Mediation of Disputes

CSGnet Archive CSG2016
1

I came across this statement of Sayre’s Law: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." It made me wonder: What are the stakes in this math mistakes thread? The way I understand the “Math Mistakes� thread so far it seems Rick claims to have discovered some new truth about the velocity-curve whatchamacallit and Alex, Martin and Bruce claim (a) Rick doesn’t understand it and (b) Rick’s math is flawed.

Is there something really important and profound at stake here or simply egos at war? It seems to me that the parties involved are all talking past one another. Assuming there is something truly important at stake here, it seems to me that the use of a disinterested, third-party mediator might be in order. What do we need to resolve this dispute? An accomplished mathematician? A physics professor? What?

Fred Nickols

···

From: Richard Marken [mailto:rsmarken@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2016 1:55 PM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Math Mistakes

[From Rick Marken (2016.09.15.1100)]

Martin Taylor (2016.09.15.13.05) –

MT: Having read Bruce’s request for Rick to restate Bruce’s explanation of the mathematical error at the heart of Rick’s problem, to show understanding, I would like to modify my request to Rick. I originally asked Rick to point out where in the material quoted below he had difficulty understanding, but since he hasn’t chosen to do that, I offer an easier alternative instead.

MT: Now I ask Rick just to provide a paraphrase of the argument.

RM: No thanks. The proper way to show that there is a problem with my analysis is to explain in in terms of my analysis. So show me how what Bruce calls my “conceptual error” and what you call my “mathematical error” affects the validity or correctness of my analysis. IN order to do this you have to know what my analysis is. As I told Bruce, you and Bruce have shown no evidence of understanding my analysis. So how about showing showing that you do understand my analysis by restating it and then explaiking exactly how my “conceptual” or “mathematical” error invalidates it.

Thanks.

Rick

It should only take four or five lines to paraphrase enough to show whether he does understand. The first of those lines might be something like this: “A basic equation for curvature is stated”. That would be enough to cover the first paragraph of the explanation.

With Rick’s paraphrases of these two explanations of the problem by Bruce and me we would have a basis for understanding why he thinks that the error either isn’t an error or is irrelevant to his claim to have demonstrated (proved?) something about the curvature power-law observations.

RM: No we wouldn’t. It’s your turn to shop that you understand my analysis.

Martin

--------material to be paraphrased, from [Martin Taylor 2016.09.13.14.55] (“they” are Gribble and Ostry)-----

Now we have to see how they came to equation (9). That’s a bit more complicated, so please bear with me.
They presumably either used someone else’s derivation or made their own, starting from one of several equivalent measures of curvature, one of which is C = 1/R where R is the radius of the osculating circle at the point of concern. Another one is developed using vector calculus, which I have no intention of introducing into this discussion. It is C = dx/dsd2y/ds2 - dy/ds * d2x/ds2, where s is distance along the curve from some arbitrary starting point.
For G+O this formula was not very convenient, because they would have had to measure these first and second derivatives of x and y with respect to distance along the curve fairly accurately. But they had a trick available, in the “chain rule” of differentiation: dx/dydy/dz = dx/dz. The "dy"s cancel out just like ordinary variables. Using the chain rule on the first derivative gives you the rule for the second derivative, and so on. For the second derivative the rule is (d2x/dy2)(dy/dz)2 = d2x/dz2.
Using the chain rule, G+O could multiply the formula for C by (ds/dz}3/(ds/dz)3 = 1, for any variable z that allowed the differentiation, to get C = ((dx/ds)(ds/dz)(d2y/ds2)(ds/dz)2)(ds/dz)3 - (dy/ds)(ds/dz)(d2x/ds2)__(ds/dz)3)/(ds/dz)3__. This formula is true (allowing for typos) for variable “z” whatever (as with the divide by zero example), but it wouldn’t have helped G+O very much, had it not been that for one particular variable they already had measures they could use. Those measures were the ds/dt velocity and the derived d2s/dt2 values they had obtained from their observations of movement. Using those measures, they could set “z” = t (time), making dx/dt = dx/ds*ds/dt. They could then take advantage of their measured velocities to substitute for ds/dt, and write

