Eloise's thoughts and fancies - Comments

Eloise: Impartiality and belief

nospam@example.com (Eloise) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:19:00 -0700

I think you're approaching my statements as a scientist, considering only the science. In that context I could say I accept that your model, with its proviso about maths, is accurate to the limits of my knowledge. I could equally, if I were a member of the public who didn't consider themselves a scientist, say "That's true." They would probably, in fact, say that Evolution is true, or Creation, depending on their beliefs, with or without understanding the evidence, provisos and limitations of the scientific model if they believe evolution is the better model.

I really didn't want to get into a discussion of the nature of truth. It's a whole different argument to discuss how science is reported in the general media and how it should be. Whilst you can, and I certainly have, argued the case that the public have a model of the world informed by science as reported in the media, the media don't present it that way, nor do the public generally regard it that way.

The media says "Sciences has shown...", "Scientists know..." and so on. The public's model of the world IS the truth as far as most of them are concerned. It's not a testable, modifiable map, it is the terrain. All too often things that don't fit in, or don't seem to make sense (like a lot of quantum mechanics for example) just get ignored.

And explaining things isn't only about science. History, philosophy and more explain things to people and influence their models of the world. Everyone's world view is made up of "true" stories that explain things to them. Many of these stories are based in evidence. Many others are just not evidence based but are culturally true. Many don't understand that evidence-based truths are subject to change as new evidence is found.

If, for example, these people in Italy have really found faster than light neutrinos, physics is going to be having a LOT of fun over the coming decades. I know enough to understand it's a REALLY big deal to undermine relativity that way, but I don't know anything like enough to understand all the implications and shockwaves. And I'd like to believe it's true that I'm in the group that accepts that new evidence can overturn old "truths" as new descriptions emerge.

Troy McLuhan: Impartiality and belief

nospam@example.com (Troy McLuhan) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:58:00 -0700

Everyone uses models all the time. It's how you predict the outcome of
a decision before you take action. Your models are your personal,
internal understandings of how the world works.

Of course everyone wants their internal models to be true. People can
be very protective of their things. They might say they "believe"
their models.

The sciences provide a collection of models that have been tested
against evidence over time. They're all "good enough for now", open to
revision, and provisional. I'd never go so far as to call them "true."

Since reading your comment, I went through various scientific models
that I know from various sciences, and couldn't find any that are
universally true in all cases without exception.

Actually, mathematics is special. A mathematician can develop an
elaborate system with no basis in reality, and therefore not subject
to testing against reality. Can such a system be "true"? Mathematical
systems start by assuming certain things are true (e.g. axioms,
postulates, rules of logic); everything else is a consequence. The end
result may be beautiful, but it's only as true as the original
assumptions.

Eloise: Impartiality and belief

nospam@example.com (Eloise) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:33:58 -0700

Although I definitely use models from time to time, despite not being an engineer or a physicist, and I agree we use "good enough to be useful" models all the time, something about this comment didn't fit easily with me.

It took me a while to pin down why - and that's because of my starting point for this thought, and the tie to journalism that I ended up with. Although there's a side rant into truthfulness and the like, it's really a blog piece about stories.

I think you can have useful explaining stories, but you can also have broadly true ones that are not useful. And as soon as you drift away from explaining, stories have no inherent need to be true or useful.

And perhaps what's also going on is a difference in intent. A story in a newspaper about climate change should be truthful. It's utility is only in explaining what's going on. There isn't really a model of climate change that is being reported. That might change for the journalist if you're trying to report why your government is taking a particular course of action in response to climate change where you might try to explain why this model is useful and how doing X will improve the situation. I certainly hope the models that are used are tested for utility by the scientists and others making the recommendations about the changes that are needed and the options to achieve them.

I would like to believe I understand enough of the science to understand the truth as it's presented to the public. I'm sure that without several years of hard work in unfamiliar disciplines I don't have the knowledge to determine the utility of the different models that are being discussed. And therein lies the difference that I was struggling to put my finger on. I need, we need, to be able to trust people to tell us the truth of the situation for some things, because we don't have the skills and experience to determine the utility and accuracy of what they're doing for ourselves. In those fields where we do... using the models is more important day-to-day, but being able to present "the truth" for a good story may be just as important if it suddenly enters the public domain.

Troy: Impartiality and belief

nospam@example.com (Troy) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 04:40:34 -0700

Another way to judge models (stories, theories) is to ask how useful they are. What do I mean by useful?

