This whole discussion started because of your claim that it is generally possible to depend upon objective assessment

The original claim was;

"Also, objective recording of results is one socially acceptable form of negative feedback."

It was made in response to the OP article's assertion; "Do someone you know a favor. Be hard on them when they screw up. Make their loss of status exquisite and sharp, pointed like a surgeon's knife. They will be better for it."

it seems to me that you are now merely asserting the usefulness of falsification as a way to explain what is objective (albeit now downgraded to 'a good rough measure')

The theoretical falsifiability of a theory (it's potential to be proven wrong by any particular experimental result) is a measure of its predictive power.

To return to the original notion; Humans learn from their mistakes but often they don't enjoy the process because it means sometimes they'll be wrong and being wrong is unpleasant. Being vague can help a person avoid appearing wrong, but this also allows the person to avoid learning. Phrasing ones ideas so that if they are wrong they will be obviously, irrefutably wrong can help accelerate learning. It can also be a way to avoid the social blowback associated with blunt criticism, since it is the objective result and not one's interlocutor who is being critical. Telling someone that their painting "sucks" will often distance them rather than improve them, even if the painting is legitimately bad, because people often interpret critical feedback as a form of hostility. So it's useful to provide negative feedback in a way that it gets past a person's social and emotional filters. Otherwise, the feedback will often be explicitly ignored and the speaker avoided, or else the recipient of the negative feedback will mishear the feedback in such a way that the negative feedback is considered safely ignorable.

Of course, after several posts, the discussion ranged widely from that original assertion.

"It can also be a way to avoid the social blowback associated with blunt criticism, since it is the objective result and not one's interlocutor who is being critical. Telling someone that their painting "sucks" will often distance them rather than improve them, even if the painting is legitimately bad, because people often interpret critical feedback as a form of hostility. So it's useful to provide negative feedback in a way that it gets past a person's social and emotional filters. Otherwise, the feedback will often be explicitly ignored and the speaker avoided, or else the recipient of the negative feedback will mishear the feedback in such a way that the negative feedback is considered safely ignorable.
"

Note that the would-be authoritative, definitive tone of your assertions is quite at odds with the falsificationist epistemology that you claim to support. Also the detachment from context.

In life, it is not a question of abstract entity A telling entity B that their painting sucks - but either on the one hand the guy teaching hobby art evening classes and who has very little experience, mediocre ability, and who has not been inducted into a great tradition telling a student "your painting sucks"; and on the other a renowned professor at a great institution who has studied with the best artists of the former generation telling a prospective and awed student "you have very little talent for art. you cannot draw people, but perhaps you should consider architecture".

If you are operating in a mass environment where people do not have the emotional maturity to accept the judgement of somebody with real expertise, then certainly you will need to make accomodations to the level of those involved. But that is a matter of making the best of a bad thing, and a different thing from operating in an environment oriented towards real excellence where one can be more frank. It would be a great mistake to try to operate in the latter environment in the manner that you would in the former, and to suggest that emphasizing only what can be measured is a solution risks destroying the source of high standards. Therefore, in my opinion, the original point stands. Compare and contrast Apple under Steve Jobs with any firm that is very driven by targets and objectives today. Compare the quality of work in the social sciences of American universities compared to a century ago - the emphasis on peer review and counting references has utterly degraded what gets published.

Quote:"Note that the would-be authoritative, definitive tone of your assertions is quite at odds with the falsificationist epistemology that you claim to support. Also the detachment from context."

If we were just discussing one or two points, I'd focus on supporting my point as I typically do. As it is, we still don't seem to demonstratably share a common understanding of what my beliefs or your beliefs are (the hypothesis). It makes little sense to discuss evidence for a hypothesis when we don't even agree on the hypothesis (or hypotheses.) I'm pretty confidient I could find a way to test my assertions. I've had a fair number of discussions in my free time where I've more or less noted the results. But adequately debating even a single point will take a fair bit of time. And it would require a much firmer agreement as to what we're actually debating.

So after my general beliefs were misstated about a dozen times, I shifted to outlining my beliefs instead of providing evidence for them. If we can agree on a single point, I could discuss that point in a falsifiable manner (both in terms of how I test the matter personally and also relevant clinical data). Though with human behavior we often get tendencies rather than absolute rules. Although at this point, we should focus on other things. I don't believe that this discussion is likely to be productive for either of us going forward.

Quote:Compare the quality of work in the social sciences of American universities compared to a century ago - the emphasis on peer review and counting references has utterly degraded what gets published.

1. You're pointing to primarily intersubjective standards here, not objective ones.

2. You keep conflating objectivity with a blind belief in the results of the formal literature, regardless of methodology involved.

3. Alan Sokal's Social Text hoax made an interesting demonstration of a journal that was willing to publish a paper that flattered its ideological pre-conceptions even though it was literally salted with what Sokal called "nonsense." A single incident like this isn't data, granted, but it does point to a potential problem with the lack of objective standards regarding peer review in the social sciences. You're pointing to a problem based on intersubjecitve agreement detached from any external standard here, which is exactly what Sokal emphasized.

Outside of incidents like this which test the standards of peer review or lack of testable concepts in the social sciences, I don't claim to be able to measure the quality of results from that discipline.

Words of Tolstoy spring to mind:

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”

The problem that frequently arises in such debates is that from what I have read I can see Pheroquirk and I understand your point of view, but it is equally clear that you do not understand ours. Without such an understanding it is very hard successfuly to criticise our arguments

(06-19-2012 11:32 AM)Planchet Wrote:  Words of Tolstoy spring to mind:

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”

The problem that frequently arises in such debates is that from what I have read I can see Pheroquirk and I understand your point of view, but it is equally clear that you do not understand ours. Without such an understanding it is very hard successfuly to criticise our arguments

While I don't necessarily claim to understand all of Pheroquirk's point of view (though I've tried to explore it and seem to already agree with significant portions) Pheroquirk's tendency to attribute to myself views which I don't hold demonstrates pretty clearly to me that he does not understand my view.

But here's an attempt to try and put forward what I feel are Pheroquirk's beliefs. He can correct me where I err. I'm going to phrase these in such a way that I hope it will be obvious if they misrepresent him, and to focus on outstanding points of disagreement since we obviously agree on a number of things. My views or criticisms are in parentheses. The non-parenthetical assertions are what I see as assertions he would make, or the consequences of such assertions.

1. Since Pheroquirk has associated problems with peer review in the social sciences to a call for objective evidence, Pheroquirk holds that all or most forms of peer review are an attempt to produce objective data. (This might be contrasted with my notion that peer review in the social sciences is often the result of the formalized enforcement of intersubjective beliefs by those demonstrated to be familiar with a topic, with insufficient accountability to objective standards.

