tom thinks

To Know, 2001/06/21:11:58

tom's home ~*~ tom's index I have a single vice:
The desire to know everything

Thermodynamics
respond
responses A place to start writing about the 2nd law as an example of a contextual absolute, and exploring foundational thermodynamic concepts.

Creatures
respond
responses Baby ducks are cool.

I was down by the water yesterday and a herd of baby ducks were following their mother through the dusk. The surface was still, almost oily in appearance, and the ducklettes would spread out across it until one or two decided they were too far away and zoom back to mother duck using only their feet for propulsion, skimming across the surface like they want to be unlimited hydroplanes when they grow up.

Baby ducks can walk on water.

There was a small crowd standing around the head of the docks for no apparent reason. A police car was parked near by, and a couple of people from the crowd came over to talk to the constable, who got out and came to look at whatever they were looking at. Curious, I stood nearby while she stared for a while at whatever the crowd were looking at. A few seconds later I saw a gang of river otters (or maybe stoats or weasels--they were pretty skinny for otters but I don't know the local varieties that well) go bounding down the dock. Better lock up your boats!

Me
respond
responses I'd be a lot happier if I took more pleasure in iconclasm.

The path to knowledge is littered with the ruins of the lore. In any field there is the lore: foundational beliefs that you must accept to be considered a member of the community of researchers working in that field. You can't be a Marxist and reject the labor theory of value. You can't be a physicist and reject the relationship between symmetries and conservation laws.

If there is any meat on the bones of Kuhn's analysis of science, it is that normal science is the working out of the consequences of the lore, and revolutionary science is questioning the lore itself. Questioning the lore is a dangerous, chancey business: those beliefs are held by people for reasons, sometimes very good ones, so you risk spending a lot of time proving to yourself what everyone else takes for granted, and this won't lead to professional advancement however deep an understanding it gives you. When the reasons for believing the lore are not so good, questioning it is even more dangerous because you wind up threatening the establishment, and a naked emperor is a barrel of laughs compared to a naked emperor's tailor.

But the problem remains, for me, that the first step in learning is so often knocking down, or at least questioning, truths that people hold dear. And knocking down is easy compared to the building up that follows. So if just smashing icons was more fun, I'd be a lot happier, because it's so easy to do. But it isn't enough: breaking without building is too sterile a pursuit.

Of the many episodes of religious indoctrination I got as a child I remember only one lesson. The teacher divided the class in two on a voluntary basis, telling us that we could choose either creation or destruction. The creators got to build model airplanes. The destoryers got to rip up a bunch of stuff. I chose creation. By the end of the lesson, all but one of the kids who chose destruction had come over to watch the creators work. Destruction is boring, however necessary it may sometimes be.

Ethics
respond
responses A place to start writing about moral calcuation

Physics
respond
responses The first physics results from the SNO detector have been announced. They confirm the results of Super-Kamiokande that neutrinos from the sun change flavor. The really interesting result is still to come: the direct measurement of the neutral current rate.

Science is a tricky business. The number of conclusions you can draw from a single experiment is almost always far fewer than one. The stereotypical Hollywood image of scientists immediately grasping the deep significance of some new result is wildly wrong in part because most new results simply don't have that much significance. The chain of logic from experiment to conclusion is long and arduous, and the number of premises always vastly exceeds the number of conclusions.

Historically, scientific thinking has been held to be strictly separate from ordinary thinking. The Popperian straight-jacket of hypothetico-deduction has been the primary means of defence of this orthodoxy in the past century, but it is now thankfully fraying at the seams. The work of people like Ed Jaynes on plausible reasoning, and the Baysian revolution generally, is showing us how to both bring the tools of non-deductive reasoning into the sciences and also how to be more rigorous in our everyday thinking.

But we have a long way to go yet: most people are still unable to distinguish between a plausible idea (increasing CO2 levels cause global warming) and an established fact (increasing CO2 levels have not had any unequivocal effect on the Earth's climate, and as you focus on cleaner data such as that provided by satelite measurements of tropospheric temperatures the less likely it seems that the globe is warming at all, much less that the warming is caused by human activity.) The relative complexity of the statement of fact--the qualifications and evidential considerations--are one reason why people prefer plausible hypotheses; it's so much simpler if you don't have to get your brain dirty with all the fiddly bits. But the truth dwells in the details. So does the beauty. Reality is baroque.

As solar neutrino physics goes, the Super-K results are good, but their detector isn't quite all one might ask for--because of the reaction it uses for neutrino detection it has very little sensitivity to the shape of the neutrino spectrum. It's also not as deep underground as one might like. The SNO results are much cleaner--the muon rate is so low that I was never able to satisfy myself that we could properly predict what it will be. There's a wealth of physics the detector makes possible due to it's depth and unique construction.

