OT: gut bacteria influence on.. everything!

I have yet to see a "holistic" approach result in actually learning anything new. "Holism" appears to me to be a way for people who don't actually know anything to feel superior to people who are working to find things out.

How do you do science "holistically", exactly?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Gut flora are considered to be symbiotic with ourselves, but we have this view that they are just passengers to our host. Perhaps it is that we are cultivated the way that we cultivate the land. Gut flora farm our bodies and treat us well to preserve their world. They treat their world the way we don't treat ours.

There's nothing "holistic" about getting more detailed information about th e nature and diversity of different kids' hind-gut bacterial population.

It a thoroughly reductionist approach of finding out - in more detail - whi ch, and roughly how many, bacteria are present inside different kids.

That's not holism - that's half-baked observational science, looking for co rrelations between behaviour and broad-brush bacterial population statistic s.

Medical training isn't aimed to producing good researchers but rather good doctors. The skills aren't the same, and Ohio State's Institute for Behavio ral Medicine Research is presumably stuck with medically qualified research ers because without them they can't look at human subjects, just like every academic medical research centre. Medical training doesn't stop you from b eing a good researcher, so some of these centres manage to do useful work, but most of their output is even more uninspired than regular academic rese arch.

I don't think that anybody ever claimed that it would be a good idea to dri nk glyphosphate. It won't kill you directly, but there does seem to be some evidence that it's carcinogenic. It's certainly a lot less toxic to mammal s than it is to growing plants, but not even the most avid reductionist wou ld claim that "less toxic" can be equated to "non-toxic". Even reductionist s realise that biological systems are complex, though they do differ from J amie in concentrating their attention on the bits that they can understand and analyse, having the advantage over Jamie of being bright enough to unde rstand and analyse the simpler bits of complex systems.

I do electronics holistically, but it's only possible because, at least in principle, everything in electronics can be determined analytically, or at least computationally. So the whole can be broken into its parts, toyed with, reassembled and massaged. Ala the "REDUCTIONISM - HOLISM" drawings from GEB. With actually good results.

Doing so on the poorly known and "squishy" sciences just isn't possible, at least yet. You're as well off testing everything empirically. Which is what they do, in trials and everything. Messy business, and for the rate that it can be done at (trials are slow and expensive, etc.), the success and efficacy rate is probably as good as you can expect.

Tim

That isn't holism, it's design. The only things that can be understood holistically are those simple enough to be immediately present to the intuition. Some design insights are like that, as are numbers small enough not to require counting. But it's limited to very simple systems. (The angels are said to understand everything that way--*intelligo* vs. *ratio*.)

I read GEB when I was a boy, and was impressed--it's one of only three books that I ever read through twice without stopping. Looking at it again somewhat more recently, it's still fun but philosophically far less persuasive. It's a self-referential look at self-reference, but doesn't go as far as looking at self-reflexive systems (such as self-modifying code).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I beg to differ. While philosophically, I agree that electronics should be deterministic, I still find phenomenon in electronics that cannot be explained with computation. In simplest form, holistic design falls apart when it attempts to consider the customer and user as part of the product ecosystem.

For example, a perfectly working computah, that has been assembled and configured by me with the utmost in care, will produce radically different results depending solely on the individual using the computer. One particular class of customers are instantly productive, even in the presence of known bugs, while another is instantly destructive of whatever they touch. I can even take a machine that has been working perfectly for me, give it to one of these people, and have it misbehave almost instantly.

Similarly, geographic effects cannot be easily calculated. For example, all my prototypes work normally in the lab, fail when delivered to the client, and work normally again when back in the lab. Obviously, geography has an effect on the function of the circuitry.

There is also the phenomenon called "bit rot", where code and products that are deemed perfectly adequate when initially produced, somehow become unacceptable, unusable, and "old" after some random period of time. This can happen with the product still in its original packaging, never having had power applied to it. To the best of my knowledge, predicting the degree and rate of decay involved in "bit rot" has not been successfully performed.

While such phenomenon can be somewhat predicted using statistical methods, that's not really deterministic. One can't reliably determine if a given circuit or product is going to work or continue to work in the hands of users with any degree of reliability or repeatability.

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Goedel, Escher. Bach was a fun book, but not to be taken at face value. Dou glas Hofstadter created an amusing conceit, and he's repeated the exercise since then, but it's essentially entertainment. I'm not sure that he'd shar e this opinion - rumour has it that he takes himself seriously.

