Post: #11

Quote:First, I agree that focusing on 'being positive' or 'being nice' to the detriment of being honest is problematic.

In which case we agree about the first half of the key question at stake here. The second half is that modern anglophone culture does indeed tend to emphasize being pleasant at the expense of acting so as to achieve excellence. I am not sure that you agree with this part. At the risk of courting further controversy, there is a link here with the feminization of the West (observable in male testosterone levels, as well as in the exterior develop of culture).

(Today 1:21 PM)Planchet Wrote: As someone who invests in public markets I find this response, which is typical in the modern world, highly amusing. Those with 'objective' 'genuine expertise' created the financial crisis and the risk managers with 'genuine expertise' completely failed to see it coming. Many of those who managed to predict it were those without any kind of recognised expertise as being outside the system helps one recognises the failings thereof - think of the emperor's new clothes story.

The problem here is an underlying belief in the existence of objectivity (which is false) and a desire to categorise and control which is described by Iain McGilchrist as a bias to the use of the left hemisphere of the brain in his book "The Master and his Emissary". Pheroquirk's point about how one determines those who know what they are talking about on the internet is spot on in this regard.

Further, I would note that the other aspect of the excess of niceness is that many have become overly emotionally sensitive and so unable to cope when others are not nice - I've seen this a few times on this forum.

Quote:I don't think your reply demonstrates an understanding of what I've written. Neither have I found my beliefs to be common or typical in the general population.

Whether or not it is demonstrated by his post, I rather think that Planchet gets your basic point even if he did not follow the origin of the term 'genuine expertise'.

Quote:First, note that "genuine expertise" was in quotes for a reason. I was using the term that pheroquirk had provided. I quoted it because I saw it as a tautological argument (we believe who we believe) which neglected to explicitly state the ultimate basis of its epistimology.

Can our epistemology ever be made explicit? I somehow doubt it, and indeed that this relates very much to the book by Iain McGilchrist mentioned by Planchet. As a practical manner I find it interesting to observe that scientists, religious thinkers, investors, artists and the like very rarely make their epistemology articulate. More theoretically, Polanyi has pointed out that a great deal of reasoning actually depends on what is tacit and might not be possible to be made articulate. One can try to tease out the foundations, but in the end they can at best point to one's epistemological grounding, and not fully specify it. Godel tells us that any formal system that is complete will struggle to describe the real world.

All said and done, I'm a practical man, and the discussion started with respect to a practical question. Fancy philosophical ideas are all very well, but all too often they lead us away from looking at the world as it is in favour of a beautiful abstraction that can never properly describe the real thing.

The meaning of the term genuine expertise is perfectly clear. Somebody who has studied computer studies at university with a certificate in Microsoft networking has a credential, might claim to be an expert, and might be thought to have expertise in that area. But whether he can actually do the job or has any genuine expertise is a totally different question. It may well be that the fifteen year old kid in the neighbourhood has zero credentials, but a great deal more genuine expertise than the credentialed guy. How do you tell? Well - assessing expertise is not that easy - you need a good feel for the subject, and a good nose for talent. But just because you can't write a manual that explains to someone with no ability to judge how to choose, doesn't mean that this kind of skill doesn't exist. Clearly it does.

"I'm not criticizing his basis for trust. I'm questioning his objective assertion that his process should be the exclusive basis, when he isn't explicitly stating his process and perhaps is not able to. There are various processes for establishing trust, and all have flaws that can be balanced against other methods."

I am not aware that I said that natural authority and good judgement should be the exclusive basis form making decisions in life. I repeat what I said before that Nature has more shades of grey than black or white. Nonetheless - as Planchet points out - the custom today to look for objectivity and demonstration of ability or quality, and one to which you clearly subscribe quite strongly, is very much the culmination of a modern trend - actually a trend in consciousness, a certain way of looking at the world. It's especially a Western, and above all an American way of thinking. Many parts of the world do things rather differently, and this is a point tacitus used to make. He suggested an important step in personal growth would be to disconnect entirely from technology and go live with a tribe that has retained other modes of consciousness and has a more plastic way of looking at the world. I do believe he did something rather like this in his youth, and benefited tremendously from it.

It is certainly true that whilst Moore's Law holds, and there are continued benefits from breaking tasks down into components, automating what can be automated, and farming the rest out to be done by the emerging world, that this prevalent mode of consciousness has many benefits and understandably has come to be associated with great prestige by virtue of its success in our era. But one should not make the mistake of confusing what works for now today in certain parts of life as the only valid way to look at the world. Looking for objective proof, and distrusting natural authority is the consequence of an acquired mode of consciousness and set of mental habits. I cannot blame you for rather liking it. But one should be aware that consciousness shapes the world that one sees, and if one were to choose to adopt a different set of habits for certain other contexts one would see the world differently, and most likely in a richer, more fulfilling manner. This is what I learnt from tacitus.

By the way, in case it might be of interest, tacitus nailed the bursting of the housing bubble in real time - see some of his old posts back in Feb 2007 (the point of minimum fear in the credit market). He did this based on not depending primarily on objective models, but rather good judgement and discernment.

"
Quote:But in many fields where quality really matters, it is often only someone with genuine expertise that can tell the difference between good and bad work. And then people need at some point to recognize that the judgement of the one with expertise is likely better than their own, even if they can't see why.


His definition of the process by which 'genuine expertise' arises is, essentially, "trust your friends and then gain your own expertise.""

With the greatest respect, I think not. I tried in my example to give you a sense for how natural authority arises in the world because given how you look at things, I believe this concept must to you seems like gibberish, or at best tendentious and reflective of hidden power structures. Natural authority arises naturally in a culture where people are in the habit of forming their own judgements about things that they need to depend on. I understand that this isn't the case for much of modern life in America, particularly within elite circles, but it certainly is true for certain other circles, and not circles that are lacking in prestige or power. The world is a big place, and it is easy to think that the way things are done in the circumtances with which one is familiar must be the only correct ways when that is not necesarily the case. That said, there is no doubt that your way of looking at things has become more fashionable in recent decades.

" Sometimes that works, but that also gave us Bernie Madoff."
Actually, quite the reverse. People invested with Madoff because he ticked all the boxes, and everyone else was doing it. Also because people thought they knew his game, which they imagined to be frontrunning customer flow but getting away with it because he was clever and protected by his standing in the Establishment. This kind of credentialist left hemisphere consciousness is quite the reverse of that which favours natural authority. A discernment based culture would say when he came to visit hmmm it is very interesting how profitable you are able to be with a strategy that nobody else is able to make any money doing; please help us understand better. And a discernment based culture led to people digging deeper in response to something that didn't seem to make sense. This only happens when you trust your intuition, and refined sensibility, not when you only look at the numbers, and what the credentials of the people appear to be.

The problem is that you can not substitute "data" and "objectivity" for a deep understanding of what is going on. The data are a starting point, but you always need to dig deeper. Our society, especially in big cities, leads people not to trust their personal judgement and intuition (which requires practice, training and development) enough to depend on it, but rather to depend on social institutions - follow the herd, do what you are supposed to, get rich, right? That can work for a while, but in the long run there is no substitute for confronting the world as it truly is.

"Just because someone claims objectivity based on data doesn't mean you give credence to their claims."
Indeed. Therefore one needs to exercise discernment, and also to pay attention to the observations of natural authorities on the subject in order to figure out what might be right or wrong with such models. There is no escaping the need to decide who knows their stuff and who does not, and you can't go by social proof in these matters. In 2006, Paulson was not even a second rate hedge fund guy, for example.


" Quote:The problem here is an underlying belief in the existence of objectivity (which is false)


To claim authoritatively that objectivity is false is to make an objective statement. In any case, you have to at least allow an imperfect measure of objectivity, or else the notions of true and false in general become meaningless. If really don't believe anything is objective then you don't get to claim that anything is false."