But the fact is that the first SNO results are confirmation of something that we were pretty sure of anyway. And yet not sure enough.

I, for instance, am surprised--I was still leaning toward the belief that the apparent deficit of electron neutrinos from 8-B in the sun was due to problems with solar models, not new neutrino physics. Particularly as the mass range became restricted to values that were utterly un-explanatory of any other phenomena, it seemed to me improbable, inelegant and unlikely that neutrinos had mass.

But now I know differently.

Writing
respond
responses As well as revisions to the paper I presented at the First Annual Enlightenment Meeting, I've got a number of other essays in the works. Two in particular are taking on increasing importance. One, on the 2nd law of thermodynamics as an example of a contextual truth, is a lead in to some other work in physics I'm doing. The other, on Abelardian conceptualism, is an attempt to show how Rand's notion of objectivity can fill in the missing pieces--this is an area that I'm still only just learning about, but I will say that the Medieval philosophers are far more fun than they first appear.

And then there's an essay on the impossibility of moral calculation, an idea I've been promoting for over five years without a single taker, as near as I can tell. The difficulty, as always, is getting people to take the argument seriously--nothing new is ever right, so new ideas can be dismissed without looking at them, see? One person I corresponded with about the idea openly admitted that he'd simply skipped over my argument, which was fundamental to the point I was making! He "knew" the argument was wrong, so obviously he didn't need to address it, or even read it. He was almost Randian in his willful ignorance.

One way of selling a new idea is to address an acknowledged problem. Economists, at least a few of them, are now aware that intransitive preferences exist, and so something that addresses that problem might be of interest to them. But coming from a non-economist, it won't be read, and the people I'd really like to address are philosophers, who won't see the relevance of the economic argument.

And pointing out to economists the fundamental irrationality of choices between lotteries--which is the basis for subjective preference elicitation--won't win me any friends either. Naked emperors have no sense of humor.

And then there's poetry, experiments in philosophical erotica, and a longer fable/lyrical piece. Time and sufficient peace of mind are barriers here.

The first step to working on these other projects is to start sections in this journal for them, which I'll do right now.

One day I'm going to see if I can create a single journal entry in which I say something non-vacuous on every topic. How many hats can a person wear at once?

