Teasers for the previous 100 posts
1/ The real AI challenge is figuring what will get a desired message across in advance, not generating enough entry-level drivel to sometimes get lucky, and that requires context we don’t know how to model.
https://tis.so/catwoman-leaving-batman-for-jar-jar-binks-because-of-his-implied-proficiency-at-oral-sex-as-a
2/ The “meaning” of communicative acts is the influence they have on action; more precisely, it is the delta they have on the actions agents would have otherwise taken.
https://tis.so/gaming-and-entailment
3/ Language is the solution to a coordination problem between people who want to get stuff done, and a lot of that has to do with figuring out what futures people are mutually interested in and attempting to make them happen.
https://tis.so/coordinating-with-cups
4/ The signals we use to interpret our world and, importantly, our effect on the world are markers we hope indicate actual underlying realities—our understanding of reality always bottlenecks at these markers.
https://tis.so/everything-bottlenecks-with-appearances
5/ John Nerst’s (@everythingstudies) Cat Couplings (https://everythingstudies.com/2019/10/30/cat-couplings/) are a memetic technology that creates and reinforces types, e.g., Types of Guys.
https://tis.so/cat-couplings-are-a-way-to-construct-and-reinforce-types
6/ Generalized Reading is a concept we use a lot in TIS, which just means everything that can be manipulated by people will be used for communication—here are three worked-out examples.
https://tis.so/generalized-reading-for-everybody
7/ Cherry-picked examples make the dream of AI—and it’s current status—hard to assess through over-hyping, which actively holds back progress from being reported, since it won’t be perceived as progress at all.
https://tis.so/how-examples-undermine-gpt-4
8/ The pragmatic usage of language we see in people is grounded in the modeling of possible futures every agent does for every other agent, allowing us to be vague or wrong, because we expect the other person to snap onto useful interpretations.
https://tis.so/reference-on-the-fly
9/ The problem of selecting options from possibilities is always pragmatically scoped to the circumstances that you expect selection to take place—that’s why rules of thumb are never universal—examples abound from drug mules to policing cinematic taste.
https://tis.so/thoughts-on-differentiation
10/ Predictability is a form of communication—that’s why in adversarial games it’s so dangerous: being obvious is a “tell” and you don’t want to tell your opponent anything real, unless you can condition them and exploit their new found predictability.
https://tis.so/optimization-v-empowerment
11/ How much more can people know themselves than observers can know them given that they have privileged access to information, but extra motivation to distort its interpretation?
https://tis.so/signal-privilege-vs-representation-privilege-in-introspection
12/ Compartmentalizing your mind—whether out of fear or a sincere desire for self-manipulation—leaves your mind less efficient in its ability to coordinate itself or throw its full weight at something it might otherwise gobble-up delightedly.
https://tis.so/the-degree-to-which-you-are-divided-is-the-degree-to-which-you-are-conquered
13/ A system that’s trying to satisfy you will modify your preferences, but we tend to think of current content recommendation systems as fundamentally more pointed and agential, without much evidence to that effect.
https://tis.so/learning-to-manipulate
14/ Thinking about things in terms of “either it happens or it doesn’t” only works if that thing has a reasonable probability of going either way, otherwise you’re liable to end-up with bad definitions that don’t tell you what you think they will.
https://tis.so/excluded-middle-frames-and-when-to-doubt-them
15/ What are attempts at artificial ethical judgements actually trying to do?
16/ A quick overview of how some of us conceptually cut-up situations into elements of strategy.
https://tis.so/quick-sketch-of-the-strategic-situation
17/ If you think about strategizing you’ll probably be bad at it, because you weren’t trained to do it consciously and most situations specifically try to winnow away your ability to.
https://tis.so/consciously-strategizing-in-social-interaction-is-a-chinese-fingertrap
18/ There are things you know that others can’t because they’re not you, and ways of thinking about things you don’t know because of lack of exposure: how do these two things interact in communication between different parties?
https://tis.so/the-limits-of-signal-privilege
19/ Socializing one’s self into taste is often more effective than performing taste, because it makes use the reality of your internal preference engine, which you can’t consciously simulate with high fidelity.
https://tis.so/taste-optics-and-authenticity
20/ Information that’s preserved by a group is what coordinates it, and coordinating requires this kind of preservation—and often protection from other groups who would like to intrude on the current order.
https://tis.so/boundaries-protect-information-too
21/ Helping people play signaling games or trying to enforce them away, tends to make them more nuanced and powerful.
https://tis.so/the-signal-democratization-double-bind
22/ How hackable is the world we live in?
https://tis.so/generalized-hacking
23/ The balance in human life, and indeed in most competition, is between doing what everyone else is doing to be part of the herd, and doing something different to stand apart from everyone else in the herd.
https://tis.so/girardean-mimesis-bourdieusean-distinction
24/ A lot of spookiness comes from introducing frames we don’t know how to properly apply to a situation and then being stunned by what these frames insist is or can’t be true.
https://tis.so/natural-ontologies
25/ “Will my uploaded brain whistle?”
https://tis.so/will-my-uploaded-brain-whistle
26/ “free associative therapy can be thought of as a special sort of game, where the speaker conceives of the listener as having a certain special knowledge which can fix the speaker’s problems”
https://tis.so/introspection-vs-extrospection-and-psychoanalytic-epistemics
27/ The often overlooked meta-goal of “having a good time” underlies the dynamics of most games in ways often not expressed in formal rules or analysis—what happens when a player doesn’t abide by it?
https://tis.so/degenerate-play
28/ Cues (social or otherwise) shape how we view a situation, leading to metonyms (”suits” instead of business men or women) that compress how we see the world into what we see in the world.
29/ In the real world, people continuously develop their internal conceptual ontologies to map what they should do about recognized events, which often makes hypotheticals that play with these ontologies poor simulations of reality.
https://tis.so/reply-to-heuristics-that-almost-always-work
30/ The AI concept of “wireheading”—an agent changing its reward function to make it easy to achieve—isn’t a case of the AI cheating a test, it’s a case of bad definitions that make you think there’s a paradox.
https://tis.so/wireheading-is-a-teleological-misnomer
31/ Doing something because it’s worked before is fundamentally different than doing something because you have a model of why it might work.
https://tis.so/cargocult-to-william-james
32/ What potlucks provide as a social technology: a series of intertwining games that people self-select themselves into, often benefiting the group total.
https://tis.so/aligned-incentive-structures-of-potlucks
33/ The things we say are often more about carving grooves in social dynamics to make certain actions favored or disfavored, rather than saying anything specific about the world.
https://tis.so/non-literal-communication
34/ A smattering of vocabulary we use to describe the games we see and the bottlenecks we use to explain them here at the Inexact Sciences.
https://tis.so/a-vocabulary-primer-to-strategic-interaction-pt-1
35/ Selection games (like you choosing which shampoo to buy and brands competing to be chosen) are underwritten by the fact that complete honesty is not beneficial to the party subject to selection, allowing the Detective genre to arise.
https://tis.so/tana-french-on-the-selection-games-of-detective-work
36/ Searching for examples to describe new concepts is the search for “things that have this strong similarity to other lived experiences, but crucially have not yet been generalized”—prototypicality alone is not enough.
https://tis.so/examples-of-themselves
37/ Realness is often fetishized, and when it is considered consciously as such, it becomes a symbol in and of itself, that can be played around like the rest of our cultural symbols…is that bad or not?
