Clear Language, Clear Mind

[Philip_E._Tetlock]_Expert_Political_Judgment_How(Bookos.org)

Very interesting book!

—-

Game Theorists. The rivalry between Sherlock Holmes and the evil

genius Professor Moriarty illustrates how indeterminacy can arise as a

natural by-product of rational agents second-guessing each other. When

the two first met, Moriarty was eager, too eager, to display his capacity

for interactive thinking by announcing: “All I have to say has already

crossed your mind.” Holmes replied: “Then possibly my answer has

crossed yours.” As the plot unfolds, Holmes uses his superior “interac-

tive knowledge” to outmaneuver Moriarty by unexpectedly getting off

the train at Canterbury, thwarting Moriarty who had calculated that Paris

was Holmes’s rational destination. Convoluted though it is, Moriarty

failed to recognize that Holmes had already recognized that Moriarty

would deduce what a rational Holmes would do under the circum-

stances, and the odds now favored Holmes getting off the train earlier

than once planned.23

 

Indeterminacy problems of this sort are the bread and butter of behav-

ioral game theory. In the “guess the number” game, for example, con-

testants pick a number between 0 and 100, with the goal of making their

guess come as close as possible to two-thirds of the average guess of all

the contestants.

24 In a world of only rational players—who base their

guesses on the maximum number of levels of deduction—the equilib-

rium is 0. However, in a contest run at Richard Thaler’s prompting by

the Financial Times,

25 the most popular guesses were 33 (the right guess

if everyone else chooses a number at random, producing an average guess

of 50) and 22 (the right guess if everyone thinks through the preceding

argument and picks 33). Dwindling numbers of respondents carried the

deductive logic to the third stage (picking two-thirds of 22) or higher,

with a tiny hypereducated group recognizing the logically correct answer

to be 0. The average guess was 18.91 and the winning guess, 13, which

suggests that, for this newspaper’s readership, a third order of sophisti-

cation was roughly optimal.

 

interesting

 

-

 

Our reluctance to acknowledge unpredictability keeps us looking for

predictive cues well beyond the point of diminishing returns. 39 I witnessed

a demonstration thirty years ago that pitted the predictive abilities of a

classroom of Yale undergraduates against those of a single Norwegian

rat. The task was predicting on which side of a T-maze food would ap-

pear, with appearances determined—unbeknownst to both the humans

and the rat—by a random binomial process (60 percent left and 40 per-

cent right). The demonstration replicated the classic studies by Edwards

and by Estes: the rat went for the more frequently rewarded side (getting

it right roughly 60 percent of the time), whereas the humans looked hard

for patterns and wound up choosing the left or the right side in roughly

the proportion they were rewarded (getting it right roughly 52 percent of

the time). Human performance suffers because we are, deep down, de-

terministic thinkers with an aversion to probabilistic strategies that ac-

cept the inevitability of error. We insist on looking for order in random

sequences. Confronted by the T-maze, we look for subtle patterns like

“food appears in alternating two left/one right sequences, except after

the third cycle when food pops up on the right.” This determination to

ferret out order from chaos has served our species well. We are all bene-

ficiaries of our great collective successes in the pursuit of deterministic reg-

ularities in messy phenomena: agriculture, antibiotics, and countless other

inventions that make our comfortable lives possible. But there are occa-

sions when the refusal to accept the inevitability of error—to acknowledge

that some phenomena are irreducibly probabilistic—can be harmful.

 

indeed, but generally it is wise to not accept the unpredictability hypothesis about some fenomena. many things that were thought unpredictable for centures turned out to be predictable after all, or at least to some degree. i have confidence we will see the same for earthquakes, weather systems and the like in the future as well.

 

predictability (and the related determinism) hypothesis are good working hypotheses, even if they turn out to be wrong some times.

 

this is what i wrote about years ago on my danish blog here. basically, its a 2×2 table:

 

What we think/what is true	Determinism	Indeterminism
Determinism	We keep looking for explanations for fenomena and in over time, we find regularities and explanations.	We waste time looking for patterns that arent there.
Indeterminism	We dont spend time looking for patterns, but there actually are patterns we that cud use to predict the future, and hence we lose out on possible advances in science.	We dont waste time looking for patterns that arent there.

 

The above is assuming that indeterminism implies total unpredictability. This isnt true, but in the simplified case where were dealing with completely random fenomena and completely predictable fenomena, this is a reasonable way of looking at it. IMO, it is much better to waste time looking for explanations for things that are not orderly (after all), than risk not spotting real patterns in nature.

 

Finally, regardless of whether it is rash to abandon the meliorist search

for the Holy Grail of good judgment, most of us feel it is. When we weigh

the perils of Type I errors (seeking correlates of good judgment that will

prove ephemeral) against those of Type II errors (failing to discover

durable correlates with lasting value), it does not feel like a close call. We

would rather risk anointing lucky fools over ignoring wise counsel. Radi-

cal skepticism is too bitter a doctrinal pill for most of us to swallow.

 

exactly

 

-

 

But betting is one thing, paying up another. Focusing just on reactions

to losing reputational bets, figure 4.1 shows that neither hedgehogs nor

foxes changed their minds as much as Reverend Bayes says they should

have. But foxes move more in the Bayesian direction than do hybrids and

hedgehogs. And this greater movement is all the more impressive in light

of the fact that the Bayesian updating formula demanded less movement

from foxes than from other groups. Foxes move 59 percent of the pre-

scribed amount, whereas hedgehogs move only 19 percent of the pre-

scribed amount. Indeed, in two regional forecasting exercises, hedgehogs

move their opinions in the opposite direction to that prescribed by Bayes’s

theorem, and nudged up their confidence in their prior point of view after

the unexpected happens. This latter pattern is not just contra-Bayesian; it

is incompatible with all normative theories of belief adjustment.8

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backfire_effect#Backfire_effect

-

The Signal and the Noise Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t Nate Silver 544p

 

It is a pretty interesting book especially becus it covers some areas of science not usually covered in popsci (geology, meteorology), and i learned a lot. it is also clearly written and easy to read, which speeds up reading speeds, making the 450ish pages rather quickly to devour. From a learning perspectiv this is awesome as it allows for faster learning. it shud also be mentioned that it has a lot of very useful illustrations which i shared on my social networks while reading it.