There is a real world out there, that is accessible to us directly via intuition, supported by the evidence of the senses. But the evidence of the sense (such as data and models) can never be objective, because it requires placing into context, and there is always an aspect of discernment and judgement in doing so. Data by itself is meaningless, and the kind of evangelical belief some Westerns have in data stripped of intuitive thinking on the grounds that this objectively tells you anything is very much mistaken.

"I agree with your assertion that we should prefer unbiased individuals over biased ones as a heuristic, especially if we lack the capacity to understand their mental models."

I don't believe either Planchet or myself spoke of heuristics, or of unbiased individuals. My experience of life is that there is always a bias, and truth emerges at best via critiquing and dialectic.

"Of course, most High School and even most college education isn't teaching kids about anything so poorly understood as economic theory. Objective standards work a lot better in regards to teaching material which is well understood."

It strikes me that standards a century ago were much less objective than they are today. Coincidentally, standards then were much higher. Also, academic standards in India and Hong Kong are arguably much higher than they are in England and the US. (In A Level exams, a C grade in the Hong Kong exam will get you an A in England). Yet the fashion for 'objective' marking has been much greater in the West. I do think there is a casual relationship here (albeit not direct), but don't wish to drift further here.

"@Pheroquirk - "if there was one nation in the world that exemplified the rule of law rather than the arbitrary rule of man, it would be England."

I'm not sure I agree with that. Modern America, for example, is far more legalistic and lawsuit happy than England was."

The Rule of Law is not about the reign of lawyers! Rather the opposite! A legalistic culture is the opposite of one where the Rule of Law holds. Blackstone is quite clear.

"Not to mention that the pasturelands of Ireland and Scotland were noted as being difficult to defend against theft, which seems to contribute to cultures of honor."

English elite culture at its height was shaped barely at all by Ireland, and only somewhat by Scotland. The concept of an English gentleman owes nothing to the putative 'honour cultures' of Scotland and Ireland.



" Quote:You may say that I have no objective basis for believing the Savile Row suit superior. But on the whole it is very likely to be, whether or not you can tell.

What does 'it is very likely to be' mean here?"

It means you might somehow have found an amazing suit in Barneys, and gotten a horrible one that doesn't fit and doesn't make you look good from your tailor in Savile Row. The latter is not very likely, but not impossible.

" If there's no objective basis for quality, then quality is subjective and relative and should be discussed using appropriate terms. Terms of preference ("I like") would be more suitable than statements of absolute fact ("It is"). Unless, of course, you think the product has some absolute quality which is universally preferred even if you personally lack the ability to measure that quality."

This is a very clear statement of your beliefs. As I said, these questions are metaphysical and metapolitical. I believe there is a natural hierarchy of discernment and expertise in any particular area, and that human beings are naturally oriented towards figuring this out. But because you do not believe in anything beyond the evidence of the senses (which includes 'data'), you exclude this possibility by assumption. I don't want to try to persuade you that you are wrong, but it's my belief and that of many others that you limit the aspects of the world that you can experience by starting with this basic assumption, an assumption that is useful but not true. Quality is objective because intersubjective, and a representative suit from Savile Row (I shall not mention particular tailors) is of higher quality than a representative suit from even high-end department stores.

"This seems to be a common epistimological mistake; people claim that matters are subjective but still wish to discuss them using objective terminology. They don't just assert that their opponents have a different preference, but that their opponents are "wrong." To say that a thing is wrong requires some universally legitimate objective standard."

Your paragraph above is unimpeachable by prevailing cultural fashions in America. But they are only fashions. If one has genuine expertise in a field then to say a thing is wrong does not require a universally legitimate objective standard. One can say a thing is wrong because I have been doing this a long time, and I know what I am doing, and I tell you this is not correct. If there is a discussion about it with other experts then one then uses language to point to the thing that is not right in an attempt to get others to see what you do. That's utterly different from producing 'objective' evidence of your point of view.

Ever read Zen and the art of archery?


" Quote:Authorities become such because they are recognized by others as such, not because they claim to be one. Please don't ask me to prove to you that he knows his onions. This is how authority works.


The problem is that this doesn't explicitly state how you determined that Pago "knows his onions." (your epistimology)"

He clearly knows his onions, and I say that because I have been using mones a long time and am very sensitive to small differences. If you would like to claim that he doesn't, you would need to point out things he ought to have noticed but didn't, and things he clearly interpreted wrongly - but I suspect such will be hard to find.

As I said earlier, I have never found much good to come out of devoting excessive thought to questions of pure epistemology, and indeed most great thinkers seem not to have done so either. Knowing all the epistemology in the world will not teach you how to think, and how to judge. I think you might enjoy Iain McGilchrist's book - he explains very well the problems of relying exclusively on the kind of thinking you prefer. It's hard to condense into just a few lines, however.

" There's a process at work there, whether you're cognizant of it or not, whether I accept your process or not. This is what I'm referring to when I say that you're using loaded terms."
Of course there is a process at work - a process of discernment and judgement. But it's certainly not one that can usefully be codified and placed in a four-ring binder!

Post: #12

In any case, there is no substitute for judgment.

Of course. I agree. It's when we try and ask how we know that our judgement is good or bad, that we easily run into circular arguments.
I don't think we have to make circular arguments, at least not to the extent that we do. And to the extent we can unpack our epistemology we can improve it and share it with others.

It is not the case that it must either be objective and conforming to a certain measurable standard, or subjective...The problem here is an underlying belief in the existence of objectivity (which is false)

I agree that there are limits to objectivity, both in the absolute sense and also in our capacity to measure something objectively.
But we can only make objective statements (true, false) to the extent that objectivity exists. To the extent it does not exist, we need to qualify our statements or express them in terms appropriate to preference. I have no objection to shades of grey, in and of themselves.

I also have no objection to intersubjectivity as long as appropriate descriptors are used to indicate intersubjective agreement.
Or at least that people realize internally that they're describing a subjective experience and not stating an objective truth.




-------------------------


In which case we agree about the first half of the key question at stake here. The second half is that modern anglophone culture does indeed tend to emphasize being pleasant at the expense of acting so as to achieve excellence. I am not sure that you agree with this part. At the risk of courting further controversy, there is a link here with the feminization of the West (observable in male testosterone levels, as well as in the exterior develop of culture).

I'm really not disagreeing with the problem. We're pretty much in agreement there. I'm discussing the proposed solution. Rather than the constant conflict between hierarchies and attempts to level hierarchies it's helpful to defer, when possible, to objective standards. This is a predominantly Western standard, and has been employed by the West with very good results compared to those standards practiced by other known cultures to date. It does open the possibility of gaming the system, but that's a problem with enforcement rather than method.

Can our epistemology ever be made explicit? I somehow doubt it, and indeed that this relates very much to the book by Iain McGilchrist mentioned by Planchet. As a practical manner I find it interesting to observe that scientists, religious thinkers, investors, artists and the like very rarely make their epistemology articulate.

Our epistemology can typically be made far more explicit than it usually is, and there are powerful benefits to doing so.
An explicit understanding of our epistimology allows for testing that epistemology, improving it and sharing it with others to promote a common understanding which can be used to resolve problems with less ego involvement. I'd note that there are some of each group of professionals that you mention who do make their epistimology explicit, indicating it's possible to do so. Popper did some of the best work in this area in regards to science. (It's interesting, to say the least, how popular Kuhn is among Speech Com majors compared to Popper who tends to be popular with actual scientists.)

Sure, it's possible for us to 'go with our gut.' Often we have to, due to a lack of capacity. But that surrender carries with it a huge price in terms of sacrificed self knowledge, an inability to understand the limits of the models we base our decisions on and a difficulty in reconciling our worldview with the worldviews of those who disagree with us.

Godel tells us that any formal system that is complete will struggle to describe the real world.

Certainly. There are limits to objectivity. But this also means that there are limits to knowledge, and limits to what we can describe as 'true' or 'false.' The Incompleteness Theorum is not a license to treat uncertain things as certain.

Fancy philosophical ideas are all very well, but all too often they lead us away from looking at the world as it is in favour of a beautiful abstraction that can never properly describe the real thing.