38/ J. Robert Oppenheimer on the intimate vs. the surveying view of phenomena.
https://tis.so/near-and-far-view-in-the-inexact-sciences
39/ Formless empiricism is our default working methodology in TIS: we aim to be doing pragmatically useful things, underwritten by our experience of reality, without requiring immediately paying the meaning debt through direct experimentation.
https://tis.so/on-formless-empiricism
40/ Pragmatically scoped notes on an academic paper about game theoretic pragmatics: how should we mechanically model communication as a game?
https://tis.so/notes-on-franke-2013-game-theoretic-pragmatics
41/ Narratives give us something that procedural description or declarative denotation of a system/phenomenon doesn’t: an opportunity to excavate categories through the patterns across narratives.
https://tis.so/danny-at-the-grand-canyon
42/ Good examples are often worth more than large sample sizes.
https://tis.so/the-pfeilstorch
43/ What if language is just finely-tuned associative babbling?
https://tis.so/brute-association—or-babbling
44/ Anti-inductivity is rarely a direct property of a system—it’s a limiting case that systems often asymptotically approach or avoid.
https://tis.so/anti-inductivity-is-a-limit-case
45/ Saying things that are hard to be reasonable about discussing or analyzing is selected-for in philosophical discourse.
https://tis.so/being-incoherent-is-lindy
46/ Two years into TIS: what are we doing and why are we here?
47/ Strong emergence is an incoherent proposition, as it can always be factored-out of any argument for its existence.
https://tis.so/consciousness-is-not-strongly-emergent
48/ “Thought sinks” that we keep coming back to are often interpreted as parts of ourselves that need attention or as neuroses that need resolution, but what if they’re requests to go meta?
49/ Winning a bored game in a way that ruins your friendships violates the meta-game of board games because “board games” are a social construct.
https://tis.so/board-games-are-a-social-construct
50/ If you want to be an X, you will often keep scraping at the bottom of the barrel of what can be done, because you’re incentivized to look like those who came before you.
https://tis.so/prestigious-costumes-and-cargocult-philosophy
51/ What is the relationship between new language and new concepts?
https://tis.so/language-and-science
52/ We can learn about others by learning our own responses to different stimuli, and this is precisely why communication is so often conceived first in terms of its effects and only secondarily in terms of its literal content.
https://tis.so/self-response-learning-and-acim
53/ Calling “all communication manipulation” makes it seem like that manipulation is reliable, as if one was pulling a lever in a machine, but that’s certainly not how we experience it.
https://tis.so/an-aspect-of-manipulation-that-not-all-communication-has
54/ Victory through population appears in many cultures and times—and is often conflated with reaching paradise: why does this happen and at point will population mean something other than “living humans”?
https://tis.so/ecstatic-demography
55/ “Spooky” information—like what energy healers supposedly tap into—really isn’t all that spooky when we think of mundane examples like socially contagious ideas and feelings.
56/ A critique of C. Thu Nguyen’s concept of “value clarity” that asks: isn’t single mindedness something humans are constantly drawn to across contexts, cultures, and times?
https://tis.so/value-clarity-2-0
57/ Why would moderators of a deception-based game enforce a rule about not signaling you’re telling the truth?
58/ Often, a player who is guaranteed to lose is the one who can decide who will win—we can call such players kingmakers, because they decide who has dominion.
59/ A couple mutually going overboard with affection and desire in romantic relationships usually reduces communicational bandwidth.
https://tis.so/always-wearing-lingerie-is-banal
60/ Showmanship has been a part of science for hundreds of years, especially the kind involving scientists attempting to prove something by showing that they trust their own invention enough to use it on themselves.
https://tis.so/showmanship-in-science
61/ Being wrong is useful if you can get people to correct you with information you were seeking in the first place.
https://tis.so/false-dichotomy-as-filter-and-focus
62/ “Heuristics are sticky just like prices.”
https://tis.so/sticky-heuristics
63/ Intuitive and embodied theory building for understanding social dynamics supports ambiguity that direct theory building simply can’t support due to its explicit, mechanical methodology.
https://tis.so/embodiment-verbalization-and-ambiguity-in-social-theory
64/ It is very difficult to see things that you’ve backgrounded, because you assume nothing is communicating with you through their details.
https://tis.so/you-are-a-slave-to-the-messages-you-look-for
65/
“We pushed the empty frame of reason out the cabin door
No we won’t be needing reason anymore.”
66/ How much of the technological and biological knowledge that got us here is stored only in lore and then lost, sometimes forever?
https://tis.so/monograph-or-aether
67/ Categories are heuristics for thinking about what we want from the categories we choose to name.
https://tis.so/categories-as-heuristics
68/ Establishing a model of setup and payoff and exploiting its legibility after it’s established is the essence of performance.
https://tis.so/bad-dancing-and-bad-writing
69/ The way people use language to cut-up a complex conceptual space—like chess or biology—tells you a lot about what you can expect them to know.
https://tis.so/clever-chunking
70/ Perceivable clusters exist in the space of human attention, which has been pragmatically tuned to accent certain features.
https://tis.so/a-cluster-in-salience-space
71/ Testing science on yourself isn’t just performative—it’s good ethics.
https://tis.so/so-called-showmanship-in-science
72/ When you assume everyone is constantly self-interested, you tend to over-estimate how much they want because you’re not used to systematically reasoning out what they want expect, except in exceptional cases.
https://tis.so/favors-and-fear
73/ Torque—when one party exaggerates its actual stance in the hopes of forcing the other party to meet them in the middle—acts on rules and policy all the time, because policy writers don’t trust enforcers or enforcees.
74/ Fastmusic (via machine learning) is going to change music like fastfood changed food.
https://tis.so/the-bull-case-for-ai-music
75/ We always frame things inexactly for our own pragmatic purposes—these are called biases when they don’t work, but studying something only when it doesn’t work is called “not establishing a base rate” and it’s bad practice.
https://tis.so/goffman-s-primary-framework
76/ Metrics express the institutions that choose them like writing expresses a writer.
https://tis.so/incentives-and-degenerate-play
77/ To represent one’s self is to attempt to choose one’s category in the mind of another, to do so in a way that slides attention off you is ontological camouflage.
https://tis.so/ontological-camouflage
78/
- We understand a lot about consciousness.
- We fundamentally don’t understand consciousness.
- Consciousness exists on a spectrum.
- There is no test for consciousness.