 

—

“Fortunately, Dustin is really cocky, because if he was the kind of person

who was intimidated—if he had listened to those people—it would have ruined

him. He didn’t listen to people. He continued to dig in and swing from his heels

and eventually things turned around for him.”

Pedroia has what John Sanders calls a “major league memory”—which is to

say a short one. He isn’t troubled by a slump, because he is damned sure that

he’s playing the game the right way, and in the long run, that’s what matters.

Indeed, he has very little tolerance for anything that distracts him from doing

his job. This doesn’t make him the most generous human being, but it is ex­

actly what he needs in order to play second base for the Boston Red Sox, and

that’s the only thing that Pedroia cares about.

“Our weaknesses and our strengths are always very intimately connected,”

James said. “Pedroia made strengths out of things that would be weaknesses for

other players.”

 

This sounds like low agreeableness to me. I wonder if Big Five can predict baseball success?

 

-

 

The statistical reality of accuracy isn’t necessarily the governing paradigm

when it comes to commercial weather forecasting. It’s more the perception of

accuracy that adds value in the eyes of the consumer.

For instance, the for-profit weather forecasters rarely predict exactly a

50 percent chance of rain, which might seem wishy-washy and indecisive to

consumers.41 Instead, they’ll flip a coin and round up to 60, or down to 40, even

though this makes the forecasts both less accurate and less honest.42

 

Floehr also uncovered a more flagrant example of fudging the numbers,

something that may be the worst-kept secret in the weather industry. Most com­

mercial weather forecasts are biased, and probably deliberately so. In particu­

lar, they are biased toward forecasting more precipitation than will actually

occur43—what meteorologists call a “wet bias.” The further you get from the

government’s original data, and the more consumer facing the forecasts, the

worse this bias becomes. Forecasts “add value” by subtracting accuracy.

 

thats interesting. never heard of this.

 

-

 

This logic is a little circular. TV weathermen say they aren’t bothering to

make accurate forecasts because they figure the public won’t believe them any­

way. But the public shouldn t believe them, because the forecasts aren’t accurate.

This becomes a more serious problem when there is something urgent—

something like Hurricane Katrina. Lots of Americans get their weather infor­

mation from local sources49 rather than directly from the Hurricane Center, so

they will still be relying on the goofball on Channel 7 to provide them with

accurate information. If there is a mutual distrust between the weather fore­

caster and the public, the public may not listen when they need to most.

 

Nicely illustrating for importance of honesty in reporting data, even on local TV.

 

-

 

In fact, the actual value for GDP fell outside the economists’ prediction

interval six times in eighteen years, or fully one-third of the time. Another

study,18 which ran these numbers back to the beginnings of the Survey of Pro­

fessional Forecasters in 1968, found even worse results: the actual figure for

GDP fell outside the prediction interval almost h a l f the time. There is almost

no chance19 that the economists have simply been unlucky; they fundamentally

overstate the reliability of their predictions.

 

In reality, when a group of economists give you their GDP forecast, the

true 90 percent prediction interval—based on how these forecasts have actually

performed20 and not on how accurate the economists claim them to be—spans

about 6.4 points of GDP (equivalent to a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2

percent).*

 

When you hear on the news that GDP will grow by 2.5 percent next year,

that means it could quite easily grow at a spectacular rate of 5.7 percent instead.

Or it could fall by 0.7 percent—a fairly serious recession. Economists haven’t

been able to do any better than that, and there isn’t much evidence that their

forecasts are improving. The old joke about economists’ having called nine out

of the last six recessions correctly has some truth to it; one actual statistic is that

in the 1990s, economists predicted only 2 of the 60 recessions around the world

a year ahead of time.21

 

and this is why we cant have nice things, i mean macroeconomics

 

-

 

I have no idea whether I was really a good player at the very outset. But the

bar set by the competition was low, and my statistical background gave me an

advantage. Poker is sometimes perceived to be a highly psychological game, a

battle of wills in which opponents seek to make perfect reads on one another by

staring into one another’s souls, looking for “tells” that reliably betray the con­

tents of the other hands. There is a little bit of this in poker, especially at the

higher limits, but not nearly as much as you’d think. (The psychological factors

in poker come mostly in the form of self-discipline.) Instead, poker is an incred­

ibly mathematical game that depends on making probabilistic judgments amid

uncertainty, the same skills that are important in any type of prediction.

 

The obvious idea is to program computers to play poker for u online. If they play against bad humans, they shud bring in a steady flow of cash for almost free.

 

-

 

 

“Fortunately, Dustin is really cocky, because if he was the kind of person

who was intimidated—if he had listened to those people—it would have ruined

him. He didn’t listen to people. He continued to dig in and swing from his heels

and eventually things turned around for him.”

Pedroia has what John Sanders calls a “major league memory”—which is to

say a short one. He isn’t troubled by a slump, because he is damned sure that

he’s playing the game the right way, and in the long run, that’s what matters.

Indeed, he has very little tolerance for anything that distracts him from doing

his job. This doesn’t make him the most generous human being, but it is ex­

actly what he needs in order to play second base for the Boston Red Sox, and

that’s the only thing that Pedroia cares about.

“Our weaknesses and our strengths are always very intimately connected,”

James said. “Pedroia made strengths out of things that would be weaknesses for

other players.”

