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Meaningness's profile
David Chapman
David Chapman
David Chapman
@Meaningness

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David Chapman

@Meaningness

Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.

meaningness.com/about-my-sites
Joined September 2010

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    1. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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      A 🧵 on studies of formal logic as an embodied, situated, social, cultural, materially-mediated activity. This view contrasts with: 1 formal logics as Platonic mathematical objects 2 formal logic as an innate mental capacity

      7 replies 35 retweets 151 likes
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    2. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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      🧵 inspired by @cdutilhnovaes’ _Formal Languages in Logic_, about why formality is useful. Her overall explanation of how formal rationality works is closely similar to mine in _The Eggplant_ draft, so it was exciting reading! https://amzn.to/2NQNsxa 

      2 replies 0 retweets 16 likes
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    3. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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      The traditional explanation for the power of logic is “expressive precision,” but the experience of attempting to use logic in AI is that it totally fails for that. Specifically, whenever it encounters nebulosity, which is the main point of Part I of _The Eggplant_.

      1 reply 0 retweets 19 likes
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    4. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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      Another traditional virtue of logic is truth preservation (true premises => true conclusions); but there are nearly no absolute truths in the eggplant-sized world, and deduction does not preserve mostly-truth. So that’s not the answer outside applications in math and CS.pic.twitter.com/JZBRjPqrUH

      4 replies 0 retweets 25 likes
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    5. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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      David Chapman Retweeted David Chapman

      “Dual process theories” say we have an innate rationality module that does logic correctly, plus an irrationality module that messes it up. (This goes back to the Greeks.) In a recent 🧵 I pointed out several reasons this is wrong and has damaged cogsci.https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1079802460124766215 …

      David Chapman added,

      David Chapman @Meaningness
      Rationalism tends to lump all phenomena other than formal rationality as a single deficient category. “Dual process” theories systematize this error. pic.twitter.com/mCafGrQbpz
      5 replies 8 retweets 28 likes
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    6. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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      @cdutilhnovaes’s book [quote below], and the others I’ll cite in this 🧵, treat logic as a culturally-evolved technology for particular sorts of reasoning. It’s something we do, not something we have or are. It’s also not something that lives in the Platonic Form Realm.pic.twitter.com/o4kxqx5KxN

      2 replies 5 retweets 34 likes
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    7. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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      Mostly we do formal reasoning on paper, or a blackboard or whiteboard. Some bits are best done in the shower, but most of it critically depends on these external material technologies. Richard Feynman got this:pic.twitter.com/zAFeMumKm0

      2 replies 29 retweets 116 likes
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    8. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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      Rationalism holds that rationality works by abstracting a concrete problem into an immaterial formal realm. This is a weird flex, inasmuch as modern rationalists are usually passionately committed to materialism. Can we do formal logic without spooks? Yes we can!pic.twitter.com/nOa4A8fFGZ

      5 replies 3 retweets 39 likes
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    9. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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      Taking formal reasoning as typically a publicly observable, material activity exorcizes the banshees. But, there’s something right about the “abstraction” idea. How and when and why does this work? [Eggplant text here and in last, not @cdutilhnovaes]pic.twitter.com/gXxLc31Bme

      3 replies 0 retweets 16 likes
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    10. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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      There’s also something partly right about the “informal reasoning messes up formal” idea, as shown by the Cognitive Reflection Test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_reflection_test …pic.twitter.com/ef2sCzzgO3

      3 replies 1 retweet 19 likes
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      David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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      The essential problem faced by “mere reasonableness”—informal rationality—is the unenumerability of potentially relevant background factors. Part II of The Eggplant explains how that works. (In part: cross the river when you come to it.)pic.twitter.com/LHdfQBbzpt

      10:35 AM - 12 Jul 2019
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      • Noise Reduction 🕷BenjaminP.Taylor🇪🇺 Martin Klewitz 🏛 Will Kane Adam Strandberg Sean Erle Johnson Venkatesh brrrRao AQ Nimayi
      1 reply 8 retweets 38 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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          In the Cognitive Reflection Test, you have to forcefully inhibit your informal reasoning, which gets wrong answers. Nice analysis from @drossbucket! @cdutilhnovaes gives similar examples from the Wason selection task: real-world relevance interferes. https://drossbucket.wordpress.com/2018/12/12/the-bat-and-ball-problem-revisited/comment-page-1/ …pic.twitter.com/gS9ykxsecE

          4 replies 11 retweets 47 likes
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        3. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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          Reasoning with external material formal notation (squiggles on paper) accomplishes abstraction in two ways discussed by @cdutilhnovaes: de-semantification and ease of calculation.

