A giveaway is when people use 'experts' who don't really have qualifications in the area but hold a view they agree with and have some kind of nominal credibility somewhere else. — Tom Storm

Ah, yes. I consider the term 'expert' to already cover the idea of it being a relevant field, but I see what you mean about people abusing the term. I'd also add that, although it's not always clear cut, one can identity (and so rule out) obvious conflicts of interest. For example, if a climate expert is directly paid by a fossil fuel company.

I would privilege an expert qualified in the subject for starters, and then maybe pay additional attention to someone who holds a different view to mine because they may know something I don't. — Tom Storm

That's an interesting approach, but then, what would you use as your criteria for then believing that expert? What's the convincer?

The logic of conscription has always been put forward on the basis of an existential threat — Paine

A threat to the existence of whom, or what?

An employee is not an owner, so should have no input in this. If you are an owner (you own any stock say), then you very much do have input in this, if only to vote for the guy you want making these sorts of decisions for you. The actual decisions are not made by the stockholders any more than laws are made by the average citizen. — noAxioms

In the first half of this you use "should" and the next part use "are not". Which are you talking about, the way things are or the way things ought to be?

it does seem that people chose the experts or commentators who provide the scaffolding in support of their preexisting biases or beliefs. — Tom Storm

On what other grounds would you have people choose which experts to believe?

No. I asked for a geopolitical account by which he might be understood as a rational actor. — apokrisis

Why would you be asking me for such an account, what makes you think I have one?

Thought I'd pop this here.



The funniest part is the postscript...

When I posted an earlier version of this piece on my Substack, I mentioned that AEI doesn’t disclose its donors. But Ben Freeman pointed out to me that after some digging, you’ll find that AEI has taken money from the military industry by way of its board chair — meaning that all the think tanks advising US foreign policy are taking money from weapons manufacturers one way or another, and the chart above should be a solid yellow pie. — Stephen Semler

Ah, the desperate need to strawman, when you cannot prove wrong the other one. — ssu

Seriously? You dismiss entire swathes of analysis as lunacy, pro-Russian, uninformed, beneath response... Do you think those posters would agree you've represented their positions in the most charitable light? Would you even stand by such a claim?

By basically talking a lot more about everything else than the actual topic of the thread, the war in Ukraine. — ssu

Our governments are involved in the war in Ukraine. Their involvement is therefore squarely on the subject of the war in Ukraine.

It would be more credible, if you came up even once with some actions, any action, of your government that would be justified. — ssu

Taking part in negotiations. But this this already been mentioned.

Obviously Ukraine surrendering and then Putin putting his puppet oligarch friend Medvedchuk as leader of what's left of Ukraine after the territories of Novorossiya would have been annexed by Russia would have meant fewer dead — ssu

Yes.

Even less would have been killed if Putin wouldn't have attacked Ukraine starting from 2014. — ssu

So? Even less would have been killed if airlifted the entire population to Mali too. What possible relevance could that have?

So you continue to strawman me. — apokrisis

You literally said...

what is your balanced view of Putin and his little adventure? What paints him in some better light? — apokrisis

It's a direct quote, you asked for a moral judgment on Putin. I don't give a shit what 'paints him' in any kind of light, why would I? What is with this obsession over how bad Putin is? He's a thoroughgoing heartless psychopath. Is anyone still in any doubt about that? What matters is what we do about that.

Whinging about it online is pretty low on the list.

Where it gets particularly uncomfortable for me is where we might have a viable constituency which believes something untrue (let's say The Protocols to the Elders of Zion) and is ripe to be coopted into a political force by a predatory candidate. — Tom Storm

Yes, I think something like that can happen these days in a way that would not have been possible 20 or 30 years ago. It's very worrying. We see a sweeping increase in populism and a rise in far-right politics such as we've seen in Sweden recently. Removing that leash was dangerous, but there seems to be little incentive to return it now.