This sounds like low agreeableness to me. I wonder if Big Five can predict baseball success?

-

The statistical reality of accuracy isn’t necessarily the governing paradigm

when it comes to commercial weather forecasting. It’s more the perception of

accuracy that adds value in the eyes of the consumer.

For instance, the for-profit weather forecasters rarely predict exactly a

50 percent chance of rain, which might seem wishy-washy and indecisive to

consumers.41 Instead, they’ll flip a coin and round up to 60, or down to 40, even

though this makes the forecasts both less accurate and less honest.42

Floehr also uncovered a more flagrant example of fudging the numbers,

something that may be the worst-kept secret in the weather industry. Most com­

mercial weather forecasts are biased, and probably deliberately so. In particu­

lar, they are biased toward forecasting more precipitation than will actually

occur43—what meteorologists call a “wet bias.” The further you get from the

government’s original data, and the more consumer facing the forecasts, the

worse this bias becomes. Forecasts “add value” by subtracting accuracy.

thats interesting. never heard of this.

-

This logic is a little circular. TV weathermen say they aren’t bothering to

make accurate forecasts because they figure the public won’t believe them any­

way. But the public shouldn t believe them, because the forecasts aren’t accurate.

This becomes a more serious problem when there is something urgent—

something like Hurricane Katrina. Lots of Americans get their weather infor­

mation from local sources49 rather than directly from the Hurricane Center, so

they will still be relying on the goofball on Channel 7 to provide them with

accurate information. If there is a mutual distrust between the weather fore­

caster and the public, the public may not listen when they need to most.

Nicely illustrating for importance of honesty in reporting data, even on local TV.

-

In fact, the actual value for GDP fell outside the economists’ prediction

interval six times in eighteen years, or fully one-third of the time. Another

study,18 which ran these numbers back to the beginnings of the Survey of Pro­

fessional Forecasters in 1968, found even worse results: the actual figure for

GDP fell outside the prediction interval almost h a l f the time. There is almost

no chance19 that the economists have simply been unlucky; they fundamentally

overstate the reliability of their predictions.

In reality, when a group of economists give you their GDP forecast, the

true 90 percent prediction interval—based on how these forecasts have actually

performed20 and not on how accurate the economists claim them to be—spans

about 6.4 points of GDP (equivalent to a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2

percent).*

When you hear on the news that GDP will grow by 2.5 percent next year,

that means it could quite easily grow at a spectacular rate of 5.7 percent instead.

Or it could fall by 0.7 percent—a fairly serious recession. Economists haven’t

been able to do any better than that, and there isn’t much evidence that their

forecasts are improving. The old joke about economists’ having called nine out

of the last six recessions correctly has some truth to it; one actual statistic is that

in the 1990s, economists predicted only 2 of the 60 recessions around the world

a year ahead of time.21

and this is why we cant have nice things, i mean macroeconomics

-

I have no idea whether I was really a good player at the very outset. But the

bar set by the competition was low, and my statistical background gave me an

advantage. Poker is sometimes perceived to be a highly psychological game, a

battle of wills in which opponents seek to make perfect reads on one another by

staring into one another’s souls, looking for “tells” that reliably betray the con­

tents of the other hands. There is a little bit of this in poker, especially at the

higher limits, but not nearly as much as you’d think. (The psychological factors

in poker come mostly in the form of self-discipline.) Instead, poker is an incred­

ibly mathematical game that depends on making probabilistic judgments amid

uncertainty, the same skills that are important in any type of prediction.

The obvious idea is to program computers to play poker for u online. If they play against bad humans, they shud bring in a steady flow of cash for almost free.

-

Cambridge.University.Press.Analyzing.Grammar.An.Introduction.Jun.2005 free pdf download

 

Overall, there is nothing much to say about this book. It covers most stuff. Neither particularly good, or interesting, or particularly bad or uninteresting, IMO.

–

Forexample, what is the meaning of the word hello? What information

does it convey? It is a very difficult word to define, but every speaker of

English knows how to use it: for greeting an acquaintance, answering the

telephone, etc. We might say that hello conveys the information that the

speaker wishes to acknowledge the presence of, or initiate a conversation

with, the hearer. But it would be very strange to answer the phone or greet

your best friend by saying “I wish to acknowledge your presence” or “I

wish to initiate a conversation with you.”What is important about the word

hello is not its information content (if any) but its use in social interaction.

In the Teochew language (a “dialect” of Chinese), there is no word for

‘hello’. The normal way for one friend to greet another is to ask: “Have you

already eaten or not?” The expected reply is: “I have eaten,” even if this is

not in fact true.

-

In our comparison of English with Teochew, we saw that both languages

employ a special formof sentence for expressing Yes–No questions. In fact,

most, if not all, languages have a special sentence pattern which is used for

asking such questions. This shows that the linguistic form of an utterance

is often closely related to its meaning and its function. On the other hand,

we noted that the grammatical features of a Yes–No question in English

are not the same as in Teochew. Different languages may use very different

grammatical devices to express the same basic concept. So understanding

the meaning and function of an utterance will not tell us everything we need

to know about its form.

interesting for me becus of my work on a logic of questions and answers.

-

Both of the hypotheses we have reached so far about Lotuko words are

based on the assumption that themeaning of a sentence is composed in some

regular way from the meanings of the individual words. That is, we have

been assuming that sentence meanings are compositional.Of course,

every language includes numerous expressions where this is not the case.

Idioms are one common example. The English phrase kick the bucket can

mean ‘die,’ even though none of the individual words has this meaning.

