Finding Connections in Obsidian

I've been thinking about the idea of Domains. That there are thoughts that are useful, within a particular range of information, but less useful outside the boundaries of that range. Examples of this might be when descriptions of specific scientific processes become metaphors. Evolution or quantum uncertainty, for example. These ideas have very rigorous meanings in their original context (which I'm calling Domain, I guess). However, when they're taken out of this conquest, there's a possibility they may be misunderstood. Clearly, the application of Darwin's ideas to "scientific racism" and Social Darwinism are examples of this problem. It's not always clear, though, when an idea has reached the boundary of its domain. There has been a lot of argument about Thomas Kuhn's description of Paradigms in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Some people contest this theory as useful even in the history of science. But setting that aside, how applicable is the general idea of paradigm shift to change in other fields of knowledge? Or, how valid is the extrapolation of genetics that Richard Dawkins did in The Selfish Gene, to produce the idea of Memes? Some people think of memes as an interesting metaphor -- other believe in them as actual things in the world (this seems a bit like religious faith to me, so it's a bit ironic that many of the people who seem to feel this way are neo-atheists).

Another and much more mundane element of this same issue, I think, is people who are acknowledged experts on one topic believing they can make authoritative statements on anything that comes into their heads. This was the problem Neil deGrasse Tyson had on the Joe Rogan podcast, which I recently reacted to. I'm not usually a big stickler for disciplinarity, so I don't think my objection was that Tyson strayed from astrophysics to history. But he missed some important points -- possibly because he was more interested in being titillating with his mentions of syphilis and Native American reactions to alcohol. The one area the disciplinary difference might have tripped him up, though, was time. You just can't talk credibly about speciation over a 10,000-year timeframe. That's off by at least two orders of magnitude.

After I finished sifting the "Domain" mentions, I ran quickly through another couple of keywords such as "useful" and "metaphor". At the end of the process, I created a note called Domain in which I can continue connecting these other notes and thinking about this. It has seven connections to start, and will probably grow more fairly rapidly as I work on this idea.

I'm beginning to try to get stuff OUT of my vault in this way. I'm new at this; for the last year or so I've been much more focused on putting stuff in. But the whole point of putting all this stuff in one place, of course, is so it will be available to me when I need it.

So this new note I’ve made is a catch-all for ideas I'm beginning to have related to the ways we think. Should this include a map of knowledge, LYT-style? Or at least, a set of links to the pages where I discussed the idea? Maybe that's how you begin a narrative of the idea?

In [[2021-11-13]] I outline this idea of Domains and their possible limitations. (I think this may be the first time I've actually ever linked to a Daily Note!) I don't need to double-bracket the term Domain more than once on a page, because the link search will take me there and will return the whole page, not just a block.

In Antifragile I try to expand on Taleb's use of the idea of Domains to suggest that it's "probably more significant than his examples of the rich dudes that don't want to carry their luggage but then head to the gym. I think it takes some rigor to map out exactly where an idea is useful in its own right, where it's a useful metaphor, and where it may actually hinder understanding." Later I take issue with his claim that "Humans tend to do better with acute than with chronic stressors, particularly when the former are followed by ample time for recovery." (70) Is this true? I ask. In what Domains? Probably in weight training. I'm not so sure in response to Black Swans. (I was thinking of removing the double brackets around this instance of the word, because I've already been directed to the page. But it's a long page. Maybe I should leave it.)

In the Readwise Reading Notes I haven't processed yet (called [[Antifragile 1]]), I tagged a place where Taleb says "We accept the domain-specificity of games, the fact that they do not really train you for life, that there are severe losses in translation. But we find it hard to apply this lesson to technical skills acquired in schools, that is, to accept the crucial fact that what is picked up in the classroom stays largely in the classroom." He also says, "Kahneman and Tversky have shown, outside the domains in which they were formed, these can go awfully wrong." I had to click back through to the Kindle to remind myself exactly what Taleb was saying K&T had been talking about. Turns out, it was Evolutionary Heuristics. (This suggests to me I should make my annotations in the future with the idea that I want to understand the point without backtracking)

The next link that I made was to Chomsky and Waterstone's Consequences of Capitalism, where they're talking about Bernays and Lippmann. I think my point in marking this passage was to question how widely applicable their generalization was. It will take more digging for me to decide about this -- probably into some primary writings.

The next link is to Einstein's Unfinished Revolution by Lee Smolin, which I read recently. He talks about how, for Einstein, the wave-particle duality "while a profound challenge, had been limited to speculation about the constitution of light. Confined to that domain, it did limited damage, perhaps because particle and wave theories of light each had long histories and recognized virtues. But the idea of matter waves came as a complete shock. De Broglie and Schrödinger transformed physics by bringing the wave-particle duality into the core of physics, where it sat enshrined as the central mystery of the revolutionary new quantum physics." I think this is a pretty good expansion of what I was thinking about, which I should consider.

This final link I collected was to an essay I wrote when in my first year of grad school (2006), about Kuhn. Describing paradigms, I said, "idea generated interest and discussion across a number of fields in addition to science, eclipsing to some extent Kuhn’s original focus. This is a danger when a new explanatory scheme becomes extremely popular -- often it is extended by analogy beyond its actual usefulness. A notorious example of this effect was Social Darwinism, but other ideas such as the uncertainty principle, relativity, and memes have all been extended into areas where it's not entirely clear they are appropriate. Kuhn was aware of this potential problem, so he refined his description, made many of his assumptions explicit, and gave some suggestions and warnings regarding wider application in a Postscript included in the edition I read."

So I've been thinking about this for a while.