JONATHAN PLACES RANDOMNESS AT ZERO ON A "GOOD TO BAD" SCALE THAT GOES FROM
POSITIVE TO NEGATIVE
Hi Platt, Roger and all,
PLATT>
> I don't mean to butt in on your interesting discussion of random patterns but
> feel obliged to point out something Pirsig said that contradicts Jonathan:
...
> At the end of his talk, "Subjects, Objects, Data and Values" Pirsig
> specifically states that what is meaningless can nevertheless have value.
Having spent several posts trashing randomness as valueless (Q=0), I walked home
last night thinking about how, by a twist of irony, this is not completely true.
I was thinking about how to make an elegant retreat, but Platt was too quick off
the mark.
PLATT
>It is like saying that the number zero is unacceptable to
>mathematics because there's nothing there. Mathematics
>has done very well with the number "zero" despite that fact.
I am forced to agree with Platt, and want to develop this a little further. The
truth is that there are circumstances where we "value" randomness, or rather,
arbitrariness. Whereas we usually value the PREDICTION power of our models,
sometimes we want to neutralize such models to eliminate PREJUDICE.
The sample picked by the opinion pollster, or the jury picked by the court are
valued precisely because they are considered not to be part of a prejudicial
model. I now realize why this is important:
THE PRECONCEPTION MAY BE WRONG
>From my post yesterday:-
JONATHAN
>How does one know whether or not some meaningless sequence of
>characters is a coded message or a monkey typing on a keyboard?
>When one can identify the source and it's intent, it is fine to regard
>the signal as information. However, there is a danger of extracting
>"false" information, which is what I believe that astrologers and
>palm readers do.
The preconceived model may be so wrong that it is worse than no model at all!!!!
Imagine imprisoning an innocent man, or even worse, executing him!
Randomness really does correspond to Quality=0, but that is compared to GOOD
patterns with positive quality and BAD patterns with negative quality.
Sometimes we don't know what sort of quality our pattern has i.e. we doubt its
TRUTH. Thus,
working on the assumption that GOOD patterns tend to re-emerge, it is sometimes
better to drop back to
Q=0 and start again with randomness.
Jonathan
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@wasted.demon.nl
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:00:40 BST