- Consciousness is a process.
https://tis.so/five-quick-reminders-about-consciousness
79/ Discovering the lack of novelty in your ideas is painful, but trying to be somewhat novel anyway or simply not worrying too much is often the only way forward.
https://tis.so/the-world-s-answering-machine
80/ What AI Safety as a community is today emerged largely out of non-academic channels, making it an interesting case study of knowledge logistics in the era of the internet.
https://tis.so/overwhelming-legibility
81/ A case study in how finite games evolve out of the infinite one, set at a Maui pool party.
https://tis.so/maui-pool-party
82/ A dream reveals to Collin that the reason why people talk about utility functions is that they’re secretly hoping functions are simple and understandable.
https://tis.so/boing-or-utility-is-not-a-function
83/ Misrepresentation is often weeded out through iterated games that would punish a misrepresenter, raising the question: when should you game a selection game?
https://tis.so/short-term-v-long-term-in-selection-games
84/ Sure, self-experimentation might be ethical, but there’s also a lot of machismo driving the engine of science throughout history.
85/ In a world of 1 hour time blocks, 40 minute meetings are a social technology that allows people to contract or expand the meeting time as needed, while saving face eitherway.
https://tis.so/40-minute-meetings
86/ Focusing on instrumental truths still leads one to models that correspond to reality, as the Good Regulator Theorem might suggest.
https://tis.so/pragmatic-truth-seeking-leads-to-correspondences
87/ Honesty is the best policy in communities that are ecologically huddled, otherwise surveillance becomes necessary to make it the best policy.
https://tis.so/honesty-is-the-best-policy
88/ Who is causing the torque in the statement “any alcohol during pregnancy is dangerous and reckless”?
https://tis.so/caught-in-the-torque
89/ A general principle: you are probably “late” to any noticeable trend, good or bad.
https://tis.so/things-which-trend-downwards
90/ On the origins of the emotionally two-faced monotheistic God.
https://tis.so/monotheism-and-the-volcano
91/ A little bit knowledge logistics about asymmetrical justice (as a treat).
https://tis.so/asymmetric-justice
92/ Sorites paradox: actually you’re just bad at thinking about pragmatics.
https://tis.so/memories-are-environmental-indices
93/ “Science is inextricably enfleshed in tinkering,” says Alex Boland, and TIS says “amen.”
https://tis.so/response-to-narrative-engineering
94/ Showing how self-deception happens is the only reliable way to establish enough common ground to talk about how to make it not happen.
https://tis.so/the-point-of-a-mechanistic-theory-of-self-deception
95/ Least Common Denominator messaging: ”idiot proof” warnings and communication meant to cover-up any actual advice that could have been given, due to the fear of litigation of actionable but only contextually applicable information.
96/ Flags are one of the oldest still used symbolic communication technologies—perhaps because of how easy they are to repurpose and contextualize.
97/ Zoom out and contextualize—a move in the game of analysis that stops you from being a pedant about definitions, and asks: does the indexical meaning of this thing present anything useful we can decontextualize?
https://tis.so/zoom-out-and-contextualize
98/ I explain why I want a theory of social dynamics: because I want to have been everybody.
https://tis.so/on-the-origins-of-my-drive-towards-social-analysis
99/ The scariest possible thing is other people finding things you allow to grow in your life illegible, unreasonable, and unmanageable—how will you convince them you’re a reliable coordinator if they don’t get it?
https://tis.so/bartleby-the-illegible
100/ A little retrospective (as a punishment).
100th post anniversary
This is the 100th in an unbroken sequence of daily posts since tis.so’s inception! To celebrate, a rough quorum of authors answers: what was your favorite post of yours, what was your favorite post from someone else, and what post do you want to see expanded into a part two?
Collin
My favorite post of my own was “On formless empiricism”, because it really helped me to carve out what exactly I’m doing here. I’ve never liked the idea of saying “I’m a philosopher”, but neither do I want to just say “I’m not doing philosophy” and leave it at that, lest I come off as having the same obsession with form that I’m constantly rallying against. “Formless empiricism” is me digging out my own scrape and living in it, and I sure do find it cozy.
My favorite post from someone else has to be Possible Modernist’s “Danny at the Grand Canyon”. I had a specific example about specific examples second-hand; he had access to the primary source and was able to dive more precisely into what actually happened. The story ended with the poetic “Danny at the Grand Canyon had some more specific details bound up with it, but it got Danny at the Grand Canyon’d into just being ‘Danny at the Grand Canyon’”; it’s an absolutely perfect parable of conceptualization.
I want to see more of Suspended Reason’s “The worlds answering machine”. I think that’s exactly the correct way to think about the interplay of frontier work and looking at what’s been done before: an acceptance that you might end up doing a lot of work that was done already and just calling the answer machine, balanced with an understanding that only those who are seeking can be expected to find. But how does that middle way play out in our lives? What trail-sign do you look for to determine if you’re on one side or the other?
Hazard
My favorite post of my own was “Cat couplings are a way to construct and reinforce types”. Despite it including no ideas that I hadn’t already seen or written about elsewhere, it was a quintessential piece of “information logistics”, a set of dots I was excited to connect, a moment of realizing someone else in the extended blogosphere had perfectly filled in the gaps of something I’d been working on.
My favorite post from someone else is “Boing! Or; utility is not a function” by Collin. It’s a great critique of thinking thru the lens of utility functions, and follows a deliciously first-person path to make its point. What was actually going on in your head when you made a claim you thought was legit about how some external mathematical form adequately represents what’s ? What’s all of the implicit under the hood correspondence work one does implicitly for the formalism to feel sensible? And what sort of fuckery comes from when said correspondence doesn’t actually make it into the formalism or explicit conversations about the formalism?
I want to see more from Suspended and Crispy’s “Pragmatic truth-seeking leads to correspondences”. I’m not so secretly hoping that we’ll converge on this and similar points, but I don’t want to taint the line of inquiry by running my mouth too much :)
Feast of Assumption
My favorite post I made was “Monograph or aether” because it was an organic upwelling in my own life, of some of the concepts on the nature of communication and knowledge transmission that we focus on around here. In a room full of philosophers, I stick out like a sore green thumb. This made the opportunity to share a communication crystallization all the sweeter.
My favorite co-tissoer’s post was “Clever chunking” —the attention particularly on the fact that “You need chess experience to come up with “knight development” as a useful way to describe a series of chess moves, but you don’t need chess experience to recognize “knight development” as a chunk derived from experience.” I’ve been keeping my ears pricked for ‘chunks’ from expert practitioners since reading it.
I’m looking forward to more Torque Policy (in all its forms, 1, 2, 3 &c!). This has long been a favorite topic and I love hearing perspectives from across our collective.
(Are we a collective? Can somebody replace that word with a better one?)
RIP DCB
My favorite post — well, the only post — I’ve contributed so far is “Incentives & degenerate play”. It introduced a handful of my interests: institutions & their structural failings, the inevitable disjunction between the spirit & the letter, and the important, often unstated, role of practical logic and associations in our decision-making processes. I’m excited to expand on the closing paragraphs of that piece — namely, how the decisions made by institutions in the past not only affect the decisions they’ll make in the future, but also shape their field of possible perceptions and actions — even if it took me nearly the whole thing to get there.
Hard to choose a favorite post — there are so many good ones — so I’ll ride with my recency bias here and say it’s Collin’s “Memories are environmental indices”. It opened my eyes to a new way of seeing the extent to which we’re cognitively enmeshed in our environments; what it means that we exist despite the environment; how building our memories and sending them through time creates, in a single gesture, meaning and resistance to the universe’s intractable drive to pulverize everything into sameness. It also peaks behind language’s curtain, giving us a conceptual frame within which to understand meaning, one that isn’t tied up (or down?) with unnecessary philosophizing.
