Tuesday, December 31, 2019

The Missing Arrows

How to read a model chart



What is the problem with this picture?

First some translation. "Hållbarhet" means Sustainability. The other circles say, in clockwise order, "economical", "technological", "cultural", and "social". The boxes say, in clockwise order, "values", "knowledge", "skills", "ecological method".

The graph is a mess. Can we be specific about why it is a mess? First, there is a feeling of confusion. How is this to be interpreted? Are the "values" only related to "economy" and "technology", and not to "sociality" and "culture"? That seems like an odd point to make. And "skills" is not linked to "technology". My dominant hypothesis is that the words in the boxes have been thrown in at random.

Second, the what do we learn from this? We learn that Sustainability affects the Economy, and that the Economy affects Sustainability. Okay? And not only that: Sustainability affects all the other circles, and is in turn affected by all of them. All the arrows are also the same size, so all the interaction are given equal importance. What does it even mean to say that Sustainability affects Culture? The graph leaves this as an exercise to the reader. The cooperative reader will certainly come up with some interaction and be content. What has the cooperative reader learnt? To fantasize.

The problem with the graph is that everything affects everything. Any experience or observation that the reader has about an interaction between two of these concepts will fit into the model. The reader will not reject the graph based on experiment: it permits everything.

When reading a chart, pay attention to which arrows are missing. The missing arrows are what make the actual claims. In science, a model with many nodes and few arrows eliminate a large part of the hypotheses, which make for more powerful predictions. In engineering, a design with few interactions between different parts makes for a system that is easier to maintain and modify.

An example of a good model with only a couple of clear interactions is the Central Dogma of molecular biology:

The central dogma of molecular biology
What claim is made here? That DNA does not produce proteins directly, but that the information goes via RNA first. It also claims that information is never added to DNA, except at replication. Another claim is that RNA and proteins do not replicate.

The extended central dogma.
This model was falsified by experiment. It turns out that RNA sometimes does replicate by itself. And also that RNA can sometimes write to DNA. Perhaps not the way a human engineer would have done it, but we want to describe nature well, so the arrows have to be added.

How to start the scientific revolution

The enlightenment was about striking arrows, not adding them. Striking the arrow from morality to disease was the foundation of medicine. Striking the arrow from planetary movements and theology to the outcome of games of chance was the foundation of the mathematics of probability. Striking the "transmutation" arrows from elements to other elements was the foundation of chemistry. Striking the arrows between human relationships and financial transactions was the foundation of economics, a less successful example.

How to use your time with an expert efficiently


Geology - always lower = older?
(suppose we chance upon a geologist)

Astronomy - assume that stars will move in a strictly periodic pattern? This is what tells planets apart.

Demography - humans are born, grow up, have children, and die - in a quite predictable pattern!

Ecology - what species do not interact directly?


How to ask questions in order to find out these hidden reductionist assumptions in different fields? [1] First of all, we should find out whether this field and this person is actually committed to being consistent. If the field makes no solid predictions and the person is agreeable, then we should be able to make them agree to pretty much any absurd hypothesis. If the field makes no predictions and the person is disagreeable, then we are dealing with a game of Mao. Mao is a card game where the rules are being made up on the fly by the game leader, the chairman. The chairman punishes transgressions of rules that have never been spoken. The disagreeable but scientifically empty field is just politics and fashion. The fiercest players win, instead of the most correct hypotheses. So as a way of finding out the truth, it serves no purpose.

Suppose now that we have good reason for believing that our expert will not agree to anything, but will also not discard our arguments simply on the basis of coming from an outsider. So the expert will treat our arguments skeptically but charitably. Now we have the basis for actually exchanging knowledge. How should we proceed to find the reductionist assumptions in the field? The problem is that these assumptions may not be so conscious for the expert. It does also not make for interesting conversation to simply ask directly "what are the hidden reductionist assumptions in your field?". One thereby misses a chance to prove to the expert that one is worthy of their best response. A clever person finds a way to find out the hidden assumptions with questions that seem to be leading a different way at first.


