Oh, by the way, I should clarify that the really interesting thing here is not ‘are the answers right?‘, but ‘in what ways the answered questions are different from the asked?’. It took me months to think of seriously reading the post from a totally-not-botanical POV, which is a failure of rationality if there is one, and which is a reason why I am now even more horrified by traditional testing practices.
For me, those two brief Latin words which signify the name of the plant mean the world. I might not know the properties of the species, the genus, the family—heck, there are entire orders which I have never had cause to look up. But for all that, I have an idea of how narrow a category a species is. It means that I will automatically give more precise answers to such questions—wrong, perhaps, but at least more ‘compact’.
A non-biologist will read the same words and completely dismiss the Latin name (which is one reason why I think Feynman’s attitude to biological nomenclature is bad for people who want to understand sufficiently meta problems). He will see overlapping sets and try to guess the more likely intersections from scratch, or worse, since we live in a sea of seed plants and are more used to their combinations of traits.
So my (improved) model of the answered questions is ‘if this thing, unrelated to any other thing, has a habit of doing X, how likely is that once upon a time Y up and happened to it?’ or some such.
Luckily, I can (and do) review the literature to look up the frequency of XY among pteridophytes in general (but not seed plants, because that would take a Singularity) and then correct or not the position taken by (the only volunteer) Luke_A_Somers. Hopefully we’ll see which parts of the species’ descriptions were given more weight in the analysis; I am fascinated by the possibility of actually finding the ‘weakest link’ in the chain.
Just saying it here in case I don’t get to finish the job.
Biology is neat like that, it has to make sense. I think the largest difference between math and the rest of non-humanities we learned in high school was that math doesn’t (have to) make intuitive sense; you solve an equation, it’s like you chop off a Hydra’s head; they can just write another one almost like the first one, but with some other power of x or something, and this new equation has to be solved from the very start. There is no ‘maybe I am a bit wrong here, but if I narrow down or widen this definition in such-and-such way, my answer will be right’, just right or wrong.
I did like pieces of it, like mass point geometry which almost seems ‘humane’ in its ‘here is how we reduce this thing to another thing’ approach. Perhaps other people like me would be fond of it, too.
Oh, by the way, I should clarify that the really interesting thing here is not ‘are the answers right?‘, but ‘in what ways the answered questions are different from the asked?’. It took me months to think of seriously reading the post from a totally-not-botanical POV, which is a failure of rationality if there is one, and which is a reason why I am now even more horrified by traditional testing practices.
For me, those two brief Latin words which signify the name of the plant mean the world. I might not know the properties of the species, the genus, the family—heck, there are entire orders which I have never had cause to look up. But for all that, I have an idea of how narrow a category a species is. It means that I will automatically give more precise answers to such questions—wrong, perhaps, but at least more ‘compact’.
A non-biologist will read the same words and completely dismiss the Latin name (which is one reason why I think Feynman’s attitude to biological nomenclature is bad for people who want to understand sufficiently meta problems). He will see overlapping sets and try to guess the more likely intersections from scratch, or worse, since we live in a sea of seed plants and are more used to their combinations of traits.
So my (improved) model of the answered questions is ‘if this thing, unrelated to any other thing, has a habit of doing X, how likely is that once upon a time Y up and happened to it?’ or some such.
Luckily, I can (and do) review the literature to look up the frequency of XY among pteridophytes in general (but not seed plants, because that would take a Singularity) and then correct or not the position taken by (the only volunteer) Luke_A_Somers. Hopefully we’ll see which parts of the species’ descriptions were given more weight in the analysis; I am fascinated by the possibility of actually finding the ‘weakest link’ in the chain.
Just saying it here in case I don’t get to finish the job.
Biology is neat like that, it has to make sense. I think the largest difference between math and the rest of non-humanities we learned in high school was that math doesn’t (have to) make intuitive sense; you solve an equation, it’s like you chop off a Hydra’s head; they can just write another one almost like the first one, but with some other power of x or something, and this new equation has to be solved from the very start. There is no ‘maybe I am a bit wrong here, but if I narrow down or widen this definition in such-and-such way, my answer will be right’, just right or wrong.
I did like pieces of it, like mass point geometry which almost seems ‘humane’ in its ‘here is how we reduce this thing to another thing’ approach. Perhaps other people like me would be fond of it, too.