I'd hypothesize that the value of work done outside of academia is enhanced by improved access to various forms of feedback which people can use to thest the applicability of theories. )

2. Pheroquirk has used words along the lines of 'prestigious' and 'renowned' to validate the authority of organizations without defining these things. These things are a form of popularity, presumably among a set of people who are, themselves, uniquely qualified to have an opinion. But this just moves us one turtle down the stack, since he hasn't addressed who is qualified to have an opinion except for those familiar with a topic (and presumably non-deficient) or else some completely obvious but indefinable quality. (This is not a denial of the existence of something called "expertise", but simply a note that it's criteria are still incompletely defined for the purpose of this discussion. )

3. Pheroquirk holds that "objective" information is roughly equivalent to peer reviewed results or else something similar but outside an academic setting (as opposed to peer reviewed scientific results being a small subset of objective phenomenon). On this basis he holds that calls for the use of objective support discards information which could be useful and hold sthat calls for objective observation is opposed to a process we might call "judgement" because judgement is necessarily an opaque process (as opposed to a process of judgement only being opaque due to some theoretically correctable inadequacy on our part, and objective information contrasting with potentially divergent subjective opinions.)

Quote:This is how legitimate and natural authority arises. No voting, no credentialism (no PhD in applied pheromone science). But I bet if you approached the problem in this manner, you would come up with a list of the ten most knowledgeable people on the topic and there would be a kind of natural objectivity to it. Somebody else might get a slightly different list, but chances are you would basically arrive at similar answers.

Quote:The concepts of legitimate and of natural authority have a certain shared meaning amongst those who have considered the topic, and should be understood in that context.

4. Pheroquirk holds that "general expertise" is a roughly convergent opinion for those who are skilled and who, themselves possess "general expertise" or else some capacity to judge it. People who are a familiar with a topic generally agree on who is skilled so this convergence can be used to produce an intersubjective standard. (Contrast this with the notion that there are typically multiple schools of thought and styles, many of whose adherants are familiar with a particular subject, some of which are predicated on differing subjective values and thus valid while antagonistic to one another. Above and beyond objective testing for deficiency, expertise is often divergent )

Quote:One may have a suit made at Savile Row in London, or in Naples. It is entirely likely that in many circles nobody who matters may be able to tell the difference. You may say that I have no objective basis for believing the Savile Row suit superior. But on the whole it is very likely to be, whether or not you can tell.

5. Pheroquirk holds that value is a thing which exists independent of any particular subjective human experience of the thing, as verified by the intersubjective agreement of certain cognocenti whose authority is based on.... I'm not sure. Familiarity with the topic? convergent intersubjective agreement?

Contrast this with the notion that individuals subjectively assign value to certain objective properties (Properties which sometimes only skilled individuals can identify.)



6. (planchet)

Quote:The problem here is an underlying belief in the existence of objectivity (which is false) and a desire to categorise and control which is described by Iain McGilchrist as a bias to the use of the left hemisphere of the brain in his book "The Master and his Emissary".

Planchet holds that the belief in an underlying objective (universally observable) reality is false. This is supported by authoritative statements about how the brain produces thought by a particular author. These statements are, themselves, validated, not by experiments which defer to the existence of an objective reality, but by intersubjective support from educated people for the authority of the author.

7. Pheroquirk holds that ojective models which attempt to predict future performance based on past trends are part of the reason for the financial crisis, thus a desire for objective data contributed to the crisis. When people extrapolate future trends based on past trends and get erroneous results, as they very often do, this demonstrates the problem with the call for objective data rather than the problems stemming from using any system, whether based on gut instinct or data, whose basis and limits one does not understand.

8.

Quote:But testing is not really objective. For it to be such, one would need to control for all the conditions that matter.

Pheroquirk holds that objective testing is defined as a properly controlled study or equivalent, (rather than the referral to observation of non-subjective phenomenon.) Uncontrolled testing is therefore not objective. Therefore, calls for objective support are an attempt to limit one's beliefs to what can be supported by the peer reviewed scientific literature or some equivalent.

“Pheroquirk's tendency to attribute to myself views which I don't hold demonstrates pretty clearly to me that he does not understand my view”.

If I have attributed to you views that you do not hold in a manner that is essential to the topic at hand (the bracing effect of a turn away from false niceness, and whether a belief in being able to assess performance based on objective standards is compatible with the achievement of excellence), then I would ask that you be more specific. Also, your use of the word 'tendency' implies that I have made a habit of doing so, which I do not believe to be the case.

“1. Since Pheroquirk has associated problems with peer review in the social sciences to a call for objective evidence, Pheroquirk holds that all or most forms of peer review are an attempt to produce objective data. This might be contrasted with my notion that peer review in the social sciences is often the result of the formalized enforcement of intersubjective beliefs by those demonstrated to be familiar with a topic, with insufficient accountability to objective standards.”

The real measure of whether your work is valuable is peer usage, not peer review. In today's world the latter quickly becomes contaminated by the actions of referees who do not exhibit a spirit of honesty and use the peer review process to try to influence and control what gets published (bearing in mind that reviewers tend often to be professional rivals of the person publishing and have a great stake in preserving their own status in the field).

There is pressure to change your work from what you truly believe to something that will mollify your critics. Given that really valuable work is revolutionary, and not in keeping with incremental work within the regular parameters, peer review tends to stifle its publication. We saw this emotional dynamic play out with Semmelweis (pre the modern system, but the same pattern emotionally), and the emotional response to the work of Barry Marshall, discoverer that ulcers tend to be caused by H. pylori, and not just stress. I do not wish to discuss the politics of anthropogenic global warming here, but the leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia demonstrate clearly attempts to control what papers important journals may publish using political means.

Peer review is not an attempt to produce objective data; it is merely a custom that developed out of the long tradition of scientific publishing. However the elevation of peer review – today essentially a bureaucratic process - as being the defining characteristic of what is good science reflects the same mentality that wishes to rule out the possibility of existence of all variations in quality that cannot be objectively measured. I suggest that it is not objective standards that explains the corruption of peer review in our age, but the fact that many scientists – operating within a bureaucratic framework - are no longer even pretending to try to be honest, and that with this shift in expectation of standards, ways of acting and thinking that are clearly dishonest are no longer grounds for expulsion from the circle of people considered to be serious, but merely a matter of a political game.

So to conclude, I do not think you understand my stance on this.

“2. Pheroquirk has used words along the lines of 'prestigious' and 'renowned' to validate the authority of organizations without defining these things.”

To validate the authority would mean to prove that such authority rests on a sound foundation. These words have clearly defined meanings, as anyone who refers to the Oxford English Dictionary may verify for themselves.

Returning again to my illustration using a small scale example that makes the underlying phenomenon a bit clearer: if you are known as a good singer, or for being good at maths in your school, particularly if you are thought to be such by people who are both good themselves, and clearly good judges of these things – then you are renowned for such a talent, and may have significant prestige for it. Probably you are not completely crap, as measured by the standards of your school, at least. And if you are in the habit of going to some larger scale event where you mix with people from different schools in your town and become known even within those circles, that perhaps means something more. Clearly there is a structure here that is not entirely arbitrary. And in reality there is as an emergent phenomenon in social, commercial, and civic life a degree of specialized order oriented towards figuring out who is good at different kinds of things.

“These things are a form of popularity, presumably among a set of people who are, themselves, uniquely qualified to have an opinion.”

Popularity is something entirely different. Everyone is familiar with the distinction (between being popular, and being renowned for one's talent). How frequent it is to meet somebody and think that they are very good at what they do, but not especially likeable. In America today perhaps some people have forgotten how to tell the difference. But most societies can still do this, and your great-grandparents (if they were American) certainly could.