Sure, all ideas are abstractions. Even our experiences and feelings are abstractions of sensory data. This is how we think. It's utilitarian. It helps us make decisions and determine the reliability of the mental models. Of course, if any of my beliefs don't match my experiences then I need to know that. But being able to accurately measure and predict and falsify beliefs are extremely practical issues.

Quote:The meaning of the term genuine expertise is perfectly clear

If it really were perfectly clear, you would not have so much trouble defining it. ;-) My point is not to deny the existence of something we might call expertise but to unpack the term so that our common understanding of it (and how we measure it) is explicit rather than vague. Difficulty defining expertise and how it could be measured one way or another corresponds with difficulty understanding what expertise is, even if the term feels familiar.

Quote:But just because you can't write a manual that explains to someone with no ability to judge how to choose, doesn't mean that this kind of skill doesn't exist.

The inability to write that manual (even if it were an incredibly complex and painstaking manual) does suggest an inability to measure and understand expertise. Expertise is a concept which we use to model and predict behavior and capacity.

Here's how I'd do it;

There are a few tests I'd run for our network engineer; first, I'd test for deficiency of relevant knowledge. What's an IP address? What's the difference between a static and dynamic IP address. What's a packet? Contrast IPv6 with IPv5, etc. Deficiency tests can weed out the bottom 50% or so of professionals, are highly objective, but have trouble differentiating among the more analytical candidates.

I'd look for problem solving skills; For example, can our candidate reduce a complex problem to simpler components.

You could ask his past coworkers and bosses how well he's done. That information might be relevant especially if it is from people with opinions who are not, themselves deficient. Votes only matter if the voters are competent and trustworth. But if they are, they are worth weighing.

I'd find the most complex or difficult problem that our candidate has successfully solved, to measure upper boundary capacity. The NIH uses a similar standard for their Outstanding Investigator grants which seem to have been a pretty fruitful program. This is a much more subjective test and also requires a far more trained tester, as tests of higher level activity usually are and do.

Our inability to distinguish among the upper ~30% of professionals or so suggests that there may not actually be a true "upper 1% of network engineers."
If it's possible to construct such a test, businesses and individuals still often fail in this regard.

The more subjective abilities are still subject to measurable standards in the long term; To what extent do a company's practices correlate to profit, for example?
And it's worth noting that Madoff's failure, while delayed, can still be objectively measured.

Quote:Nonetheless - as Planchet points out - the custom today to look for objectivity and demonstration of ability or quality, and one to which you clearly subscribe quite strongly, is very much the culmination of a modern trend - actually a trend in consciousness, a certain way of looking at the world. It's especially a Western, and above all an American way of thinking. Many parts of the world do things rather differently, and this is a point tacitus used to make. He suggested an important step in personal growth would be to disconnect entirely from technology and go live with a tribe that has retained other modes of consciousness and has a more plastic way of looking at the world. I do believe he did something rather like this in his youth, and benefited tremendously from it.

I realize you made the argument before. I acknowledged it. But I don't see what bearing it should have on the discussion.

Why does it matter whether a practice is a 'culmination of a trend' or not? Why should we believe that trends in beliefs can be used to indicate the truth or falsehood of those beliefs?

Quote:I am not aware that I said that natural authority and good judgement should be the exclusive basis form making decisions in life.

Isn't the definition of good judgement the capacity to make good decisions? If that's not the definition, what is?

I think the question was "how do we know if our judgement is actually good?"

Quote:But one should not make the mistake of confusing what works for now today in certain parts of life as the only valid way to look at the world.

Sure. We've discussed bounds for models already. But it is also possible to predict that particular models will work outside the bounds they were trained on if we understand the basis of the model and aren't just extrapolating on past trends.

Quote:Looking for objective proof, and distrusting natural authority is the consequence of an acquired mode of consciousness and set of mental habits.

I don't believe that looking for objective proof correlates with distrusting "natural authority." To the extent that we can obtain objective proof of a thing, it should either confirm or debunk our belief that certain authority is "natural." If a rule or authority is non-falsifiable, that indicates that it's non-predictive as well. Predictive value and falsifiability are two sides of the same coin.

Quote:I cannot blame you for rather liking it. But one should be aware that consciousness shapes the world that one sees, and if one were to choose to adopt a different set of habits for certain other contexts one would see the world differently, and most likely in a richer, more fulfilling manner. This is what I learnt from tacitus.

Dude.

I'm So Meta Even This Acronym ;-)

Quote:By the way, in case it might be of interest, tacitus nailed the bursting of the housing bubble in real time - see some of his old posts back in Feb 2007 (the point of minimum fear in the credit market). He did this based on not depending primarily on objective models, but rather good judgement and discernment.

I'll check it out when I get the chance. But if his results can be measured objectively, that's an objective result. If we can't unravel what "good judgement and discernment" means in this instance, though, we're unlikely to learn from his example.



To be clear, I'm not saying that natural authority is gibberish. I'm just trying to get an explicit definition of the process you use to decide if someone is an authority, so that the process isn't obscure. I apologize if I incorrectly described your methods.

Quote:The world is a big place, and it is easy to think that the way things are done in the circumstances with which one is familiar must be the only correct ways when that is not necessarily the case.

I don't think that's what I'm doing. What I believe isn't a matter of familiarity. I've lived and worked overseas and traveled to other countries. I feel I believe the things I do because those beliefs are both functional and also more internally consistent than competing systems.

Quote:This only happens when you trust your intuition, and refined sensibility, not when you only look at the numbers, and what the credentials of the people appear to be.

There were people "looking at the numbers" saying that Madoff claimed to have traded more on particular days than all the stock traded on those days and discounting him on that basis. You seem to be associating "objective measurements" with a sort of tremendous credulity when it comes to anything expressed in numbers. People can lie with numbers as easily as they lie with words. I'm highly skeptical of your assertion that those working with Madoff did so in contradiction to their intuition and feelings, or that intuition and feelings are reliable in all circumstances. But more importantly, we can look at the problems associated with Madoff and note that they had an objectively bad result in order to condemn them and not repeat the problems that led up to the result. (Less regulation for Market Makers, for instance.)

If the best way to avoid being conned is to trust to indescribable intuition, the matter is problematic because you can't teach better intuition. Those people who don't understand the subject are lost. I agree that many of Madoff's clients believed they were gaming the system. I don't think that helps the matter, though.

Quote:That can work for a while, but in the long run there is no substitute for confronting the world as it truly is.

You're trying to assert that intiution is synonymous with seeing "the world as it is" with no support for that belief. It's a circular argument and repeating it won't make it more valid. Even worse, such a view is obfuscatory since intuition can't be taught or accumulated from generation to generation.

Quote:The Rule of Law is not about the reign of lawyers! Rather the opposite! A legalistic culture is the opposite of one where the Rule of Law holds. Blackstone is quite clear.

Every power structure requires some form of enforcement. But I never claimed that lawyers "ruled." A legalistic culture can be the opposite of one where Rule of Law holds if people don't have access to the legal system, promoting inequality. But historically, lawsuits have been the alternative to other forms of vengence. Cultures of Honor are notoriously violent. It's one of their distinguishing feature, as you've noted.

Quote:English elite culture at its height was shaped barely at all by Ireland, and only somewhat by Scotland. The concept of an English gentleman owes nothing to the putative 'honour cultures' of Scotland and Ireland.

Fair enough. We'll restrict ourselves to England only.

I don't know why you'd call those honor cultures putative since they're as fit for the term as England, but so be it.

Quote:But because you do not believe in anything beyond the evidence of the senses

Intuition isn't based on the senses? Extrapolating from intuition or extrapolating from data differ only in that the first process is obscured and the second is open.

Quote:Quality is objective because intersubjective, and a representative suit from Savile Row (I shall not mention particular tailors) is of higher quality than a representative suit from even high-end department stores.

If you're going to defer to intersubjectivity, you're back to popularity contests. Or at least popularity contests among people that you like and agree with and who share your unstated norms. Intersubjectivity isn't universal. It's localized to a particular in-group.

