Ontological camouflage

by Suspended Reason

1. Ontologies allow us to choose, and choose in a coordinated way, best-fitting action. By “best-fitting,” I mean, “interacting with the environmental context in such a way as to bring about desired ends in a desired way.” An ontology, then, is a set of heuristics.
2. These heuristics are structured as concepts (i.e. “decision rules”) within an action-schema of perceptual cues, types, and best responses. A metonym or surrogate (or more often, a gestalt of metonyms and surrogate, which add up to feeling or “vibe”) indicates type, which in turn (contextually) indicates ideal response; for instance, evidence is weighed in a courtroom to determine whether the state ought to charge a defendant with manslaughter or murder; these classifications alter the kinds of punishment which are available to a judge.
3. To camouflage oneself is to appear as some other plausible option; for instance, a stick bug cannot only not look like a bug, he must also look like a stick. To camouflage oneself is to change the ontological category which an evaluating agent places the camouflaged party in, and thus to change the action which the evaluator believes ought to follow such an identification.
4. I might say that all deception, all strategic appearance, is about subverting the classification of ourselves by others. We are not this, we are that. And we do not care about classification for its own sake, but because classification has consequences.
5. We put in strategic work to be classified advantageously (e.g. dramatic realization). But questions of deceit, correctness, and truth are difficult to answer. I might say that to camouflage ourselves is to alter our classification from what it otherwise would be (would be by “default,” or “normally”). But this begs the question, What is a “default” interpretation and why is it privileged?
6. Because agents systematically alter and manage their appearances to achieve better outcomes in strategy games, it makes sense that we would distrust the appearances and classifications desired by self-representing agents. And selectors (or “evaluators”), on average, have more interest in ascertaining the pragmatic, project-relevant truth of the situation. But there is no denying that evaluators can err in their evaluations, that objects, agents, and situations are regularly classified in a way which is an “error” insofar as it hurts the classifier’s best interest.
7. What’s more, evaluated parties are not automatically legible or transparent; they must do the work of dramatic realization, acquiring a set of signals which reliably communicate what kind of thing they are to evaluators. In other words, strategic work must be done in order that we are classified “correctly.” (That is, to the benefit of the classifier.) So it cannot be as simple as saying that strategic appearances are deceptive.
8. To deceive I might say, I know he would behave a certain way if he classified me as this, and even though I think I am a this, that treatment is undesirable, so I will convince him I am a that. Or it might be to say, he thinks I am this but I think I am that, and I will fabricate compositional parts in order that he infers that whole instead of this whole. And sometimes I will think I am being very cooperative when I fabricate or bend appearances so that I can get you to classify me as that instead of this. Sometimes I will do a great deal of good in the world by getting this classification. Sometimes all parties privy—all parties with an interest—could all agree that the effects of labeling this that would be quite positive and desirable, and might even conspire together to fabricate or alter appearances, to emphasize some aspects and de-emphasize others, to secure that-status.
9. And sometimes, resignedly, they admit that this can only ever be a this, that it would be grossly inappropriate to label this a that. But if the grounds of their judgment is non-pragmatic, is about the “truth” of definitions rather than the action outcomes of defining, then what has their “reality-based” (i.e. fantastical) resignation accomplished? Have they not erred through deontology? Can they not be flexible with their categories, with their heuristic schemes for action?

ontologies pragmatic ontologies decision rules heuristics fit strategic interaction opticracy selection games dramatic realization

Incentives & degenerate play

by RIPDCB

When designed institutional incentives fail, their failure is predictable; when they succeed, their success is conditional. In trying to align the interests of the individual with those of the institution within which he operates, these types of incentives can only work provisionally, doing so by optimizing for a metric that the higher-ups have decided represents, in a necessarily approximate sense, the larger interests of the institution. They will–if they’re effective–shift one’s priorities around, pushing for one task to get done before another. But designed institutional incentives surely are not capable of reconfiguring the structure of one’s value system, meaning there’s almost always a gap to be bridged between the institution’s interests and the individual’s. A structural feature of most, if not all, superorganisms.

