Wow, EricC.  I never knew that.  It's so 19th century!

N

On Tue, Apr 7, 2026 at 10:52 PM Eric Charles <[email protected]>
wrote:

> I'm not sure how it got on this thread... but I think it is worth noting
> as often as possible that TMS is "Mesmerism."
>
> Among other aspects of his early work, Mesmer waved extremely large
> magnets around people's heads, and created effects thereby. Gardens with
> enormous magnets that you would walk through became popular, etc.
>
> Then it was all discredited.
>
> Then it became fashionable cutting-edge science.
>
> The world is odd.
>
> Best,
> Eric
>
> <[email protected]>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 7, 2026 at 12:45 PM Marcus Daniels <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Transcranial magnetic stimulation is used for medication resistant
>> depression.  One could imagine an active learning protocol with EEG
>> feedback.  fMRI would be trickier since a second set of pulsed magnets
>> would be needed.   And MEG would saturate, but maybe some sensors wouldn’t
>> lose calibration and could recover?
>>
>>
>>
>> *From: *Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of Prof David West <
>> [email protected]>
>> *Date: *Tuesday, April 7, 2026 at 9:27 AM
>> *To: *[email protected] <[email protected]>
>> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Metaphor... and more...
>>
>> do the magnets produce an altered state of consciousness, or just mess up
>> the optic nerve? "Sparkles and rainbows" are a common aspect of LSD trips.
>> How strong a magnet? Sounds like something I might try.
>>
>>
>>
>> davew
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 7, 2026, at 9:28 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>
>> I briefly collaborated with a staffer at the National High Magnetic Field
>> Laboratory.  She said that near the big magnets, vision goes to sparkles
>> and rainbows.
>>
>>
>>
>> I think this experiment might not be a good idea, at least in the cause
>> of understanding the scientific utility of metaphor?
>>
>> *From: *Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of Santafe <
>> [email protected]>
>> *Date: *Monday, April 6, 2026 at 7:08 PM
>> *To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
>> [email protected]>
>> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Metaphor... and more...
>>
>> Thanks Nick,
>>
>>
>>
>> I will have to read your longer-form work.  Your use of all this is so
>> far from my own, and so far from any literature and user community that I
>> work with or in, that I don’t even know what you mean different words to be
>> doing in your sentences, and thus what you believe yourself to be
>> asserting.  (If I could track that much, I could then come back to whether
>> I think the assertions “go through”, or under what analysis one would make
>> such a judgment.)
>>
>>
>>
>> Clearly this is going to be a matter of just blanking my mind (giant
>> magnetostimulation of the brain) and submerging in your writing for a
>> while, to try to “get a feel” for your language usage.  Then come back to
>> these short forms and see if I can follow them any better.
>>
>>
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Apr 6, 2026, at 7:42, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> DES -- One urgent point.  I asked George to look at our correspondence to
>> see what I was missing.  He caught one thing immediately "Fitness causes
>> selection, selection causes fitness" is not necessarily a tautology nor do
>> i think of it as such.  Its a virtuous circle, or "spiral" so long as  
>> *selection
>> and fitness can be independently known.  *
>>
>>
>>
>> I apologise for wiring text that was open to that misinterpretation.
>>
>>
>>
>> N
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 5, 2026 at 5:39 AM Santafe <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Nick,
>>
>>
>>
>> I’m kind of relieved that I posted “I promise I really will shut up” on
>> Apr 1, before Gil’s brief blast of exasperation, which I kind of get.  I
>> think I should keep my word, as much as possible without being obnoxious.
>>
>>
>>
>> At the same time, thank you for taking the time to reply, including what
>> I actually wrote, and responding to it in-frame.
>>
>>
>>
>> Your two papers are attached to the later email, too, so we have them.  I
>> will read if and as I am able.  The abstracts sound like they make a much
>> more normal reference to the routine work that people actually do, than
>> many of the post-string here have (to me); so that is hopeful.
