind feels connected to everything, feels literally at one with the universe. It’s an illusion, of course. Transcendence is experience, not insight.

***

Neurons do not fire spontaneously, only in response to external stimuli; therefore brains cannot act spontaneously, only in response to external stimuli. No need to wade through all those studies that show the brain acting before the conscious mind “decides” to. Forget the revisionist interpretations that downgrade the definition from free will to will that’s merely unpredictable enough to confuse predators. It’s simpler than that: the switch cannot flip itself.
 
citações do livro Echopraxia, Peter Watts

outubro 15, 2023

Sunk costs

No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back. -- Turkish proverb