I’d love to see Suspended Reason build on his post “Categories as heuristics”. Language as a heuristic? Sign me up! It could be a satisfyingly formal & fibrous way of finally proving that ‘meaning is use’.
Possible Modernist
It’s been fun going back through the archives here, and realizing the range of ideas that we’ve touched on. Most posts were familiar, but there were some that I’d forgotten about (including some of the ones that I wrote!)
In choosing a favorite post from among those I wrote, the one that stood out to me is “Eating dirt”. This was one of my earliest posts, when I was still getting a sense of what I was trying to do here. Writing this one (starting with just a feeling that it was worth saying something about this) was helpful in figuring that out. It was an excuse to write about a topic I find amusing (how AI researchers think about ethics), to adopt a somewhat irreverent tone (which is one of my favorite registers), and to realize that I was free to include an excessive amount of detail (which I think is important to convey the texture, even if the details themselves are not so important).
My favorite post by someone else is a bit of an outlier: “Getting real”. In this post, Neil uses the book The Age of Innocence to dig into the feeling of things not being real. We don’t do a whole lot here that focuses on specific works of fiction, (part of the point of tis.so is to be a place to sketch out ideas, so many posts are more like stones dropped into water), and so I think one was helpful for me in seeing the space of possibilities. I liked that Neil was able, in a short post, to both convey the essence of a particular text, while connecting it to deeper questions. This post also helped me appreciate a work of fiction that had never really made sense to me (although I’ve only seen the film, without having read the book), while simultaneously giving me cause to reflect on my own life.
The post that I’d like to see all of us build on is Incentives & degenerate play by RIPDCB. This post connects to one of the strongest themes being collectively built out here, which is the nexus of games, incentives, and surrogation. Building on the idea of degenerate play, as previously discussed by a number of us, it zooms out to the level of institutions, pointing out that while the same traps of flawed incentives and cargoculting apply, institutions are also designed in a way that people are not. Obviously the designs are subject to constraints, and will always be imperfect (thus also connecting to the notion of generalized hacking), but this means that the ways in which they fail could be informative about their history, and the contexts in which they exist. I think there is much more to be explored here, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next!
Crispy Chicken
Damn, I need to write more.
I don’t really have “favorites” as a category unless they really spring out at me, so I’m going to say I liked “The bull case for AI music” the best of my own pieces. It’s short, it’s concrete, and it encourages discourse (even though as far as I know no one liked it). I think we’re developing a lot of cool conceptual tech, but I want to see more skin in the game, so I tried to do just that.
My favorite post by someone else is probably “Kingmakers” by Possible Modernist. Such a clean explanation of a dynamic that occurs in so many games: a losing player that will decide the winner. It lends meaning to the surrounding discussion of degenerate play that Modernist mentions above (RIP DCB’s linked post is really quite excellent, and takes you through these dynamics more elegantly than most of our writing on this subject). Special shoutout to “Torque policy” by Suspended Reason, which lives up to our example-focused aims and grounds itself in the mundane, showing that there is a game underlying what we let our eyes brush past quickly.
The post that draws out what I’d like to see more of most is Collin Lysford’s Formless empiricism. Every time I read it, it feels like a call to action: we’re figuring out what kind of epistemology we need right now by actively doing it, but still making sure we describe what we think we’re doing as we go. It’s also an example of itself, that tells you what it’s trying to expose. I’m not gonna say anything object-level about it, so you might as well take ten minutes and read it right now.
Neil
I think the best thing I’ve done here is Bad dancing and bad writing. What I most like about writing for TIS is the practice in keeping things short and sweet. I think this piece gets in, accomplishes something, and gets out; it’s grounded in some of my more unique personal experiences; it’s about literature, but it’s of general interest.
My favorite not-by-me post is Feast’s “Monograph or aether”. It’s always tempting to produce more analysis and meta-analysis instead of collecting stamps, so I appreciate a post that’s just grounded in chickens. Plus, who isn’t charmed by a good crawl through the archives of human knowledge? “Clever chunking” is a close second.
I’d like to see more in the “degenerate play” sequence (a term I just made up to describe these four linked posts). We’ve established that perverse incentives can exist and wreak havoc, but both of the last two, in my mind, are flirting with an interesting question: given that things sometimes do work, what can we say about that?
My primary angle here has been literature, so I think I’m frequently coming at things a bit differently! But I’m optimistic that we’ll dovetail again down the road. I recently re-read The Crying of Lot 49, and I was struck by Pynchon’s description of America’s “continental solemnities—storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence.” Pynchon was an engineer, and it’s not an accident that he refers to meteorology—an inexact science, if there ever was one. If literature is a science of these storm-systems, as I think it often is, then maybe it’s not as distant as it seems.
Bartleby, the illegible
by Neil
Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is a story about a man who, one day, declares that he “prefer[s] not to” perform the duties of his job as a copyist in a law office. Consequently, he is fired, starves, and dies. Capitalism!
But, not just that. It’s also a story about the intersection of moral duty and legibility — a concept that I hope will be familiar to our readership, since it’s been taken up by Venkatesh Rao, Scott Alexander, Lou Keep, Hotel Concierge, and our very own Natural Hazard. If somehow you’ve missed all of these, let’s just say legibility is about the push to define things in the terms of those with power — and the concern that something may be lost in translation.
The first time Bartleby declares “I would prefer not to,” we’re only 25% of the way through the story. So if Melville was trying to write about a guy who defies his boss, gets fired, and dies in destitution, he wrote an awfully baggy story — surely he could’ve gotten from point A to point B a bit more expeditiously. So let’s review the story in more detail.
The first part of the story doesn’t even mention Bartleby. The narrator, a “rather elderly man” who runs the law office, employs two other copyists, known only by their nicknames, “Turkey” and “Nippers.” These two are hardly model employees, but the narrator doesn’t mind, because he has a system for managing them. Turkey gets a bit erratic after lunch (possibly because he’s having a lunch beer), and tends to make errors in the afternoon; whereas Nippers suffers from indigestion, and tends to be belligerent in the morning. The narrator accounts for their behavior, with, essentially, humorism; Turkey is sanguine, and Nippers is choleric. So we might suspect that he’ll try to understand Bartleby as melancholic. And, indeed, he is introduced as “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forelorn!” The narrator even expresses a hope that his disposition “might operate beneficially upon the flighty temper of Turkey, and the fiery one of Nippers.”
From the beginning, and throughout most of the story, Bartleby is actually an extremely diligent copyist. In terms of his primary responsibility, he gets documents and copies them, working at seemingly all hours. He “prefers not to” perform any of his secondary responsibilities — reviewing work, running errands, and so on — but he’s far from useless.
