Awesome! I love it when the thread forks but so clearly maintains its pre-fork core.
The pragmatism of truth-flexible power analytics is revealed, perhaps, in Krugman's "taking sides". It's clear that partisanship (think Pelosi) need not involve a total loss of non-partisan credibility. Some of us, even though we may *want* to have deep conversations with various "enemies" in the hopes we can lessen the bloodshed, in the end any continuum distance between any 2 positions will eventually be discretized. We can either discretize it purposefully, as *engineers*. Or we can have it stumble into a discretization haphazardly. In the Krugman context, he disjointly lumps all the righties into a group, despite their intra-group variation. In Eric's context, a theory champion (maybe Bohmian mechanics or Thomas Gold's hot biosphere or even alchemy or somesuch) circumscribes a "them" by which to contrast an "us". (Robert Rosen was famously bitter about being ignored or accused of vitalism, for example.) This discretization is model simplification at its best. These champions can be viewed as sacrificing themselves for the greater good. They adopt a position and advocate it in spite of their own inner homunculus shouting at them that they should be more reasonable ... take criticism as constructive and respond in metered and polite language, stick to the facts, be willing to change one's mind. But by making these (purposeful) discretizations, they are simplifying the domain and, thereby, making potential 80/20 solutions *feasible*. People like me, who remain on the fence about everything, skeptical even of our own beliefs, don't move the world. The champions who commit (and are eventually revealed as wrong to lesser or greater extent) move the world. So, this is the sense in which commitment, persuasion, and power is a more pragmatic way to parse the world. It's hard for me to imagine someone *not* being moved by, e.g. Greta Thunberg's, partisan, impassioned language. But I also believe that power can be an *indirect* measure of truth. And if you allow that, then it seems reasonable that power structures are the higher order things like fixed points, phases, attractors, etc. The study of these more global systemic phenomena (Power) *leads* to facility with the more localized mechanisms (Truth). Those of us who try to restrict their talk to Truth and facts are *preemptively* closing themselves off to Truth and fact. E.g. an alchemist who thinks of alchemy as True will be trapped in her misinterpretation for longer than an alchemist who thinks of alchemy as Power. I.e. what can I *do* with trickle-down economics versus what can I *know* with trickle-down economics. As long as the focus is on what you can do with your model, you're more open to doffing that model when it fails you. So, to sum up, I also agree (in the sense of his "choosing sides") with Krugman because simplification is good engineering. And I *think* I agree with Eric that what we need from any self-professed Pragmatist, is a way of constructing higher order structures out of (putative) lower order structures so that we can *be* pragmatic at any scale and have ways of navigating across scales. The Standard Model does this quite well, I think. And a commitment to it, in a shut-up-and-calculate sense, is very postmodern and pragmatic. Would it be possible to do something similar with Social Justice issues? One point made in this video <https://youtu.be/N230wLWjwEU> implies that we can. The idea being that our incarceration nation is more a result of minimum sentencing laws than other causes. This is power analysis. But it's not not relativism run amok. If there is a bottom-turtle, atomic lexicon of truth bricks underlying it, it's waaaaay down there. And we don't need to commit to unjustified hypotheses about those (distant and putative) bricks in order to make good progress way up here and in the meantime. We just need to stop obsessing over our desire for direct access to THE Truth and allow for a path toward Truth via Power. Or, e.g., if people think NIPS is offensive, just change the damned name and avoid tweeting about it. 8^) On 12/26/19 10:39 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > In spite of this review, I still agree with Krugman. > > https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/review-paul-krugman-arguing-with-zombies/603052/ On 12/26/19 10:33 AM, Eric Smith wrote: > I am relieved you brought up the Truth/Power bundling, Glen, because I wanted > to but was too much of a coward to do it. > > There is a style of speech that I hear often, which goes something like “It > doesn’t matter what so-and-so says, or thinks he means. He is just claiming > he owns truth, but I know he is just an entitled > group-group-group-assignment, motivated only to exploit or oppress [fill in > whoever the good people are].” My inner translator translates that to my > language as “The only thing I care about in life is the fight by which I have > constructed my identity, and in my world, there are only two kinds of people: > those who are in my army and the enemy. There are no non-combatants.” I > know my cartoon above is excessive and over-simple, but I may as well admit I > have become primed to hear it through time and the accumulation of conflicts, > and I can think of a few good exemplars (specific exchanges with specific > people over the years) where I think it is fair to say that is really what is > there to be heard. > > The problem is, that kind of conduct precludes any other conversation about > anything, including most conversations aimed at intellectual clarity, > distinctions, etc. Basically, you can talk to that person if you are talking > about or some other way engaged in that person’s fight. > > To me it is not hard to understand that there is a difference between what > one is trying to think about, and what one may be motivated to care about. > Certainly, there are some who are so totally consumed by compulsions that > they can’t do it ever and so can’t see a distinction, but I think most of us > in ordinary life are comfortable with the premise that both can exist, and > are capable to some extent of knowing when we drift from one to the other. > Not ideal, and not reliable, but enough that we can see a reason to have both > categories. I assume most postmodern philosophers are complex enough to be > capable of parsing such distinctions. Hence if they choose to entirely > conflate them, it feels to me like dishonesty, and often the specific > dishonesty of a resentment motive (at the core; it accretes lots of other > vanities and problems as it grows institutional.) > > This is what I find unpleasant about Rorty. If he had labeled himself a > social critic, I would have been happy to support him (and in that role, I > _do_ support much of what he says and I find it insightful and important). > But his delight in hoping he is destroying something that somebody once > esteemed (here, the concept of truth, though I have watched him dance like a > Stephen King monkey in attacking Weinberg’s efforts to describe some things > about how science is practiced) is to me just the posture of the person who > is mainly motivated by resentment of whatever he construes as power. > > > My comments above are oblique to your main point below about Truth and Power, > and the postmoderns being pragmatist, but I think it connects back > eventually. > > I have been thinking a bit about pragmatism in the context of a different > conversation, which (for reasons not relevant to the thread here) have me > thinking there should be a formal version of the pragmatist position that has > technical questions in common with ideas we pursue in statistical mechanics, > error correction, and things of that kind. Where I want to get to is that we > can all admit to the probable error of all positions on the short term, > without concluding thereby that they must reflect claims to power and > therefore we can be power-monists, without needing to have both truth and > power as primitives. (I am not branding you as endorsing such a position, > but I read you as saying that is where the postmoderns want to be, which is > also how I read them). What I want to claim is that that postmodern position > is very far from what I would think of the main conceptual center of > pragmatism. > > The idea being very lowbrow. Suppose we are willing to work within the space > of concepts and models that physicists have been using for a century, and not > worry about deconstructing every word in every sentence in case they might > all be hallucinating. I want to make claims about structure _within_ that > space of models and concepts. > > We routinely talk about a generating process for some stochastic dynamic, and > the process has values for some parameters. (Rates for a chemical reaction, > biases for flipped coins, whatever.). We then talk of samples from the > process, of estimators computed for the samples, and of how the estimators > are distributed. In this lowbrow world, it is unproblematic for a problem > with a continuous state space, that a finite sample estimator has > measure-zero probability to coincide with the exact value of the parameter in > the generating process, but that the generating parameter can still give the > value of a stable central tendency for samples. We care, then, about which > estimators are unbiased, which estimation protocols converge with large > sample sizes, etc. All stuff that everybody on this list knows backward and > forward. > > Things become interesting when there starts to be considerable mechanistic > complexity and hierarchy, control relations, feedbacks, etc., so that it > becomes _very_ hard to chase through the convergence properties of finite > samples. Hence we see that the biosphere appears to have certain properties > stable on geological timescales even though many other things change, but can > we justify that impression, or derive from some kind of “first principles” > whether a sensible model for the biosphere would be stable in that way? So > far, not. > > The problem of making pragmatism a well-formed position feels like it should > have much of that character. Scientific inference (also everyday inference) > is very much “theory-full” in Leslie Valiant’s sense in Probably > Approximately Correct. The theories are controlling systems over how we get > rich interpretations from poor observations. Sometimes the weight of > observation can nudge a theory Bayes-wise in a better direction. Sometimes a > bad theory leads to systematic misinterpretation of facts for a very long > time (Alchemy, trickle-down, one could go on seemingly forever with > examples). The components have only each other and their couplings with > whatever we posit is a “real world” to stabilize them, and whereas we > tautologically consider the “real world” to be whatever is consistent by > virtue of being what it is, we should take as assumptions that all the > components of the interpretive system can be subject to errors in a > monstrously more difficult version of the way sample estimators can be wrong. > > Biases from unfortunate motives can be one source of sample skew, but that is > just one mechanism. Identifying it, or any other mechanism, seems like a > different conceptual problem from trying to figure out what > convergence-to-truth can mean in an interpretive system, and to then derive > what kinds of properties “truths” can have as the fixed points of such > convergences. For instances, even if I tell you that phase transition theory > exists, or that asymptotically reliable error correction exists, you still > have the whole scientific domain of understanding how sparse or dense or > stable phases can be, how they can be related or interconnected, etc., or > what is the domain of applicability of Shannon’s reliable-encoding theorem > and how its manifestations vary from context to context. > > It would be appealing to me if some of what we have learned in these much > simpler fields (physics of matter, reliable communication) could be > bootstrapped into a technical analysis of what pragmatism can be or is. It > also seems to me that there is a kinship between the explanation for the > stability (or apparent stability) of very complex things like the biosphere, > and the problem of formulating a notion of truth with the right kinds of > stability. > > To circle back, then, with the complaint that opened this post, when the > postmoderns just declare that there isn’t really anything else to think about > regarding truth, than their resentments of somebody or some system that they > regard as holding power, they make themselves uninteresting for me to invite > into my personal world, which has a hard enough time holding together and > making any progress on anything as it is. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