In this way, incentives are a hyperpragmatic attempt at ensuring that gameplay goes the way the game managers would like. They take as their premise that you can’t ever enforce the spirit of the law, only the letter, and that the letter is, at best, a rough and paradoxical approximation of the spirit. Suspended Reason gives a concise overview of this spirit-into-letter problematic in Surrogation:

When an institution wishes to set up an internal game, it must convert a desired spirit of behavior into a specified letter of law.

…

Letter—the specification of spirit—can attempt to capture some of the shapes and guises in which spirit manifests, but can never succeed in full. And yet spirit cannot be legislated, cannot be uniformly instituted as expectation, cannot tile itself across a superorganism.

So if you can’t enforce the spirit of your project, you can at least enforce its letter. Designed institutional incentives are, in theory, a short-term solution to the long-term problem of aligning to the letter, ensuring that the tasks that need to get done today in order to keep the shop lights on do in fact get done.

We might also think of these types of incentives as institutional forms of degenerate play. Possible Modernist gave a neat definition of degenerate play not so long ago:

In brief, degenerate play can be thought of as strategies which abide by the rules of the game, but go against the spirit, or simply as strategies that make the game less fun for everyone.

But there’s a potential caveat: do designed institutional incentives go against the spirit of their institutions in the same way that degenerate play goes against the spirit of games? In a certain sense, no, as they are more spirit-irrespective rather than spirit-spiting. Their relationship to the spirit is only via the letter as “the specification of the spirit”, and given that they’re meant to optimize along the lines of the letter, any behavior promoted by an incentive that plays by the spirit of the game would be an added bonus, not a feature of the incentive’s structure.

When designed institutional incentives fail, however, they can fail badly, tailspinning out and leading to a host of unintended consequences, such as thousands of firings and millions in fines. The autopsy on these failures usually reads the same: the metric was poor, crudely defined, compromised, etc., which allowed for people to take advantage of it in their own self-interest.

In these catastrophic cases, it’s not just the letter of the game that’s violated, but the spirit as well. When Wells Fargo managers decided that ‘number of accounts opened per customer per day’ was their optimal metric for measuring short-term financial success, they almost certainly did not intend for thousands of their lower-level employees to defraud–albeit to varying extents–tens of thousands of clients. But the employees did, and did so in violation of both the letter (US law as dictated by the SEC) and the spirit (making money without defrauding the client). Similarly, when public school teachers are both rewarded and punished based on their class’s performance on mandated state- and national-level standardized tests, they may only teach the testing material (including backroad testing shortcuts) irrespective of whether or not this approach actually teaches anything (see: The Wire, season 4, for insight into problems inherent in ‘teaching to the test’). And finally, in keeping with the educational theme, when adjunct professors, who are the most tenuously situated in an already tenuous labor market, are re-signed or let go based on their students’ reviews, they might focus more on being personable and grade more easily, in order to gain an edge in the eyes of their students.

Across all three cases the metrics chosen and their resultant incentive structures promote different degenerate strategies in order to win. Degenerate plays might even be the optimal plays when working under designed institutional incentives,¹ given the effort necessary for payoff versus potential punishment.

This is usually where the analysis on incentives ends. Institutions will say, “We chose a bad metric”, we might respond, “Duh, all metrics are bad!”, and we move on. But what might incentives tell us about the institutions that chose them? They deliberated on and chose metrics to be representative of their own spirits. They may not have intended to promote, for example, company-wide fraud or grade inflation, but they did, and the metric they chose to optimize for selected those behaviors based on their fit.

In the space between subjective intent and objective consequences lie the host of practical associations that undergird why we do something and how we do it. Sometimes we verbalize these practical associations to ourselves in the decision-making process, but most times we don’t, because practice works intuitively, historically, and heuristically.

This is not to say that institutions are intentionally choosing bad metrics, but that behind the metrics they choose to optimize for, behind the incentives they then design, is a buried history of past metrics and incentives, past administrative decisions and hires, past letters and spirits. Incentives don’t fail (or exist) piece-meal, but rather as individual strategies embedded in a structure of other possible strategies: the metrics that could have been chosen and the designs that could have been deployed tell us just as much about an institution’s past and present as those that are selected. That designed institutional incentives can promote degenerate play isn’t just a defect of their structure, but also a window into the specific historical tensions between the spirit, letter, and the agents within that govern policy decisions and, ultimately, define institutions.