Nevertheless, the compositionality of meaning is an important aspect of the

structure of all human languages.

for more on compositionality see: plato.stanford.edu/entries/compositionality/

emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=3233

-

We have discussed three types of reasoning that can be used to

identify the meaningful elements of an utterance (whether parts of a word

or words in a sentence): minimal contrast, recurring partials, and pattern-

matching. In practice, when working on a new body of data, we often use

all three at once, without stopping to think which method we use for which

element. Sometimes, however, it is important to be able to state explicitly

the pattern of reasoning which we use to arrive at certain conclusions. For

example, suppose that one of our early hypotheses about the language is

contradicted by further data. We need to be able to go back and determine

what evidence that hypothesis was based on so that we can re-evaluate

that evidence in the light of additional information. This will help us to

decide whether the hypothesis can be modified to account for all the facts,

orwhether it needs to be abandoned entirely.Grammatical analysis involves

an endless process of “guess and check” – forming hypotheses, testing them

against further data, andmodifying or abandoning those which do not work.

quite a lot of science works like that. conjecture and refutation, pretty much (Popper)

-

What do we mean when we say that a certain form, such as Zapotec ka–,

is a “morpheme?” Charles Hockett (1958) gave a definition of this term

which is often quoted:

Morphemes are the smallest individually meaningful elements in the utter-

ances of a language.

There are two crucial aspects of this definition. First, a morpheme is mean-

ingful.A morpheme normally involves a consistent association of phono-

logical formwith some aspect ofmeaning, as seen in (7) where the form ˜ nee

was consistently associated with the concept ‘foot.’ However, this associ-

ation of form with meaning can be somewhat flexible. We will see various

ways in which the phonological shape of a morpheme may be altered to

some extent in particular environments, and there are some morphemes

whose meaning may depend partly on context.

obviously does not work for en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranberry_morpheme

what is the solution to this inconsistency in terminology?

-

In point (c) above we noted that a word which contains no plural marker

is always singular. The chart in (17) shows that the plural prefix is optional,

and that when it is present it indicates plurality; but it doesn’t say anything

about the significance of the lack of a prefix. One way to tidy up this loose

end is to assume that the grammar of the language includes a default

rule which says something like the following: “a countable noun which

contains no plural prefix is interpreted as being singular.”

Another possible way to account for the same fact is to assume that sin-

gular nouns carry an “invisible” (or null) prefix which indicates singular

number. That would mean that the number prefix is actually obligatory for

this class of noun. Under this approach, our chart would look something

like (18):

the default theory with en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markedness is more plausible than positing invisible morphemes.

-

since the book contiues to use Malay as an ex. including the word <orang> i’m compelled to mention that it is not a coincidence that it is similar to <orangutan>. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan#Etymology

The name “orangutan” (also written orang-utan, orang utan, orangutang, and ourang-outang) is derived from the Malay and Indonesian words orang meaning “person” and hutan meaning “forest”,[1] thus “person of the forest”.[2]Orang Hutan was originally not used to refer to apes, but to forest-dwelling humans. The Malay words used to refer specifically to the ape is maias and mawas, but it is unclear if those words refer to just orangutans, or to all apes in general. The first attestation of the word to name the Asian ape is in Jacobus Bontius‘ 1631 Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis – he described that Malaysians had informed him the ape was able to talk, but preferred not to “lest he be compelled to labour”.[3] The word appeared in several German-language descriptions of Indonesian zoology in the 17th century. The likely origin of the word comes specifically from the Banjarese variety of Malay.[4]

The word was first attested in English in 1691 in the form orang-outang, and variants with -ng instead of -n as in the Malay original are found in many languages. This spelling (and pronunciation) has remained in use in English up to the present, but has come to be regarded as incorrect.[5][6][7] The loss of “h” in Utan and the shift from n to -ng has been taken to suggest that the term entered English through Portuguese.[4] In 1869, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, co-creator of modern evolutionary theory, published his account of Malaysia’s wildlife: The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise.[3]

-

Traditional definitions for parts of speech are based on “notional”

(i.e. semantic) properties such as the following:

(17) A noun is a word that names a person, place, or thing.

A verb is a word that names an action or event.

An adjective is a word that describes a state.

However, these characterizations fail to identify nouns like destruction,

theft, beauty, heaviness. They cannot distinguish between the verb love and

the adjective fond (of),or between the noun fool and the adjective foolish.

Note that there is very little semantic difference between the two sentences

in (18).

(18) They are fools.

They are foolish.

it is easy to fix 17a to include abstractions. all his counter-examples are abstractions.

<love> is both a noun and a verb, but 17 definitions, which is right.

the 18 ex. seems weak too. what about the possibility of interpreting 18b as claiming that they are foolish. this does not mean that they are fools. it may be a temporary situation (drunk perhaps), or isolated to specific areas of reality (ex. religion).

not that i’m especially happy about semantic definitions, it’s just that the argumentation above is not convincing.

-

Third, the head is more likely to be obligatory than the modifiers or other

non-head elements. For example, all of the elements of the subject noun

phrase in (22a) can be omitted except the head word pigs.If this word is

deleted, as in (22e), the result is ungrammatical.

(22) a [The three little pigs] eat truffles.

b [The three pigs] eat truffles.

c [The pigs] eat truffles.

d [Pigs] eat truffles.

e *[The three little] eat truffles.

not so quick. if the context makes it clear that they are speaking about pigs, or children, or whatever, 22e is perfectly understandable, since context ‘fiils out’ the missing information, grammatically speaking. but the author is right in that it is incomplete and without context to fill in, one would be forced to ask ”three little what?”. but still, that one will actually respond like this shows that the utterance was understood, at least in part.

-

Of course, English noun phrases do not always contain a head noun. In

certain contexts a previously mentioned head may be omitted because it is

“understood,” as in (23a). This process is called ellipsis . Moreover, in

English, and in many other languages, adjectives can sometimes be used

without any head noun to name classes of people, as in (23b,c). But, aside

from a few fairly restricted patterns like these, heads of phrases in English

tend to be obligatory.

