Bodies with organs
Facepalming right now for not realizing that “organism” and “organization” share the same root, and that the whole concept of “organs” is distributed specialization. The distributed specialization and hierarchalization allows an abstraction over layers and modules, simplifying the computational and managerial problem; each organ has its own API, its own specialized heuristics, its own habitus.
Farmers
We recently discussed here how muskrats are fish, as are bees. More recently, the New York Times covered an article published in Current Biology, and asks, “Are Gophers Farmers?”
In some ways this article is just another example of the difficulty of determining membership in categories, since almost none of them have simple and unproblematic criteria for inclusion or exclusion. What makes this interesting as an example, however, is the different sorts of authority and groundings they reach for in trying to answer this question.
Their starting point is the familiar tactic of analogizing: what do you think of when you think of farmers? According to the NYT, it probably includes “overalls, straw hats, tanned forearms; bails of hay, tractors, seeds”. By contrast, gophers likely bring to mind “fur, whiskers and large front teeth”. Since these lists do not overlap, gophers are probably not farmers.
The scientific article covered by the times (which prompted this whole discussion) instead leans on behavior as the key criteria. In particular, it notes that gophers partly subsist on roots which grow into their tunnels (21% of daily caloric needs). It turns out that the particular type of gopher being studied here promotes root growth not only by aerating the soil (i.e., digging tunnels), but also by scattering their fecal wastes in the tunnels, which acts as a fertilizer. This is as close as we’re going to get to a scientific attempt at categorization in this piece.
Details aside, it seems pretty clear from the original article that the claim about gophers being farmers is just acting as a narrative hook — a way to make their data more interesting. The real purpose of this (short) scientific article is to report on the root cropping behavior of pocket gophers.
Indeed, their claims regarding farming are tentative and heavily hedged:
“Unlike fungus-growing insects, gophers neither sow nor weed their crops. This may disqualify them as farmers, but if accepted, they would represent the first farming non-human mammal.”
Nevertheless, this suggestion was enough to prompt a line of inquiry by the Times.
First, the NYT reporter interviews the the general coordinator of the Farmworker Association of Florida (perhaps playing the role that is closest to a religious authority in this context?), who suggests that “any individual having control over their land and being able to decide what they want to grow” counts as a farmer. The article glosses this as “free will”, which the NYT claims “probably can’t be attributed to pocket gophers”, simultaneously making highly questionable use of the term “free will”, and a seemingly unjustified (though classic) distinction between humans and other mammals.
More of-the-moment is the criteria given by the outreach director for New York FarmNet, (“an organization that consults with the state’s farmers”): “If you identify as a farmer, we will work with you.” Thus, (at least for people), self-identification provides a highly flexible and seemingly inclusive criteria (though one that has also been known to lead to conflicts with other common membership criteria for certain categories), but not one that is open to languageless gophers.
Predictably, we also get a reference to the law, which, as with the California bees, provides what is often the most consequential authority. Even here, however, the interpretation feels a bit watered down. The NYT references the Florida Farm Bureau guide to agricultural laws, which states that “‘Agriculture’ means the science and art of production of plants and animals useful to humans” (which would seemingly exclude gophers), but this hardly seems like the last word. Can’t we at least get something from the relevant parts of the Federal tax code?
Finally, the article includes something of a consequentialist take: a biologist who specializes in gophers (and who discovered that pocket gophers glow under UV light) suggests that we could consider gophers to be farmers, but we’d have to think about what this would mean for how we describe all mammals, not just gophers. They don’t elaborate on this, but presumably we could find other mammals who aerate and fertilize the soil, thereby promoting the growth of the plants they consume, which would further expand the category of farmers.