Part of the problem (as I see it) is the bipartisan use of these tools. No one wants to put the leash back on. The moment we return to using qualification as a criteria for inclusion the right are going to weaken their positions on environmental issues, gun control (in America), welfare...; the left are going to lose ground on identity politics, public health, globalisation... Both sides use these tools to good effect and neither are willing to let them go, consequences go hang!

No one brags about being post-truth do they? — Tom Storm

No, indeed. I understand 'Post Truth' to be a group term describing a set of rhetorical tools which all make use of the same basic theme - that of eliminating the criteria which previously barred entry into serious debate, that of expertise. The aim being to remove what might previously have been a leash on certain political ideas being taken forward.

Climate change is a good example. Where previously we might have had discussions about the best way to combat it, 'post truth' rhetorical tools allow politicians to pursue policies which don't even address it because they've opened the door to their voter's own lay opinions being included in the debate.

Of course, no one refers to such a trick directly, the term is used pejoratively by political opponents (who, in my experience, use exactly the same trick to their own ends - what smart politician is going to turn down such a powerful weapon).

Discuss away. — apokrisis

It's been 'discussed' at great length, if by discussed you mean mentioned, immediately dismissed as delusional Russian propaganda and then rendered beneath further response (your begrudging invitation through gritted teeth notwithstanding).

As to your specific questions, I haven't any idea why anyone would want to discuss who the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys' are in geopolitical events. If virtue signalling your disgust at Putin's actions is your thing, then you crack on, some of us take seriously our duty to hold our governments to account for their actions, so for us what matters here is the justness of the actions of our governments, and for most of us, that isn't Russia.

If you seriously can't think of any way in which The West could possibly be the bad guys in a collapsed Russia then I can only imagine that you've either been reading too much Rand or have been living on a remote island for the last 50 years.

@Jack Cummins

This is an interesting topic, but @Banno's right here with

Perhaps you would be better thinking of what you have said here as a definition of what you ought believe, rather than of truth. — Banno

The idea of 'Post Truth' is not really about truth at all, it's about belief. The people using the term (and rhetorical devices it describes) want us to do something, and for that they merely need to change our beliefs, not the whole concept of truth.

As a rhetorical device (or collection of devices really), the idea is to throw shade on the methods we used to rely on to decide what to believe, particularly in those cases where we are not ourselves sufficiently knowledgeable to decide empirically. But the aim is still to get us to believe that something is 'true' (or not 'true') and as such requires the same definition of truth as before.

The matter of trust is interesting, but unrelated to truth as a concept. It's related more to those methods. What we're seeing in the 'Post Truth' world is nothing more than politicians and campaign leaders attempting to co-opt the same credentials experts used to have for the entitlement to have their views taken seriously in public discourse aimed at establishing what we ought to to believe. To do this trick, they have to undermine the public trust in expertise (since raising themselves to that level is not an option). I think it's this process of undermining trust in expertise that Sachs is referring to, but that's about criteria for inclusion in the debate, not so much about Truth itself.

As I said, it was hyperbolic in response to benkies hyperbolic accusation of imperialism being a fiction. — apokrisis

You've continued to paint all opposing views here as bafflingly delusional at every opportunity. This was not a one off rhetorical tool.

I've taken part in this discussion for several hundred pages. The main protagonists are interested in nothing but ensuring the world knows how much they think Putin is bad, that's it, so the meta-argument about public discourse, 'disinformation', and the maintenance of hard partisan lines is the only interesting matter left to interrogate. It's not as if anyone's open to actual discussion about the crisis itself is it?

So Treisman says the seizing of Crimea was either to prevent loss of Black Sea fleet, or part of a more general imperialist agenda, or just an impulsive improvisation of an autocrat turned erratic. — apokrisis

Treisman concludes by rejecting the first two possibilities. But again, this is not the point (unless we're going to go through every single opposing academic one by one). The point is that your comment...

