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

[Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>]

Forwarded message:

> Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 18:10:17 -0500
> From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
> Subject: Re: e$: Snakes of Medusa on Wall Street? (fwd)
> 
> > 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. :-).

Hardly, the Renaissance started toward the beginning of the 1400's (eg
Galileo) and ended by the end of the 1500's (eg Newton). Did you know that
Galileo died the same year that Newton was born? Some contemporary of Newton
made the comment that the world could support no more than 1 such intellect
at a time.

> 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?)

After thinking about this I am certain that you are speaking of a movement
other than the Great Awakening. I can't remember or find a convenient name
for the religous/ethical awakening that occured prior to the Civil War.

In thinking about this it occurs to me that immediately after each such
occurance of a 'Great Awakening' there is a war of global (or at least
what passes for the know world) proportions.

Fortunately I can lay claim to being either the last of the baby boomers
or the first of the gen-x'ers depending on whose definition you use.
Personaly, I consider the labels spin-doctorisms intended to focus folks on
the differences instead of the similarities.

> > > 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...

Actualy 'dracul' is a word that means devil, it has the same roots as
'dragon'. Neither father or son used that in their name, it's what others
called Vlad when they weren't calling him the Impaler.

> > 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. :-).

Yes, but each of those were individuals. Opinions are tied to individuality
and not geography or chronological ordering. What you actualy have is a
group of individual opinions that once the observer is aware of the set then
forms their own opinion of what the original opinions meant.

> > 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.

A better and more fundamental question:

How do we know what we think is what we think?

If you can't demonstrate this then you have no way of demonstrating there is
even an 'out there' to see.

The point that always seemed clear to me is that there is an implicit
assumption with the whole mind/body question, in short; there is more to
reality than what we experience. Therefore our experience of reality is
fundamentaly different than reality. A further problem I see is that the
implied assumption that the observer is seperate and isolated from that
being observed.

> 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.

You are using a fundamentaly different science than I use. At no time does
science assume there is a truth, only interactions that can be manipulated
and are simple enough in their core interactions for us to understand.

> Science gives a way to keep getting *closer*...

Science is nothing more than a methodology for asking questions that fit
particular and well defined forms. At the core of this is a basic assumption
about nature, it is homogenous and isomorphic.

> > 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.

Please be so kind why heuristics is the only thing we got? Seems to me that
serendipity has raised its head more than once. As I understand heuristic
algorithms (ie rule base) is that they pre-suppose a system for goal meeting
and then go through a itterative process comparing the current position with
the goal and then reducing that distance.

> 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. :-).

Ah, but there is a rub here. Respect is an opinion.

> Remember the story about Gauss, who, in the middle of some guy's
> announcement that he'd discovered the normal distribution(?), said
> hueristic: Gauss is usually right, so he must be right here, too. (An
> appeal to authority, for you informal fallacy counters out there... :-).)

Yeah, he did this several times. He nearly caused Bolya to quit mathematics.
He made many such claims through his life, quite a few of them were never
born out when his papers were examined after his death, though quite a few
of them were as well. He also told his son to ask his wife to wait a moment
to die while he finished his cyphers (calculations).

> 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.

If you don't know how to ask a question in a scientific manner you can't
test it. Science itself doesn't say anything about the results directly
other than they are homogenous and isomorphic, the observer does however when
we examine the goals and reasons for the experiment in the first place. To
observe nature requires a fundamentaly different methodolgy than 'commen
sense' observation. Further, the realization that there are processes in
nature that are fundamentaly un-repeatable is what forced the creation of
statistics and the study of families of events.

> > 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.

Replication of experiments comes from a base assumption in science (which
unlike other axiomatic systems are open to refutation) that nature is
fundamentaly homogenous and isomorphic, in other words the rules of nature
are the same irrespective of geography. Should we find such a non-homogenous
or non-isomorphism in nature then the fundamental reliance on science as we
impliment it now would be shown wrong. 

The flip side to this is that if the universe turns out to be so arranged
then we have in effect a non-relativistic frame of reference because we have
now proven by exception that a given point or particle in the universe is
truly unique and identifiable through some mechanism.

> > What to do with the results is engineering.
> 
> How to make the results *profitable* is what engineering is... ;-).

No, that is business management. At no point in an engineering study is the
issue of cost v price examined. Study Nikola Tesla to understand why your
statement is fallacious.

> > 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?

Popularity means that the issue is well known, influence is that people use
it as a reason for their actions.

> 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.

I agree that they are linked. I don't think that in the grand scheme of
getting through life they are nearly as important as some would have us
believe. I personaly am more interested in the fundamental question of
whether the meme or paradigm works in the sense of providing me the return
on my resource investment that I intended. I guess a simpler way to put it
is that intellectual capital should not be avaluated by the same methodology
we use to select books or movies to buy.


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