Near the end of the NYT article, the author states that “The authors of the paper argue that ‘farmer’ is a somewhat artificial concept”. I’m not sure if this is a fair characterization of the views of those authors or not, but just to state the obvious, what exactly is it that makes a concept “artificial”? Indeed, what is a concept that is not artificial, and how can we tell the difference? Moreover, is the distinction between artificial and its complement itself artificial or not? According to what authority?
concepts categorization science authority animals Florida farming artificiality examples gophers
Notes on Elwood & Baldwin
Notes on generalized reading from a People Who Read People interview with fencer Seth Baldwin about Baldwin’s career as a top-ranking fencer. Some thoughts are Elwood’s, some are Baldwin’s, some are my own.
feint: a move which entices a commitment by an opponent, so as to be exploited by the feinter
lure: a feint which works, in part, because the lured player does not realize he is in a game
variance: luck, distribution spread of possible outcomes, the bracketed unknown context. Definitionally that which averages out: over n many rounds, as n increases, variance decreases; thus, outclassed players are incentivized to keep n low (against higher-skilled players)
watching footage: a way to develop good inferential instincts (a well-developed action schema of differences which make a difference) for a given opponent
establishing, then subverting, patterns: a means of exploiting players by staying a step a head in Sicilian-reasoning or anti-inductive games; akin to what I have called pseudo-legibility, insofar as it feigns “readability” or “predictability”
builds & balance: in non-PIG-optimal games, there are tradeoffs between being a generalist or a specialist, between different kinds of specializations and identities; in team events, following the Pareto principle, these builds are akin to the complementarity of social heuristics
frequency dependency: left-handers outcompete right-handed fancers, on average, because they regularly face and practice on right-handers, whereas right-handers only very rarely oppose left-handers. At high levels of competition, this disparity lessens.
divergent cultures of player: Hazard once asked if I knew examples of games where different cultures of play emerged from philosophical differences over “proper” or preferred spirit & letter of play. Here we learn that the saber, foil, and epee divisions are exactly the product of such schisms. (Religious schisms generally are another good example.)
Zachary Elwood generalized reading anti-inductivity PIG optimality social heuristics builds variance pseudo-legibility strategic epistemology subversion surprisal frequency dependency fencing
Red Desert
I re-watched Red Desert, the 1964 Antonioni flick, this week. Giuliana (Monica Vitti) wanders—accompanied by either her young son Valerio, or love interest (and husband’s colleague) Zeller—around post-War Ravenna and its surrounding industrial landscape. Flames shoot from the towers of petrochemical plants; old ditches serve as trash heaps; the earth is washed-out, the sky a dreary gray.
Coastal fog, smoke, and pollution from the factories constantly obscures the characters’ views; the world comes in and out of sight. Sometimes we see the world—for just a second—from Giuliana’s view, and it looks radically different than the “objective” image of the camera.
As in Cassavetes’s Woman Under the Influence, our heroine is a housewife and young mother who slips in and out of sanity, slowly losing her grasp on reality. What is unclear, however, is the extent to which that reality is physical versus social.
In a scene which serves as the film’s centerpiece, Giuliana, her husband, and two other couples camp out in an old shack on unused docks, burning its slats for heat. The port had once been a center of commerce, but the slick ooze of petrol and chemicals now covers its surface. The couples drink wine and eat quail eggs, and talk in alluring tones about the eggs’ supposed aphrodisiac effects. Each takes their turn eating an egg and performing for the group: we see Giuliana down two, then pause thirty seconds before beginning to sway sensually. The social recognition of the eggs’ effects gives them their power—no chemical, orally ingested could possibly kick in so quickly, let alone on a full stomach.
At some point, a large cargo ship pulls up in the empty port, unexpected and unusual. It raises a single yellow flag, and the men of the party debate whether or not the raised flag is a signal of illness on board. One of the wives comments—“That must have been what the cry was about”—and the men ask, “What cry? We didn’t hear a cry.” She insists but falters; perhaps it was imagined, perhaps it was an idea given her by the book she’s been reading, the allege. “Maybe,” she says, caving.
But Giuliana now joins the fray, insisting that she too heard a cry of distress earlier. Now it becomes a scene: the men alleging that she is making a scene, taking a stand to take a stand, or defend her friend. It becomes a gendered conflict very quickly, if it wasn’t already. When a doctor arrives, and then an ambulance, evidence shifts toward the women, but this shift goes unacknowledged.
