Re: e$: Snakes of Medusa on Wall Street? (fwd)

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

At 3:14 pm -0500 on 11/18/97, Jim Choate shows the benefits of being on the
top of a CDR address stack :-) :

> Um, I believe that went from the late 1500's to the early 1700's at best.

Nope. Check it out. As defined in any decent book of American history,
well, maybe one that hasn't been too "revised" :-),  the "Great Awakening",
which gave us most of our American-flavored religions, happened in the
early part of the 19th century, though rumblings started shortly after the
revolution.

> Is your claim that there was a
> second Great Awakending or are you saying the traditional (if you will)
> dating is incorrect?

I'm saying that I think you're confusing the Renaissance with the Great
Awakening. :-). BTW, Emerson, Dickenson, Whitman, Thureau, etc., were part
of the same ideological outpouring which, in the theological arena, was the
Great Awakening. A lot can be said for the view that this was American
Romanticism, as Chopin, Byron, the Brontes, Austen, etc., were all
happening in roughly the same couple of generations. Later, like libertines
and enthusiasts throughout history, they became extremely repressive. We
eventually came to call them Victorians. (Sound familiar, you baby boomers?)

> > that Vlad Dracul, the Impaler, was Transylvanian
>
> Actualy, to be accurate his name was Vlad Teppish. He was eventualy killed by
> his lord for carrying on excesses such as killing a woman because she let her
> husband walk around with a tattered coat. Dracul and Dracula are derived
> from dragon and imply a connection with the devil (which also derives its
> own existance from this lexical tree).

Okay. I have to go back and look now, I woudldn't be surprised if you're
right. Anyway, there were two Transylanian nobelmen, father and son, and
one, the impaler was, among other things, called Vlad, son of Dracul,
which, I think, gets you Dracula, but I'm not sure. The Teppish part sounds
like it's more right, now that you mention it. Maybe we're looking at Vlad
Dracul the father, and Vlad Tepish, Dracula, (son of Dracul)?  Oh, well, as
I said in my rant, the cost of error is bandwidth. :-). Someone here
probably has all the, um, gory details...

> > Of opinion, influence, and reputation, opinion is the most atomic. An
>opinion
> > can be safely defined as a judgement, right or wrong, based on some
>accepted,
> > or maybe just perceived, set of facts.
>
> Doesn't the use of 'perceived' imply some a priori assumptions about the
> base structure of reality and in fact imply a more atomistic issue, that
> of conceptual viability?

I don't think so, but I haven't thought about it much. I'd hate to get into
a recursive regress when a simple opinion will do. ;-).

I think a little further on you saw what I was getting at. I meant, in the
above, "most atomic", as in most atomic of the three. I would be hard
pressed to turn that into "absolute" atomism of any sort. :-).

> How does an opinion become atomistic if in order
> to express it we must invoke other equaly critical (or atomistic)
> expressions? Further, without testing a 'perceived' fact is nothing but an
> opinion.

Good question. Mostly, I was starting from small bits, opinions, and
munging them together into bigger coherent bits, influence, and then adding
persistance, reputation.

> > word about whether Socrates said the words himself. Opinion can be
>completely
> > dissociated from identity. An anonymous post on a mailing list can have an
> > opinion, and people can agree or disagree with that opinion as they see
>fit.
>
> That doesn't change the fact that the opinion, anonymous or not, originated
> from a single source.

I think I could argue for multiple simultaneous sources of the same opinion
pretty successfully. :-).

> While I can accept that testable facts can be isolated
> from source biases it escapes me how an opinion can be so isolated.

I think this sums up Socrates' "Right Opinion" statement pretty well. Have
you read Plato, by chance? ;-). Folks later called this the Mind/Body
problem. How do we know what we think in here is what we see out there,
etc. Big problem in philosophy. Science solves it to most people's
understanding of it. Or mine, anyway.

However, again, I'm just talking about opinions, and, as you've noticed,
not about truth. :-).  I said later on in the rant that when we got to
science, that that was better. With science, we got as close to "truth" as
we're ever going to get, asymptotically closer, but not to truth itself. We
gave up on Aristotle's First(?) Cause, what *is* something, because we
admitted we'll never know. But, frankly, it doesn't matter. Science gives a
way to keep getting *closer*...


>  At its
> lowest level it is nothing more than a description of an individuals
> beliefs about reality and their place in it and clearly has impact on the
> sorts of ideas that are expressible in them.

Okay...

> Perhaps opinion & fact are unwittingly being confused. Opinions tell the
> observer about the holder of the opinion, not the subject the opinion is
> direct toward.