“ But this just moves us one turtle down the stack, since he hasn't addressed who is qualified to have an opinion except for those familiar with a topic (and presumably non-deficient) or else some completely obvious but indefinable quality. (This is not a denial of the existence of something called "expertise", but simply a note that it's criteria are still incompletely defined for the purpose of this discussion. )”

The problem is that you are trapped in a representational world and cannot see out of it. I feel sorry for this because life is much better when one is able occasionally to see the world as it is, even when it does not fit with the narratives and representations of it that we sometimes confuse it with. I am pointing you to real things that exist out there in the world, and you are asking me to make things fully articulate and defined - which as many important writers, Godel and Polanyi included, have observed can never in the general case be possible.

In practical life, it is pretty obvious at the margin who is more qualified to be a good judge, and who is less. Especially true in a smaller and more static social environment than one that is vast and where things are always changing – but somewhat true even then. You probably don't ask a virgin about sex and dating – even if he has a PhD in sexology and is a nationally syndicated columnist - because he has never done it before and lacks some practical insight about these things. You may well turn to some guy with absolute no credentials or supporting objective evidence of expertise, who is furthermore blogging from his father's basement, because you really this guy speaks truth, and clearly knows his onions! And turning to another example in the same domain, who appointed Roissy as the pre-eminent author on game and society? Nobody – in theory people don't even know his real name, what his academic qualifications are, etc etc. Give me one single objective reason why anyone should listen to him! But people turn to him for advice and insight, because the guy is switched-on. Yet in your world I don't know if you would be willing and able to recognize that talent makes itself recognized in just the way that he has managed to do so – and that this is a principle that has much broader application.

“3. Pheroquirk holds that "objective" information is roughly equivalent to peer reviewed results or else something similar but outside an academic setting (as opposed to peer reviewed scientific results being a small subset of objective phenomenon).”

I do not follow your meaning here, and therefore do not think you have understood me. The same mentality that makes a fetish of peer review instead of thinking about whether it is good work or not is the same mentality that leads people to emphasize supposedly objective criteria in assessing job performance.

“ On this basis he holds that calls for the use of objective support discards information which could be useful and hold sthat calls for objective observation is opposed to a process we might call "judgement" because judgement is necessarily an opaque process (as opposed to a process of judgement only being opaque due to some theoretically correctable inadequacy on our part, and objective information contrasting with potentially divergent subjective opinions.)”

Focusing only on criteria that can be made 'objective' by its very definition throws away potentially useful information. The consideration of factors that may never be measured and only pointed to does not constitute opacity, because if communicating with somebody competent one can explain what they are and often tease out the origin of underlying differences in opinion by discussing them. So I do not think you have summarized my position correctly.

“4. Pheroquirk holds that "general expertise" is a roughly convergent opinion for those who are skilled and who, themselves possess "general expertise" or else some capacity to judge it. People who are a familiar with a topic generally agree on who is skilled so this convergence can be used to produce an intersubjective standard. (Contrast this with the notion that there are typically multiple schools of thought and styles, many of whose adherants are familiar with a particular subject, some of which are predicated on differing subjective values and thus valid while antagonistic to one another. Above and beyond objective testing for deficiency, expertise is often divergent ) “

I believe I spoke of genuine expertise (which implicitly I opposed to a spurious emphasis on mere credentials, such as a PhD, which often did not consider whether the person truly had any skill in this area), rather than 'general expertise'. So I do not think you followed my point.

There may be different schools of thought, but in most cases members of one school will be able to make some assessment of the expertise of members of even the most detested of the other schools taking into account their differences in orientation. An emotionally mature conservative (who perhaps believes in tradition and the free market) can tell if a potential communist academic hire is any good in terms of the things that matter – teaching, representing the institution, developing grad students, writing research – and vice versa. I have seen this happen many times. Of course if people are not emotionally mature then you have quite another problem on your hands! (And I suspect that is at the origin of the turn towards a pseudo objectivity, and the tendency to spare peoples' feelings by being overly nice – that people have been brought up wrong, have experienced many years of prosperity and therefore are no longer emotionally mature).


“Quote:One may have a suit made at Savile Row in London, or in Naples. It is entirely likely that in many circles nobody who matters may be able to tell the difference. You may say that I have no objective basis for believing the Savile Row suit superior. But on the whole it is very likely to be, whether or not you can tell.
5. Pheroquirk holds that value is a thing which exists independent of any particular subjective human experience of the thing, as verified by the intersubjective agreement of certain cognocenti whose authority is based on.... I'm not sure. Familiarity with the topic? convergent intersubjective agreement?

Contrast this with the notion that individuals subjectively assign value to certain objective properties (Properties which sometimes only skilled individuals can identify.)”

I don't agree with this. Value to me depends entirely on my situation. If I am on the verge of starving to death, then a gold coin – in the absence of being able to trade this for food – has no value to me in relation to food. However, I do believe that whether a suit is well or shoddily made is not entirely an arbitrary question in the absence of objective standards. One will be able to reach quite a high degree of agreement about which garments are of excellent construction, and which are not. The potential existence of a few difficult cases by no means renders this point invalid. As I said, life is about shades of grey – not black and white. But the fact that precise distinctions may on occasion be controversial – even amongst those with genuine expertise – does not by any means mean that these distinctions have no basis. Of course the modern education system does not encourage subtlety of thought.


“Planchet holds that the belief in an underlying objective (universally observable) reality is false.”

I am sure that he can speak for himself – but I think he is saying that one cannot completely describe reality and fit it into a fully articulated representation of such and be confident that this is all there is. The world exists, and it is not a question of your truth, or my truth as Tony Blair might have it. But with words all we can do is point to things, construct simplified models of the world, or create metaphors. One can never capture the world as it truly is. And if you cannot do that, then there will always be depth in somebody's performance that by the very nature of reality cannot be captured in an objective metric.
“This is supported by authoritative statements about how the brain produces thought by a particular author. These statements are, themselves, validated, not by experiments which defer to the existence of an objective reality, but by intersubjective support from educated people for the authority of the author.”

Again, I don't think you have understood him at all. Planchet is not saying you ought to read this author – 25 officially very educated people recommend him, and therefore my model says you will find this interesting and useful. He is saying take a look at this work; it is a difficult work, but if you persist perhaps it will point you to a richer understanding of the world that may help you escape your present representational prison. He would say this even if the author was a nobody and the book was as yet undiscovered – the book stands on its own, really. Of course one needs to have a degree of intellectual confidence and training to be able to make up one's own mind about things regardless of whether official authorities tell you it is acceptable to like something or not. But we are here on a pheromone forum, which according to most people (and many scientists) discusses products that can't possibly be terribly useful. So I would expect that present company can make up its own mind, with a little encouragement.