1. Does the model allow you to make reliable predictions about the future? This property is useful to airplane engineers and policy-makers.

2. Does the model allow us to reconstruct the past (maybe only approximately), using available evidence? This property is useful to cosmologists and historians.

I think the usefulness of a model may be even more important than it's "truth". For example, engineers often assume that the restoring force exerted by a spring is proportional to how much it has been stretched, and they use that model as part of their design process. But that model (Hooke's Law) isn't "true": it says that if you stretch a spring to be 1000 times its original length, it will give a restoring force of such-and-so, but we all know the spring would break long before that!

Similarly, the formula T = 2*pi*sqrt(L/g) tells you the period T of a pendulum of length L (in a gravity field of strength g). That formula is wrong for large-amplitude swings, but it's good enough for small-amplitude swings: it's useful for everyday situations.

I don't remember where I heard this, but it's a great line: "All models are wrong, but some models are useful."

Eloise: Rewriting Copyright (also copyleft, CC etc.)

nospam@example.com (Eloise) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 06:31:09 -0600

I do appreciate the sentiment. But as I was thinking about that for writing this, I thought of something else:

Amazon and Apple already do track your habits. Actually, no, they keep track of what you buy, not what you actually play/read, but it's very similar to my mind.

In the case of Amazon they use it very openly to recommend "You may like this" too. Apple use it to track upgrades and the like, and the Genius Bar is meant to predict based on your purchases too.

So I found myself wondering exactly what I'm giving up by having it. Particularly when everyone has their habits monitored.

It would be easy to write a system that doesn't record times of access too, so there's less tracking, simply a record that you have such a license. That's really the same data as it already stored, no?

Otenth Paderborn: Rewriting Copyright (also copyleft, CC etc.)

nospam@example.com (Otenth Paderborn) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 01:14:16 -0600

I don't really want someone (anyone) tracking what I read and listen to, although the ability to transfer a license to digital media would be very nice.

Eloise: What changes do we need to make for on-demand learning? #LCBQ

nospam@example.com (Eloise) — Sat, 07 May 2011 10:49:09 -0600

Given we agree on artisanal goods, I'm going to leave that well alone.

I think there are two other points though worth considering. I agree that cheap, fast and good are subject to interpretation but to some extent that's a good thing. If we're using it analyse new car markets, we're talking prices starting around £10,000 and rising to... well the sky's the limit really, but £300,000+ is certainly possible. If we're talking armchairs and the like, cheap starts around £150 and unless we're talking antiques, seems to top around £1,500 from what I've seen. So cheap is certainly case dependent. Good... again subjective. If you're very tall and overweight a good chair or car could be very different to if you're very short and slim on the basis of ease of fit, comfort to drive etc. all of which are relevant. Good in terms of mobile phone services could be 'they cover my home and office and no one else does both' very easily, or something much more complicated. And let's not get into the Apple vs Windows debate!

I'm happy with leaving it as a guideline statement for artisan products. I think it can probably be applied to products with blurred boundaries between the mass and luxury/artisanal markets - cars, furniture etc. - but not in the mass markets.

But, like so many of these statements that can be true within limited subsets of situations, there's a temptation to generalise them beyond those limits, then forget the limits and then discard the rule as useless. A bit like the process I've just described... no caveats and so it becomes easy to find counter-examples!

Troy McLuhan: What changes do we need to make for on-demand learning? #LCBQ

nospam@example.com (Troy McLuhan) — Sat, 07 May 2011 08:38:26 -0600

I agree that artisanal goods probably can't be all of cheap, fast, and good at the same time.

Other cases are debatable, I think, because the words "cheap", "fast" and "good" are vague and subject to interpretation-to-suit-my-purposes. Overall, the whole "put them at corners of a triangle" stuff comes across as MBA-talk. It looks and sounds "sciency" without having any real evidence.

(A scientist might give tight definitions for cheap, fast, and good, and then construct a 3-dimensional plot, with the xyz axes being those three metrics. Then particular cases/examples would be plotted as points and we'd see patterns in the distribution of the points. I doubt the points would all lie embedded in a 2-dimensional surface, but if they did, that would be a pretty cool finding!)

Eloise: What changes do we need to make for on-demand learning? #LCBQ

nospam@example.com (Eloise) — Fri, 06 May 2011 09:54:19 -0600

OK, I didn't qualify it fully in the text because I didn't think it required it - it's a truth for artisan type work. I include in that many learning packages that are developed in something closer to that model with the expert teacher doing the heavy lifting although ably assisted by many others.

