I have valued your work on Quora for a long time. I’m a reader, and occasional commenter. I see Quora not working well for me as a paying customer, so I can pretty easily guess that it would be even worse for writers! I have been close to US business community for 50 years and the grasping of power by finance folk (yeah, looking at you, Venture Capital, Private Equity, stock market wienies, hedge fund manipulators, predatory bankers, government “business development leaders”, robbing CEOs, bonussed executives, greedy individual employers, and I should stop!) has me in despair that anything will ever work right again here in the US, Which is a long way of saying Quora is one problem in many!
OK…From my perspective, you ARE mostly wrong, picking up your ball and huffing off the Quora court. I am sure it felt good, and god knows, if anyone deserves to feel good, you do. But what about the rest of us??!!
Yours is the sexiest brain on Quora…(This is coming from a woman who will be 80 in July, so don’t get excited. But if I was still the blonde bombshell of the ‘80s, I’d be flying my Lear to New Zealand to meet you!)
Men like you, minds like yours, are so precious, so few and far between! You are the shaft of sunlight shining through the roiling black clouds that cover so much of cyberspace. Hmm..like a drawing by Blake. And Quora, for all its manifold faults, it the easiest way for most of us to access you.
Please reconsider this possibly hasty decision, and crosspost back to Quora. What do you have to lose? You have made your point, and we get it, but you are punishing US with it, not Quora. “First, do no harm.”
I am certainly in the realist camp. I got a paper published in a supplement to the International Journal of Quantum Foundations called Quantum Speculations (Volume 1, Number 1, October 2019, Pages 1-31) entitled
Basically, I am claiming that ideas exist independent of minds, and that they are the collapse of the wave function in Quantum Mechanics. For a non-technical explanatation see my Medium essay:
Hylomorphic Functions: Is consciousness quantized?
I started with the question of why Kurt Godel was a Platonist and ended up being dragged, kicking and screaming (well actually, muttering into my beard) into the pan-proto-psychist camp of Chambers and Goff. Took 15 years, but that is where I ended up.
I’m sorry I missed you on Quora. I, too, posted quite often, mostly in the period from 2014-2020. My bailiwick was prmarily religion, especially Pantheism. It was a great way to work through one’s own ideas, point by point, sharpening the arguments through dialog with other participants.
But as a computer professional working in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning/Natural Language Processing, I found their recommender system is to be remarkably wretched - on a par with Facebook’s. It is sweet and touching to read a personal vignette from an emergency room nurse who heroically saved a patient’s life despite the machinations of some arrogant, meat-headed doctor, but, my god, I do not need my Quora feed to then comprise of 30% of these kind of postings for the next few weeks (or months) until this feedback is extiguished! It takes the fun out of it.
Personally, I think that YouTube has a remarkably good recommender algorithm. Being a music lover, I watch lots of music videos and they are especially good at recommending new artists to listen to. Having written a recommender system myself, I know that it is a tricky piece of work, especially since, compared to other Machine Learning tasks, accuracy is a squishy criterion in recommendation. Like hand grenades, a recommender system is good enough if it is close.
By the way, I used a simplified Bayes Theorem computation to write the recommender instead of the canonical k-nearest neighbour approach. In other words, a recommender system can look for similarities in a space of selections, but you can also recommend by guessing future interest based on past performance.
Thanks for the detailed comment. Can’t disagree one jot about Quora: fundamental design flaws there have come back to bite everyone.
Looking quickly through your Medium post and article, I think that I’ll likely disagree fairly vehemently about a lot of your foundational assumptions—once I’ve spend some time doing your work justice :)
On the surface, I’m a bit concerned about the reification that seems to be implied. What are your thoughts on ET Jaynes’ “mind projection fallacy”?
I have heard of Jaynes but never given his work the level of consideration it deserves. So I am going to shoot from the hip, but realize that my response may be totally different once I have thought some more.
The “mind projection fallacy” is extremely important. As someone whose philosophy of life is based on Taoism, this is a fundamental caisson in my cognitive foundation: “The Tao that can be stated is not the Tao”.
“Once one has grasped the idea, one sees the Mind Projection Fallacy everywhere.”
Indeed, the mind reels when faced with all of the examples of this fallacy. Reification happens all the time. And you know that if it is bad in physics, then it is worse in the more difficult sciences like biology and psychology. By the time you get to political science, taking LSD won’t alter your mental projections all that much.
In physics today, anyone who thinks that the universe is a machine/computer/tesselation is guilty of this. Even smart people like Tegmark and Wolfram fall into this trap.