And it keeps coming back to this; that subjective matters are presented in objective terms, with the leap from one to the next being unexamined.

Quote:an assumption that is useful but not true.

To say that a thing isn't true is to make an objective statement.

Quote:If one has genuine expertise in a field then to say a thing is wrong does not require a universally legitimate objective standard.

To say a thing is "wrong" implies a legitimate objective standard. That's what objectivity is. You're trying to argue that opinions can become facts if the people you trust believe in them. As if enough food experts agreed that chocolate was the best flavor then saying vanilla is the best flavor would be 'wrong.'

This does not seem internally consistent.

Quote:One can say a thing is wrong because I have been doing this a long time, and I know what I am doing, and I tell you this is not correct.

That is not a valid basis for truth. Many long-standing practices were later demonstrated to be objectively incorrect or suboptimal. Time is not sufficient.
Untested proclamations of self knowledge are not sufficient. Neither are assertions. I can't prove what's true, but this assertion is pretty well falsified.

Quote:If there is a discussion about it with other experts then one then uses language to point to the thing that is not right in an attempt to get others to see what you do. That's utterly different from producing 'objective' evidence of your point of view.

Um... falsification is part of objective evidence in my point of view.

Quote:Ever read Zen and the art of archery?

My distaste for Nazi authors steered me away from it. Is that really the authority you want to point to?

Quote: He clearly knows his onions

To be clear, I'm not disputing a matter of fact. I'm trying to get you to spell out your epistemology.

Quote:If you would like to claim that he doesn't, you would need to point out things he ought to have noticed but didn't, and things he clearly interpreted wrongly - but I suspect such will be hard to find.

If such evidence is reproducible, it is objective.

Quote:As I said earlier, I have never found much good to come out of devoting excessive thought to questions of pure epistemology, and indeed most great thinkers seem not to have done so either. Knowing all the epistemology in the world will not teach you how to think, and how to judge.

I believe that it does help with both thinking and judgement. It helps me to understand the limits of my ideas and when they will work or not work so that I can better adapt them to unfamiliar territory. It helps me remove unnecessary restraints on my own thinking. If you want to interpret peer reviewed studies, it really really helps to have some understanding of study design.

Feynman wrote a fair bit about what boils down to epistemology.

Most professionals speak within their closed circle and under a presumed shared understanding (which isn't always there.) It's mainly those few who try and convey inside insights to outsiders (or potential insiders) or those insiders that don't share a common understanding that really need to discuss epistemology. You don't need to understand art theory to enjoy art, after all. But teaching and conflict resolution are still worthwhile skills.

I'm not sure what evidence I could provide to change your mind, so this will be my last reply to you. (With all due respect.) I suspect from here on out we'd just be repeating our basic premises on the topic, without any worthwhile advancement of the discussion.

Post: #13

I think Pheroquirk and I both understand what you are saying. One significant point of difference relates to your insistence that things are either objective or subjective. This is a false dichotomy, although I admit this is a horribly complex subject.

Having no deisre to take up your time unnecessarily, I'd second Pheroquirk's suggestion of McGilchrist's book, one of the best I have read, and point out the role of context - attempts to define abstract objective standards are a function of a move away from contextual thinking whereas judgment is inextricably bound to context. McGilchrist is excellent on analysing this.

The majority of people are uninterested in arguments which do not accord with their views and so discard opportunities to develop. It's clear from your writing that you're an intelligent and knowledgeable person and it'd be very interesting to read your thoughts if you do make time to read his book.

Post: #14

(06-12-2012 11:28 AM)Planchet Wrote:  I think Pheroquirk and I both understand what you are saying. One significant point of difference relates to your insistence that things are either objective or subjective. This is a false dichotomy, although I admit this is a horribly complex subject.

Are you saying that nothing can be labeled as objective or subjective or that some things are a mix of both? The second I agree with, clearly. The first I don't. What I disagree with is taking clearly subjective or intersubjective material (or mixed material) and presenting it as purely objective. The use of words like "wrong" or "false" implies the existence of exactly the kind of pure objectivity that the users of those terms attempt to disprove. The question is not even whether objectivity exists as a pure category, but rather whether a person who claims pure objectivity does not exist can still make arguments, without caveat spoken or implied, which are predicated on its existence. I'm fine with people having different worldviews. But I view this particular outcome as internally inconsistent.

Some things are matters of opinion but collective opinions don't become facts outside of the circle of people who hold to those norms, and that limit needs to be acknowledged. Pheroquirk has argued that there is a rough convergence of opinions regarding expertise in a "natural" setting. From what I've seen, outside of testing for deficiency/competence which is essentially objective, there is little such natural convergence. Or rather, there are multiple points of convergence which means that truly intersubjective beliefs can't fairly employ typically objective terminology. Their scope is bounded.

Quote:Having no deisre to take up your time unnecessarily, I'd second Pheroquirk's suggestion of McGilchrist's book, one of the best I have read, and point out the role of context - attempts to define abstract objective standards are a function of a move away from contextual thinking whereas judgment is inextricably bound to context. McGilchrist is excellent on analysing this.

The majority of people are uninterested in arguments which do not accord with their views and so discard opportunities to develop. It's clear from your writing that you're an intelligent and knowledgeable person and it'd be very interesting to read your thoughts if you do make time to read his book.

I'm not sure that Pheroquirk could accurately paraphrase the type of argument that I'm likely to make. And I'm uncertain whether I could pass that test in regards to his beliefs, either. It does seem that he assigns a certain power to obscure processes which open processes can't ever hope to match, whereas I believe that obscure process are only obscure because we don't understand them yet.

Quote:attempts to define abstract objective standards are a function of a move away from contextual thinking whereas judgment is inextricably bound to context.

Objective models are judged, in large part, by their predictive value (as laid out by Popper) so they are applied and tested multi-contextually. Predictive value is meaningless without some context. Inductive reasoning is part of a process of applying knowledge to multiple contexts (and finding the limits of such generalizations), not a move away from context entirely. Therefore objectively testable models aren't antagonistic to judgement, but are a process by which the judgement of one person can be effectively shared with and validated to (tested by) many other people.

The Master and his Emissary certainly got good, intelligently written reviews on Amazon. Even the people who criticized the book praised it. And McGilchrist seems to have a good background in the sciences. I'll read it if I have time, though it looks rather large and the reviews didn't seem to include much in the way of helpful insights, which is a bit of a red flag.

I'm already swamped by my current reading list, tragically. I'd be happy to go over some good summary of the material, if anyone has condensed it to 5-10 pages. In any case, describing where a mode of thought comes from in an attempt to negate it is a sort of ad hominem argument since it does nothing to address the quality of the argument itself.

I did find this interesting review;

Quote:Despite the brilliance and erudition of this book and all I have learned from it, I feel the author has erred in framing science as the product of an over-dominate left brain with its implications of its dehumanization of our social being. That is not what science does. To seek, to the greatest degree possible, knowledge of the reality behind appearances (and illusion) does not diminish or demean humanity. It enriches it.

I'd add to that that "science" is more than simply the formalized output that is published in peer reviewed journals.

Post: #15

Introduction to the book here:



It is not easy to understand. There is certainly a problem if one cannot see that one's own manner of thought is culturally and temporally specific. Every criticism I have read so far, bar one, is a function of not understanding what McGilchrist says.

Post: #16

Quote:There is certainly a problem if one cannot see that one's own manner of thought is culturally and temporally specific.

Our manner of thought is not entirely culturally and temporally specific, otherwise there'd be no significance to saying "there is certainly a problem."

Your own use of language which asserts any kind of facts, truth, falsity etc. implies that you, yourself, strongly believe some portion of thought is not temporally specific.

Does my thought have a temporally specific aspect? Sure, but it also has a non-temporarily specific aspect. This is implied by any assertion of right or wrong.

But we're going in circles again. I've put this matter forward several times and it hasn't been properly addressed.

Thanks for the intro. The page doesn't load due to some bad URL encoding which seems oddly persistent and particular to this url.