>>
>>
>>
>> I tried a couple of times to come up with some kind of reply, and decided
>> it is hopeless.  There is a perfectly good language to address the problem
>> that, after we have identified and characterized traits, and observed that
>> sometimes they change frequencies in populations, we don’t generally know
>> at the outset whether there is something about the traits’ functions in
>> organisms’ lives (in their population contexts) that is eligible to be a
>> “cause” of that change in frequency.  We would like to know, for which
>> traits in what settings, variations in trait parameters result in
>> variations in function performance that (through the vast noise of
>> everything else that is going on too) poke through to result in changes in
>> trait frequency.  There are no tautologies in the statistical reduction
>> that defines different components of change (among which one is fitness,
>> though its definition is partly by convention), and there are no other
>> problems than the ordinary problems of functional characterization and
>> statistical analysis in figuring out which variations in trait parameters
>> and functions correlate with changes in trait frequency robustly enough to
>> be candidates for cause of the change in frequency.  It’s all so terribly
>> ordinary and understandable.
>>
>>
>>
>> Meanwhile, you have a program: to assert that there are some tautologies
>> and some ambiguities etc.  Therefore I understand that, since we can
>> observe a field of people who get from problem statements to answers, by
>> completely ordinary and conventional steps with standard methods, without
>> tautologies, whatever those people are doing is simply irrelevant to your
>> program.
>>
>>
>>
>> I will admit, so that it doesn’t just seem irritating, that at a
>> half-dozen points below, I am sure that you are just throwing up verbal
>> chaff and playing word games to try to make something that is actually
>> completely ordinary and orderly “look” all mangled and messed up.  But it
>> doesn’t look that way to me.  At every one of these, I trip over some
>> string of words that looks like complete nonsense, which doesn’t make the
>> idea we were on “look” like anything; it just veers away from the track of
>> that idea to put a word game in its place.  (An example: "success causes
>> fitness, and that fitness causes success")  It was after trying to call out
>> two or three of these that I realized i need to just give up.  I suspect
>> you could follow an ordinary mathematical argument about as well as the
>> next guy, and you just don’t want to.  Thus anything I try to reply will
>> just yield another round with the same form as this one.  I will add to
>> irritating the list, which is what I wanted to cut away from doing earlier.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> I appreciated your introduction of placeholders, and of course I am quite
>> open to that kind of thing.  Not so open to the Chalmers kind, which is
>> defined as having _no_ added content from what our ordinary, understandable
>> language, is already doing.  I don’t know why you think you see a
>> non-Chalmers-like placeholder here; but okay.
>>
>>
>>
>> So, is it the English who say: Please Proceed.
>>
>>
>>
>> I do hope you will be able to push through to the book you were writing.
>> We accumulate all these unfinished efforts, and it is a shame if they can’t
>> get to some safe harbor in some output.
>>
>>
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Apr 4, 2026, at 14:23, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> DES  -- I hate to drag you back into our den and maul you some more but
>> your last post was fascinating to me and so akin to difficulties we have
>> had with Elliott Sober and difficulties I have had understanding entropy
>> (ugh) that I want to pursue them with you further
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *--for me, “fitness” is a name given to (something like) the units (or
>> dimension) in which reproductive success is measured, or quantified.  Not
>> sure “units” is quite the right term, but the point is that it’s about
>> defining a quantification program for observed outcomes, or the model
>> variables that we try to fit to them.  I had taken the state of modern work
>> to show that this is the only actual meaning the term was ever given.*
>>
>>
>>
>> I am happy to have a variable with a name to represent that dimension.  I
>> just think "fitness" is an appalling name for it.  Call it selectedness.
>> Call it success.  Just don't call it fitness or adaptedness or anything
>> that might confuse a reader into thinking that you have any information
>> about the morphological or behavioral synchrony of the organism with its
>> environment.  The essence of D's theory is that success causes fitness, and
>> that fitness causes success.  If one calls oneself a Darwinist it must be
>> because those connections between the two ideas are empirical, not logical.