In the spirit of Taoism, I would agree with you that “Everything ‘true’ is always just provisional—not yet wrong.” I also go the extra step and say that the books of the past are, as the wheelwright said, the dried-up bones of the sages of old. I respect the wisdom of the past - up to a point.
So it sounds like I agree with you (and Jaynes also) in an anti-realist stance.
There are a couple of things going on here.
The first is to point out that our provisionally wrong ideas are efficacious. They help us navigate the world. When I first articulated the concept of “hylomorphic functions” I thought to myself, “gee, this explain a lot.” It unites concepts like substance and process metaphysics and cleans up the issue of “consciousness” that von Nemuann alluded to. It is a form of property dualism.
I kind of disagree with people like Massimo Pigliucci that the difference between science and philosophy is that philosophy is “underdetermined”.
The second issue is a kind of meta-level issue. I may be an anti-realist in your sense of the word, but my conceptual framework is realist about ideas.
Let’s look at the quote on the Wikipedia page:
[I]n studying probability theory, it was vaguely troubling to see reference to "gaussian random variables", or "stochastic processes", or "stationary time series", or "disorder", as if the property of being gaussian, random, stochastic, stationary, or disorderly is a real property, like the property of possessing mass or length, existing in Nature. Indeed, some seek to develop statistical tests to determine the presence of these properties in their data...
When you look at my paper, you will realize that I agree with Jaynes: there exist real properties. They exist in nature because they are instantiated as a collapse of the wave function. Basically, what I did is to describe in physics the distinction that Jaynes makes in this paragraph. I am giving the physical explanation of why a “real property” is a “real property”. You will see that Jaynes and I agree on what constitutes a real property and what is not. It is just that my real properties are more real than his are. They are causally active because they are part of Quantum Mechanics.
Ideas are a property of reality, to put it in property dualism terms.
Don’t make too much of this, though. Most panpsychism is like saying that electrons and silicon atoms exist, so a grain of sand thinks. Pan-proto-psychism is saying that the conscious mind is built up of real wave function collapses equivalent to the way the physical mind is built up of biochemistry. And I don’t believe in Penrose and the other “quantum mind” explanations either. The mind does not need quantum processes in that way. They are inherent in the qualia and the neural processing that goes on to understand and interpret the qualia.
p.s. Reading this back, I think I come across as an anti-realist realist. Oh my…
Nice initial post, and the proposed next topics also look promising! What I would find especially interesting are your thoughts on quality control in science (and research policy) - touching on the issues like “How do we reconcile the growing volume of new research with the shortage of good peer-reviewed?“, “How can a researcher strike a balance between doing quality research and administrative work (peer-review, serving on advisory/grant assessment boards, etc.)?“.
Thanks for the feedback. Those are topics very close to my heart, and I’m absolutely certain that after I’ve laid some groundwork—my next article should come out on Sunday—I’ll get cracking on quality and peer review. (I have a few crazy ideas for the latter in particular).
This jibes with some things I’ve been thinking lately.
A lot of people are so afraid of being wrong that they’d rather be right than correct.
How do I know I’m “righter” than those other people who always think they’re right, even when they’re nuts? Well, I don’t know for sure, but it helps that I keep checking myself for errors. They don’t. They’re afraid to.
Being wrong is wonderful. It’s how you learn stuff.
If you’re not making mistakes, you need to try harder.
Please give me more. I'm particularly interested in the science-religion non-dichotomy from an athiest's perspective. I'd also love to hear your speculate about the way you were deluded into dimissing the lab-lead theory during COVID, even while several reliable researchers were endorsing it, but just popular culture was critical of it. It's a mainstream consideration now--or no longer considered "racist," at least. Again, can you parse your evolution on that, in a scientically "wrong-is-right" way?
Now you’re sealioning. If you’re really interested, I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait. I’m too busy criticising myself on too many other fronts at present to meet your amusing demands :)
In the meantime, you may wish to contemplate the real benefits of Science as I’ve presented it. This involves self-criticism. I am continually astonished how almost everyone removes themselves from criticism at this point: “self-criticism is great provided it doesn’t actually apply to me!”
I have been a big fan of your on Quora, especially when I had free time during the pandemic, and I’m having surgery in May and again have time to read for leisure right now. Your take on science being wrong is fascinating in light of your pandemic rants about how the lab leak theory was so flawed.