Post: #17

Hi.

I agree with Planchet that you are an intelligent and knowledgeable person.

It is difficult to persuade somebody to explore a perspective alien to them solely from a discussion on an internet forum, but since you set forth a certain perspective quite clearly – one that is aligned with the dominant narrative in the Anglophone world, and one with which I profoundly disagree - I wanted to take the time to address it more completely even if the prospect of a meeting of minds might be slim.

I will separate out what I see as the substantive points from the rest, and start by addressing the former.

Substantive Points

Deprivileging of points of view you do not find agreeable
A great deal has been written about the topics you raise, yet you assert your point of view as if it were the only valid one, and all others are simply invalid. I think that at the very least you may be able to develop a more complete understanding of your own perspective by considering others that you find at face value unconvincing.

Intuition versus the evidence of the senses
You say “Intuition isn't based on the senses? Extrapolating from intuition or extrapolating from data differ only in that the first process is obscured and the second is open. "

Actually intuition is directly opposed to the evidence of the senses. Intuition means a kind of direct access to reality that may be informed by sense data, but transcends it. Of course one needs to check one's intuition against the real world, but intuition is a totally different thing from extrapolating or making inferences from data. Might I refer you to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on this matter!





As I understand it, you are sceptical about the existence of intuition as a dependable source of insight. That is your privilege, as they say in America, but one ought to recognize that your belief is culturally specific, and that the great preponderance of humanity that has ever lived, or that live today – including the majority of scientific pioneers - would have a rather different take on matters. Therefore you need to argue for the superiority of your view and not just assert it.

Pherotruth is based much more on personal discernment and intuition than objectivity
I note in passing that the very venue where we are discussing things is one where people place quite a lot of weight on the cultivated discernment, intuition and insight of those who are experienced, and rather less weight on the 'objective' and measurable conclusions from scientific studies of pheromonal effects. It is very difficult to find instances where people on the forum learning about new molecules have chosen to do so in a 'scientific' manner by pursuing controlled experiments. Yet I do not see you objecting to the formation and dissemination of what must seem like arbitrary personal opinions not grounded in objectivity.

If it were me, this discrepancy would be the source of great cognitive dissonance, and it would be something I would be trying to figure out.

Epistemology vs practical steps to become a better thinker
Talking about the theory of something is different from holding oneself to a high standard, doing it, and via practice and experimentation getting better at it. It is useful to know a little theory to become a better lover, but diminishing returns quickly set in. Equally, the study of epistemology may be useful background if one wants to become a better thinker, but I doubt very much that studying the theory of how people know things is the same thing as practically getting better at learning them.

If you take the best people in any field that has a cognitive element, I do not think you will find that the best are distinguished by the degree to which they have made their epistemological views articulate, nor by the degree to which their beliefs conform to your personal opinions about how learning ought to take place (viz via objective metrics and falsificationism). We could for example look at the people in this forum, or at investors in public markets.

Falsificationism does not describe how real science gets done
You assert that a study and discussion of epistemology leads to improved practical results.  Perhaps you ought to make this clear by using the example of applied pheromone research.  What tricks are we missing out on as applied pheromone experimenters by not having made such a study, and agreed on a framework?  I am highly sceptical, but am certainly open to learning.

I have been interested in Popper's work since a friend of mine at high school got into him and he used to visit him at his house for tea.  However falsificationism doesn't actually describe how science gets done.  When an experiment fails to confirm your hypothesis, there are inevitably too many other variables to know definitively what the failure means (ie there are bunch of subsidiary hypotheses, not all of which are made explicit).  A study of the history of intellectual thought demonstrates that this really isn't how knowledge progresses, even if it is a nice, grand and idealistic fairy tale to inspire children.


Insight is connected to bodily experience
George Soros is the most prominent proponent of falsificationism and the thought of Popper outside the field of epistemology, and has claimed to ground his political activities on Popper's framework of an open society. However, there is a fantastic story told by Robert Soros – the son who runs Soros Fund Management. His son said (I am paraphrasing) “You know my father has these grand theories, but 90% of it is crap. What happens is he is long the market, and his back starts hurting. So he exits his position and goes short”. A psychologist has written about this, and tied Soros's trading style to the work of Eugen Gendlin on the bodily felt sense – the paper was received favourably by Soros. So even people who claim to be Popperians admit the reality is that bodily experience has great importance in shaping perception and decision-making.

There are tremendous nervous links to both the gut, and the heart - the gut has been described as being the "second brain" of the body, and HeartMath have done some fascinating research on the role of the heart in thinking and feeling.  So one should be careful not to downplay the literal role of somatic phenomena in cognition.  But I think you are wrong to suggest that there is a dichotomy between following an objective standard and "going with our gut".  Just look at the forum - every day people point out real understandings that are by no means objective but also are no means rawly instinctual as your phrase might suggest.  Every now and then, a true Rationalist comes along to the forum, insisting that we must be imagining things, and that there is no real evidence for the kind of things we have found.  But such a poor benighted person is missing what is really going on, based upon a false view of the nature of knowledge and perception.


Intersubjectivity and natural authority versus popularity contests
"Quote:Quality is objective because intersubjective, and a representative suit from Savile Row (I shall not mention particular tailors) is of higher quality than a representative suit from even high-end department stores.

If you're going to defer to intersubjectivity, you're back to popularity contests. Or at least popularity contests among people that you like and agree with and who share your unstated norms. Intersubjectivity isn't universal. It's localized to a particular in-group."

There is a difference between the intersubjective assessment of expertise and popularity contests, because the former considers the fact that there is a hierarchy of ability between people whereby the best are very much better than everyone else.  Therefore if you want to figure out what makes a good suit, you will do okay by asking the very best-dressed people you know to help you learn more.  Similarly with pheromones.

These things are not de facto a matter of personal preference, relativism, and the arbitrary tastes of the in-group because of the remarkable degree of agreement that tends to be found amongst the most able people of different groups over certain essential things.  There is a different culture here to that at the androtics site - members overlap somewhat, but not totally.  Yet you will get similar, well-founded assessments of which products are the best for certain purposes from the leading members of either forum.  (I already explained how I would start to figure out who the leading members are).

Genuine expertise exists, and cannot be fully captured in a manual

Quote:"Quote:The meaning of the term genuine expertise is perfectly clear

If it really were perfectly clear, you would not have so much trouble defining it. ;-) My point is not to deny the existence of something we might call expertise but to unpack the term so that our common understanding of it (and how we measure it) is explicit rather than vague. Difficulty defining expertise and how it could be measured one way or another corresponds with difficulty understanding what expertise is, even if the term feels familiar.

The definition of the word pair "genuine expertise" is perfectly clear, as reference to the oxford english dictionary will demonstrate. Of course it may be that you are not willing to accept that this actually exists in the world because of your prior commitment to a set of values – but that is entirely a different question.

Quote:Quote:But just because you can't write a manual that explains to someone with no ability to judge how to choose, doesn't mean that this kind of skill doesn't exist.

The inability to write that manual (even if it were an incredibly complex and painstaking manual) does suggest an inability to measure and understand expertise. Expertise is a concept which we use to model and predict behavior and capacity.

That might be what you use the word to mean ("expertise is a concept which we use to model and predict behaviour and capacity"), but it is not what the word and older predecessors (such as skilfulness) have meant in many centuries of existence of modern English (by modern, I mean not the English of Chaucer).  It is the height of absurdity to suggest that because you can not write a manual on how to be a great conductor, a great opera singer, a great mechanic, a great investor, or a great pheromone formulator, the quality of having great expertise in this area does not exist!

Quote:There are a few tests I'd run for our network engineer; first, I'd test for deficiency of relevant knowledge. What's an IP address? What's the difference between a static and dynamic IP address. What's a packet? Contrast IPv6 with IPv5, etc. Deficiency tests can weed out the bottom 50% or so of professionals, are highly objective, but have trouble differentiating among the more analytical candidates.