[1] Why even ask a person at all? Why can't we google it? This is the type of thing that is typically hard to find in written sources. Another problem is that before knowing a subject's hidden reductionist assumptions, basically nothing one reads within the subject makes deep sense.

Sunday, December 15, 2019

Fragment of a sejour: Sunday in September

What did I do on the 22nd of September? This was representative of the Sundays in September and October.

This was the second Sunday after E had come. He was very tired from his first work week. We both woke up at 08 and had a very pleasant breakfast talk for an hour. I lectured about Borges, since he had read his first Borges fiction a day earlier. At 09 we got ready for church. I dressed quite seriously, he more casually. We went to the evangelical church in Stern. The day's service was held by the children's group, so the church was very full with parents and relatives. The children performed several songs and I wept quite much, for it was so touching.

On the way back home, we bought chocolate croissants. Regular shops are not allowed to be open on Sundays in Germany, but bakeries can stay open until noon. Restaurants can stay open all day. We had lunch at a restaurant near our room. We were both feeling very enthusiastic about our new country at the time, so we ordered two schnitzels and two tall glasses of wheat beer.

In the early afternoon I studied German for a couple of hours, in preparation for a rendez-vous with miss S at 15. I arrived punctually, she arrived 5 minutes late. Arriving late is acceptable on Sundays, for the same reason that having a clock on a wall inside a church sermon room would be wrong. Precise timekeeping should not be done on the holy day. We met at the Brandenburger Tor, the smaller one in Potsdam. We spent a bit more than two hours walking in Sanssouci park. The first thing that happened was that she managed to pay for my coffee. Luckily, I got an opportunity to buy entrance for both of us to the Chinese Tea House. I found the depicted Chinese in the tea house to be quite amusing, because they looked so much like Europeans wearing long mustaches. The painter had probably not seen many Asians.

The park Sanssouci was overall very beautiful. I felt blessed to live in a city where entrance to such a place with such palaces was free. In an average other city, it would have set you back at least 10 euros. Miss S had lived in Sweden for a number of years, so we talked about that and I prodded her for differences between Swedish and German music, which seemed to be our greatest common interest. We said goodbye in a friendly way and I believed we would meet again, but we never got around to it.

10 minutes after saying goodbye to miss S, was my appointed time with the afternoon's second date: miss B. Miss B was quite late however. She hadn't confirmed the appointment by text on the day (which means one may intend to flake), but she answered the phone when I called and got on her bike. E met up with us as well, and the three of us had a very good chemistry right away. She was very cheerful and immediately chummy, nudging my arm several times when making a joke about me. We had dinner at an Asian place, being served in very large bowls. The outdoor space was crammed with guests, but we got our own table. I got praise from E and B for pronouncing "check, please" very well in German. E was in a very good mood when biking back to Babelsberg. We became friends with miss B, and met with her on several occasions until the end of October.

Fragment of a sejour: Friday in December

What did I do on my last Friday in Potsdam? This was a representative day for the period mid-November to mid-December.

I spent the morning on distractions. I woke up at 10 with a warm feeling after having had a long, sorrow-free dream about miss L. I laid in bed for a few minutes wondering about the reason for such a dream. Could it be the plans of moving to Stockholm? After a while, I realized that it must have been that a conversation with miss H the previous night had steered into the importance of human touch for well-being, which had evoked a tender memory. My current model for dreams at the time was that the purpose of dreams is to get experience of one's reactions to / preferences for events that happen too rarely in real life for a normal person to accumulate much experience with, but are nonetheless important act throughout as if one had a lot of experience. A consequence is that it is important to not be aware that one is dreaming: otherwise, one's reactions are not authentic. This dream in particular helped remind me about the caring feelings one can experience in a long term relationship.

Checking my messages out of bed, my friends were discussing the night's election results in the UK. The conservative party had won by a landslide. I had only a vague memory from two months earlier that there was going to be an election at all. My reaction was that it was refreshing that an election settled a clear winner, for once. The conservative victory meant that Brexit most likely would have gone through by the time I got around to moving to London. This was expected anyway.