>>
>>
>>
>>  *— are you two claiming otherwise; that my supposition is not at all
>> the case?  That there are biologists for whom there is some other meaning,
>> instead of or in addition to the one I gave above, about being a
>> measurement unit? *
>>
>>
>>
>> Indeed, we are
>>
>>
>>
>> *Something like: “fitness” is a name for “the cause of reproductive
>> success”.  As if to say: Well, there’s this thing with the form of a name,
>> so there must be something it names, that is a kind of causal force
>> responsible for generating what we witness as reproductive success.  And
>> since there is one name, there must be some one kind of causal force it
>> names.*
>>
>>
>>
>> Well, if we do believe that the relative success of every genetic type of
>> organism is systematic then it has a cause.  Now I suppose that it's
>> possible that each instance of success has a different cause, in which we
>> would have reduced Darwin's theory to, "whatever causes an animal's sucess
>> causes its success".  But I think even FW would rate that a tautology.  To
>> escape that bind, we have to find some class of relations that leads to
>> success which is other than the class that leads to failure.  And to be a
>> proper Darwinian you have to at least be able to entertain the possibility
>> that selection would produce something other than fitness and vice versa.
>>
>>
>>
>> *— to me, an interpretation like that is so bizarre, it would never have
>> occurred to me to that there is anyone making it.  *
>>
>>
>>
>> Well, here we are. We stand before you.  I have been making such a claim
>> in print for 56 years, so either I have managed to pull the wool over many
>> editors' and reviewr's eyes, or it has some resonance somewhere among
>> biologists. I hope calling it "bizarre" isn't the first step toward putting
>> your fingers in your ears and shrieking.
>>
>>
>>
>> .
>>
>> *It seems very similar to taking an expression like “elan vital”, and
>> saying that, since it has the shape of a name, there must be something it
>> names.  *
>>
>>
>>
>> Well, exactly!  The example I like to use is the "dormitive
>> virtue"..Years ago, before the dinosaurs, Lipton and I wrote a paper in
>> which we talked about such expressions that purport to be explanatory but
>> which include a reference to the explanandum within the explanans as
>> "recursive".  (eg. life is caused by the Life Force) The dormitive virtue
>> was a place-holder for what came to be known as the very specific chemical
>> properties of morphine.  The Moliere play makes fun of people who imagine
>> that the assignment of a placeholder has solved the problem.   We thought
>> of these place holders as serving to keep the goal in sight while
>> scientists looked for it.  Science consists a lot in filling in or dividing
>> up these place holders.  The progress in the identification of the AIDS
>> virus is a wonderful example. See, if tempted, Comparative Psychology
>> and the recursive nature of filter explanations
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fcommons.clarku.edu%2ffacultyworks%2f66%2f&c=E,1,k4G28ruXzTMikjk22fWt55DQZBrY8oTBaFPZetykCEmKkrdW7Zgm_InoVrTc91PCgHYC1XjdS7pzs2zz_HaX2PnsGuZtad3L3YiDf1g2E2bBiY5y9m0Lp_g,&typo=1>
>>
>>
>>
>> *To me, those are strings of words that satisfy rules of syntax and that
>> don’t have any semantic referents at all.  They may as well be Chomsky’s
>> “colorless green dreams” or something.  I would not have imagined that
>> there was anything anyone expected, beyond the working out of the mechanics
>> of lots of cases of how-lifecycles-play-out-in-contexts, which can fill out
>> some vast taxonomy that has no singular “essence” underneath it.  That
>> could well be my lack of empathy for how many other people think, like my
>> lack of empathy for their thoughts about God (along with my ignorance about
>> who is in the world).  *
>>
>>
>>
>> Indeed.  That would explain a lot. Please understand that I am a lifelong
>> unbeliever.  I am not even an atheist.  My family had no interest in
>> religion whatsoever.  You might call me a religious Ignoramist.  I have
>> never been cuffed on the ears by nuns.
