For your CR arguing with actually_thinking, here are some things to consider:
I’ve been thinking about making a discussion tree today. I and LMD can compare if he decides to make one.
But I’m trying to understand why that’s the case. Why you can maximise one thing only. Is that just a feature of the concept of maximising that I’m missing or confused about? If so I think that could explain part of my misunderstandings.
The reason I talked about the business example is because I’m trying to relate what I think I understand from the article to the business scenario we were considering. In the article, an issue is combining factors from different dimensions so that we can make an overall evaluation. I wanted to see how those concepts map on to the example.
Sure, I agree with that. But if you have 3 things, and you don’t combine them, why can’t you maximise them individually? I think that’s closer to the problem that my intuition is flagging. That’s why I was pondering about why in practise the three things that you want to maximise must be combined. My thought was that you need one plan, one course of action: you can’t act in three different ways.
I feel like I’m missing something. To me, you seem to be replying with conclusions that the article has when I’m trying to understand the reasoning behind the conclusions in the article.
As for untangling non-cf epistemology, I think I would happy just clearly perceiving the errors in it. But it doesn’t feel like I’m getting it yet as far as this maximisation problem goes.
A reason for combining them is if you want to maximize, but can’t maximize multiple things, then you can combine first then maximize. This reason for combining is premised on not being able to maximize multiple things. If you dispute the premise then that’s a separate issue.
Here’s a way to think about it: The concept of maximization is only defined for one thing. Maximizing multiple things is a made up concept with no definition and no mathematical meaning.
You could create definitions for maximizing multiple things, but none of them match the standard, intuitive concept of maximization well.
You asked if there was a way to do something and I gave the answer (no). I think a universal mathematical proof would be hard for you to understand, hard to make rigorous, and wouldn’t help with your issue anyway. If there’s something you think might be a way, you can present it. I think addressing what you think might work will be more effective than trying to prove that nothing can work for this particular sub-issue.
Because you have to deal with option sets (plans) like:
A: 1,2,3
B: 3,2,1
C: 1,3,2
The only option which maximizes the first factor is plan B, but it doesn’t maximize the other factors. This is typical. The cheapest car (maximizing low price) usually isn’t also the nicest or fastest.
If another option was D: 3,4,5 then you could maximize them all individually by choosing D, but you can’t generally rely on the existence of a strictly best option like that.
Another reason for combining factors is we may want to know how good Plan A is based on 3 factors. How good a plan is is 1 thing, but if we’re basing that 1 thing on 3 factors, then we have to combine them somehow or otherwise use them in the process of generating 1 evaluation of plan A.
Maybe this will help. You could ask other related questions too. https://g.co/gemini/share/23efea76f6bd Gemini opens by saying you can maximize multiple factors but what it actually means is you can pick an option that isn’t strictly worse than any other options. There may be many such solutions and that’s not what maximization actually means.
There have been a lot of forum posts lately. I think I’m caught up but if I missed something that you specifically wanted a reply to, let me know. In general, especially if you post a lot, I’m not going to reply to everything, but you can bring up a specific thing you think is important that I may have missed or that you want more help with.
Okay, I think what happened is that I didn’t intend what I wrote as a question to you, but a statement of a problem to myself. I didn’t consider that you might read it as a direct question.
Okay. It’s not important I don’t think, but why don’t you think that a proof would help my issue? It seems that it would. Though I agree with you that a math proof would be hard for me to understand and I’m not suggesting we try that. Maybe I’ve lost sight of my issue here.
I think addressing just what I think might work, as opposed to looking for a general explanation/proof, is an interesting approach. I don’t think I usually think about stuff like that (?). I can’t see a way that maximising multiple things can work. So maybe I should be satisfied with that. I think what Gemini was talking about regarding optimising and trade-offs rang a bell for me. I think I was potentially confusing the concepts of optimising and maximising?
I’ve been very busy recently btw!
OK. What’s the difference between optimizing and maximizing?
I’m not exactly sure. I can state what maximising is. Maximising is about increasing something as much as possible.
