the analogy was tailored. — Isaac

Naughty.

In chess one doesn't have the benefit of peer review, or even a chat with a couple of colleagues — Isaac

And all that's basically wrong, but I don't know that it matters.

expert opinion in the public domain is largely (if not wholly) past the stage of blunders in basic reasoning — Isaac

Probably?! But the blunder idea is not the main point anyway.

Here the social narrative (grandmasters playing tournament chess) ruled out a storyline which might have worked better. — Isaac

No, no, that's not it at all. For grandmasters (and some lesser players) the first handful of moves aren't normal moves on the board at all; it's a cryptic negotiation, like bidding in bridge, about what opening they're going to play and thus what kind of position. So they screw around a lot with the textbook move order that kids learn. I'm saying they were so caught up in this negotiation and deciding what sort of game each felt like playing under the circumstances that they essentially forgot these are also actual moves on the board.

The funny thing is that the Soviet-era term for this kind of mistake is "playing the programmed move", that is, following a script when you shouldn't have. (Funny because we program machines better than we do ourselves.)

I'm going to risk your polite wrath by suggesting that the 'fact of the matter' (whether the wrong move was a 'blunder') is itself a socially constructed post hoc story. — Isaac

GMs, some of them anyway, can be surprisingly forthcoming about their mistakes. There's not much point in trying to dissemble, since the facts are plain for everyone to see.

As another data point, David Bronstein argued for faster time controls (less time per move), decades before quick chess became common and respected, precisely on the grounds that it was a myth that slower games produced better quality chess. He would point to all the blunders in top-tier chess played at slow time controls as proof. (Mainly he wanted people to think of chess as a creative endeavor, rather than something that might conceivably be done perfectly.)

But, again, blunder is only part of the story. Narratives can help -- actually unclear, but I'm willing to let them in as "imaginative", "changing the narrative", that sort of thing -- or they can get in the way of analysis, is the rest. More or less.

((The part in the middle of your post I don't have anything to say about yet.))

It's an assumption about the audience, that's all. — Isaac

Proper reasoning is just the qualifying round, not the playoff. Sure, we can still disqualify contenders at the first round, but almost every serious contender has cleared that stage with ease. The role in a social narrative is the playing field on which the finals take place. — Isaac

This argument makes some sense, and maybe is relevant to the covid debate, though I'm thinking of the more general case.

But it seems to entirely miss the distinction between capability and performance. I used to be a tournament chess player. It is a fact that grandmasters make blunders. As you say, when a move looks wrong, maybe it's not the first explanation we reach for. (A trap? A speculative sacrifice?) But it's absolutely still on the table. Performance is inherently unpredictable, even before you consider outside factors. (I used to tell my gymnast daughters that training is about moving the range of probable performance, raising the floor and the ceiling, but that you still can't know what will happen at a meet.)

I can't find the reference but there's a great example of a grandmaster game where, through an apparently innocent transposition, white was actually hanging the exchange on move 3! But neither noticed -- they carried on with the usual shadow boxing GMs engage in for the first half dozen moves. Note that this also speaks to my point that no computer would have missed the blunder; ideology about the opening was interfering with actual analysis of the position on the board -- the narrative about what exactly they were doing. Neither player even got to the point of dismissing the possibility of blunder on reputation grounds (and there are stories of that); they just didn't see the position for what it was. Looking over the shoulders of amateurs, they would have though. (Skin in the game is a sound idea, despite Taleb's endorsement, but so is Robert Burns on lice.)

reasoning (by which I mean a set of thinking methods that are well-known to preserve or approach more true conclusions) is not redundant as an explanation of the differences between various people's conclusions. It's a necessary but not sufficient factor in the explanation. — Isaac

And I think we'd all agree with that under the heading of "human frailty".

I haven't read Noise yet. Have you looked at it? It seems like the natural approach to me. As I indicated in the last post, I used to spend a lot of time analyzing baseball, and there's an example from baseball that's a perfect fit here, the calls of balls and strikes by home-plate umpires. For years now, we've had data on where each pitch actually went, so you can analyze the performance of individual umpires, and of umpires as a group. You find a lot of noise and a lot of bias. (A machine would be more accurate and consistent, and there's been talk for a long time of switching to an "assisted" system somewhat like what's used in tennis.)

Here's one example I recall: umpires are, as a group, somewhat reluctant to make game-deciding strike calls. That is, when a called strike would decide the outcome of the game, then and there, umpires are slightly more likely to call a ball a pitch they would usually call a strike.