If we stop the analysis at “all metrics are bad, thus all incentives are flawed,” we might miss the social histories obfuscated and hidden by the predictable inefficiencies of superorganisms.

incentives games surrogation degenerate play superorganisms The Wire

Goffman’s primary framework

In Frame Analysis (1972), Goffman defines primary framework as an interpretive schema which “allows its users to locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of occurences defined in its terms,” and is the basis by which a scene is meaningful. It makes certain aspects of the information environment more salient, and others less; it is a cultural definition of reality which serves as a basis for sense-making, decision-making, and action.

(Compare Chapman’s “stance”—a pattern of feeling, thinking, & acting—and Bourdieu’s habitus—which “functions at every moment as a matrix of perception, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks, thanks to analogical transfers of schemes permitting the solution of similarly shaped problems.”)

Goffman suggests two broad classes of primary framework—natural frameworks (e.g. a scientific weather report) and social frameworks (e.g. a weather channel newscast):

Social frameworks… provide background understanding for events that incorporate the will, aim, and controlling effort of an intelligence, a live agency, the chief one being the human being. Such an agency is anything but implacable [in the way “nature” is]; it can be coaxed, flattered, affronted, and threatened. What it does can be described as “guided doings.” These doings subject the doer to “standards,” to social appraisal of his action based on its honesty, efficiency, economy, safety, elegance, factfulness, good taste, and so forth… Motive and intent are involved, and their imputation helps select which of the various social frameworks of understanding is to be applied.

(Any “socially guided doing” is “continuously conditioned by natural constraints,” such that “effective doing will require the exploitation, not the neglect, of [these] condition[s],” and so any happening placed in a social framework may also be translated into a natural framework.)

The set of primary frameworks in a given society constitute its “cosmology.” We pay special attention to frame-breaking displays and events—for instance, an interest in stunts, and “willed agency” under seemingly “impossible conditions,” or in the supernatural, which we take on faith will eventually be explicable within our current naturalistic frame, even if they are currently inexplicable. Or, say, our special attention to “flubs,” “gaffes,” and extraordinary turns of chance—concepts which must be at hand in order to handle and accommodate such decorum slippages in our analytic system.

Kahneman and Tversky have explored the “biasing” of decision-making through framing, which they term “frame effect”—but this understanding seems reductive. It is not that a frame “biases” our making of a decision, but that a frame is the entire basis by which we are able to make a decision in the first place. It is the system of meaning—pragmatic, cultural, and baked-into our language—with which we can understand and navigate a world at all. When we enter a situation, we use cues or surrogates to tell us what “type” of situation it is; this type provides the basis for selecting and generating responses or reactions. This is the sense in which “analogic transfers” undergird the extensibility of the frame: novel situations can be related back to encountered situations of similar “type” (that is, which share goal-relevant features), and understandings of these previous encounters “ported” over to the present.

Of the connection between frame and language, George Lakoff counsels, “When you are arguing against the other side: Do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame—and it won’t be the frame you want.” From the frame issues value clarity: the idea of “tax relief” implies affliction and a heroic reliever or “cure,” with those who stand in its way cast as villains. Like all linguistic descriptions (see e.g. Nietzsche, “Truth & Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”) it is a metaphor which picks out similarities between parts. This picking out is strategic, in the sense that similarities are chosen with an expectation of cash value, but not necessarily “pragmatic” in the sense that they are geared toward fulfilling some task beyond the alteration of social reality (“politicking”). We can call this strategic conceptualization or strategic framing: a description of a situation which is not so much geared to selecting among possible responses in the advancement of a goal, but to persuading others that a pre-selected response is in fact the right one.

Erving Goffman George Lakoff frames primary framework Pierre Bourdieu habitus pragmatic ontology ontology value clarity

The bull case for AI music

by Crispy Chicken

I am on record as telling people that they’ve been sniffing glue when it comes to claims that AGI is just around the corner, and I stand by that. I do believe AI is going to have an enormous impact on the economics and affordances of our world, though.

Here’s one important case-study: music.

The bear case on AI music is simple to make: it’ll be technically flawless, but it’ll revert to the mean in melody, lyrics, texture, and anything else important.

To be fair, this is what 99% of people who try to make AI music work will do, and it’ll suck and no one will care about those people.