Optimising I’m less sure about. Optimising seems to do with some goals conflicting with each other and so there being trade offs involved, it’s about picking the best option, so it’s about multi-factor decision making too? Idk it seems there are related issues like how do you compare factors from different dimensions to each other.
When I read through the gemini transcript, I thought some of the things it was saying were similar to how I was thinking about the maximising problem, e.g:
In reality, maximizing multiple factors at the same time involves finding the best possible balance or trade-off among them.
Optimising also seems like the kind of thing that your conclusions about multi-factor decision making say can’t be done.
I don’t think I know the distinction, but there seem to be clues here about confusions I’m having.
So I then read the article intro of this: Mathematical optimization - Wikipedia
What I’m getting from this is that optimising is about picking the best option from a range of options. What is best depends on our criteria. Our criteria could be “whichever option maximises our factors”.
So maximising is about increasing something as much as possible, and optimising is about figuring out the best option from a set of options (by whatever criteria)?
yes
“optimize” often means “improve details”. it can mean “improve” but is often about getting like a 5% or 1% improvement or less, like your initial solution is pretty good (not optimized yet) then you optimize for further small improvements. seeking the “best” option is a form of maximization (because anything less than the best/maximum is failure). historically, optimizing often meant maximizing, like making things optimal not just improving them.
EDIT: added the word “details” to optimize meaning and more clarification.
Here is my sentence by sentence breakdown for the paragraph from Bleak House. I did it while reading it in real time. Took about ~30mins.
London.
I think this is telling us where we are? like setting the location of the scene. I don’t know what kind of scene it is or what.
Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
I looked up what Michaelmas term was, because the phrase ‘Michaelmas term lately over’ didn’t make sense to me. According to google AI overview, it’s the first academic term of the year (~October to ~December). So that terms has finished recently (“lately over”). So we know when, at least when within the year. So it’s basically the middle of winter in the UK? I’m guessing that it’s academic related and not just “midwinter” or “December” is relevant.
The sentence also tells us that the Lord Chancellor is sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
I looked it up, and the Lord Chancellor is like the highest judge, and Lincoln’s Inn is one of the four Inns of Court in London. Legal facilities I guess.
Implacable November weather.
Okay it’s November. This is making sense with the Michaelmas term thing I found out.
The weather is implacable. I’m guessing it’s pretty cold and wintery, or getting that way.
As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
So these sentences are so far are fragments. That’s unusual. But it’s an artistic thing. They each are descriptive of the scene.
It’s very muddy in the streets. So it’s been rainy and miserable?
But it’s muddy “as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth”. I don’t think the author means that it’s not muddy, but that it’s very muddy. It’d be weird to talk about a street being not muddy, because you don’t really expect a street to be muddy. Although if this is set further in the past, then the streets were probably dirt, and would get quite muddy with rain.
“but newly retired” sounds like the waters had gone from the earth. But it’s muddy, which means there is lots of water on the earth.
Does the author mean the seas? but I don’t see why they would. Or do they just mean that the water has dried up?
Anyway it’s seems like the author means there is so much mud in the streets it looks like a prehistoric, uncivilised scene.
Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
Another fragment and not a sentence. It describes smoke and soot coming down from chimneys. It’s drizzling with rain too, and that’s mixing with the smoke and soot. The smoke is being described as going into mourning for the death of the sun, because it’s lowering from chimneys and not rising up like you’d expect. That’s from the drizzling rain bringing it down.
There is no sun because of the weather/season.
Dogs, undistinguishable in mire.
Another fragment. a mire is swampy or boggy ground. Thats a metaphor for the muddy streets I suppose. The dogs are undistinguishable (indistinguishable(?)) because they’re muddy (“in mire”)?
Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.
Another fragment (I’ll stop saying that till it changes).
The horses are also really muddy, so that is what was meant by “in mire” before. They aren’t as muddy (“scarely better”) presumably because they are taller. Though they are splashed to their “blinkers” which are things which I know cover their eyes or restrict their vision, so they’re muddy quite a way up them.
Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Big sentence.
People are in a foul mood because of the weather and the mud situation. They’re slipping where others have slipped. It’s getting worse and worse.