In light of the newer research showing how Dr. Fauci was manipulating the research into the lab leak theory, and especially how it’s becoming the most credible explanation for the viruses origins, I was hoping (in the spirit of this essay) you could take a moment to reflect on what went wrong with your own assumptions and thinking during that stressful time for all of us.
Here is one reference to back up my points about the increasing credibility of lab-leak theorists, in case you have not considered this side of the issue for a while:
You will find the “new” humility around the possibility of a lab leak even from a geneticist who at the time poo-pooed it (Francis Collins), as you also did. The 11 min. from 48:00 to 59:00 in that podcast are the most illustrative of that point.
That’s interesting. I quickly read the transcript, and it seems to be singularly devoid of actual science that refutes the solid scientific reasons (and simple logic, concerning things like provenance, the two early strains, etc.) that still make the ‘wild’ origin of the virus so much more likely—as I see it.
I may well devote a future post to this topic. At present, I have so much other groundwork to lay, this may be several months away.
Now I have a reason to use my substack account…
Thanks for what you do, on and off the internet.
I wonder how many will follow you from Quora.
Thanks :) Intriguingly, Quora distributed that ‘final’ post to almost nobody, complaining post hoc about the question.
I toddled over from Quora too, are you also on Bluesky?
@dr-jo.bsky.social, but an infrequent user of Bluesky at present.
Yep, but I don’t use it much. @dr-jo.bsky.social
Another from Quora
I’m one… ✌🏻💙🇬🇧
Ditto - it’s why I opened a Substack account
I have valued your work on Quora for a long time. I’m a reader, and occasional commenter. I see Quora not working well for me as a paying customer, so I can pretty easily guess that it would be even worse for writers! I have been close to US business community for 50 years and the grasping of power by finance folk (yeah, looking at you, Venture Capital, Private Equity, stock market wienies, hedge fund manipulators, predatory bankers, government “business development leaders”, robbing CEOs, bonussed executives, greedy individual employers, and I should stop!) has me in despair that anything will ever work right again here in the US, Which is a long way of saying Quora is one problem in many!
One more following you from Quora :-) thanks for the excellent writing!
Well,l binned Nazi Bird for Bluesky, & now, with a blurry eye*, I see Quora's smoking ruin in my wing mirror**
Followed Dr. Jo here, not in a "leader" sense, more a "sense of curiosity about what's next".
*cataracts. And macular degeneration. And tears of regret.
**no licence at the moment due eye problems, stroke & epilepsy, fuck's sake, it's allegorical.
I’m in a quandary here. I want to say ‘ROFL’ but don’t want to stoop that low :)
I was going to post an image of my ¾ done bottle of Marlborough Sov Blonk but can't find the image function.
Pesky new-fangled web things....
OK…From my perspective, you ARE mostly wrong, picking up your ball and huffing off the Quora court. I am sure it felt good, and god knows, if anyone deserves to feel good, you do. But what about the rest of us??!!
Yours is the sexiest brain on Quora…(This is coming from a woman who will be 80 in July, so don’t get excited. But if I was still the blonde bombshell of the ‘80s, I’d be flying my Lear to New Zealand to meet you!)
Men like you, minds like yours, are so precious, so few and far between! You are the shaft of sunlight shining through the roiling black clouds that cover so much of cyberspace. Hmm..like a drawing by Blake. And Quora, for all its manifold faults, it the easiest way for most of us to access you.
Please reconsider this possibly hasty decision, and crosspost back to Quora. What do you have to lose? You have made your point, and we get it, but you are punishing US with it, not Quora. “First, do no harm.”
Hi Jody
Thanks for the vituperative attack/overwhelmingly positive comments :)
I will likely cross-post on Quora once I’ve built up a more substantial body of work on Substack. I only know that today is not that day—more or less.
Regards, Dr Jo.
I resurrected my my substack account purely as a response to your post.
Followed you here from Quora. Keep up the good work.
Glad you’re free of Quora, Dr Jo. Cheers.
Wow. Just, wow!
I am certainly in the realist camp. I got a paper published in a supplement to the International Journal of Quantum Foundations called Quantum Speculations (Volume 1, Number 1, October 2019, Pages 1-31) entitled
“Causally Active Metaphysical Realism”
https://ijqf.org/archives/5704
Basically, I am claiming that ideas exist independent of minds, and that they are the collapse of the wave function in Quantum Mechanics. For a non-technical explanatation see my Medium essay:
https://medium.com/science-and-philosophy/is-consciousness-quantized-15e249aac558
Hylomorphic Functions: Is consciousness quantized?