When I watched Red Desert with Nico, I never heard a cry either, but she did. When we debriefed afterwards, she talked a lot about the soundtrack, the jarring industrial noises and unnerving alarm-like sound effects. She tied Giuliana’s psychological distress to the sensory bombardment of a hostile industrial landscape. I didn’t notice any of those, I told her. But it seems correct, as an interpretation of the movie’s themes. At one point, Giuliana’s son asks about noxious yellow smoke being released from factory stacks; she tells him the gases are poisonous. He asks whether, if a bird flew through the fumes, it would get sick or die, and she comforts him: No, no, the birds have learned by now to steer clear.
There’s a long history in Western thought of casting men as rational, women as feeling. There’s a lot of prejudice in this account, and an emphasis on difference rather than continuity. But if there’s a small kernel of truth in this account, it might be found in the predictive processing paradigm of top- and bottom-heaviness.
Very briefly, the idea of predictive processing is that we constantly make guesses (predictions) about our environment, then learn from the error—the differential between prediction and subsequent (perceived) events. Friston’s free energy, a version of this model, makes very specific, controversial claims about how the brain works—but in its generic form, the predictive processing theory is very much aligned with a long history of Western thought about schematic learning and cognitive modeling from Kant to Piaget to Gestalt theory.
“Top” here refers to high-level hypotheses which alter and affect bottom-up sensory experience—for instance, a placebo changing how your body experiences pain. With little top, the world resemble’s James’s “buzzin’ bloomin confusion”; with little bottom, we fall into heavy denialism, confirmation bias, and delusion.
In Red Desert, the men are always trying to reduce Giuliana’s experience—and the experience of other women—to some rationalistic formal system, top-down. At points—such as with the cry on the docks—this rationalizing approaches gaslighting. And yet, if the cry is there, the men are merely less perceptive! Near the film’s end, Giuliana’s young son Valerio fakes paralysis, sending her into a panic. She tests his reflexes, stands him up, tempts him, but he defies her suspicions and maintains the paralysis. He is authoring a social reality for her, manipulating her with it (to avoid kindergarten). When she catches him, some hours later, getting out of bed to grab a toy from the table, she is first overjoyed, then distraught. Throughout the film, one implicit question has been, how does this little boy, Valerio—her son, her ward—turn into someone like her husband, or like Zeller—a man who alters and controls her understanding of the world. And this deception is such a tipping point. He doesn’t need me anymore, she tells Zeller; my son doesn’t need me. Already he is authoring the reality I inhabit, rather than living in mine.
I think a lot about top-heaviness and bottom-heaviness. I think a lot of leading or managing an organization looks like creating and maintaining a shared social reality around which lower-level members synchronize, allowing coordination. The CEO constructs a narrative, which guides and influences decisions of both employees and investors. Hence—perhaps—the stereotype of the high-powered executive who likes to be tied up in his/her afterhours—a complete renunciation of narrative control. And is it really a coincidence, “topping” and “bottoming” in a sexual context? Production versus consumption—of desire, of experience.
Psychedelics, a la REBUS, relax priors, make experience less top-heavy. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that one of the most common psychological effects of psychedelics is boundary dissolution, between oneself and one’s environment. A greater permeability, a reduced ability to filter out: one can imagine that, tripping across the harsh industrial landscape of Red Desert, we might go mad like Giuliana.
If there is a difference in men and women’s “top-heaviness” or “bottom-heaviness,” it is much smaller than the similarity in our processing, and I think it would be a mistake to take this carving too seriously. More obvious is the ossification which comes with age: the way that neuroplastic young minds become close-minded and unable to learn as they grow up. It’s not that ossified minds go out intending to impose social reality on people: it’s that their perception has naturalized, that it’s hard not to live in a world, around people, without imposing your narrative, especially when you have the status or power to force others to adapt around you. And perhaps that’s what the man/woman dichotomy is really about: Men impose their systems and social realities because historically, they have had the power to. Because for them, their personal perception has always been the reality, rather than mere perception.
