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97% of people fail. Can you solve the puzzle?

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What is a South American turquoise swarklebug?

(When you're ready to reveal the secret answer, click "Show")

If you answered that the South American turquoise swarklebug is a swarklebug with a turquoise shell whose home region is South America, you won!


A Wikipedia article whose lede doesn't begin with that degree of simplicity, obviousness, and hyperlinking is usually ripe for improvement.

How many examples can you find and fix today?


Ontology in general is complex, and we aren't going to "reach the end of it" on Wikipedia; but applied or practical ontology is a big part of the difference between (1) being ignorant, or being only narrowly educated in certain areas, and (2) being broadly and deeply educated. And most applied or practical ontology is oddly simple, once you've figured it out, despite seeming mysterious before that. Often it is only a matter of recognizing, for example, that there are wikilinks that should be in this lede, but aren't yet. And it's not that hard to realize that in the article on (say) iron oxides, the words iron and oxygen, with links to those elements' articles, should be in its lede—indeed, in the opening sentence of that lede. It's not even hard. In fact, if you have solid 101-level scientific literacy, some critical thinking, and some basic composition skills, you can usually find ways to improve Wikipedia literally as fast as you can read it, in articles below GA status. (The same is true of Wiktionary.) And yet Wikipedia to date is still full of ontological gaps. Which (if you think about it) reflects on us humans, the default ways we tend to think, and what low-hanging fruit is available in improving upon them, even while acknowledging and accepting their humanity. And most practical ontology could be greatly elucidated at Wikipedia and Wiktionary (the two working together) if enough critical thinkers worked earnestly on those projects. Imagine a world in which 99% of the practical ontology that most people ever need was fed seamlessly to them, instantly, for free, and on demand, by Wikimedia projects. It would mean that when they land on the article about the South American turquoise swarklebug, they are going to understand within seconds (not by doing a bunch of further research) that it is a swarklebug with a turquoise shell whose home region is South America. And within only a few degrees of separation that can be jumped at the speed of a hyperlink, they will be able to tell, if it occurs to them to ask, what other kinds of swarklebug exist, what other things exist that are turquiose, where South America is, what an insect is, what other insects live in South America, why turquoise is called turquoise, and so on. Wikimedia can facilitate that, if people will simply bother to build these projects. We are not there yet—not nearly. You may find portions of Wikipedia that feel like they have arrived at that juncture—for example, the iron oxide articles of the Wikipedian world mostly already say "iron" and "oxygen" in their ledes—but I can guarantee you, from being one of the volunteers working away, out in the weeds, that in some of the areas that matter most to human health and economics, we are not yet even close.

Not yet close; in fact, there is so much low-hanging fruit around that sometimes, while I am picking it, I am troubled by the thought that out of something like half a billion to a billion native and ESL English speakers in the world, so very many of whom could be working on the English Wikipedia for free at any time they were willing to be and had a device and internet connection available to do it, I am the only one within the past decade who both thought of the fact, and bothered to take care of it, that the article on molecular biology, for example, should link to the article on molecules in its opening sentence. The funny thing is, it doesn't take much. A mere high school education, some curiosity, some thought, some reading of books and googling of connections, is all that's required for most of the improvements I make to Wikipedia. I myself went to university, too, although I'm now making up for the deficiencies of my experience there, slowly and on my own. Anyway, the point being, anyone with half a head can do this, and it's kind of sad that so few are, considering how much nearly everyone benefits from the existence of Wikipedia, both directly and (even more importantly) indirectly. It troubles me that we have such a fat, wonderful opportunity in front of all of us, waiting for nothing but for smart people to bother, and it's lying here so largely unrealized—quarter-realized or tenth-realized, compared with what it obviously could be if more than 0.1% of capable people were bothering. And yes, people who don't bother could point out that I'm spending my own time doing this, and at what opportunity cost, and Wikipedia has errors in it, and on and on, but let's get real here—what the hell are countless other people doing at this very moment with their allegedly precious time? Posting shitty political image macros on Facebook? Watching action flicks and playing active-shooter video games?

If you think that that sounds like a whole lot of bullshit and you'd instead like to do something useful and educational and positive and peaceful and self-improving and altruistic with your life, grab a hoe and come help, out here in the weeds. It's fucking free, and there's fresh air and sunlight.

PS: Speaking of the theme of "shouldn't this already have happened by now?", see also "Shit I cannot believe we had to fucking write this month" by Emily Temple-Wood ("This month in systemic bias, we had to write a whole bunch of shit that should have been written forever ago and generally made the world a better place.")

The Signpost
6 November 2024

Top whys: Why even build Wikipedia at all? Would it be better not to?

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This question is both epistemic and socioeconomic. My best version of my answer will continue to evolve, but I wanted to capture an evolving draft here.

I perceive that some instantiation, or group of instantiations, of the concepts of Wikipedia and Wiktionary is, both epistemically and socioeconomically, both (1) inevitable in a free society and (2) preferable to the absence thereof. Unlike techno-utopians, though, I do not believe that such instantiations can be a replacement for either intellectual property or scholarly publishing; rather, instead, I perceive them to be necessary adjuncts thereof: corollary complements. Regarding this distinction, I feel that the vision statement of the Wikimedia projects ("imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge") contains a lamentable polysemic ambiguity that causes a communicative flaw: when it speaks of "the sum of all knowledge", does it mean the sum total, or a summary? The word sum has senses referring to (denoting or connoting) both. The summary sense is the appropriate sense in which to understand the vision of the Wikimedia projects; it is the sense in which the vision is epistemically and socioeconomically sound. (Compare also WP:PRIME.) In contrast, the sum total sense is the sense in which techno-utopians have often tended to take it, but this notion is a misapprehension, because it encourages pathologic variants or corollaries implying that there cannot be any intellectual property that is not theft and that the gatekeeping (threshold-setting) role of editorial boards, editorial offices, and peer reviewers in scholarly publishing is worthless or even harmful. Both of those flaws in thinking are wrong, and we are paying the price for their recent binge of stalking abroad (a drunken binge that began with the panglossianism of the early web era but just bears yet more diseased idiocratic consequences every year), and we will pay still more to come if we do not learn to curb and domesticate the monsters that have been loosed.

And yet—I perceive that the general public, by which I mean all of us in our day-to-day lives, of all education levels and occupations, benefits from having, and should somehow be provided, a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and a free dictionary that anyone can edit, as epistemic and socioeconomic complements to (not replacements of) whatever other information resources exist (including those that require some intellectual property and/or scholarly publishing). And I perceive that if ones are not provided, ones will be bootstrapped in the wild to fill that vacuum. This is the inevitability factor, but it is not any techno-utopian variant of inevitability but rather a real-world version. It is not inevitable that the instantiations that exist will be good ones, or adequate ones. What is inevitable is that shitty ones will exist if good ones do not.

Speaking of which, I am not asserting that the current ones themselves are not shitty. In fact I perceive a certain latent shittiness about them that is even larger than their superficially apparent shittiness. I am asserting, though, that wherever they currently are on the gradient of shittiness, it is worth improving them, because (1) if they go away then others at even lower points on the shittiness gradient will inevitably replace them, and (2) every day, as millions of people use them, it would be better if they sucked less than they do; that would be a net gain, a net benefit. In other words, we are boned, so then working within that framework, tack appropriately, and do the work (to do so).

A problem with the current ones is that they are too threadbare and sketchy in important areas of worthwhile information (notwithstanding that they contain a massive surfeit of various types of unimportant or less useful information, which reflects not so much the law of triviality as the laws of which aspects of life most humans tend to find most mentally engaging). The best way to lessen this problem is for capable (competent) people to bother to do the work of incrementally improving them.

This essay draft on rationales will continue to be iterated.