Every analysis of Putin tells the same story. — apokrisis

...was ridiculous, but more importantly, this whole trend (of which you've merely been an example) of painting all voices opposing the mainstream Western narrative as being somehow deficient, has to stop. We've had accusations of psychological disturbance, ideological delusion, collusion... Everything from plain old stupidity to being full-on FSB agents. Everything... except just acknowledging that we simply have a legitimate difference of opinion.

The point is not what Treisman, or any of the other academics I mentioned, said. The point is that this new way of conducting discourse is toxic and erodes trust in the only means we currently have of distinguishing legitimate debate from populist diatribe.

Being so transparent, why aren't more calling him out for it? — jorndoe

You've just posted the almost literal wall to wall international condemnation. What more exactly were you expecting?

Blah, blah, blah. Wake me up when you have sources to back up your opinions.

if you read the above. It's not a wavering opportunist speaking — ssu

I've read the above. It sounds like a wavering opportunist speaking. Now what? I'm consigned to the looney bin because I disagree with your interpretation?

I don't know how to break it to you any more gently than this, but the way things seem to you to be is not always the way things actually are.

Can you cite some actual argument he makes that makes your point explicit? Both you and Beckie are remarkably coy on quoting sources or indeed detailing a counter position in any way. — apokrisis

I'm referring to his 2016 Essay in Foreign Affairs on why Putin took Crimea, but that's not relevant. If I make the claim "all men over 50 have grey hair" it's not acceptable proof for me to provide a couple of grey-haired men and say "find me one that doesn't then". That is proof that some men over 50 have grey hair, not proof that all men over 50 have grey hair.

You made a claim about the motivation behind Russia's foreign policy that it was universally held to be imperialist, or motivated by a desire to secure soviet borderlines. You made that claim so boldly as to suggest anyone thinking otherwise was not even to be taken seriously, a lunatic, motivated by deep psychological issues. Such a claim would be supported (short of you providing the works of every academic in the field), by either some kind of statistically significant sample, or by citation from someone expert in the matter making such a claim themselves. You've provided neither, you've just made a wildly unsupported claim about the prevalence among foreign affairs analysts of a particular interpretation with absolutely no support given at all, and then you attempt to shift the burden of proof on anyone who disagrees with you.

If you want to claim that such a position is universal, then provide us with some evidence that such a position is universal.

Oh, and I can't believe I'm having to say this, but given @ssu's latest offerring...the fact that it seems to you that such opinions are universal is not evidence that such opinions are in fact universal.

even when Putin says it himself, you still can’t admit being wrong. — apokrisis

Ahh, so now Putin's actual words are indicators of motive. Great, then we have our answer. Here's why he chose to invade Ukraine.

...[NATO] moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.

...these past days NATO leadership has been blunt in its statements that they need to accelerate and step up efforts to bring the alliance’s infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders.

Any further expansion of the North Atlantic alliance’s infrastructure or the ongoing efforts to gain a military foothold of the Ukrainian territory are unacceptable for us.

Focused on their own goals, the leading NATO countries are supporting the far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine

First a bloody military operation was waged against Belgrade, without the UN Security Council’s sanction but with combat aircraft and missiles used in the heart of Europe. The bombing of peaceful cities and vital infrastructure went on for several weeks. I have to recall these facts, because some Western colleagues prefer to forget them, and when we mentioned the event, they prefer to avoid speaking about international law, instead emphasising the circumstances which they interpret as they think necessary.

Then came the turn of Iraq, Libya and Syria.

They [The Western powers] will undoubtedly try to bring war to Crimea just as they have done in Donbass — Putin's speech marking the initiation of the invasion

Or is it just some of the things he says that matter now. The things you pick.

We override our natural tendencies all the time, showing that we can be in control, if we want to. — Tzeentch

How on earth would you know? Do your thoughts all have labels on them declaring their origin?

there's no contradiction. — ssu

Of course there is. If Putin is an opportunistic politician who uses imperialist rhetoric when it suits his ambitions, then all your speeches prove is that at the time of the speech the political landscape was such that imperialist language would help cement Putin's position (or at least, he thought as much). So any analysis of the motivations behind the recent invasion can't be assessed on the basis of past speeches as if they were indicators of a consistent motive, having just established that they were most likely reactionary and Machiavellian.

