Is there a name for the phenomena encountered with this particular response?
Specifically, I’m talking about when discussing extremely complex systems, ones that we don’t have full understanding of, there’s this tendency at a certain point of complexity to throw your hands up and say:
“because we can’t understand all of it perfectly then we can’t understand any of it and so just rely on these exceptionally loose grained impossible to define heuristics that have no comparability reference or baseline or anything meaningfully objective”
It’s like completely abandoning the concept of science measurement and just going full in with nothing matters we can’t measure it so do whatever you want.
Is it a failure of communication or is this an actual cognitive pattern that we can define?
It seems like a basic implementation of the all or nothing fallacy
That being said, listening to your own body is not a bad strategy. The nervous system evolved in tandem with this particular extremely complex system and is arguably purpose-built to keep it in good working order.
| listening to your own body is not a bad strategy.
Is it this strictly true? Are people that are overweight not just "listening to their body" when they overeat? I feel its not as simple as that. If we always listened to our bodies we would never exercise beyond the first instance of becoming tired for example.
Is there a name for the phenomena encountered with this particular response?
Specifically, I’m talking about when discussing extremely complex systems, ones that we don’t have full understanding of, there’s this tendency to ignore the huge gaps in our knowledge and deny that individuals can know anything objectively about how their body responds to things, even though science has no explanation for it…
>ignore the huge gaps in our knowledge and deny that individuals can know anything objectively about how their body responds to things, even though science has no explanation for it
You’re claiming that
There are “huge gaps in our knowledge”
And that (some group) denies that “individuals can know anything objectively about how their body responds to things”
Implying that the latter satisfies the first
This is precisely what I’m asking about
You’re suggesting that a less specific and less measurable vague notion is more predictive than the current state of the art in measuring bodily
I rest it on my own personal experience and that of many others, which you don’t seem to accept. Nevertheless, here is just one example of what I’m talking about.
I spent over a year with daily terrible headaches. I suspected they were related to my thyroid medication not being correctly dosed, as they started immediately after a new bottle of medication arrived, and closely resembled headaches I had had related to dosing issues in the past. The measurements and latest “scientific" knowledge said my dose was fine, so various doctors had me try all kinds of different things. I even tried a chiropractor. (I’m not a fan of them in general. Mostly crazy kooks in my experience.) I finally found a doctor that suggested my dosing was wrong, changed my prescription, and the headaches went away immediately. This doctor (and many others), based on the experience of many thousands of patients’ experiences, believes the current scientific consensus on thyroid hormone dosing is wrong. And everybody knows there is a huge gap in our knowledge around hormones in general.
So there you have it. I could give other examples, but they would be second hand, rather than first.
Oh, and then a year after I finally got this solved, I got a letter in the mail that the batch of medication I had received at the start of this all was being recalled... for being wrongly dosed.
You have one complex adaptive system with a simplified interface to another complex adaptive system and you leverage that to understand the first, where trying to reduce it to a toolkit that you can internalize is impossible due to the finite nature of your cognition.
OP is like your ancestors trying to predict the arrival of game in the spring and relying on a certain flower blossoming.
Yours is trying to arrive at a working calculation involving the time from the winter solstice combined with the daily sun exposure, thermal gain, precipitation, and biennial changes in major weather patterns, etc, leading to the possible but not certain generation of a new complex system that must be sustained by a population of humans and might not ever work as well.
In many instances, your perspective is the more questionable one.
In effect you’re making a claim that in the general case, less systemic precision is preferable because more precision is brittle
However you cannot know the relative brittleness apriori and you have to have a consistent measure that you’re comparing to
Like it seems that you’re suggesting a loose grained low variance forecasting model will only find high likelihood inferences and filter everything less impactful - making it more robust
However experiments regularly destroy previous concepts by the merging of conflicting variables - this is hegelian synthesis, or popperian falsification
So foundationally that thesis is flawed because it implies no system improves from additional observation - it gets more brittle. The entire theory of the firm, monopoly efficiencies etc… are a counter example disproving this logic
That said, all systems are coupled, so if a complex system is optimized around a narrow saddle point then it tipping into a new state may perturb other coupled models which cause cascading adjustments - that’s not more brittle by default. It means you have to observe more coupled interactions and not overestimate likelihood you can’t experimentally validate with a functional system.
You strawmanned my argument into brittleness, but there are significant other options such as that there may not be sufficient technological reach to even construct a reasonably accurate complex system.
I did not say things can only progress into brittleness, you invented that so you could have something to argue against.
It's well and good to listen to your body. Observation and insight is humankind's great boon. But man, the science nihilism & belief you can just think about it and come up with better understanding than the world's greatest doctors & researchers is astounding & a massive boat-anchor that threatens to drag humanity down below the waves. Awful.
Specifically, I’m talking about when discussing extremely complex systems, ones that we don’t have full understanding of, there’s this tendency at a certain point of complexity to throw your hands up and say:
“because we can’t understand all of it perfectly then we can’t understand any of it and so just rely on these exceptionally loose grained impossible to define heuristics that have no comparability reference or baseline or anything meaningfully objective”
It’s like completely abandoning the concept of science measurement and just going full in with nothing matters we can’t measure it so do whatever you want.
Is it a failure of communication or is this an actual cognitive pattern that we can define?
It seems like a basic implementation of the all or nothing fallacy