“Pheroquirk holds that objective models which attempt to predict future performance based on past trends are part of the reason for the financial crisis, thus a desire for objective data contributed to the crisis. When people extrapolate future trends based on past trends and get erroneous results, as they very often do, this demonstrates the problem with the call for objective data rather than the problems stemming from using any system, whether based on gut instinct or data, whose basis and limits one does not understand. “

I believe it was Planchet who originally observed the link between the modern mania for depending only on what can be measured and the financial crisis, although it is an observation that I agree with. In my favoured cultural framework, credit research agencies exist in order to help investors with doing their own homework on credit quality, but the idea that one can outsource such decisions and depend on a 'rating' in order to offload one's accountability would be seen as the height of irresponsibility. If you are investing someone elses money, it is your duty to consider the risk and potential return. If you aren't competent to assess these things, you ought not to accept such a grave duty in the first place!

So I think you have only half understood me. It is the desire to pretend that judgement and discernment can be avoided that played an important part in the build-up of problems before the crisis. Part of this pretence involves slapping labels on things, and treating these things as if the labels are eternal descriptions of what is within them, when in reality the characteristics of what is within are constantly changing (because of the dynamism of life itself). Another part involved policy makers depending on objective econometric models rather than their own judgement of what was going on, such models never having accurately predicted a downturn in the economy before it happened (or at least not before the equity market crashed). It's a contemptible and unmanly shirking of responsibility for somebody to try to blame his model rather than accept that he himself was at fault, since nobody forced him to continue to use the model and to fail to modify it in the face of changing conditions.

“Quote:But testing is not really objective. For it to be such, one would need to control for all the conditions that matter.

Pheroquirk holds that objective testing is defined as a properly controlled study or equivalent, (rather than the referral to observation of non-subjective phenomenon.) Uncontrolled testing is therefore not objective. Therefore, calls for objective support are an attempt to limit one's beliefs to what can be supported by the peer reviewed scientific literature or some equivalent. “

Actually, even a double-blind placebo controlled study is not objective because there are always important factors that are not controlled for. I would not agree with what you wrote, but would say that to call to depend only on objective support is to call for something close to impossible because one never has enough of the right data and eventually things always change – particularly if one is depending on the results from the experiment! Even measurement of physical constants such as 'g' have been found to be disturbingly variable over the years. We have avoided this problem by nailing them down by assumption, but only by assumption.
In practice the only way people who pride themselves on their belief in objectivity ever get anything done is to smuggle in discernment and judgement by the back door. The problem is that when you do in an unconscious manner you tend to do it worse than if you had thought about it carefully in an explicit way.

So in summary, I do not agree with a single one of your would-be summaries of my position (nor, for what it is worth, with those summarizing that of Planchet, based on what I believe him to think). This tends to reinforce the idea that Planchet's sense is correct - we are in different ways trying to point to something that for now is mysterious to you, but might not remain so if you persisted in thinking about it (including reading further).

Quote:If I have attributed to you views that you do not hold in a manner that is essential to the topic at hand ...whether a belief in being able to assess performance based on objective standards is compatible with the achievement of excellence), then I would ask that you be more specific. Also, your use of the word 'tendency' implies that I have made a habit of doing so, which I do not believe to be the case.

There wasn't much dispute about turning away from false niceness. The majority of these posts aren't on that topic since our beliefs on that topic don't diverge too widely.

When you've misrepresented my beliefs I've quoted what you said and explained why it didn't match my beliefs. You can't ask for a more specific answer than that, I don't think.

Could you quote, word for word, some reply of mine which was insufficiently specific? I'll gladly make it more specific.

I think one difference between our positions is that I'm at least able to acknowledge when I might have misunderstood your views, while you seem entirely impervious to repeated clear demonstrations that you've misunderstood mine.

Quote:Actually, even a double-blind placebo controlled study is not objective because there are always important factors that are not controlled for.

I think this statement confirms that we're using different definitions of "objective", which will be the root of a great deal of confusion.

I already contrasted objective observation (A dictionary definition; Not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts) with subjective opinions like "I like ice cream." The observation of a black swan can objectively falsify the statement "there are no black swans." (assuming that the definition of 'swan' doesn't actively require whiteness) Peer review isn't needed. A control group isn't even needed. Formal clinical science is not a requirement for objective falsification.

There's a reason why I noted that we can objectively show a thing to be false and replaced "objective truth" with predictive value. We can never know if there's some theory out there which is more predictive, so we can't demonstrate that some theory about the natural world is affirmatively true in the platonic sense. We agree there, I think.

But we don't get around that limit by "going with our gut." Our "gut" is just a process of pattern recognition, associating one thing with another in space or time. Those associations are also limited by our life experiences and fallible, the same way that more explicit processes are. They have the same source and the same limits, even if "our gut" is easier to use or has access to a broader or more relevant data set. Since "our mind" is more than just our conscious thoughts, our gut may recognize patterns that we may not even be consciously aware of yet because it has access to data our conscious mind does not. Granted. Pheromones are probably a good mechanism of how such unconscious information might be transmitted. But there is no pattern which is, by necessity, obscured and cannot or should not be made explicit if possible. Obscured processes are much harder to teach to others since we don't really understand them ourselves. They're hard to improve or correct if they fail. So whatever wisdom they contain is easily lost and whatever limits they have are often beyond our understanding.

Obscuring a process doesn't make that process limitless, vis a vis Godel's incompleteness theorum. It just hides the limits of the process and makes us vulnerable to accidentally overstepping those limits. If we cannot demonstrate that a certain thing is true, a gut feeling that it is true is just as haphazard as trying to extrapolate from previous trends without understanding the underlying model. (i.e. assuming a cyclical trend is linear since our experience doesn't extend before the beginning of the cycle.)

Quote:The real measure of whether your work is valuable is peer usage, not peer review. In today's world the latter quickly becomes contaminated by the actions of referees who do not exhibit a spirit of honesty and use the peer review process to try to influence and control what gets published (bearing in mind that reviewers tend often to be professional rivals of the person publishing and have a great stake in preserving their own status in the field).

Peer usage is often used as a proxy for value, yes. Sometimes it may correlate with usefulness, But is it possible to cite false or misleading work? If so, in that case peer usage would indicate a measure of harm, not value. This goes back to understanding the limits of our models, etc.

Quote:We saw this emotional dynamic play out with Semmelweis (pre the modern system, but the same pattern emotionally), and the emotional response to the work of Barry Marshall, discoverer that ulcers tend to be caused by H. pylori, and not just stress.

If you're arguing that there's institutional resistance to certain discoveries or views I agree and didn't say otherwise. Just the opposite, I've said three or four times now that I wasn't trying to affirm scientific institutions and their problems. On the contrary Barry Marshall was an institutional outsider who helped to objectively falsify the notion that antibiotics were unable to cure some forms of peptic ulcers.

So the question is not whether any particular institution is flawed, but whether those flaws might be removed. And, if so, by what method? Would a person relying on their gut have been able to effect the change that Marshall did?

Quote:However the elevation of peer review – today essentially a bureaucratic process - as being the defining characteristic of what is good science reflects the same mentality

Quote the passage where I claimed that peer review was the defining characteristic of good science. At least acknowledge that your claim here doesn't address my views in any way.

Quote:as being the defining characteristic of what is good science reflects the same mentality that wishes to rule out the possibility of existence of all variations in quality that cannot be objectively measured.

Considering that this statement doesn't represent my view, you have your first datum of disconfirming evidence regarding this assertion. It is not a disproof, but it is something to acknowledge and consider.