Suppose you want to explain why there is so much variation in a field that is supposed to have little variation, because it is supposed to be rule-governed; you would look for factors that would interfere with the consistent application of the rules. I could see many of the things you are wont to talk about slotting in there. It's not so far from the way Wittgenstein and Sellars talk about images and myths that philosophers rely upon without recognizing it.

But, perhaps unfairly, perhaps defensively, I always get the impression that you think there is no such process being interfered with, that all there is is my myth versus your image, that you can only reduce the influence of one myth by replacing it with another, that it's all noise and bias all the time and nothing else. Say it ain't so, Joe.

you would expect, especially if the brain/body was shutting down, that reality would be fading, not becoming more vivid. — Sam26

The brain does a whole lot of filtering of sensory input. If some of those filters start to fail...

So experts fall down on which theories they prefer, find more intuitively compelling, find less risky to throw their weight behind... etc. — Isaac

It's hard to disagree with a statement that ends with "etc." and I won't try. But I do disagree with the suggestion, which you constantly walk right up to, that there's nothing more to find but personal preferences for personal reasons, that not only is it all stories, it's all *just* stories.

I remember an argument I got into with a guy on Fangraphs (a sabermetrics site): guy had a model that predicted the strikeout rate of pitchers and was highlighting pitchers he believed had been lucky so far that season (and were thus overvalued by fantasy players). I suggested that another explanation might be something that was not in his model and that was hard to measure, like sequencing or deception. His response floored me: it couldn't be that because if there were such an effect it would show up in the data. That's the wrong answer. Something is in the data; the question is whether it's stochastic and how we could know. (Hence the obsession on Fangraphs with sample size.)

I'm getting to the point. There are statistical methods you know better than I that can give you an idea how much of the variation in opinion can be explained by your social roles and stories model. I assume that value is something less than 1. My question is, how do you know that what's left definitely isn't reasoning?

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

So the variable that matters is how hard the flaw is to spot, not how many experts spot it. — Isaac

This argument seems like it makes sense, but how exactly is "how hard the flaw is to spot" defined? As I understand it, you want this to be the independent variable; it is not defined as the percentage of experts within a population that miss it. But that's pretty weird because, on the one hand, "spotting" is a concept that implies the gaze of an expert, and, on the other hand, the percentage of the expert population that misses it tracks exactly how hard it is to spot. They're equivalent, aren't they?

Now, I'm the first to admit that my stats fu is weak, but I think the argument you'd rather be making is that we don't know enough about the problem to know what sample size we need to be confident in our conclusion. Maybe only one in x engineers will spot the mistake, and so far you've asked 5. Is 5 enough? Dunno. Maybe x is 2, maybe x is 20.

It's an interesting analogy, but I'm having trouble thinking of any conceivable use for it. If we actually did stuff this way (instead of what experts actually do, learn from each other's mistakes) then we would collect data that would help us estimate x. We would not leave ourselves in the position of having absolutely no idea what its value might be.

Pick any one you like. I could have added a lot more.

I read it when it came out, listening to Sonic Youth on cassette. Ah, cyberpunk days...

What is the difference between having a brain and a body but no mind, and having a brain and a body and a mind?

Mind requires brain and body for sure. But that doesn't also mean that mind is brain/body. You can't jump to that conclusion. — dimosthenis9

Wouldn't dream of it. Brain and body are, as you say, necessary but not sufficient conditions for mind. Is something else necessary? Will I have a mind after I have died?

There simply isn't a mechanism whereby the agreement of a majority of one's peers could affect the likelihood of a theory being right. — Isaac

Not a mechanism, no, not in the sense that what someone else thinks has a causal bearing on whether what you think is true. (There's actually stuff about that -- can't quite place it.)

But from a simplistic population point of view, why not? Why can't we be happy to tell the story of science this way: 99 guys believed in phlogiston and 1 didn't; smart money was that he was wrong, but it turns out he was right. Probability isn't destiny. The unlikely-to-be-right, unlike the impossible-to-be-right, can, and now and then should, turn out to be right.

I think what you're saying is that there is a better way to assess those likelihoods than just counting heads, and that's fine. Better than fine. But the important thing is that your likelihood function be properly calibrated, right? There are probabilities between 0 and 1, and if you think your model shouldn't leave room for the unlikely to turn out to be right, you're doing it wrong. The question is whether the unlikely turns out to be right as often as you predicted it would, neither more nor less.

They stop existing too. But what exactly does that prove? — dimosthenis9

Oh, I don't know that anyone's proving anything here...

It does seem to me though that my voice is a property of me; is it conceivable that I could still have this property after I have died?