(23) a [The third little pig] was smarter than [the second ].

b [the good], [the bad] and [the ugly]

c [The rich] get richer and [the poor] get children.

i was going to write the author doesn’t seem to understand the word ”obligatory”, but it another interpretation dawned upon me. i think he means that under must conditions, one cannot leave out the noun in a noun phrase (NP), but sometimes one can. confusing wording.

-

As we can already see from example (5), different predicates require

different numbers of arguments: hungry and snores require just one, loves

and slapping require two. Some predicates may not require any arguments

at all. For example, in many languages comments about the weather (e.g. It

is raining,or It is dark,or It is hot) could be expressed by a single word, a

bare predicate with no arguments.

it is worth mentioning that there is a name for this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_pronoun

-

It is important to remember that arguments can also be optional. For exam-

ple,many transitive verbs allowan optional beneficiary argument (18a), and

most transitive verbs of the agent–patient type allow an optional instrument

argument (18b). The crucial fact is that adjuncts are always optional. So

the inference “if obligatory then argument” is valid; but the inference “if

optional then adjunct” is not.

strictly speaking, this is using the terminology incorrectly. conditionals are not inferences. the author should have written ex ”the inference “obligatory, therefore, argument” is valid.”, or alternatively ”the conditional “if obligatory, then argument” is true.”.

confusing inferences with conditionals leads to all kinds of confusions in logic.

-

Another way of specifying the transitivity of a verb is to ask, how many

term (subject or object) arguments does it take? The number of terms, or

direct arguments, is sometimes referred to as the valence of the verb.

Since most verbs can be said to have a subject, the valence of a verb is

normally one greater than the number of objects it takes: an intransitive

verb has a valence of one, a transitive verb has a valence of two, and a

ditransitive verb has a valence of three.

the author is just talking about how many operands the expressed predicate has. there are also verbs which can express predicates with four operands. consider <transfer>. ex. ”Peter transfers 5USD from Mike to Jim.”. There Peter, subject, agent; 5USD, object, theme, a repicient, Jim, ?; Mike, antirecpient?, ?.

The distinctions between OBJ₂ and OBL make little to no sense to me.

It is important to notice that the valence of the verb (in this sense) is not

the same as the number of arguments it takes. For example, the verb donate

takes three semantic arguments, as illustrated in (8).However, donate has70 Analyzing Grammar: An Introduction

avalence of two because it takes only two term arguments, SUBJ and

OBJ. With this predicate, the recipient is always expressed as an oblique

argument.

(8) a Michael Jackson donated his sunglasses to the National Museum.

b donate < agent, theme, recipient >

|| |

subj obj obl

Some linguists use the term “semantic valence” to refer to the number of

semantic arguments which a predicate takes, and “syntactic valence” to

specify the number of terms which a verb requires. In this book we will use

the term “valence” primarily in the latter (syntactic) sense.

doens’t help.

-

We have already seen that some verbs can be used in more than

one way. In chapter 4, for example, we saw that the verb give occurs in

two different clause patterns, as illustrated in (10).We can now see that

these two uses of the verb involve the same semantic roles but a different

assignment of Grammatical Relations, i.e. different subcategorization. This

difference is represented in (11). The lexical entry for give must allow for

both of these configurations.3

(10) a John gave Mary his old radio.

b John gave his old radio to Mary.

(11) a give < agent, theme, recipient >

|| |

subj obj2 obj

b give < agent, theme, recipient >

|| |

subj obj obl

it seems to me that there is something wholly wrong with a theory that treats 10a-b much different. those two sentences mean the same thing, and their structure is similar, and only one word makes the differnece. this word seems to just have the function of allowing for another order of the operands of the verb.

-

A number of languages have grammatical processes which, in effect,

“change” an oblique argument into an object. The result is a change in

the valence of the verb. This can be illustrated by the sentences in (19).

In (19a), the beneficiary argument is expressed as an OBL, but in (19b)

the beneficiary is expressed as an OBJ. So (19b) contains one more term

than (19a), and the valence of the verb has increased from two to three;

but there is no change in the number of semantic arguments. Grammatical

operations which increase or decrease the valence of a verb are a topic of

great interest to syntacticians. We will discuss a few of these operations in

chapter 14.

(19) a John baked a cake for Mary.

b John baked Mary a cake.

IMO, these two have the exact same number of operands, both have 3. for word <for> allows for a different ordering, i.e., it is a syntax-modifier.

at least, that’s one reading. 19a seems to be a less clear case of my alternative theory. one reading of 19a is that Mary was tasked with baking a cake, but John baked it for her. another reading has the same meaning as 19b.

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(20) a #The young sausage likes the white dog.

b #Mary sings a white cake.

c #A small dog gives Mary to the young tree.

(21) a *John likes.

b *Mary gives the young boy.

c *The girl yawns Mary.

The examples in (20) are grammatical but semantically ill-formed –

they don’tmake sense.4

the footnote is: One reason for saying that examples like (20) and (22) are grammatical, even though

they sound so odd, is that it would often be possible to invent a context (e.g. in a fairy

tale or a piece of science fiction) in which these sentences would be quite acceptable.

This is not possible for ungrammatical sentences like those in (21).

i can think about several contexts where 21b makes sense. think of a situation where everybody is required to give something/someone to someone. after it is mentioned that several other people give this and that, 21b follows. in that context it makes sense just fine. however, it is because the repicient is implicit, since it is unnecessary (economic principle) to mention the recipient in every single sentence or clause.

21c is interpretable with if one considers ”the girl” an utterance, that Mary utters while yawning.