–
Okay the paragraph describes a scene in London, where it’s near the end of the year, wintery. The streets are muddy as hell. Dog and horses are covered in it. Everyone is having a hard time and in a bad mood. They’re slipping over and stuff. The weather sucks. it’s dark, it’s raining. You can’t tell whether the sun has risen and whether a day has really started cos it’s so cloudy and miserable. The Lord Chancellor sits in a court. He seems important and we don’t know why yet.
Ok so after watching the video. I didn’t know it was a Charles Dickens novel. That makes sense for the muddy streets time period (I think Dickens was like 1800s England?).
I thought I did okay! I still don’t get how the sentence about the “waters newly retired from the face of the earth” worked. But I think I understood the meaning well: that it was muddy as hell and the scene looked prehistoric (the megalosaurus thing).
Reading the ChatGPT transcript in the video, its answer was that it’s a reference to a biblical flood. That it’s like the flood waters of a biblical flood had only recently receded, leaving the land muddy. That makes sense to me now.
I didn’t know that “the waters” was a biblical reference. Just now, searching “the waters retired” didn’t give me anything useful on google but “the waters receded” did. If I had searched that I would’ve found it.
So I skipped over understanding in detail what was meant by that part of the paragraph, because I thought I could tell quite well what it meant. I turned out to be right; it meant that it was really muddy. But because I got the right answer doesn’t mean that was the right thing to do. Though I was aware of my interpretation and I was looking for its corroboration in later sentences. Like I consciously knew I didn’t quite understand that part and decided I was okay with that and would keep an eye out. Do you have any thoughts on my process there?
In the vid, ChatGPT says that the “mourning” the sun part is because the soot flakes are black. Not the smoke which is lowering down from the chimneys. Interesting. That kinda makes sense, I didn’t notice the connection with them being black there. But soot flakes are always black, aren’t they?
Oh the soot flakes are like snowflakes that have gone into mourning. I see! But snowflakes wouldn’t mourn the sun, the sun would melt the snow flakes… Still I think that’s what is meant, I was wrong there.
you got the general gist of what’s happening (muddy etc) but there is room for improvement.
Did you not use a dictionary? One of the definitions of “mire” is “heavy often deep mud, slush, or dirt”. So it’s not a metaphor.
Also, when you repeat words (or synonyms) from the text (undistinguishable, muddy/mire), it’s hard to check whether you’re understanding them correctly (why does the book connect undistinguishable with mud? what does that mean?) You might know but also someone could echo those words without knowing, so I can’t tell what you know or not.
Similarly, you didn’t directly comment on the dinosaur and the “not be wonderful” wording, so it’s hard for me to tell what you understood or not about that.
This is incorrect. A dictionary would have been more helpful.
That definition is in the dictionary, but so is another one that fits the rest of the passage better.
I’m no Bible expert but I don’t think it’s the specific wording like “the waters” that makes it a biblical reference. I think it’s just describing a scene from the bible: the world being covered in water which then recedes.
When you were considering that maybe the sentence meant it wasn’t muddy, in the context of the rest of the passage, that indicates that your reading is off the mark. In a passage about bad weather and mud, the sentence probably isn’t actually a bit ambiguous between muddy and not muddy, so that means you’re probably looking at it in the wrong way to have some doubts between muddy or not muddy.
Also bringing up a hypothetical dinosaur just to say ~“it looked prehistoric because it was so muddy” would be strange and out of place. So that interpretation shouldn’t be satisfactory unless you think you’re dealing with a poor writer. There should be a bit more to it than dinosaurs are prehistoric and the scene looks prehistoric. If a metaphor seems too random or arbitrary that’s a sign you may be missing something. More broadly if the sentences or clauses don’t seem to fit together well, with clear connections and relevance, then you may be missing something.
I googled it, and the definitions it gave me didn’t include that. But looking in my dictionaries I can see that it does talk about it being mud.
When I looked it up, I thought I knew what mire was, and it felt like I was just double checking. I thought it meant swamp.
Yeah good point. I’ll try to be more aware of that.
I thought they were indistinguishable because the mud covers their different coats and makes them the same colour and texture. It also changes their shape a bit by e.g flattening down fur so even an individual dog can appear quite different from how it would normally, and so make it harder to distinguish. That’s what I thought at the time.