I don't think we'll ever have herd immunity for it the way we do with measles. — frank


That's my thought. I'm still trying to find the current level of herd immunity the experts say we're at globally, but no luck yet. — Merkwurdichliebe

My understanding was that herd immunity, if it was ever a genuine possibility, is in the rear-view mirror now, and that SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic to the human population, like a handful of other coronaviruses. That might mean annual covid shots, or might mean eventually catching covid is catching a cold. In the meantime, the vaccine is for reducing illness and death and to some degree transmission.

If we got vaccines that really conferred immunity, then herd immunity would be on the table again.

Many have voted for a deep problem being one that touches on something fundamental. (, , indirectly -- if metaphysics is fundamental, indirectly, maybe -- if that explains why the impact of an answer would be so great).

@Banno and @Hermeticus both note that questions we never quite answer are the deep ones. @T Clark and @TheMadFool make related points, that there can be problems or tasks where we feel we are out of our depth, or in over our heads, either unable to answer or at least finding that our usual ways of solving a problem don't work.

@Joshs is the only one to suggest that depth may not be a very helpful way of classifying problems, and suggests "intimacy" instead.

I am genuinely surprised no Wittgensteinians showed up to say that there are no deep problems.

@Joshs answer I don't quite have a handle on, but I have a bad interpretation of it that might be useful: if we set out to define what we mean by "fundamental" we might naturally arrive at something like a dependency tree. But what are the nodes in this tree? Concepts? Issues? Beliefs? Problems?

It can't be problems (or questions) because that would suggest a dependency like "to answer b, you need first to answer a"; if answering simple questions is dependent on answering deep, hard questions, the simpler questions are at least slightly more unanswerable than the deeper ones. Maybe that's wrong though. Maybe it's only that if you had an answer for a then b would take care of itself. Unclear.

Concepts might be a better candidate, but then we're not saying a question is deep if answering it requires the most fundamental concepts, because everything does, everything is dependent on them; instead we might say depth is not dealing with a lot of dependent concepts, but passing right by those nodes on the tree and heading for questions the answer to which only uses nodes close to the root.

Which brings me to my bad interpretation of @Joshs. The tree image suggests there are a lot of steps between where we start, out here at the leaves, perhaps, and the answers we seek, near the root; @Joshs's idea of intimacy actually does look like a claim that we can instead do valuable work right here within a step or two of where we are. He could even say, maybe there is hierarchical tree structure here, but we needn't peg value to depth, to distance from where we are.

I also want to come back to this:

I think what we mean with deep philosophical problems are questions, with no definite answer, which would have an enormous impact on how we perceive and think about the world. — Hermeticus

Sometimes mathematicians will speak of "deep" results, theorems that show connections that are surprising and illuminating. I remember being entranced as a youngster when I first saw $e^{{\pi}i} = -1$. How could $e$ and ${\pi}$ be related like that? It was mind-boggling. The proof of Fermat's last theorem pulled together several branches of mathematics that as an undergrad you might not expect to be related. That's a deep result. It might change the way you think about mathematics.

I also want to make one more nod to the experience of depth. We all know the joke about looking where the light is best. As you move farther from the available light, you might begin to experience depth, the depth of shadow and obscurity. As you go deeper into a cave, the light coming in from the cave's mouth is less and less helpful in finding your way around. It's always Wittgenstein: the general form of a philosophical problem is, "I don't know my way around here." What's more, my usual way of finding my way around here -- sight -- isn't working; I not only need to find my way, I need first to find a way to find my way. Is that depth? (And to pull these two paragraphs together: deep in the cave, you might discover that this cave actually connects to another cave you know, the mouth of which is miles away.)

(Bring a torch! My limited experience with real math matches that. To prove a theorem in topology, say, you build some really specialized sort of set or space or transformation -- your torch -- and then you send it down into the cave and it lights up your surroundings for you, shows you exactly how things stand. That suggests that philosophical problems might be solvable with a sort of Deleuzean, or at least pragmatic, concept craftsmanship.)

What happens, when I die, to my voice, my gait, my verbal tics, my habits? My interests and passions? My duties? My laziness?

STFU Prishon.

identifying bullshit relies on identifying a difference between what is true and what someone believes. — Banno

That's identifying falsehood.

I'd lean toward taking bullshit as speaking without warrant, and I don't need truth to judge that.

Meh. I gave you the answer in the fourth post. Everything after that is quibbling — Banno

Evidently your answer isn't as much help as you think it is.