But a few people are going to realize a simple recipe

1. Improved versions of models like Jukebox are going to capture certain styles well enough and be good enough at making “interesting” discoveries in the space of possibilities to be sifted through by paid or unpaid crowds to be useful at getting the music part right.
2. Improved versions of models like GPT-3 are going to be able (already?) able to generate eerily captivating and lucid snippets of insight when conditioning on relevant information…which is really all you need for good lyrics.
3. Combine and profit.

What I’m describing here is fastmusic: music generated to order to target niches, such as nascent subcultures, as soon as they arise. Being there first can matter a lot: you can become a schelling point for the Elders and sneak in your own ideas a bit if your clever. It’s a whole new kind of branding.

Companies may find these subcutltures through quantitative or qualitative methods. They may choose to target only large subcultures or it may be possible to serve-up custom ads with custom music to a few dozen folks. And many songs may only be listened to once.

It really doesn’t matter—because if producing these kinds of aesthetic snipe attempts is cheap enough i(n terms of hardware to run big neural networks on) there will be plenty of money in using it to create schelling points that you and your friends socialize around, even if only one song in a million hits.

Isn’t that what a lot of gpeople are doing now, in place of AIs?

generalized reading communication distinction difference information theory music GPT-3 OpenAI AGI Jukebox

Torque policy

by Suspended Reason

1.

Previously, I’ve written about torque epistemology and semantics. The concept was inspired by a Bourdieu passage about how and why writers try to “twist the stick” of discourse with strategic representations of the world:

This explains why writers’ efforts to control the reception of their own works are always partially doomed to failure (one thinks of Marx’s ‘I am not a Marxist’); if only because the very effect of their work may transform the conditions of its reception and because they would not have had to write many of the things they did write and write them as they did—e.g. resorting to rhetorical strategies intended to ’twist the stick in the other direction”—if they’d been granted from the outset what they are granted retrospectively.

To communicate, or to represent, is to act—and actions are always performed with some delta in mind, a transformation of the world as it is, towards how it ought to be. We light the fire to heat the house; we email our colleague to prevent his making an error. What is important with torque utterances is that they diagnose, and attempt to correct, a perceived discursive imbalance: because decision-makers’ perceptions or beliefs are already biased in one direction, they must be de-biased through the presentation of a biased picture in some contrary direction. This tit-for-tat, corrective approach to messaging can erode audience trust in the message source, but also appears more effective at mobilizing partisan enthusiasms.

In torque policy, similarly, some type of regulatory or governing agency establishes behavioral guidelines. These guidelines for behavior may be legally enforced or else enforced socially through judgment, reputation-damage, and shame. In some cases, they are relatively private affairs, targeted messaging, for the receiver’s own sake, which assumes some systematic desire or bias (“ought”) in one direction, and thus systematically misrepresents descriptive reality (“is”) in order to counter this user ought. For instance, an instruction manual may advise a user to perform X action for 60 seconds when only 30 seconds are needed, because consumer studies have shown that most users severely under-count seconds, and will (if advised at 60 seconds) on average perform the action only half that.

Must we really wait 15 minutes after applying waterproof sunscreen, before going on a swim? Tooth-brushing (2 minutes) and handwashing (20 seconds) guidelines may similarly be torque. On the other hand, they may not be. Part of the issue with torque policy is that it muddies the epistemic status of the larger precautionary landscape. Some fastidious literalists will always perform the proper advised action to its full extent, which causes some wasted energy but is overall relatively harmless. More problematically, the existence of torque policy in some domains can cause non-literalists to interpret non-torque advisements as over-stated. Real requirements will be fallen short of, warning labels will not be taken seriously. Torque policy can cause a treadmill of exaggeration.

While many of the above examples assume a ~benevolent body producing guidelines which will result in roughly optimal outcomes across a population, this is by no means necessarily the case. A brand of dishwasher detergent may advise that users pour an unnecessary amount of detergent powder, since a higher use rate means higher sales.

