Spot on! -- Owen
On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 6:29 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Nick to Owen: > > ... > > Yet, just as you could never get the world to > > agree that emotionality was just the number of fecal boluses left by a > rat > > in an open field maze, you will never get the world to agree that > entropy is > > just the output of a mathematical formula. They might say, "that is a > > useful measure of entropy, but that is not what it IS." To put the > matter > > more technically, no matter how much reliability a definition buys you, > it > > still does not necessarily buy you validity. The same point might be > made > > about f=ma. (I fear being flamed by Bruce, at this point, but let it > go.) > > Non fingo hypotheses and all that. One could, like a good positivist, > > simply assert that a thing IS that which most reliably measures it, but > few > > people outside your field will be comfortable with that, and everybody, > even > > including your closest colleagues, will continue to use the word in some > > other sense at cocktail parties. It was my position that the lab bench > > meaning and the cocktail meaning have some common core that we have some > > responsibility to try to find. > > This is a very pure example of the semantic drift that drives me crazy, > in that "the lab bench meaning" was the *first* meaning: the word DID NOT > EXIST before it was coined (in its adjectival form, in German, by composing > badly-understood-by-its-coiner morphemes from Greek, by the physicist > Clausius) > in 1865. Tait (an early knot theorist and somewhat of a religious nut, as > well > as a thermodynamic theorist) brought it into English three years later, but > changed its sign (more or less). By 1875 Maxwell had changed it back to > what > it now is. During this period of time the concept expressed by "entropy" > became clearer, as did the whole field of thermodynamics, and eventually a > good mathematical formalism for it developed--"good" in the sense that it > "made sense" of results from "the lab bench" by reducing downwards (if I > have your phrase right? I dunno, maybe upwards, or both ways?) so as to > (1) define "entropy" of a macroscopic system in terms of the statistical > behavior of the ensemble of microscopic entities participating in that > system, and (2) facilitate calculations (some exact, some asymptotic) > of the "entropy" (and similar thermodynamic quantities) which (3) often > agreed with "lab bench" observations. > > When Shannon came along to study signals and noise in communication > channels, he had the insight to see that *the same mathematical formalism* > could be applied. He did *not* have the insight (or dumb luck) of > Clausius, > so he overloaded the already-existing Common English word "information" > with > a new, technical, mathematical meaning. *That* rather quickly allowed > visionaries, hucksters, and cocktail partiers to talk about "information > theory" without understanding much or any of its technicalities. It also > (I suspect; but here I am arguing ahead of what data I happen to have > around, > so this may merely be my default Enraged Bloviator talking) encouraged the > same gangs of semantic vandals to appropriate the word "entropy" to their > various malign uses. (For what it's worth, the OED doesn't have citations > of non-specialist uses of thermodynamic "entropy" until the mid 1930s--by > Freud [as translated by a pair of Stracheys, not by Jones] and a Christian > apologist; non-specialist uses of information-theoretic "entropy" appear > to hold off until the mid 1960s.) > > So, to whatever extent the vernacular ("cocktail party") meaning(s) of > entropy has or have a common core with the technical ("lab bench") > meaning(s), it is because that core REMAINS FROM THE TECHNICAL MEANING > after the semantic shift, and not because (as I *think* you mean to > imply in your sentence containing the word "positivist") there is > some ("common core") concept which BOTH the technical AND the > vernacular meanings are INDEPENDENT ATTEMPTS to "reliably measure". > If "we have a responsibility to try to find" anything, I think it > is to try to find *why* some people insist on (1) glomming onto bits > of jargon with very well-defined in-domain meanings, (2) ignoring much > or all of those meanings while re-applying the jargon (often without > ANY definition to speak of) in a new domain, while (3) refusing to > let go of some (or all) of the Impressive Consequences derived in > the original domain by derivations that (4) depend on the jettisoned > definitions (and the rest of the technical apparatus of the original > domain). > > Grrrh. > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >
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