This is the biggest mistake, and it is the nemesis of generalized compatibilism, or standpoint epistemology. The biggest problem with the American left is not its belief in social construction or standpoint epistemology: it is that it pays lip service to these ideas when convenient, while turning around and naturalizing all its own eccentric perceptions and value judgments as “natural rights,” the product of an “inevitable arc of moral progress.” But that arc is a product of hindsight, not foresight.
Michelangelo Antonioni predictive processing social reality REBUS psychedelics Monica Vitti social construction deception generalized compatibilism
Divide by less
From Slime Mold Time Mold’s “On the Hunt for Ginormous Effect Sizes”:
But here’s something they don’t always tell you: p-hacking is only an issue if you’re doing research in the narrow range where inferential statistics are actually called for. No p-values, no p-hacking. And while inferential statistics can be handy, you want to avoid doing research in that range whenever possible. If you keep finding yourself reaching for those p-values, something is wrong.
…
Studying an effect that is truly ginormous makes p-hacking a non-issue. You either see it or you don’t. So does having a sufficiently large sample size. If you have both, fuggedaboudit. Studies like these don’t need pre-registration, because they don’t need inferential statistics. If the suspected effect is really strong, and the study is well-powered, then any finding will be clearly visible in the plots.
The point of science isn’t to achieve perfect correctness in the global knowledge game, getting a high score on the List of True Things. It’s to figure out things that will improve people’s lives when that knowledge is acted upon. People are imperfect detectors of signal, of course, and statistics have their use in some situations. But grubbing in the soil for p-values is an unhelpful default we should wean ourselves off of. If the effect is a subtle nudge that disappears when you look at it in the wrong light, we could spend a lot of time arguing whether that wrong light is the “real light” or if there’s “really something there”. Or we could just stop and say: well, whether or not there’s something there, it’s not that much of something, and there are plenty of Muches of Somethings out in the world, so why not look at one of those instead?
Take scurvy. If you go months without vitamin C, you get Much of Bad Things Happening to You. Get some vitamin C in you, and Much Of Return To Health Happens To You. This is what a deficiency disease actually looks like. It’s Much! No one is running a meta-analysis or looking at the p-value to determine if vitamin C has an effect on scurvy; the analysis is You Won’t Believe What Happened When These Sailors Ate Some Watercress! If you’re looking in to a particular nutrient deficiency and you need to tease apart a maybe-effect with statistics, then whether or not it lands on the side of “significant” or “not significant”, it’s clearly not that significant.
You don’t need to be a nutrient truther to default to being skeptical about science that doesn’t ground out in anecdote.1 But what about the other way around: anecdote that doesn’t replicate in science? Supposedly one of the chief purposes of science is to soberly look at a presumed trend and see whether it fails to replicate. But what does it actually mean when an anecdotal giant effect doesn’t hold up in general?
Well, what does “in general” mean? All people, everywhere? “Unprotected sex results in childbirth” fails to generalize for everyone, but it’s obviously true and a ginormous effect. If your volunteers were from a community filled with mostly people incapable of giving birth, you could probably make a study where the sex→childbirth link wasn’t statistically significant. But all that means is that your representations were wrong.
This is obvious because “capable of giving birth” is something we can easily recognize and are used to knowing about ourselves. But every effect of the form “highly meaningful for a few, largely unnoticeable in others” could be governed by similar dynamics! If you have a scientific study showing that an intervention was a great help for 5% of people and irrelevant for the other 95%, your job isn’t to open a Jupyter notebook and run a significance test to figure out if that intervention is “real science”; it’s to figure out what language describes the commonalities of that 5% such that anyone reading along at home will know if it’s worth trying for them. Our modern conception of science often gets this exactly backwards: by “removing outliers” and bounding findings in some scoring system, effects that are obviously ginormous when you see them in front of you get dully labeled as “failure to replicate” because you picked a lot of people it wasn’t true for also. But that’s your fault for assuming your ontologies were already adequate! It doesn’t make the effect less ginormous!
