{"id":23210,"date":"2013-06-04T21:57:52","date_gmt":"2013-06-04T21:57:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=23210"},"modified":"2013-06-04T22:02:25","modified_gmt":"2013-06-04T22:02:25","slug":"a-woman-a-ladder-four-goats-and-a-cow-named-bessie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=23210","title":{"rendered":"A woman, a ladder, four goats, and a cow named Bessie."},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — the four goats go with the woman, the cow called Bessie belongs with Hiyakawa’s Ladder of Abstraction ]
\n.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

**<\/p>\n

My friend the anthropologist Peter van der Werff<\/strong> recently wrote this paragraph about a woman he met in India:<\/p>\n

The very poor woman explained me she and her four goats needed the shadow of a tree to escape from the blistering afternoon sun in their semi-arid part of India. There was a tree at the edge of the village, but the owner did not allow her to come near that tree. Therefore, she and her goats suffered from the heat, at the cost of her health and the productivity of the goats.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was reminded of SI Hayakawa<\/strong>‘s Ladder of Abstraction<\/em>.<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

Caution: you really do need, as it says, to “read” this image from the bottom up…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See Bessie, the Cow<\/em>, in SI<\/strong> and AR Hayakawa<\/strong>, Language in Thought and Action<\/a>, pp. 83-85, 5th ed..<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

Why did I think of Hayakawa’s ladder?<\/p>\n

Here are two other things m’friend Peter had to say about the woman and her goats, the merciless sun, and that tree with its abundance of merciful shade:<\/p>\n

As long as economists don\u2019t include oppression and exploitation in their models, they cannot understand poverty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and:<\/p>\n

Such cruel relationships occur in many of the 750,000 villages of India. Without including those oppressive and exploitative realities, real poverty is not captured. We may invite economists to fit this reality in the computer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

**<\/p>\n

We humans can do it. But how do we configure models that can hold those levels of granularity and abstraction — of individual human concern and global decision-making necessity — close enough together to give our grand plans humane flexibility?<\/p>\n

I suspect writers such as Lawrence Wright<\/a><\/strong> know more about this than the number crunchers — and that the well-selected anecdote <\/strong>must become as significant as the well-chosen statistic <\/strong>…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron — the four goats go with the woman, the cow called Bessie belongs with Hiyakawa’s Ladder of Abstraction ] . ** My friend the anthropologist Peter van der Werff recently wrote this paragraph about a woman he met in India: The very poor woman explained me she and her four goats […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[923,922,191,526,327,560,706,758,743,853,795,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abstraction","category-anecdote","category-anthropology","category-charles-cameron","category-complex-systems","category-india","category-model","category-quant-qualit","category-simulation","category-statistics","category-story","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23210"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23260,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23210\/revisions\/23260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}