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[António Pedro Marques]

Lee Berman wrote (04-11-2011 18:56):

> The fact remains that James and I see a Wolfe wink here. Invoking the names Silent and Silver
> Silk seems to call for much more than the simple fact of Silk quietly looking out of a screen.
> Why would that, by itself, be so important? If him peeking out of a screen seems important
> enough to you for Wolfe to give us these epithets along with a detailed explanation of what an
> epithet means for a god, that's fine. But why should it bother you that James and I follow our
> intuition?

Here I have to agree on both counts (that the coincidence is interesting and 
that no one should be bothered by others' following of it). The second 
agreement is subsidiary to the first, but the reasons for the first are 
quite objective (so, no, no you-allow-it-because-you-like-it ticket).

> as James just noted, I agree there is some poetry to "Greysilk"

There's Gandalf the Gray... is Silk to become White or Black in the future?

> I think the furthest I've gone in that direction is to invoke the young woman/old lady optical
> illusion http://www.qualitytrading.com/illusions/images/oldgirl.gif. If some people can only see
> one or the other, I think that is fine. Does it make those who see both more clever? (I don't
> think so, and I can explain why I don't, if needed)

I don't know that it's needed, but I don't think it would hurt.

But Gerry's answer is not that he doesn't see your pictures. It's rather 
that he finds them so faint that, if such faintness is allowed, then he sees 
not only your pictures, but a thousand other ones. As he demonstrated with 
his Dalek interpretation. If you want to answer that criticism, you must do 
it in concrete terms; doing it in abstract terms can reasonably be 
considered both condescending and non-responsive. In fact, I think the crux 
of the problem is the insistence on concreteness: what is it that a given 
hypothesis offers that is worthy and sets it apart from noise. Of course, 
worthiness may be subjective; but here I think a central criterion is the 
ability of a model to give the reading something other than the model itself 
(and it's legitimate to say that it gives you the kicks; it's just that 
unless it gives a few others the kicks as well, it isn't very convincing).