Some examples collected by fellow tis.so members:

“best by” dates on food (hyper-legible & idiot-proof, compare with sniff tests, taste tests, visual mold checks as surrogates)

a company sets a productivity goal it doesn’t expect any employee to be capable of reaching, with the hope of “motivating” the employees to produce at a higher clip than they might otherwise. A few employees work weekends for months in order to hit the goals.

recommendations as to how often you should replace your water filter, air filter, etc

doctor telling you you need to lose 30 pounds when in actuality, even 15 or even 5 would begin to have positive effects on your (knees, diabetes, whatever)… [if] the doctors say 30, it’s in an attempt to shock you into action; and he thinks results would be better if it was done more like charity

my favourite example in this space has got to be the DHS color-coded terrorism threat levels (low, guarded, significant, high, severe), which never fell to the either of the two lowest levels before the system was retired after 10 years

the American Society of Civil Engineers issuing a “failing grade” for every part of the US’s road and bridge infrastructure every year and putting out a figure of 4.5T in needed investment by 2025

2.

Overall, I’m less and less satisfied with the “torque” concept these days, as it seems to blend more and more into linguistic pragmatism and the ACiM hypothesis. But what is clear, from these examples, is that action and outcome are always the ends of communication, even supposedly neutral “informative” communication, and that representation—far from being something which can only ever ben true or false, honest or deceptive—is always tailored toward accomplishing these outcomes. To view communication as something which is foremost “true” or “false” is to fall into the fallacy of the excluded middle, and repeat the errors of the logical positivists.

Utterances are tactics, and every tactic encodes (lossily) its goal. We can’t reliably reverse-engineer a speaker’s goal from a single tactic; the lossy nature, and confounding by “speaker beliefs,”¹ means that a given tactic is always ambiguous, could be in service of a thousand desired outcomes. But as we gather a body of data, concerning deployed tactics, we are able to triangulate them into a model of desire.

torque epistemology positional semantics torque policy Pierre Bourdieu desire ACiM law of the excluded middle

Favors and fear

by Suspended Reason

I believe that people always want something, when they speak—even if it’s broad or underspecified. That you, the addressee, are included in that plan, as a subject of their wanting.

But I also see a common and easy pitfall, to this way of thinking, which is to systematically overestimate the scale of what people are after. Your cocktail interlocutor might just want you to take over the conversation, because they’re running out of things to say, or they’re anxious they’ve have been talking too much. Someone who starts complaining about their personal life may want emotional support, or sympathy, or brainstorming, or a full-blown serious favor.

Just because communication is motivated, and motivated towards altering others’ behavior, doesn’t mean the ask is as high as one may be dreading.

ACiM strategic interaction

So-called “showmanship” in science

by Feast of Assumption

In response to Possible Modernist’s Showmanship in Science, I don’t want to oppose his central claim that showmanship can play a role in science (via science popularization, via attracting science funding, &c.). But I do want to invalidate his given example.

In his opening paragraph, PM asserts

From dramatic demonstrations, to self-experimentation, a public performance with an emotional arc might be the only thing that convinces some people (or at keeps them paying attention).

Dramatic demonstrations, sure. Public performance with emotional arc, sure.

But self-experimentation is not first-and-foremost showmanship. Self-experimentation is just the main ethical way to do batshit stuff!

The boundaries of science and engineering are tested and expanded by curious people, whose drive to know can outpace the willingness of review boards and funding partners to approve and fund research, respectively.¹

When you want to work faster or weirder than the establishment will let you, the only ethical test subject is yourself.

I would agree that you could accuse some instances of self-experimentation of being showmanship, and if you were to, you would probably specifically label the flavor of showmanship “stolen valor.” But in PM’s chosen example, I would point out that “wanting to work quickly to give humans immunity to a novel virus” is actually just plain old valorous. Yes, the experimenter took the real vaccine dose in his closet, and “took” a blank dose for the photographer.

But he didn’t stage a vaccination to accept valor he hadn’t earned. He was just letting the photographer illustrate the work as it actually had occurred: feverishly motivated, faster than the review boards, un-or-under-funded, batshit—and tested on himself.

philosophy of science performance engineering

A cluster in salience space

by Suspended Reason

The phrase “a cluster in thingspace” implies that, even as concepts are fuzzy bundles of extensions rather than clearly boundaried intensions, they are organized and grouped together by virtue of some “real,” formal, objective similarity. This is misleading.