I'd look for problem solving skills; For example, can our candidate reduce a complex problem to simpler components.

You could ask his past coworkers and bosses how well he's done. That information might be relevant especially if it is from people with opinions who are not, themselves deficient. Votes only matter if the voters are competent and trustworth. But if they are, they are worth weighing.

I'd find the most complex or difficult problem that our candidate has successfully solved, to measure upper boundary capacity. The NIH uses a similar standard for their Outstanding Investigator grants which seem to have been a pretty fruitful program. This is a much more subjective test and also requires a far more trained tester, as tests of higher level activity usually are and do.

To a reasonable extent here, you are smuggling in discernment and judgement into your process without admitting it.

Excellence exists, and the best performers are much, much better than the rest

Quote:Our inability to distinguish among the upper ~30% of professionals or so suggests that there may not actually be a true "upper 1% of network engineers."
If it's possible to construct such a test, businesses and individuals still often fail in this regard.

The more subjective abilities are still subject to measurable standards in the long term; To what extent do a company's practices correlate to profit, for example?

Correlating practices with profit is fraught with problems unless applied with insight and discernment.  For example, Enron was the poster boy for leading management consultants and business writers, and the perception of their success shaped how other people behaved even though it was based on lies and delusion.  Similarly, sometimes a company does very well or very badly because it is sitting in the right place at the right time.  Much of life is cyclical, but we tend to forget this when we want to fit the messy world into our simple models.

Quote:Our inability to distinguish among the upper ~30% of professionals or so suggests that there may not actually be a true "upper 1% of network engineers.

This is clearly false - anyone who keeps their eyes open can see that it's darned obvious that in all fields of life some people are just very much better than others.  Not just 10% better, but 50x better.  A man such as tacitus had no peers in many aspects of life - pheromone exploration being just one of them.  And finally 'science' is catching up to the darned obvious.  See, for example the following:-

Quote:We revisit a long-held assumption in human resource management, organizational behavior, and industrial and organizational psychology that individual performance follows a Gaussian (normal) distribution. We conducted 5 studies involving 198 samples including 633,263 researchers, entertainers, politicians, and amateur and professional athletes. Results are remarkably consistent across industries, types of jobs, types of performance measures, and time frames and indicate that individual performance is not normally distributed—instead, it follows a Paretian (power law) distribution. Assuming normality of individual performance can lead to misspecified theories and misleading practices. Thus, our results have implications for all theories and applications that directly or indirectly address the performance of individual workers including performance measurement and management, utility analysis in preemployment testing and training and development, personnel selection, leadership, and the prediction of performance, among others.

Our results point to the influential role of elite performers (i.e., superstars), which opens new research avenues for the future. First, although we know there are more superstars than a normal curve would suggest, exactly what percentage of workers can be considered superstars has not been established. The classification of superstars is a subjective judgment, and there are no norms to indicate what proportion of workers should be considered elite. Second, research is needed on the deleterious effects of superstars. For example, does the presence of a superstar demotivate other workers to such an extent that total organizational output decreases?

Finally, our research provides information on the performance distribution, but it does not examine what individual characteristics top performers possess nor did it investigate the stability of the top performing group. When and how do these individuals reach the elite group? What is the precise composition of this elite group—do individuals rotate in and out of this group, or once in the top group, they remain in the top for most of their career? What individual, group, and cultural factors predict an individual's membership in the top-performing group over time? Ultimately, certain individuals likely possess abilities and skills that increase the probability of extraordinary performance, but the interactive nature of performance and context suggests that environmental factors and other actors in the network also play a role in determining individual performance (Aguinis, 2009). That is, superstars likely cannot emerge in a vacuum. Top researchers can devote the necessary time to their work because there are others who take on some of their teaching and administrative duties. Hollywood stars emerge in part because of supporting casts on screen as well as off screen (e.g., agents, managers, publicists).

Your beliefs are peculiarly American corporate, 2012 edition; others have different beliefs

Quote:Why does it matter whether a practice is a 'culmination of a trend' or not? Why should we believe that trends in beliefs can be used to indicate the truth or falsehood of those beliefs?

A degree of self-awareness, in my experience, tends to reduce arrogance and misplaced self-confidence in one's particular approach to the world.  Travel broadens the mind, and so does reading that places one's worldview into a broader context.  Europeans often observe that it is a peculiarly American trait to think that the American way is the only way, and to struggle to understand other ways without relating them to what the person already knows.

Quote:"But one should not make the mistake of confusing what works for now today in certain parts of life as the only valid way to look at the world."


Sure. We've discussed bounds for models already. But it is also possible to predict that particular models will work outside the bounds they were trained on if we understand the basis of the model and aren't just extrapolating on past trends.

Implicitly you are saying that every way of looking at things is a model.  But this is a metaphor, and metaphors often break down.  The approach of trying to break everything into fragments, and proceeding as if one can standardize and objectively assess these fragments is one approach.  It has had some benefits that make it popular in 2012, and some costs that are less well understood by most.  In time, I suspect that the popularity of this approach will ebb, as happens with all approaches.

I cannot blame you for rather liking it. But one should be aware that consciousness shapes the world that one sees, and if one were to choose to adopt a different set of habits for certain other contexts one would see the world differently, and most likely in a richer, more fulfilling manner. This is what I learnt from tacitus.



Use of language

I hate to insist on the proper spelling and usage of words, but if you are going to use high-flown words such as 'epistemology', it would be better to spell them correctly consistently, otherwise it detracts from the effectiveness of the argument. Similarly a circular argument is a particular kind of fallacy that neither of us have made. “Eggs are tasty.  Why are they tasty?  Because they are yellow.  Why does yellow imply tastiness?  Because it is evocative of eggs”.

I understand that you do not think I have made articulate how it is that intuition can result in direct access to reality, but you must remember that this is a very complex philosophical question, about which there is considerable philosophical controversy (as you will see if you peruse the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy linked above) and that it is not possible to fully make clear how intuition functions in this kind of context.

You say "I also have no objection to intersubjectivity as long as appropriate descriptors are used to indicate intersubjective agreement. Or at least that people realize internally that they're describing a subjective experience and not stating an objective truth. "

Well, the English language has been around much longer than you or I.  I fail to see why we should demand its mutilation in order to fit to an ideologically imposed standard of how things ought to be phrased.  If I interview somebody and say to my colleague later "I am not sure about this guy.  He has a disingenuous, not-sincere aspect to him", then I am using words to point to something that I believe to be objective.  I believe you would dispute both the language, the objectivity (because potentially intersubjective) and potentially even the likelihood of of such an intuitive observation being true. But it is unreasonable to expect people with different cultural and metaphysical beliefs to conform to your own values and preferences in how to communicate.

Borrowing the prestige of science to justify 'objective' standards

Quote:Rather than the constant conflict between hierarchies and attempts to level hierarchies it's helpful to defer, when possible, to objective standards. This is a predominantly Western standard, and has been employed by the West with very good results compared to those standards practiced by other known cultures to date. It does open the possibility of gaming the system, but that's a problem with enforcement rather than method.

What you are doing is imposing a particular set of values and mode of consciousness as being to be preferred based on your subjective preferences, but you are obfuscating the value-ladenness of this by merely asserting the helpfulness of this approach.

This approach, by the way, is not so much just purely Western, as Western as of 2012.  The founders did not think this way; neither did Lincoln; Feynman, Tesla, Carnegie, Edison, or most other great men of the English-speaking world until about the mid 1930s.  I believe it is no coincidence that as this approach (of assuming objectivity) has spread, we have seen stagnation in all areas but computing, as Peter Thiel (CEO of Paypal, and the first investor in Facebook) makes clear below:



Economic growth in our time has depended almost entirely on an extending of existing technology and very much less on true innovation.  It might seem like the internet was revolutionary to us, but the impacts of the telegraph, the railway, and the canal were very much greater.

