Part 1: Ontology, indexicality, correspondence, meaning-debt (!).
> In one sentence: there are possibilities we can conceive of solely because our ontologies can include things we can’t directly point to, but this power comes with the debt to make them point to something later.
Part 2: Problems representing meaning, comparison, explanation, stories instead of data, some words point to things that are uncertain without a way to resolve them.
Part 3: "Representations annihilate detail," "Meaning is a product of interaction," "We intuitively know how to open our eyes in our everyday lives, but how do we open the door between us and the myriad of static representations that modern life puts before us?"
Part 4:
Historically "data couldn’t help but be interactive and indexical, because it was bound up inextricably with human beings."
"Because data collection and analysis work can be made more and more automatic and scalable while the anti-ridiculousness work is much more manual..., the balance is getting ever-more disturbed by modern norms of science."
What is often called a failure of replication is often instead a failure of representation.
"This is not a manifesto about all scientific findings and modern rationality being wrong. It’s a warning that the right stuff and the wrong stuff are going to look exactly the same to the untrained eye."
Whew... That's quite a read, and I was interrupted several times with life, but worth it. Think Godel, Escher, Bach the blog post.
Very interesting article that makes a valid point about the outcome of studies presumably covering the same ground but that fail to line up. This is trivially easy to notice in medical journal articles, for example, reports of drug trials are often contradictory. (A notorious example: studies of SSRI antidepressants.) How could this be? In simple terms, the sets of subjects weren't congruent. For one thing, given the intrinsic difficulty of measuring "depression" and subtle differences in sex, age, and distribution of symptoms among cohorts of depressed individuals it's hardly a surprise to find out response to a treatment could vary significantly.
I fully agree with the author's ideas about interactivity and context of events. But these are infinitely variable and it often takes a lot of effort to work out what are the salient elements that shape the data we're collecting.
There's a point to be made about "premature abstraction" that's parallel to the oft-cited evil of "premature optimization". It might even be the very same thing.
This is highly relevant to LxAGI (https://lxagi.com) because it allows you to specify your own ontology as a JSON schema. You can then parse natural language to your schema as it is found. A shared schema library would probably be useful.
The comment’s point was that the expected value of the game is positive, but more to the point of the article, if the things we’re talking about are pianos or container ships, “winning” the game might cause you some headaches.
> In one sentence: there are possibilities we can conceive of solely because our ontologies can include things we can’t directly point to, but this power comes with the debt to make them point to something later.
Part 2: Problems representing meaning, comparison, explanation, stories instead of data, some words point to things that are uncertain without a way to resolve them.
Part 3: "Representations annihilate detail," "Meaning is a product of interaction," "We intuitively know how to open our eyes in our everyday lives, but how do we open the door between us and the myriad of static representations that modern life puts before us?"
Part 4:
Historically "data couldn’t help but be interactive and indexical, because it was bound up inextricably with human beings."
"Because data collection and analysis work can be made more and more automatic and scalable while the anti-ridiculousness work is much more manual..., the balance is getting ever-more disturbed by modern norms of science."
What is often called a failure of replication is often instead a failure of representation.
"This is not a manifesto about all scientific findings and modern rationality being wrong. It’s a warning that the right stuff and the wrong stuff are going to look exactly the same to the untrained eye."
Whew... That's quite a read, and I was interrupted several times with life, but worth it. Think Godel, Escher, Bach the blog post.