I’ve seen a number of posts on social media today about “Julius Caesar” but have managed to remain blissfully ignorant of the actual issue being discussed, so I’m choosing to imagine that people are arguing about the actual ancient Roman dude
“I thought that people didn’t like the same stuff that I did, but as it turns out, other people do,” he said. “So we made a little community just by doing that.”
when someone mentions Pearl Discourse i always think about how the MSPA forums have had a series of Vriska Quarantine Threads for literal years now because otherwise every discussion eventually turned into a giant Vriska argument
case in point:
these threads last 100 pages, or up to 2500 posts each before a new one is made. so it could be much worse
the mere fact this vriska argument went on for 42,500 posts and still going is a good estimate of human nature
To be fair, those threads pretty quickly turned into freeform chat threads for (mostly) Vriska fans, with actual arguments taking up a very small fraction of the post count
(The MSPA forums had a number of threads like this – in some periods the general MSPA discussion threads would fill up in a day or two, and were basically treated as forum-based IRC channels for a group of regulars, leading the mods to propose minimum content limits on posts)
I was just reading a blog post by Will Creeley about the recent revocations of Harvard admission offers. I don’t care very much about the main subject of the post, but:
Having spent the last decade defending student and faculty rights, I’ve learned a couple of things about exactly what type of campus civil liberties violations receive the most media attention. It’s not always what one might expect.
For example, I remember feeling shocked that a student’s expulsion over a Facebook post protesting the construction of a parking garage didn’t warrant above-the-fold coverage. I was amazed that students blacklisted for complaining to administrators about being subjected to mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds, performed by their peers, somehow didn’t go viral and make its way onto every social media timeline in the country. And my colleague Samantha Harris just penned a powerful piece for Vox about the relative media silence regarding Princeton University Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who has received death threats and been forced to cancel appearances following her Hampshire College commencement address last month.
All of that actually happened, and as far as I can tell, Creeley is not exaggerating or misrepresenting any of it. Yet I have never heard about the parking garage case or the transvaginal ultrasound case. What the fuck?
Admittedly, the parking garage expulsion happened in 2007, but the ensuing litigation went on until 2015.
Twin Peaks escaped the Empty Cup Awards in its original run, but takeout coffee culture has expanded dramatically in the years since. What does Twin Peaks’ relationship with coffee look like in 2017?
I say this as someone who doesn’t know much about music, but: music has always felt different from the other arts, to me, because so much of its impact comes from things that can be identical or nearly identical in many different works. Specifically, chord progressions and rhythm.
I realize that both of these get more complicated in jazz (and undoubtedly in various other forms), but they take very simple and repetitive forms not only in most pop and rock but also in much of classical music (which is sometimes defined by the harmonic patterns it used). Sure, these patterns vary, but the room for variation is far, far less (in plain information terms, “bits needed to encode it”) than in text or video. If it were a language, the vocabulary would be tiny and the grammar very simple.
Yet these elements also provide much of the bodily and emotional experience of listening to music. In every other art, a lot of execution prowess is necessary to pull off even a very generic effect that appeals to the lowest common denominator: the most paint-by-numbers of pulp novels still has much more structural complexity than a pop song.
That isn’t to say that there is less room for artistry in music, just that the artistry usually sits of top of some elements that immediately affect people without the artist having to do anything. The closest thing I can think of is cooking, where chefs can do all sorts of brilliant things but there’s always still the backbone of being a hungry animal and eating food. We never get bored of food, just as we never get bored of hearing one chord follow another.
This has affected my relationship to musical taste. I’m more confused by snobs who disdain generic music than snobs who disdain generic art of other kinds, because that seems like disdaining all food that isn’t haute cuisine. Even the fancy stuff leans heavily on the backbone for support, and the backbone is there in the least fancy stuff.
It seems like things are much easier to handle if, instead of putting any actual numbers (probabilities) in, we just track the partial order generated by the logical relations. Like, when you consider a new hypothesis you’ve never thought about, you just note down “has to have lower probability than these ones I’ve already thought about, and higher probability than these other ones I’ve already thought about.”
At some point, you’re going to want to assign some actual numbers, but we can think of this step as more provisional and revisable than the partial order. You can say “if I set P(thing) = whatever, what consequences does that have for everything else?” without committing to “P(thing) = whatever” once and for all, and if you retract it, the partial order is still there.
In fact, we can (I think) do conditionalization without numbers, since it just rules out subsets of hypothesis space. I’m not sure how the details would work but it feels do-able.
The big problem with this is trying to do decision theory, because there you’re supposed to integrate over your probabilities for all hypotheses, whereas this setup lends itself better to getting bounds on individual hypotheses (“P(A) must be less than P(B), and I’ll willing to say P(B) is less than 0.8, so P(A) is less than 0.8″). I wonder if a sensible (non-standard) decision theory can be formulated on the basis of these bounds?
I’ve seen papers on doing reasoning, based on propositions being more or less likely than other propositions, but without assigning numbers to the probabilities. Unfortunately, a half hour of poking around doesn’t turn up the papers I’m thinking of. The general area is called “valuation algebras on semirings”. In the case I remember, the semiring is Boolean algebra on propositions, which induces a partial order on the extent to which they are believed.
Anyway, that’s a not-very-useful half-assed reference. Now I’m going to switch to a more common mode of Tumblr discourse, i.e. talking about how what you say shows you’re thinking wrong (I may be misunderstanding what you say, but this being Tumblr, I will ignore that possibility.)
You’re operating on the principle that the goal of reasoning is to put probabilities on propositions. Then you find various problems involving e.g. what if you suddenly think of a new proposition, or realize that two propositions you thought were different are actually the same. But it seems to me that propositions are not the best thing to assign probabilities to.
What we want to find is a probability distribution over states of the world. Turning that into a probability for some proposition is a matter of adding up the probabilities of all the states of the world where that proposition is true. This is bog-standard measure theoretic probability theory, so it’s not just something I made up. You might find that thinking this way dissolves some of the perplexities you’ve been pondering in your last two posts.
Thanks for the pointer about valuation algebras on semirings.
About world states – I addressed that in my original post, when I contrasted the die roll example (where we really can describe world states) to real-world claims like “Trump will be re-elected in 2020.”
If we actually want to specify states of the real world at the level of measure theoretic outcomes (set elements, rather than sets), either we’ll throw away some of what we know about the world, or the outcomes would have to be things like quantum field configurations down to the subatomic scale. (Indeed, even that would be throwing away knowledge, since we don’t have a unified theory of fundamental physics and aren’t fully committed to any of theories we do have; the outcome-level description would have to involve different candidate laws of physics plus states in terms of them.)
The natural reflex is to do some sort of coarse-graining, where we abstract away from the smallest-level description, but at that point we’re basically doing Jaynes’ propositional framework, since we’re allowing that our most basic units of description could be refined further (we don’t specify O(10^23) variables for every mole of matter, but we allow that we might learn some of those variables later).
TBH, I think I am so skeptical of Bayes in part because I am used to thinking in the measure-theoretic framework, and it just seems so obvious that we can’t do practical reasoning with descriptions that are required to be that complete. Jaynes’ propositional framework seems like an attempt to avoid this problem, or at least hide it, which is why I’m focusing on it – it’s less clear that it’s unworkable.