>>
>>
>>
>> *— I guess, since there are people who continue to talk about Strong
>> Emergence, and Philosophical Zombies, and who sound to me much like people
>> who talk about God today, and maybe like people who would have talked about
>> Elan Vital some generations ago, I should have right away imagined this
>> reading of what you were writing.*
>>
>>
>>
>> Again, that explains a lot of our difficulties.  But I beg to suggest
>> that there is a more generous reading.
>>
>>
>>
>> *the above is what you were claiming, it would explain why my long Emily
>> Litella-like replies seemed like a tiresome recital of what population
>> geneticists already do (Nick’s point that “all that would be left is
>> EricS’s 2a and 2b”), which everybody already knows anyway, and which isn’t
>> interesting and wasn’t to your point. So, were you claiming that there are
>> biologists operating that way*? *And are there really biologists
>> operating that way?y *
>>
>>
>>
>> Indeed there are.  They are called comparative biologists, comparative
>> anatomists,comparative ethologists, comparative physiologists, anybody who
>> studies the form of classes of organisms in relation to their
>> circumstances.  Natural design didn't get eliminated by Darwinism; it got
>> partially, and incompletely and in some cases wrongly explained by it.
>> Some effort needs to be expended in finding out the degree to which natural
>> design actually accounts for natural selection and vice versa.  Please see 
>> Toward
>> a Falsifiable Theory of Evolution
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fcommons.clarku.edu%2ffacultyworks%2f67%2f&c=E,1,uEqHnsI2N6agATrwVIuvnLowDECLxZG4KT5Za_GJiyC2lUxcNNve9iY0ZctgPVn2cXHp3MIF_4h0exfyKRO9KdPS6nCz0uerbqjb5nNIWBw,&typo=1>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 3, 2026 at 2:17 PM Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>> DES  -- I hate to drag you back into our den and maul you some more but
>> your last post was fascinting to me and so akin to difficulties we have had
>> with Elliott Sober and difficulties I have had understnding entropy (ugh)
>> that I want to pursue them with you further
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --for me, “fitness” is a name given to (something like) the units (or
>> dimension) in which reproductive success is measured, or quantified.  Not
>> sure “units” is quite the right term, but the point is that it’s about
>> defining a quantification program for observed outcomes, or the model
>> variables that we try to fit to them.  I had taken the state of modern work
>> to show that this is the only actual meaning the term was ever given.
>>
>>
>>
>> — are you two claiming otherwise; that my supposition is not at all the
>> case?  That there are biologists for whom there is some other meaning,
>> instead of or in addition to the one I gave above, about being a
>> measurement unit?  Something like: “fitness” is a name for “the cause of
>> reproductive success”.  As if to say: Well, there’s this thing with the
>> form of a name, so there must be something it names, that is a kind of
>> causal force responsible for generating what we witness as reproductive
>> success.  And since there is one name, there must be some one kind of
>> causal force it names.
>>
>>
>>
>> — to me, an interpretation like that is so bizarre, it would never have
>> occurred to me to that there is anyone making it.  It seems very similar to
>> taking an expression like “elan vital”, and saying that, since it has the
>> shape of a name, there must be something it names.  To me, those are
>> strings of words that satisfy rules of syntax and that don’t have any
>> semantic referents at all.  They may as well be Chomsky’s “colorless green
>> dreams” or something.  I would not have imagined that there was anything
>> anyone expected, beyond the working out of the mechanics of lots of cases
>> of how-lifecycles-play-out-in-contexts, which can fill out some vast
>> taxonomy that has no singular “essence” underneath it.  That could well be
>> my lack of empathy for how many other people think, like my lack of empathy
>> for their thoughts about God (along with my ignorance about who is in the
>> world).
>>
>>
>>
>> — I guess, since there are people who continue to talk about Strong
>> Emergence, and Philosophical Zombies, and who sound to me much like people
>> who talk about God today, and maybe like people who would have talked about
>> Elan Vital some generations ago, I should have right away imagined this
>> reading of what you were writing.
