Knowing Things is Hard – Book and Sword
Knowing Things is Hard
Abstraction
Wikipedia's explanation needs work.
Computer scientists use abstraction to make models that can be used and re-used without having to re-write all the program code for each new application on every different type of computer. They communicate their solutions with the computer by writing source code in some particular computer language which can be translated into machine code for different types of computers to execute. Abstraction allows program designers to separate a framework (categorical concepts related to computing problems) from specific instances which implement details. This means that the program code can be written so that code does not have to depend on the specific details of supporting applications, operating system software, or hardware, but on a categorical concept of the solution.
Analogy
Anecdote
Its wise not to trust them unless you have checked an original source. All too often the story that you use to represent a situation in miniature was made up by a journalist in 1928 or an opera writer in 1782. See Friedman's Law of Anecdotes for more details.
Anchoring Effect (skepdic)
Once you have a number for something, you tend to feel that other numbers for it should be similar, even if the first number was pulled out of a hat. This is one reason why Decorative Statistics (q.v.) are not harmless, and why Anecdotes (q.v.) should not be trusted.
Archaeological Visibility
Ceramics and lithics survive much better than skin, wood, or textiles, but most things in the ancient world were made of those materials which rarely survive. So we know the most about objects of the less common materials.
Argumentative Theory of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber)
You cannot reason someone out of a position which they did not reason themselves in to, yet hearing other views helps you develop your own. If we were always as cautious and unsure as the evidence warrants, little ancient history would be written!
Authoritarian Teleology (Iza Ding, 2023)
Broadly speaking, it's a style of thinking that interprets whatever an authoritarian govt does as a \u2018strategy\u2019 to \u2018stay/remain/survive in power.\u2019 ... We also see a functionalism that explains everything by staying in power. Repress? To stay in power. Ease repression? To stay in power. ... This might not be wrong, but it is unfalsifiable. ... Another big problem is that \u2018between action and consequence lies a chasm that no one can bridge, let alone control.\u2019 ... Other factors like emotions, pettiness, petulance, values, commitments, laziness, narcissism, and mere stupidity get set aside or coopted
Iza Ding, Associate Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University (Illinois), .com, 18 November 2023 http://archive.today/ oagGs
She has now used this term in at least one lecture. See also Illusion of Control.
Autobiographical Heuristic
Assuming that elements in a work of literature reflect the writer's life and experience, rather than earlier texts, things they had been told, or pure imagination.
ancient biographers of famous poets ... had access to extremely little genuine information about famous poets' lives, but they desperately wanted more information, so they tried to interpret those poets' works biographically, assuming that their characters' personalities reflect aspects of the poets' own personalities and that events the poets portray as happening to their characters reflect actual events that happened to the poets themselves in real life. The problem is that, in the absence of reliable biographical information about the author of a given work, it is impossible to reliably distinguish which aspects of the work are inspired by the author's real life and which aspects are purely fictional with no basis in reality. Moreover, even when events in a play do probably draw inspiration from real-life events, they also draw from the literary tradition. For instance, although Sophokles's depiction of the plague in the Oidipous Tyrannos does probably owe some inspiration to the real-life Plague of Athens, it almost certainly also draws inspiration from the Iliad, which similarly begins with a plague sent by Apollon devastating the Achaian troops.
Spencer McDaniel https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2024/04/30/ what-do-the-newly-read-herculaneum-papyri-actually-tell-us- about-plato/
See also Persona.
Auxiliary Sciences of History (Wikipedia)
Availability Bias
I talked about this in my first book
Big, modern, educated brains
don't use them to imagine how you would solve a problem when you can ask skilled but less educated people from another culture how they did it! Your solution might not be worse than a historical solution, but it will almost certainly be different.
Brandolini's Law, the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle (2013)
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
Burden of Proof
its the obligation of the person making a claim to support it, not of the audience to refute it. See Brandolini's Law.
Cherrypicking
choose the data or the interpretation which supports your preferred interpretation
Citing Nonexistent Sources
ChatGPT output is not the only text that does this!
Clash of Civilizations
very rarely a real thing but makes good stories. See Internal vs. External Conflict.
Classical Style of Argument (2016)
Confabulation (Skeptic's Dictionary)
see also Power of Fiction. NB. \u201cchildren and many adults confabulate when encouraged to talk about things of which they have no knowledge.\u201d (think about what this implies about LLM s and spicy autocomplete)
Confirmation Bias
Most people are much better at making up arguments for something they want to believe or against something they don't want to believe than at finding the truth. This is one reason why academia is based around debates. One possible reason for this is the Argumentative Theory of Reason (q.v.). See nullius in verbis.
Constitutive Other
many neurotypicals define themselves against one, even if that other is mostly made up. The Wikipedia page on Other (Philosophy) points to 20th century philosophers, but the specific phrase Constitutive Other is hard to find in Google Books before 1991. I would like to explore the history of this concept further!
Cool URIs don't change. Changing them breaks the link from citation to source. Knowing where something actually comes from is key to historical scholarship, because if the original argument was bad, often nobody since has made a better argument.
Counterfactuals (Meyer v. Weber)
You can't discuss cause and effect without making claims about what would have happened without this, but predicting what would have happened in that case is very very hard. Predictions, like advice, often tell you more about the person giving them than about the world.
Deconstruction \u2026
Decorative Statistics (Ray Fisman, Andrew Gelman, and Matthew C. Stephenson, “The Statistics That Come Out of Nowhere,” The Atlantic, March 2023)
These numbers are what we might call \u201cdecorative statistics.\u201d Their purpose is not to convey an actual amount of money but to sound big and impressive. That doesn't keep them from being added, subtracted, divided, or multiplied to yield other decorative statistics.
Defensiveness
its embarrassing to be wrong in public, so once you have publicly committed to a position its hard to change your mind. See also Confirmation Bias and Identity Protection and Partisanship.
Ecological fallacy
the average person in the past saw about two children reach adulthood, but many had none and many had five. Peasant societies are diverse and dynamic when you look closely, they only seem static and unchanging when you zoom out and look for overall trends. One family often rose and fell in income, one village specialized in millstones or weaving cloaks, its only when we look at an economy as a whole that we see average income staying about the same and millstones and cloaks being made.