Quote:ways of acting and thinking that are clearly dishonest are no longer grounds for expulsion

Without a notion of objectivity, it's fairly difficult to identify 'ways of acting and thinking that are clearly dishonest.'

Unless vis a vis East Anglia you show someone cooking a model. But that type of evidence, while valid, is extremely hard to come by.

Quote:So to conclude, I do not think you understand my stance on this.

Fair enough. And will you, likewise, finally recognize that you haven't come anywhere close to accurately representing mine?

Quote:To validate the authority would mean to prove that such authority rests on a sound foundation. These words have clearly defined meanings, as anyone who refers to the Oxford English Dictionary may verify for themselves.

I'm not looking for a dictionary definition, and suggestions to look in the dictionary misunderstand the question. I'm looking for a checksum. "Good" also has a definition in the dictionary, but "what is good" is a matter of intense debate.

Saying that "good" has a dictionary definition does not mean that people agree what "good" is. People don't agree on that at all.

Quote:To validate the authority would mean to prove that such authority rests on a sound foundation.

And a sound foundation would require
1. A valid argument
2. True premises

So to demonstrate that an authority has a "sound foundation" you need to make a valid argument for that authority and then demonstrate (positively) that the premises that the argument is based on are true. If you don't do that, you haven't validated the authority. By your given definition.

Do you see how I'm trying to drill down here to show the stuff that a particular belief is made of, not just asking for someone to hand me a dictionary?

Quote:: if you are known as a good singer, or for being good at maths in your school, particularly if you are thought to be such by people who are both good themselves, and clearly good judges of these things...Probably you are not completely crap, as measured by the standards of your school, at least.

We agree that certain deficiencies can be objectively demonstrated and agreed upon. The basics for a craft are typically traits which can be objectively measured.

Quote:Clearly there is a structure here that is not entirely arbitrary.

Yes. The basics. Deficiency. The part that can be objectively measured.. But each author or musician has a different fan base and what one person considers "good writing" may not be liked by another. (I've encountered this a LOT. Haven't you?) Which would indicate that skill beyond a certain point is likely to be subjective and divergent.

Which I feel I've stated and which you've just ignored. Do you need more evidence that different fanbases support different artisans? What would it take to get you to address this point with something other than repeating your beliefs? Should we test this? Would a test change your mind?

Quote:Ryan: “These things are a form of popularity, presumably among a set of people who are, themselves, uniquely qualified to have an opinion.”

PQ: Popularity is something entirely different. Everyone is familiar with the distinction (between being popular, and being renowned for one's talent).
How frequent it is to meet somebody and think that they are very good at what they do, but not especially likeable.

To be clear, I'm talking about the popularity of a person's work[/quote], not an individual. "Stuff qualified people like" = "renowned stuff" = "popular stuff." As in the phrase "pop music." I'm also talking about a person's ability to produce work which wins such a popularity/likability contest. I'm not saying that the artisan competes on the basis of his personality. I hope that's clearer.

Quote:I am pointing you to real things that exist out there in the world, and you are asking me to make things fully articulate and defined - which as many important writers, Godel and Polanyi included, have observed can never in the general case be possible.

As noted previously, Godel's incompleteness theorum points to a real limit to our ability to know truth. You seem to feel that "gut feelings" can jump that bridge. But the limit applies to all attempts to know truth. Even gut feelings which are derived from senses.

Quote:I feel sorry for this because life is much better when one is able occasionally to see the world as it is, even when it does not fit with the narratives and representations of it that we sometimes confuse it with.

It should be clear by this point that I've tried on more than a few different philosophies to see how they fit and am not just coasting along. So this kind of condescension is a bit tendentious and actively unpersuasive.

Quote:I am pointing you to real things that exist out there in the world

And I'm asking you to be meta-cognitive and to try and better understand how your judgement works and what its limits might be.

Quote:The same mentality that makes a fetish of peer review instead of thinking about whether it is good work or not is the same mentality that leads people to emphasize supposedly objective criteria in assessing job performance.

Again, this is an assertion and my views are dis-confirming evidence of that assertion. If you want to assert that I'm a special case violating the general trend, please make that explicit.

Quote:The consideration of factors that may never be measured and only pointed to

If you cannot observe something, you cannot point to it. If you feel inclined to disagree, please reread my posts and consider whether I'm using a different definition of "observe." If a thing can be observed, it can be measured.

If you disagree, please give an example of something that can be observed but not measured, or neither observed nor measured but still 'pointed to' (aside from math, things that are true by definition, or tautologies.)

There are exceptions, like the effects of pheromones. But that's a soft limit, created by our current weak ability to measure very particular phenomenon, not something which can never be overcome.

Quote:I believe I spoke of genuine expertise (which implicitly I opposed to a spurious emphasis on mere credentials, such as a PhD, which often did not consider whether the person truly had any skill in this area), rather than 'general expertise'. So I do not think you followed my point.

I didn't discuss formal credentials at all. I just pointed out that people who can be familiar with a topic and not deficient often have different views and priorities. So you need give a definition of "genuine expertise" which

1. Is more than just familiarity and a lack of deficiency.
2. Does not simply point to a dictionary.
Here's the dictionary definitions for "genuine."

Quote:possessing the claimed or attributed character, quality, or origin; not counterfeit; authentic; real: genuine sympathy; a genuine antique.

Note that the dictionary doesn't describe [i]how you know if a thing poseess a claimed or attributed character. It's that process of determining what is genuine and the reliability and limitations of that process at accurately determining "genuine-ness" that is at issue.

Quote:There may be different schools of thought, but in most cases members of one school will be able to make some assessment of the expertise of members of even the most detested of the other schools taking into account their differences in orientation.

Yes, by testing for deficiency, typically, which we already agreed is objective. Would you care to point to a different process?

Quote:An emotionally mature conservative (who perhaps believes in tradition and the free market) can tell if a potential communist academic hire is any good in terms of the things that matter – teaching, representing the institution, developing grad students, writing research – and vice versa.

Thanks for the specific example. A proper treatment of this matter would be breaking down these catagories (or at least one of them, we don't have time for all) and asking "what process or method does the mature conservative use to identify if a communist is good at teaching."

Quote:Value to me depends entirely on my situation.

Good, we agree on that.

Quote:I do believe that whether a suit is well or shoddily made is not entirely an arbitrary question in the absence of objective standards.

1. To the extent that we judge a suite to be non-arbitrarily well made, I hold that we can craft some objective standard which could measure that quality.

2. To the extent that a suit is universality held to be well-made there are usually some universally held implicit objective standards and goals as well. A suit which falls apart is, objectively, poorly made, because there's an almost universal belief that suits should not do that. The ability of a suit maker to adhere to demonstrate deliberateness in the construction pattern, including things like symmetry, tend to be associated with quality.

These can all be measured and are indicators of deficiency when someone falls short.


What property doesn't fit this description? If we hold that stitching with good integrity is a charicteristic of a quality suit, we can measure the integrity of the stitching. If comfort is the issue, we can measure how the shape of the suit changes as the body contorts.

Though admittedly I don't think I could tell a $5000 suit from a $500 one.

I'd be better able to discuss some other product, perhaps. I'm no clothier.

Quote:One can never capture the world as it truly is.