We might imagine that the narrator would find a way to work around Bartleby. After all, he’s able to overlook the quirks of Turkey and Nippers. The difference with Bartleby is that he cannot explain why Bartleby behaves the way he does. Bartleby simply “prefers not to,” and explanation comes to an end there. For one thing, this makes him a greater threat to the narrator’s authority. If Turkey acts out in the afternoon, the narrator can explain his behavior by reducing it to biology, and that still gives him a quiet sense of superiority. (Compare with how a man might smugly write off an angry woman: “well, I see it’s that time of the month.”)
The narrator’s problem, really, is not that Bartleby won’t work — it’s that he refuses to explain himself in a “reasonable” (= legible) way to the narrator. So in scene after scene, when he confronts Bartleby, his main demand is: explain yourself. Even when he does ask Bartleby to do work, it seems more like a provocation, an attempt to get at his real goal.
At some point, Bartleby stops working entirely, and takes up residence in the office, but still, the narrator doesn’t kick him out. What finally spurs him to action is that the clients who visit the office also find it strange. The narrator can live with something inexplicable to himself; but once he has to explain it to others, Bartleby has to go.
So the narrator denies and forsakes Bartleby. The exact series of events is…aggressively analogous to the betrayal of Christ, silver and all. Then Bartleby dies in prison.
Ah! But there’s one more thing. The narrator has figured out why Bartleby was…like that! (The reader must be excited as well.) As it turns out, Bartleby previously worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington! Dead letters! That sounds so depressing! Well, no wonder it turned out like it did. The narrator cries: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”
This explanation is very compelling until you think about it for two seconds. If Bartleby was so depressed from working at the Dead Letter Office, why did he take another job as a copyist? Why did his depression manifest in this particular way, where he like, mostly did his job, until he didn’t? Why don’t all the other people who worked at the Dead Letter Office act like this? The narrator provides some eloquent imaginary scenarios that might occur in such an office, engagement rings lost forever and such. But he actually explains nothing at all.
But lucky for him, Bartleby is dead, and cannot refute this account. So the narrator is able to return to the world of the reasonable and legible, and shake off the feeling that he might have had some responsibility to Bartleby, which was inexplicable but nonetheless real.
On the origins of my drive towards social analysis
I have previously written about my struggle with literalism, which it would not be unfair to say, describes the origins of my social perspective. However, there are plenty of literalists who choose to create cultures among themselves, hide themselves away, or find more bespoke solutions to living life in a pragmatic world.
Many times this year I have been faced with the convential wisdom theory that people are driven to their ambitions by their defining tragedies. While reductive, I think this theory explains a lot of the variance in ambitions we observe around us everyday.
While I was walking through a park today, I realized how I could explain my “tragedy” in all its banality. It was a warm summer day and there were many people walking around, sun bathing, having a picnic, etc. There were so many different kinds of people. People posturing in different ways. People with different resting expressions. People who were more or less conscious of their self-representation efforts. People who were flowing and people who were trying. People who seemed happy. People who seemed to be content with whatever they were feeling. People who wanted attention. People who wished they didn’t have so much. People who couldn’t decide.
When I step into a social situation, even one in which I am an observer, I perceive so many threads going through them of what it is like to be and want and do different things and I feel a terrible, literally naseauting envy. It is a feeling I have felt before, at a Nordstrom. I walked in through the entrance and was immediately faced with a massive rack of scarves, all of the same design, but each with a burstingly different color. I did not come to buy a scarf. It was the middle of summer, I never wore scarves, and these would look rather too feminine on me. But when I looked at it I was struck by the painful fact that I wanted all of these scarves, sitting in my closet at home so I could rifle through them at my leisure, wear one for an hour, and have access to just a little bit of what it would be like to own each one. Buying a single scarf would make things worse. Buying no scarves was the only solution and it still felt awful.
My defining tragedy is that I am constantly lonely whenever I think about my background feeling. I am only unlonely when I am engaged enough to not think about it. I have close friends, colleagues, and mentors. I have a happy life. But I am so intensely hungry for bits and pieces, that I simply cannot be satiated. I turn that painful focus on vicarious experience into a drive to verbalize, with the power of a literalist voice that doesn’t know what else to do with terrain that it is forced to traverse.
Zoom out and contextualize
Recently, Crispy and I wrote about how pragmatic or instrumental truth begins to resemble correspondence theory when sufficient pressure is put on it.
This is what I’d like to call a “zoom out and contextualize” move. Here’s another example, from a Conversations with Tyler blurb:
What does it mean to uphold disability rights, or the right to economic liberty? What framework should be used when rights appear to conflict? Constitutional law expert Jamal Greene contends that the way Americans view rightsas fundamental, inflexible, and universal is at odds with how the rest of the world conceives of them, and even with how our own founders envisaged them. In his new book, How Rights Went Wrong, he lays out his vision for reimagining rights as the products of political negotiation. The goal of judges, he says, should be to manage disagreement in a way that leads to social harmony and social cohesion-and by doing so, foster the ultimate goal of peaceful pluralism.
Any materialist out there has likely, at one point in zir life, balked at the idea of “natural and inalienable rights.” Clearly these rights are violated regularly—were violated for most of history, and are still violated today in most of the world—without issue. Clearly concepts like freedom of speech and religion are cultural or social constructs which feign to “naturalness” as a rhetoric tool: their naturalization makes them less liable to being questioned or revised.
And yet within the social reality of natural and inalienable rights, much of what we know about freedom of speech or religion can be preserved. Just as many of the insights of correspondence theory can be preserved.
Zoom out and contextualize moves are about taking facts of social reality and grounding them at a higher level of material and historical reality. Much of social construction theory constitutes such a maneuver; so too does Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. (Although neither philosophy was, in my opinion, sufficiently compatibilist.) Crucially, they are about “shoring up” coverage of the social reality heuristics, which work in most typical cases, but fail or uncouple from reality when too much philosophical pressure is put on them—when edges and boundaries and foundations are examined.
pragmatism truth correspondence theory evolutionary epistemology zoom-out-and-contextualize frames generalized compatibilism
Flags
I was thinking today about how flags are a remarkably old technology that have been in constant use for an incredibly long time: a large piece of cloth used to display, signal, or communicate something, especially when attached to an apparatus designed to increase its prominence, such as a spear or a flagpole.1
There are two elements to this. At a basic level there is the material technology — some sort of fabric that is durable and flexible enough to create a flag that flies in the wind, along with pigments to decorate it. (One could use just the material as it is, but pigment enables much greater flexibility). The real power of the flag, however, comes with some sort of coordinated meaning.
In the simplest case, a flag could present a unique symbol that is not necessarily understood by others. One could try to come up with a design that would communicate an intended message in this way, although there is no guarantee that it would be interpreted correctly. (I think here too of the question of how to mark sites that are filled with depleted nuclear fuel to help protect future people should there be a societal collapse). Still, a flag flying above a town on the horizon communicates something, independent of its design.
For most flags, however, the functionality is premised on a design that will be familiar to at least some people. Consider the standard for an army. Such a flag serves both as a focal point for troops to rally around, but also a signal of strength, and a call to arms. A recognizable pattern (as with a national flag) can similarly serve as a symbol of strength and unity for those who follow it, and potentially as a source of fear among those who would oppose them.
