14 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2023
    1. When you call 'foo' in Ruby, what you're actually doing is sending a message to its owner: "please call your method 'foo'". You just can't get a direct hold on functions in Ruby in the way you can in Python; they're slippery and elusive. You can only see them as though shadows on a cave wall; you can only reference them through strings/symbols that happen to be their name. Try and think of every method call 'object.foo(args)' you do in Ruby as the equivalent of this in Python: 'object.getattribute('foo')(args)'.
  2. Dec 2022
    1. what Marvin Harris said was the most important thing projecting the viability of a historical cultures is infrastructure, which is your expertise. But before we get into the infrastructure part, how do you envision society at the higher levels of belief, motivation, institutions? 00:25:09 Have you thought about that? Simon Michaux: Yes. So I believe society will shift into four parallel groups based on paradigm

      !- transition : for cultural / social groups / paradigms

  3. Oct 2022
    1. he limited hisdiscussion of Kuhn to a short article crediting Georg Christoph Lichtenbergwith a much more sophisticated concept of “paradigm.” 9

      Hans Blumenberg felt that Georg Christoph Lichtenberg had a more sophisticated conceptualization of the idea of "paradigm" than the one which Thomas Kuhn delineated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

      Cross reference the original mention of this:

      9 Borck, “Begriffene Geschichte: Canguilhem, Blumenberg und die Wissenschaften,” in Borck, Blumenberg beobachtet, 168–95, 179, outlines Blumenberg’s criticism of Kuhn’s model of paradigm change as too schematic. On the notion of paradigm, Blumenberg, “Paradigma, grammatisch,” in Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 157–62.

  4. Nov 2021
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  10. Mar 2019
    1. such as scope, simplicity, fruitfulness, accuracy

      Theories can be measured according to multiple metrics. The current default appears to be predictive accuracy, but this lists others, such as scope. If theory A predicts better but narrower and theory B predicts worse (in A's domain) but much more broadly, which is a better theory?

      Others might be related to simplicity and whatnot. For example, if a theory is numerical but not explanatory (such as scaling laws or the results of statistical fitting) this theory might be useful but not satisfying.

    2. Like in evolution, the process does not change toward some fixed goal according to some fixed rules, methods or standards, but rather it changes away from the pressures exerted by anomalies on the reigning theory (Kuhn 1962, 170–173). The process of scientific change is eliminative and permissive rather than instructive.

      This is similar to evolution: not guided, but not random. Does this view contradict the idea of progression?

      It also suggests a complex dynamic system that possess path dependence and environmental interaction.

  11. Feb 2019