>>
>>
>>
>> If the above is what you were claiming, it would explain why my long
>> Emily Litella-like replies seemed like a tiresome recital of what
>> population geneticists already do (Nick’s point that “all that would be
>> left is EricS’s 2a and 2b”), which everybody already knows anyway, and
>> which isn’t interesting and wasn’t to your point.
>>
>>
>>
>> So, were you claiming that there are biologists operating that way?
>>
>>
>>
>> And are there really biologists operating that way?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 1, 2026 at 5:15 AM Santafe <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Can I ask one last question? after which I promise I really will shut up:
>>
>>
>>
>> The content of EricC’s note below (about the key in a lock), reflecting
>> back on things Nick said in the early posts about selection’s being a
>> tautology, which got me started digging a hole, have bothered me through
>> the night, and made me wonder if I can understand how I have been missing
>> both-of-y’all’s point.  Was it something like the following:?
>>
>>
>>
>> — for me, “fitness” is a name given to (something like) the units (or
>> dimension) in which reproductive success is measured, or quantified.  Not
>> sure “units” is quite the right term, but the point is that it’s about
>> defining a quantification program for observed outcomes, or the model
>> variables that we try to fit to them.  I had taken the state of modern work
>> to show that this is the only actual meaning the term was ever given.
>>
>>
>>
>> — are you two claiming otherwise; that my supposition is not at all the
>> case?  That there are biologists for whom there is some other meaning,
>> instead of or in addition to the one I gave above, about being a
>> measurement unit?  Something like: “fitness” is a name for “the cause of
>> reproductive success”.  As if to say: Well, there’s this thing with the
>> form of a name, so there must be something it names, that is a kind of
>> causal force responsible for generating what we witness as reproductive
>> success.  And since there is one name, there must be some one kind of
>> causal force it names.
>>
>>
>>
>> — to me, an interpretation like that is so bizarre, it would never have
>> occurred to me to that there is anyone making it.  It seems very similar to
>> taking an expression like “elan vital”, and saying that, since it has the
>> shape of a name, there must be something it names.  To me, those are
>> strings of words that satisfy rules of syntax and that don’t have any
>> semantic referents at all.  They may as well be Chomsky’s “colorless green
>> dreams” or something.  I would not have imagined that there was anything
>> anyone expected, beyond the working out of the mechanics of lots of cases
>> of how-lifecycles-play-out-in-contexts, which can fill out some vast
>> taxonomy that has no singular “essence” underneath it.  That could well be
>> my lack of empathy for how many other people think, like my lack of empathy
>> for their thoughts about God (along with my ignorance about who is in the
>> world).
>>
>>
>>
>> — I guess, since there are people who continue to talk about Strong
>> Emergence, and Philosophical Zombies, and who sound to me much like people
>> who talk about God today, and maybe like people who would have talked about
>> Elan Vital some generations ago, I should have right away imagined this
>> reading of what you were writing.
>>
>>
>>
>> If the above is what you were claiming, it would explain why my long
>> Emily Litella-like replies seemed like a tiresome recital of what
>> population geneticists already do (Nick’s point that “all that would be
>> left is EricS’s 2a and 2b”), which everybody already knows anyway, and
>> which isn’t interesting and wasn’t to your point.
>>
>>
>>
>> So, were you claiming that there are biologists operating that way?
>>
>>
>>
>> And are there really biologists operating that way?
>>
>>
>>
>> As always, I appreciate whatever patience or indulgence,
>>
>>
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mar 31, 2026, at 15:47, Eric Charles <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> I'm a bit confused here...
>>
>> The initial dog pile on Nick seemed (to me) to have as one of its main
>> points something like "Look, old man, once you formalize something
>> mathematically we don't need to care what any of the words might mean or
>> imply in any other context, it is just math, stop thinking that the words
>> matter!"
>>
>>
>>
>> And now there have been several posts by EricS, at least one by Glen, and
>> I think Marcus and Frank are in there somewhere as well, claiming that the
>> words are crucially important and we need to take them much more seriously.
>>
>>
>>
>> So.... where does that leave us? Is everyone now onboard with
>> the metaphors mattering quite a bit?