Agreed. But the question is falsfication. Can you capture the world as it truly is not.

Quote:And if you cannot do that, then there will always be depth in somebody's performance that by the very nature of reality cannot be captured in an objective metric.

If a person has a gut feeling, that feeling derives from some pattern which they have experienced. Sight, Smell, Taste, Touch, Hearing, some yet unidentified chemosensory sense, such as with pheromones. It may be processed using some abstract model. But it is dependant on the senses in some way for input. And if a thing can be sensed, it can also be measured.

Quote:may help you escape your present representational prison

Just for the record, I tend to have a very strong distrust for emotionally loaded words like this. They're red flags. If you're trying to be persuasive, it's likely to have the opposite of your intended effect.

Quote:So I would expect that present company can make up its own mind, with a little encouragement.

I will try to make the time to read it. Haven't had the time yet. Too busy posting on forums. ;-p

Quote:I believe it was Planchet who originally observed the link between the modern mania for depending only on what can be measured and the financial crisis

Certainly. But the issue here is still a lack of metacognition. It's people relying on models that they don't understand.

Quote:Part of this pretence involves slapping labels on things, and treating these things as if the labels are eternal descriptions of what is within them, when in reality the characteristics of what is within are constantly changing (because of the dynamism of life itself).

Agreed. Which is why metacognition and an understanding of the limits of any model is critical. Which means that if a person "goes with their gut" that they should have some understanding of how their "gut" works. Just the way a person should have an understanding of the limits of any other model.

You asked previously why an understanding of epistimology is necessecary. I think this cuts to the heart of it. We'll make mistakes if we don't understand how we think and what our limits are.

If the complaint here is that people lie using statistics or attempt to use them to sheild themselves from blame, I'll agree.

But if a bad thing is sugar coated with what would be a good justification in other circumstances, that good justification still works in the proper circumstances.

I asked you to explain how I have misrepresented your beliefs because I do not believe that I have, and found your illustrations of my putative misrepresentation unconvincing or unclear.

For example, we have the following exchange:-

““Quote:A great deal has been written about the topics you raise, yet you assert your point of view as if it were the only valid one, and all others are simply invalid. I think that at the very least you may be able to develop a more complete understanding of your own perspective by considering others that you find at face value unconvincing.

This is an inaccurate paraphrasing of my beliefs. Do I belive some views are invalid? Yes. So do you. So does Planchet.
You've both indicated you hold to the possibility of invalid beliefs and the rejection of perfect relativism through the criticisms that you've made of my views, among other things. Do I believe that some views are inconsistent or sub-optimal by their own standards and fairly judged on that basis? Yes, of course. “

I have not attempted to paraphrase your beliefs (to paraphrase is to restate an argument in different words); merely to critique their salient features. You make certain normative assertions regarding metaphysical and cultural questions (statements regarding how things ought to be) without explaining your basis for doing so, and implicitly denying the possibility that others may legitimately hold different beliefs. “

In what way have I misrepresented your beliefs here? You say that I have paraphrased them, but I have not paraphrased them (this would mean to restate them in different words). I have merely observed that you make assertions phrased in the strongest terms, clothed in language that strives to be authoritative (about for example the ability to measure performance objectively) without providing the grounding for such assertions.

It seems that we have made some progress here, in that you acknowledge that not one of your restatements of my position correctly captured it. In other words Planchet's Tolstoy quote was spot on! I put it to you that the reason that you do not understand my position (to which Planchet's is similar, I believe) is that it is very difficult to escape prevailing fashions, habits and modes of consciousness (which I believe you now acknowledge characterize especially the English-speaking West of 2012, but do not characterize other cultures and eras).

I am open to the idea that I do not understand yours, but I am still awaiting your asserted “repeated clear demonstrations” that I do not understand them.

“There's a reason why I noted that we can objectively show a thing to be false and replaced "objective truth" with predictive value. We can never know if there's some theory out there which is more predictive, so we can't demonstrate that some theory about the natural world is affirmatively true in the platonic sense. We agree there, I think.

But we don't get around that limit by "going with our gut." “

Once more, I do not think you have understood me when you oppose the falsificationist epistemology that you favour with “going with your gut”, as implicitly the only alternative to it. I never argued for “going with your gut” as the way to make decisions; I merely pointed out that it was a great mistake to downplay the importance of somatic information, including information from the gut itself, in making informed decisions. Again, we have a false dichotomy that has been erected here. Life is characterized by shades of grey, and most decisions tend to involve both factors that can fit neatly into a checklist or manual, and factors that cannot.

“But there is no pattern which is, by necessity, obscured and cannot or should not be made explicit if possible. Obscured processes are much harder to teach to others since we don't really understand them ourselves. They're hard to improve or correct if they fail. So whatever wisdom they contain is easily lost and whatever limits they have are often beyond our understanding.
“
Your words here are very strange. Of course there is no pattern which cannot be made explicit if it is possible. Obviously if it is possible to make explicit then it can be made so. This is a tautology. Stepping back from questions of expression, there is an important literature on tacit and inarticulate knowledge. You cannot just step over the proven existence of such, by saying I wish that it be made articulate and explicit, because it is easier for me to deal with that way. You act like somebody is deliberately obscuring what is not explicit, when that is just in the very nature of things.

“Quote the passage where I claimed that peer review was the defining characteristic of good science. At least acknowledge that your claim here doesn't address my views in any way. “

I did not say that you made that claim. I said that the “elevation of peer review – today essentially a bureaucratic process - as being the defining characteristic of what is good science reflects the same mentality” as the one you favour. It logically follows from the tendency to which you are attuned. If you dispute my view, you must demonstrate that it need not follow from this tendency, or that you are not in fact attuned to this tendency. The conversation starts to become a little silly, here.

“Without a notion of objectivity, it's fairly difficult to identify 'ways of acting and thinking that are clearly dishonest”. So is it your belief that it is difficult to know whether putting pressure on the editor of a journal not to publish an article that threatens your prestige is dishonest or not, bearing in mind that the normal approach in the scientific spirit would simply be to respond to the article and to identify its flaws.

“To validate the authority would mean to prove that such authority rests on a sound foundation.

And a sound foundation would require
1. A valid argument
2. True premises”
This is simply not true at all. This is a case of seeing something work in practice, and wondering how it could possibly work in theory. As I keep saying – I am pointing to observable patterns in the real world that characterize much of human history, not trying to prove the theoretical correctness of an abstraction. The bumble bee flies, even if at one point it was thought that this was inconsistent with theoretical understanding of the time. A building may rest on what long experience has shown to be a sound foundation, even should we understand little of the theory of buildings. Similarly with authority.

“But each author or musician has a different fan base and what one person considers "good writing" may not be liked by another. (I've encountered this a LOT. Haven't you?) Which would indicate that skill beyond a certain point is likely to be subjective and divergent.

