Hi

I am not capable of original thought like Bear, so have to depend on throwing
in a quote from somebody else, in this case from Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain:

"Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good, in so far
as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices,
and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it sets free, refines,
humanises, makes slaves ripe for freedom. But it is bad, very bad, in so far as
it stands in the way of action, cannot shape the vital forces, maims life at
its roots. Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death,
with which it may belong - allied to the grave and its unsavory anatomy"

page 222, vintage classics ed, 1999, trans Lowe-Porter; first pub 1924.

Fran (B)

--- bear <tc_spirit@...> wrote:
> Some thouhts that have been swimming around.
>
> I checked the OED... as i suspected improbable refers to unlikely in an
> extreme form. so, for example - the crumbling of the WTC buildings was
> improbable on 9/10/01 but neither unpredictable nor impossible.
>
> unpredictability, on the other hand describes a situation in which it
> is impossible to predict, which i would argue strongly against on the
> basis that prediction is always possible even if it later, by whatever
> arbitrary standard has been agreed to in advance, turns out to have
> been incorrect...
>
> Than there is also a temporal issue that i suspect may be important to
> consider. If i am doing polling data on election day, and I choose my
> sampling frame well, and i am not doing the polling in the state of
> florida in 2000, then when i draw my inference from my sample to the
> whole population of voters - anywhere but florida, i am not predicting
> in terms of a future state of the world, but merely describing
> something that has already happened. i am still likely to be wrong
> about the estimate though the 95% confidence interval will likely be
> very accurate, tho potentially useless information if it is not
> sufficiently narrow for whatever decision-making has to occur in
> reporting, interpreting, or acting on my results...
>
> On the other hand, when i am trying to forecast a future state of the
> world (i am mindful that some may argue that there is no such thing as
> objective, forward moving time, but that is another discussion
> entirely, and i am already on record as ridiculing victor stenger for
> his 'backward traveling in time particles' thesis, anyway), and this is
> the area that I, were I in martha's purple dress, would be more
> concerned about. Suppose, for example, I were talking with a student in
> the 1950s or 1960s and they, having just run a statistical regression
> on teachers salaries and liquor sales. I would be very concerned if
> their proposed solution to excessive alcohol drinking was to recommend
> that teachers salaries be lowered on the presumption that there was a
> causal link between salaries and drinking that might be rectified in
> the future by adjusting teachers' salaries. That is a wholly different
> matter than reporting about the current state of affairs to making a
> prediction that, based on a certain intervention - a future state of
> affairs would come to exist.
>
> I think there are also some issues in terms of how we approach
> knowledge - rather than asking about our ability to produce unitary
> knowledge by building up, one dimension at a time, perhaps we ought to
> think of it the same way that galileo did when considering the ages old
> proposition that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. In
> his 'thought experiment', galileo reportedly argued thusly - if a
> heavier object falls faster than a light object, then if I put both
> objects together they will be heavier than the heavier object and ought
> to fall faster. On the other hand, it would be unreasonable to assume
> that the lighter object, which on its own would fall more slowly, would
> not hold the combined object back because of its slower speed. The only
> way to view the situation more accurately would be to assume that they
> all fall at the same rate of speed...
>
> Now, shifting to the question of excluding any form of 'knowing', if we
> assumed we had 'unitary knowledge' that just happened to incorporate
> inferential statistics or any quantified knowledge, would it be
> justifiable to exclude that knowledge from our unitary knowledge? If
> so, on what basis would that exclusion be made? Could we then transfer
> the same justification for excluding any other aspect of knowledge -
> aesthetic representation, phenomenological inquiry, one 'qualitative'
> method after another on the basis that its contribution was
> reductionistic compared to the remaining wholeness?
>
> Then there is yet another issue - are all things inherently
> immeasurable? I used to have polite discussions with a peer about this
> issue all the time a few years ago. The question of something being
> immeasurable is, at best, temporally determined. Could I have measured
> X-rays in 200 BC? probably not. Can I do that in 2004 AD? Yes. Can I
> measure the time til death of a healthy human being, barring knowing
> that they are on death row in texas? No, not unless I have prior
> knowledge of the exact moment of their death. I would argue that the
> assertion that things are 'not measurable' must be no less justified
> than that they are measurable - perhaps more so. Person X may not have
> the skills, aptitude, tools, or technical efficiency to measure a
> phenomena - but that does not automatically translate to the phenomena
> not being measurable by someone who possesses the appropriate skills,
> aptitude, tools, or technical efficiency to measure the phenomena. So
> someone says they want to study sadness but feels that no extant
> approach to measurement is appropriate. On further discussion they say
> they want to compare sadness in two populations, high school graduates