You can't, on the one had, claim his speeches give us a window into his foundational motives then on the other admit that he just says whatever he thinks is going to work best at the time.

Great. You will have no problem providing expert sources arguing the opposite then. Look forward to it. — apokrisis

I've provided plenty of sources throughout my contributions, but on this particular issue (the motivation behind Russian foreign policy) there's academics like Daniel Treisman, experts such as Fyodor Lukyanov, Andrei Tsygankov, Richard Sawka, Marie Mendras...

But I'm not getting into this ridiculous shifting of the burden of proof here. If you're seriously making the claim that all academics believe imperialist ambitions drive Russian foreign policy, then you are making by far the more extraordinary claim for which you've yet to provide a single source.

So, in return. I look forward to hearing your sources to back up your claim...

The fact is that the view is held and shared as justification for the current actions. — apokrisis

Who's denying that the view is held and shared as justification for the current actions? People hold all sorts of views. Hell, I could probably find someone who thinks Putin is the head of the lizard men. So some people think Russia's foreign policy is driven by imperialist expansionism. Others don't.

The question was why you want to paint those that do as prophets and those that don't as lunatics. Both views are held by experts in their field. The discussion is one in academic articles. What's obscene is this modern attempt to weaponise ostracism for your own political gain. We exclude quacks and lunatics from serious discussion because they are unqualified to take part. We don't exclude perfectly qualified academics because we don't like what they've got to say... or at least we didn't used to, but I suppose I'm too old fashioned for the new discourse.

If you believe these are fictions, then get busy with the debunking. — apokrisis

What could possibly debunk them? They are someone's opinion about the intent behind Russian foreign policy, what do you expect me to debunk? That in fact no-one has such an opinion?

There are no facts there to debunk, that's the point. It's someone's opinion about the motivation for events. The events are facts, the theory about what motivates them is opinion. I can't see how you're not getting that distinction.

War is insanity. Each side accusing the other of insanity is part of the war. Can one speak of insanity sanely? — unenlightened

I think that's right, but one can, perhaps, speak sanely about those practices which lead to a promulgation of war and those which work to limit it?

Part of the problem I was trying to describe is that the partisan division of all who are not 'with the Ukrainians' as being 'with the Russians' means that such conversations, which I think are important, can't take place. If one cannot criticise the behaviour of one side without being treated as if one must thereby be on the other, then all we have left is the "insanity" of two warring sides.

Wake me up when you have sources to back up your opinions. — apokrisis

What sources could possibly back up the claim that you are presenting opinion as fact? Such a claim only requires a rational analysis of the type of proposition you're making and the nature of the sources you're using. It doesn't require sources itself, it's not that sort of claim.

What's happening here is just lazy partisanship in place of debate and I think it's a social change that needs resisting as it undermines the status of experts and if we no longer trust in experts then all that's left is populism.

You can be both critical and supportive of organizations or countries depending on the subject or issue.

I have no trouble of being critical against NATO and the US especially when it came to the war in Afghanistan... — ssu

So I can criticise NATO, so long as that criticism agrees with yours. Got it.

I think the prize should go to you by going so well along with the Kremlin line. — ssu

The Kremlin take an anti-NATO position. So if following the Kremlin's line is reprehensible, then you're basically saying that no-one can take an anti-NATO position.

The Kremlin are broadly opposed to Western governments. So if following the Kremlin's line is reprehensible, then you're basically saying that no-one can take a position critical of Western governments

It's an absurd position to take that any argument which is also used by the Kremlin must be avoided on pain of accusations of collusion. The Kremlin don't need to deal entirely in lies. Their enemies make sufficient moral and strategic errors to supply a reasonable flow of useful propaganda items. It's ridiculous to place all of that out of bounds just because the Kremlin are using it too.