I started with the question of why Kurt Godel was a Platonist and ended up being dragged, kicking and screaming (well actually, muttering into my beard) into the pan-proto-psychist camp of Chambers and Goff. Took 15 years, but that is where I ended up.
I’m sorry I missed you on Quora. I, too, posted quite often, mostly in the period from 2014-2020. My bailiwick was prmarily religion, especially Pantheism. It was a great way to work through one’s own ideas, point by point, sharpening the arguments through dialog with other participants.
But as a computer professional working in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning/Natural Language Processing, I found their recommender system is to be remarkably wretched - on a par with Facebook’s. It is sweet and touching to read a personal vignette from an emergency room nurse who heroically saved a patient’s life despite the machinations of some arrogant, meat-headed doctor, but, my god, I do not need my Quora feed to then comprise of 30% of these kind of postings for the next few weeks (or months) until this feedback is extiguished! It takes the fun out of it.
Personally, I think that YouTube has a remarkably good recommender algorithm. Being a music lover, I watch lots of music videos and they are especially good at recommending new artists to listen to. Having written a recommender system myself, I know that it is a tricky piece of work, especially since, compared to other Machine Learning tasks, accuracy is a squishy criterion in recommendation. Like hand grenades, a recommender system is good enough if it is close.
By the way, I used a simplified Bayes Theorem computation to write the recommender instead of the canonical k-nearest neighbour approach. In other words, a recommender system can look for similarities in a space of selections, but you can also recommend by guessing future interest based on past performance.
Thanks for the detailed comment. Can’t disagree one jot about Quora: fundamental design flaws there have come back to bite everyone.
Looking quickly through your Medium post and article, I think that I’ll likely disagree fairly vehemently about a lot of your foundational assumptions—once I’ve spend some time doing your work justice :)
On the surface, I’m a bit concerned about the reification that seems to be implied. What are your thoughts on ET Jaynes’ “mind projection fallacy”?
Regards, Jo.
I have heard of Jaynes but never given his work the level of consideration it deserves. So I am going to shoot from the hip, but realize that my response may be totally different once I have thought some more.
The “mind projection fallacy” is extremely important. As someone whose philosophy of life is based on Taoism, this is a fundamental caisson in my cognitive foundation: “The Tao that can be stated is not the Tao”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_projection_fallacy
“Once one has grasped the idea, one sees the Mind Projection Fallacy everywhere.”
Indeed, the mind reels when faced with all of the examples of this fallacy. Reification happens all the time. And you know that if it is bad in physics, then it is worse in the more difficult sciences like biology and psychology. By the time you get to political science, taking LSD won’t alter your mental projections all that much.
In physics today, anyone who thinks that the universe is a machine/computer/tesselation is guilty of this. Even smart people like Tegmark and Wolfram fall into this trap.
In the spirit of Taoism, I would agree with you that “Everything ‘true’ is always just provisional—not yet wrong.” I also go the extra step and say that the books of the past are, as the wheelwright said, the dried-up bones of the sages of old. I respect the wisdom of the past - up to a point.
So it sounds like I agree with you (and Jaynes also) in an anti-realist stance.
There are a couple of things going on here.
The first is to point out that our provisionally wrong ideas are efficacious. They help us navigate the world. When I first articulated the concept of “hylomorphic functions” I thought to myself, “gee, this explain a lot.” It unites concepts like substance and process metaphysics and cleans up the issue of “consciousness” that von Nemuann alluded to. It is a form of property dualism.
I kind of disagree with people like Massimo Pigliucci that the difference between science and philosophy is that philosophy is “underdetermined”.
https://medium.com/socrates-cafe/free-will-conceptual-landscapes-and-the-nature-of-philosophical-progress-c82704023e3e
If I write a philosophy paper, I try to put in some experimental tests. Otherwise it is cargo-cult philosophy in the sense of Feynman.
I did that in my IJQF paper, which is the first third of the full paper, which also has experimental tests:
“Hylomorphic Functions” https://researchers.one/articles/hylomorphic-functions/5f52699b36a3e45f17ae7d94
The second issue is a kind of meta-level issue. I may be an anti-realist in your sense of the word, but my conceptual framework is realist about ideas.
Let’s look at the quote on the Wikipedia page:
[I]n studying probability theory, it was vaguely troubling to see reference to "gaussian random variables", or "stochastic processes", or "stationary time series", or "disorder", as if the property of being gaussian, random, stochastic, stationary, or disorderly is a real property, like the property of possessing mass or length, existing in Nature. Indeed, some seek to develop statistical tests to determine the presence of these properties in their data...