>>
>>
>>
>> I'll also note that "function" can't do the work on its own to explain
>> evolution. We still need to know why some functions are favored by
>> selection and others are not. EricS seemed to indicate that we assess "fit"
>> by determining if animals are "happy".... but the metaphor of "fit" is like
>> a key in a lock. To explain evolution you need the matching of
>> form-and-function-to-a-particular-environment.  That matching *sometimes*
>> increases reproductive success, and *sometimes* the traits in question are
>> hereditary.
>>
>>
>>
>> Population genetics combined with field research can be very powerful
>> along those lines, but the math of population genetics on its own, floating
>> out in the ether, can't do it at all.
>>
>>
>>
>> Best,
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 31, 2026 at 6:10 AM Santafe <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Nick,
>>
>> Two smaller replies to what have become two sub-threads:
>>
>> > On Mar 30, 2026, at 15:42, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > DES, EPC, FW
>> >
>> > So far as I understand, the argument flowing from Fisher makes no
>> claims about the kind of trait that produces reproductive success other
>> than that it is the kind that produces reproductive success. FW, if that's
>> not a tautology, it's a pretty tight circle.
>>
>> As usual, let’s decamp to more neutral ground in the hope of having an
>> ordinary negotiation.
>>
>> Suppose that, in your overweening pursuit of the study of metaphor, you
>> never noticed that there is a once/4-year gathering called The Olympics.
>> Also never learned what any of its so-called “events” are, what they are
>> about, how they work, and how one differs from another.  My hypothetical
>> here is meant to define a condition of having “very little prior
>> information” about some phenomenon that we can, nonetheless, still
>> reasonably unambiguously circumscribe.
>>
>> But a quick inspection shows that a subset of the participants (who all
>> together seem to be called “athletes”) are given metal disks and stand on
>> some kind of 3-tiered podium, while other athletes do not.  Being a
>> statistician — a skill so helpful in the study of metaphor that it was
>> worth taking the time out to learn — you immediately recognize that this is
>> a kind of marking that can be used to partition the athletes.  Taking
>> notice, for the first time, of some of the conversation in the society
>> around you, who seem not nearly so devoted to metaphor and thus have time
>> to do other things, you gather that these marked people seem to be called
>> “winners” (or better, “medalists”, this “winning” thing is a finer
>> sub-partition; I’ll mis-use “winner” to label the most salient marking for
>> this little parable).  It’s handy to have such a term, for use in later
>> sentences, so they become less tedious than the ones I have been typing so
>> far.
>>
>> You also note that while there is only one 3-tiered podium and metal-disk
>> set per one “event”, there seem to be many such distinct “events”, so some
>> kind of event name gives you a second kind of marking you can put on the
>> athletes.  Moreover, interestingly, the “event” label is again a proper
>> partition (or at least seems to be; this one is less cut-and-dried than the
>> observation that everyone carrying a metal disk is not someone not-carrying
>> a metal disk, so we are wary; the event label seems to be a bit more
>> abstract): every athlete is in some “event” set, and it appears that no
>> athlete is in more than one of them.  As with the “winners” label, you
>> learn that there are conventionalized names for the events, and you can
>> find a look-up table if you need one or another of them.
>>
>> Now, I can make a list of statements that seem to be of two different
>> kinds (scare quotes here indicate my statisticians’ attribute labels; in my
>> condition of very little prior knowledge, I don’t claim I have any more
>> semantics for them than I listed above):
>>
>> 1. Every “winner" is someone marked as having won something.
>>
>> 2a.  Every winner in the “gymnastics” event is shorter than the average
>> over all the participants;
>>
>> 2b.  Every winner in the “high jump” event is taller than the average
>> over all the participants;
>>
>> … (we could presumably look for other such summary statistics that seem
>> to be unusually regular and to carry different values in different
>> “events”).
>>
>> I would say sentence 1 is “a tautology”, or close enough to it for the
>> purpose of this negotiation.  Maybe I should use EricC’s good, and slighly
>> more flexible term, “truism”.
