[Emphasis added.]It is clear that what makes Fourth of July oration humbug is not fundamentally that the speaker regards his statements as false. Rather, just as Black’s account suggests, the orator intends these statements to convey a certain impression of himself. He is not trying to deceive anyone concerning American history. What he cares about is what people think of him. He wants them to think of him as a patriot, as someone who has deep thoughts and feelings about the origins and the mission of our country, who appreciates the importance of religion, who is sensitive to the greatness of our history, whose pride in that history is combined with humility before God, and so on.
The hedgehog and the fox? — Srap Tasmaner
I take as an indicator of comprehension, the ability to simplify and explain. — Hanover
Chess provides a clear example, as usual: there's a saying among masters that the move you want to play is the right move, even if it seems impossible. This is intuition... — Srap Tasmaner
To simplify, it must be a story because stories are what happens in real life. — Hanover
The complicator keeps it abstract without the ability to fully explain it, either because he's just poor at anticipating what his audience doesn't understand, or more commonly, he doesn't fully understand what he's talking about
A chess master's intuition would seem by definition to be something that the CM can't put into words — wonderer1
I can write paragraphs about this but I doubt anyone wants to read that. — Srap Tasmaner
Back in the early days of AI, Herbert Simon did a lot of work on chess and concluded that intuition is in some sense a myth, that it is just experience, and chess masters have vastly more experience than amateurs, have a huge stock of positions and patterns committed to memory and can draw on those to evaluate positions, find variations and so on. — Srap Tasmaner
Do you think it might be worth looking deeper than "just experience"? — wonderer1
I think everything you posted is right, and comports with what I understand of the two systems model; thus we can continue to use the word intuition just to mean something like very fast, largely unconscious, habitual thinking, problem solving, recognition, and so on. — Srap Tasmaner
Now my impression, as someone who's studied a bit about human mind/brain issues, is that it's highly reasonable to think that there are variations in brain organization that bias people towards one of these perspectives or the other. (Obviously there are social factors as well that play a huge role in which perspective one takes, and there are likely factors of brain organization that influence the degree to which a person adopts the view of those around them, or strikes out on their own in searching for the truth. It's all very complicated with regard to the nature/nurture question.)
Anyway, one way of looking at how people's minds work differently is, looking at whether they have a bias towards intuitive (pattern recognizing) cognitive processes, or logical thought. Now both aspects of human mental processing can be of great value, and both aspects can produce misleading results. And I'm inclined to think an ideal is to use both intuition and logic in a synergistic way, but anyway, that's somewhat tangential.
Being autistic, it is definitely the case that I can be poor at anticipating what other people will and won't understand, at least until I've gotten to know the person somewhat. — wonderer1
All you say may be true, that you fully comprehend without having an easy way of showing that to others by reducing your thoughts to conveyable language, but would not that still make you a complicator under your use of the term? — Hanover
I imagined a complicator or simplifier to be someone who offers information to others for clarification purposes, but if you're imagining those terms to describe a person in terms of what goes on internally for their self-clarification, then that would be a difference in how I considered the terms you presented. — Hanover
And in that model nothing is synchronized enough to be called 'the present'. If you see a bird flying in the sky near the sun, the light that bounced off the bird hit it a fraction of a second ago, but the rays coming for the Sun left it eight minutes ago. That is, what you perceive as contemporary is not – the Sun might have suddenly ceased to exist four minutes ago, long before that bird even got near you. Your perception 'the bird flies when the sun shines' would be false in that case.
The same goes for all your senses, of course. If you step on something sharp, you feel it about 0.3 s after the fact. If you think that you have heard something at the exact same moment - you did not, as your auditory impulses are also delayed, but less than touch. And of course both stimuli occurred even earlier, before they were processed by your brain. What you perceive as 'the present' is a jumble of of various occurences that have already happened at different times. 'Reality itself' it is not. — Jabberwock
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. — Albert Einstein
Which is almost identical to the original Ockham's, entities should not be multiplied without necessity. (And the simplified version: all else being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the best -- or something like that.) — Srap Tasmaner
Missing the forest for the trees is a real thing, but a forest without trees is a castle in the air, if you don't mind mixed metaphors. — Srap Tasmaner
Here's a more controversial example because it speaks to methodology. Timothy Williamson tells a story about explaining the Gettier problem to an economist colleague, who was really puzzled by all the fuss: "So there's a counterexample, so what? Models always have counterexamples." — Srap Tasmaner
When Capablanca played chess, someone said, it was like he was speaking his native language. — Srap Tasmaner
By the way, it's your model so I don't know what to do with this, but it might be worth bearing in mind that something that is invariably unarticulated might not be inarticulable, but simply not hooked up to the speech-producing system. — Srap Tasmaner
This discussion has gotten me thinking back over a set of related experiences I've had.
Around 15 years ago I had designed some logic, recognizing its efficiency compared to what my employer had done in the past. Sometime later my boss was asking about the functionality of that bit of logic, and checking to make sure I had done it in the approved historical way. I told him I hadn't done it the historical way, and he asked me to explain how I had done it. I didn't have a good way to explain it to him except by drawing a schematic. I'm guessing he realized fairly quickly that I wasn't going to be able to convey an understanding of the design as quickly as he could develop his own understanding from looking at the schematic. So he had me bring him the schematic. I gave a brief explanation of what various submodules do, and he looked at it for a minute or so, and said we should have gotten a patent on that.
I don't really know what it was he saw in the schematic but I suspect it is things that I wouldn't recognize until much later. My boss was one of those guys who went to university studying physics when he was 15 years old, and was the star of the math team even though he wasn't a mathematics student.
I think now, that he likely recognized a mathematical elegance to the design which, at least in some regards, I did not recognize at that time. There is a fairly simple mathematical equation which conveys the gist of the logical process occurring in the design, and I think that I had an intuitive recognition of the mathematical elegance 'driving' me to design the logic as I did. However, I didn't think in those terms when doing the design.
As best I can recall, when designing the logic I focused on a design which would efficiently use 'space' in an FPGA as well as DSP clock cycles, while doing the job the logic was intended to achieve with much greater accuracy than we had any practical use for. As I said, I think in retrospect, that intuitive subconscious recognition of the mathematical elegance played a role in what I designed. However, I don't think I can say that I consciously recognized the relevant mathematical equation. I would say it was more like I trusted the part of my mind that did recognize the elegance, even though that part of my mind wasn't able to 'speak into consciousness' except in a vague way motivating me to design what I did.
Anyway, I really didn't start this thread to talk about me. I greatly appreciate the way you've gotten me to think about things in ways I haven't before.
It may very well be that there are activities complex enough that no human is ever able to give an analytical account of their actions while so engaged -- just too many variables, too many feedback loops, and so on. — Srap Tasmaner
But there's another category where people believe there is a kind of judgment that cannot be reduced to analysis even in principle. — Srap Tasmaner
Finally, a question I had, that came from looking into Capablanca a bit... Wikipedia says, '...Bobby Fischer described him as possessing a "real light touch".'
I'd like to hear your perspective, as speculative as it may be, on what Bobby Fischer might have meant by that. — wonderer1
On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.
I probably haven't quite answered your question, about the "light touch." Maybe I have. — Srap Tasmaner
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