          1 reply 2 retweets 21 likes
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        4. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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          De-semantification: If you read the word “raven” you usually get a visual image and are primed with all your background knowledge of ravens. Writing ɸ(x) instead of “is a raven” strips that off, and thereby inhibits the “merely reasonable” ways of thinking.

          4 replies 4 retweets 34 likes
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        5. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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          Humans evolved for concrete sensorimotor activity (e.g. foraging) and for social relationship maintenance. We didn’t evolve for formal rationality; unfortunately there is no “System 2” logic box in the brain, and we are terrible at it. We can manage only with external aids…

          3 replies 5 retweets 35 likes
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        6. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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          Calculation: external formal notation repurposes our sensorimotor skills to perform operations our brains unaided mostly can’t. Logical giant A.N. Whitehead: “By the aid of symbolism, we can make transitions in reasoning almost mechanically by the eye” & @cdutilhnovaes below:pic.twitter.com/thW8x7tW6i

          1 reply 1 retweet 30 likes
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        7. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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          A well-designed formalism, skillfully deployed, makes each next calculation step *visually obvious* and therefore difficult to screw up. Mathematicians speak of calculative rationality as “symbol pushing” because at a felt level that’s exactly what we’re doing.

          4 replies 4 retweets 36 likes
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        8. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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          Examples: Putting terms in a commutative expression in the right order helps a lot even though “logically” it makes no difference. Align key symbols in formulae vertically on the page to group analogous clauses to make it clear what the next step is.

          1 reply 0 retweets 17 likes
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        9. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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          Einstein notation replaces enormously complicated algebraic work with visually simple sub/superscript fiddling that analogizes kinesthetically to physically moving things around by hand. Also uses visually different symbols to track vector dimensions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_notation …pic.twitter.com/oBfWkyENZR

          1 reply 0 retweets 27 likes
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        10. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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          (h/t @drossbucket for this example)

          2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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        11. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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          Two quotes here from @cdutilhnovaes about this. Also two of her key sources, which I haven’t yet looked into myself (but intend to).pic.twitter.com/CqSK3SAcna

          1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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        12. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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          “The materiality of mathematics: Presenting mathematics at the blackboard” by @greiffenhagen makes this much more concrete, through close study of a video of a lecturer presenting a proof of the completeness theorem for propositional logic.pic.twitter.com/Ru0J6xGfmz

          4 replies 5 retweets 37 likes
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        13. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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          David Chapman Retweeted David Chapman

          Here’s @greiffenhagen showing the embodied, spacial, temporal, interactive nature of a proving of the Dutch Book Argument (cc @cdutilhnovaes)https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1005489362052632578 …

          David Chapman added,

          David Chapman @Meaningness
          Startling serendipity: I began a literature search on the ethnomethodology of formal rationality yesterday, and one of the first things to turn up was a video analysis of someone delivering the Dutch Book Argument! http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1172/2585#g232 … pic.twitter.com/L7LoK6t85t
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          1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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        14. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 12 Jul 2019
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          (Going to pick up this unfinished thread tomorrow probably—have other things to do now!)

          6 replies 1 retweet 7 likes
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        15. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 13 Jul 2019
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          David Chapman Retweeted David Chapman

          Yesterday’s logic 🧵 got out of control. Shorter 🧵 here on formal logic as a social practice that is a somewhat-contingent product of cultural evolution:https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1150166188476862464 …

          David Chapman added,

          David Chapman @Meaningness
          “Ethnomethodology” is basically the empirical study of rationality, both informal and formal, considered as an embodied, situated, material, social and cultural activity. Unfortunately it has its own jargon plus methodological issues; but seems directly relevant to your work.
          Show this thread
          1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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        16. End of conversation

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