My worst fear is that if the now held areas are "acquired" to be part of Mother Russia, Putin will use tactical nukes to "Escalate to De-escalate" and then cow the West to urge Ukraine to stop the war immediately however badly it is going for Russia. — ssu

This is a lovely piece of spin, it should get some sort of award...

Russia will cow the west into getting Ukraine to stop the war (despite all that famous Ukrainian agency we hear so much about). Holding a strong enough position to force the whole Western world to do their bidding (whilst still incompetently losing, of course!). Whereupon the West (who are obviously still barely involved in this war) will nonetheless stop the war (the one they're barely involved in), in Russia's favour (who will still somehow will have lost though).

Fantastic, just what we've all been waiting for. A Ukrainian victory (negotiated between Russia and NATO, who are barely involved).

Hyperbole seems the appropriate response for this low grade thread. :blush: — apokrisis

Hyperbole is absolutely the worst possible response in the world, there's literally no worse response, you couldn't think of a worse response if you tried. It's worse than murder.

Every analysis of Putin tells the same story. — apokrisis

In what world does you coming up with a handful of sources become 'every analysis'?

I also love how the assumption is that when someone disagrees with you they are simply uninformed. — Benkei

We live in a terrifying new world where one side has 'the facts' and the other 'disinformation' simply by fiat, and that such fiat happens to align with the interests of some of the most powerful actors in the global economy is apparently a coincidence.

I thought this comment I read in a interview recently was very pertinent to @Olivier5's absurdity, he's talking about Paul Mason, but the point is the same...

Paul Mason’s position is that if you say anything in public, particularly if you’re an academic, that aligns with what he calls Russian talking points or Kremlin talking points, then you must be silenced.

Some of this came out last week in leaked emails, where he’s allegedly talking about de-platforming people. He doesn't quite have the intellectual faculties to understand the implication of that. Virtually any criticism of Western foreign policy or mainstream media coverage is going to align in some way with Kremlin talking points.

He's basically saying you can no longer be critical of your own government. — Justin Schlosberg, professor of journalism at the University of Birbeck, and former Chair of the Media Reform Coalition

since the Russians started this war, it's worthwhile thinking about the conditions under which they could be forced or convinced to stop it. — Olivier5

Yet...

if you want to understand or to question why the war continues, ask that question to the belligerents. They are better placed to answer. — Olivier5

Your 'point' is as transparent as ever. Parrot Western mainstream media and deflect any criticism by transferring all responsibility to this amorphous group 'the Ukrainians' whom you've neither polled, nor surveyed, nor asked, but in whose hands you're happy to place unprecedented levels of firepower, barely traceable, for them to do with what they will.

EU citizens are welcome to demonstrate or argue against what the EU does, ie the EU sanctions or the EU support to Ukraine. But they are not the one deciding to fight or not, and to negotiate or not, or whether it's worthwhile to resist or not. — Olivier5

So by that token your comments about Russian military policy have been out of place. It is carried out by Russians and affects Ukrainians. Nothing to do with you, a matter only for Russians and Ukrainians to comment on.

One supposes that this counting as is the result of neural processes yet need not be located in any particular process. There need be nothing in common, perhaps, in the neural patterns that enable one to make a cup of tea and the neural process that enables one to order quality Russian Caravan from an online supplier. Yet both are to do with tea. — Banno

Yes, that's how I see it. The outcomes are 'put together' by an entirely different process ('social construction' in old money), so we'd have no reason at all to think they'd be the same neural networks associating all 'tea-related' things as would be the ones involved in carrying out tea-related interventions to their environment. The curation of 'tea-related' things after-the-facts, tends to be much more stable (even to the point of some researchers showing indications of specific neurons), whereas the the tea-related interventions are less discretely distributed. A classic example is snipping the dorsal and ventral perception streams. Subjects (baboons usually) will be able to manipulate objects functionally without problems, but may well have trouble in identification tasks. To use your example, they'd know how to make tea, but wouldn't be able to say such an activity might take place in tea-shop. The latter being something of a post hoc story, but stored quite discretely in specialised neural clusters, the former being more an 'anything that gets the job done' sort of system.