When an effect is anecdotally ginormous, all that a study can ever truly disprove is “The granularity of description I’ve chosen is enough to predict who ought to expect an effect”. If you see high magnitude for small numbers of people, then you know there’s something for you to find and it’s just relying on proper ontological work to create the new conceptual handle you need. It’s a damn shame that so much of science is focused instead on small magnitude effects that presume to be held for large numbers of people. There’s no universal person, and the sooner we accept that and stop centering tests that equate evidence against universality with evidence against effect, the sooner we can get back to proper ginormous science.
I am like 85% a nutrient truther.↩︎
ontology Slime Mold Time Mold knowledge logistics science representation epistemology p-hacking
Why artists return to nature
Mature artists often seem to lose patience with art itself and “return to nature”, often describing it as the essential source of inspiration of which art is just an attempt to isolate a single thread or imitate in some narrow medium.
I think there’s a very good and general reason for this to be the case: nature is self-organized with complex situations more than the human mind can fathom, but art is bottlenecked by the generalized reading game that the artist participates in.
Art is created by the artist, and no matter how genius the artist or how much they are able to act as a conduit for forces more complex than themselves, it is the artist’s pen that is fundamentally the bottleneck in complexity. Deeply complex things that demand expression may make their case to the artist, but they will be projected down into the complexity of the medium and the artist’s ability to express it.
This expressive ability isn’t necessarily bottlenecked by explicit understanding: artists are constantly expressing things in art they are incapable of representing explicitly in language. But there is some kind of bottleneck created by the artist’s expressive capacity.
Nature isn’t like that, unless you want to hypothesize God and say its bottlenecked by their creativity. Since we have no idea what that bottleneck is, we’d backwards engineer it from reality, so it wouldn’t be perceived as a bottleneck by us in practice.
Nature is self-organized and is the thing that puts together our capacity for thought: it contains more complexity than we can possibly capture in our heads, leading us to find explanatory patterns that allow us to explain some of what’s going on more simply (but never all, because we can’t compress nature into a small enough format to fit the human mind). Nature is also mostly unconcerned about communicating with humans, which means that examining nature is an exercise in expanding one’s generalized reading vocabulary.
The end result is that artists can seek new partial isomorphisms with their experience infinitely in nature. This is theoretically possible in art, but often a given era of art will be endless shitty variations of a theme on the same isomorphism as each artists tries to speak in approximately the same ways with approximately the same audiences. There is certainly plenty of variation in art, but it’s often either random or too directly derived from recognized artistic environments to lead to truly new complexity.
Art is, at the end of the day, more contrived than nature: it is human’s contrivance towards kinds of expression they are incapable of explicilty representing with the same force. But nature’s massive computation machine and endless store of time has created perceivable systems that express truths it is difficult to derive from human discourse, until they are inserted directly into the discourse through art itself.
“Wartime export”: Colorado potato beetle
The “Ask an Entomologist” post I’m linking below is worth reading. A tale of beetle evolution, human management attempts, and a little bit of wartime propaganda. I found it interesting that both sides in WWII expected that the other side was going to weaponize the potato beetle, and both sides did research for both offensive use and defensive protection against weaponized crop-eaters. But in the end, neither deployed the beetle intentionally—it just proliferated simply by lack of management:
- lack of quarantine checks
- lack of insecticide supply
- lack of agricultural laborers
that were all secondary effects of war efforts—both Axis and Ally.
Fun article. Read it, starting from the 3rd paragraph.
There’s speculation that CPB was used as a biological weapon in WWII because potatoes were an important wartime staple. The idea was that CPB would cause the countries at war to burn more resources to produce food. Research designed to turn this insect into a weapon was certainly done by both sides, but it’s natural spread most likely rendered this unnecessary.
