An aspect of “manipulation” that not all communication has
by Hazard
“All communication is manipulation” (ACiM) is a catch-phrase that Suspended coined to try and characterize some of the TIS approach to understanding communication. We’ve had almost as much debate about this particular wording as we’ve had about the underlying idea that it points to. I’m not a fan of the phrase, since it requires immediate “backpedaling” to explain the particular sense of “manipulation” that is meant. But until I can make something catchier and clearer that can memetically out-compete ACiM within the crew, the phrase shall persist.
Suspended very early on clarified that he’s trying to tap into a value-neutral sense of manipulation as “causing effects”, like in “manipulating a data-structure” or “manipulating the sails of a ship to steer it”, as opposed to the common way the word is used in a sentence like “why do you keep dating manipulative assholes?” Hence his later corrective “All communication is manipulation, some manipulation is mutually advantageous”. His idea is not that all communication is adversarial and zero sum attempts to control each other, but simply that all communication is motivated. People say things for reasons, to try and do things, through each other. You could see it as the claim that all communication is more complicated versions of “pass the salt”.
Today I realized another aspect of “manipulation” that I think breaks the catch-phrase, and it’s about the level of reliable control. When one talks about manipulating some object towards some end, there’s a level of fluidity, predictability, and repeatability that is conveyed. You might say that Tony Hawk manipulates a skateboard, or that a blacksmith manipulates his hammer, but it doesn’t quite fit to say that a novice that falls over every time they put both feet on the board is also “manipulating” the skateboard.
Plenty of instances of “effecting the behavior of others via communication” have this quality of reliability. A conductor manipulates the orchestra with their wand. The head of a military field unit manipulates their team via hand signals. In both of these scenarios the person communicating has a clear sense of the outcomes they’re trying to produce and fluidly communicates in a way that predictably and reliably cues the desired behavior.
It’s also clear to me that plenty of instances of communication don’t have this quality. Imagine two mathematicians working on a novel problem together. “Hey wait, the output is always prime!” This communication is still motivated by the desire of enlisting the other in solving the problem, but neither has a clear sense of a robust, predictable, repeatable way that the communication produces the desired outcome. The logic is more like “tell the other anything I’ve figured out about the problem, and maybe one of us will have a eureka moment at some point.” It’s lacking the reliable control aspect of “manipulation” that we teased out earlier.
You could say that the degree to which a given interaction has the potential to surprise you is the degree to which it lacks this quality of manipulation.
All that to say, this another way “manipulation” doesn’t quite fit the bill. Maybe “All communication is motivated”? We wouldn’t even have to change the acronym :)
Self-response learning and ACiM
Dawkins, interview with Sean Carroll 2022:
Bird song has great aesthetic appeal… As Keats said of the nightingale, “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.” The nightingale’s song had a drugging effect on Keats’s nervous system. And he would’ve called it an aesthetic effect, but he also likened it to taking a drug. Well Keats’s nervous system was a vertebrate nervous system and so is a female nightingale’s…
And I like this idea because we know that bird song actually does have a measurable physiological effect on the female bird’s hormones. This has been shown in doves and in canaries. It actually… Male song in canaries actually causes the ovaries of a female to grow. So, it’s as though the male is having a direct hormonal effect, [a] physiological effect on the female. A human physiologist could cause a female’s ovaries to grow by injecting hormones, or perhaps he could influence her behaviour by sticking electrodes in her brain. Well, the male bird can’t do that. But he can do something equivalent, which is to sing. So there was a man called Hartshorne who actually tried to make the case that… birds have an aesthetic appreciation of song, that [they] actually [enjoy] song in the same way as we enjoy music. And he was rather ridiculed for that. But, it’s not too far distant what I’m now saying, which is that the manipulative effect of a male bird’s song on the female physiology is kind of like an aesthetic experience.
Now, if we go now to the question of how the male bird learns to sing, it’s been shown in a number of species that… young birds, when they’re developing their song, are teaching themselves to sing by trial and error… And this has been shown by experiments. What they’re doing is kind of burbling around at random. And every time they hear a phrase that they like (I used that phrase advisedly) they repeat it. So they’re learning. They’re teaching themselves to sing by repeating those phrases of burbling, of warbling, which appeal to them, turn them on. Now, a male nightingale or a male canary is the same species as a female. He has a similar brain. So, whatever turns him on might turn the female on. Well, that’s getting perilously close to talking about it as an aesthetic experience, isn’t it? It’s saying, the male teaches himself to sing by singing phrases at random. And the ones that he likes, the ones that turn him on aesthetically, are likely to be the same as the ones that would turn a female on aesthetically and sexually.
There are a couple really interesting things happening in this quote. First, Dawkins is presenting an example of just how strong and physiological the manipulation effects of communication can be. (Recall that Dawkins is one of the originators of the ACiM idea.)
Second, Dawkins is laying out what we might call a self-response learning process for developing a repertoire of effective utterances.