Apologies to everyone for the much shorter responses than your interesting questions deserve. I have a work commitment this week which will require more than the usual amount of my attention...

Yes, broadly it's (2). What I'm really saying is that language doesn't seem to me to be very much in the business of 'representing' anything at all so much as the business of manipulating hidden states. It obviously derives from a model of how those hidden states will respond (otherwise the action on them would be random), but I wouldn't, myself, expect to see very much by way of reflection in the language of those motivating models.

So to answer your second post (or just make my position even more confusing!) there's a difference between "there's a a kettle" and "the kettle is boiling" that is not found in the grammatical structure of predication. I see them as two different expressions for two different jobs, rather than see one as reflecting a hidden state and the second a predicating something of it (that same hidden state reflected by the former). Hidden states are whole and dynamic, linguistic entities are discrete and static. So linguistic entities can't really reflect hidden states, but I don't think that prevents them from being about hidden states, just that the 'aboutness' might be two-way (not just reflection but aspirational). "there's a kettle" might mean something like the intention that other's should use the word kettle for that which I model as such, whereas "the kettle is boiling" might be more intended to get people to stand away from the object and it wouldn't have really mattered if I'd said "the pot is boiling" instead.

As such, it's difficult to see any analysis of the truth of "the kettle is boiling" as being based on anything other than a post hoc assumption that the expression predicates something of the same "kettle" we have in mind when conducting this analysis.

So given that, from your description of "hidden states" -- I'd say these things are absolutely not connected. First we don't even have concepts with your neural model, that's sort of just "assumed" to ride along with the firing of neurons. And then with all the causal language being used "noumena" seems wholly innappropriate as a boundary condition for this discussion. I'd say this falls under "empirical psychology", so the transcendental conditions of knowledge won't effect what we have to say here even if we are Kantians. — Moliere

Great, thanks for the insight. I think my conversations with @Mww have moved along similar lines (the lack of overlap), but I can also see where there might be space for such a notion in our meta-theories. Hidden states themselves suffer from the same problem in that simply by positing them as causal, we have identified them (and so they're not really hidden). They can't really play a direct role in perception as such, but only in a meta-theory about perception. I can't look inside someone's brain and then look at my hidden-state-o-meter and see the connection, I can only put 'hidden states' as a place holder in my meta-model of how models are made.

I suppose the error theorist's task, then, is to lay out what discriminates a fantasy from a purposeful story -- "story" in the sense of our ability to parse the world into story form, ala "purposeful fiction". — Moliere

Yes. This kind of work (on social narratives and their function) is what I used to do my research on. It's a fascinating field - but then I would say that wouldn't I?

it is also evident, to me at least, that our language and how we conceive mentality does not match up, in any simple way, with this description. Now what? — Srap Tasmaner

Well... that's a massive question that deserves more time than I currently have for it. But... I think it leads us back to where I first interjected. If we're not conducting any kind of empirical investigation (nor constraining our models by the results of any such) then we're perhaps constructing an entity more like maths where axiomatic choices are made and consequences follow, but without any hooks in reality (as far as my limited understanding of maths goes). That's certainly as entertaining a pastime as any other, but it leaves us, much like maths, with judgements like 'elegance' or 'coherence' as our targets for a good model, rather than the more boring 'pragmatic utility' of the empirical investigation. All still fine so far, until... I aesthetically prefer my models to be pragmatic. My desire for a system to have pragmatic hooks into empirical sciences isn't dogmatic, it's aesthetic. I just like my theories that way. so any contribution I might make to the purely 'philosophical' constructions of how the world might be is going to end up that way whichever route we take to judging a theory's merit.