An important exploration on this topic:

  • The only essential difference between Wikipedia and collaborative student notes is that Wikipedia is the singularly large and epistemologically rigorous member of the class; it is a special case, but not a different thing. It constitutes a widest union set of notes, kept by a widest union set of students. Its epistemological rigor is merely a sequela of its size, as the rigor's maintenance is requisite "to prevent fall-apart" (as the appliance salesman would put it): to prevent fall-apart of the size, which entails preventing fall-apart of the union set of notes, which entails preventing fall-apart of the union set of students.
    • Corollary 1: The existence of the union set of notes, and of the union set of students, as constituted so far (first two decades), is anathema to authoritarians, essentially because it is an exception to the rule that might makes right: that violence controls epistemics. Authoritarians do not object to encyclopedias per se; rather, they object to ones that they do not control via censorship. Authoritarians do not object to union sets of humans per se; rather, they object to ones that they do not control via violence.
    • Corollary 2: Speaking of thinking clearly about obvious logical concepts and giving them appropriate (self-evident) names (as I just was before this update): The object above regarding "the rigor's maintenance is requisite 'to prevent fall-apart' of the size and of the union sets": In other words: each Wikipedia is a single epistemic space in the same way that its article namespace is a single namespace. This fact is transparently obvious, but I am not aware of anyone having pointed out before that there is such a thing as an epistemic space by that name as a coordinate term to the word "namespace" and with the clear implication that such spaces can collide just as namespaces can collide. Sure, the term epistemic regime already exists, but that term is unfortunate because the word "regime" tends to connote government or coercion, whereas an epistemic space does involve competition and pluralistic challenges and intellectual struggle over its unity's nature and definitions, yes, but it is not always a context that people are imprisoned in against their will. Admittedly, yes, sometimes it is. Dissidence is the cardinal class of instantiations of that theme. But this brings us back to corollary 1. Authoritarians seek to rule and control epistemic spaces because they don't want to end up as dissidents themselves in an epistemic space that they don't control (it being controlled instead by forces such as the rule of law and democracy, rather than by rival criminal overlords), which is to say, a different epistemic space than the one they seek to define.
    • Corollary 3: TL;DR: Many humans are predisposed to bashing each other over the head so that they don't have to instead either forge agreed worldviews or forge agreements to forgo forging completely agreed worldviews, which is to say, to agree to disagree on some things; and this is why we can't have nice things.
  • I must reiterate here how important I currently perceive it to be to try to further improve the 101-level help that Wikipedia ledes and hatnotes and Wiktionary entries (defs, ux, semantic relation links) provide to their users, to the extent that any of us has time and ability to do so. Regarding having any clue about anything: Most of the people in many countries get what few clues they have by hastily skimming the top (and only the top) search results in places like (1) the web in general and (2) whichever social media apps they use (if any, in each person's case). 98 out of 100 of them haven't read book X, or book Y, or book Z, and they're also not going to [near-certainty shorthand-expressed as practical certainty]. This does not apply solely to the uneducated or poorly educated ones. I have known many people with college degrees who were surprisingly ignorant about any given thing, even particular things that their own occupation should have forced them (already, by now) to have a better handle on. It is more pervasive than some people think. Regarding the reasons why it matters so much: it is not merely altruistic, like wouldn't it be nice to help people for the help's own sake. No, it is much worse than that. I just read today where Paulos 1988 says that if people believe astrology, it's scary to think what else they believe and why. It's dangerous. The theory is that we help our own self-defense interests by trying to help other people think critically and know more knowledge. I guess someone could counterargue, yes, but what about the theme that a little knowledge is dangerous? I respect the counterargument, and I don't yet know my full response to it. I think it is something like "the tiny bit that they currently have or can google hastily (N) is already a clear and present danger for that same reason, and we're trying to get to where they have N+1 because it represents a reduced danger level." I hope this theory is sound. I also fully acknowledge that none of us are omniscient, none of us are experts about many things at once, and I myself am an example of that. No hubris in this regard. Only (1) fear of danger and (2) some idea of some way to address/mitigate it.
  • Related train of thought: Perhaps it is true (i.e., it seems to be true, so far) that the best way to understand, epistemically, "what Wikipedia is" (and thus also "what Wikipedia is not"), is that the correct choice of pre-web analogue (or metaphor) needs to be chosen: When Wikipedia was (somewhat accidentally) invented in 2001, its inventors thought that they had created (or, might we better say, stumbled across) a viable "crowdsourced online way to build an encyclopedia," but really what they had created was a viable "crowdsourced online way to build collaborative student notes that closely approach (like a diff) the identity/nature/essence of a 'published' 'encyclopedia' for many, although not all, of the topics/articles contained within it." A practical corollary of this thought is not only that (1) people must always take Wikipedia's content with large grains of salt (which, to be fair to humans generally, most adult humans at least halfway understand, and any competent parents should teach their kids, if they even know it themselves), but also that (2) perhaps Wikipedia might serve humanity best (most clearly, with best teaching) if it would clearly label itself (i.e., its own identity/essence) as student notes—massively collaborative ones, of course (i.e., massively multiplayer student notes), but not a 'published' 'encyclopedia'.

Correlations

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Ones you can help with:

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Ones you may find idly interesting (as I did):

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Flings

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Snacks

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Balance points

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Readings

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Various, lately; some notes are jotted below. These notes are mostly in chronological order with the newest first (older last), except for the limited extent to which the analysis must sometimes loop back or cross-reference. Corollary: To follow along/retrace, read each parent-level bullet and its dependent/child bullets (if any) as a unit, in chronological order; thus, overall, in ascending (not descending) order.

2024-Q3

  • "They warned us 20 or 30 years ago that software was going to eat the world. What they failed to be honest about was that, more specifically, *shitty* software was going to eat the world." — I saw this a while back (words to this effect) and failed to keep track of where I saw it. Now I'm not finding it upon trying to dig for it. Oh well. I wrote it down here because I was really feelin it today when some needlessly shitty software was interfering with my workday.
  • I knew I'd finish, sometime or other, the old tan 60/120 special that I'd set aside. I knew because its nature × my nature = perceptible predeterminedness. Sure enough, last night I polished it off. We came to the point in the story where he said, as I paraphrase it, Herein we have explored X. Its natural and sequential counterpart, Y, also merits a book. The end. Flip to the verso and nil. Lol, this ending was entirely in keeping with the thing's nature, and my reaction to it was entirely in keeping with mine. The whole scene was something whose chips were carted off a million years ago.

2024-Q2

  • Is [Redacted 19xx] a 40/80 special with a high nominal-actual spread, or is it instead a 60/120 special as a member of a cousin class? It prompts so many thoughts, most of which will not get written down.
  • Musser-2024-03-19, notes jotted.

2024-Q1

  • It seems to me at the moment that people often improperly conflate the concepts of a unit of heredity and a unit of selection. All it takes to be a unit of heredity is to have function that passes on protein-coding instructions to offspring, whereas what it takes to be a unit of selection is for that function to confer fitness advantage. The two concepts are definitely differentiable and worth keeping straight, as the one is a subset of the other (that is, multiple units of heredity may fit inside a unit of selection), in a way that is not always irrelevant.
    • Update a few days later: An idly intriguing thought: I was just passing through, skimming over a discussion by Ben Brubaker about how Zhi Li and Latham Boyle serendipitously compared notes about flavors of local indistinguishability (in aperiodic tilings and in quantum error correction),[1] when I read about how "it's impossible to tell any two tilings apart by examining any local area" [because subsets can repeat even though supersets never repeat] and that Boyle said, "If I plop you down in one tiling or the other and give you the rest of your life to explore, you'll never be able to figure out whether I put you down in your tiling or my tiling." This made me think again of this nucleic acid idea, which I had just recently been thinking about, regarding subsets of nucleic acid sequences (strings of some limited amount of information) nesting within larger ones (strings of some slightly less limited amount of information that has slightly more significance/ramification). I'm not claiming that the analogy is profound, but it is mildly interesting that all three phenomena share a theme of large supersets of information with localized subsets whose significance (1) is lesser, (2) is not big enough to be unique, (3) must not be misinterpreted (in the direction of being overblown/overestimated), and (4) has implications for information theory generally that are separable from the concrete details of the domain. It was worth a scribble here in passing.
      • PS: I had to add a coda here because the preceding sentence didn't entirely capture all of the analogous aspects. There's one other that my mind was noticing as well. It has to do with the limits of homology. By chance I happened to be reading another one of my 40/80 specials recently, and it talks about how even though recombinant technology banks so heavily on homology (many leaves, same limbs; different clowns, same circus), there are always some details around the edges that have to be handled (engineered) because the homology has its limits. Things like a certain range of AARs that is specific to eukaryotes (the example given was the signal that insulin is bound for leaving the pancreas). The theme we see here is the subset sequence that is identical to one elsewhere versus the fact that if you open out the reading frame wider enough, you reach the juncture where now you've got a nonidentical string of information. Again, I'm not claiming profundity — merely an alignment of analogies. And that's OK — that's enough — as that's what the mining engine is for, and it's a swing of the bat; and even something as cool as what Li and Boyle discovered (a home run) starts with a first moment that is no more than a swing of the bat: a noticing of an analogy that begs to be checked for any possible underlying unities.

2023-Q3

2022-Q3

  • Various reading lately not entered here. In general I am trying to determine what to enter here versus in other places. Probably just let it simmer for now and see what happens. One argument is to not even bother writing much down and thereby just have that much more time for that much more reading. I like that idea in theory, but some writing in response is helpful too, cognitively, so taking it down to zero is not great either. It starts with just jotting notes as rapidly as possible, with focus on the reading itself, but it then develops into trains of thought that get refined and end up being educational in themselves, albeit only as augmentation and not the main event. For now I will just reiterate here that being willing to read eclectically, with plenty of backlist and out-of-print mixed in, remains quite helpful to developing insights. Even just in the past few days I've been reading something from 40 years ago that changed and grew my perspective in some significant ways, regarding where we are now and how we got here over the past 80 years. I've decided not to report here, for now, what it is.