The following 2 hours, I went back-and-forth a bit with a man in Jerusalem about morality and game theory. I re-read Taleb's Minority Rule, and paid much better attention to the examples than before. I decided to put Feynman's What do you care what other people think? on my reading list. I also kept up some threads with the guys back at the office about a proposal.

At noon, I called K to ask him for a favor regarding a room, and we ended up talking throughout the lunch hour about the recent PISA results. I also told him about my observation about cartographers (aesthetically minded people with no tolerance for bogus), and about my AI Alignment thought experiment (if humans had been created by ants, what would they ask us to do, and should we listen?). We also touched upon institutional rot (which was rule), and had a good flow of ideas about current day things that would be horrifying weirdtopia to an observer from antiquity. It was a very pleasant talk, and well worth the hour.

At 13:30, I went to the usual Indian restaurant. I ordered the same thing as always, and had a good dinner where I thought of the idea for this post. I said Happy Christmas to the waiter when leaving, thinking that symmetrically,  I would not object to holiday greetings if living in another country, even if they pertained to a different religion. Afterwards, I took only a short walk through Weberplatz. The weather was clear and well cold.

Coming back in the afternoon, two choices for the day's work presented themselves. Either I could do work to learn more about nonlinear solvers, and to continue my survey of commercially available solvers. Or I could do my own studies and learn more about symbolic manipulators from chapter 2.3 of Knuth's TAOCP. In the latter, I was on the precipice of finding out, through practical exercise, the principles of mathematical engines. Both were long standing wishes of mine. To have two interesting prospects for one's curiosity, is actually worse than having one. I decided to go with the letter, since I had worked on that the day before. Thus I broke my habit of working on the survey on Fridays. It is said that any art, however minor, requires nothing less than total commitment to it, if one wishes to excel in it. I take 'total devotion' to mean devoting about 12 hours of work 6 days a week, as well as softer things like thinking about the art in one's downtime, and to make it a part of one's identity. I reproached myself for devoting only 3 hours of this day to advancing my knowledge of my subject, however I noted that it was better than nothing at all. At any rate, there seemed to be no better activity with which to consume the cream of the afternoon.

The working time did not go well. Due to lack of concentration, I was not able to get past the initial phase of devising a strategy, and coming up with suitable representations, classifications, and definitions. Therefore could not start coding. At 18:20, when E came back home, I gave up and started preparing for the evening's social event at C & R's place. I crummily wrapped a Christmas present to C, and took the bike.

From Babelsberg I took the shortcut through Südliche Innenstadt (which is kind of dodgy). I crossed Havel and got a good speed along Bundenstrasse, turning left at an appropriate red light, to get to Charlottenhof. I arrived punctually at 19:30, and so did most of the other guests. Lovely people, Germans. The others seemed to know each other somewhat, but one girl, miss J, had arrived alone and was new in the city. She spoke quite good English and was on a rather prestigious track for her age. However, she was not in a domain that interested me, so I didn't start to fantasize. She became the center of attention for the first round of Glühwein and I listened intently to her, grasping as much German as I could. She seemed to notice my attentions and started asking me questions. I answered smilingly but quite shortly in English, so as to get past the standard set of questions to see if she was going to try something. In the fourth or fifth question she asked "for how long are you in the city?". If we consider that this is conversation between ESL speakers, this phrase can be interpreted as either "How long will you stay in the city for?", or "How long have you been in the city?", although I think the first interpretation is more correct. Foolishly, I did accept the first interpretation and said truthfully "until Monday", after which no-one bothered much to get to know me. This, I think is perfectly reasonable. I spent most of the evening trying to talk to R and C about how we would keep in touch after I went back. I hadn't established a repertoire of online communication with either of them, but we had met mostly in person. They agreed with my analysis. I extended their hospitality and was one of the last to leave. When the majority left at 23, miss J asked me whether I would come to an event on the Sunday, which I thought was very polite and lovely of her.

I came back home at 01:30. Having received an interesting question from miss G, I responded with a passage about the murder of Olof Palme, Swedish Prime Minister, in 1986. I found an informative documentary about the subject, so I did not fall asleep until 03:00.