For all your counter examples I'd accept cheap and in broad terms good (although good in the sense of high quality is certainly arguable for many of them). Fast is questionable though. How many years did it take to establish the electricity grid? How many years does it take to build a new power station? Electricity as you use it now is fast, but there's decades of support work and infrastructure in there that you're ignoring. In terms of person-hours you could be easily talking millennia of development to provide you electricity at the flick of a switch.

What's the development cycle for a new computer. 18 months if you take the iPad to iPad2 iteration... not fast, and if we guess at 100 people on the teams that did the work, that's over a century of person-hours.

How long were Chrome and Netflix in development before stable release? I know Chrome was about a year in public beta, and in private development before that, plus the engine they built on...

It helps to compare like with like Troy. And OK, I said it without qualification, but electricity from a consumer perspective and developing a learning package for on-demand learning are not the same, not even close to similar.

Troy McLuhan: What changes do we need to make for on-demand learning? #LCBQ

nospam@example.com (Troy McLuhan) — Fri, 06 May 2011 07:23:23 -0600

You wrote:

"Sketch a triangle, and put the words Cheap, Fast and Good on the corners. Cover up any one and you can have the other two... but not all three."

I've read this elsewhere, espoused as some kind of obvious truth, but there are plenty of counter-examples.

Modern computers are incredibly cheap, fast, and good.

Electricity is cheap, fast and good.

In the USA, Netflix is cheap and gives you instant access to oodles of great movies.

Chrome, the web browser...

Jeff Goldman: Assessing informal learning #LCBQ

nospam@example.com (Jeff Goldman) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 03:14:29 -0700

Thanks for the great response and some practical ideas for assessing informal learning in an org.

In a nutshell, "Check what questions are asked and what guidance is given." really sums up what I think we should first look for when gauging what people are getting from informal learning.

Thanks again,

Jeff

Eloise: Object of the year

nospam@example.com (Eloise) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:00:23 -0700

I have a rather nice, top-end amateur camera. I tend not to be a random snapper and while I don't take enough photos to make it worth me having a professional camera with body and separate lenses and so on, I get as close as I can.

It takes much, much better photos than any camera phone I've ever seen - being bigger and deeper (and heavier) makes a difference for all the optics ultimately.

That said, I'm not really a prima donna about it. The best camera is the one you've got when you need it and so on.

I think the thing is to think about what you actually need from your camera. If you're going to be snapping family, school kids at close range etc. then a camera phone (or an iPad camera if that's in version 2) should be fine.

About 50% of the pictures I take end up being converted into textures for SL, and having more pixels (12M or so) to manipulate is then always a critical part of the equation. Most of the other 50% are wildlife pictures, and the pesky wildlife never gets close enough for a camera phone to work. Sometimes they don't really get close enough for the big zoom on the proper camera to work either!

If you like landscapes... my feelings are mixed. But the better camera lets you make more choices about focus, depth of field etc. But, I'm a crap landscape photographer (don't really practise the art at all) and so they end up being touched up a lot and the camera in my old iPhone is often just fine because I don't take good enough pictures to really blow them up anyway.

Carol Rainbow: Object of the year

nospam@example.com (Carol Rainbow) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 16:35:11 -0700

Hi Eloise
I have to say I agree, I use mine more and more each day and really enjoy using it. Have not had the netbook out since I had the iPad, also rarely use the laptop, they are becoming redundant as I find apps to do what I need to do. I am still wondering whether to invest in the camera, not sure I actually need it though, the iphone will take reasonable pictures... Have you bought one and do you find it useful?

Also they are slightly more sociable, rather than sit at my desktop all night I am spending more time reading or whatever in the same space as anyone else at home but using the ipad to do my own thing whilst they all watch TV etc. I am still pretty antisocial though as you can tell At least by now they are all used to it!

Pip: The joys of constitutional monarchy

nospam@example.com (Pip) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 21:35:02 -0700

Hi Eloise. They are like the celebrities in the US, who are sort of like our royalty. These are people who get to live very well while not performing any meaningful or productive work, or doing much of anything that is actually useful to society. They are shown respect (by the media, mostly) because they either have tons of money, come from a powerful family and/or because the represent some sort of dream/fantasy. I'm not sure how I would feel about my tax money paying for the royal lifestyle but they do represent history and tradition.

scholarships for mothers: The joys of constitutional monarchy

nospam@example.com (scholarships for mothers) — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 18:03:00 -0700

thanxx
scholarships