= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
sixes_and_sevens comments on True numbers and fake numbers - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (128)
Some anecdotal and meandering gubbins.
I am occasionally called upon to defend what an interlocutor thinks of as a "fake number". The way I typically do this is to think of some other measure, parameter, or abstraction my interlocutor doesn't think is "fake", but has analogous characteristics to the "fake number" in question, and proceed with an argument from parallel reasoning.
(Centre of mass is actually a very good go-to candidate for this, because most people are satisfied it's a "real", "physical" thing, but have their intuitions violated when they discover their centre of mass can exist outside of their body volume. If this isn't obvious, try and visualise the centre of mass of a toroid.)
Some of the above are this sort of parallel measure I have used in the past, either with each other or with some other measures and values mentioned in comments on this post. I'm quite pleased at how divisive some of them are, though I'm surprised at the near-unanimity of food calories, which I would have expected to be more politicised.
My conclusions to date have been that the "reality" of a measure has a strong psychological component, which is strongly formed by peoples' intuitions about, and exposure to, abstract concepts with robust, well-understood or useful behaviour.
How is the fact that the center of mass can exist outside the body volume supposed to make center of mass "fake" in any way shape or form?
To clarify, my position is that whether someone finds an abstract measure to be "fake" or not depends on how comfortable they are with abstractions. Some abstractions wear very concrete disguises, and people are generally fine with these.
My experience is that people's folk-physics interpretation of their centre of mass is that it's an actual part of their body that the rest of their body moves around. A lot of dancers, for example, will talk about their "core", their "centre" and their "centre of gravity" as interchangeable concepts. When confronted with the idea that it's an abstraction which can be located outside of their body, they're often forced to concede that this intangible thing is nonetheless an important and useful concept. If that's true of centre of mass, maybe they should think a little bit harder about market equilibria or standard deviation.
As Dan pointed out here cousin_it's definition of "fake number" has a very concrete meaning. The most your example shows is that the folk-physics notion "center of gravity" as opposed to the actual physics notion is a fake number.
While his definition of "true number" is fairly concrete, his definition of "fake number" is less so, and importantly is not disjoint with "true number".
ETA: Having thought about it a bit and looked over it, I'm fairly sure we're just talking past each other and there's no coherent point of dispute in this discussion. I suggest we stop having it.