Houdenbako Blog

Talkin' Philosophy Of Science

This morning I went out for a walk. The weather was nice, I wanted get my body moving (instead of just sitting at a desk for a few hours), and maybe buy a pound of coffee beans for my espresso machine.

At the coffeeshop I ordered my beans, but when I asked for the small coffee that they usually give you as a courtesy, they told me they didn't have that policy anymore - that was only with a coupon.

Still, they were nice enough to give me the cup of coffee along with the update. I only buy about one pound of beans every month... maybe even less, but my intention was to sit in the shop reading where I could enjoy the brilliant morning sunlight and not get in my roommate's way while he was waking up and getting ready to go to work - I don't really understand why he leaves himself so little margin: If I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth at the wrong moment, it would make him late for work. Oh, never mind...

As I was adding cream and sugar to my coffee at the condiment bar, I lifted up my backpack flap to put the beans inside. Then I heard somebody call my name.

It was Mitch, one of my dog-walker friends. "What's goin' on, Evan!?"

I lifted the bag of coffee to feature it like a game-show prize: "Just resupplying for my coffee machine at home!"

"Did you shoplift that!?"

--sproing!@#$ "No, I didn't shoplift it! I bought it!"... (Turning to the woman next to me a the condiment bar:) "If I did shoplift it, why would I want him to yell across the room about it?"

Things Settle Down

Mitch got his coffee, and another one for one of the homeless guys in the neighborhood. His had soy milk. Then he got the two cups mixed up. "Did you see which one I poured the cream into?"

This weekend Mitch is taking his Praxis test so he can become a schoolteacher. I've seen his workbooks, and we talk about the material sometimes. Maybe it's just me, but it seems that you could get a passing score on the test without really knowing much about it. Questioning the foundations of knowledge comes naturally to me, so I've thought a lot about why the answers are what they are... Then again, I took a lot of those multiple-choice tests, and it's so easy to eliminate wrong answers. If we put a little more effort into learning the Why, we wouldn't have to trust our memory so much for the What and the How.

I showed off the book I brought - Rudolph Carnap's "An Introduction To The Philosophy Of Science". My idea of 'light reading', I guess. Back to those foundations again.

Just for laughs, I've also been reading "Statistics In A Nutshell" from O'Reilly. Not sure how many statistics textbooks I need, but I bought it after reading a good review. It has more space devoted to what data and measurement are, since these days a computer can do the calculations. That makes it an excellent resource - abstruse theoretical material has been available for decades, no doubt, but who could stand to read it? This book renders a lot of that material in a more readable format. Anyhow... I wanted to ask Mitch if he had ever dealt with that aspect of Stats: Did he land in the middle of the subject without ever treating the foundations, has he doubled back to explore, or has it just never come up? Chances are, when you start at the beginning, you don't see the significance right away, and most people seem to learn better from examples. The only problem is, those people may leave their vague understanding of the foundations at that.

'Nutshell', just like other serious textbooks, starts out talking about "Levels Of Measurement". I wasn't consciously seeking a comparison when I picked up the Carnap book, but there it is: "The concepts of science... may be conveniently divided into three main groups: classificatory, comparative, and quantitative." That maps well to the four levels of measurement: nominal, ordinal, interval, & ratio data. I wanted to know if Mitch was familiar with those labels. He wasn't... but he was familiar with the descriptions. Apparently, it's hard to come up with good examples of interval data. And, nominal data is often numbered (to save space in computer files, I imagine). But people often make the mistake of putting data into equations where it doesn't belong, and sometimes nobody even notices the mistake.

We sat in the sun, drank our coffee, and petted some of the passing dogs. I want Mitch to do well on his test, not get distracted by my favorite ideas.