2022-Q2 and Q1

  • It's been about 20 years since I read MacNeal 1994 (Mathsemantics). Reading Paulos 1988 (for the first time, recently) stoked my interest in rereading MacNeal 1994. Wow. I've reread the first few chapters so far, and I am struck by how perfect it seems now, in a kind of retrospect. MacNeal figured out (using mostly just good horse sense) and then named, and explained so succinctly to others, basic realities that everyone should be aware of (and also should find obvious and self-evident upon inspection, independent of any personalities). He should be more famous than he is. I have a dim memory of what he goes on to cover in the rest of the book, and I thereby know how good it is. Interestingly, the only specific detail I could still remember after circa 20 years, besides the gist of the whole book which is of course the general nature of mathsemantics, was that apparently (if I recall correctly) before MacNeal's work in the 1960s to 1980s, no one spoke of passenger-miles as a unit of measure, and no one managed to keep straight mentally the difference between passenger counts and unique person counts; our cultural systems simply lacked the mental clarity and the terminology to do so. Oh, sure, plenty of people (although sadly not all) would readily agree how obvious it is that 5 apples and 2 oranges add up to 7 pieces of fruit, once you've pointed it out, but they won't necessarily assert it themselves unprompted (even now), and they especially wouldn't do so back in the 1960s-to-1990 era, when MacNeal was working but before his book pointed it out for more attention. As I reread, I'll have to see how accurate that memory may be (that is, my takeaway memory that MacNeal more or less invented, or was the first person to popularize, the unit of the passenger-mile). I think now to myself, surely some of the SAC/McNamara/ops-res/whiz-kids people had named the units of the passenger-mile or the ton-mile before MacNeal ever did? I'll see as I reread. [Updated many months later: nothing new about those units (e.g., at Wiktionary s.v. ton-mile, see citations showing 19th-century familiarity among railroaders), but still, MacNeal seems to have gotten some people in his industry to be more careful about their transportation mathsemantics than they were before.] But speaking of how recent some pieces of mental clarity and terminology are, did you realize that the words instantiate and instantiation are as young as post-WWII?, There are grandparents alive today who predate them. The time before they existed is within living memory. Let alone their logical derivatives such as coinstantiate, coinstantiation, reinstantiate, or reinstantiation. Let that one sink in for a minute, and then return to the fact that apparently no one had instantiated enough clear conscious thinking and naming regarding passenger-miles or some other aspects until MacNeal did so circa 1965-1980. Well no fucking wonder.
  • [Wikipedia as student notes: draft later moved to "why or why not build WP" section above]
  • Taking Paulos's advice (1988:100-101), I just picked up George Pólya's How to Solve It and began looking at it. I had only flipped one page (the title page to the copyright page) when I read, "Typography by Edward Gorey." I was like, surely not the Edward Gorey, right? Wrong: Yes, the Edward Gorey, as one can infer given that his Wikipedia article explains that "From 1953 to 1960, he lived in Manhattan and worked for the Art Department of Doubleday Anchor, illustrating book covers and in some cases, adding illustrations to the text"—and the book that I'm looking at is a New York Doubleday Anchor edition from 1957. I already would have known that this coincidence is meaningless albeit entertaining, but additionally now I also know a mathematical basis to explain why and how it is meaningless. Nonetheless, I did just add it to that spot in the article about Gorey, because it's a neat piece of Bacon's-law-style trivia, and I'm allowed to have fun too, just like everybody else does. That reminds me of a certain piece of deliciously dysphoric earworm that I've sometimes lived in for days on end.
  • Really humming along now in Paulos 1988. Almost every discussion concisely presents another "greatest hit" of numeracy and sound epistemology, although usually not by the names that people today in the 2020s usually label them with. For example (besides the examples I already mentioned earlier, such as the birthday problem and Bacon's law), he also touches on (1) the possibly mundane nature of abiogenesis (pages 79-82) (and I aver that when I mentioned it earlier, I had not seen his broaching of it yet) and (2) the need to keep straight the independence of the variables of whether extraterrestrial life exists and what the nature of UFOs may be (pages 79-82) (and I aver that when I mentioned it earlier, I had not seen his broaching of it yet). Then also, we get to page 84 and we find that he concisely points out the demarcation problem to his readers (mathematical laypersons and otherwise), although he doesn't call it by that name, and then we finish the same paragraph on page 85 and he concisely points out the general case that the demarcation problem is an instance of, which is that just because a dichotomization [or other discretization] of a spectrum is in some ways artificial (because the difference is not truly quantized, although he does not invoke that term), it is nonetheless not only useful but also both valid (factual) and necessary, because, essentially (and here I am stating the explanation in my own words, not Paulos's), the qualitative difference between noncontiguous segments of a spectrum is indeed, in fact, a qualitative difference, notwithstanding that there is an intermediating/cross-linking segment of the spectrum that is contiguous to both of them. This is the very nature of spectra and of discretizations thereof, including both (1) the instance of spectra that we humans usually think of as the cardinal instance, which is the electromagnetic spectrum, and (2) the visible portion thereof, which is a rainbow or is what a rainbow instantiates (natural language is not precise enough in its map–territory relations to say that only one of those predicates is correct; they are both correct in natural language because of polysemy: a rainbow [sense 1] instantiates a rainbow [sense 2]). And regarding this nature of spectra and discretizations thereof, I aver that when I mentioned it earlier (here and here), I had not seen his broaching of it yet. I think a theme that we are seeing in this list entry is that most of the things that Paulos 1988 discusses are "greatest hits" of numeracy and sound epistemology, and the only question is to what extent do we owe him a debt of gratitude as a founding father of awareness-raising about them, and to what extent (on the other hand) would it not have mattered which messengers had echoed these centrally important recurring themes of thought and reality. The crude way of putting that thought is as Nelson Muntz did so: "If you hadn't done it, some other nerd would have, so quit milkin it." You may not be surprised to learn that I think both viewpoints are right (speaking of dualities): yes, we should thank Paulos for writing what he did, when he did, even despite that if he hadn't done it, human discourse would probably still have developed expositions of the same problems by now. It's kind of like a million other instances too: maybe we would have had to wait longer (on the historical time scale of decades) for certain improvements in the further development and (just as importantly) dissemination and popularization of human wisdom (including science), if that person hadn't done something insightful as early as when they did it. Yes, we should admire them, because even though they aren't gods or sine qua nons, they are still role models and helpers and teachers and positive influences. Speaking of popularizing science, I just realized that if the article about Paulos doesn't already put him in the category of science communicators/popularizers, then it now should, and accordingly I just did (edit it to do so).
  • An exercise in reorganized restatement of the same set of facts (the selfsame elephant):
    • The object labeled here as "Yes, but what if you're that one" is just yet another dual-use technology: it has both good and bad applications, and both valid and invalid ones.
      • In this respect it is analogous to, and cognitively adjacent to, other recently discussed instances of the object labeled here as (1) "not entirely [useless or bad] despite being [bad in some ways, or dual-use]" or (2) (relatedly) "they are not always [bad or wrong or incorrect] even though they are [misleading or counterfactual]".
        • Cognitively adjacent: the proverbial dual-edged sword (triteness alert, yes; nonetheless, it must be acknowledged here as relevant, before dismissing the triteness and getting down to business, only to preempt anyone "nodding knowingly" when they bring it up because we didn't [i.e., if we hadn't]).
      • The object labeled here as "although the odds of any particular coincidence happening are low, the odds of at least some coincidence happening are high" has a directionality attribute when it is used (applied) as a decision-making aid, or a guide to behavioral choices, as follows:
        • Flowing in (what I will call here for now) a clockwise direction (i.e., "although the odds of any particular coincidence happening are low, the odds of at least some coincidence happening are high"), …
        • Flowing in (what I will call here for now) a counterclockwise direction (i.e., "although the odds of at least some coincidence happening are high, the odds of any particular coincidence happening are low"), …
          • … it explains why some people (some percentage/subset of a population) should avoid playing the lottery (explanation of why: mind the emphasis in each of these corollary restatements: you can win, but you won't [near-certainty shorthand-expressed as practical certainty]; which is to say, one can win, but you won't; which is to say, someone will win, but it won't be you), …
          • … but/and …
          • … it also explains why most people (some large percentage/subset of a population) should not avoid a dream-vacation traveling event just because the risk of airliner hijacking or other terrorist activity is nonzero (you can get the shortest straw, but you won't [near-certainty shorthand-expressed as practical certainty]; which is to say, one can get the shortest straw, but you won't; which is to say, someone will get the shortest straw, but it won't be you).
    • Speaking of groping the elephant's legs and trunk:
      • In the passage in Paulos 1988:9, Paulos mentions that they "nod knowingly", and he is annoyed because, as he might say to them (if we explicify the reaction paraphrastically), "you haven't demolished my argument despite that you think that you have." But what is happening here is that the "knowing nodder" (if we may use that label here for a convenient handle) cannot feel (is not touching) the other leg (whereas Paulos is), but the nodder is touching one of the legs, which is why he is so sure of what he is saying: he knows that that leg is there (and is true); it is a fact. He simply isn't aware of the other leg at this time. But that is hardly his fault—the very reason why the parable is so durably important in human life is because perceiving the whole elephant at once is not easy or trivial. (In fact, that is why we are even having this conversation, for example, instead of not even needing to have it.)
  • Speaking of math teachers who are smart but yet also unsmart, I was just reminded of this idiotic failure of a 'genius' who didn't 'get' important things about people who weren't himself.
  • This line of thought also just reminded me of an annoyance from years ago. A math teacher was proving his superiority over other (non-math-teacher) people by posting a sign that proclaimed the semi-famous old line that "lotteries are just a tax on the mathematically impaired." But that guy was obtuse in his own way, without realizing it. The other guy, who buys a Powerball ticket, does in fact objectively have some hope of winning, albeit depressingly small. Just like the sneezy bastard last week did—in reality/in fact/in valid mathematical certainty. In contrast, the guy who doesn't play can't win, period (a mathematically valid fact—and speaking of can't win). The difference is some hope (any hope) versus no hope (zero, truly zero). People who don't understand why that difference is worth the $10 ticket price to some other people are not as astute or wise as they smugly think they are (and speaking of people who are willing to buy tickets in chance games). And no, in case you might ask, I myself don't play (I already know the general case of whether I can win or not, and I think I have accepted it), but I respect many people who do play; I comprehend why they do it. Now additionally consider whether the guy who does play is 50-something or 60-something, nearly broke (that is, closer to broke than he likes to think about), hates his job but certainly can't afford to retire anytime soon, has some health problems, has been being forced to overpay out the ass for his prescription meds and is stressed out about it, and in recent years has been finding himself acquiring a bigger aggregation or degree of health problems each year. People who still don't understand why that difference is worth the $10 price to some other people (even after that train of thought), and who still don't comprehend the human desire for small hope instead of zero hope, are goto you-know-the-rest-of-the-sentence.
  • Speaking of both (1) valid applications of the "Yes, but what if you're that one" theme (in contrast with the clearly flawed applications thereof) and (2) Earth-derived sentients and whether they are alone or not, I find that Paulos 1988:54 nicely summarizes an analogue of a circumspect numerate argument that I first heard years ago, and found quite wise, for why humans can easily accept that they may be alone in the universe despite the apparently low odds of it from various viewpoints (about countless inhabitable planets, and the possibly mundane nature of abiogenesis, and whatever else). "When one is dealt a bridge hand of thirteen cards, the probability of being dealt that particular hand is less than one in 600 billion. Still, it would be absurd for someone to be dealt a hand, examine it carefully, calculate that the probability of getting it is less than one in 600 billion, and then conclude that he must not have been dealt that very hand because it is so very improbable." (Emphasis mine.) The analogue is that no matter how stupendously improbable it may be that we are alone, the relevant point is that if (ie, in the case that) that hand is in fact the hand that we have been dealt, then it is absurd to believe that it cannot exist merely because its arising was improbable. Just like the bridge hand in front of you, or the lotto ticket that some lucky bastard bought last week at a certain store in your region on a certain day. Just because it "shouldn't" exist doesn't mean that it doesn't once it's already in front of you. That particular bastard won the Powerball even though his odds of doing so were insanely long. It didn't not happen. If you have a problem with the nature of that cat, take it up with Schrödinger. Maybe if the bastard had sneezed before approaching the clerk for a ticket, he'd be in another universe right now. [Noted later: conceptually related: this.] So again, with feeling, but in a different key: "Yes, but what if you're that one?" This made me realize a moment ago that it's all the same elephant, regarding some things that Paulos 1988 mentions: not only the fact that although the odds of any particular coincidence happening are low, the odds of at least some coincidence happening are high, and the thing about the hairs on the heads of Philadelphians (his example of the pigeonhole principle), but even also the non sequitur itself: all of it. The realization was the instantaneous perception of a whole object, or contraption, or woven fabric—nonverbally—within the mind/brain: in other words, a set of several keyhole vistas aligned with each other at once. It's an object, almost a physical object, that can be perceived—not a bunch of words, although it takes a bunch of words to express it here, to others. If not literally a physical object then a virtual model of one, like a solid model in CAM. The interesting thing is, I perceived it instantly, but could not instantly find the words to name the components, and had to go climbing to retrieve them, in TOTish manner. The engine at work. That's how it normally works. I could not see the whole object or network, I could only feel the keyhole alignments—suddenly as many of 4 or 5 of them at once. That aspect reminds me of the tumblers in a cylinder lock. If you can get all X of them aligned at once, the lock can turn. TFW (that feeling when) you feel that all X of them just slipped into position: and you know instantly that the bolt is now free to slide. You don't see it, you feel it and know it. Lastly, regarding the metaphor of climbing: it is an apt metaphor, the most apt one I can think of at the moment. Climbing up and down and across pipes and ladders and ledges. But some of it is in the dark though. When in the dark, you don't see and gaze, but rather you feel and remember and crawl back and then crawl forward again, until you refine the connections and learn the route better, at which time you can jump instead of crawling, even in the dark. In this respect the keyholes and vistas as metaphors are imperfect, because they represent only the visible-spectrum/VFR portions of the activity, not the IFR portions.
  • Speaking of speaking of things, such as the devil or anything else, Paulos 1988 (Innumeracy) shows why/how it's true that although the odds of any particular coincidence happening are low, the odds of at least some coincidence happening are high. Of course, this is not news by now; here in 2022, we've all long since heard of the birthday problem and Bacon's law, which perhaps most of his readers in 1988 hadn't until then (and the six degrees thing wasn't even Bacon's law yet, by that name). Certainly it reinforces the idea that the fixer is merely a thousand monkeys, which I'd already accepted. So even though the PAS instance was a rare beast born almost mature, whereas most of them take more of a slog somewhat analogous to a cryptographic brute force attack, with an aspect of gambling thrown in to boot, there is another level on which it is all merely brute force attack and gambling, for the meeting of Lehmann's prepared mind with an aspirin-metabolism line of thought was itself just yet another of the countless tosses of the dice that we're assured God doesn't play with. Of course it looks impressive (like a neat trick) from within the viewpoint of the single instance, and that's what Paulos was getting at with his annoyance at the non sequitur: "'Yes, but what if you're that one,' [they say,] and then nod knowingly, as if they've demolished your argument with their penetrating insight." (1988:9) The thing is, though, one might think that the other obvious lesson or corollary is that the engine must be useless, but no, it turns out that that doesn't follow. Why not? Because of the aforementioned fact that the fact that ore processing finds speciously shiny bits doesn't make it unprofitable, for it also simultaneously refines real ore. You don't get things like Lehmann's PAS idea without such engines, and you also don't get things like Proust's due kitchen appreciation. I know of insights in my own work that most of my colleagues don't have because 'why ever think about analogies (among superficially heterologous things) whose relevance or irrelevance isn't already apparent and certain before you broach thinking about them?' Why indeed. Why hunt through overburden when you're going to find apatite anyway, right? But we've been over it, though. For in an interesting and useful way, the personal-relevance thing that Paulos laid his finger on (distastefully) may be working on multiple levels, one bad and one good. He was pointing out the bad way: that many or most people have inadequate generalizing capability or appreciation because that instance-overvaluing thing recurrently gets in the way. An analogous thing is that I've always noticed, too, for decades (before ever reading Paulos 1988), a similar theme, how most others don't have much of the engine because they're too self-absorbed in some ways for it to work well (thus, for example, the anthropocentrism train of thought.) Meanwhile the engine works for people willing to look beyond the self-absorption. But although much of the engine's output is instances of what he denigrates (coincidences misinterpreted as being more meaningful than they really are), and that shows the multiple-level thing (who has an engine versus who doesn't, both with a misplaced specious-relevance appearance), you can't get anything, either invalid or valid—whether overburden, apatite, or precious scarce ore—if you never do any mining or any ore processing. It's like the lottery people like to say: you gotta play to win, which is to say, you can't win if you don't play (1 − N). You also get no Proust in life, or other things of the sort, if you don't play. What would Proust's train tables be, or his kitchen appreciation, if he never played? And where would insightful inventions come from (leaving aside the brute-force molecule ones)? Thus, it takes non-self-absorption to have the engine at all (i.e., for the engine to be capable of running), but beyond that, to advisedly allow it to run (even despite its own form [another level] of "you're that one"/"the coincidence has meaning") takes a circumspect theme of "nonetheless, let it run anyway, because it gives us art, and kitchen interest/beauty, and insightful inventions, as long as you keep in mind (maintain a channel to monitor) that it is also simultaneously in the meantime (between ore lodes) for entertainment purposes only too—that it is like a slugger: amazing hits, but lots of strikeouts in between; but that doesn't mean the slugger is worthless, though. Speaking of things that are not entirely [useless or bad] despite being [bad in some ways, or dual-use]. Speaking of speaking of things, such as the devil, the fixer, the monkeys, or the God who plays no dice.
