From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat May 17 2003 - 13:39:53 MDT
James wrote
> I hadn't seen the Nolan chart before. Thanks for the
> pointer. I still think it's just the two dimensional
> analogue of the left/right fallacy, but less fallacious.
Yes.
> To increase the accuracy, should we add more dimensions?
I think that this is a general epistemological point. It's
almost as if there were a formula
adequacy-of-statement = (truth-content)/conciseness
So if someone could come up with a spiffy 3D Nolan chart,
then provided the numerator here made up for the increased
denominator, it would be seen by people as worthwhile.
In general, "the planets move around the sun in ellipses"
is solid-gold IMO as truth. Of course, "every statement
must be further modified", and so it's *more* accurate
(but at a great cost in clarity) to say instead "the planets
move around the sun in ellipses except for minor perturbations
induced by Jupiter and except for minor General Relativistic
corrections".
> Again, a perfectly accurate chart would be the universe itself,
> with all its unanalysable nonlinearity.
Exactly.
> This remind me of the Myers-Briggs personality types. That partitions
> personality into 16 groups, rather than 2. The granularity is increased,
> and with it the accuracy, but it's still not perfect. Refining the
> dissection would cover more edge cases, but increase the complexity,
> which such models are designed to reduce.
Just so.
> I believe the underlying question is about simple, linear models of
> complex nonlinear phenomena. At what level of complexity does the
> model cease to be sufficiently useful? At what level of simplicity
> does the model cease to be sufficiently accurate?
Worse, the answers will vary from person to person and from time to
time, and perhaps from situation to situation as well. That's sort
of why I love things like "planets move around the sun in ellipses",
and "there are those of us on the Right, and those of them on the
Left, and so, it appears, to have always been".
> I won't pretend to have thought hard enough about this to offer an
> answer, but I know the Left/Right model is so inaccurate that it's
> invariably used as a weapon rather than a useful simplification.
Well, yes, it is very unfortunate that it is used as a (ineffectual)
weapon. To say someone is a "right-wing superpatriot" does come
across as insulting; but I think that there are plenty of other
terms of abuse that the speaker could employ on his favorite targets
(e.g., "loony anti-American"), so somehow (call me crazy) I've always
had this feeling that it made for greater toleration, somehow, to
acknowledge the symmetry between ourselves and our adversaries, which
just might keep us from thinking them stupid, ignorant, misguided,
subhuman, mean-spirited, or malevolent by nature.
So it's not "invariably" used as a weapon.
Lee
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