21a is almost common on Facebook. ”John likes this”, shortened to ”John likes”.

not that i think the author is wrong, i’m just being creative. :)

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The famous example in (23) was used by Chomsky (1957) to show how

a sentence can be grammatical without being meaningful. What makes this

sentence so interesting is that it contains so many collocational clashes:

something which is green cannot be colorless; ideas cannot be green,or

any other color, but we cannot call themcolorless either; ideas cannot sleep;

sleeping is not the kind of thing one can do furiously; etc.

(23) #Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

it is writings such as this that result in so much confusion. clear the different <cannot>’s in the above are not about the same kind of impossibility. let’s consider them:

<something which is green cannot be colorless> this is logical impossibility. these two predicates are logically incompatible, that is, they imply the lack of each other, that is, ∀xGreen(x)→¬Colorless(x). but actually this predicate has an internal negation. we can make it more explicit like this: ∀xGreen(x)→Colorful(x), and ∀xColorful(x)↔¬Colorless(x).

< ideas cannot be green,or any other color, but we cannot call themcolorless either; ideas cannot sleep;

sleeping is not the kind of thing one can do furiously> this is semantic impossibility. it concerns the meaning of the sentence. there is no meaning, and hence nothing expressed that can be true or false. from that it follows that there is nothing that can be impossible, since impossibility implies falsity. hence, if there is something connected with that sentence that is impossible, it has to be something else.

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This kind of annotated tree diagramallows us to see at oncewhat iswrong

with the ungrammatical examples in (21) above: (21b) is incomplete, as

demonstrated in (34a), while (21c) is incoherent, as demonstrated in (34b).

a better set of terms are perhaps <undersaturated> and <oversaturated>.

there is nothing inconsistent about the second that isn’t also inconsitent in the first, and hence using that term is misleading. <incomplete> does capture an essential feature, which is that something is missing. the other ex. has something else too much. one could go for <incomplete> and <overcomplete> but it sounds odd. hence my choice of different terms.

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The pro-formone can be used to refer to the head nounwhen it is followed

by an adjunct PP, as in (6a),but not when it is followed by a complement

PP as in (6b).

(6) a The [student] with short hair is dating the one with long hair.

b ∗The [student] of Chemistry was older than the one of Physics.

6b seems fine to me.

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There is no fixed limit on howmanymodifiers can appear in such a sequence.

But in order to represent an arbitrarily long string of alternating adjectives

and intensifiers, it is necessary to treat each such pair as a single unit.

The “star” notation used in (15) is one way of representing arbitrarily

long sequences of the same category. For any category X, the symbol “X∗”

stands for “a sequence of any number (zero or more) of Xs.” So the symbol

“AP∗” stands for “a sequence of zero or more APs.” It is easy to mod-

ify the rule in (12b) to account for examples like (14b); this analysis is

shown in (15b). Under the analysis in (12a),wewould need to write a more

complex rule something like (15a).3 Because simplicity tends to be favored

in grammatical systems, (12b) and (15b) provide a better analysis for this

construction.

(15) aNP → Det ((Adv) A)

∗ N (PP)

bNP → Det AP∗ N (PP)

for those that are wondering where this use of asterisk comes from, it is from here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

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In English, a possessor phrase functions as a kind of determiner. We

can see this because possessor phrases do not normally occur together with

other determiners in the same NP:

(19) a the new motorcycle

b Mary’s new motorcycle

c ∗Mary’s the new motorcycle

d ∗the Mary’s new motorcycle

looks more like it is because they are using proper nouns in their example. if one used a common noun, then it works just fine:

19e: The dog’s new bone.

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Another kind of evidence comes fromthe fact that predicate complement

NPs cannot appear in certain constructions where direct objects can. For

example, an objectNP can become the subject of a passive sentence (44b) or

of certain adjectives (like hard, easy, etc.) which require a verbal or clausal

complement (44c).However, predicate complement NPs never occur in

these positions, as illustrated in (45).

(44) a Mary tickled an elephant.

b An elephant was tickled (by Mary).

c An elephant is hard (for Mary) to tickle.

(45) a Mary became an actress.

b *An actress was become (by Mary).

c *An actress is hard (for Mary) to become.

45c is grammatical with the optional element in place: An actress is hard for Mary to become. Altho it is ofc archaic in syntax.

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mi amamas. ‘I am happy.’

yu amamas. ‘You (sg) are happy.’

em i amamas. ‘He/she is happy.’

yumi amamas. ‘We (incl.) are happy.’

mipela i amamas. ‘We (excl.) are happy.’

yupela i amamas. ‘You (pl) are happy.’

ol i amamas. ‘They are happy.’

it is difficult not to like this system, except for the arbitrary requirement of ”i” some places and not others. its clearly english-inspired. inclusive ”we” is interesting ”youme” :D

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This constituent is normally labeled S’or S (pronounced “S-bar”). It con-

tains two daughters: COMP (for “complementizer”) and S (the complement

clause itself). This structure is illustrated in the tree diagram in (15), which

represents a sentence containing a finite clausal complement.

how to make this fit perfectly with the other use of N-bar terminology. in the case of noun phrases, we have NP on top, then N’ (with DET and adj) and then N at the bottom. it seems that we need to introduce some analogue to NP with S. the only level left is the entire sentence. SP sounds like a contradiction in terms or oxymoron though, ”sentence phrase”.

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I was looking for something else.. and found this instead… From here: able2know.org/topic/151812-1

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LittleMathYou

I think a 9 year old killing himself is a good representation of suicide as a whole. Selfish,short-sighted, and always looking for an escape. Although it seems insensitive for me to say this, I think we just need to realize that those things are apart of deciding to end your life.

Pyrrho

It is funny that people who stay alive because they want to, call people “selfish” who kill themselves because they want to. (It is like those who have children because they want children calling childless couples selfish for not having children because they don’t want to have children.)

