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Randomization is a method poorly understood by Victorian natural philosophers and their students. Scientists are just beginning to grasp its power. One may rea

by ncmncm 4y ago

Randomization is a method poorly understood by Victorian natural philosophers and their students. Scientists are just beginning to grasp its power. One may reasonably wonder whether the success of Monte Carlo modeling and natural selection helped to usher in this insight. Its limitations are as important as its uses.

kelseyfrog 4y ago
This is perhaps a tangent too far, but your association between the perception of randomness and Victorian thought struck a chord. Would it be safe to say that there was an establishment of a connection between randomness, chaos, nature, and usefulness that was framed in opposition to order, structure, rationality, and usefulness during this time? I suppose I'm interested in the phylogeny of this dichotomy if it exists at all and its repercussions today. Directly, it would seem to affect the gendered practice of mysticism today where we can pretty clearly see in who and how modern divination is practiced.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The Victorians started with a huge societal bias for mysticism. It was even coded into law, making atheism effectively illegal. Digging out from under that mountain of shit was a huge job with little room for nuance. Science is even today not very secure (cf. antivaxx, flat-earthers), so being open to non-causality is still hard. Similarly, geologists had to carve their field out of universal insistence on catastrophism. Appealing to a catastrophic explanation in geology was akin to appealing to God in physics, or "life force" in biochemistry. It has been a productive esthetic. But catastrophes really do happen sometimes, and are the explanation for, e.g., the eastern Washington state Scablands. It was very hard for geologists to allow that. Thus the K-T bolide strike was very, very hard for them, and the Younger Dryas boundary strike that killed off the mammoths and the Clovis culture is still hard for many. Historians have had to begin to adjust to results from archaeology, carbon dating, surface luminescence, pollen analysis, and population genetics, where everything used to depend entirely on preserved texts. They still have not internalized big, organized, pre-literate societies, and societies like the Harappans whose entire written corpus is forever lost.

by ncmncm 4y ago

kelseyfrog 4y ago

This is perhaps a tangent too far, but your association between the perception of randomness and Victorian thought struck a chord. Would it be safe to say that there was an establishment of a connection between randomness, chaos, nature, and usefulness that was framed in opposition to order, structure, rationality, and usefulness during this time? I suppose I'm interested in the phylogeny of this dichotomy if it exists at all and its repercussions today. Directly, it would seem to affect the gendered practice of mysticism today where we can pretty clearly see in who and how modern divination is practiced.

ncmncm 4y ago
The Victorians started with a huge societal bias for mysticism. It was even coded into law, making atheism effectively illegal. Digging out from under that mountain of shit was a huge job with little room for nuance. Science is even today not very secure (cf. antivaxx, flat-earthers), so being open to non-causality is still hard. Similarly, geologists had to carve their field out of universal insistence on catastrophism. Appealing to a catastrophic explanation in geology was akin to appealing to God in physics, or "life force" in biochemistry. It has been a productive esthetic. But catastrophes really do happen sometimes, and are the explanation for, e.g., the eastern Washington state Scablands. It was very hard for geologists to allow that. Thus the K-T bolide strike was very, very hard for them, and the Younger Dryas boundary strike that killed off the mammoths and the Clovis culture is still hard for many. Historians have had to begin to adjust to results from archaeology, carbon dating, surface luminescence, pollen analysis, and population genetics, where everything used to depend entirely on preserved texts. They still have not internalized big, organized, pre-literate societies, and societies like the Harappans whose entire written corpus is forever lost.