Which I feel I've stated and which you've just ignored. Do you need more evidence that different fanbases support different artisans? What would it take to get you to address this point with something other than repeating your beliefs? Should we test this? Would a test change your mind?
“
There are different styles and schools, and there is no doubt that some members of such may be blind to the virtues of others. Chinese classical opera sounds all the same to me – like a cat being strangled, but to somebody brought up with that culture their perception may be very different. But to recognize this is not to deny the shared recognition of the existence of skill altogether, as you appear to want to do. I notice that you choose not to engage with the concrete examples I gave of Roosh (implicitly) and Roissy. A Christian blogger interested in improving his relationship with his wife may disapprove very much of what Roissy has to say; but at the same time he most likely will recognize his genuine expertise in his chosen domain.
“Quote:I feel sorry for this because life is much better when one is able occasionally to see the world as it is, even when it does not fit with the narratives and representations of it that we sometimes confuse it with.

It should be clear by this point that I've tried on more than a few different philosophies to see how they fit and am not just coasting along. So this kind of condescension is a bit tendentious and actively unpersuasive. “
That's the whole point. Philosophy is what true understanding of life as it is becomes when it becomes devitalized and turned into abstraction. Hegel wrote about this. I do not say that you are ignorant of philosophy - your difficulty is being trapped by philosophy itself, and confusing what can only be a sometimes-helpful abstraction at best for paying close attention to the world as it is.

“Quote:may help you escape your present representational prison

Just for the record, I tend to have a very strong distrust for emotionally loaded words like this. They're red flags. If you're trying to be persuasive, it's likely to have the opposite of your intended effect.
“
Actually, thinking is always an emotional process. Human beings are not microcomputers, The power of metaphors arises in part from the associations and emotional connotations – they help us see old things in a new light, that may clarify aspects of the question that previously were hidden to us. Therefore, I observe with curiosity your dislike for the term, but I don't see that its power to evoke is a strike against it – quite the contrary!

“Quote:The consideration of factors that may never be measured and only pointed to

If you cannot observe something, you cannot point to it. If you feel inclined to disagree, please reread my posts and consider whether I'm using a different definition of "observe." If a thing can be observed, it can be measured.
“
Implicitly you suggest that if you can point to something you can measure it. This is clearly untrue, and this belief of yours is one of those at the root of our difference in understanding and this demonstrates Planchet's point. You then go on to say “there are exceptions... created by our current weak ability to measure [a] very particular phenomenon”. So if you can point to something you can measure it, except for the exceptions that is? So in essence we agree, and we are just arguing over how large the class of exceptions is. I think it is very large, and constitutes the essential difference between high quality and mediocre work. You think it is small, but we are now longer in an area where you can depend only on objective measurement of results. You can depend only on objective measurement when the exceptions to what can be measured are not very important. But how can you determine whether they are important or not? Well, for sure, by definition, measuring the results will not tell you!

I'm very short on time now, so this reply may be incomplete as will most future replies. Life intrudes. But hopefully we're close to wrapping up.

Quote:In what way have I misrepresented your beliefs here?

I don't have time to make a whole list, sorry. Go back through the thread and look at those lines where I say "this is not what I believe" in response to your assertions. There are a few examples in this post.

PQ: yet you assert your point of view as if it were the only valid one...You make certain normative assertions regarding metaphysical and cultural questions (statements regarding how things ought to be) without explaining your basis for doing so, and implicitly denying the possibility that others may legitimately hold different beliefs. “


Ryan: I don't belive that my view is "the only one." Neither do I believe that the belief that my view is the only one logically follows from what I've written. Quite the opposite, I've stated there were likely better views in existence that I was unaware of. Obviously I have a viewpoint and I'm going to speak from that viewpoint in order to illustrate it, as do you, but I've given enough information in this thread to try and indicate under what criteria my view would not apply. If a person held, for instance, that human observation didn't correlate with the existence of some objective reality in some way then that would be an alternative view based on different premises. Or perhaps they held that pleasure was more desirable than predictive value. They would rather believe something beautiful or self serving than something which had predictive value. I've put forward that opinions on expertise are not likely to be convergent, which suggests the existence of multiple valid points of view on any particular art. You've already agreed that value is not inherent to a thing, but is a function of an individual's desires. And desires diverge.


I can't really give a more specific reply unless you let me know which specific normative statements you want me to clarify. I believe that I've given a basis for my statements. For instance, the rejection of Platonic notions of affirmative truth in favor of predictive value. This alteration to Platonic standards stems from the belief that Newton's Laws were affirmatively true and demonstrably complete, followed by the realization that they were not. This indicates that people had the capacity to believe that they had affirmatively proved something true in a way that seemed logical and agreed with their intuition. And this belief could be objectively shown to be false (or incomplete and imprecise) in ways which were unexpected and non-intuitive. Thus, we can measure the predictive value of a belief about the material world under certain circumstances or it's falsifiability. But we cannot prove it true, affirmatively. Neither does 'explanatory power' give us information about the world. Neither can intersubjective agreement be universally applied (Ask 20 different people who you consider knowledgeable "who is the best singer and what is your basis for that." You'll get some objective criteria like vocal range, but the separation of the best from the best will be rather subjective and divergent. You can disagree with me here. But if so please provide some sort of evidence or objection that you haven't already. )

Quote:In other words Planchet's Tolstoy quote was spot on!

Do you believe it applies to yourself as well? It seems like it could be applied to anyone who had spent some time considering their viewpoint. In which case, the quote doesn't advance the discussion much except to say "Hey! You don't believe what I'm saying because you believe something else!" Well yes... and?

Quote:I put it to you that the reason that you do not understand my position (to which Planchet's is similar, I believe) is that it is very difficult to escape prevailing fashions, habits and modes of consciousness (which I believe you now acknowledge characterize especially the English-speaking West of 2012, but do not characterize other cultures and eras).

I'm certainly not of the impression that the rest of my culture shares my beliefs, though I have tried to cultivate such relationships, to an extent. Such cultivation has not been an easy thing. I feel I'm in a better position to be aware of such differences between myself and others than other people would be. It's common for people in one group to view people from other groups as "of a type." But the more we become familiar with a group, the more we see the important distinctions among them. Many people interested in science are more interested in the proclamations from a kind of new priesthood. They want "settled science" that supports their political beliefs. Not "predictive value" and an imperfect search for an elusive predictive understanding. I'm of the second group. You seem to have mistaken me for the first.

I never once claimed that my view was ancient. My view relies critically on 20th century discoveries and is particular to the modern age. Certainly. But not for reasons of 'fashion' as you put it.

This is not a change in my position. The debate on this point was to what extent my view was a 'fashion' and to what extent it was an advancement over most ancient views. The Platonic view held to the possible affirmative understanding of absolute truth. You, yourself, have cited Godel's incompleteness theorum in disproving the possibility for a logically complete system which some ancients believed. These are both relatively modern (relative to the span of human history) and western. Does this mean that "everything keeps getting better and better?" (another view you incorrectly ascribed to me.) No. It does mean that certain things that the ancients believed are shown to be false. If you remove a falsehood from your consciousness, is that an objective improvement? Arguably yes, though it's still possible that other bigger problems might creep in. And an objective improvement is the opposite of ideas simply being fashionable. The design of cars may be "fasionable" to some extent but the functionality of cars is objectively superior to horses in some ways. Therefore even if cars are replaced by horses in some places or some other superior transport later in history, I wouldn't call them simply 'a fashion.'

Quote:Your words here are very strange. Of course there is no pattern which cannot be made explicit if it is possible. Obviously if it is possible to make explicit then it can be made so. This is a tautology.