Maybe, but remember my smart crack about hueristics. It's all we've got, in
any practical sense. We can't just go around testing every opinion we hear,
more than once, anyway, :-), and, frankly, most of us just take other
people's word for things, especially if we respect their reputation. :-).

Remember the story about Gauss, who, in the middle of some guy's
announcement that he'd discovered the normal distribution(?), said
something like, "Oh. I did that already. Years ago.", and everyone believed
Gauss, even though, I think, he never proved it? I'd bet that Gauss *did*
discover the normal distribution, but the operative function there was
Gauss's reputation/influence, because he'd been right so much before. A
hueristic: Gauss is usually right, so he must be right here, too. (An
appeal to authority, for you informal fallacy counters out there... :-).)


> > can't *prove* our opinions are right. The definition of modern human
>thinking,
> > is, however, that at the core of it all, someone, somewhere, is using
>science
> > - -- which is all about verifiable and replicable physical results -- to
> > validate, and occasionally create, the set of opinions most of us would now
> > call knowlege. So, science or no, our thinking is still functionally,
> > heuristics, but it works. Oh, well. Life is hard. :-).
>
> Science is about how to ask questions, it is NOT concerned with the results
> directly.

Well, actually, it's more about how to make replicable results, I'd say.
The "how to ask questions" might come from a theory (brought about by
observing reality with replicable results), and the creativity of the
questioner.

> Science is a non-intuitive mechanism whereby we can regulate how
> we think about the world around us.

And, my understanding is that at the core of that is the replicability of
experiment. And the predictivity of theory, of course.

> What to do with the results is engineering.

How to make the results *profitable* is what engineering is... ;-).

> Science itself is heuristic.

I'm not sure how that differs with what I'm saying, though.

>
> > I think the nice thing about science in the geodesic age, by the way,
>is that
> > the technology of microcomputers and networks makes it easier for more
>people
> > to be closer to scientific truth.
>
> There is no 'scientific truth', THE main axiom of science is that everything
> is open to review and change in responce to the observation and description
> of the item under studies interactions with the environment around it.

Woops. I used the "T" word inappropriately. Sorry. I agree with you
completely. Scientific truth is, as I've said before, a non-sequitur to the
extent that science is about how to make replicable experiments and
predictive theory. It's not "truth" at all in the Aristotelean sense.
Which, by the way, helps me out with my bit about perception and opinion,
above, I think...


> > So, what's influence? On a personal basis, influence occurs when
>someone else
> > agrees with your opinions.
>
> Only if they changed their opinions *because* of the expression of your
> opinions.

Okay...

>  Otherwise we are left with independant discovery.

Glad you figured this out, too. (see above)

>Influence is
> the ability of one theory to cause the holder of another theory to add
> data or tests that could potentialy alter the outcome of that original
> theory. The results may or may not support either of the original theories
> or could even cause a 3rd theory to be born.

Cool. I'll go for that...

> > The more people agree with your opinions, the more
> > influence you have.
>
> The more people agree with your opinions AND are willing to act on them is
> a measure of influence. Also, the fact that others may in fact be motivated
> to act because they *disagree* with you also is clearly a possibility you
> don't address.

True enough, there is such a thing as negative influence (TM) ;-). I'll
take action and opinion as part of influence for the time being.

> Never confuse popularity with influence.

Well, since I don't know how to define one in terms of the other, I won't.
How's that?

> > Back to our stack of planes, by no means does the "line" of someone's
>identity
> > have to be a straight one
>
> This runs counter to your assumption regarding the number of line-plane
> intersections. If the line is not geometricaly 'straight' it can in fact have
> zero, one, or more intersections. This causes a problem with this part of the
> conclusion, you are using the axiom as proof of the assertion (the axiom).

I don't think so. a line goes through a plane. If it doesn't intersect that
plane, it only appears on that plane at a single point. If the line's
curvy, and it goes through a bunch of other planes parallel to the first
plane, then, whether it's squiggly or not, the more planes you have data
from the better the resolution is on your picture of the line. That's the
point of the analogy, there. You can get the functional equivalence of
concordance, and thus identity from enough data. Kind of a "motherhood",
but there it is.

Besides, even though I'm talking in geometry here, it's still just a
(twisted :-)) metaphor. I said I wasn't trying for mathematical rigor,
because I don't have a mathematical handle on the problem, and probably
never will, unfortunately.

Still, I think the idea of opinion/influence/reputation/identity as linked
this way allows you to think about it better.

Or at least it helped *me* think about it better, anyway.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/
Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>