C = (dx/dtd2y/dt2)/V3 - (dy/dtd2y/dt2)/V3

Oh goody! We don’t have to measure anything new to get our curvatures. We can use the values of dx/dt and dy/dt that we got before! Very handy. … But also very confusing, because it made the published equations look as though the V3/V3 multiplier was special to the velocities they measured, whereas it was simply a convenient choice from a literally infinite variety of choices they could have made. G+O made it even more confusing in the publication by using the Newton dotty notation, which made it look as though there was something necessary about the time differentiation in the curvature equation.

When we put all this together, we come to the way this is a variant of the “divide by zero” error. That error depends on the fact that you can put any variable at all in for “x” in “x/0 = infinity”. The – shall we call it – the “curvature error” depends on the fact that you can use anything at all for V (including the measured values), provided only that V is defined as ds/dz where z is some variable for which ds/dz exists everywhere. You therefore cannot use the curvature equation in any way to determine V.

---------end material for paraphrase-------

–

Richard S. Marken

“The childhood of the human race is far from over. We have a long way to go before most people will understand that what they do for others is just as important to their well-being as what they do for themselves.” – William T. Powers

2

I agree, Fred. And I won’t spend an extra minute of my time with this bullshit discussion. But remember that in science, which is certainly carried out by people with egos (usually big ones), one cannot just speak mambo-jumbo and repeat long paragraphs of bullshit and then hope that one calls “a mediator” to solve it as if that was an emotional break up between a couple. If one does not provide evidence, of provides very little and makes it sound as if it was a whole general proof, if one does not understand basic maths, if one doesn’t read each other’s explanations, if one think he has discover another behavioral illusion even before really getting what the problem is all about, if one does not want to read the forwarded basic references on the topic, in a word, if one uses the CSGnet as a way to hear the echo of his own voice amplified, and if people who can’t judge a cent about how flawed and rhetoric all those arguments are now come and give us lectures about patience and comprehension and MOL and mediators, if that is what CSGnet is what is supposed to be, then the Great Explorer who crossed the seas can only pity us from the other side of the universe as he realizes that he had the skills and courage to sail to the unknown, whereas most of his fans now just repeat the stories about how great that Explorer was, but they can hardly build a boat, nor know the geography of other lands, nor want to learn it; they just found a confortable place to write and write and write and write about the quests of the Explorer, and nothing more. Shame!

···

On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 8:29 PM, Fred Nickols fred@nickols.us wrote:

I came across this statement of Sayre’s Law:  "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." It made me wonder: What are the stakes in this math mistakes thread? The way I understand the “Math Mistakes� thread so far it seems Rick claims to have discovered some new truth about the velocity-curve whatchamacallit and Alex, Martin and Bruce claim (a) Rick doesn’t understand it and (b) Rick’s math is flawed.

Is there something really important and profound at stake here or simply egos at war? It seems to me that the parties involved are all talking past one another. Assuming there is something truly important at stake here, it seems to me that the use of a disinterested, third-party mediator might be in order. What do we need to resolve this dispute? An accomplished mathematician? A physics professor? What?

Â

Fred Nickols

Â

From: Richard Marken [mailto:rsmarken@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2016 1:55 PM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Math Mistakes

Â

[From Rick Marken (2016.09.15.1100)]

Martin Taylor (2016.09.15.13.05) –

MT: Having read Bruce’s request for Rick to restate Bruce’s explanation of the mathematical error at the heart of Rick’s problem, to show understanding, I would like to modify my request to Rick. I originally asked Rick to point out where in the material quoted below he had difficulty understanding, but since he hasn’t chosen to do that, I offer an easier alternative instead.

MT: Now I ask Rick just to provide a paraphrase of the argument.

