[From:Chris Cherpas (970110.0911)]
[re:Bill Powers (970109.2010 MST)]
cc:
Perceiving frequency is just perceiving frequency.
cc:
Why can't I bet on a particular outcome being a given frequency being
observed? In that case, the "event" is simply an observed frequency.
BP:
A steady continuous frequency is not an event, is it?
cc:
Oh, no. I was not thinking of frequency in a steady, continuous sense.
I meant the static sense of frequency -- like viewing the distribution of
the counts of outcomes that show up when you toss dice a thousand times.
I think this is the sense that normally links frequency and probability.
Throwing the dice a thousand times can be viewed as a thousand events,
as one event, or as many events as you care to parse it into.
Aside: Historically, "frequentists" can be said to be objectivists (not
subjectivists) and foundationalists (not coherentists, or better,
"foundherentists" as Susan Haack puts it).
What sort of steady continuous frequencies do you have in mind?
BP:
...probability is entering in two different roles in this conversation...
In the other role, the probability itself is a perception to be controlled in
its own right.
cc:
I guess this is the sense I'm most interested in since I want to teach
kids how to control their perceptions of uncertainty/certainty, how to
construct and interpret representations (e.g., graphs, numbers) that help
them avoid unnecessarily stupid decisions or to stand up and criticize powerful
people who make claims about the future which are more likely to be constructed
for maintaining their power than to assist us in imagining futures we
can realistically expect to decide to pursue.
BP:
Instead of making the bet, we act to change the odds. We put on our glasses,
turn on the lights, and move closer to the thing, changing it from a blur to a
clear image of either a cat or something else. Then, when we act, a bet is no
longer necessary (that is, nobody would bet against us).
cc:
I think you find the notion of sitting around passively waiting for something
to happen, and betting on the outcome in the meantime, is frankly unsavory.
OK, I'll speak for myself: _I_ find it unsavory. I want to be able to act on
variables that change my uncertainty. That's why I distinguished between
classical and Bayesian probability senses earlier: classicists wait around for
outcomes of some scholastic, essentially vacuous, experiment, while Bayesians
actively seek to perform crucial experiments to revise the probabilities.
BP:
My recurring complaint about psychology is that having found the predictions
of accepted theories to entail a rather large margin of uncertainty,
psychologists have simply accepted this uncertainty as a fact of life and have
adapted their thinking and their methods to its apparently unavoidable
existence.
cc:
I agree and I think you've defended this point adequately. Even the much
maligned B.F. Skinner would agree too -- if he were not a decomposing corpse at
the moment. (There I go, making fun of the dead.)
cc:
Actually, contrasting different levels of scope or aggregation may reveal
the most important contribution of the discipline of probability (forget
the classical dice-throwing trivia for a moment): it's to stabilize some
point of view during the process of reconciling relatively
well-established macro- and micro-theories which are not coherent, to find
coherence "in the meantime" while you try to figure out some deterministic
scheme/perception to control for that is all-encompassing.
BP:
Chris, there's just GOT to be a simpler way to say that. I'll wait until you
find it.
cc:
A speculation: I'd like to propose that the event level may be especially
suited for (category-level?) representations to be shared, verified,
and/or challenged socially and culturally.
BP:
I think you have some narrow range of categories in mind.
cc:
My emphasis here is on external representations endure in a culture;
that are used for teaching successive generations about the world.
For example, history is largely represented in terms events.
BP:
What's so special about the "event" level?
cc:
That's the same question I'm raising. I speculated that external, sharable
representations of events seem to reflect important _collectively_ controlled
variables. I guessed that perceptions of events are what people often fight
about and agreement on events is what is often satisfactory to resolve
conflicts. In applying probability, we consider what the "outcome" will
be of an experiment, for example. This verifiable outcome is perhaps most
easily agreed upon -- or perhaps most easily made the basis for a new
experiment -- if we agree first of all that it is an event. I'm not making
a point about the principles of psychology here, just about ways that
people have found to resolve conflicts (see below).
cc:
Perhaps enduring/public/external representations of
events are easily agreed-to or compared.
BP:
I don't see that events are any easier to agree about than colors
or meter readings.
cc:
I don't think social conflicts are concerned with meter readings
and colors -- they're not generally "uncertain" enough. If a conflict
can be resolved by people aligning perceptions of the certainty of
something -- that something is more often events. Perceptions either
below or above tend to not be readily resolved by agreement of their
certainty (above) or are so easily resolved (below) that agreement
on their certainty is not so crucial to conflict resolution.
Anyway, so much for speculation, eh?
BP:
It's typical of a hierarchy of perception that when you select one
level through which to be aware of the world, everything takes on the
appearance of that level. If you're perceiving consciously at the level of
relationships, the world is made of relationships. If you're focused on the
configuration level, everything is an object. And if you're operating from
the symbol-handling level, everything consists of descriptions in words that
are defined only in terms of other words.
cc:
Well said. A point often forgotten (or just plain never considered!) by many
a sincere, but limited, seeker of knowledge, let alone those who consciously
exploit ignorance.
BP:
I'm sure that perception in terms of events has some useful part to play in
the functioning of the whole system. But no one level of perception is
useful by itself.
I couldn't agree more.
Best regards,
cc