During WWII, there was a lot of research into chemical warfare by both the Allied and Axis powers. Although this was supposedly to develop new weapons, much of it was out of fear of the Colorado Potato Beetle. The first organophosphates, nerve gasses turned pesticides, were invented while looking for new ways to fight the CPB in preparation for such an event.
strategic interaction mutual futures modeling AI safety but for insects diet
The physical implementation of the Liar’s Paradox is a buzzer
by Hazard
From a delightfully weird little book, Diamond: A Paradox Logic1:
Is the Liar true or false? Boolean logic cannot answer. What bold expedient would decide the question? What but Experiment? Let us be scientific! Is it possible to build a physical model of formal paradox using simple household items, such as (say) wires, switches, batteries and relays? Yes, you can! And indeed it’s simple! It’s easy! Just wire together a spring-loaded relay, a switch, and a battery, using this childishly simple circuit:
When you close the switch, the relay is caught in a dilemma; for if current flows in the circuit, then the relay shall be energized to break the circuit, and current will stop; whereas if there is no current in the circuit, then the spring-loaded circuit will re-connect, and current will flow. Therefore the relay is open if and only if it is closed. Which? To find out, close the switch. What do you see? You would see less than you’d hear; for in fact you would see a blur! The relay would oscillate. It would vibrate. It would, in fact, buzz!
“All buzzers, bells, alternators, and oscillators are based on this principle of oscillation via negative feedback. Thermostats rely on this principle; so do regulators, rectifiers, mechanical governors, and electromagnetic emitters. Electric motor/generators and heat engines are rotary variants of this process; they use cybernetic phase alternation to ensure that the crankshaft constantly tries to catch up to itself.
There’s nothing paradoxical about a buzzer circuit. Unless of course you had some notion that it was supposed to be representing things in such a way that it always ended up in some steady state. The Liar’s Paradox is a paradox because it is an intent of the representational system that is formal logic that proofs terminate. If you find that proofs in your formal system are “oscillating”, its equally logically valid to say “well I defs don’t want my proof system to do that, so time to rework the proof system” as it is to say “huh, maybe I want to think about the idea of ‘proof’ and what types of things it pertains to differently.”
ht to Malcolm Ocean for putting me onto this example.↩︎
Paradoxes come from reifying representations
by Hazard
From Anthony Wilden on paradoxes:
In the impossible object, a single jump in dimensions is made and unmade and remade ad infinitum by the paradoxical command about the third dimension implicit in the image of the triangle. The coded cues about dimension in one part of the image are switched into a conflicting code in another part. […] For people and societies that have not decided (collectively) and learned (individually) to see three dimensions in two-dimensional pictures, the paradox of the imaginary triangle does not exist1. […] What we have learned about reading dimensions into pictures we cannot unlearn later on.
As with most representations, there is not some correspondence cop following you around who will alert you when making a perfectly allowable move in representation space doesn’t actually correspond to something real in the domain you’re trying to represent. I can draw a picture of my closet and a picture of my car inside the closet, even though the things they represent wouldn’t fit inside each other. The substrate of representation is not bound by the same rules as that which is being represented. They are necessarily different, in order for representations to be more lightweight than reality itself, and that means making decisions about which subset of the rules of the territory you will try to enforce on the substrate of your representation, and which you will ignore.
A framework or representation schema cannot be “paradoxical” on it’s own. It can contain a contradiction, two things that assert the impossibility of each other, but it’s not until you have notion that “because they’re both in my framework, they must both be correct” that there is a paradox. If I write on a note-card “I am 10 years old” and “I am 80 years old”, it generally wouldn’t be considered a paradox because no one was expecting random words I wrote on a note-card to all be true.
This paradox cannot be resolved as long as the frame that creates and maintains it is accepted as unalterable and real.
Paradoxes can never actually be, and contradictions are resolved by Jumping Out Of The Frame.
Susceptibility to various optical illusions does vary by culture, but it’s not entirely an artifact of culture. The Ames Window illusion is more convincing when one has grown up in “carpentered environments”, but its not an on/off switch. You can also tweak the illusion for greater convincingness across the board.↩︎
Don’t forget you’re contradicting, dear
If you do formal logic wrong even once it blows up. This is called the principle of explosion. If you’ve allowed a single contradiction into your system, you can use it to prove any incorrect statement you like - or the opposite of that statement! You’re left with a bombed-out wreckage of a formalism, completely incapable of distinguishing any truths whatsoever.