>>
>> Now you may write a protest email:  But the sentences 2a, 2b, have not
>> told me what constitutes “competition” in these “events”: “gymnastics” and
>> “high jump”, and given me the rule book for scoring them.  Okay.  And they
>> didn’t cook your dinner and do the dishes afterward either. Life is hard.
>> And more a propos (breaking my little 4th wall here), the path to a
>> fully-adequate “causal” theory through statistical inference is like the
>> Road to Heaven: narrow, tortuous, and inadequate to many things one can
>> rightly want to know.  That’s what other sciences are then for.
>>
>> But if you claim: The sentences 2a and 2b didn’t give me _any
>> information_ about these “events”, and couldn’t have, because they are
>> tautologies, I would say you made an error.  Of course, the real Nick would
>> not say that, so we are all safe.
>>
>> The above parable is, of course, about selection.  I didn’t say anything
>> about heredity.  But if I had happened to note that height is a fairly
>> heritable trait, I could have spun out a much longer story, and defined
>> some Bayesian-posterior conditional probabilities, which would be shown to
>> have properties such as: the posterior probability, under various ceteris
>> paribus conditions, for a child of a high-jump winner to turn out another
>> high-jump winner is higher than for that child to turn out a gymnastics
>> winner, and so forth.  The amalgamation of both of those stories would go
>> in the direction of Fisher’s fundamental theorem.  It would leave out all
>> the stuff that Fisher left out of emphasis in his mad pursuit of his
>> covariance term as an analog to the thermodynamic 2nd law (a non-valid
>> analogy, as it turns out to be easy to show), and that Price included
>> didactically (and here, to EricC’s answer):  that I didn’t even mention
>> that the tall people might get drafted into wars and put into an infantry
>> to fire rifles over tall dijks, while the short people might be drafted
>> into Special Forces and sent on missions to attack through underground
>> tunnels, and so the number of survivors could depend on many factors about
>> which war their country had started, in what theater, and against what
>> opposition, etc.  These are the world of everything-else that Fisher lumped
>> together into “deterioration of the environment”, as Steve Frank (and I
>> think also Price) lays out.  They are probably not well-analogized to
>> “mutation”, but in genetics, mutation also goes into the same bin in the
>> Price equation — _outside_ the term of Fisher’s fundamental theorem — as
>> the “deterioration” effects.  The accounting identity is flexible enough
>> that we don’t need analogies to use it; we can formulate a version for
>> whatever statistics our phenomenon-of-interest supplies.
>>
>> Anyway; at issue:  Seriously, do we have a problem in scientific work, of
>> people being unable to gain partial knowledge about phenomena through
>> sentences of the kinds 2a, 2b, because they can’t tell the difference
>> between those and sentence 1?  In the world where I live, I don’t see
>> evidence for this mistake.
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> [email protected]
>>
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson&c=E,1,TtGHguBztcaI183g6Goerj-O4VoUmgxpx6RFwy76dnUtcD6dMcEs2GfRLne1FYCYIv9JZQ_Qlp0DYwPIxqwUF0P5yyaODACw5wXNyxIS_4NA3OoABA1XdQ,,&typo=1>
>>
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> [email protected]
>>
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson&c=E,1,2XwwB39XAWBxm8sZIiJJtQaGopoq86JnxTvN46gGqo6aH0noWqqKl_l7rB_k-DozfW1XYaJks5IPwIsYhgQEFcMMYaST1TtrgzyaPODraxU,&typo=1>
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> [email protected]
>>
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson&c=E,1,yOlkmrrUeTaGeYex3-BP2up_KTKEECrDeXyMl2bn9HMBnlqmOWOhGvMQOKYLoybbMqLzqnZSs7-_jUa1hkV7hkzl30kqZYwyMpt1XgLahOOdGMUu_KCS&typo=1>
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>>
>> *Attachments:*
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>>    - smime.p7s
>>
>>
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-- 
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
[email protected]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
https://substack.com/@monist
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