  • I'm almost done with Graham 1996, but I just want to capture here the thought that just as I had decided not to bother reading all of it, because I was unlikely to learn any new insights about the world by doing so, it started to provide yet more JP-7 and TEB to the ABs for me, leaving me dazzled by the latent firebox management analogies, the bank shot analogies, the moon imagery and the walls composed of aurora, and other thoughts. As for the firebox management analogies, it shows that chance favors the prepared mind, because the only way I knew about the intricate challenges managed by competent locomotive firemen of the 1840s-1920s time span (it was a lot more than 'just shoveling shit') is because I once read (and I mean closely read) a published explanation of them, and someone had fortunately written and published that explanation (and I mean closely written). I've experienced this phenomenon before (on the cusp of skipping when the arcs light up), and it just illustrates that it depends on one's cognitive mode on a given day, and that the mode of cognition that drives most management-related success, no matter how useful and necessary it may be in that context, is nonetheless ineptly blind in some other dimensions compared with the mode that produces certain classes of insights that end up being useful and worthwhile. It is why the idea of PAS became obvious to Lehmann (and not merely obvious but also obviously simple, not abstruse) and yet nonetheless meanwhile remained unseen by most of the world until he pointed it out to them and spoonfed its import to them. And it is why venture capitalists, card-counting gambler sharps though they are, cannot themselves develop the technologies and business lines that they pay other people to develop. (After all, if anyone is smart enough [about business and management] to know that they should cut out the middle man, it is them, but they also know that 'the talent' is not a middle man at all in these cases but rather is a sine qua non that is not disposable. Moreover, if anything, the sharps are ore processors, sifting through overburden to find 'the talent'; obviously the talent is a valuable resource.) It is also why some staircase professors retain their employment: they know how to count cards and watch faces for tells while gambling, and how to do academic politics, even if they are not the top talents in the field in which they hold the professorship. Lastly and most synchronicitously, I just flipped back to Blinkist and read, "Proust signs off the essay by explaining this to the young man: When you walk around a kitchen, you will say to yourself this is interesting, this is grand, this is beautiful like a Chardin." By the way: In parallel with Louis/Lewis and TOTishness, I tease when I call it a funny little engine, but funny is polysemous, after all; not everything funny is ha-ha funny, and some engines are funnier than others.
  • Speaking of Jack Black, I just skimmed what William S. Burroughs said about him as quoted in Wikipedia's article about Black (i.e., Burroughs reading Black in the 1920s, having been raised on St Louis mores and feeling ill-at-ease with them), and my mind instantly saw a connection straight from Burroughs's thought to Babbitt (1922) and Sinclair Lewis. With this obvious question having popped up, I naturally then searched Wikipedia's article on Burroughs for "Lewis" to see what Burroughs might have had to say about either (1) what influence Lewis may have had on him, or (2) at the very least, how he felt upon reading Lewis's work. The paucity of search hits suggests that his Wikipedia article doesn't mention either of those things, at least not yet. The fact that it probably ought to is another keyhole vista. It would be something like Wikipedia > William S. Burroughs > semantic relations and ontology components—wikilinks that should be in this article—influence of Lewis on Burroughs and/or reaction of Burroughs to Lewis. But it's only a question that I now have, not an answer that I yet know, so for now it will have to remain just another interesting transient thought that blows away into the wind whence it came. Maybe it'll wander back someday and be worth some time to explore.
    • For now I simply googled "william s burroughs" on "sinclair lewis", and instantly found the following little nugget, which proves that Burroughs had read Lewis's advice to writers: "That’s one of Sinclair Lewis‘ pieces of advice to young writers – “Learn to type” – I agree entirely." Regarding the funny little engine that fires instantly, it is not lost on me that /ˈluːɪs/ is a homophonic keyhole between Louis and Lewis. The salient theme is an electric arc somewhat like now what does that remind me of but instant and barely even verbal at all (only minimally so). The fact that homophony is a mere accident doesn't prevent the arcs from sparking (speaking of things that are not incorrect or unuseful just because they're misleading or specious or spurious). I'm not alone in that; it's why many people (not just me) find the ryegrass thing either confusing (before mastering it) or just annoying (after mastering it), and it's familiar to many. Speaking of verbal versus nonverbal, what many people don't realize about the words to convey these thoughts is that they take way longer to type (speaking of typing) and to parse (speaking of readings) than the thoughts themselves take to fire off silently like the aurora (speaking of Graham 1996:169 ff.), which is almost zero milliseconds. For the connection has already happened; retrieving information about the identity of the object on the other end is the only remaining operation, and it can be anywhere from practically instantaneous to annoyingly TOTish in any given instance. Living in the era of googlability is a (duly counted) blessing in that regard, for it does for the mind what a thesaurus does but 'on steroids' and for all semantic relations, not just synonymy and plesionymy like your father's Roget's. I like it when the engine is humming, with all of its spikes and doors and vanes tuned to sweet spots. It's AB cruise of another kind (speaking of Graham 1996:169 ff.). It's almost obscenely powerful, like a J58 for which a big-block V8 is merely the start cart, notwithstanding that big-block V8s in other contexts are the main event of a circus of the obscenely powerful. (Speaking of burning shit-tons of fuel and shitloads of cash at stupidly high speed, with motives and net benefits that may be questionable and economic opportunity costs that may be scandalous.) There's something about it that's like a laugh-inducing insult to propriety. It seems like there may be an audacity to its very existence, although unlike other affronts to decency like this and this and this (which humans have wrought, whether or not they ought to have done), it's nobody's fault, because it was made by the fixer, or a thousand monkeys that seem like one. The affront is subjective anyway. I think of a guy I once knew who was a professor (or more accurately, professed to be one) but had never been up close before, or maybe had but didn't comprehend. The fact that he had a reaction like this, as many people do, says more about his unfamiliarity or incomprehension than about the engine. And Graham reports that your teeth rattle if you're standing close when this happens. But then, that professor also spoke with glowing eyes about the staircase grading method in a manner that suggested that he actually used it. I guess he was personally familiar with some things at least. Professional competence is uneven; some people's talent is in pretending to have another talent, in a way that is usually poorly falsifiable.
  • Speaking of things that may be bullsh-t cosmologically but can still nonetheless be useful: Misnomers and teleology share a theme (in mental models): they are not always [bad or wrong or incorrect] even though they are [misleading or counterfactual], but comprehending the difference, and keeping it in mind or being reminded of it occasionally, requires a circumspection that many people lack. This ontological fact is simple, not complicated, but humans overall have remained very confused about it nonetheless (notwithstanding some individuals' understanding), because their mental tools for semantic relations and ontology components have remained typically poor (unduly limited) so far. (This reminds me of how the fact that rye is a grass but is not ryegrass is confusing only because of words, not because of ontology.) Thus, for example, to a flustered pedant we might reply, "Yes, we recognize that pencil leads aren't literally lead, and that evolution isn't literally an intelligent designer, but it's still OK for us to utter the term 'pencil lead' and a clause like 'evolution gave fish fins so they can swim', as long as we duly explain the disjunction ('yes but') to adolescents and adults, who can handle it as long as it is explained. (As for preteen children, their pedagogy may preclude it, but that's OK, because they'll just learn that layer of ontology later, and that fact is not so different after all from their learning arc on the topics of Santa Claus and the tooth fairy; settle down, it's OK; you needn't set your hair on fire for the sake of 'saving the children' from the ruinous perdition of miseducation; the kids are OK; the kids will be OK.)" This reminds me of a commonly recurring theme about indignant combatants: "Settle down and stop throwing punches, because you're both half-right, although you're both too muddle-headed to know how and why." (Somewhere in there may be a joke about half-right half-dead half-wits.) Continuing to improve Wikipedia and Wiktionary is an interesting way of having some effect on this otherwise largely uncontrollable force of nature (that is, the fact that humans have a proclivity for substituting violence for wisdom), because every time someone googles something and skims a Wikipedia lede or two and learns to settle down a bit ('the ontology and cosmology are OK; the kids are OK'), the emotional forces that tend to drive a throwing of a punch, and thus the likelihood of a punch, may be reduced. (Corollary: Every time a bar bet is settled without an assault, an angel gets his wings).
