As an American I've been confused by this argument against a second referendum. It has for a long time seemed like the best option. If people still want Brexit, they'd vote for it (note that a second vote would only strengthen confidence that Brexit is really what people want). If not, then the will of the people has changed.
It seems like a second referendum would optimally be framed differently than the first, but it seems like the best option as an outsider. The current scenario doesn't seem to be working.
Well, fellow American, how about this, then: You're in prison, want to get out, and are granted an appeal. If you lose the appeal, that's the end. You stay in prison. But you win the appeal. Not guilty. But instead of allowing you to leave, the prosecutors demand you be tried again. After all, if you really are not guilty, what possible objection could you have to another trial?
Or let's say that I'm President. You are the challenger in the election. If I win, I go on being President. But you win, and I and my friends at powerful agencies and media outlets all agree that, since we are entitled to rule, the election is not valid and has to be overturned by some means. But I'm willing to compromise. Surely even you could have no complaint about just repeating the election. Either that, or we just void the election entirely, which would probably be best for all, I'm sure you'd agree.
That analogy requires a strong reason to see being kept in the EU as a punishment rather than being ejected from it as one, because if you reverse the scenario between guilty and not guilty, well, a new trial based on signficant new information is actually an accepted thing in the US.
The "confusion" was about why anyone would object to just having another vote. The majority of voters voted for "let us out", which is a strong reason why--to those voters--being forced to stay where they don't want to stay is a far better analogy than fear of being forced out.
I read it differently, but I don't think the author was saying art has no quality in the way you're interpreting it at the end of your sentence, in the sense of value or anything to offer. I interpreted them to mean that there's no way to objectively determinine that value, so practically speaking there's no objective quality in art. I think there's even a sentence or two where they try to make clear that they're not questioning art's value, just our ability to determine that value in real terms.
I agree that the author's choice of words was probably kind of poor. But I interpreted the article to mean that as it becomes more difficult to determine inherent worth in an area, success becomes more and more dependent on social networking effects per se. If you need a hammer, it has a specific function, and you can quantify that function in various ways. But if you're talking about something where the value is unknown, either because no one knows the ultimate truth, or because it's based on subjective experience or something, you can't quantify it, so you go back to networks.
This author has been making the rounds a bit in the last few years, and I think they've done research on these topics. Their argument is that network effects are very strong, and account for a lot of variability in outcomes that are popularly attributed to individuals (broadly defined).
In studies, people - including untrained people - can fairly reliably tell the difference between messy abstract art made by trained artists and messy abstract messes made by kids messing around with paint.
So there seems to be a quality of visual intelligence present in at least some art which is not present in non-expert splashes.
I would be surprised if you couldn't train a neural network to recognise the difference.
This is different to having an explicit formal model of "the quality that is different."
It's also different to a financially successful artistic career. All kinds of things can kill or promote a career which have nothing to do with the art itself.
Likewise for market pricing, which is always based on what galleries and auction houses hope they can get away with - often in a hyper-inflated market where art is reliably used for money laundering and tax evasion and other pastimes which have absolutely nothing to do with what it looks like.
These are all great points, thanks for writing that out. I see what you are getting at -- I agree with your take the author probably needed to choose their words more carefully. I had a hard time getting past the sentence "But I do mean to say there is no quality in art." The brutal wrongness of it so fundamental and stark... it was like a car crash where I couldn't look away.
Something like the SCID is useful as a structured way of measuring or assessing behavior. A binary output is probably not helpful though.
What's interesting is that the people who developed the SCID (and the DSM and its predecessor, the RDC) actually developed a very similar tool in the 60s, but instead of it producing binary diagnoses, it produced scale scores more like test scores. It actually had better statistical properties and provided fairly detailed information. It's always been a mystery why they moved away from that, except that the DSM as a whole moved away from that.
That's interesting. It reminds of the BMI, a metric intended only for use at the population level. It's been adopted (some would say misappropriated) as a yardstick for individual health, because... reasons?
I do research on the topic of the article. I actually initially clicked on it because the title seems so uncannily similar in content to an article I wrote that I thought they might mention something about it. They did not but it's still really salient to me.
The article is sort of strange in that it brings up these issues and then fails to discuss the huge range of research in this area. The p-factor stuff is sort of hot lately but is just one subtopic in a vast area, somewhat controversial, and more of theoretical interest than clinical utility.
Part of the problem is that there are different purposes for classification systems. I think you're right in that categorical diagnoses have all the appeals you mention at least among some subgroups, but those are a little detached from (1) how many clinicians actually think about a lot of problems, and (2) how many researchers think about these things. Putting aside the "syndrome"-favoring clinicians, a lot of clinicians focus more on behavioral patterns, which tend to be very specific, more targetable, and far removed from broad categorical labels. Many researchers are moving away from these categorical labels also, for many reasons, but mostly generally because the patterns you see in behavior don't map onto the categories in the DSM in reality. Think blood pressure or height as analogies for depression or disorganized thinking, rather than Huntington's disease or malaria.
RDoC is important to mention but it's ending up to be about as controversial as the DSM for various reasons. First, it suffers from the same "names by committee fiat" as the DSM, which is problematic when you are dealing with something like neurobehavioral pathology, which can be examined at many levels and from many directions, which is fuzzy and complex, and about which we know very little. Second, despite its noble intents, was kind of developed by neuroscientists with little connection to actual clinical human behavior. I don't mean any offense to them, but when you get together a bunch of researchers, a substantial number of whom study rodent neurobiology, you're going to start losing touch with what clinicians are actually wrestling with in clinical settings. Look for psychosis or subdimensions of psychosis, for example, and it's missing from RDoC. I like to think of RDoC as "revenge of the neuroscientists," people who got tired of trying to connect their research to human public health, and decided to just redefine problems so it's closer to their own research. A similar initiative is HiTOP, which is more phenotypically focused, and uses statistical/quantitative models for classification rather than committee decisions (I'm not saying HiTOP is better, it just is a similar but different approach from RDoC).
I think the issue is not whether or not mental disorders should have names, it's whether or not there are mental disorders per se, or how to best describe mental-neural-behavioral patterns. You need to be able to quantify to study something scientifically, and quantifying implies labeling; the question is how.
It seems like a second referendum would optimally be framed differently than the first, but it seems like the best option as an outsider. The current scenario doesn't seem to be working.
Strange times we all live in.