Experience is the best teacher, they say. There are some things, it is argued, that can at best only be closely approximated in the mind by a process consisting merely of visualisation and fuelled essentially by imagination. Marriage, for example is considered well understood, at least as an institution. And yet, it is supposedly something that those who are either married themselves, or who have had a relatively long exposure of the institution can really understand, leave aside appreciate.
Old sayings, supposed to be the summarised results of centuries of wisdom, should be, at least in theory, be usable effectively as a proxy to self-experience, especially if used in conjunction with, and in addition to an anticipatory framework developed, both syntactically and semantically, on the basis of a logical analysis, and having a causal relationships based structure. In other words, based on a “what causes this ? “ questions as the core mechanism, and then a “what does this translate to ?” question as the mechanism to transfer the insights from the former to a model, giving you a set of things or events to expect or not to expect, as the case may be.
Though analytically sound, the above argument, however, makes some pretty big assumptions. For one, the ability of the model-developer to ask enough and the right kind of questions at both stages is assumed to be adequate, even if the adequacy as a relative evaluation is taken for granted for a moment. This is a dangerous assumption to make, especially if you are to base any decisions on the expectations derived from the model, not just because you may act on incorrect information, but also because most often you will not even realise the same, and therefore any undesired effects of your decisions are unlikely to be attributed to incorrect modelling, even at a latter stage. This means that there is a more than reasonable chance of your getting into a situation where you might keep looking for a problem where none exists, and perenially fail to be effective at all.
But of course, any engineer would immediately point out that there is a systemic design flaw, and in any case, there should have been a definite mechanism for feedback within the model in the first place. The problem with that, ofcourse, is that humans have not, as of now, discovered a way to beat time, and therefore every “feedback” is, really speaking, merely a “feedahead” in temporal terms. In other words, since you cannot use information from any feedback to reverse the effects of a decision you have taken in the past – at least not completely. This argument, in conjunction with the fact that all decision making in the end breaks down to answering a set of yes-no questions, complicates the entire process, because when you answer a yes-no questions incorrectly, the impact is likely to be much larger than that of an error you make in slightly under or overestimating a certain parameter – what I would call a grayscale error.
Another assumption in the suggested theory is even more obvious. It has been assumed that there is no information external to the model and affecting it, which is unknown at the time of answering the questions asked. This is a mammoth assumption, often not given due significance simply because we, in our typical human arrogance, believe that we have understood ourselves entirely, and therefore the combined and accumulated wealth of human knowledge should be enough to correctly answer all the questions asked at both the stages of the model-building process. This, we feel, is almost completely true especially in the case of social sciences, though we may concede some unknowns in the domain of physical sciences. Two major problems exist with this assumption. One is that our understanding of and interpretation of social sciences by itself is highly correlated with the progress we have made in grasping the physical truths of the universe. This is because every social phenomenon, behavioural trait, human characteristic, needs, wants etc. are explained, at the end of the day, using axioms from the physical and natural sciences, the the theory of evolution and the theory of chaos being striking examples of this dependence. Thus any changes in the theories of the physical world may any time shake the very foundations of the social theories, laws and frameworks. The second problem is that even if one accepts that we understand social sciences almost completely, the “almost” means that the entire question of uninhibitedly trusting the answers given on the basis of this knowledge is thrown open.
Exasperated though one may have been by so many problems raised in the preceding discourse, with no hint or intent of talking about a solution at all, I see one way, which, while not perfect by far, comes the closest to it. And to sum up the solution in a sentence, “Only a husband or a wife can truly know what marriage is.” . That is, I go back to feeling things instinctively without a deliberate effort at structure or analytics. Drastic though this may seem, even desperate to some readers, I take refuge in the fact that instinct, firstly, has a very small decision making window in time, i.e. instinctive decisions are taken for a very short future period of time. Simply put, this means that an instinctive decision is essentially only a “what just next ? “ and does not even seek to answer “what after that ? “ . This reduces, to a great degree, the damage that could be done by taking a wrong decision. Also, that makes feedback much more meaningful and relevant, as you can incorporate feedback very fast, sometimes in your very next action, as you are not committed at any point to any particular course of action.
The second justification comes from the fact that while we may not have theorized some of the physical laws at any given point in time, out instinctive feel of the way the physical world works is likely to be much more complete, having conditioned for much longer.