Rather, members of most conceptual sets are grouped together because they are similar or patterned in ways which are perceptually and pragmatically salient to human beings in a specific culture of distinction and practice.

concepts words cluster structure in thingspace prototype theory Eliezer Yudkowsky

Clever chunking

by Collin Lysford

An example surfaced from Nintil’s “Scaling Tacit Knowledge”, about memorizing chess games:

I would have considered it a waste of time before giving it a chance. The trick is that to memorize a game, you sort of have to understand it. It’s possible to just memorize moves like you’d memorize a list of random words, but it will be 10x harder than just understanding what’s going on.

If you understand what’s going on, you end up memorizing the game in a series of chunks, instead of a series of moves. For example one miniature that I’ve memorized is this game between Peter De Bortoli and Botond Smaraglay. I can recite move by move, but the way I remember it is roughly “Smith Morra gambit, knight development, bishop development, scare off bishop, threaten queen trap, knight blunder, queen trap”. Memorizing a couple king’s gambit games has definitely improved my king’s gambit play by giving me more ideas.

Why does chunking makes things easier to memorize? The same reason words are easier to remember than arbitrary strings of letters - because we use them. “Knight development” is a pattern of chess moves that are far more likely than random chance to happen in sequence, because they lead to an unusually good outcome (relative to the space of all possible moves) when executed. It’s memorable because it’s common, it’s common because it’s useful, and it’s useful because people often like what happens when they do it.

I don’t actually know what constitutes “knight development”, because I don’t really follow chess. The extent of my knowledge is that your knights are more free to move and threaten enemy pieces, but I couldn’t tell you what exactly constitutes “knight development”. But I don’t need to know that to understand what’s happening when I see a chunk like “knight development”. Almost every domain of any complexity has this same phenomena of fluid ontology, where chunks that aren’t based on the root-level objects (one piece, one turn) get parceled out by language owing to their uncommon usefulness.

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. Domain-specific language that’s been matured through experience just looks a certain way, and that way can be recognized without deep knowledge of that domain. (An analogy: you need specific botanical knowledge to look at a single tree and estimate how old it is, but you don’t need that same knowledge to tell that it at-least-so-old.) You can use this to jump-start your understanding in a new field by instantly identifying sources that are far more likely to be credible owing to the relative “maturity” of their chunking, as expressed through langauge. I think people are sometimes hesitant to admit this, because it sounds like a sort of petty elitism or classism - “I can tell from the way that you talk that you’re more likely to be correct, even if I don’t know anything about what you’re talking about.” But, well, sometimes you can tell from the way people talk that they’ve spent a lot of time interacting with the domain - and if that doesn’t make them more likely to be correct, what the hell does?

examples games ontology tacit knowledge concepts chess Nintil memorization

Bad dancing and bad writing

by Neil

When new partner dancers are starting out as leads, they usually want to be able to lead really flashy moves: spins, dips, stuff like that. But teachers, and more experienced dancers, usually encourage them to focus on basics. Is this because their teachers hate fun? No. It’s because their lead is too noisy.

If you don’t lead simple, basic moves cleanly and purposefully, the follow won’t know what’s going on when you get to the fancy stuff. If the lead makes distracting, unnecessary movements, the follow has to ignore them; and vice-versa, if the lead fails to clearly indicate what they expect, the follow has to guess (or deduce, from trial and error, and the lead’s facial expressions) what the lead wants them to do. Either way, the follow trusts the signal less — so it’s difficult or impossible for the lead to communicate subtler ideas, and it’s a less pleasant experience for the follow, even if they do happen to guess correctly the whole way through.

Bad writing has the same quality. I read a very early draft of a friend’s short story recently. She’s a fine writer, but because it was such an unrefined fragment — she’d written it in about an hour while we were hanging out and drinking — I noticed that the piece had a lot of small misleading components. Individually, they weren’t a big deal, but overall, they created a fundamental problem.

To explain what I mean, let’s consider a simplified model, where a story consists of a series of setups and payoffs. In the dance analogy, we could say the setup is like the lead, and the payoff is like the follow executing the move, and ideally feeling good doing it.

If your story is titled “Sarrasine,” I’m going to wonder who, or what, this Sarrasine is. If your story begins, “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia,” I’d better hear more about Uqbar, the mirror, and the encyclopedia. And if your novel begins, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife,” I will expect it to contain one or more single men, and have a dry sense of humor about human nature.