Sorry, what I was trying to ask was whether Collingwood is any help with this: some people use "fact" to mean a state of affairs that does or did obtain; others seem to mean our descriptions of such things. (It seems a little easier to convince people to use "true" only for propositions, but "the truth" is still out there (heh) in the wild, as a phrase.) I've been trying to go around the whole issue, or dissolve the issue, or something, so I was just curious.

What do we make of Collingwood here saying "ascertain" rather than, say, "establish"?

And how many of those die from the virus, Xtrix? Virtually none. — Bartricks

I think this is a valid point, so far as it goes. The vaccine does not immunize you against infection, just reduces your chances substantially, but the evidence is also strong that it reduces the severity and duration of the illness.

But since uptake of the vaccine has been relatively slow in the United States, there is still a large portion of the population the virus can spread through essentially unchecked. There may have been a window, earlier on, for getting enough of the population vaccinated quickly that the virus would have much less opportunity for reproduction -- herd immunity -- but that window seems to have closed. Since the virus still has a steady supply of new hosts to spread to, it is continuing to mutate, and that's trouble. I believe several prominent virologists and epidemiologists (maybe Andrew Pollard?) have expressed a concern that the virus may yet throw up a variant that it is even more effective at infecting the vaccinated. And I see no reason to assume that we won't end up fighting a variant that causes more severe illness among the vaccinated -- though that's admittedly speculation on my part, and I don't want to lean too heavily on dangers we might face. On top of all that, it is known that resistance to coronaviruses fades over time. It's still there, but the immune response seems to be somewhat less robust many many months after exposure or vaccination.

All of which is to say it is more than paternalistic concern for the well-being of the unvaccinated that leads genuine experts to want as many people as possible to get vaccinated. The longer the enemy is in the field, changing as it reproduces, the harder the enemy is to fight. A lot of this is about timing.

Also, I don't know how many people in here know about that term/expression. — Alkis Piskas

Roughly, everyone except you.

That is appreciably more work!

I don't know. It's an odd thing, the physical limitation. The number of possible chess games, for instance, is clearly a large but finite number. I used to hear that the number was larger than the number of atoms in the known universe. (No idea how anyone figured that out.) But playing through every possible game -- and finally figuring out if chess is a draw or white wins! -- is something that, as they say in the theory of computation, Zeus could do. (Unlike counting the real numbers, say.)

I suppose one way to approach the simple question of whether there is an exact number of leaves in your state would be to take just one tree -- a nice small one! -- and count the leaves. You'll get a number. And then you argue that the total number is the sum of the numbers you would get for each tree by doing the same. You can't get them, there are just two many physical obstacles, but you can prove that a single tree does have an exact number of leaves at a given moment, and other trees are like this one in the respects that matter, therefore they will all have an exact number of leaves.

And as @Olivier5 pointed out, there are sound statistical techniques for estimating this sort of thing, if for some reason you need an actual number. My simple little argument only shows that there's nothing incoherent -- to me, anyway -- about talking about such a number we'll never be able to know.

Is there something I'm missing?

Insofar as the framework business is playing a role here, it's obviously in how we define tree, leaf, leaf of a tree (so not the leaves of vines climbing on the tree), state boundaries, how counting works, blah blah blah. There's a lot, but I think all of it together is consistent with treating "number of leaves on all the trees in my state" as theoretical quantity whose value we happen not to be able to determine.

Need two criteria first, for "in the yard" and "blade". If it's bounded by sidewalks, maybe, that's your first one. Maybe length for the second, whatever. Without those, there's nothing to do. If you have those, the only tricky part is working through an irregularly arranged collection like this, and the usual trick is to just go by adjacency and mark what you've done so you don't get lost. (You could count the number of spaces on a paint-by-number this way.) Marking would also allow you to work in parallel with many others to speed up the task.

If I were smart I could come up with a design for a machine to do it, but the low-tech way should work. It'll just take a while.

Problem?

How come?

That's his problem. I think we can talk coherently about things we have no hope of knowing. (How tall was Socrates?)

And one way of treating it as a factual question, not necessarily the only one, or the way a philosopher might.

But is it inaccessible in principle, or only as a practical matter?

A religious framework makes gods appear — DanLager

It makes the question of a god's existence intelligible. Religious people will tell you that when they pray they can feel God's presence. So there's a practice that helps them answer a question that counts as factual for them.

Countering that with "no you didn't" isn't particularly effective. If you want to convince someone that their religious experience is not what they think it is, you have to offer them a different framework, and indeed people sometimes come to see their own experiences in a different light.