Ofcourse, I understand that there are at least five to six distinct objections to this idea which are well known and articulated. In the next part of this discourse, I am looking at making my stand about, hopefully, each of those and more, clear.
Old sayings, supposed to be the summarised results of centuries of wisdom, should be, at least in theory, be usable effectively as a proxy to self-experience, especially if used in conjunction with, and in addition to an anticipatory framework developed, both syntactically and semantically, on the basis of a logical analysis, and having a causal relationships based structure. In other words, based on a “what causes this ? “ questions as the core mechanism, and then a “what does this translate to ?” question as the mechanism to transfer the insights from the former to a model, giving you a set of things or events to expect or not to expect, as the case may be.
Though analytically sound, the above argument, however, makes some pretty big assumptions. For one, the ability of the model-developer to ask enough and the right kind of questions at both stages is assumed to be adequate, even if the adequacy as a relative evaluation is taken for granted for a moment. This is a dangerous assumption to make, especially if you are to base any decisions on the expectations derived from the model, not just because you may act on incorrect information, but also because most often you will not even realise the same, and therefore any undesired effects of your decisions are unlikely to be attributed to incorrect modelling, even at a latter stage. This means that there is a more than reasonable chance of your getting into a situation where you might keep looking for a problem where none exists, and perenially fail to be effective at all.
But of course, any engineer would immediately point out that there is a systemic design flaw, and in any case, there should have been a definite mechanism for feedback within the model in the first place. The problem with that, ofcourse, is that humans have not, as of now, discovered a way to beat time, and therefore every “feedback” is, really speaking, merely a “feedahead” in temporal terms. In other words, since you cannot use information from any feedback to reverse the effects of a decision you have taken in the past – at least not completely. This argument, in conjunction with the fact that all decision making in the end breaks down to answering a set of yes-no questions, complicates the entire process, because when you answer a yes-no questions incorrectly, the impact is likely to be much larger than that of an error you make in slightly under or overestimating a certain parameter – what I would call a grayscale error.
Another assumption in the suggested theory is even more obvious. It has been assumed that there is no information external to the model and affecting it, which is unknown at the time of answering the questions asked. This is a mammoth assumption, often not given due significance simply because we, in our typical human arrogance, believe that we have understood ourselves entirely, and therefore the combined and accumulated wealth of human knowledge should be enough to correctly answer all the questions asked at both the stages of the model-building process. This, we feel, is almost completely true especially in the case of social sciences, though we may concede some unknowns in the domain of physical sciences. Two major problems exist with this assumption. One is that our understanding of and interpretation of social sciences by itself is highly correlated with the progress we have made in grasping the physical truths of the universe. This is because every social phenomenon, behavioural trait, human characteristic, needs, wants etc. are explained, at the end of the day, using axioms from the physical and natural sciences, the the theory of evolution and the theory of chaos being striking examples of this dependence. Thus any changes in the theories of the physical world may any time shake the very foundations of the social theories, laws and frameworks. The second problem is that even if one accepts that we understand social sciences almost completely, the “almost” means that the entire question of uninhibitedly trusting the answers given on the basis of this knowledge is thrown open.
Exasperated though one may have been by so many problems raised in the preceding discourse, with no hint or intent of talking about a solution at all, I see one way, which, while not perfect by far, comes the closest to it. And to sum up the solution in a sentence, “Only a husband or a wife can truly know what marriage is.” . That is, I go back to feeling things instinctively without a deliberate effort at structure or analytics. Drastic though this may seem, even desperate to some readers, I take refuge in the fact that instinct, firstly, has a very small decision making window in time, i.e. instinctive decisions are taken for a very short future period of time. Simply put, this means that an instinctive decision is essentially only a “what just next ? “ and does not even seek to answer “what after that ? “ . This reduces, to a great degree, the damage that could be done by taking a wrong decision. Also, that makes feedback much more meaningful and relevant, as you can incorporate feedback very fast, sometimes in your very next action, as you are not committed at any point to any particular course of action.
The second justification comes from the fact that while we may not have theorized some of the physical laws at any given point in time, out instinctive feel of the way the physical world works is likely to be much more complete, having conditioned for much longer.
Ofcourse, I understand that there are at least five to six distinct objections to this idea which are well known and articulated. In the next part of this discourse, I am looking at making my stand about, hopefully, each of those and more, clear.