Now let’s consider my friend’s story. The first sentence describes the narrator “picking up two gallons on the way home.” So, hmm, maybe it’s gas, although that’d be a weird way to describe it? Maybe it’s milk, and they’re a bodybuilder or something? Or maybe it’s some fictional liquid, like the setting is a sci-fi dystopia where everyone has to get their government-mandated happy juice? But none of these made sense with the rest of the story.

Later, the narrator notices minute details about the decorations of their friends’ neighbors’ houses that normally wouldn’t merit attention. At this point, I was already uncertain whether I could trust my instincts. Was the narrator trying to keep their mind off something unpleasant? Was the narrator supposed to be autistic (like, Curious Incident autistic)? Was it going to turn out later that the narrator was a professional exterior decorator? Was it just a slightly-awkward way of indicating that the narrator had been here frequently?

Neither of these are catastrophic problems taken on their own; individually, they could give an air of mystery to the story. I could be left holding my breath, waiting to figure out what those two gallons were. But when many of these problems occur, there’s a fundamental shift, where I stop assuming that the things I notice are meaningful, and start assuming that they’re just the result of…well, someone writing a fragment on a short time limit while drinking.

This very simple setup-payoff model doesn’t explain everything about writing, of course; and even within this model, a really talented writer could give the reader a setup with no payoff. But that requires a masterful level of control everywhere else. The reader needs to feel that the writer is creating an effect on purpose.

communication dance literature narrative

Categories as heuristics

by Suspended Reason

Walking along the Mississippi I told Colin, “What I realized, writing Surrogation, was that if I wanted to take the project any further, I’d need a serious understanding of causality and inference.”

But I’ve also developed a hunch that understanding (1) heuristics (2) meta-heuristics (the learning, mimesis, explore-exploit algorithms that dictate acquisition, spread, and discovery of heuristics across a population) is key to everything we’re interested in at TIS.

I’m coming to think that we should think of the meaning & use of words & categories as heuristics—their efficacy, when deployed, is receiver-dependent and prone to intra-population frequency-dependent dynamics; words/categories’ meaning/boundaries are tethered to an environment & set of goals which is constantly morphing; different strategies (words/categories) develop connotations or “reputations” that alter acquisition & deployment.

The heuristic is a simple but powerful concept which goes: we can’t know perfectly the effects of our actions in a novel situation, but we can categorize the situation and choose an action that probabilistically/historically has high efficacy in that “type” of circumstance. And this gets right back to functional pragmatism, action-oriented ontologies, Hazard’s “words as decision rules,” etc. Building communicative and interpersonal skills looks like ongoing ontological remodeling + building a toolkit of S-R patterns.

And because “fitness” is central to the heuristic, we can take a whole bunch of evolutionary dynamics with respect to selection, environmental drift, frequency dependency, etc and plug them in to our understanding of language & concepts.

heuristics pragmatism communication surrogation causality inference frequency dependency

Monograph or aether

The fate of folk knowledge

by Feast of Assumption

This is my first year keeping poultry, and among the things I’m learning are “which traits are genetically linked in chickens,” and “how information is stored and shared among poultrymen.”

Poultry comb inside baseball

My flock is fleshing out their secondary sex characteristics this week, and I spent a few days baffled by the fact that I might have two roosters, contrary to what I’d ordered and what I’d been expecting based on comb morphology in the flock’s early weeks.

There’s a lot to know about comb morphology. I chose my poultry based on breeders’ suggestions of cold-hardiness. Later I learned that they’re cold-hardy largely due to having ‘rose’ combs (close to the skull, no fancy nubs for heat dissipation and/or frostbite).

I was confused about my rooster(s) because one chick had been sporting a bigger comb since early on. Once his wattles stretched out, I noticed that a second fowl had stretched its wattles on the same day—but hadn’t grown the spiky comb I’d taken to mean “definitely the rooster”. Watching wattles, green tail feathers, posture, neck—they’re definitely both roosters.

So discussing with my friends “which rooster will stay with the flock / which rooster gets fried,” I find the reason that single combs ‘sport’ in rose comb breeds is that homozygous rose combs often have sperm motility issues, so flocks tend to stay heterozygous. So do I keep the single-comb rooster for more offspring, or the rose-comb rooster to perpetuate the cold-hardiness that motivated my choice of this variety?