Sure. I understood that the scene was being described as being so muddy, that it looked like a prehistoric/primeval place, so much so that one wouldn’t be surprised if they saw a dinosaur walking down the street. I think that’s what the “it would not be wonderful” means: that it wouldn’t be of surprise. Seeing a dinosaur would be very surprising normally.
Yeah I learned that from the video. I felt satisfied with the google search ai result, and didn’t consider there might be more to look for. I was expecting it to mean something about the time of year, and so finding that and seeing that it was later talking about the same time period (november), I felt satisfied. I noticed that I didn’t understand why it was referring to an academic term so I assumed it had something to do with the thing about the courts, but didn’t think I needed to look into and know those details.
I think using a dictionary first, or at least doing that as well as a simple google search is a good idea. I ended up just going with the first thing I saw if I could see a way that it made sense.
Yeah okay for whatever reason I didn’t get that.
I think I just was considering it to be diligent, because I was having trouble interpreting the waters phrase, like it was part of the brainstorm and I was dismissing it. I wasn’t actually confused about whether it was talking about it being muddy or not, like I don’t think I had actual doubts there, I was kind of just going over the option and making sure. I thought I was pointing out that I knew it meant that it was muddy. It felt like an obvious thing to me and I’m not sure why I pointed it out.
I feel a bit misunderstood here. I think that’s because I didn’t communicate what I think well with my writing. I don’t think I included some important thoughts and I included some confusing thoughts. I did try and do this exercise kind of quickly.
Do you still think I’m missing the point of that part after I added some more detail earlier in the post about it?
I’d recommend using a dictionary over google in general. But if you google “mire” then click “show more” then “soft and slushy mud or dirt.” will show up as a definition.
correct
yeah maybe. how does the dinosaur thing connect to something else in the text? there’s a better connection than heavy mud looking kinda prehistoric.
Yeah I think that’s a good idea too. I’m going to try this exercise again with further paragraphs of the book and use the dictionary primarily.
Okay. here is the sentence again from Bleak House:
As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
I don’t see anything reasonable to relate the dinosaur to in first three sentences of the paragraph.
An idea is that the dinosaur idea is related to the biblical flood idea, but that relationship seems like the one that I had, that it looks prehistoric. I.e that the biblical flood and the dinosaurs are in the deep past.
Oh yeah I found out that Holburn Hill is related to Lincoln’s Inn hall, which is in Holburn. I found that out when I initially read it but didn’t mention it.
But I think the connection we’re talking about is more about the dinosaur?
A connection could be to the indistinguishably muddy animals (dogs, horses). Perhaps it’s that muddy that a dinosaur could walk past inconspicuously, indistinguishable from the dogs and horses? I don’t really think that’s it though.
I got a digital copy of Bleak House. There were footnotes for a few references in the paragraph, so I checked them out. For the megalosaurus reference, it says:
“(p. 17) Megalosaurus … waddling … up Holborn Hill: When fossils of a dinosaur that came to be named the “Megalosaurus” (Latin for “giant lizard”) were found in 1824, the discovery challenged the belief that dinosaurs were destroyed in the biblical flood. Nonetheless, the popular belief persisted, with the result that this dinosaur would have been regarded as a strange anachronism.”
This is weird because afaik the megalosaurus was the first dinosaur identified, but it says that it’s discovery challenged the belief that dinosaurs went extinct in the biblical flood. But weren’t dinosaurs not known about until megalosaurus was identified? How could there be theories of dinosaur extinction for megalosaurus’ discovery to challenge?
That being said, perhaps there is an extinction type connection between the flood and the dinosaur?
In my understanding, Noah kept two of every animal on the ark, so that includes dinosaurs. So, right after the flood, Megalosaurs would not be extinct. So that’s the connection.
Does that now seem like a clear connection to you? The megalosaur comment follows from and relates to the flood comment, rather than being an independent, isolated way of saying it looks prehistorically muddy.
I think trying to go into scientific and logical details misses the point because the book doesn’t expect readers to know which dinosaur was discovered first or how intellectuals reacted to those fossils and tried to reconcile them with theology. The book is meant to be less difficult or obscure than that.
