timelets

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 17:46:48 GMT

If a research experiment were well defined, it would be altogether unnecessary to perform it. For the experimental arrangements to be well defined, the outcome must be known in advance; otherwise the procedure cannot be limited and purposeful. The more unknowns there are and the newer a field of research is, the less well defined are the experiments.
...
And if after years we were to look back upon a field we have worked in, we could no longer see or understand the difficulties present in that creative work. The actual course of development becomes rationalized and schematized. We project the results into our intentions; but how could it be any different? We can no longer express the previously incomplete thoughts with these now finished concepts.

Cognition modifies the knower so as to adapt him harmoniously to his acquired knowledge.

-- Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a scientific fact.

similar to Bezos' "wandering."

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Fri, 06 Oct 2023 05:48:51 GMT

How did the third little pig know that a brick house was going to work against the wolf?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Little_Pigs

I can't find any source that would describe or at least hint at the process of obtaining the crucial knowledge and related skills. It's one of those "obvious" things that come from perfect hindsight.

upd: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41386323

The pigs mother told them to build sturdy houses that would protect them against the wolf. The story doesn't say how she knew, nor suggests that their family home was made of brick.

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Thu, 28 Sep 2023 18:34:20 GMT

Что же здесь происходит? Почему нужно избушку повернуть? Почему нельзя войти просто? Часто перед Иваном гладкая стена
— «без окон без дверей» — вход с противоположной стороны. «У этой избушки ни окон, ни дверей, — ничего нет» (17). Но отчего же не обойти избушки и не войта с той стороны? Очевидно, этого нельзя. Очевидно, избушка стоит на какой-то такой види- мой или невидимой грани, через которую Иван никак не может перешагнуть. Попасть на эту грань можно только через, сквозь избушку, и избушку нужно повернуть, «чтобы мне зайти и выйти»

-- В. Пропп. Исторические корни волшебной сказки.

I never thought about избушка as an interface, an airlock, between spaces. We could probably model it as a pushout.

Another interesting observation:

Слеп человек не сам по себе, а по отношению к чeму-нибудь. Под «слепотой» может быть вскрыто понятие некоторой обоюдности невидимости.

...
Герой все это знает, потому что он г е р о й . Геройство его и состоит в его магическом знании, в его силе.
Вся эта система испытания отражает древнейшие представления о том, что подобно тому, как магически можно вызвать дождь или заставить зверя идти на ловца, можно вынудить вход в иной мир. Дело вовсе не в «добродетели» и «чистоте», а в силе.

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Mon, 24 Jul 2023 03:13:15 GMT

We argue here that people’s limited knowledge and their misleading intuitive epistemology combine to create an illusion of explanatory depth (IOED). Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do. The illusion for ex- planatory knowledge–knowledge that involves complex causal patterns—is separate from, and additive with, people’s general overconfidence about their knowledge and skills. We therefore propose that knowledge of complex causal relations is particularly susceptible to illusions of understanding.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-18942-001

Is the growth of conspiracy theories an inevitable consequence of the growing complexity of technology/society?

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Wed, 08 Mar 2023 05:32:49 GMT

What makes it the case that something counts as a form of cognitive success? For instance, why think that knowing the capital of Pakistan is a cognitive success, rather than just another cognitive state that an agent can occupy, like having 70% confidence that Islamabad is the capital of Pakistan? Not every cognitive state enjoys cognitive success. Knowing, understanding, mastering—these are cognitive successes.

[e.g]...we describe a person as “knowing” something as a way of signaling that her testimony with respect to that thing is to be trusted.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/

Machines can now be trained to generate information traditionally associated with cognitive successes by humans. Today, we know relatively well what kind of cognitive success is achievable for a majority humans. We are still in the beginning of the process of building cognitively successful computers. We simply don't know what they are capable of when trained by a small number of highly successful humans.

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О войне и Красной Шапочке

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 23:43:26 GMT

Ответы волка на вопросы Красной Шапочки были новой информацией, но не новым знанием. Знание появилось только после того, как он ее съел.

После начала войны у нас не стало намного больше информации о России. Но прибавилось огромное знание о ней. Информацию можно было игнорировать, а знание - нет. The asymmetry between past and present knowledge is dramatic.

В определенной степени это относится к переходу from Google to the so-called generative AI.

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Sat, 11 Jun 2022 21:10:55 GMT

[92] (1) As for the first point, it is necessary (as we have said) for our purpose that everything should be conceived, either solely through its essence, or through its proximate cause.

