User talk:FloraC/Critique on D&D's terminology

Quick note on GPV

As I messaged you on Discord, I do plan to engage with the rest of this, in particular after our RTT guide is finished being published. For now, though, just a quick note: our suggested replacement for "generalized patent val" is not "simple map". "Simple map" is the replacement for "patent val". Our replacement for "generalized patent val" is "uniform map". "Integer uniform map" is a synonym for "simple map". --Cmloegcmluin (talk) 15:53, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for point it out. FloraC (talk) 06:11, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

When/how to respond

Hi Flora. I'm just checking in to see if you happen to have reviewed the whole guide by now, to see if you might have additions or revisions to your critique. And I'd like to know how best to respond to your criticisms — perhaps in discussion topics right here? I'm still busy looking for a job and need to focus on that effort, but I will get to this soon. Ultimately I suppose that for each of your criticisms the outcome will be one of the following:

1. You convince me of your position, and I make the changes throughout the relevant pages.
2. I convince you to withdraw the criticism, and you remove it from this page.
3. We remain in disagreement, and the pages stay as they are.

--Cmloegcmluin (talk) 19:53, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't think I'm finishing reviewing all the terms any time soon, but the existing sections can be taken as finished so far. I'll update the essay accordingly as you respond, and perhaps you'll wanna do it in a separate page in your own namespace. FloraC (talk) 04:26, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

I'll probably avoid creating a critique-of-critique page on my namespace, so I guess I'll stick to discussion topics here.

To set expectations up front, I can already see that for some of your critiques, you will almost certainly not change my mind. But I pledge to stay open to your point of view, and I can see that for some others of your critiques you may well persuade me, in part because you make good points, I care relatively little about the issue, Dave and I weren't in solid agreement about a choice to begin with, or some combination of these and possibly other factors. Thanks as always for taking my/our work seriously and spending the time and energy to engage with it, even when it is to offer constructive criticism like this. --Cmloegcmluin (talk) 15:38, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Re: Domain basis

This is an issue where Dave and I never reached complete agreement. He is fine with "subgroup basis" himself. It's only me who doesn't like it.

Re: consistency. I have deleted the offending quotation. Sorry for the incorrectness.

Re: simplicity. I do not admit that subgroup is technically more correct than subspace. I only acknowledge that some (such as yourself) argue for this. While JI may only be accurately described by free abelian groups, RTT can be accurately described by either those or by vector spaces, depending on the context or approach. If we take the commonplace, historical, and advisable approach of optimizing tunings of temperaments in terms of projections — i.e. lower dimensional approximations that are re-embedded into the original space, such as quarter-comma meantone with generator [0 0 ¼⟩ — then we're working in vector spaces. That's the way I recommend thinking of it, and I see no compelling reason for most musicians to learn "free abelian group", when it's hard enough for them to understand "vector" and "space".

Re: specificity. I have deleted the offending quotation. You correctly identified that this reason was based on the previous term we played with, "interval basis", and is now obsolete.

Re: inclusivity. I have deleted the offending quotation. I accept that we can't hold this issue against "subgroup", as it has never been made explicit or consistent.

I just went ahead and deleted that whole section.

--Cmloegcmluin (talk) 00:41, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Re: Prime-count vector

I disagree that we use "vector" inaccurately. Maybe you don't understand that physicists, engineers, computer scientists, and (most importantly for RTT) linear algebraicists use the term "vector" very differently from the way group theorists use it. I expect that your concerns will seem arcane to our target readership, just as you apparently consider us "ridiculous" to say that a vector is a presentational form, that 81/80 is a quotient and not a vector, and that [-4 4 -1⟩ is its vector form.

--Cmloegcmluin (talk) 00:41, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Re: Held interval

You think that instead of "held-interval" we should use "constraint". Well, "constraint" works fine in pure math or stats contexts. And indeed, in the D&D guide, we do explain that held-intervals are one type of constraint, where the system is for optimizing the tuning of a regular temperament.

With "held-interval", we designed a way to speak about this concept in this context which clearly, concisely, and completely expresses it for our target audience, who are musicians, not mathematicians. So at the least, we're talking about some sort of "interval". What kind of interval, though? We might consider "constrained interval", but that's incomplete, because it leaves open to question how exactly it is constrained. A more specific term such as "constrained-to-pure interval" or perhaps "pure-constrained interval" would suffice, but "held interval" is shorter and sweeter than those. (Then we typically hyphenate to "held-interval basis" for clarity in some contexts.)

--Cmloegcmluin (talk) 00:42, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Re: Map

I am aware of Gene's explanation and defense of the term "val"; I understand that you are compelled by it, but I remain as unconvinced by Gene's words as Dave was during that conversation, and my target readership will feel the same way. So I also have nothing to repeat from that thread you linked. I think Dave clearly won that debate (to be clear, that means that we accept that "val" may be appropriate in certain very specific cases in exchanges between advanced mathematicians, wherever one finds needs to distinguish between an ordinary linear map and a "finitely generated homomorphic mapping from Q+ to Z", but in the 99% of RTT cases where this distinction is not useful, "map" is the term to use). I will here repeat, however, the reasoning why Dave and I recommend not using "val", as we wrote it up on the map page:

Dave and Douglas recommend using "map" rather than "val", for two reasons. First, "map" is a basic linear algebra term with wide familiarity (being specialized for this purpose) while "val" is unnecessary jargon that creates a barrier to understanding by newcomers. Second, the coinage of "val" from the obscure mathematical term "valuation" is tenuous and unlikely to provide helpful insight: "p-adic valuation" is an obscure term for "prime count", which would be an element of a prime-count vector ("monzo"), not a map ("val").

As for Gene's death, I am sensitive to the fact that he was cruelly taken from us before his time, and that his friends and followers should mourn his passing. What I find "uncool" is how you've invoked his death in an attempt to chill efforts to question his work. We cannot simply end debate of people's ideas an account of their death.

--Cmloegcmluin (talk) 00:42, 4 May 2023 (UTC)