Here my line by line analysis of the immediate next paragraph from Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Here is the paragraph in full:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.”
Fog everywhere.
Lots of fog outside. Fog is like misty vapour that can sit near the ground making it hard to see very far.
Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.
First thing I notice is the word “aits”. I hadn’t heard that before. According to my dictionary, an ait is a small island in a river. This makes sense with the text. A green ait I think is one covered in grass or foliage.
The river in question I believe is the river Thames which flows through London. The Thames flows from west to east into the north sea. Upriver means toward the source of the stream, and downriver away. The green aits and meadows are to the west. The “tiers of shipping” I believe may refer to the locks and weirs along the Thames enabling freight ships to travel up and downstream. They allow boats to be raised and lowered to different levels of a river.
The “waterside pollutions” may refer to industrial activity happening in London and along the river to the east. The river was used in industry (and domestically) to dispose of waste and to help supply water for factories. The fog itself is “defiled” or made impure by these industrial pollutions too. The same industrial activity would also emit lots of air pollutants, which was a big problem with the burning of a lot of coal during 19th century England.
Upriver, the fog amongst green aits and meadows, which are implied are cleaner and greener than the downstream industrial activity.
There were intense thick fogs in London after the industrial revolution, it mixed with the air pollution from burning coal.
Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.
The Essex marshes are coastal wetlands and mudflats. I can’t find details about the Kentish Heights that isn’t referring to Dickens, and I don’t want to read that just yet. I’m guessing these two places contrast with each other in some way. My guess was that they are geographically contrasting to emphasise that there really was fog everywhere, from coastal lowlands to higher lands?
I saw someone asked a question about this on reddit that got no replies, their theory was that the essex marshes and kentish heights were socioeconomically contrasting.
I asked Gemini, and it had an answer similar to mine that it was a geographic contrast.
Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.
I didn’t know what the term caboose meant, and I didn’t know what a collier-brig was. A collier is a cargo ship for transporting coal. A brig means a two masted ship. So a collier-brig is a two masted coal transport. This connects with the references to shipping, pollution, and industry earlier in the paragraph. The caboose is the kitchen of the ship.
The “yards” I believe are shipping yards, not e.g yards of a house. This fits with the ship theme of the sentence. which are places for loading/unloading cargo and that service ships etc.
I looked up gunwale, its the upper edge of a ship.
This paragraph is further emphasising the pervasiveness of the fog. The ship theme connects to the river idea (ships use the river), the coal (a ship mentioned is a coal transport ship). The coal is in turn connected to the fog by exacerbating it.
Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck.
“Greenwich pensioners” aren’t just old people on pension. They’re ex-navy sailors and marines, usually living in the Royal Hospital Greenwich. These are the “wards” they are in: sections of the hospital. This connects to the ships idea.
Coal was used for domestic heating too. Coal burns dirty. Its smoke irritates the eyes and throat. A fireside is a place next to a fire. The ancient greenwich pensioners were wheezing and made sick from the smoke of their own fires, and the coal fog that their fires helped exacerbate. This connects to the coal smoke idea.
There is fog in the smoking pipe of the skipper (a trading ships master or captain). The pipe is for smoking tobacco, the fog there too mixes with the smoke that he breathes in.
The fog is “pinching the toes and fingers” of the boy on the “deck” of the ship, because it is cold. His extremities are feeling the cold. He is also shivering.
As well as connecting to all the previous ideas, this sentence sets up a contrast between where it is warm (by the firesides, in the close cabin of a ship) and where it’s cold (on the ship’s deck, where the apprentice shivers). Because it’s about the pervasiveness of the fog.
Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
These are bridges going over the Thames. The parapets are like the railings of the bridge. When looking over the side of the bridge, with fog above and below, unable to distinguish sky from river, it would appear you were up in the clouds.
Quick summary:
The paragraph is about the pervasiveness of the fog, how it’s literally everywhere. It’s across the country, high and low, up and down the river, in the homes and ships and bodies of London. It has connected themes of coal, industry, shipping, the navy, the rivers, sickness, smoke.