The reach of flags expands considerably once they are systematically combined, however, such as in methods used to signal between naval vessels. A set of standard flags allows for constructing a code that is capable of expressing arbitrarily complex messages. Such communication is essentially a kind of written language, and demands a certain level of skill and coordination among those who would use it. With an investment in this technology, individuals suddenly gain the ability to communicate silently over long distances, potentially in a way that would be indecipherable to outsiders.
Somewhere in the middle might be something like a white flag used to indicate surrender. This is more of a communicative flag than one that is purely symbolic (though of course it also has symbolic importance), though one in which you are only trying to communicate a single, fixed, message, and in this case you hope it is one that your opponents will also understand.
Today it’s far less common today to see flags used for encoded messages. But as a technology for symbolic communication, they are still extremely common, seemingly existing in a form that is essentially unmodified since they were first created.
I learn from Wikipedia that the study of flags is known as “vexillology”, which is delightful.↩︎
LCD messaging
Informal human evaluation allows enforcement based roughly in spirit—a “feeling of reasonableness”—but modern institutional bureaucracy demands letter laws for legal accountability, transparency, and consistency of enforcement. What’s more, public guidelines and product advisories must hedge against tail risk, adversarial misinterpretation, and a lack of common sense (for which they might prove legally liable). We shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which this norm changes the incentive and communication landscape.
One class of torque policy I’ve started calling “least common denominator (LCD) messaging.” This is the idea that, for reasons of legal liability and broad public messaging, public guidelines and advisories must cater to uncharitable interpretations and boneheaded users. They must attempt to torque against behavior that most of us would see as lacking in common sense. They must produce populationally robust advisories by paying for a small dip in false negatives with an abundance of false positives.
Warning signs at campsites and National Parks concerning fire hazards and bears are frequently targeted at reducing the sloppiest behavior of society’s worst offenders—put kindly, to prevent idiots and city-slickers from getting mauled. Precautionary signs, trespassing warnings, health advisories, and regulatory hoops may be geared toward making the environment “idiot-proof”: if you’re already a relatively careful, conscientious person in general, you’re probably OK taking these warning more lightly, with grains of salt. Unfortunately, more conscientious individuals are also more likely to update (or “over-update”) on these sorts of warnings, than are less consientious individuals.
Of course, sometimes messaging is not geared to lowest common denominators. Sometimes advisories should be followed to their very letter, uniformly. But the presence of torque policy and LCD messaging leads to a muddied epistemic landscape, where it’s unclear how seriously to take and update on certain messages.
torque policy least common denominator messaging LCD messages torque epistemology
The “point” of a mechanistic theory of self-deception
by Hazard
- It’s very under-discussed. Most investigations of self-deception I’ve encountered either focus on studying its “ecological niche” (the “why”), or focus on demonstrating that self-deception is indeed happening in a specific situation (the second half of The Elephant in the Brain is just this).
- This is a problem for anyone who was hoping to learn something personally useful. If you haven’t gotten the mind-worm that self-deception is totally awesome and you should be doing it all the time, you might reasonably wonder how you might be able to tell if you’re “lying to yourself” about important things that will result in you fucking yourself over. The prevailing attitude I encounter towards this question is “lol, you can’t” or a slightly less aggravating “lol, that’s not my department.”
- Let’s say you care about the fact that you’re in varying degrees of conflict with parties that you think are deceiving themselves. When you only have the theory of “why” and tools for asserting it’s happening, the best you can do is make a rhetorically convincing case to third-parties that the second party is self-deceiving, leading to the third-parties joining you in coordinating against them.
- That’s not nothing, to be clear. It’s just that the above is a conflict resolution hammer that I’d only want to pull out in situations where I’ve got no better choice.
- If you want to usefully contribute to someone actually amending their ways, you need to understand the phenomena on a more gearsy/mechanistic level.
Response to “Narrative Engineering”
Discussion post of Alex Boland’s “Narrative Engineering”. A lot of provocative stuff in here. Markets as anti-inductive. The role of expert intuition. The validity of models. Tractable habit. The compatibilism of heuristics.
Complexity vs. engineering
Boland starts his piece with an explanation of the three-body problem. You can skip the passage if you’re already familiar with three-body problems, otherwise it’ll set the scene):
Imagine a planet orbiting a star, nothing else in the picture, at all. This is the whole universe. Only having to take these two things into account, it’s possible to write up a mathematical equation that reliably describes their trajectory; in time, as they pull on each other, they will eventually settle on a predictable stable pattern. Now, let’s say that planet has a moon. Now everything goes to hell: this doesn’t just make the problem harder, it makes it literally impossible. Poincare proved that there exists no equation to describe this situation, not least because there is no ultimately stable long-run pattern. Eventually, even the tiniest difference in the initial positions, speeds, and masses of these celestial bodies will dramatically change the outcome, which means that even if you make a computer simulation of this, you can’t ever fully predict it because your inputs will have a finite number of digits and will have to be ever so slightly different than the actual initial conditions.
Boland casts this as a parable for complexity at large, cf. all the chaos theory stuff about how minute differences in starting conditions radically alter the end state. And yet the lesson is that, despite all this complexity, human engineering projects more or less work:
in a given year there are tens of millions of flights but only around a dozen crash, diseases get cured, vast amounts of goods are reliably transported across the world at ever increasing volumes. None of this was ultimately accomplished IKEA-style from textbook theories; it was the result of relentless tinkering and trial and error, the work of engineering. Engineering is messy, it has no explicit rules and its approximations are sloppy to degrees that make theorists spit out their coffee.
The view of engineering he espouses feels aligned with the pragmatic prejudices of this blog—his line that “adding negative numbers, imaginary numbers, and so forth allows the mathematician to do more,” separate of ontological questions about whether imaginary numbers “exist,” could be straight out of Crispy’s Concepts are Tools, not Artifacts frame.
engineering, isn’t about getting predictions right or wrong, and it’s most definitely not about establishing a scientific claim as unequivocally True or False, it’s about doing what works, of which models, predictions, experiments, and falsifications constitute an invaluable part but are not the essence of it.
Models, abstractions, heuristics
We’ve talked before about high-level abstractions as angels and demons on our shoulder—how opposing ideological stances can both seem reasonable in the abstract—e.g. Chesterton’s fence vs. vestigial features, or the benefits of external oversight vs the legibilizing costs. Neither conservatism nor liberalism is the “correct” orientation globally, rather, in some cases, a bias proves more effective as a guiding star than its opposite might have. In other words, not “which heuristic is globally best” but “which heuristic is best suited for this type of problem,” where determining the type of the problem is identical to determining the best heuristic (they are the same question). The only way I know that progress can be made on these issues is by drilling into the relevant differences—which cases are more amenable to one approach over the other, what at the relevant distinctions and categorizations to make. Dialectic as a practice of sophisticating ontologies, of problematizing current action-oriented schemas. I think Boland would agree:
At this point it would be fair to suggest I’m playing word games, so let me put it another way: there is a difference between a model seeming like it works but then turning out to be bunk, and a model actually working but just not everywhere.