Â

RM: No thanks. The proper way to show that there is a problem with my analysis is to explain in in terms of my analysis. So show me how what Bruce calls my “conceptual error” and what you call my “mathematical error” affects the validity or correctness of my analysis. IN order to do this you have to know what my analysis is. As I told Bruce, you and Bruce have shown no evidence of understanding my analysis. So how about showing showing that you do understand my analysis by restating it and then explaiking exactly how my “conceptual” or “mathematical” error invalidates it. Â

Â

Thanks.

Â

Rick

Â

Â

It should only take four or five lines to paraphrase enough to show whether he does understand. The first of those lines might be something like this: “A basic equation for curvature is stated”. That would be enough to cover the first paragraph of the explanation.

With Rick’s paraphrases of these two explanations of the problem by Bruce and me we would have a basis for understanding why he thinks that the error either isn’t an error or is irrelevant to his claim to have demonstrated (proved?) something about the curvature power-law observations.

Â

RM: No we wouldn’t. It’s your turn to shop that you understand my analysis.Â

Â

Â

Martin

--------material to be paraphrased, from [Martin Taylor 2016.09.13.14.55] (“they” are Gribble and Ostry)-----

Now we have to see how they came to equation (9). That’s a bit more complicated, so please bear with me.
They presumably either used someone else’s derivation or made their own, starting from one of several equivalent measures of curvature, one of which is C = 1/R where R is the radius of the osculating circle at the point of concern. Another one is developed using vector calculus, which I have no intention of introducing into this discussion. It is C = dx/dsd2y/ds2 - dy/ds * d2x/ds2, where s is distance along the curve from some arbitrary starting point.
For G+O this formula was not very convenient, because they would have had to measure these first and second derivatives of x and y with respect to distance along the curve fairly accurately. But they had a trick available, in the “chain rule” of differentiation: dx/dydy/dz = dx/dz. The "dy"s cancel out just like ordinary variables. Using the chain rule on the first derivative gives you the rule for the second derivative, and so on. For the second derivative the rule is (d2x/dy2)(dy/dz)2 = d2x/dz2.
Using the chain rule, G+O could multiply the formula for C by (ds/dz}3/(ds/dz)3 = 1, for any variable z that allowed the differentiation, to get C = ((dx/ds)(ds/dz)(d2y/ds2)(ds/dz)2)(ds/dz)3 - (dy/ds)(ds/dz)(d2x/ds2)__(ds/dz)3)/(ds/dz)3__. This formula is true (allowing for typos) for variable “z” whatever (as with the divide by zero example), but it wouldn’t have helped G+O very much, had it not been that for one particular variable they already had measures they could use. Those measures were the ds/dt velocity and the derived d2s/dt2 values they had obtained from their observations of movement. Using those measures, they could set “z” = t (time), making dx/dt = dx/ds*ds/dt. They could then take advantage of their measured velocities to substitute for ds/dt, and write

C = (dx/dtd2y/dt2)/V3 - (dy/dtd2y/dt2)/V3

Oh goody! We don’t have to measure anything new to get our curvatures. We can use the values of dx/dt and dy/dt that we got before! Very handy. … But also very confusing, because it made the published equations look as though the V3/V3 multiplier was special to the velocities they measured, whereas it was simply a convenient choice from a literally infinite variety of choices they could have made. G+O made it even more confusing in the publication by using the Newton dotty notation, which made it look as though there was something necessary about the time differentiation in the curvature equation.

When we put all this together, we come to the way this is a variant of the “divide by zero” error. That error depends on the fact that you can put any variable at all in for “x” in “x/0 = infinity”. The – shall we call it – the “curvature error” depends on the fact that you can use anything at all for V (including the measured values), provided only that V is defined as ds/dz where z is some variable for which ds/dz exists everywhere. You therefore cannot use the curvature equation in any way to determine V.