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Thermodynamics respond responses	A place to start writing about the 2nd law as an example of a contextual absolute, and exploring foundational thermodynamic concepts.
Creatures respond responses	Baby ducks are cool. I was down by the water yesterday and a herd of baby ducks were following their mother through the dusk. The surface was still, almost oily in appearance, and the ducklettes would spread out across it until one or two decided they were too far away and zoom back to mother duck using only their feet for propulsion, skimming across the surface like they want to be unlimited hydroplanes when they grow up. Baby ducks can walk on water. There was a small crowd standing around the head of the docks for no apparent reason. A police car was parked near by, and a couple of people from the crowd came over to talk to the constable, who got out and came to look at whatever they were looking at. Curious, I stood nearby while she stared for a while at whatever the crowd were looking at. A few seconds later I saw a gang of river otters (or maybe stoats or weasels--they were pretty skinny for otters but I don't know the local varieties that well) go bounding down the dock. Better lock up your boats!
Me respond responses	I'd be a lot happier if I took more pleasure in iconclasm. The path to knowledge is littered with the ruins of the lore. In any field there is the lore: foundational beliefs that you must accept to be considered a member of the community of researchers working in that field. You can't be a Marxist and reject the labor theory of value. You can't be a physicist and reject the relationship between symmetries and conservation laws. If there is any meat on the bones of Kuhn's analysis of science, it is that normal science is the working out of the consequences of the lore, and revolutionary science is questioning the lore itself. Questioning the lore is a dangerous, chancey business: those beliefs are held by people for reasons, sometimes very good ones, so you risk spending a lot of time proving to yourself what everyone else takes for granted, and this won't lead to professional advancement however deep an understanding it gives you. When the reasons for believing the lore are not so good, questioning it is even more dangerous because you wind up threatening the establishment, and a naked emperor is a barrel of laughs compared to a naked emperor's tailor. But the problem remains, for me, that the first step in learning is so often knocking down, or at least questioning, truths that people hold dear. And knocking down is easy compared to the building up that follows. So if just smashing icons was more fun, I'd be a lot happier, because it's so easy to do. But it isn't enough: breaking without building is too sterile a pursuit. Of the many episodes of religious indoctrination I got as a child I remember only one lesson. The teacher divided the class in two on a voluntary basis, telling us that we could choose either creation or destruction. The creators got to build model airplanes. The destoryers got to rip up a bunch of stuff. I chose creation. By the end of the lesson, all but one of the kids who chose destruction had come over to watch the creators work. Destruction is boring, however necessary it may sometimes be.
Ethics respond responses	A place to start writing about moral calcuation
Physics respond responses	The first physics results from the SNO detector have been announced. They confirm the results of Super-Kamiokande that neutrinos from the sun change flavor. The really interesting result is still to come: the direct measurement of the neutral current rate. Science is a tricky business. The number of conclusions you can draw from a single experiment is almost always far fewer than one. The stereotypical Hollywood image of scientists immediately grasping the deep significance of some new result is wildly wrong in part because most new results simply don't have that much significance. The chain of logic from experiment to conclusion is long and arduous, and the number of premises always vastly exceeds the number of conclusions. Historically, scientific thinking has been held to be strictly separate from ordinary thinking. The Popperian straight-jacket of hypothetico-deduction has been the primary means of defence of this orthodoxy in the past century, but it is now thankfully fraying at the seams. The work of people like Ed Jaynes on plausible reasoning, and the Baysian revolution generally, is showing us how to both bring the tools of non-deductive reasoning into the sciences and also how to be more rigorous in our everyday thinking. But we have a long way to go yet: most people are still unable to distinguish between a plausible idea (increasing CO2 levels cause global warming) and an established fact (increasing CO2 levels have not had any unequivocal effect on the Earth's climate, and as you focus on cleaner data such as that provided by satelite measurements of tropospheric temperatures the less likely it seems that the globe is warming at all, much less that the warming is caused by human activity.) The relative complexity of the statement of fact--the qualifications and evidential considerations--are one reason why people prefer plausible hypotheses; it's so much simpler if you don't have to get your brain dirty with all the fiddly bits. But the truth dwells in the details. So does the beauty. Reality is baroque. As solar neutrino physics goes, the Super-K results are good, but their detector isn't quite all one might ask for--because of the reaction it uses for neutrino detection it has very little sensitivity to the shape of the neutrino spectrum. It's also not as deep underground as one might like. The SNO results are much cleaner--the muon rate is so low that I was never able to satisfy myself that we could properly predict what it will be. There's a wealth of physics the detector makes possible due to it's depth and unique construction. But the fact is that the first SNO results are confirmation of something that we were pretty sure of anyway. And yet not sure enough. I, for instance, am surprised--I was still leaning toward the belief that the apparent deficit of electron neutrinos from 8-B in the sun was due to problems with solar models, not new neutrino physics. Particularly as the mass range became restricted to values that were utterly un-explanatory of any other phenomena, it seemed to me improbable, inelegant and unlikely that neutrinos had mass. But now I know differently.
Writing respond responses	As well as revisions to the paper I presented at the First Annual Enlightenment Meeting, I've got a number of other essays in the works. Two in particular are taking on increasing importance. One, on the 2nd law of thermodynamics as an example of a contextual truth, is a lead in to some other work in physics I'm doing. The other, on Abelardian conceptualism, is an attempt to show how Rand's notion of objectivity can fill in the missing pieces--this is an area that I'm still only just learning about, but I will say that the Medieval philosophers are far more fun than they first appear. And then there's an essay on the impossibility of moral calculation, an idea I've been promoting for over five years without a single taker, as near as I can tell. The difficulty, as always, is getting people to take the argument seriously--nothing new is ever right, so new ideas can be dismissed without looking at them, see? One person I corresponded with about the idea openly admitted that he'd simply skipped over my argument, which was fundamental to the point I was making! He "knew" the argument was wrong, so obviously he didn't need to address it, or even read it. He was almost Randian in his willful ignorance. One way of selling a new idea is to address an acknowledged problem. Economists, at least a few of them, are now aware that intransitive preferences exist, and so something that addresses that problem might be of interest to them. But coming from a non-economist, it won't be read, and the people I'd really like to address are philosophers, who won't see the relevance of the economic argument. And pointing out to economists the fundamental irrationality of choices between lotteries--which is the basis for subjective preference elicitation--won't win me any friends either. Naked emperors have no sense of humor. And then there's poetry, experiments in philosophical erotica, and a longer fable/lyrical piece. Time and sufficient peace of mind are barriers here. The first step to working on these other projects is to start sections in this journal for them, which I'll do right now. One day I'm going to see if I can create a single journal entry in which I say something non-vacuous on every topic. How many hats can a person wear at once?