(2) If the thing be self-existent, or, as is commonly said, the cause of itself, it must be understood through its essence only; if it be not self-existent, but requires a cause for its existence, it must be understood through its proximate cause.

(3) For, in reality, 
                   the knowledge
                   of an effect 
is nothing else than 
                  the acquisition of 
                  more perfect knowledge
of its cause.”

--- Benedictus de Spinoza. “Improvement of the Understanding.”

// is this the origin of the reasoning behind the "good laws" methods?

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Mon, 30 May 2022 20:07:43 GMT

( Read more... )

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Fri, 27 May 2022 03:03:40 GMT

[30:2]
...we must first take care  not to commit ourselves to a search, going back to infinity - that is, 

in order to discover 
                     the best method 
of finding truth, there is
               no need of another method 
               to discover such method; 
nor of a third method 
for discovering the second, 
                and so on to infinity. 

(3) By such proceedings, we should never arrive at the knowledge of the truth, or, indeed, at any knowledge at all.

[31] (1) But as men at first made use of the instruments supplied by nature to accomplish very easy pieces of workmanship, laboriously and imperfectly, and then, when these were finished, wrought other things more difficult with less labour and greater perfection; and so gradually mounted from the simplest operations to the making of tools, and from the making of tools to the making of more complex tools, and fresh feats of workmanship, till they arrived at making, complicated mechanisms which they now possess.

--- Benedictus de Spinoza. “Improvement of the Understanding.”

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Thu, 26 May 2022 21:45:05 GMT

https://youtu.be/2BJYXuZZK3c?t=205

An important moment where he talks about purposefully giving up on intuition.

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Putin delenda est

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 18:57:43 GMT

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Sat, 26 Mar 2022 00:23:38 GMT

Lawvere's Hegelian Taco https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA360121.pdf

Retrieving stored knowledge presupposes some consciousness of the structure it has; this structure is in its particularity fixed by the storage process itself (and in its generality is partly a reflection of the content, i.e. of the nature of the knowledge stored). Thus in both retrieval and storage one needs to be explicitly aware of the kind of structure involved.

Lot's to learn here.

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Tue, 07 Dec 2021 05:14:45 GMT

...the insight into the discontinuous series of points on the graph consists in a grasp, not of necessity or impossibility, but simply of possibility.

--- Bernard Lonergan. Insight, a study of human understanding.

This could be a link between a new technique for extracting data, i.e. creating a new graph/space, and discovering new possibilities, both in the old, but more importantly in the new space.

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Tue, 20 Oct 2020 17:13:37 GMT

PROP. XIV

A true knowledge 
             of good and evil 
                        cannot check any emotion 
by virtue 
            of being true, 
but 
      only in so far as 
                   it is considered as an emotion.

---Proof.

An emotion is an idea, 
                       whereby 
the mind affirms 
                  of its body 
a greater or less 
                  force of existing 
than before (by the general Definition of the Emotions); 

therefore 
             it has no positive quality, 
which 
     can be destroyed
                    by the presence 
of what is true;

consequently the knowledge of good and evil cannot, by virtue of being true,
restrain any emotion. But, in so far as such knowledge is an emotion (IV. viii.)
if it to have more strength for restraining emotion, it will to that extent be able
to restrain the given emotion. Q.E.D.

--- Spinoza, Ethics. Part IV, Prop. XIV.

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Sat, 16 May 2020 21:07:41 GMT

He [Wittgenstein] does not mean by this that the doubt in question is spurious or deceitful, only that it is not real doubt – it is not what we mean by doubt. We doubt when we have reason to doubt, not because we are at leisure to doubt: ‘The question is this: how is doubt introduced into the language-game? One doubts on specific grounds’ (OC 458). Moreover, the philosophical sceptic’s doubt purports to be obsessive or radical: from the fact that we sometimes have reason to doubt, he concludes that we are always entitled to doubt. It is, again, precisely in this that the sceptic’s doubt is not real doubt: ‘A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt’ (OC 450); ‘If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty’ (OC 115).
...
According to Wittgenstein, the sceptic is making two grave mistakes – and these are connected. One, we have just seen, is that he is mistaking the behaviour of doubt for genuine doubt; and the other is that he is mistaking hinges for propositions (either empirical or epistemic).

Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, Understanding Wittgenstein's On Certainty.

Reasoned vs at leisure doubt is a key distinction that emerges from OC.

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