Volume 2 – Handbook #II: Glossary & “Terms of Art” Definitions – Page 20
For new readers:
- Please read the “Pinned Post” at the top of this Substack’s Home Page, and titled Why Use Public Peer-Review to Write a Book? - “See for Yourself”.
For returning readers & subscribers:
A reader reacted to yesterday’s post, and the entry about the “Tenth Man” in particular, by pointing out that institutions in trouble, and that would benefit the most from such an approach to decision-making seem to be running away from it, stuck in locked-step, group-based “Willful Ignorance, Error & Deceit” - and asked: ” Why might this be the case?”
- Reading Richard Prum’s book, “The Evolution of Beauty”, provides an hypothesis as to why it may be that when we need alternatives the most, we run away from them, and why this may be the rule rather than the exception. Prum revives Charles Darwin's second leg of the theory of evolution: The impact of mate selection - the subjective world/mind-map/"Predictions" of the decision-maker - in addition to “Natural Selection” - the objective impacts of "Motions".
- Thus, the absence of hard constraints on conceptual mind-maps based on subjective “Predictions” may explain run-away Beauty in Art as well as Horror in Ideology. As we board such conceptual runaway trains of Art & Ideology, the objective, and hard constraints of “Natural Selection” may reassert themselves at some point, but it takes time, and bad things can happen in the meantime.
- "Constructive Skepticism", “Tenth Man”, and all provide conceptual regulators on such subjective runaway trains of thought, and their consequences. However, many trains leave the station in a hurry, heading for a crash before a “Tenth Man” can climb onboard.
Continuing with our regularly scheduled program, this post presents Page 20 for the “Terms-of-Art” definitions as shown below. This is the final page for Volume 2 – Handbook #II: Glossary & “Terms-of-Art” Definitions.
Volume 2 – Handbook #II: Glossary & “Terms of Art” Definitions – Page 20
Unsupervised Training
- “AI/ML” “Mmethodology”: “Inductive Inference” learning by discovery.
Utility
- 18th Century (D. Bernoulli 1738), “Small Worlds” approach to optimizing decision-making often used in economic and financial decision-making above & beyond the limitations of its “Axioms, Assumptions,& Hypotheses”. For instance, in her 1962 book “Economic Philosophy”, Joan Robinson shows that the definition of “Utility” suffers from logical circularity: “… the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility.”
Variance
- The “Expected Value” of the squared deviation of a “Random Variable” from the mean of its “Distribution”.
Veiling
- Key word from James Carse’s book “Finite and Infinite Games” to name the idea that we need to become willfully ignorant, thus “veil” ourselves from seeing the greater picture of the Infinite Game, in order to play Finite Games seriously enough to win them.
Visible Explanation
- One of the four quadrant descriptions in the enhanced-Cipolla chart. Applies to the upper-right quadrant, (the) “Intelligent”, and the good “Accuracy” of the “Known-knowns”.
Wild Randomness
See “Randomness”
Willful Ignorance
- Expression from Herbert Weisberg’s book by the same name to describe the self-blinding to the reality of “Clinical Ambiguities” in the “Large World” when one works with decision-making techniques based on the ensemble statistical “Tools” from the “Small World”.
Window of Virtuosity
- Expression that describes a period of time in an individual lifecycle when the combination of training, and experience turns into a state of “Flow’ – the seemingly effortless production of excellence and peak experience.
Winner-Takes-All
- Expression that describes the outcomes from a “Process” with non-ergodic “Growth Dynamics”, such as the Power Function,reflecting the presence of “Preferrential Attachments” rather than random assignments.
Wonder (Belief, Knowledge, Wonder)
- See “Belief”
Word Magic
- The use of words, as defined by C. K. Ogden, with the “Belief” that to name something means having power over what the named item. The use of language (natural, mathematical, or algorithmic) as a “Shadow-Soul” of the structure of reality – See “Number Magic” and how this leads to the idea of computer-based “Algorithmic Magic”.
Zones of Thought
- The name of a book trilogy by Vernor Vinge, started in the 1990s, representing a conceptual mapping of the Universe that include: (i) The Unthinking Depths, (ii) The Slow, (iii) The Beyond, and (iv) the Transcend. We can only see what we understand.
“CTRI by Francois Gadenne” writes a book in three volumes, published at the rate of one two-pages section per day on Substack for public peer-review. The book connects the dots of life-enhancing practices for the next generation, free of controlling algorithms, based on the lifetime experience of a retirement age entrepreneur, & continuously updated with insights from reading Wealth, Health, & Statistics (i.e. AI/ML/LLM) research papers on behalf of large companies as the co-founder of CTRI.