Knowing that contradictions are so dangerous, it may surprise you to learn that one of the most powerful techniques in mathematics is the “proof by contradiction”, dancing right on the razor’s edge of explosion. It works like this: start by assuming something is true with no evidence. Execute steps one after the other that have all been previously proven valid until you reach a contradictory conclusion. Something must be wrong for a contradiction to be let in, and there’s only one possible option: the assumption you made at the start. So that assumption must be false.
You can see that if you’re doing a proof by contradiction, it’s awfully important to remember what it is you assumed without evidence. If you went through so many steps that you’ve forgotten the initial assumption, you’ll get to the contradiction and think: “Wow, this goes against normal mathematics, but all of my steps were valid, so it must actually be right!” And once that happens you have explosion, gleefully chasing other findings that seem to “follow” from your contradiction without realizing that all statements are equally true or false in your exploded formal system.
In Being incoherent is Lindy, Crispy Chicken makes the point that the “classic” philosophical paradoxes are often just unhelpful conceptualizations obscuring the point (because well-formulated questions get answers). Let’s think about these contradictory statements as evidence that we’re in an exploded logic, and hunt for the assumption that the unhelpful conceptualization is hiding.
Take perennial TIS punching bag The Ship of Theseus paradox. The ship was rebuilt piece by piece, and a scavenger from behind made a ship from the discarded parts. Is one or the other the “real” ship of Theseus? How does one ship become two? We could play around with this exploded logic, or we could just notice: we assumed there was such a thing as “real” identity indepdent from a use case. We reached a contradiction. Ergo, our initial assumption was wrong: there must not be such a thing as a metaphysical “real ship”.
The sorties paradox: taking away or adding one leaf doesn’t meaningfully change a leaf pile into “not a leaf pile”, so how do we get leaf piles? Well, we’re assuming that a threshold of when leaves are a “pile” is a strict function of leaf count, but we seem to have reached a contradiction, so it’s probably wrong. If you see a leaf pile and are about to jump in, but then someone walks past you with a bloody forehead and says “That’s a single layer of leaves on top of a rock to trick people, don’t do it”, it sure doesn’t feel like a leaf pile anymore, does it?
What about the extremely-annoying-in-rationalist-circles Newcomb’s paradox? There’s a reliable predictor that’s changing the reward in a box based on it’s prediction of your behavior, so do you make the choice that “cooperates” with the future prediction, or are you safe to maximize since whatever it’s deciding has been decided? You could try to make your decision by going down a Wikipedia page that has separate headings for “causality and free will”, “conscioussness and simulation”, and “fatalism”. Or you could say, wait, this all seems extremely goofy and totally disjoint to how anti-inductive dynamics actually work in practice. We started this by assuming a reliable predictor that’s reliable even when the agent in question knows the options the predictor is predicting between and has no cost to change their mind, and now we seem to be in an exploded formalism, so probably our assumption was wrong and we’ve just accomplished a proof by contradiction against this kind of reliable predictor.
Remember the hallmark of a formal logic that’s been struck by the principle of explosion: anything is true, because you can prove half of everything with one version of the contradictory statement and the other half with the other version. If you’re in a situation where a statement and it’s opposite both seem to have valid proofs, take a step back and ask yourself: what concept am I assuming exists? You may have just been contradicting so hard you forgot you were doing it, and you haven’t actually proven the statement OR it’s opposite, but instead disproven the assumption that got you there in the first place.
philosophy incoherence logic mathematics principle of explosion paradox
Legal language
In my last post I explored the way in which glass defies what would otherwise be a nice clean categorization scheme in which things are either solids or liquids (or other states like gas and plasma). Shortly after that, Feast of Assumption wrote about a context in which muskrats are fish. The first concerns a scientific distinction, whereas the latter comes down to a religious dispensation. Here, I wanted to add a third example, this time with the relevant authority derived from legislation.
As has been somewhat widely covered, including on Scott Alexander’s blog, courts in California recently ruled on the comprehensiveness of a category for the purposes of wildlife protection, especially as this pertains to bees.
The headlines all deploy basically the same hook, e.g. “Bees are legally fish in Calfornia”. More specifically, the California Court of Appeal recently ruled that four species of bees can be included in the category “fish”, as defined by the Endangered Species Act.