    • Even the very struggle to detect the underlying nature of synchronicity (by Jung, Pauli, and others) seems subject to this same principle, and Jack Black has already told us why. I can imagine him replying to our flustered whatabouts: "Settle down—yes, the game is rigged; yes, the fix is in. No shit, Sherlock. No, of course I can't tell you who the fixer is, or if there even is one [speaking of pardonable teleology], because that's part of the fix; that's how successful fixes work, dumb-ass. So settle down, keep your shirt on, and put your hair fire out. I already explained all this to you. Didn't you pay any attention?" [Corollary: Did you fail to RTFM? Maybe because of too much recentism?]
  • Speaking of keyhole vistas and the moon and TL;DR: "Like the Impressionists, Proust wants us to think in new ways about things we see and experience, things like that late afternoon moon. If it took a few extra words here and there, well, Proust was okay with that." — Blinkist summary of Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life. Regarding my having read this little gem today, not anytime before today and not anytime after today, well: Synchronicity may be bullsh-t cosmologically, but it can still nonetheless be entertaining and even useful (even if it's noncausative).
  • Although the A-12 and SR-71 did not represent the militarisation of space (because they were air-breathing aircraft, with jet engines, operating well within the atmosphere), they now strike me as analogous to it in some practical ways, and more precisely, from some viewpoints they were closer in nature to the militarisation of space than to most other/sibling forms of military aviation. I envision that some people may dispute that idea's verity even as others may dismiss it as a mere truism, and although those two groups would have polar-opposite notions of the thought's factuality, they would agree on another aspect of its nature—namely, that it doesn't bear close attention either way, because it is either false or trivial. But reading an operational blow-by-blow of an SR-71 ops sortie made me perceive and appreciate it in an odd new way. Exploration of why is to be shelved elsewhere for now. Highlights: misrepresentation of black boxes in cognition (i.e., when supposed "details" are in fact, in contrast, qualitatively differentiating factors); times in life when "the apparent analogies are false, and the valid analogies are latent"; etc. Organic chemistry R&D, and drug discovery especially, is an analogy for the latter theme. Ore processing knows exactly what materials it is sifting for, whereas molecule discovery does not know exactly what they will turn out to be but knows hunches about their aspects (their parts and properties). This puts me in mind, too, of Ryan 1992's description of Jörgen Lehmann's development of PAS, a description that was markedly memorable for similar reasons. Page ranges include, but are not limited to, 242-244. The PAS instance was a rare beast born almost mature, whereas most of them take more of a slog somewhat analogous to a cryptographic brute force attack, with an aspect of gambling thrown in to boot. But they share a theme of lining up the keyholes and seeing latent vistas. Keyholing again from vistas to billiards, where light rays become pool shots (fired at just the right angle but not steerable once fired), we see that somewhere between calling all the shots in advance (which is usually superhuman) and blindly groping through a million shots waiting for the right ones to happen (which is usually unprofitable) lie sweet spots of value and ROI. Now the analogies are flowing, though, as business incubators and venture capitalists play that same game, seeking those spots. There's one that's bothering me since yesterday that I can't determine the utility of, if any, but it has to do with how Habus on a hot leg couldn't even turn or move the throttle without doing some penciled fuel arithmetic and fussing with spikes and doors and figuring out revised ballistic trajectories that can hardly be modified. I can't help thinking of properly stoking a locomotive boiler outmatched by freight weight, more than thinking of piloting a fighter. Meanwhile, though, the space analogy also asserts itself. Guys in space suits doing math exercises before they even twist each dial, blowing across a continent before lunchtime, tweaking tiny parameters per projections of ending up over either Santa Fe or San Francisco depending on whether you forgot to carry the 2 or round off to a sig fig. Is this an airplane or the Space Shuttle? They're both reusable vehicles that burn a shitload of fuel to blast themselves way way up into the crazysphere, where their flight dynamics are more math class and billiards than Top Gun, then are as careful as a frail uncle how they get back down in one piece, and the only thing they burn even faster than their shit-tons of fuel is shitloads of cash. These are the keyhole vistas that I am talking about, and they're not so different from Lehmann's as some might imagine, nor from Graham's Kodak moment with the moon (1996:169). If you hit the right alignment you might shoot through the hole into a sweet spot.
  • Speaking of Bernstein's Second Law (as I was recently), there is a phonemic analogue to the semantic tendency described by that law. Just as there are predictable practical limits on the semantic precision of a term across many speakers operating in many places, there are predictable practical limits on the absence of allophony across many speakers operating in many places; thus, allophony will arise. I don't know whose law this latter thought independently recapitulates. Probably someone's.
  • A few weeks ago I was reading Ezra Klein on his and others' thoughts on what might be needed for the United States to be able to build things [again]—to get things done [again].[2] Then today, in Rhodes 1999:226, I came across "America Is Process" by John A. Kouwenhoven from 1961.[3] It made me sit up and do a double-take, then look up Klein's 2022 article again. Klein 2022 quotes specific recent papers from several other specific thinkers about how America has lost its go-getter/building-and-making capacity in recent decades and those persons' ideas about why, including too-many-lawyers and so on: one of them "argues that liberal governance has developed a puzzling preference for legitimating government action through processes rather than outcomes. He suggests, provocatively, that that's because American politics in general and the Democratic Party, in particular, are dominated by lawyers." But Kouwenhoven's passage from 1961 shows that these forces are not new, which recasts my takeaway about the people that Klein quoted. What they are grappling with may well be a recent baroque exacerbation of the old forces, but it is not a newly introduced force that did not exist "back when America was better at getting stuff done", so to speak, like the 1940s to 1960s—which, I think it is fair to say, they seem to imply or believe. Some cursory googling today, of things along the lines of America / getting things done / lawyering / process / outcomes / building things and similar search term combos, digs up other recent articles that try to grapple with the same theme, but again, as I skimmed some of them, I found that none of them grounded their analysis in the historical baseline that Kouwenhoven pointed out in 1961—and he wasn't talking about something new at that time; he was clearly talking about what was already long since America's essence, or a core part of it. I'm not saying that they should have cited him specifically; what I'm saying is that I suspect that they may be too ignorant, generally, of the entire tradition that he was merely pointing out, although they probably don't realize what they don't know in that respect. The takeaway here today, in my view, is that people spin their wheels a lot without acknowledging some of the grounding context at the outset, and I suspect that many of them are probably insufficiently aware of it (that is, I suspect not that they are aware but just chose not to mention it), and I suspect that a reason for that weakness is that you can't read enough interesting and useful publications from decades ago if you're spending almost all your available time consuming words that your coevals just recently spewed, such as listening to hundreds of podcast episodes, and viewing what's on streaming services, and reading lots of recentism-heavy recent-best-seller-type books and recent long-form journalism articles. Your thinking may be insufficiently grounded if you've got that mix out of balance, tilted too far into recentism. A species of filter bubble, selecting for recentism. You can't well understand the present if you're slighting the literature from 2 decades ago and 4 decades ago (in your reading) and meanwhile bingeing (perhaps excessively) on the literature of the past 5 or 10 years. I'm not saying that all of the authors that I cursorily sampled today definitely have that bias (not at all); I'm just sketching on the napkin my hasty impression that many of them might have it. The last thing I would note is that when I read Kouwenhoven's passage from 1961, although I did get a surprise because of the connection-bell-ringing that went off regarding the Klein article of 2022, I was not at all surprised at what Kouwenhoven himself was saying, because the theme that in America lawyers often rise through public office to become executive leaders is old hat to anyone my age who was educated decades ago, learning about the founders, and Abe Lincoln's rise, and the many American leaders who have had law degrees, and so on. We always knew when we were growing up that America valued process (including due process specifically but also regulatory and legislative process), even at the risk and expense of having too many lawyers and too much lawyering. After all, whence the old witty chestnuts that we live in a litigious society, and you can trust democracy and America to do the right thing eventually after exploring all other options first, and democracy is the worst form of governance except all the others, and so on. These themes are not new.
    • Update several days later: Regarding recentism bias in people's reading choices: I just read a news column by a guy who wishes that a certain book, which was slightly ahead of its time from some viewpoints, had been published some years later than it was (not earlier), because probably then more people would have read it and discussed it. Notwithstanding that he may well be right about that, think about the enormous pathology that that line of thought uncovers regarding human behavior and cognition. It says that people today, in aggregate, will predictably almost certainly miss out on the full value of insights provided by a publication from a few years earlier because reading something that's a few years old is something that many people will just refuse to do. Think about the logic: he's not pointing out any anachronism challenge, such as a wish for time travel, or anything crazy like that; he's merely pointing out that people overall will miss the full effect of a valuable message because most of them are too preoccupied with recentism to simply use the existing tools that are available. Perhaps humans in aggregate get what they deserve in life, from some viewpoints at least?