> five years after graduation, and their HS peers who did not graduate at
> the same time. Either qualitative or quantitative methods might be used
> to do this. We might seek to interview 8 people from each group about
> the experience of post-hs sadness. the problem, of course, is that the
> only people who will show up will be people who identify with sadness -
> so the comparison may be flawed if our interest was to compare the
> percent of people who are sad in each group. If, on the other hand, we
> are more interested in the unique ways that sadness might manifest and
> be reported by HS grads v HS non-completers, it would likely be foolish
> to ask a randomly selected portion of each group to take the Beck
> Depression Inventory...
>
> I think the appropriateness of either qualitative or quantitative (or
> both) methods is ALWAYS dependent on 'what is the research question.'
>
> One additional point for reflection - when we conduct an inquiry
> seeking to capture wholeness - are we not always basing our assessment
> of wholeness on a snapshot, a sampling of all possible snapshots that
> we, or others, might have ever taken? Here I will acknowledge one of my
> more embarrassing moments. In my youth, as a young cub just out of
> school, I worked for the department of social services. I had a client
> who had been convicted of second-degree manslaughter. He had 7 children
> with one woman and was reputed to have fathered many other children in
> the area. I did the good liberal thing of rationalizing and justifying
> behavior, which I personally found somewhat troubling and formed an
> image of him that I thought to be accurate, positive, and balanced. I
> held him in positive regard, did everything I could to help him and his
> family deal with the rigors of life… One day, as I walked through the
> local 'community action agency' building, I heard a voice that sounded
> familiar. I retraced my steps and looked into a meeting of the
> community action board. There, wielding the gavel, was my client, the
> president of the board. Now a simple measurement incorporated into my
> prior thinking would have produced a radically different portrait - How
> many local community action boards do you chair? __ (0=none; 1= one or
> more). This answer would not have made any qualitative distinctions
> between how well he performed in that role - but it would certainly
> have fleshed out the unitary portrait of his life that I had woven
> based on obviously extremely limited information. That my client served
> in so responsible a position and held such positive regard in the
> community was improbable earlier that day - but clearly not impossible.
> That he held such a position and such regard was predictable - tho my
> personal prediction might have been on the order of 1/1000 or less with
> a 99% confidence interval… The prediction would clearly have been
> proven false based on a little inquiry however - as premature
> predictions are from time to time…
>
> Like it or not, all of our data collection is constrained. I am color
> blind, there are color vision based distinctions I will never be able
> to make that another person can. I could, perhaps substitute
> measurement of wavelengths but I may miss the affective response to
> gradations of color that are appreciated by a non-colorblind person.
> But certainly understanding that there is a difference in wavelength
> will help me to appreciate the distinction between my own perceptions
> and those of my less-impaired colleagues. On a related note - I once
> pondered the implications of the crackpot former prestidigitator, 'the
> amusing randi' possessing the ability to detect and manipulate a human
> energy field. What I argued, would the errant assumptions of skeptics
> turn out to be if randi was so skilled at observing and modifying the
> HEF that he could actually modify choices made by TT practitioners in
> performing an experiment such as the rosa tt test, just by being in the
> room - or anywhere else for that matter? What if he was able to do this
> but for purely selfish and gratuitous reasons, chose to deny something
> that he could actually prove to be true based on his profoundly
> extra-normal skills?
>
> In the end, it is not, I suspect, whether we predict but what we do
> with and assume about our predictions. Teachers salaries ought not be
> lowered when workers salaries overall have risen and fed the increase
> in alcohol consumption, quite apart from the salary rise among
> teachers…
>
> In any event - before we could defend a position that there is no place
> for inferential statistics in the suhb, I think we would have to
> distinguish between the different types of inferential statistics,
> their actual meaning and interpretation, and how the knowledge derived
> was to be employed. I would also add as a footnote to all of this, that
> it may be a mistake to prematurely write off quantitative research and
> quantitative measurement. I fear that this is often done simply on the
> basis that some people are outsiders to the millenia old hermeneutic
> circles (yes I know heidegger did not mean 'circle') of mathematics,
> philosophy, and more recently statistics and probability theory. Our
> decision, I think, ought not be based on the lack of understanding of
> outsiders to those dialogues - that the dialogical circles are ongoing
> and that the insiders to the discussions have their own understanding
> that the grasp of the statements of number, measurement, inference, are
> incomplete and open to endless redefining. We should never, I think,
> suggest that the current shorthand linguistic conventions of
> statistical inference (p-values, confidence intervals, bias, estimates,
> certainty, uncertainty…) are anything more or less than the current
> 'state of the art' in statistical and epistemological theory…
>
> Just a couple of errant thoughts to add to the dialogue…
>
> bear
>
>
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