Newtonian mechanics weren’t “wrong” or “right” in some binary way, so much as they were incomplete. They correctly mapped most cases humans cared about, and worked just fine for architecture or artillery fire. They are still the preferred set of equations for practical modeling of e.g. artillery fire. Given a specific subset of the overall space of possibles—those state conditions which are most likely or common in a domain, what we might call “the normal state of affairs”—the general relationship between input and output, intervention and effect, holds. Of course, as human activity drifts and the environment changes—is actively decoupled from the relevant heuristics by actors motivated to perform this decoupling—this state of affairs, and the demands we put on our tools, changes in turn. What is true of heuristics is true of Korzybski’s “map,” is true of models, is true of our classification schemas and categories.
Boland states as much: “there’s no such thing as a universally valid model,” and “new models exist because of the need to fill in the holes left by previous models.” Still, for all his distinctions of engineering and models, and given his understanding of conflict as a driver of continuing adaption, I don’t see why the same can’t be said about engineering. After all,
Just like science utilizes models that work well enough, people, and for that matter organisms in general, manage to do things that simply work well enough for their purposes.
Perhaps the distinction I can best make sense of is that models are “a middleman, not the engine [of knowledge production], and for that matter not the end goal either. The end goal always has been and always will be efficacy.”
(Boland uses a term I like a lot here, tractable habit, to describe efficacious behaviors that stick around because they’re efficacious.)
I’m intrigued by his discussion of homomorphism and congruence, concepts with which I wasn’t familiar with before. There is some overlap with alignment problems (AI Alignment Forum folk would call strategic appearance of congruency “deceptive alignment”):
A model that is congruent with its subject is one that’s capable of anticipating its behavior. The problem is that a model can appear to be congruent until it doesn’t.
Lessons for the Inexact Sciences
There’s a lot Boland understands about science, inference, and language which we have been stumbling toward on our own. The essay contains some gems about the rigorizing pipeline from inexact to exact sciences, as well as the construction of concepts.
Fields like physics might have precise measurements, well-known natural laws described by powerful models, strict codes of protocol; but these a priori rules didn’t just descend from the heavens, we were only able to get there by improvisationally seeking out pockets of order within the chaos and gradually refining these practices into increasingly universal structures.
Rigor follows from the maturity of a practice, when ideas and conjectures finally converge on some pocket of stability.
And on language problems (related to an Amirism tweet):
there’s no bucket holding all the models that you can just stick your hand in, you have to construct a model, which means picking relevant attributes. Of course, attributes themselves are not things that can merely be picked out of some bucket, they are defined relative to other concepts, which themselves are defined relative to other concepts, and so forth. The positivists claimed that all this eventually settled on an absolute ground of “sense data,” from which everything else could be built up from self-evident foundations, but this too is completely smashed to bits by Godel’s proof that you can never have enough axioms to say anything.
And when he gets to Thomas Kuhn, I think he really starts to define what’s exciting about this moment in time, intellectually, where old regimes are proving inefficacious, and old paradigms are unable to make progress:
As long as [the dominant] paradigm continues to produce promising results, it is in a phase called normal science in which scientists contribute incrementally by essentially solving puzzles inscribed in stable rules that continue to work. There eventually comes a time, however, where the paradigm starts failing to produce any new results, either failing to predict what it ought to be predicting or simply finding no new applications or even relevant questions.
Such sluggishness inevitably hurtles into crisis as the paradigm grinds to a halt and the people and institutions involved enter a phase known as extraordinary science: a process of Bricolage in which disparate concepts from all kinds of unconventional places are connected in novel ways to create the foundations of a new paradigm.
What is most worrying to Boland is when there is a narrative monopoly or hegemony, in contrast to a “rich ecology of narratives.” For one, this means an impoverishment of materials when the time for bricolage comes. For another, this means that said monopolies end up extracting rent, as in the case of successive generations of academics enforcing their own paradigms on their graduate students in order to bolster their own intellectual legacy:
If a paradigm fails to serve any purpose beyond socially or financially validating its constituents, the only way it could be surviving is through rent-seeking.
…monopolies on social capital… cause the overall narratives themselves to be disproportionately owned by the few and subject to rent-seeking, with certain narrow institutional paths being the only way offered to the inquisitive for finding any kind of narrative in which to play a part.
Probably his biggest challenges to our project are (1) his criticism of theory (2) his argument that “further progress [cannot] get made by mechanically extrapolating from existing formalisms.” I also felt, after reading, that for all our lip service to functional pragmatism, or subsuming taxonomy to telos, we haven’t articulated clear engineering goals for all this knowledge we’re consuming and producing.
I’ll wrap up with a bit about tinkering and abduction, which feels aligned with some of Crispy’s thinking on inference and pfeilstorchs. Boland goes on, in the second half of the essay, to discuss narrative open-endedness, play, and the generation of possibilities—but I’m still trying to grapple with what arguments he’s advancing, and how the parts cohere.
Nor does further progress get made by mechanically extrapolating from existing formalisms: science is inextricably enfleshed in tinkering. However many abstractions there are, scientists still have to do the experiments by interacting with the material: they operate instruments, pass down and receive folk wisdom, have conversations, and most illustrative of all, they understand where corners can (and must) be cut; which is why Popper was right to understand that an errant observation here or there can’t be considered an inherently damning thing. All this is why despite all the torrential downpours of data that amount to nothing, a revolutionary theory often comes with just a little bit of data. More simply isn’t better, data without abduction is as inert as a hammer without a hand.
anti-inductivity intuition narratology three-body problem deceptive alignment alignment Thomas Kuhn Alex Boland engineering prediction heuristics generalized compatibilism pragmatic ontology tractable habit knowledge pipeline Amirism
Memories are environmental indices
To be a living being is to spit in the eye of thermodynamics. Sure, on a universal scale, the house always wins, and all order will gradually be erased until everything is complete uniformity. But you can still win at your own game, taking in more than your “fair share” of energy to send the pattern of “here’s how you can take in more than your fair share of energy to send a pattern forward in time” forward in time.
To be a living being with memory is to spit in the eye of thermodynamics and then slap it square in the face. You’re locally reversing entropy on two levels: your genome and your lived experience. 1 When you eat food to sustain yourself, you’re both sending “here’s how you send a brain that can remember” forward in time and sending the things that your brain is remembering forward in time.
Picture yourself in the middle of a Minnesota winter, walking to work in -20F. The environment is supplying more than the usual resistance to your information flowing into the future, trying harder than usual to replace your highly complex self with uniformity. If you’re going to be out in those conditions, you’d better have a nice thick winter coat. The winter coat is a piece of barrier technology that reduces the resistance to your information flow, making it easier to send your information forward in time. When we say it’s “objectively true” that you should wear a nice thick winter coat when it’s twenty below, this is what we’re talking about: the indisputable fact that your coat is thermodynamically meaningful to the preservation of your pattern. This also means that a zipped up coat is more meaningful than a coat that isn’t zipped.