Your observation about the vulnerability of 'objective standards' to gaming is, very truly, spot on.  One interviews Ivy League graduates these days, and initially one is struck by their apparent broad knowledge and sophistication.  But dig a bit deeper, and the poor dears have no idea how to think!  One sees people with PhDs in statistics who can barely solve a practical puzzle of the sort once upon a time bright kids would try to solve at the age of twelve.  The relative decline of the US in educational league tables during the time this approach of 'objective standards' has spread, ought to be at the very least cause for prolonged head-scratching.

The substitution of credentials and certification for making a real assessment of someone's capability is exactly the problem.  People that bought AAA-rated mortgage bonds using other peoples money blame the rating agencies and the banks.  Well, they have a point, but it was part of their job to figure out whether these bonds really offered good risk:reward as described rather than taking the sellers' word for it.  A bright schoolboy could have figured out there was something wrong with the process.  But instead people tried to offload their responsibility for doing something that was at the essence of their role by depending on third-party representations and opinions.  You might save your behind that way, but you are certainly failing in your moral duty by acting so.

What's more, any objective standard will always be gamed and there is no way that the regulators or standard-setters will keep up with the gaming.  Not only will they not keep up, but they are unlikely to want to keep up until something goes very wrong.  We see this again and again and again, yet never seem to learn from it.

Post: #18

Secondary Points

Herrigel and Nazi slurs
You claim that your distaste for Nazi authors steered you away from Herrigel's “Zen in the Art of Archery”.

First of all, might I say that in the general case an author's political affiliations are not relevant to the substance of their writing, unless their arguments are inextricably bound up with these political affiliations. For instance Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party, but he remains an important figure philosophically, and one cannot just ignore his work merely because one doesn't approve of his politics. There is not a hint of Nazi thought in Herrigel's work, so I must assume that either you were misinformed, or you are just name-calling. Name-calling is not aligned with the spirit of your outlook. It is a shame to miss out on a quite profound work (one not without its flaws) because of on error of historical knowledge.

Secondly, unlike Heidegger, Herrigel was not a Nazi. The full version of Zen in the Art of Archery was published in 1948 – so not only was it not published during the Nazi era, but the fact that it was published demonstrates that he had no questionable links, since intellectuals who were remotely associated with Nazi organization or thinking were not allowed to publish at this time.

Frameworks of theory and measurement cannot fully describe the real world
"Godel tells us that any formal system that is complete will struggle to describe the real world.

Certainly. There are limits to objectivity. But this also means that there are limits to knowledge, and limits to what we can describe as 'true' or 'false.' The Incompleteness Theorum is not a license to treat uncertain things as certain."

The point is that systems are very useful but can never completely describe the real world.  Therefore we should not mistake our theoretical abstractions for the thing itself, and always try to be aware of what is really going on out there that is not captured in our models.  The fashionable approach tends to see this looking at the world as it is as unjustified subjective opinion, up until the point somebody finally manages to capture it in some formal model.  But the gap between discerning something out there that doesn't fit the model, and writing a new model that incorporates the anomaly tends to be years, by which time the world has probably changed again.  If you want to achieve excellence, you need to focus on what's out there, not what you think ought to be out there.

"Fancy philosophical ideas are all very well, but all too often they lead us away from looking at the world as it is in favour of a beautiful abstraction that can never properly describe the real thing.

Sure, all ideas are abstractions. Even our experiences and feelings are abstractions of sensory data. This is how we think. It's utilitarian. It helps us make decisions and determine the reliability of the mental models. Of course, if any of my beliefs don't match my experiences then I need to know that. But being able to accurately measure and predict and falsify beliefs are extremely practical issues. "

It's not true that all ideas are abstractions.  Or at least there is a great difference between on the one hand using a word to point to something out there in the world, understanding always that it is only pointing to what is out there, and having what is out there in mind when you use the word; and on the other using a word to turn this thing out there in the world into a concept and detaching it from the possibility of evoking real phenomena in order to classify it.  This corresponds to a shift in consciousness from right hemisphere, gestalt thinking to left hemisphere, analytic thinking.  We need both, but our civilization has experienced runaway analytical thinking.

It's important to be able to critique ideas.  But that doesn't mean falsification, or quantitative prediction and certainly doesn't mean measure.  "Copulins can at the right moment tend to make girls horny, get them to think of you no longer as just a friend, but may turn good girls off you".  All of these things are clearly true, but there has been none of this falsification, prediction, and measurement that you are so keen on.  Certainly, if Peter Thiel decides to get into mone use, and devote some of his billions to research, we could run a grander study.  But grand studies are always missing important parts of the context, so they never really tell you all that you need to know in practice.  You can't abstract away real expertise without suffering a real deterioration in quality.

Post: #19

I apologize that I don't have the time right now to deal with your whole response. I'll digest it as I can.

Quote:A great deal has been written about the topics you raise, yet you assert your point of view as if it were the only valid one, and all others are simply invalid. I think that at the very least you may be able to develop a more complete understanding of your own perspective by considering others that you find at face value unconvincing.

This is an inaccurate paraphrasing of my beliefs. Do I belive some views are invalid? Yes. So do you. So does Planchet.
You've both indicated you hold to the possibility of invalid beliefs and the rejection of perfect relativism through the criticisms that you've made of my views, among other things. Do I believe that some views are inconsistent or sub-optimal by their own standards and fairly judged on that basis? Yes, of course.

Do I believe that my views are the only valid views or the most optimal? No. You've argued for convergence of intersubjective beliefs. I've argued for some measure of divergence. That should be enough, in and of itself, to demonstrate that I don't believe my views are the only valid ones.

What I object to is the notion that the better part of my epistimology is a "fashion." I'll leave aside the question of how common my views are. What I will say is that I believe that there have been a large number of beliefs which were popular historically prior to my own which have flaws demonstratably greater than those of my own set of beliefs. You could say I believe that there is some kind of progress, even if time of origin is far from a perfect measure of an idea's worth. There are probably other sets of beliefs equal to or better than my own set. I don't subscribe to relativism or the notion that all ideas are equal. I don't believe you do either, or you would have no grounds to criticize others beliefs or critique them.

Asimov has a wonderfully succinct essay called "The Relativity of Wrong" which addresses some of how I view my current beliefs in relation to history. Succinctly put, even if there were flaws in the current theory of combustion it is demonstrably superior to the phlogiston theory, which is superior to the four element theory.

Quote:from the encyclopedia; "Knowledge is generally thought to require justified true belief"

To be clear, I don't hold with the platonic definition. I prefer Popper's epistimology. A belief can be falsified and it can be predictive and it can be falsifiable. For practical purposes, I don't hold that beliefs about the physical world can be irrefutably proven objectively true, nor do I have much use for such a concept even if it were theoretically valid. But they can be objectively proven false. I'll use a belief in objective truth socially because it's socially expected and people won't understand me otherwise.

Quote:Actually intuition is directly opposed to the evidence of the senses.

I see what definition of intuition you're using here. If you want to say that A = A is based on intuition, that may be passable except that all the definitions of a priori knowledge given in your encyclopedia entry are tautological and definitional/taxonomic. I take knowledge to mean models with predictive value of the natural world. (To be clear, that can include knowledge of one's subjective self, such as "I like ice cream.") Intuition does not produce such models without involvement from the senses. To put it another way, if you put a person in a box without any external stimulation for all their lives, they can not develop even the concept of A=A much less an application of that concept. Such a concept is developed only through interaction with the outside world, making the notion of intuition apart from sensation mostly illusory. (This is partly based on Jeff Hawkin's view of the Cerebral Cortex as an organ for recognizing forms and making predictions from his book "On Intelligence." )

There are certainly many human instincts. Even blind people sometimes cover their eyes, I've been told, as a reflexive gesture. But even that instinct exists only because it has evolved. That is, it exists because of a form of sensory feedback and selection with the natural world over the course of generations. To some extent, this may be an assumption. I'm not sure how I'd test or falsify this belief offhand, though I might be able to think of an experiment given more time.