When you look at my paper, you will realize that I agree with Jaynes: there exist real properties. They exist in nature because they are instantiated as a collapse of the wave function. Basically, what I did is to describe in physics the distinction that Jaynes makes in this paragraph. I am giving the physical explanation of why a “real property” is a “real property”. You will see that Jaynes and I agree on what constitutes a real property and what is not. It is just that my real properties are more real than his are. They are causally active because they are part of Quantum Mechanics.
Ideas are a property of reality, to put it in property dualism terms.
Don’t make too much of this, though. Most panpsychism is like saying that electrons and silicon atoms exist, so a grain of sand thinks. Pan-proto-psychism is saying that the conscious mind is built up of real wave function collapses equivalent to the way the physical mind is built up of biochemistry. And I don’t believe in Penrose and the other “quantum mind” explanations either. The mind does not need quantum processes in that way. They are inherent in the qualia and the neural processing that goes on to understand and interpret the qualia.
p.s. Reading this back, I think I come across as an anti-realist realist. Oh my…
Another follower from Quora. You have inspired me to make a similar move and start writing on Substack myself.
Well done. Looking forward to reading your posts.
Cheers, Dr Jo.
Nice initial post, and the proposed next topics also look promising! What I would find especially interesting are your thoughts on quality control in science (and research policy) - touching on the issues like “How do we reconcile the growing volume of new research with the shortage of good peer-reviewed?“, “How can a researcher strike a balance between doing quality research and administrative work (peer-review, serving on advisory/grant assessment boards, etc.)?“.
Thanks for the feedback. Those are topics very close to my heart, and I’m absolutely certain that after I’ve laid some groundwork—my next article should come out on Sunday—I’ll get cracking on quality and peer review. (I have a few crazy ideas for the latter in particular).
Regards, Dr Jo.
This jibes with some things I’ve been thinking lately.
A lot of people are so afraid of being wrong that they’d rather be right than correct.
How do I know I’m “righter” than those other people who always think they’re right, even when they’re nuts? Well, I don’t know for sure, but it helps that I keep checking myself for errors. They don’t. They’re afraid to.
Being wrong is wonderful. It’s how you learn stuff.
If you’re not making mistakes, you need to try harder.
Following you here from Quora.
Following some others on Bluesky.
It would be nice if we could find one forever home.
Please give me more. I'm particularly interested in the science-religion non-dichotomy from an athiest's perspective. I'd also love to hear your speculate about the way you were deluded into dimissing the lab-lead theory during COVID, even while several reliable researchers were endorsing it, but just popular culture was critical of it. It's a mainstream consideration now--or no longer considered "racist," at least. Again, can you parse your evolution on that, in a scientically "wrong-is-right" way?
Now you’re sealioning. If you’re really interested, I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait. I’m too busy criticising myself on too many other fronts at present to meet your amusing demands :)
In the meantime, you may wish to contemplate the real benefits of Science as I’ve presented it. This involves self-criticism. I am continually astonished how almost everyone removes themselves from criticism at this point: “self-criticism is great provided it doesn’t actually apply to me!”
I have been a big fan of your on Quora, especially when I had free time during the pandemic, and I’m having surgery in May and again have time to read for leisure right now. Your take on science being wrong is fascinating in light of your pandemic rants about how the lab leak theory was so flawed.
In light of the newer research showing how Dr. Fauci was manipulating the research into the lab leak theory, and especially how it’s becoming the most credible explanation for the viruses origins, I was hoping (in the spirit of this essay) you could take a moment to reflect on what went wrong with your own assumptions and thinking during that stressful time for all of us.
Here is one reference to back up my points about the increasing credibility of lab-leak theorists, in case you have not considered this side of the issue for a while:
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/francis-collins-on-faith-and-lab
You will find the “new” humility around the possibility of a lab leak even from a geneticist who at the time poo-pooed it (Francis Collins), as you also did. The 11 min. from 48:00 to 59:00 in that podcast are the most illustrative of that point.
That’s interesting. I quickly read the transcript, and it seems to be singularly devoid of actual science that refutes the solid scientific reasons (and simple logic, concerning things like provenance, the two early strains, etc.) that still make the ‘wild’ origin of the virus so much more likely—as I see it.
I may well devote a future post to this topic. At present, I have so much other groundwork to lay, this may be several months away.
Thanks for the comments. Dr Jo.
I knew your reply would be so thoughtful, thank you. And I greatly look forward to reading you again!