Look at creationism. At some point they figured out they weren't making much progress just disagreeing with the top line claims of biologists and paleontologists, so they started attacking radio-carbon dating. Gotta take on the whole framework, and that's a step in that direction.

@Olivier5 gave a solid example.

I don't have a theory to offer, but I'd think we're looking for a battery of concepts with how those concepts are related and practices for applying those concepts. Anything from language-games to astrophysics.

For everyday life, there are candidates like Sellars's "manifest image" or folk psychology, but everything's muddled and open to debate. Sellars, for instance, talks about the manifest image updating itself selectively to keep up with the times, but it's still fundamentally different from the "scientific image".

I would hate to end up now in a discussion of incommensurability. Like I said, not offering a theory, just some thoughts and it seems plain to me that fact claims have to fit in with a whole battery of other concepts, beliefs, commitments, practices. If those are all presupposed, we get to argue about whether something's a fact; when those are not shared, or sufficiently shared, we talk past each other or get into conceptual muddles. (Like whether Everest has a height.)

Absolutely. And though the conflict is actually between frameworks, it might be waged as a contest between facts.

(Like the priest who says to the vicar, "Why are we fighting? We both work for the same Guy. So you go forth and teach His teachings in your way, and I'll go forth and teach His teachings in His.")

For the conflict between frameworks, I got nuthin'.

It does not make them less factual. Just because all facts (observations) happen within a certain theoretical framework does not imply that they are not useful as facts, that you can't rely on when making decisions within this framework. — Olivier5

Exactly what I was saying, yes. I was relativizing facts, I guess, but I think fact-within-framework is the only kind we have.

Here's another stab at what I've been trying to get at: within a given framework, there will be questions that count as questions of fact and ones that don't. There's no super-general framework where everything is a question of fact. It's shockingly easy to misuse part of a framework and think you're entitled to facts when you're not (either because you haven't brought along enough of the framework for the fact-question to work, or because you're trying to shove a piece of one framework into another).

In my front-yard example, you get to ask exactly how many blades of grass there are if you've already settled what counts as being in the front yard and what counts as a blade of grass. That is, if you have in place a framework for which that's a factual question. That doesn't make it a factual question in every framework, and you don't get to assume that frameworks that generate facts where you want them trump other frameworks; all you can say is that this framework does what you want.

For me, for example, that there is another planet in our galaxy with humanoid creatures living on it is either a fact or it is not, regardless of whether we can discover the truth of the matter. — Janus

What if you can't even imagine being able to discover the truth of the matter? We can imagine an extraordinary spaceship that would allow us to visit every planet in the galaxy, one after another, in a couple days, and we're pretty sure we would be able to recognize humanoid critters as such when we arrived on each of them. Maybe that's all we need to talk of their existing or not as fact, even if it's not practically within our ability to establish it. We could even count them.

But then there's "How many blades of grass are there in my front yard?" Seems like a simple but terribly impractical counting problem, but is "my front yard" clearly circumscribed? If it's not, no matter how quickly and carefully we count, there's no fact of the matter here. Is what counts as "a blade" clearly defined? If not, same problem. Sometimes questions like this do have imaginable but not practical answers and sometimes they don't.

I rather think a model, as such, should be a definitive representation of something, composed of a multiplicity of conceptions, as opposed to a mere caricature, which will always have the fewer. — Mww

This I don't understand. All models are wrong, and by design not definitive. They're all caricatures.

This morning it seems obvious that my little model of modeling is inherently static -- which I caught but ignored when I said it can't be kept up-to-date -- but that means it's literally a picture not a model; we could pretend it's a snapshot, a momentary state of a running model, and maybe that's better than nothing. A picture is worth a thousand words; it's maybe even worth a thousand lines of code.

It seemed to me that the most important word in this:

Just YOU. The person I am replying to at the moment I am writing these lines. YOU is the person himself, his identity, the human being, a living unit. It is very concrete, as far as the language is concerned as well as a reality. There's no "emergent phenomena" involved! — Alkis Piskas

is the word "living". You can only talk to whoever you're talking to while they're living.

Of course you are not your body, because your body could also be the inanimate thing lying on the floor once you're dead. We who remember you will still call it "Alkis's body", even though there's no Alkis anymore, just the body. There's only an Alkis while Alkis is alive, and that means while Alkis's body is a living thing. This is generally what people have in mind when they say, however clumsily it has to be said in our language, that Alkis is an emergent phenomenon.

a living unit — Alkis Piskas

And if we he were not living? What sort of interaction could you have with his YOU?

typo!