Further; given that quantum mechanics and relativity are generally observed but non-intuitive, I believe intuitive knowledge to the extent that it might related to the world is demonstrably trecherous and limited. The notion that a line is the shortest distance between two points might be called intuitive, but that model doesn't hold up against relativistic physics. Similarly, some intuitive beliefs seem challenged by quantum mechanics, giving experiment and prediction an edge over intuition.

If I misunderstand any other terms of art you use, I do apologize though. Words like "intiution" have more than one definition and my background in philosohpy is far from comprehensive. It's certainly not my primary area of interest, and I've explored it mainly as a tangent to other interests.

Quote:Therefore you need to argue for the superiority of your view and not just assert it.

Certainly. If what I've posted so far is not sufficient let me know what point you'd like me to support. But I'm not even arguing for the ultimate superiority of my view. I am arguing that objective judgements like the existence of "falsehood" is necessarily predicated on some measure of a belief in objective truth, and cannot be arrived at through subjective or intersubjective means. (though if it were universally intersubjective among all involved parties, noone would know the difference as far as conflict resolution were concerened.) So statements grounded in relativism combined with assertions of falsehood of some system or other are likely due to an inconsistent application of one's epistemology.

Quote:and rather less weight on the 'objective' and measurable conclusions from scientific studies of pheromonal effects.

My previous post already noted that objective observations were not synonymous with scientific studies. The second is a subset of the first and it is the more general category that I'm interested in. Objective hypotheses are testable. Evidence for them certainly does not need to prove anything comprehensively. On the contrary, I don't hold that objective beliefs can be comprehensively proven true. They can only be shown to be predictive (a sliding scale, not a binary quality), non-falsifiable, or falsified.

Quote:Yet I do not see you objecting to the formation and dissemination of what must seem like arbitrary personal opinions not grounded in objectivity.

An arbitrary personal opinion might be something along the lines of "You should have slept with that woman" or "Interest from females is desirable." I don't think that such views are invalid and they are certainly useful in predicting the behavior of the person making them. But I don't hold them to be capable of logically persuading those who don't already agree with them, either, and so they can be unreliable when it comes to conflict resolution. An objective assertion might be "androstadienone tends to lower physical distance with women when worn by a man." This is objectively testable regardless of whether it has been studied clinically. It can be proven true or false based on observations. Those observations may need certain qualifications to become more predictive, such as if the mood of the tester influences the results, for instance. Pheromones don't really allow a clinical-style separation of tester and subject. But the result of Jim in New York can probably be repeated in California.

Quote:It is useful to know a little theory to become a better lover, but diminishing returns quickly set in.

I'll agree that epistimology has diminishing returns as well. It helps to know the ways a study can be flawed. But eventually a person needs to deal with the specifics of their area of expertise.

Quote:I do not think you will find that the best are distinguished by the degree to which they have made their epistemological views articulate

Without addressing what distinguishes the best from one another ( a very interesting, contentious and difficult question), I certainly believe that the worst in a field might be distinguished, if they are not hindered by their lack of basic knowledge, then by the flaws in their epistimology. If we grant that incompetent people tend to be bad at recognizing their own incompetence (I have no idea if this is true or not, but it's often asserted) then this might very well point to an epistimological problem of some variety.

Quote: What tricks are we missing out on as applied pheromone experimenters by not having made such a study, and agreed on a framework? I am highly sceptical, but am certainly open to learning.

I'm not positive what you're asking here, but I'll try to answer your question. Perhaps I'll answer the wrong one. If so, sorry.

First off, I think that a fair number of the people here have some understanding of good epistimology and proper study design and how to try and compensate for it more-or-less in their daily experiments. They're aware of the potential for various study biases. Mark and Chris even ran blind studies, which is quite impressive. So I'm not criticizing the pheromone community on this score, or holding myself above them.

A number of experimenters, myself included, have noted that they got hits in situations where the person could not possibly have smelled their pheromones. Some preliminary clinical evidence supports the notion that some pheromones make people's body language more attractive. I've known at least two individuals who claimed that they had no positive effects from mones who also turned out to be essentially immune to the effects of caffeine and alcohol. This seems a useful observation.

This suggests to me that mones exert an effect both on a user's body language and also on their target. We should be cognizant (as many are, already) of such an effect as we test, and try to account for the separate as well as combined effects. To what extent does dampening one's sense of smell diminish the effect of the particular mone? What's relevant? Length of exposure time by the target or the wearer? The androstenols seem particularly hard hit by user-resistance to their effects while androstadienone is diminished much less, if at all.

Determining the mechanism by which mones work (VMO? Nerve Zero? Mucosal Absorption ) would also bear on
which non-androstanes, if any, are likely to have a pheromonal effect.

While clinical data isn't synonymous with objective data, questions like "what is the relationship between the endogenous effects of hormones and their effect as pheromones" give the potential to apply a huge amount of accumulated clinical data on hormones to novel molecules with pheromonal potential.


If I've answered your question poorly, I apologize. I don't really separate my epistimology from "how I think", so I'm unlikely to really address the subject except when I disagree with others or they have a different epistimological basis and I need to reconcile the difference. But an understanding of epistimology does help address the assumptions behind one's beliefs. Not easily, of course, as this discussion demonstrates. So many of our beliefs about different epistimological systems are filled with unspoken assumptions that have to be made explicit before they can be addressed, and people (myself included at times) tend to avoid cognitive dissonance by turning unfamiliar beliefs to a caricature.

Quote:A study of the history of intellectual thought demonstrates that this (popper's notion of falsification) really isn't how knowledge progresses

Several things here;

1. It's been said that in formal research, ideas aren't falsified. Old scientists die off and young scientists take their place. There may be some small truth to that, though it seems overstated. There are plenty of examples of scientists changing their views based on contrary evidence. In any case, I'm not trying to formalize the mistakes and bad habits of clinical researchers, but to ask how they (and all of us) should optimally be doing things. Also, a single experiment isn't likely to falsify a belief. It may take several. And I can personally point to interesting data which is often ignored in the results of other experiments. (A recent study by Li et al showing that calcium supplements can contribute to arterial calcification while dietary sources don't have that problem fails to consider Vitamin K (Phylloquinone and menaquinone) in food, despite having that information already available in their data set, with the Rotterdamn population study providing a nice bit of evidence for Vit K2's effect in reducing arterial calcification. I digress... but yes. Sometimes it takes a few decades for some evidence to really sink in.


The important thing is that the belief is falsifiable and that we make predictions which could be proven wrong as a way of testing our beliefs and be open to falsification. The point is not that we hang all our beliefs on a single instance of a single experiment, which sometimes yields false results. (If we did 20 tests on a single new cancer drug and got one false positive, that result is likely to be published. This messes with experimental p values.) And not that we require anyone to be an omniscient saint for a system to work.

2. Fairly often, ideas are supported or disproved based on prediction and falsification. The disproof of the aether by Michaelson and Morely. General relativity predicting curved space before it was observed. Recently, the rapid phenotypic change of lizards, combined with the discovery of epigenetic mechanisms, challenging conventional neo-Darwinian gradualism. Georges Lemaître's evidence for the red shift and an expanding universe (with many but not all notable scientists changing their minds in a little more than three decades, from 1927 when the theory was announced to the 1960s when cosmic background radiation was discovered and the stragglers were persuaded. Hoyle seemed like one of the notable holdouts. Einstein one of the relatively earlier converts, backing Hoyle sometime before 1934) etc. So there is some strong evidence for this kind of progress, even if it's slow to take root or requires far more than a single experiement.

Post: #20

Quote:But an understanding of epistimology does help address the assumptions behind one's beliefs. Not easily, of course, as this discussion demonstrates. So many of our beliefs about different epistimological systems are filled with unspoken assumptions that have to be made explicit before they can be addressed, and people (myself included at times) tend to avoid cognitive dissonance by turning unfamiliar beliefs to a caricature.

I find this ironic.

Re falsification, is the basis upon which you assert this falsifiable?

See Pasteur's experiments for an example of how science actually progresses. As Pheroquirk has pointed out, Kuhn is very good on the difference between abstract ideal and reality.