---------end material for paraphrase-------

Â

–

Richard S. MarkenÂ

“The childhood of the human race is far from over. We have a long way to go before most people will understand that what they do for others is just as important to their well-being as what they do for themselves.” – William T. Powers

3

I
came across this statement of Sayre’s Law:  "In
any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely
proportional to the value of the issues at stake."Â It made
me wonder: What are the stakes in this math mistakes
thread? The way I understand the “Math Mistakes� thread so
far it seems Rick claims to have discovered some new truth
about the velocity-curve whatchamacallit and Alex, Martin
and Bruce claim (a) Rick doesn’t understand it and (b)
Rick’s math is flawed.

        Is

there something really important and profound at stake here
or simply egos at war?

4

[From Rick Marken (2016.09.15.1450)]

···

On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 11:29 AM, Fred Nickols fred@nickols.us wrote:

FN: I came across this statement of Sayre’s Law: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.”

RM: That’s one of those statements that sounds profound but is actually incorrect, from a PCT perspective. PCT says that the intensity of a dispute (conflict) is proportional to the output gain and the limits to the amount of output that can be produced by the parties involved in the dispute. So to the extent that we can consider the output gain used to control a variable a reflection of how important control of that variable is to the controller, the intensity of a dispute is directly proportional to how important control of the issue (variable) in dispute is to the parties involved. This may be why observers of the dispute, to whom the issue in dispute is not important, see disputes of increasing intensity to be much ado about nothing. Clearly, the dispute over the PCT explanation of the power law is not much ado about nothing to the participants involved.

FN: It made me wonder: What are the stakes in this math mistakes thread?

RM: What you are asking about is what is the variable that the parties to the dispute want in different states. Since we would have to describe it verbally there would probably be little agreement between the disputants regarding what that variable is. From my point of view I would describe the variable in dispute as “a PCT explanation of the power law”. Clearly this variable can be in at least two different states; my “statistical artifact” explanation is one state; everyone else’s explanation, which is unspecified but can be described as “Rick’s is wrong”, is the other state.

FN: Is there something really important and profound at stake here or simply egos at war?

RM: As I said, it’s obviously important to the disputants. As you know from PCT, things are not intrinsically important (or profound or beautiful). The importance of things is defined by our references for the state of those things and the gain with which we act to bring those things to their references. So obviously the topic of this dispute is really important to me; I think it’s also obviously important to the others in the dispute. I think the topic would mainly be important to researchers though. I can’t imagine it would be of much interest to non-researchers.

FN: It seems to me that the parties involved are all talking past one another.

RM: Somewhat. I think what you are seeing is an output detente – like where the two sides in a tug of war are pulling in opposite directions with maximum strength (gain), so the flag (the controlled variable) goes nowhere. In this dispute the “flag” is “PCT explanation of the power law”. It looks like the outputs (arguments) are having no effect on the state of this variable when in fact they are having maximum equal and opposite effects. Since they appear to be having no effect, the arguments seem to be talk that goes past each side of the dispute.

FN: Assuming there is something truly important at stake here, it seems to me that the use of a disinterested, third-party mediator might be in order.

RM: I think CSGNet is full of disinterested third parties. Some have already tried to mediate, perhaps because they were really not that disinterested. Anyway, I don’t think it worked too well. I think the dispute will eventually burn itself out, though, with everyone still believing what they though to start with. I’m certainly ready to go off to another topic.

FN: What do we need to resolve this dispute? An accomplished mathematician? A physics professor? What?

RM: An MOL therapist!

Best

Rick

Fred Nickols

From: Richard Marken [mailto:rsmarken@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2016 1:55 PM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Math Mistakes

[From Rick Marken (2016.09.15.1100)]

Martin Taylor (2016.09.15.13.05) –

MT: Having read Bruce’s request for Rick to restate Bruce’s explanation of the mathematical error at the heart of Rick’s problem, to show understanding, I would like to modify my request to Rick. I originally asked Rick to point out where in the material quoted below he had difficulty understanding, but since he hasn’t chosen to do that, I offer an easier alternative instead.

MT: Now I ask Rick just to provide a paraphrase of the argument.