  • Transclusion tweaks: noinclude, includeonly, onlyinclude.
  • Converting number bases (ie, between numeral systems) would naturally seem to be among the polysemic sets of word senses of words such as binarization, decimalization, and hexadecimalization, but apparently it is not, to date (2022-06-19), judging from corpus search results. Thus an example such as "I need to convert these numbers to base 2" apparently cannot be expressed in English currently as "I need to binarize these numbers", and an example such as "I need to convert these numbers to base 10" apparently cannot be expressed in English currently as "I need to decimalize these numbers". (I say "apparently" because I am not a programmer, so I am probing programmer-lexicon idiomaticness as an outsider rather than as a fluent speaker of their lingo.) These apparent facts strike me as accidental gaps of the type that might be backfilled at any time if some speakers initiate their backfilling and it catches on (with other speakers) via natural appropriateness.
  • Regarding the recent notes here about the raffler, Mumford, and von Neumann, I found tonight that pages 204-205 of Rhodes 1999 are a whole exploration, by von Neumann in 1955, of the inherent dual-use nature of technology, not only in the sense of civilian uses versus military uses (i.e., in the usual sense of "dual-use") but also of good uses versus evil uses generally. The whole page spread is relevant, but a salient highlight is this: "The most constructive schemes for climate control would have to be based on insights and techniques that would also lend themselves to forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined. Technology—like science—is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, indifferent to all." Thus, as already recapped below, any technology for asteroid avoidance and asteroid mining inherently also makes the raffler's analgesic possible, as well as ways to purposely F up the 93-million-mile goldilocks distance. Cue "forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined". At least we're forewarned: any bullshit that some asshole can devise, will be devised, so we need to be continually anticipating all such bullshit. Speaking of that formulation, Rhodes 1999 also contains a recounting, from Robert A.J. Matthews in 1997, of (what Matthews was certain was) the 1949 origin of the name "Murphy's law", whereas even at the time the concept itself was already long since known to humans. Wikipedia's Murphy's law § History already covers this origin assertion, but I cited these WP:RSs there in a TL;DR recap in chronologic order before the subsection on the topic gives the long-ass details.
  • Go read this guy. Holy shit. Yes, please. I perceive a recurring theme about his lines of thought: It doesn't so much matter that he can't solve every problem or answer every question (because no one can solve every problem or answer every question); rather (in contrast), the topmost important thing about him is that he's smart enough to identify and formulate the question, analyze the key factors involved in trying to solve/answer it, and cogently capture that analysis for himself and/or others to build from, either sooner or later.
    • The unspoken context of "go read this guy" is "if you are able and willing to read, then go read this guy". That narrows the cohort, I admit.
  • In concert with reading on recent nights: There are appropriate times and places in life for serving the TL;DR concept (prospectively) or invoking it (retrospectively, as critique), and (in contrast) there are appropriate times and places in life for serving the RTFM concept (prospectively) or invoking it (retrospectively, as critique), but people who never or almost never RTFM create a species of the free-rider problem (that is, a class of instances thereof).
    • Corollaries:
      • Quite a few jobs involve roles that work to somehow allow this class of free riders to get away with not paying for the free ride. Such jobs thus represent the externality passed by the free rider to the company trying to produce goods and/or services, where the free rider may be external or internal (a customer or a colleague, respectively). The payroll for them instantiates the stopping of a passed buck.
      • Part of user interface design involves this work (because it is prospectively sparing users from RTFM by anticipating the need and solving it elsewise), and there is some healthy balance for it (some of it is duly adaptive, whereas some of it is a maladaptive extreme).
        • People who programmed their VCRs in the 1980s might recognize the maladaptive segment of the spectrum: there was no app for that at the time (more like a switchboard operator role), but even so, in many cases there could have been some user interface somewhat more intuitive, even within the technological constraints of the time, but the market did not (could not?) entirely support an adaptive balance at the time; there is also analogy on this point with the fact that in the 1920s, for one's automobile, one had to do the choke and the ignition advance and the cranking manually.
      • Some roles involving repeated spoonfeeding of such free riders may present a special purgatory of double bind: "You must make things easier for someone else (up to and including covering for their incompetence) but without spending any resources, besides your own hourly rate, on the processes or equipment or software with which you provide that service." Whether that "nothing besides/nothing except" parameter value makes any sense logically and practically is context-dependent, but a trick of "successful" managers is either to be too blind to judge that context or to pretend to be too blind to do so, with plausible deniability. Either way you get to seem (to those above) to be profitable, and thus competent in your role. Your subordinates keep the overall scam going by managing upward, breaking their backs (busting their asses), and other devices.
      • Speaking of special purgatories of double binds, and of rederiving corollaries: another corollary regarding TL;DR versus RTFM:
        • If you don't spoonfeed with a finger puppet show, then many people will fail to learn the whole lesson or see the whole point, but if you do spoonfeed with a finger puppet show, then many people will complain that there are too many finger puppets who said too many words (more than two is already too many, whether puppets or words); and either way, many people cannot learn the whole lesson or see the whole point. And not only did you lack time to make it shorter, but also, you knew that by doing so you would be losing the people who would find the hyper-terse formulation more of a cryptic riddle than an explanation or exposition, so you tried to salvage at least that group even though the opportunity cost of doing so is losing the ones who just plain can't or won't pay enough attention to anything at all, and those are the most hopeless cases who are lost anyway (regardless), so they aren't a net loss anyway. Making a pedagogic effort at illustration at least can reach a few students who are conscientious learners, whereas a short but greatly unexplanatory statement would seem to help even fewer (or none), and abandons everyone instead of abandoning most but salvaging the most promising learners. The latter is obviously an optimization for the person trying to accrue some small fraction of the cohort to learning, instead of accruing zero.
  • Speaking of people rederiving laws, or deriving corollaries thereof, it's funny that my reading Bhattacharya 2021 about von Neumann, and happening across Dockboy's alert about the raffler's analgesic, and reading Rhodes 1999, happened in near synchrony, because last night I also happened across Rhodes's quoting of Lewis Mumford's postulate regarding von Neumann's dictum about the irresistible nature of technology to humans: carrying it to its logical conclusion, Mumford says, yields that "If man has the power to exterminate all life on earth, he will." (As quoted in Rhodes 1999:295.) It is fair to say that Mumford anticipated Dockboy's assertion that one can always find some people who will want to buy the raffle tickets. Which is to say, Dockboy independently rederived Mumford's corollary to von Neumann's dictum. So much for anything being new under the sun.
    • But speaking of anything being under the sun, do we now need to worry that someday someone will try to steer that thing into the sun? C. Montgomery Burns told us that since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun, and we all laughed, because the joke was that he was unknowingly describing only the subset of man that is akin to himself regarding level of villainy, while somewhat smugly wrapping it in the documentary tone in which Nimoy might have delivered it on In Search of while accurately conveying various themes that man, in the sense of actually most of man (wherein lies the comic disjuncture of Burns's line), has perennially pondered. Anyway (in any case), steering an asteroid into the sun probably doesn't matter to the sun nor to those who depend on it (anyway), but steering the earth toward the sun (or away from it) is a different story.
  • My range of reading in recent days returned me to thinking once again about polysemy and about the idea that even many words whose polysemy most people either don't realize, or realize dimly but underappreciate consciously, nonetheless create practical miscommunication problems in life (and thus the polysemy instance is not trivial nor negligible despite that many people might say it is). I was all set to feel proud of myself for having recognized some perhaps-not-previously-recognized natural law along the lines that "any term that attracts wide enough popular attention will develop troublesome polysemy as the public inadvertently extends its senses through insufficiently mastering its original sense" when I realized that all I had done was merely rederive Bernstein's Second Law.
  • Put dashpots in your valve gear, they said. When? The 1850s. Lest anyone think that hydraulic lifters in ICEs came from a tabula rasa 80 years later. I realize that the connection is only indirect. But still. Picking up tidbits like this one helps us to understand the historical context of things that happened later. They didn't happen in a total vacuum. But speaking of valve actuation, it's funny you mentioned vacuum.
  • So all cast steel is cast steel, but not all cast steel is cast steel. Fuck you, kid.