And it is absurd to call a solution to all of life’s problems forever a “short-sighted” solution. The 9 year old could not possibly have come up with any other solution to his problems that would have been so complete and long lasting.

 

(from A natural history of negation)

i had been thinking about a similar idea. but these work fine as a beginning. a good hierarchy needs a lvl for approximate truth as well (like Newton’s laws), as well as actual truths. but also perhaps a dimension for the relevance of the information conveyed. a sentence can express a true proposition without that proposition being relevant the making of just about any real life decision. for instance, the true proposition expressed by “42489054329479823423 is larger than 37828234747″ will in all likelihood never, ever be relevant for any decision. also one can cote that the relevance dimension only begins when there is actually some information conveyed, that is, it doesnt work before level 2 and beyond, as those below are meaningless pieces of language.

and things that are inconsistent can also be very useful, so its not clear how the falseness, approximate truth, and truth related to usefulness. but i think that they closer it is the truth, the more likely that it is useful. naive set theory is fine for working with many proofs, even if it is an inconsistent system.

emilkirkegaard.dk/clusterwiki

This was interesting.

A_Plea_for_Science_Studies_Philip_Kitcher

beyond the hoax – alan sokal

Much of the material is the same as in Sokal and Bricmont’s earlier book. But there is some new material as well. I especially found the stuff on hindu nationalism and pseudoscience interesting, and the stuff on pseudoscience in nursing. Never heard of that before, but it wasnt totally unexpected. All health related fields hav large amounts of pseudoscience. It is unfortunate that the most important fields are those most full of pseudoscience!

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Part III goes on to treat weightier social and political topics using the

same lens. Chapter 8 analyzes the paradoxical relation between pseudo­

science and postmodernism, and investigates how extreme skepticism can

abet extreme credulity, using a series of detailed case studies: pseudosci­

entific therapies in nursing and “alternative medicine”; Hindu nationalist

pseudoscience in India21; and radical environmentalism. This investigation

is motivated by my suspicion that credulity in minor matters prepares the

mind for credulity in matters of greater import — and, conversely, that the

kind of critical thinking useful for distinguishing science from pseudoscience

might also be of some use in distinguishing truths in affairs of state from

lies. Chapter 9 takes on the largest and most powerful pseudoscience of all:

organized religion. This chapter focusses on the central philosophical and

political issues raised by religion in the contemporary world: it deplores the

damage that is done by our culture’s deference toward “faith”, and it asks

how nonbelievers and believers can find political common ground based

on shared moral ideas. Finally, Chapter 10 draws some of these concerns

together, and discusses the relationship between epistemology and ethics as

they interact in the public sphere.

 

surely this is true.

 

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#115 The idea that theories should refer only to observable quantities is called operationalism.-, far

from being postmodernist, it was popular among physicists and philosophers of physics in the first

half of the twentieth century. But it has severe flaws: see Chapter 7 below (pp. 240-245) as well as

Weinberg (1992, pp. 174-184).

 

i thought this was a part of logiclal positivism, and it seems that it was. i knew about operational definitions.

 

plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/

 

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When all is said and done, the fundamental flaw in Merchant and Hard­

ing’s metaphor-hermeneutics is not exegetical but logical. Let us grant for the

sake of argument that some of the founders of modem science consciously

used sexist metaphors to promote their epistemological and methodological

views (this much is probably true, even if Merchant and Harding have exag­

gerated the case). But what would that entail for the philosophy (as opposed

to the history) of science? Apparently the critics wish to claim that sexism

could have passed from metaphor into the substantive content of scientific

methods and/or theories. But if modem science does in fact contain sexist

assumptions, then surely the feminist theorists ought to be able to locate and

criticize those biased assumptions, independently of any argument from his­

tory. Indeed, to do otherwise is to commit the “genetic fallacy”: evaluating an

idea on the basis of its origin rather than its content.

 

Putting aside the florid accusations of rape and torture, the argument of

Merchant and Harding boils down to the assertion that the scientific rev­

olution of the seventeenth century displaced a female-centered (spiritual,

hermetic, organic, geocentric) universe in favor of a male-centered (ratio­

nalist, scientific, mechanical, heliocentric) one.21 How should we evaluate

this argument?

 

To begin with, one might wonder whether the gender associations claimed

for these two cosmologies are really as univocal as the feminist critics

claim.22 (After all, the main defender of the geocentric worldview — the

Catholic Church — was not exactly a female-centered enterprise, its adora­

tion of the Virgin Mary notwithstanding.) But let us put aside this objection

and grant these gender associations for the sake of argument; for the princi­

pal flaw in the Merchant-Harding thesis is, once again, not historical but log­

ical. Margarita Levin puts it bluntly: Do Merchant and Harding really “think

we have a choice about which theory is correct? Masculine or feminine, the

solar system is the way it is.”23

 

The same point applies not only to astronomy but to scientific theories

quite generally; and the bottom line is that there is ample evidence, indepen­

dent of any allegedly sexist imagery, for the epistemic value of modem sci­

ence. Therefore, as Koertge remarks, “if it really could be shown that patri­

archal thinking not only played a crucial role in the Scientific Revolution but

is also necessary for carrying out scientific inquiry as we know it, that would

constitute the strongest argument for patriarchy that I can think of!”24

 

true story :D

 

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Of course, the feminist science-critics are not only archaeologists of

300-year-old science; some of their critique is resolutely modem, even post­

modern. Here, for instance, is what Donna Haraway, professor of the history

of consciousness (!) at the University of Califomia-Santa Cruz and one of

the most acclaimed feminist theorists of science, says about her research:

 

For the complex or boundary objects in which I am interested, the

mythic, textual, technical, political, organic, and economic dimensions

implode. That is, they collapse into each other in a knot of extraordinary

density that constitutes the objects themselves. In my sense, story telling

is in no way an ‘art practice’ — it is, rather, a fraught practice for narrat­

ing complexity in such a field of knots or black holes. In no way is story

telling opposed to materiality. But materiality itself is tropic; it makes us

swerve, it trips us; it is a knot of the textual, technical, mythic/oneiric,

organic, political, and economic.2

 

As right-wing critic Roger Kimball acidly comments: “Remember that this

woman is not some crank but a professor at a prestigious university and

one of the leading lights of contemporary ‘women’s studies.’ ”26 The saddest

thing, for us pinkos and feminists, is that Kimball is dead on target.

