I liked your comment and have a half-formed metaphor for you to either pick apart or develop:
LW/ rationalist types tend towards hard sciences. This requires more System 2 reasoning. Their fields are like computer programs. Every step makes sense, and is understood.
Humanities tends toward more System 1 pattern recognition. This is more akin to a neural network. Even if you are getting the “right” answer, it is coming out of a black box.
Because the rationalist types can’t see the algorithm, they assume it can’t be “right”.
I like the idea that this comment produces in my mind. But nitpickingly, a neural network is a type of computer program. And most of the professional bollocks-talkers of my acquaintance think very hard in system-two like ways about the rubbish they spout.
It’s hard to imagine a system-one academic discipline. Something like ‘Professor of telling whether people you are looking at are angry’, or ‘Professor of catching cricket balls’....
I wonder if you might be thinking more of the difference between a computer program that one fully understands (a rare thing indeed), and one which is only dimly understood, and made up of ‘magical’ parts even though its top level behaviour may be reasonably predictable (which is how most programmers perceive most programs).
Well, in the case of answers to questions like that in the humanities what does the word ‘right’ actually mean? If we say a particular author is ‘post utopian’ what does it actually mean for the answer to that question to be ‘yes’ or ‘no’? It’s just a classification that we invented. And like all classification groups there is a set of rules characteristics that mean that the author is either post utopian or not. I imagine it as a checklist of features which gets ticked off as a person reads the book. If all the items in the checklist are ticked then the author is post utopian. If not then the author is not.
The problem with this is that different people have different items in their checklist and differ in their opinion on how many items in the list need to be checked for the author to be classified as post utopian. You can pick any literary classification and this will be the case. There will never be a consensus on all the items in the checklist. There will always be a few points that everybody does not agree on. This makes me think that objectively speaking there is not ‘absolutely right’ or ‘absolutely wrong’ answer to a question like that.
In hard science on the other hand. There is always an absolutely right answer. If we say: “Protons and neutrons are oppositely charged.” There is an answer that is right because no matter what my beliefs, experiment is the final arbiter. Nobody who follows through the logical steps can deny that they are oppositely charged without making an illogical leap.
In the literary classification, you or your neural network can go through logical steps and still arrive at an answer that is not the same for everybody.
EDIT: I meant “protons and electrons are oppositely charged” not “protons and neutrons”. Sorry!
One: Protons and neutrons aren’t oppositely charged.
Two: You’re using particle physics as an example of an area where experiment is the final arbiter; you might not want to do that. Scientific consensus has more than a few established beliefs in that field that are untested and border on untestable.
Honestly, he’d be hard pressed to find a field that has better tested beliefs and greater convergence of evidence. The established beliefs you mention are a problem everywhere, and pretty much no field is backed with as much data as particle physics.
Fair enough; I had wanted to say that but don’t have sufficiently intimate awareness of every academic field to be comfortable doing so. I think it works just as well to illustrate that we oughtn’t confuse passing flaws in a field with fundamental ones, or the qualities of a /discipline/ with the qualities of seeking truth in a particular domain.
No, it’s just that FluffyC used slashes to indicate that the word in the middle was to be italisized, so she probably hadn’t read the help section, and I thought that reading the help section would, well, help FluffyC.
I don’t think that the fact that everyone having a different checklist is the point. In this perfect, hypothetical world, everyone has the same checklist.
I think that the point is that the checklist is meaningless, like having a literary genre called y-ism and having “The letter ‘y’ constitutes 1/26th of the text” on the checklist.
Even if we can identify y-ism with our senses, the distinction is doesn’t “mean” anything. It has zero application outside of the world of y-ism. It floats.
I liked your comment and have a half-formed metaphor for you to either pick apart or develop:
LW/ rationalist types tend towards hard sciences. This requires more System 2 reasoning. Their fields are like computer programs. Every step makes sense, and is understood.
Humanities tends toward more System 1 pattern recognition. This is more akin to a neural network. Even if you are getting the “right” answer, it is coming out of a black box.
Because the rationalist types can’t see the algorithm, they assume it can’t be “right”.
Thoughts?
I like your idea and upvoted the comment, but I don’t know enough about neural networks to have a meaningful opinion on it.
I like the idea that this comment produces in my mind. But nitpickingly, a neural network is a type of computer program. And most of the professional bollocks-talkers of my acquaintance think very hard in system-two like ways about the rubbish they spout.
It’s hard to imagine a system-one academic discipline. Something like ‘Professor of telling whether people you are looking at are angry’, or ‘Professor of catching cricket balls’....
I wonder if you might be thinking more of the difference between a computer program that one fully understands (a rare thing indeed), and one which is only dimly understood, and made up of ‘magical’ parts even though its top level behaviour may be reasonably predictable (which is how most programmers perceive most programs).
Well, in the case of answers to questions like that in the humanities what does the word ‘right’ actually mean? If we say a particular author is ‘post utopian’ what does it actually mean for the answer to that question to be ‘yes’ or ‘no’? It’s just a classification that we invented. And like all classification groups there is a set of rules characteristics that mean that the author is either post utopian or not. I imagine it as a checklist of features which gets ticked off as a person reads the book. If all the items in the checklist are ticked then the author is post utopian. If not then the author is not.
The problem with this is that different people have different items in their checklist and differ in their opinion on how many items in the list need to be checked for the author to be classified as post utopian. You can pick any literary classification and this will be the case. There will never be a consensus on all the items in the checklist. There will always be a few points that everybody does not agree on. This makes me think that objectively speaking there is not ‘absolutely right’ or ‘absolutely wrong’ answer to a question like that.
In hard science on the other hand. There is always an absolutely right answer. If we say: “Protons and neutrons are oppositely charged.” There is an answer that is right because no matter what my beliefs, experiment is the final arbiter. Nobody who follows through the logical steps can deny that they are oppositely charged without making an illogical leap.
In the literary classification, you or your neural network can go through logical steps and still arrive at an answer that is not the same for everybody.
EDIT: I meant “protons and electrons are oppositely charged” not “protons and neutrons”. Sorry!
One: Protons and neutrons aren’t oppositely charged.
Two: You’re using particle physics as an example of an area where experiment is the final arbiter; you might not want to do that. Scientific consensus has more than a few established beliefs in that field that are untested and border on untestable.
Honestly, he’d be hard pressed to find a field that has better tested beliefs and greater convergence of evidence. The established beliefs you mention are a problem everywhere, and pretty much no field is backed with as much data as particle physics.
Fair enough; I had wanted to say that but don’t have sufficiently intimate awareness of every academic field to be comfortable doing so. I think it works just as well to illustrate that we oughtn’t confuse passing flaws in a field with fundamental ones, or the qualities of a /discipline/ with the qualities of seeking truth in a particular domain.
Press the Show help button to figure out how to italisize and bold and all that.
Was this intended to be a response to a different comment?
No, it’s just that FluffyC used slashes to indicate that the word in the middle was to be italisized, so she probably hadn’t read the help section, and I thought that reading the help section would, well, help FluffyC.
Oh Whoops! I mean protons and electrons! Silly mistake!
I don’t think that the fact that everyone having a different checklist is the point. In this perfect, hypothetical world, everyone has the same checklist.
I think that the point is that the checklist is meaningless, like having a literary genre called y-ism and having “The letter ‘y’ constitutes 1/26th of the text” on the checklist.
Even if we can identify y-ism with our senses, the distinction is doesn’t “mean” anything. It has zero application outside of the world of y-ism. It floats.