  • "The 'artificial dichotomy' created by the 'cut' is a philosophic monstrosity," said Hugh Everett III, as quoted in Bhattacharya's biography of Johnny New Man, the man from the future; I feel his pain, being aware that artificial dichotomies happen all the time in human cognition (it's one of those themes that once you recognize it, you can then notice its many instances), which reminds me of when Jung said that "This happens all the time in practice, despite the fact that it is a philosophical monstrosity," and he was talking about the nature of thoughts, which is odd because Von Neumann's conception of the cut was that it lay nowhere short of consciousness, which is to say, just more than infinitesimally close to consciousness, an arbitrarily large (↑) number of tiny (↓) increments closer, which is to say that "between thermometer and observer, von Neumann argues, one can insert any number of processes," as Bhattacharya summarized it, but "no matter how many such steps we add, von Neumann argues, the sequence of events must end with someone perceiving these events." Thus a way in which thoughts matter concretely despite that people thought that they shouldn't or couldn't (if the cut exists at all; but Everett saw a way that it might not). Which is funny because Jung too was talking about a way in which thoughts matter concretely despite that people thought that they shouldn't or couldn't; he went on to mention "undeniable traces of its reality" despite that it (the thought) was thought of as merely unreal, such as "a painful hole in our bank balance" if the thought should have prompted some speculation. Speaking of speculations, and of artificiality in cognition, I am aware that the apparent connection from Neumann to Jung is merely a specious artifact, but it's still a pretty little shiny thing to enjoy as a bit of entertainment in passing. And the facility that noticed it is a funny little engine that digs up all kinds of shiny little connections, some of which are quite real (speaking of things that are real). The fact that ore processing finds speciously shiny bits doesn't make it unprofitable, for it also simultaneously refines real ore.
    • Regarding dichotomization—also have to acknowledge here that dichotomization isn't inherently bad; it's often necessary; but the trick is not to misapply it, especially when the human predisposition to us-versus-them mentality is involved. Outside of that, often just practically necessary. But watch for adaptive versus maladaptive. An example of adaptive: "I think it's safe to conceptualize collecting and hoarding as a continuum, and you've got to draw a line somewhere in terms of clinical significance." — Andrew Guzick, PhD, 2022
    • I needed to add here also the following juicy tidbit from Bhattacharya: "One of many objections raised to Everett's ideas is that universes multiply like rabbits, a consequence that strikes some physicists as using an ontological sledgehammer to crack an epistemic nut." But I like rabbits, and I like nuts, and I like the cut of Everett's jib, and humans are going to need more ontological sledgehammers if they are to crack through their own obstinately hard epistemic nutshells in time to avert Armageddon.
    • "For you were born into a world where most things were made by human consciousness. You may die in a world where nothing is made by human consciousness." — Erik Hoel, 2022-05-18, regarding AI art. The timing is (speciously) odd because weren't we just talking about what is made by human consciousness, or not. But meanwhile Hoel's point (quite unrelated) is also arresting for a different reason (i.e., the reason that he is duly alerted to, and alerting us about).
  • An interesting idea that I had never encountered before: UFO-ish stuff (UFO sightings, third-kind probings, whatever) doesn't necessarily have to involve any extraterrestrial life, if instead what it solely consists of is future post-human entities (just as likely cyborgic entities as not) who have time traveled.
    • This possibility would allow for two conditions to coexist: (1) Earth-derived sentients turn out to be alone in the universe after all and yet (2) not all UFO-ish stuff is unreal/fictitious/misapprehended.
    • Granted that this idea would require the physical possibility of time travel. Who the f- knows; I'm no physicist; I simply find the notion that points 1 and 2 can coexist to be novelly interesting (i.e., novel to me at least).
    • If I were the betting kind, my only bet regarding cosmology, so far, would be that this game is rigged and you can't win. Purely a hunch from the gut, and a punch to the gut.
  • A certain bit of polymer applications engineering, but with limits, although I made it further than anyone else would; but even I have my limits, as it's depressing to read the minutiae of the triumphs of a company that was remarkably profitable back then (enough that they remarked on it, after all) and then the next day crack open the digital newspaper and read that it is in receivership now, because parameters change [corollary: shit happens]);
    • same with docs on roadtrips (i.e., there are limits, albeit dynamic; again, parameters change);
    • same with tobacco packaging machinery;
    • in general, this theme makes me sigh, but at least even on a bad day I eclipse most others in how far I will go, without even feeling the distance (and if they ever invent a proper commercial application for that characteristic, they'll cry when they encounter me, and who will be sighing then?); what else lately?
  • variations on the theme of glass-lined steel tanks, speaking of things that applications engineering invented some more commercial applications for (sometimes a solution in search of problems can be a good thing, although once parameters change, even those markets can in turn be disrupted, and I had thought that that thought had exhausted even my interest in the topic, but yet damned if they didn't then erect a monument to continued relevance, with odd relevance to me, and then they also had to educate me on how another one that I had thought I was looking at had already been replaced, but then they had to replace the replacement for reasons that they themselves could not explain, but then as soon as I record the foregoing I pick up an unrelated tome and promptly read about someone's "glass-and-steel contraption" [you can't make this shit up]);
    • speaking of steel and glass contraptions, there is more than one kind (steel + glass = contraption, but steel + glass = contraption too), but one thing that's interesting is a theme that can unite the classes, which is critique. Thus: Yes, you could do that, but the glass might crack, and the steel might rust, and the contraption might leak, or you could also do something else instead but it's still not entirely guaranteed not to crack or rust anyway, and either way you're out $$$, and speaking of polymer applications engineering, you might just wrap it all in plastic instead, depending on what 'it' is;
  • blokey prejudiced chauvinists who predated Columba murdering each other on the Borders (I have my limits, and some things never change; a history of human wars is too much like the 'begats': just yet another jerkwad you've never heard of murdering yet another jerkwad you've never heard of for unjustified or questionably justified reasons, but don't worry because yet another jerkwad you've never heard of will replace him);
  • I'll read about coal market trends or drove roads in the eighteenth century just to blow off steam (coal-fired steam), as long as there's a social history hook and not just an economic data report; who will stare at the sun with me? Corollary: pack a lunch if you would beat me at staring at such suns (is it a paradox that there is a certain numbness at the heart of attentiveness? It's OK, I contain multitudes);
  • not long ago I read about serving the tinplate market (and disrupting and re-disrupting the tinplate mill business) in the 1890s through 1930s, and that one really held my interest, for heartachy reasons of a known class;
  • speaking of inventing commercial applications of concepts, it turned out that the guy with the contraption (which was just a means to an end, not the end in this case) lost out, because too many other people could see the value of the end too and got busy grabbing a piece for themselves (just another instance of the same old theme about the theory of the value of patents versus the realities thereof), but not before some wag complained in a medical journal that he just couldn't see the value in surgical anesthesia (as a general concept or practice, at all) because humans are wrong to try to avoid any happenstance that God intended for them to endure (I wonder if any SCOTUS justices will work a citation of that "wise" article into their "jurisprudence" [which is to say, personal religious preferences, or specious rationalizations of/casuistry for anti-anti-establishment innovations]);
  • "I don't tempt fate by saying things like 'fuck R'lyeh,' because I'm smart enough to respect the capability of R'lyeh, and of those with houses there, to reach out and touch someone. I'm not someone with a house at R'lyeh and I'm sure I'm not someone who could afford one anyway. But R'lyeh has limits. There are some conceptions of solutions to all of life's problems that would end R'lyeh and everyone with houses there. The opposite of asteroid impact avoidance is the seeking of asteroid impact or the seeking to control the potential for it, and it's the ultimate Manhattan project. The ultimate flash. Just because it's a technological pipe dream today doesn't mean that there's no anticthulhu out there somewhere who waits dreaming of it. There are people who would pay to be the one to press that button. You could fucking sell raffle tickets. We've got hotshots and bullies out here thinking they're all hard and cynical. But what a joke that is. There are people in pain who have sat down and designed the ultimate mode of cynicism, one that's physically impossible to out-cynic. It's the dreaming of that button, to end all pain everywhere. In his house at Peoria, halfdead anticthulhu waits dreaming." — Dockboy, in "The Thursday Morning Committee", which seems to have been taken down (down to R'lyeh perhaps?); the passage caught my fancy because it is the ultimate revenge of the nerds: the maximum conceivable version thereof. No one could top it unless they managed to concoct some way to unbang the bang. But the key difference is that the latter strikes me as inconceivable, whereas the raffler's version is conceivable. Hell, if people think asteroid mining has any snowball's chance in hell of succeeding practicably, then the raffler's analgesic is even more plausible still, because it is in fact less technically demanding.

References

[edit]
  1. ^ Brubaker, Ben (2024-02-23), "Never-Repeating Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information", Quanta Magazine, retrieved 2024-02-25
  2. ^ Klein, Ezra (29 May 2022). "What America Needs Is a Liberalism That Builds". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331.
  3. ^ Rhodes, Richard (1999). Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines, Systems and the Human World. Simon and Schuster. p. 226. ISBN 978-1-4391-2955-5. Retrieved 2022-06-25.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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