What I think we need to be careful about, is thinking the mismatch between a particular scientific model, on the one hand, and a philosophical one, on the other, indicates that one has not sufficiently slurped up the other yet, but it will. It's that "if all you have is a hammer" thing. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree. I think where we might differ is that I'd be more tempted to see the rogue philosophical position as a narrative, where you might have it more as an analytical truth?

"purposeful fictions" still contains the problematic "fiction"; I wonder if "narrative" would be better, leaping from non-symbolic to symbolic representation. Or perhaps "invention", we invent the kettle from the hidden state; but that loses something of the cooperative aspect. — Banno

I like 'narrative', but I've been told I use the word too often. I feel a renewed permission to revert to it now, though!

We must at some stage look for a bone of contention between us; It'll be something to do with the move from a neural net to a narrative. To my eye, building on Searle, at some stage there is a move from a hidden state to a narrative about a kettle, that has a logical form something like "This hidden state counts as a kettle"... — Banno

Even here though... I like '...counts as'. It covers a lot of what I was trying to get across to @fdrake in answering his questions above. The idea that speech is doing a job, in this case declarative - 'we'll treat this as a kettle'. It's declaring that any discrepancies we might have in resulting from whatever behaviours our neural networks are currently resulting in toward that hidden state, we should put them aside in favour of the more collaborative 'kettle'.

I believe there is a Kantian distinction between the "thing in itself" and noumena; the former is a purely formal or logical requirement to the effect that if there is something as perceived there must be a corresponding thing as it is in itself. .'Noumena' I take to signify the general hidden or invisible nature of what is affecting us pre-cognitively such as to manifest as perceptual phenomena. — Janus

Thanks. So 'noumena' might be closer to hidden states in that respect, but I'd be interested to hear what you think of what @Moliere says about the problem of causality. Hidden states are definitely considered causal.

We can get news and analysis just as events are progressing. We can get a survivor's account of Russian occupation days after it's been lifted. — SophistiCat

The duration of elapsed time between the events and the narrative created around them doesn't magically make bias disappear.

Neither you nor I are in the war, even those in it don't have an eagle eye view of the whole theatre.

Everything we hear is a filtered narrative. Without exception. The idea that the news, or literally any other source, provides us with some unbiased 'window on reality' is absurd.

What do you see as being a significant difference between the "hidden states" that give rise to our models or collective representations, and the noumena that are represented as phenomena? Or perhaps Isaac, if he agrees with you, can answer that question in a more informed way than you can. — Janus

I don't feel qualified to comment on the potential differences because I wouldn't claim to know very much about Kant's noumena. From a complete layman perspective though, Kant's noumena are often referred to as the thing-in-itself, yes? Taking that literally (perhaps erroneously, though) I think the difference would be in that hidden states do not posit any 'thing' at all, they are an informational construct, about data, not material composition. As such they can be an implication of a data model, whereas any thing-in-itself would be ontological? But as I say, I'm not sure as I don't have a deep understanding of noumena.

Isaac - would you actually agree that "you burn your hand if you touch the kettle" would be the same as ""you burn your hand if you touch the kettle" is true" though? — fdrake

Well, yes, to a point. Although the topic here is 'truth' I think the reason we've diverged so much is that the simple redundancy that there's nothing more to "P is true" than "P" tends to lead to an assumption that that's all there is to say on the matter of truth. Whereas, to quote Ramsey "there are interesting problems in the vicinity".

The issue of the degree to which (and implications thereof) external states constrain our use of language that tries to refer to them is just such a 'problem in the vicinity', in my opinion.

I see language as a tool, part of our suite of 'active states', which themselves from part of the Markov boundary, but (by necessity) active states are influenced only by internal states (if they weren't they wouldn't be active states, they'd be sensory states), so we have a chain of external states>sensory states>internal states>active states(language use).

If we accept that model, then the extent to which language mirrors external states is, it seems, not entirely dependant on sensory states, but rather on the intent of active states. To use an analogy with perception, I see language more like saccades than V1 modelling, part of the active state response, not the passive state reception.