RM: No thanks. The proper way to show that there is a problem with my analysis is to explain in in terms of my analysis. So show me how what Bruce calls my “conceptual error” and what you call my “mathematical error” affects the validity or correctness of my analysis. IN order to do this you have to know what my analysis is. As I told Bruce, you and Bruce have shown no evidence of understanding my analysis. So how about showing showing that you do understand my analysis by restating it and then explaiking exactly how my “conceptual” or “mathematical” error invalidates it.

Thanks.

Rick

It should only take four or five lines to paraphrase enough to show whether he does understand. The first of those lines might be something like this: “A basic equation for curvature is stated”. That would be enough to cover the first paragraph of the explanation.

With Rick’s paraphrases of these two explanations of the problem by Bruce and me we would have a basis for understanding why he thinks that the error either isn’t an error or is irrelevant to his claim to have demonstrated (proved?) something about the curvature power-law observations.

RM: No we wouldn’t. It’s your turn to shop that you understand my analysis.

Martin

--------material to be paraphrased, from [Martin Taylor 2016.09.13.14.55] (“they” are Gribble and Ostry)-----

Now we have to see how they came to equation (9). That’s a bit more complicated, so please bear with me.
They presumably either used someone else’s derivation or made their own, starting from one of several equivalent measures of curvature, one of which is C = 1/R where R is the radius of the osculating circle at the point of concern. Another one is developed using vector calculus, which I have no intention of introducing into this discussion. It is C = dx/dsd2y/ds2 - dy/ds * d2x/ds2, where s is distance along the curve from some arbitrary starting point.
For G+O this formula was not very convenient, because they would have had to measure these first and second derivatives of x and y with respect to distance along the curve fairly accurately. But they had a trick available, in the “chain rule” of differentiation: dx/dydy/dz = dx/dz. The "dy"s cancel out just like ordinary variables. Using the chain rule on the first derivative gives you the rule for the second derivative, and so on. For the second derivative the rule is (d2x/dy2)(dy/dz)2 = d2x/dz2.
Using the chain rule, G+O could multiply the formula for C by (ds/dz}3/(ds/dz)3 = 1, for any variable z that allowed the differentiation, to get C = ((dx/ds)(ds/dz)(d2y/ds2)(ds/dz)2)(ds/dz)3 - (dy/ds)(ds/dz)(d2x/ds2)__(ds/dz)3)/(ds/dz)3__. This formula is true (allowing for typos) for variable “z” whatever (as with the divide by zero example), but it wouldn’t have helped G+O very much, had it not been that for one particular variable they already had measures they could use. Those measures were the ds/dt velocity and the derived d2s/dt2 values they had obtained from their observations of movement. Using those measures, they could set “z” = t (time), making dx/dt = dx/ds*ds/dt. They could then take advantage of their measured velocities to substitute for ds/dt, and write

C = (dx/dtd2y/dt2)/V3 - (dy/dtd2y/dt2)/V3

Oh goody! We don’t have to measure anything new to get our curvatures. We can use the values of dx/dt and dy/dt that we got before! Very handy. … But also very confusing, because it made the published equations look as though the V3/V3 multiplier was special to the velocities they measured, whereas it was simply a convenient choice from a literally infinite variety of choices they could have made. G+O made it even more confusing in the publication by using the Newton dotty notation, which made it look as though there was something necessary about the time differentiation in the curvature equation.

When we put all this together, we come to the way this is a variant of the “divide by zero” error. That error depends on the fact that you can put any variable at all in for “x” in “x/0 = infinity”. The – shall we call it – the “curvature error” depends on the fact that you can use anything at all for V (including the measured values), provided only that V is defined as ds/dz where z is some variable for which ds/dz exists everywhere. You therefore cannot use the curvature equation in any way to determine V.

---------end material for paraphrase-------

–

Richard S. Marken

“The childhood of the human race is far from over. We have a long way to go before most people will understand that what they do for others is just as important to their well-being as what they do for themselves.” – William T. Powers

–
Richard S. Marken

“The childhood of the human race is far from over. We
have a long way to go before most people will understand that what they do for
others is just as important to their well-being as what they do for
themselves.” – William T. Powers