This sounds absurd, obviously, until you see the law as written (as many have pointed out). In the General Provisions and Definitions section of the Californian Fish and Game Code, “fish” is defined as “a wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals”. Flying past the seemingly recursive nature of this definition, we see that it indeed includes “invertebrate”. And as any entomologist knows, bees are, in fact, invertebrates, along with 95% of animal species.1
On one level, this is a classic case of legal language departing from common usage. As a term of art, “fish” cannot be assumed, in a legal context, to align with what the proverbial “man on the street” would take it to mean. In this case, the distinction is long standing: the California Legislature amended its Fish and Game Code all the way back in 1969 to add invertebrates and amphibians to the definition of fish.
The reason this is surfacing now is that this definition was used by the California Fish and Game Commission to classify honeybees as endangered back in 2019, and appeals by various groups are just now working their way through the courts.
The reason this matters of course, is that endangered species protection brings with it the force of law, and means that such species “may not be imported into the state, exported out of the state, ‘taken’ (i.e., killed), possessed, purchased, or sold without proper authorization”.2
On the one hand are farmers and agricultural groups, who want the broadest possible latitude in carrying out their operations. On the other side (in this case) is the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, whose mission is stated rather clearly in their name.
One question we might have is whether those proposing the addition of invertebrates to the definition intended it to be interpreted so broadly. This gets into very difficult territory, but in the end it is only partially relevant.
While the intentions may matter in how the law is interpreted (when challenged), it is the interpretation that will eventually have force. That being said, this is not necessarily the final word, in that this ruling could eventually be overruled by the California Supreme Court.
The legislature is of course free to alter the relevant definition, as they see fit, so this may end up as a test of the lobbying power of agricultural vs. conservationist interests, rather than common sense. What interests me here, however, is how definitions can sit on the books for many years, remaining unchallenged despite being fairly obviously flawed, and yet not cause any difficulties until someone comes up with a way to stitch together various definitions into something with potential legal power. In other words, this is another nice case of Generalized Hacking.
So far we’ve got science, religion, and law.3 What other systems so routinely engender these kinds of conflicts over definitions?
Note this does not mean that all insects are suddenly protected as endangered species. This ruling would seem to make them eligible, but only those species that are specifically listed by the California Fish and Game Commission are actually considred threatened or endangered.↩︎
From a summary provided by The California Department of Fish and Wildlife [source](https://wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/CESA#:~:text=The%20California%20Endangered%20Species%20Act%20(CESA)(opens%20in%20new,1984%20and%20amended%20in%201997.)↩︎
Although not of the same order, we could also add comedy as a regime which exploits category conflicts: https://xkcd.com/2630/↩︎
concepts categories science religion law legislation hacking examples ontology meaning legibility pragmatism distinction bees fish California
Drinking steel for self or others
Possible Modernist’s latest rejoinder in our ongoing discussion quotes some fun literature and again attributes the recklessness involved in self-experimentation to being ‘for machismo, rather than a pure quest for knowledge.’
I don’t deny that Boyle’s account there can easily be described as manic, drug-fueled, compulsive. But that doesn’t necessarily imply that his motives were ‘showing off’ as opposed to ‘personal curiosity.’ It could ALSO be the case, if Boyle was drinking batshit things ‘to combat gout and (kidney?) stone,’ that he was in severe pain a lot of the time, and the downsides of drinking metals seemed less dramatic in comparison with his pain, than they would to you or I or someone not beset by kidney stones in a pre-painkiller era.
This has been an enjoyable discussion, and I don’t know that I have more that is useful to add–I can’t know, and I think we can’t know–the motives of Boyle. I can know that he pushed boundaries, and even though his medical “research” was erratic and unreplicated, the fact that he recorded his acts did let us learn “whelp, I won’t be trying /that/”. We can also be grateful that he was displayed less bravado in his work on gases.
I don’t want to close without a cool new weird example, though, so here’s one recently shared by @halvorz, from Jacques Pepin’s “The Origins of AIDS”. 