 

women’s studies is nearly completely trash. reminds me of the article about black studies in the US: chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-most-persuasive-case-for-eliminating-black-studies-just-read-the-dissertations/46346

 

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This theory is startling, to say the least: Does the author really believe

that menstruation makes it more difficult for young women to understand

elementary notions of geometry? Evidently we are not far from the Victorian

gentlemen who held that women, with their delicate reproductive organs,

are unsuited to rational thought and to science. With friends like this, the

feminist cause has no need of enemies.

 

the worst enemy of women: women.

 

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[after quoting Lacan]

Mathematicians and physicists are used to receiving this sort of stuff in

typewritten envelopes from unknown correspondents. Lacan’s grammar and

spelling are better than in most of these treatises, but his logic isn’t. To put it

bluntly, Lacan is a crank — an unusually erudite one, to be sure, but a crank

nonetheless.59

 

interesting. i will ask Sokal to expand on that theme.

 

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So, if we look critically at realism, we may be tempted to turn toward

instrumentalism. But if we look critically at instrumentalism, we feel forced

to return to a modest form of realism. What, then, should one do? Before

coming to a possible solution, let us first consider radical alternatives.

 

surprisingly true.

 

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[after quoting Plantinga]

Let us stress that we disagree with 90% of Plantinga’s philosophy; but if he is so eloquently on

target on this particular point, why not give him credit for it?

 

i was surprised they quoted him, but then, they make that comment. perfect play!

 

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Let me stress in advance that I will not be concerned here with explaining

in detail why astrology, homeopathy and the rest are in fact pseudoscience;

that would take me too far afield. Nor will I address, except in passing, the

important but difficult problems of understanding the psychological attrac­

tions of pseudoscience and the social factors affecting its spread.28 Rather,

my principal aim is to investigate the logical and sociological nexus between

pseudoscience and postmodernism.

 

footnote 28:

For a shrewd meditation on the former question, see Levitt (1999, especially pp. 12-22

and chapter 4). The latter question is indirectly addressed by Burnham (1987), in the context

of a fascinating history of the popularization of science in the United States in the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries.

 

For my own part, I have been struck by the fact that nearly all the pseudoscientific systems

to be examined in this essay are based philosophically on vitalism: that is, the idea that living

beings, and especially human beings, are endowed with some special quality ( “life energy”,

elan vital, prana, q i ) that transcends the ordinary laws of physics. Mainstream science has

rejected vitalism since at least the 1930s, for a plethora of good reasons that have only become

stronger with time (see e.g. Mayr 1982). But these good reasons are understood by only a tiny

fraction of the populace, even in the industrialized countries where science is supposedly held

in high esteem. Moreover — and perhaps much more importantly — the anti-vitalism charac­

teristic of modem science is deeply unsettling emotionally to most (perhaps all) people, even

to those who are not conventionally religious. See again Levitt (1999). Of course, none of these

speculations pretend to any scientific rigor; careful empirical investigation by psychologists

and sociologists is required.

 

vitalism -.-

 

-

 

Sokal mentions the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Rosa experiment.

 

the proponents must really feel bad… even a child can disprove their beliefs. how study are they??? hopefully, it was only a fringe idea, right, right?

 

When I first heard about Emily’s experiment, I admired her ingenuity but

wondered whether anyone really took Therapeutic Touch seriously. How

wrong I was! Therapeutic Touch is taught in more than 80 college and uni­

versity schools of nursing in at least 70 countries, is practiced in at least

80 hospitals across North America, and is promoted by leading American

nursing associations.32 Its inventor claims to have trained more than 47,000

practitioners over a 26-year period, who have gone on to train many more.33

At least 245 books or dissertations have been published that include “Thera­

peutic Touch” in the title, subject headings or table of contents.34 All in all,

Therapeutic Touch appears to have become one of the most widely practiced

“holistic” nursing techniques.

 

sigh!

 

-

 

cited from pseudoscience source:

[0]ur intuitive faculty is nothing other than a source of sound premises about the

nature of reality…. [T]here exists within us a source of direct information about

reality that can teach us all we need to know.

 

top #1 reason not to teach Plato’s nonsense.

 

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But of course, those who believe in Genesis or transubstantiation do not

consider these ideas to be crazy; quite the contrary, they think that they have

good reasons to hold their beliefs. Indeed, Harris argues convincingly that

whenever any person P believes any proposition X — at least in the ordi­

nary sense of the English word “believe” — this requires, first of all, that P

must believe X to be true, i.e. to be a factually accurate representation of

the world; and secondly, that P must think he has good reasons to believe

X, in the sense that he envisions his belief as caused, at least in part, by

the fact that X is true. As Harris puts it (p. 63), “there must be some causal

connection, or an appearance thereof, between the fact in question and my

acceptance of it.”

 

this kind of causal reliabilism will not work. cf. plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/#EpiAcc

 

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www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/vegans-stomach-unpalatable-truth-quinoa

Why Not Epistocracy (i fixed the PDF found on google)

Previusly mentioned, but its pretty good, and right to the topic.

Also, the Wiki page about meritocracy sucks.