But let’s say your zipper is pretty old and bent. It doesn’t generally like to move when you tug it. You have to jiggle it just so to make it zip up. It’s your coat and you’re the only one to use it, so you don’t really mind the extra fuss. You know how to zip it, and that’s good enough. So one of those memories you’re sending forward is “how to zip up this coat”, and because zipping up the coat makes it more meaningful, that memory is meaningful too. But what sort of information is that memory? It’s not about coats or zippers in general. It’s an observation that as of this time, sending these nervous impulses to these hands while wearing this coat moved that zipper to a more meaningful state.
An “index” is a general term that more-or-less means “information about where information is stored”. Your coat was made with purpose, encoding empirical experience on how to slow down the transfer of heat between what’s in and what’s out. The zipper stores a mechanical dance to hold things in place. Your hands hold both sorts of thermodynamic defiance, the information on how to tell some cells to make a hand and the experiences those hands have been through. Your memories aren’t storing these things themselves - how many people know the molecular picture of what their coat is doing, how a zipper works, or the cell divisions that led to their hands? You’re storing references to the things themselves, knowledge of how to take the cognition strewn about the environment and fit it together just so to reach a more meaningful state.
There will always be more ways to put things together than there are things. To even speak of general concepts like “coats” presupposes that enough of these environmental indices exist to make the concept relevant. So these lookups for interactions between fragments of environmental cognition are necessary for the creation of knowledge as it is generally understood, but they aren’t the knowledge themselves, just like an index card with a call number of a library book isn’t a book itself.
This asymmetry — the broad number of indices it takes to secure small pieces of “general knowledge” — gets even worse when you add in the dimension of time. This coat, that zipper, those hands: these are objects that were not, now briefly are, but soon shall never be again. The environmental indices supporting our general knowledge are not the stable base of an informational pyramid but a roiling sea of experience, waves cresting for a moment before crashing on the shore. The work is never done, since your memories aren’t inherent truths but pointers to places where truths once were stored.
Now that know what meaning is actually made of, let’s ask one of those identity questions philosophers love to chew on: when does a coat stop being a coat? Well, when it stops being meaningful; that is, when there does not exist an environmental index of local meaning that includes that coat as an object. As a coat gets rattier over time, it takes more and more work keep it around in an index. But there isn’t a single, constant amount of work that will go into a given environmental index; perhaps one person is obsessed with appearances and quick to abandon beat-up things, while another is given to sentimentality and works longer than their peers would find reasonable to find a local peak of meaningful warmth that includes that coat. So when we say meaning is always interactive and contextual, we’re not talking about any sort of mysticism around human agency, but a straightforward consequence of applied thermodynamics.
This division between genomic pattern and “memory” pattern is much less strict and straightforward than I’m making it look. Things like epigenetics somewhat do what I’m ascribing to “memory” here, as do some purely “mechanical” things. But the point I’m making is much more intelligible if we use biological memory as our conceptual guide.↩︎
formless empiricism meaning thermodynamics memory knowledge logistics environmental cognition information theory complexity
Asymmetric justice
Asymmetric justice occurs when punishment for failures is proportionally greater than rewards for equal-magnitude successes (or vice-versa). The term was first coined by Zvi.
Asymmetric justice results in the “IBM option,” where employees will prefer low-risk but low-upside moves. In other words, risk aversion.
Similarly, in the opticratic world of scientific peer review, Crispy Chicken writes:
Most science is bad, not actively lying. The reason why it’s “bad” is because the authors present their data in a way to make their results appealing, but this kind of presentation goal specifically selects against giving reviewers anything to sink their teeth into. Most reviews are pretty negative—but without concrete things to be negative about, the person actually deciding whether the paper gets in (who is not a reviewer, by the way) can’t fairly pay them much heed.
Some onlookers believe that institutions today are broadly risk-averse as a result of functional asymmetric justice stemming from modern litigation practices.
N.N.T. takes the opposite tack, emphasizing a type of asymmetric justice in which catastrophic failures in the wake of tail risks are excused, or go unpunished, because they were “unforseeable” or “acts of God.” Financial bail-outs, for instance, effectively subsidize riskier behavior by raising the floor of possible disaster. Similarly, a short-termist approach to reward in many corporate settings leads to functional asymmetric justice whereby an executive leaps from company to company, making short-term, CV-boosting profits at tremendous (as-of-yet hidden) long-term cost to the org. The delayed effects of his poor stewardship allow him to stay ahead of the problems his short-termist optimizing causes, receiving better and better pay (and prestige) as he goes.
Asymmetric justice is related to the Knobe Effect, whereby more intentionality is attributed to individuals whose actions have negative consequences, than those whose actions have positive ones:
In a study published in 2003, Knobe presented passers-by in a Manhattan park with the following scenario. The CEO of a company is sitting in his office when his Vice President of R&D comes in and says, ‘We are thinking of starting a new programme. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment.’ The CEO responds that he doesn’t care about harming the environment and just wants to make as much profit as possible. The programme is carried out, profits are made and the environment is harmed.
Did the CEO intentionally harm the environment? The vast majority of people Knobe quizzed—82 per cent—said he did. But what if the scenario is changed such that the word ‘harm’ is replaced with ‘help’? In this case the CEO doesn’t care about helping the environment, and still just wants to make a profit—and his actions result in both outcomes. Now faced with the question ‘Did the CEO intentionally help the environment?’, just 23 per cent of Knobe’s participants said ‘yes’ (Knobe, 2003a).
asymmetric justice intentionality Nicholas Nassim Taleb Zvi Moshowitz Knobe effect tail risk short-termism long-termism opticracy
Monotheism and the volcano
by Snav
I just visited the island of Hawaii, including a tour of the caldera surrounding the semi-active volcano Kilauea. One thing I wanted to comment on is how obvious it was to imagine the woman-volcano-god, Madame Pele. It’s like, you live near unpredictable natural forces with destructive potential, of course the local culture personifies it, metaphorizes its effects, steam vents as breath, etc. Rituals emerge in tandem with these properties: women purifying themselves monthly in the steam vents, certain locations designated as sacrifice spots, access restrictions for priestly castes only, etc.
It sheds light for me on Freud’s depiction of Moses/Abraham’s God (from Moses and Monotheism) as the combination of a Canaanite volcano god, “Ja”, and the Egyptian monotheistic Sun god “Aton”, Akhenaten’s God. One tension the Torah attempts to resolve is between the absolute predictability (and life-giving capacity) of the sun, and the absolute unpredictability (and destructive capacity) of the volcano, which is why the character of God himself is so oddly two-faced, both sublime in unity and perfection and terrible and violent in rage. A challenging synthesis, though one that seems prototypical nonetheless (think of how “the government” is conceived of by millennial liberals…).
There’s some translation issues here, involving the various terms for God. This includes YHWH (lit. “i am [becoming] that which i am [becoming]”), Adonai (lit. “the lord”, which may also have a shared etymology with “Aton”), Hashem (lit. “the word”), and Elohim (lit. “voices”), all simply translated as “God”. Jaynes discusses these issues at length as part of his bicameral mind thesis, but I see it as evidence of this murky original Judaic God-concept, which western culture has since spent several thousand years purifying into abstract values, through Jesus and the popes and Martin Luther and beyond.
Sigmund Freud Hawaii Torah Julian Jaynes prediction metaphor ritual