adamShimi

7mo

When you think about it, most of what we know comes at a remove — many removes often.

Most of what we know in science comes not from going through the experiments ourselves and pondering the results, but from the successive compressions, reevaluations, analyses and reductions of scientists and textbooks.

Most of what we know of history comes not from living it, not even from reading first hand sources, but from reading secondary, tertiary, n-ary literature based on more and more removed sources.

Most of what we know of our philosophies and religions comes not from the direct experiences of the Canon in their original language, but of commentaries, translations, interpretations and adaptations.^[1]

And at each... (read 3832 more words →)

Replying toThe Compulsion For (Pseudo-)Mechanisms

adamShimi7mo

I find it noticeably harder to work with a new concept than an old one. To translate a new concept to an old one, I put it into existing terms.
I think what might happen is, during the process of science, we formulate what we're seeing in our existing terms (ie. memetic climate).
The problem is in letting this take over, or thinking that it is generally true, and not just a way for our brains to manipulate the concept/patterns we're observing.

Yes, and this leads to another essential point: any new idea is at a fundamental infrastructure disadvantage. For the old idea has been not only etched into the psyche and the ontology of... (read more)

Replying toThe Compulsion For (Pseudo-)Mechanisms

adamShimi7mo

Oh, that's a great response!

I definitely agree with you that there is something like a set of primitives or instructions (as you said, another metaphor) that used everywhere by humans. We're not made to do advanced maths, create life-like 2D animation, cure diseases. So we're clearly retargeting processes that were meant for much more prosaic tasks.

The point reminds me of this great quote from Physics Avoidance, a book I'm taking a lot of inspiration for my model of methodology: (p.32)

An unavoidable consequence of our restricted reasoning capacities is that we are forever condemned to wobble between seasons of brash inferential extension and epochs of qualified retrenchment later on. These represent intellectual cycles

... (read 544 more words →)

Replying toThe Compulsion For (Pseudo-)Mechanisms

adamShimi7mo

I'm unsure if that's what you meant, but your comment has made me realize that I didn't neatly separate the emergence of a new mechanism (pseudo or not) from the perpetuation of an existing one. The whole post weaves back and forth between the two.

For the emergence of a new mechanism, this raises a really interesting question: where does it come from. The examples I mentioned, and more that come to mind, clearly point to a focus on some data, some phenomenological compression as a starting point (Galileo, Kepler, and other's observations and laws for Newton, say).

But then it also feels like the metaphor being used is never (at least I can't... (read more)

A Methodologist's Apology

7mo

Lately I’ve been reading more intellectual histories. For those unaware of the genre, it’s a type of (usually scholarly) book that hunts down the origin of the concept we use, and how they were thought about and framed across time.

Reading a few of these, a curious pattern emerged: there is usually a succession of explanation or metaphors for the concepts, not so much tied to the concept itself, but more to the prevalent and salient memes in the air at the time.

For example, Georges Vigarello identifies four successive Western explanations of tiredness (“fatigue” in the original French):

The representations of the body and their renewal similarly guide the perception of tiredness. The oldest

... (read 3518 more words →)

How The Singer Sang His Tales

8mo

I shall ask, then, why is it really worth while to make a serious study of mathematics? What is the proper justification of a mathematician’s life? And my answers will be, for the most part, such as are expected from a mathematician: I think that it is worth while, that there is ample justification. But I should say at once that my defence of mathematics will be a defence of myself, and that my apology is bound to be to some extent egotistical. I should not think it worth while to apologize for my subject if I regarded myself as one of its failures.

(G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology, 1940, p.3)

Earlier this... (read 2470 more words →)

8mo

A few weeks ago, I read “The Egg of a Sea-bird” on Casey Dué’s substack, and got really interested in the work of Milman Parry and his assistant and successor Albert Lord.

We’ll dig into the details, but broadly, Parry realized that the Homeric epics (both The Illiad and The Odyssey) were highly formulaic: they tended to use the same clusters or words, maybe adapted to the situation, a lot. And these tended to fit the constraint of the dactylic hexameter, the meter of Ancient Greek Poetry. From there, he realized that this property of Homer probably came from oral composition (as in composing the poem orally, in performance, as opposed to through... (read 10664 more words →)

The True Goal Fallacy

Poetic Methods II: Rhyme as a Focusing Device

8mo

As I ease out into a short sabbatical, I find myself turning back to dig the seeds of my repeated cycle of exhaustion and burnout in the last few years.

