https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME

-- rec --

On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Steve Smith <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>  Nick,
>
>  It's the _shocked_ outrage I find tiresome.  By all means be outraged at
> any and all forms of corruption that take your fancy, and forge that
> outrage into action.
>
>  But if someone is shocked and thinks that shock is worth mentioning,
> then he or she hasn't been paying attention or is exhibiting another kind
> of "willful ignorance".
>
>  -- rec --
>
> Roger (et alii) -
>
> And what of "shocked but not surprised"?
>
> The longer I live, the more I experience this dichotomy... my intellectual
> self has catalogued a wide enough range of behaviour and experience in the
> world, that when confronted with a specific new point fact in the universe,
> I can usually find a place to hang it in my world-view tree, but that
> doesn't mean it doesn't disturb my soul when I first apprehend the
> "factoid" in question.
>
> I wonder how this is affected by our wide-ranging apprehension mediated
> (mostly, or formerly) by journalism (nod to Tom) and now (more recently)
> crowd-sourcing of information from around the world (including in the
> (willfully hidden from self?) corners of our own back yards).  On one hand
> we get desensitized (thus losing "shock value") and on the other hand we
> are given much more context in which to help us properly understand
> whatever "shocked but not surprised" factoid just got bounced off our
> apprehension.
>
> Every time I feel "shocked" (if not surprised) I am thankful that my soul
> remains tender enough to experience that.  While I do have plenty of
> callouses of cynicism, it is nice to be reminded that I am still alive
> inside these multiple layers of insulation (economic and other forms of
> security, cynicism, etc.).
>
> - Steve
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 8:35 PM, Nick Thompson <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>>  But Roger, isn’t this a ticket to apathy?  Where is the spur to action
>> without outrage?  I know that question sounds odd, but I am really asking
>> it.  Nick
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Friam [mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Roger
>> Critchlow
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, June 09, 2015 1:37 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] The Attack on Truth - The Chronicle of Higher
>> Education
>>
>>
>>
>> Of course the really fun thing about statistics is the ongoing discussion
>> about the "willful ignorance" of scientists submitting papers with
>> technically correct but wholly dubious claims of statistical significance,
>> because -- rather, becorrelate -- their salaries depend on getting
>> published.  Funny that the language naturally inserts a causal claim into
>> that observation, where I would rather put the cause on the system than the
>> individuals, and I have to invent a word to back off
>>
>>
>>
>> I'm tending to see this issue theologically.  The technical name for
>> "we're all imperfect and we've always been so" is original sin.  Feeling a
>> bit of impostor syndrome?  That's how the personal experience of original
>> sin manifests.  Disgusted that cops aren't fair, that rich people get
>> privileges, that politicians repay rich people with more privileges, that
>> FIFA is corrupt, that Australia outsources immigrant detention camps to
>> Nauru, that Nauru denies visas to Australian civil rights lawyers seeking
>> to defend immigrant rights, and so on?  Yeah, well, be disgusted, but try
>> not to get too righteous about it and spare us the expressions of shocked
>> outrage.  If you're shocked at this, then you haven't been paying attention.
>>
>>
>>
>> So, are there any entirely good or entirely bad persons?  Or are they
>> entirely figments of our imaginations?
>>
>>
>>
>> -- rec --
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 10:10 AM, glen <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Statistics is one tool.  I'm not sure it's the most powerful tool,
>> though.  I tend to think the best tool is ... well, it goes by many names.
>> One name is "active listening" ... "empathy" ... etc.  The technique is
>> well known to all of us (well unless we're autistic or psychopathic).  When
>> you hear someone say something that just sounds wrong, there are 2 basic
>> steps:
>>
>> 1) find out why you think they're wrong (including the statistics that
>> surround any of the facts involved), and
>> 2) try to figure out what the speaker _really_ means by whatever nonsense
>> they're spouting.
>>
>> Since I don't believe our thoughts are very accurate at all, I have no
>> problems empathizing with someone who spouts (apparent) nonsense.  I do it
>> myself on a regular basis.  I try not to.  But it's difficult.  In fact,
>> the reason I find purposeful nonsense (including climate denial or
>> chemtrails, but more like chatbots) so cool is because of the accidental
>> nonsense in which we bathe.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 06/09/2015 08:36 AM, Grant Holland wrote:
>> > Righto. So what we do is put a measure on "how much confidence" we
>> have. Statistics gives us some tools for that - namely the "moment
>> functionals" (mean, variance, skewness, etc.); and information theory gives
>> us some more general tools for that - entropy and the other entropic
>> funtionals. So maybe it's a mixture of the relative and the absolute. Maybe
>> we've moved up to the "junior" level?
>> >
>> > Grant
>> >
>> > On 6/9/15 9:14 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>> >> Correct.  Nothing is certain.  We've known that since Kant.  NOW
>> what?  That
>> >> there are no certain facts does not imply that some facts are not more
>> >> enduring and useful than others.  We need to get beyond the sophomoric
>> >> revelation that "everything is relative."
>>
>> --
>> ⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
>> Float away from those horizons
>>
>>
>>
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