Colleagues,
I am appealing for help with a paradox. On the one hand there is this well known concept of a category error, an insult that has great force in some domains of thought; on the other hand, there is probability theory, calculus, etc., which involves (to my eye) the same equivocation, but on which we have relied for the great practical achievements of our time. Is the analogy between the two not apt? If it is apt, then we have the paradox of vicious and virtuous category errors. For those of you who think I am just dicking about with words here, let me concede that there is such an evil. However, you must recognize that sometimes great gaps in our thinking are discovered by people dicking about with words. Since DAWW is all I am really capable of at my advanced age – indeed, perhaps EVER have been capable of-- it is what I have to throw in the pot. You might help me distinguish between vicious DAWW and virtuous DAWW. You might exile me. But you probably won’t get me to stop. [sigh] Nick Thompson, Doctor of DAWW. <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly Sent: Saturday, October 2, 2021 12:28 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Newborn Heart Rate Perhaps. But in the meantime people who believe in and use concepts like derivatives, integrals, position, velocity, momentum, energy, etc. send probes to the moons of Jupiter and beyond. But I guess you dismiss that with the same argument with which you dismiss nuclear reactor design using probabilities. Frenemy? You ain't seen nothing unless you've had a teenage daughter recently. Frank --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Sat, Oct 2, 2021, 10:17 AM <thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> > wrote: Dear Frank, As I say, it boils down to a question of who controls the meaning of velocity. Now we can, of course, have different realms of discourse where velocity means one thing to you and another to me, so long as we are very clear and do not equivocate about which meaning we are using. The problem is, of course, that in the discourse I am most familiar with, equivocation goes on all the time. Now there might be an interesting line of argument where you assert that “the limit of the ratio of distance to time as time approaches 0” is exactly what the “common man” means by velocity. He doesn’t quite have those words for it, but as the car is hurtling down on him standing in the middle of the road and he says that car is coming FAST, he is interested in the instantaneous motion (whatever that could possibly be!) of the car. I think that is wrong. I think he is interested in whether the car is going to cover the distance between itself and him before he covers the distance between him and the edge of the road, but perhaps there is a sense in which the instantaneous velocity is used to bridge from his perception of the motion of the car in the last second to his perception of it’s motion in the next few. Thus he uses a kind of abduction to reach a category we call “the velocity of the car” and from that category deduces the time of arrival of the car at his point in the road. This idea … that we use experience to make up useful fictions -- aka “categories, essences, reals, etc.”-- from which we then infer events is a newish one to me and I want to think about it more. Somehow, to assert that all categories, all “generals” are fictions seems right to me right now. If we are to arrive at the place where all categories are fictions then we must have a way to distinguish between virtuous and vicious fictions. And not just the Jamesian way. But, Frenemy Frank, you must recognize the absurdity you have let yourself in for when you write dualist non-sense such as “This is theoretical and approximates what happens in the physical world.” There is no moment when we know the world. To use your language, all we know is our theories of the world. The world divides out of the equation. We are in the businesses of prediction future experience from past experience and the world plays no part in that business except as theory. N Nick Thompson <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly Sent: Saturday, October 2, 2021 10:37 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Newborn Heart Rate Velocity is the derivative of location with respect to time. In three-space it's a three component vector as is location. In freshman physics at Carnegie Tech we studied these concepts with strobe lights, cameras, and frictionless (almost) pucks. Frank --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Sat, Oct 2, 2021, 8:29 AM <thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> > wrote: Frank, Well, as usual, it’s a question of who get’s the words. In the world in which I was raised a velocity is a change in position over a change in time. No change in distance, no velocity. Velocity at an instant is a mathematical fabulation in the same way that wanting at an instant is a fabulation. My problem as a “thinker” is that I want to dismiss the latter, but I cannot dismiss the former. N Nick Thompson <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly Sent: Friday, October 1, 2021 10:01 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Newborn Heart Rate Nick, i hope this helps. Given a fair die that hasn't been thrown the probability that it will come up 2 (or any of the other particular values) on the next throw is 1/6 by definition of fair. Given that it has been thrown and ceterus paribus the a posteriori probability that it shows 2 given that it does is 1.0. In that case the probabilities of each of the other values is 0.0. The acceleration of an object with constant velocity is 0.0. If the velocity is changing the acceleration is the instantaneous change in velocity the knowledge of which is limited by the ability to measure that. The acceleration of an object whose velocity is described by a closed form mathematical function is the derivative of that function as we learned in calculus. The derivative is defined by limits. This is theoretical and approximates what happens in the physical world. Questions and comments are welcome. Frank --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Fri, Oct 1, 2021, 7:21 PM <thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> > wrote: I thought the conversation about probability, category errors, and crossing boundaries between levels of organization was interesting and I was sorry I had to leave it. I want to say that to speak a die as having a probability of 1/6 of coming up 6 on a single throw is a category error because it is not a property that can be displayed on a single throw. It’s the same worry that I have often deployed about the calculus. If we take the idea of a category error seriously, then acceleration is just not the sort of thing an object can have at an instant. But just as clearly as this argument is too strong – lots of very nice longstanding bridges have been built with the calculus – so the argument is also too strong with respect to probability – lots of nice atom bombs have been built with probability theory … or something. I care about this because my standard account of such concepts as “wanting” is that they are properties of the population of responses to an object, not properties of any one of those responses. We encounter the same problem with anecdotes and newspaper photographs designed to illustrate some general fact. If the generally fact is that “very few of the immigrants at the southern border are well treated” a single photograph looking peaked or hungry is irrelevant. Equally irrelevant would be a picture of a bright eyed kid sitting in the lap of a border patrol officer eating a hot-fudge sundae. This makes me wonder about one of the foundations of psychological research, the statistics of inference, which I think Peirce invented. Let a coin be thrown 10 times and each time come up heads. What I think Peirce would have me conclude is that that coin is unlikely to be drawn from a population of fair throws of a fair coin. But, of coure, what we are likely to conclude is that “this coin is not fair.” But that could be as misguided, couldn’t it, as concluding that the kid in the lap of the border patrol officers is being mistreated. I apologize, once more, for sharing my comfusions with you. n Nick Thompson <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly Sent: Friday, October 1, 2021 6:46 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com> > Subject: [FRIAM] Newborn Heart Rate https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/61/1/119 This is for those who attended this morning's vFriam meeting. I was Schachter's colleague, among a couple of others. --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM .-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - . 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