Passed via lore?

I first stumbled across the ‘rose comb/lower fertility’ observation in a confidently asserted but completely uncited post from commenter with a default avatar on a phpBB forum. And my friend noted

weird how much animal husbandry tech there is just passed via lore and not really studied or understood by science

But this wasn’t my understanding at first—most of animal husbandry, far as I can see, is understood by science. In 1904 the OG, RC Punnett, was publishing on this very topic. They just had worked enough of it out by 1910, that few people are see fit to research it in the modern day. But you can still read all the old monographs. (And what cool monographs they are—both the photos from this post are screengrabs from 1901.)

Monograph or aether

Well, that’s the problem with folklore that in the one point of time it’s like an air, in the next point of time nobody knows it and nobody remembers anything.

observed Rafał Miśta, one of my favorite sociologists.

And that’s sort of the crux of it. When conditions shifted such that animal husbandry was no longer critical to the survival and flourishing of J. Random Citizen, a lot of knowledge did vaporize. Take this footnote, from Punnett (1904).

Whatever Mr. Assheton knew is gone, and only this fragment exists to let us know that there was something to be known. There are also almost certainly fewer laymen in 2022 with the equivalent poultry knowledge of Assheton and his peers in 1903.

There’s also the problem of missing monographs—Hindhaugh bothered to type up work that would let me decide which rooster to keep, but I can’t find a copy:

Hindhaugh, W. L. S. (1932). Some observations on fertility in White Wyandottes. Poultry J, 17, 555-560. Available in its entirety nowhere.

In the fullness of time, knowledge can either make it into a monograph, or it remains “like an air”: freely accessible and known to all, but vulnerable to being vaporized by a stiff breeze. I’m tempted to consider the uncited forum post as part of the aether (I was able to track down its source , but not to comprehend it).

I’m reminded of Crispy Chicken’s concept of ‘intellectual fascia’. The bones of a theory may be immortalized in a monograph, while the connective tissues, lymph, and plumage are long gone by the time an archaeologist approaches with his hammer.

As shifting pressures will direct human attention away from what puts literal meat on the table and toward what puts metaphorical meat on the table, those who want to know what their forefathers knew will have only the monographs available.

Works referenced

“Rose comb is from an inversion on chromosome 7 that by the way happens to clip the end of an adjacent gene affecting sperm motility. There are two documented alleles that cause rose comb with one of them repairing the sperm gene. The alleles are usually designated R1 (clips the sperm motility gene) and R2 (repairs the sperm motility gene but still gives rose comb). R1 is very common and R2 is very rare.Single comb is from a combination of a normal single comb gene on chromosome 1 plus the effect of the rose comb inversion on chromosome 7. If the inversion is not present, the result is a single comb bird whether male or female. If the inversion is heterozygous, meaning one chromosome has it and the other doesn’t, you get a fleshy rose comb. If both copies of chromosome 7 have the rose comb inversion, you get a rose comb bird. Caveat that there are several modifier genes that also affect comb size and shape and are not on chromosomes 1 or 7. Pea comb is a variation of the single comb gene on chromosome 1. If you combine pea comb with rose comb, you get walnut comb.” uncited, from DarJones, on a chicken hobbyists’ forum

Bateson, W., Saunders, E. R., Punnett, R. C. Experimental Studies in the Physiology of Heredity. 1904. Available in its entirety at: https://archive.org/details/RoyalSociety.ReportsToTheEvolutionCommittee.ReportIi.Experimental/page/n1/mode/2up , pp. 99-119. (See also their opener on my favorite bouquet inclusions, the gillyflower/matthiola!)

Gibbs, Charles S. A Guide to Sexing Chicks, 1935. Available in its entirety at: http://reader.library.cornell.edu/docviewer/digital?id=chla2802548#page/12/mode/2up

McGrew, T. F. American Breeds of Fowls: II.—The Wyandotte. 1901. Available in its entirety at: https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/5421200/PDF

Imsland, Freyja et al. “The Rose-comb mutation in chickens constitutes a structural rearrangement causing both altered comb morphology and defective sperm motility.” PLoS genetics vol. 8,6 (2012): e1002775. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1002775 . Available in its entirety at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3386170/

stamp collecting folk knowledge folklore animal husbandry intellectual fascia