subsumption

I mentioned that I tend to have a lot of difficulty with polarities. By this I mean, I tend to get left and right confused, along with true/false, plus/minus, subsumes/is subsumed by.

The good news is that I think I have finally figured out why I keep tripping over subsumption, as I have done ever since I encountered the concept in a beginner's Description Logic course.

In short, we say G ⊑ S (G subsumes S) more or less if G is a subset of S, right?

The reason I think this gives me difficulty is that there's a kind of subtle "contradiction" that my very sloppy and stupid brain simply cannot handle. It goes like this:

• G is a subset of S, so G is SMALLER than S, gotcha
• G is more general than S, so G is BIGGER than S, wait, WTF?

So the problem is that "G subsumes S" conjures up a mental image of a massive blob-like G swallowing up a helpless little S. I know the mental image isn't appropriate here, but I can't help it! You say the word, and I get the blob.

Of course, if I can keep my thinking cap on for long enough, I realise that the way out of this is that to remember that G is more general than S only by virtue of containing less stuff than it. Smaller, so more general.

But I think I'm the kind of guy that does NOT reason about things so much as trying to bash them into primitive mental constructs like "smaller" and "bigger". Hence the repeated run-ins with confusion about subsumption. How did I fool these people into giving me a fancy degree?

erician confusion

Had some nebulous insight into the nature of erician confusion; might be full of shit here, as I seem to be fond of saying: my problem seems to be that I need to fit everything into some kind of global narrative, which is very nice for remembering things, but also a huge pain if you're trying to understand things that you sort of half-get.

The second problem is that unlike other people, I seem to have a very low tolerance for half-understanding things: either I get them or I am totally lost, but I can't seem to reach that happy halfway state where I know what I understand, and I know what I don't understand and I'm ok with it. This is obviously very bad, because it means I can't go incrementally, I can't climb the ladder and increase my comprehension over time... it's

dumb erics	normal people (lucky bastards)
wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf BANG! "oh! I get it!"	"i don't get it" -> "i kinda get it" -> "ok, i think I'm getting a handle on it" -> "oh, I get it"

So these two things sort of interact. Because I only half-understand things (which means not at all), I have trouble fitting them into the global narrative (because of apparent contradictions that only appear because of my half-understanding), and because I can't fit them into the narrative, I don't make any progress understanding them. So everything... just... sucks. Because if A, B and C all belong in the global narrative, and I sort of 3/4 understand A and B and half-understand C, for me, it's as good as understanding nothing at all; there is sort of a giant WTF hanging over my head, because I'm missing the critical two halves and one quarter that I need for the stitching to work.

Completely incoherent.

Sorry, maybe I'll half understand what I wrote later.