Spellbound, what are you trying to accomplish by cut-and-pasting opinions by anonymous individuals from another discussion board to this one?
And what does it have to do with the subject line of this thread: "discussion of ctmu among professionals?"
What 'professionals' are you talking about? Who are they? What do they do professionally?
Thank you for your reply as always Yazata. You know I gotchou:
CuckYouFunts 10 points 2 days ago
Thank you for explaining why you think "If you have a good point you should be able to put it simply." I'll be brief in my disagreement.
There is no good way to losslessly compress complex data sets into convenient/ edible chunks. If it took an entire book of evidence and argument to reach a particular conclusion, however nonsensical that conclusion sounds, it is unlikely to take less than that to relate the basis for that conclusion meaningfully to another person. You can do it simply but not meaningfully, or meaningfully but not simply when there is enough information (map-territory paradox). Additionally, if the responsibility lays with the communicator, then the only effective way to approach the problem is to assume that every reader is a child and build up the argument from scratch using the most simple (and ultimately meaningless) language possible to meet everyone where they're at when you don't know where anyone is. However, that will also be ineffective for educated audiences (as I'm sure you've encountered in academia) and is not an economically responsible decision for mortals who have "limited time".
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segFault11235 7 points 2 days ago
Right but I think the reality of obfuscation happens by mixing new and accepted ideas in large blocks of information—usually because the speaker doesn't know what is and isn't generally accepted/matters of contention, etc. For instance, even if a whole book is dedicated to quantum mechanics, do we really need to divest the same amount of time in explaining the first few chapters (in theory about atoms, classical physics, linear algebra, etc.)? I'd certainly gloss over those few chapters, and hope the speaker could focus on the more nuanced points, perhaps emphasizing where I may have glossed too casually over something relevant to their greater point.
Depending on who you are conversing with, the communication is only lossy if the missing information isn't already shared. I think /u/tungstan's point is that someone incapable of recognizing this probably hasn't thought through the finer points.
For instance, your use of the word "lossy" implies you might have a good idea of how compression algorithms work. I don't need 4 pages to communicate to you why I find .mp3/4 data formats perfectly preferable to the every-day music consumer than FLAC or ALAC. We can jump straight to the heart of the matter.
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CuckYouFunts 2 points 2 days ago
Assuming that the CTMU is meant to be a catch-all, there is no discipline that could skim over the first few chapters of a book on it, given that it would incorporate information they would not be familiar with. An accepted idea that is non-controversial in one field still needs to be stated and supported in full for a lay person. So, in this particular example, that solution is somewhat inapplicable. In general, the idea is still somewhat inapplicable, which is why materials on subjects are written for audiences with different levels of exposure to and mastery of a given subject.
Can you assume the information is already shared? I wouldn't. Or rather, i wouldn't anymore. Everyone is ignorant about something. I dare say, everyone is ignorant about nearly everything and is knowledgeable only about some thing.
Additionally, I wouldn't expect any of this to come to the front of a person's mind when writing a book. I'd expect it to come to their mind after editing or after the first people had read it. I also wouldn't expect someone good at philosophy to necessarily be good at theory of mind activities, especially not ones which can easily fall into infinite recursion.
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segFault11235 3 points 2 days ago
An accepted idea that is non-controversial in one field still needs to be stated and supported in full for a lay person
Right, but the key word I'd first like to point out here is "lay person". The issue at hand is this obfuscation for people that should be fairly familiar with at least the fundamentals of wha the argument pushes forth.
If your point is that the CTMU is so fundamentally different and non-derivative of any well-established knowledge that everything has to be laid out, that sounds far more problematic than anything else.
Can you assume the information is already shared? I wouldn't. Or rather, i wouldn't anymore. Everyone is ignorant about something.
Sure, but it's far more efficient and clear if you state the pivotal points, and then unpack items where the two parties disagree—especially if those two parties reasonably do share a similar amount of information (e.g. two debating philosophers etc.). For instance, in the lossy compression conversation, I'd start by simply making the case to you that the general consumer doesn't need the full range recorded—or even necessarily everything in the audible range—to be transmitted. We don't need to start by talking about compression algorithms or what it means to be lossy—or if we do, you ask about it and we clarify accordingly.
More relevantly, from the summary provided by the CTMU, I don't find the reduction of matter as "information" particularly intelligible or accurate, that would be where both our times would be best invested.
Additionally, I wouldn't expect any of this to come to the front of a person's mind when writing a book.
But we aren't just talking about books now. Books, of course, are permitted and should be as comprehensive as necessary ("how long is a piece of rope?"). But in the context of dialog, especially between two well-informed professionals, the obfuscation is needless and telling.
If someone comes to me and tells me that they're a software engineer, and I ask them why they believe a recursive implementation is preferable to using a stack data structure, I would expect that the speaker doesn't dwell on what the two items are, how they're formulated, etc. A straight answer is best. And I'd assume they didn't know what they were talking about if they didn't recognize this.
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CuckYouFunts 3 points 2 days ago
Right, but the key word I'd first like to point out here is "lay person". The issue at hand is this obfuscation for people that should be fairly familiar with at least the fundamentals of wha the argument pushes forth.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.
I'm a particle physicist. You're an organic chemist. A third party is a sociologist. Write a document that involves fundamentals in all 3 fields without potentially obfuscating the issue for another present party. The difficult inherent to that position increases non-linearly when accounting for all disciplines, all fields and sub-fields and specialties, and that's without a discussion on field-specific uses of common jargon. A theory of everything is going to run the risk of sounding like nonsense, especially an early version of a theory of everything written by one person who is unlikely to be an expert in the fields that need to be tied down.
If your point is that the CTMU is so fundamentally different and non-derivative of any well-established knowledge that everything has to be laid out, that sounds far more problematic than anything else.
My point is that it has to work to the lowest common denominator. Even the academic discipline lowest common denominator is ridiculously rudimentary. Again, using the 3 fields discussed, I can name off the top of my head at least one basic idea from one field that will elicit blank stares from the other 2 present.
I think we're at a sticking point. The remainder of your discussion treats the context as that of a discussion. The CTMU appears to be a collection of static documents, which I also think is more reasonable than explaining the same idea multiple times to individuals of varying mastery.
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*Taps chest twice*
Pe-ace,
Nick.