That pattern should be made explicit in some forum (where it is socially appropriate) if the speaker has the capacity/meta-cognition to do so.

Hopefully this is clearer. I'd already covered this topic several times in this post and others, and noted that it was the limitation of the thinker (personal inadequacy) that typically prevented explication of their process of judgement so I'd assumed my meaning would be clear, but perhaps there was still room for confusion.

Quote:It logically follows from the tendency to which you are attuned. If you dispute my view, you must demonstrate that it need not follow from this tendency, or that you are not in fact attuned to this tendency. The conversation starts to become a little silly, here.

Yes, it is silly. You said something follows from the 'tendency to which I am attuned.' I show that it hasn't followed from that tendency in my case.
This is disconfirming evidence against your assertion regarding peer review being associated with my type of beliefs. (one data point, at least.) It's a warning flag that you should recheck your work because your prediction isn't matching up with the evidence in front of you. Or you should acknowledge, at least, that I'm a special case for whatever reason. And then ask consider very carefully why I'm a special case.

Further, I've given evdience why your statement is incorrect. To put a finer point on it; does the peer review process adhere strictly to open dialoge and objective standards? Typically, it doesn't (In case it isn't clear, by objective standards I mean standards which can objectively be shown to be violated, not standards which have universal force, vis a vis the term "objective morality.") So why link something that is divergent with my views with me?

I'll admit that the "Open Access" movement is interesting, however. I'm waiting to see how it plays out.

Quote:So is it your belief that it is difficult to know whether putting pressure on the editor of a journal not to publish an article that threatens your prestige is dishonest or not, bearing in mind that the normal approach in the scientific spirit would simply be to respond to the article and to identify its flaws.

I wrote; "Unless vis a vis East Anglia you show someone cooking a model. But that type of evidence, while valid, is extremely hard to come by. "

Let me put it this way;

1. For the type of tactic used in the CRU to be effective in disseminating false information, it has to be fairly pervasive. You need a near blackout of opposing views. One rogue editor can cause serious problems to such a tactic.
2. Despite such pervasiveness, The leak of the CRU emails was unusual.
4. This suggests people are pretty good at keeping secrets.
5. After the CRU leak, future leaks will likely be more unusual as people adapt their communication styles. There will be less reliance on email which might be stored on a central server. The CRU leak even reveals discussions urging such changes in communication style, prior to the leak.


The issue is not that "it's difficult to know whether putting pressure on an editor of a journal is dishonest or not." (Though as a side note in many cases it does seem to be difficult for many people. Public opinion on the CRU leak doesn't seem unanimous, even among those who are ostensibly informed on the issue.)

The issue is that public access to information about the political pressures brought to bear on editors is very hard to come by and not usually publicly available and explicit. Relying primarily on that kind of thing to keep institutions honest is like relying on the lottery for your personal finance. Yes, it can work in a rare few cases, however it's not going to work routinely as the
primary method of enforcement.

Political pressures exist. They are typically hidden. They can be hidden even more effectively in response to attempts to ferret them out. The question is how we respond to that. Making sure that experiments are repeatable by second and third parties is one useful method.

Quote:I am pointing to observable patterns in the real world

Don't you think I also believe I'm "pointing to observable patterns in the real world?"

Quote:I am pointing to observable patterns in the real world that characterize much of human history, not trying to prove the theoretical correctness of an abstraction.

When I questioned the evidence behind your description of what constitutes "genuine expertise" and how such a thing behaves, you pointed me to ... a dictionary. A dictionary definition is not "an observable pattern in the real world." I've given you observable patterns in the real world; Different people prefer different songs, different authors, etc. This all points to divergence.

Quote:The bumble bee flies, even if at one point it was thought that this was inconsistent with theoretical understanding of the time.

One guy couldn't figure the bee's flight out at a party a century ago (Very very roughly. No time to look up the details right now), and it got spread around that bees flying was "inconsistent with the theoretical understanding of the time."

Quote:The bumble bee flies, even if at one point it was thought that this was inconsistent with theoretical understanding of the time. A building may rest on what long experience has shown to be a sound foundation, even should we understand little of the theory of buildings. Similarly with authority.

Until there's a earthquake, and the thing topples to dust. To take your analogy with buildings, on its face this seems to be discussing extrapolating based on trends, even when the basis for those trends are not understood. That's part of what got us the recent financial crisis. People were relying too much on things that they didn't understand. This statement seems rather inconsistent with your previous statements so perhaps I just have no clue what you're saying here.

Quote:But to recognize this is not to deny the shared recognition of the existence of skill altogether, as you appear to want to do.

Incorrect. I've mentioned deficiency testing just about every time this topic has come up. This is yet another example of your misrepresenting my views. I don't know how you can go from my "deficiency testing can provide a basis for skill recognition which is almost universally recognized, with divergent opinions on non-deficient related topics" to "you want to deny the shared recognition of the existence of skill altogether"

Quote:I do not say that you are ignorant of philosophy - your difficulty is being trapped by philosophy itself, and confusing what can only be a sometimes-helpful abstraction at best for paying close attention to the world as it is.

I regularly relate my ideas to "the world as it is" as well as I can. I realize that some people are persuaded by evocative language. I try to not be one of them when I feel I have a reason for believing something else.

Quote:PQ: So if you can point to something you can measure it, except for the exceptions that is?

Okay, lets review. You said; "The consideration of factors that may never be measured and only pointed to."
This does bring into question what you mean by "pointed to." That's kind of vague and may give some room for misinterpretation.

All factors which are observable are, technically, measurable. Maybe not in a particular social context. Maybe not with our available technology, etc.
But all things which possess the quality of 'universal observability' possess the quality of 'measurability.'

Something like a somatic sense may be a grey area. Direct chemical influence of a self-modifying non-homeostatic system is hellishly hard to model and I don't claim to have a good understanding of how such systems behave (though not for lack of trying.) And it's hard to say how bodily homeostic processes alters that.

But pheromones are clear indications that such non-meta cognitive systems have the potential to be hacked by a knowledgeable individual.

(very parenthetically, reliance on bodily systems don't consistently lead to agreement. Quite the opposite, the MHC method of choosing a mate is helpful primarily because positive and negative responses are individual specific, making that system difficult to hack. )

More importantly my point is to demonstrate that the theoretical limitations imposed on any systematic gathering of knowledge (like Godel's Incompleteness Theorum) apply to information gathered from the conventional senses, including 'the gut.'

Quote:So in essence we agree, and we are just arguing over how large the class of exceptions is. I think it is very large, and constitutes the essential difference between high quality and mediocre work. You think it is small, but we are now longer in an area where you can depend only on objective measurement of results. You can depend only on objective measurement when the exceptions to what can be measured are not very important. But how can you determine whether they are important or not? Well, for sure, by definition, measuring the results will not tell you!

Not certain what you're saying here precisely but I think we agree. If so, fantastic.
Most people will agree what is good, but people may have very different ideas about what is great. And it may be very hard to rationally or objectively persuade someone to change their opinions about what is great.

http://www.capitalismwithoutfailure.com/...s-are.html
It would have been impossible to know he was write based on objective measures, but he clearly was.