Many factors were at play, some more personal that I’m comfortable discussing here. But I have unearthed at least one failure mode that I see reflected and diffracted in others lives, especially people who like me love to think, to make sense, to understand. So that seems worth a blog post, if only to plant a pointer to the problem, and my own way to solve it.

I’ve christened this issue the “true goal fallacy”: the unchecked yet embodied assumption that there is a... (read 2053 more words →)

9mo

As promised in the previous instalment on meter, let’s explore rhyming from a methodological perspective.

The first difference between meter and rhyme lies in their opposite obviousness: the first one is subtle, requiring a learned and attuned ear; the second is so sonorous and clear that children hear it as self-evident.

Take one of my favorite Robert Frost poems:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.

... (read 5095 more words →)

The Grapes of Hardness

I have an embarrassing secret: I genuinely believe that Pierre Bourdieu, the famous french sociologist, had deep insights worth digging for.

It's embarrassing for a host of reasons. First, I haven't read or studied much Bourdieu. So this is not even the deep pronouncement of an expert, just the confused intuitions of a dilettante. The second source of embarassement is more sociological: the kind of crowds I frequent, my friends and family, are not really the ones to like stuff like Bourdieu (with a few exceptions). It's too continental, too fuzzy, smells too much of bullshit. It fails to provide clear predictions and commitment for its "theories", whatever they are.

Despite these deep-seated counter-arguments,... (read 1329 more words →)

One point evoked by other comments, which I've realized only after leaving France and living in the UK, is that there is still a massive prestige for engineering. ENS is not technically an engineering school, but it benefits from this prestige by being lumped with them, and by being accessed mainly from the national contests at the end of Prepas.

As always with these kind of cultural phenomena, I didn't really notice them until I left France for the UK. There is a sense in France (more when I was a student, but still there) that the most prestigious jobs are engineering ones. Going to engineering school is considered one of the top... (read more)

Replying toHistoriographical Compressions: Renaissance as An Example

Historiographical Compressions: Renaissance as An Example

I did not particularly intend to do a book review per say, and I don't claim to be an expert on the topic. So completely fine with tagging this in some way as "non-expert" if you wish.

Not planning to change how I wrote my posts based on this feedback, as I have no interest in following some arbitrary standard of epistemic expertise for a fun little blog post that will be read by 10 people max.

Historiographical Compressions: Renaissance as An Example

Poetic Methods I: Meter as Communication Protocol

I’ve been reading Ada Palmer’s great “Inventing The Renaissance”, and it sparked a line of thinking about how to properly reveal hidden complexity.

As the name suggests, Palmer’s book explores how the historical period we call the Renaissance has been constructed by historians, nation-states, and the general public. Not in the sense that there is nothing distinctive or interesting in this (hard to pin down) span of history, but because the compressions that have most currency in people’s head are retroactive projections of what was considered good or important or even decadent about the time when the histories were written.

There’s a lot of fascinating historical details in the book, but what I want... (read 2050 more words →)

(Normally I cross post the full post from substack, but in this case substack has significantly better poetry formatting, so just quoting the introduction)

During my Christmas break, I found a doorway into the structure and intricacies of english poetry: the book "Rhyme's Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry" by Brad Leithauser.
I had read english verse before, and skimmed a couple of books about poetry. But Rhyme's Rooms entranced me by its focus on methodological questions: what are poets aiming for, which issues and constraints do they run into, what tricks and setups and techniques have they developed to handle these challenges.
Here's a sure sign that this book unlocked some new shards of understanding:

Please don't throw your mind away

I agree that it is in the text. If it wasn't clear, my message was trying to reverse engineer why I bounced off, which is more about my experience of reading than fully about the text.

Replying toPlease don't throw your mind away

Please don't throw your mind away

I remember reading this post, and really disliking it.

Then today, as I was reflecting on things, I recalled that this existed, and went back to read it. And this time, my reaction was instead "yep, that's pointing to the mental move that I've lost and that I'm now trying to relearn".

Which is interesting. Because that means a year or two ago, up till now, I was the kind of people who would benefit from this post; yet I couldn't get the juice out of it. I think a big reason is that while the description of the play/fun mental move is good and clear, the description of the opposite mental move, the... (read more)

Fragile, Robust, and Antifragile Preference Satisfaction