Everything is potentially *analyzable* analytically. Design is not analysis.

So the whole can be broken into its parts, toyed

Desiging electronics is not much more scientific than composing music. Some magical thing deep inside your brain does somathing magical, and there it is. This can, to some extent, be trained, but it's not analytical.

I can't analyze a design until I have a design.

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ouglas Hofstadter created an amusing conceit, and he's repeated the exercis e since then, but it's essentially entertainment. I'm not sure that he'd sh are this opinion - rumour has it that he takes himself seriously.

Do you have anything nice to say about anyone? I liked GEB, I remember a different book about vampires (or something) that did a better job explaining Goedel's incompleteness theorem, via the liars paradox... Here it is. "What's the name of this book?"

George H.

Well, Hofstadter did get the Pulitzer for it, which is the kiss of death for a young writer unless he has a lot more humility than most, or else a very well developed sense of his own ridiculousness.

Something similar happened to poor Brian Josephson.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Just change it.

And then of course DIY ;-}

Mikek

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Douglas Hofstadter created an amusing conceit, and he's repeated the exerc ise since then, but it's essentially entertainment. I'm not sure that he'd share this opinion - rumour has it that he takes himself seriously.

Sure. I even said something nice about Phil Hobbs recently, albeit in anoth er thread.

So did I. But as entertainment rather than education

I remember it being discussed back in 1978, when I was buying Scientific Am erican regularly. I don't think that I ever bought the book, though I proba bly should have.

My piano teacher got me to do that - at a minimal level - and was rude about my tendency to mathematical regularities.

Music is all about repetition with variation, which does seem to cover your design style.

But analysis ought to be part of the process, to see what your random object generator has thrown up, and whether it's worth attention.

There's nothing particularly magical about asking "what happens if I do x", until you hit on the right "x".

We've noticed.

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. Douglas Hofstadter created an amusing conceit, and he's repeated the exer cise since then, but it's essentially entertainment. I'm not sure that he'd share this opinion - rumour has it that he takes himself seriously.

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His Scientific American articles were nice... I read GEB after finding him in Sci. Am.

Yeah that's very sad, I heard he worked out SC tunneling answering a question on his qualifiers.

I'm happy to be a bloke of ordinary intelligence, that likes science.

George H.

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ue. Douglas Hofstadter created an amusing conceit, and he's repeated the ex ercise since then, but it's essentially entertainment. I'm not sure that he 'd share this opinion - rumour has it that he takes himself seriously.

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He's reputed to have been upset that his name was tied to the Josephson jun ction - he'd been hoping to tag it onto a device that did something.

This claim didn't make it onto his wikipedia page

but I heard it once or twice when I was in Cambridge.

Really? Since when?

The concept of causality gets awfully fuzzy when everything affects everything else.

So return your car, house, clothes, gadgets, and medications.

No one wants to talk about fecal transplants, can you imagine! Amazing results for certain diseases. Mikek

Mikek

Hi,

There are many examples of reductionist thought making determinations about the real world that prove to be incorrect, once more variables are taken into account, so I think that instead of holistic type mindsets, which require being open to new information are less prone to a superior type mindset than reductionist types of mindset, where people are more likely to become comfortable in their incorrect simplification of likely unknowable reality.

The main point I have is that yes to figure out how to build stuff of a limited number of variables, reductionist thought is inherently at play, but it is always a subset of variables. This sounds fine and the only possible solution to get anything done, but at the same time, there are a lot of side effects of a purely reductionist design process that create future problems which could be avoided if a more holistic "last pass" to the design is done, ie. a scientist saying glyphosate is safe to drink, is saying it is safe in their reductionist model of how they understand it, but in reality as has been shown, they would not actually drink it as can be seen by this video:

That implies that there is a double standard at play where the application of reductionist ideas is determined ok for the external world, but a more holistic mindset is reserved for the internal functioning of the person himself. Obviously this type of thinking has led to a lot of problems ie glyphosate (which has gone from being said to be safe to drink to being called a carcinogen), due to no consideration of a reality beyond the simplified model it is considered to operate in, that is an attitude of superiority over nature, and it is inherently incorrect to ever assume that a simplified model is more accurate than the larger unknown reality of taking into account more variables.

Science strives for holistic though, by understanding the relationship between variables, and finding new variables, which is a striving towards a holistic view of the world, but when money gets involved then the ideal of holistic advancement turns into reductionist profit making.

cheers, Jamie