ACiM is a natural extension of cybernetics insofar as it builds off the idea that organisms’ communication patterns are trained, over their lifetimes, through observation of the effects of a communicative utterance. Those speech acts which elicit a positive (desired) effect are preserved and re-deployed in the future; those which elicit negative (undesired) effects are discarded. (One meta-principle I hope to elaborate, going forward, is that we should always understand games, not by the self-representations of their players, but by the actual incentive and selection structures which govern their outcomes and survivorship.)
But an additional mechanism, which I have previously alluded to but never adequately treated or crystallized, is the self-response learning pattern laid out above, in young male nightingales developing a song repertoire. Because our psychologies, as humans, are roughly similar to those of other humans’, we are able to treat our own psychological responses to stimuli as surrogates for the responses of others. When we ourselves feel especially hurt or inspired, angered or saddened, by a remark, we gain data about what sorts of remarks might elicit similar responses in others.
Language and science
In The Invention of Science, his book about the scientific revolution, David Wootton writes that “the new science would not have been possible without the construction of a new language with which to think, a language necessarily cobbled together, out of available words and phrases.” [p. 53]
Although the text is wide ranging, Wootton occasionally focuses in on certain key terms, like “discovery” or “fact”, and traces their usage, arguing that the emergence of science as a community and practice necessitated both the creation of new terms, like “satellites” (by Kepler), and the repurposing of existing terms, like “evidence”, which Wootton claims was borrowed by natural philosophy from usages in legal contexts.
According to Wootton, until the voyages of Columbus, there wasn’t really a word for our modern concept of “discovery” in any of the major European languages. The closest equivalents in Latin were terms he translates as “explore”, “obtain”, and “find out”. “Discovery” as a term eventually spread throughout these languages, derived from the Portuguese “discobrir”, which previously meant “explore”, and gradually took on a meaning closer to “uncover”.
These may all sound quite similar, Wootton’s point is that the creation or adoption of a new term goes hand in hand with a new way of thinking. For Wootton, as an historian, this is especially useful in trying to understand the past: “Usually, linguistic change is a crucial marker of a modification in the way in which people think — it both facilitates that change and makes it easier for us to recognize it.” [p. 63]
If we believe Wootton’s analysis, previous close equivalents to discovery inherently implied a sense of “rediscovery”, because it was widely believed that everything that could be known was already known by ancient people. Even the discovery (and rediscovery) of the Azores in 1351 and 1427 seems not to have had much impact, as it was assumed that others’ must already have known of them. With reports of a gigantic, previously unknown, continent, however, it could no longer be maintained that there was nothing new to be learned, and Wootton suggests that this was instrumental in turning people’s attention towards trying to learn new things. In Wootton’s framing, “discovery was a new type of enterprise which came into existence along with the word.” [p. 63]
Crispy has long argued that we need a new language in order to make progress on certain areas of science, including our understanding of language itself. It’s easy to see some version of this happening around us — just think of all the terms related to covid-19 that did not exist a few years ago — but we are so awash in language today that it is very hard to distinguish meaningful conceptual innovation from other processes of linguistic change. I suspect it’s also much easier to see the connection between linguistic and conceptual innovation retrospectively, as in Wootton’s historical work, whereas it seems like it might be difficult to even know when one is in the midst of an important conceptual revolution.
This is only a tentative attempt to scratch the surface, but I suspect that this is a topic that will be worth returning to many times.
Prestigious costumes & cargocult philosophy
Related to Being incoherent is lindy, Year of cotton, and Consciousness is not strongly emergent.
Most interesting things that can be said about a problem like “free will v determinism” has already been said. And yet, for precisely the same reason—the length of time it has been an active topic of philosophical inquiry—free will v determinism has also acquired reputational capital, is legibly an Important Question Which Professional Philosophers Work On. So the opticratic-minded gravitate towards the appearance of progress, trading in their chances at actual progress. Pragmatic long-termists, on the other hand, opt to take a reputational hit by working on problems which are illegible or non-prestigious precisely because they are novel in their framing, conception, subject, or premise. (Moreover, non-prestigious problems are cet par less worked on, and therefore on average have more & lower-hanging fruit.) People interested in academic and idea work for identitarian reasons inevitably produce cargocult work because they are interested in costuming (noun > verb)—the extrinsic, rather than the intrinsic. (This being one of the core ideas of The Last Psychiatrist’s now-defunct blog.)
cargocult philosophy free will determinism extrinsic-intrinsic reputational capital prestige opticracy The Last Psychiatrist
Board games are a social construct
by Neil
In his piece on degenerate play, Possible Modernist touches on something quite interesting that I’d like to unpack a little more. As he points out, certain strategies might be technically legal, but against the spirit of the game, either because they’re not how the game was really intended to be played, or because they make it not-very-fun for your opponents. He suggests that this has to do with the “meta-game” of having a good time with your friends:
With games however, there is the meta goal of having a good time, which is (in the best cases) still totally possible if you lose, and which is therefore arguably more important than winning. Players who would sacrifice fun in order to secure their own victory have indeed hacked the rules of the game, but arguably to no one’s benefit.
But there’s an even larger problem. It’s not just that winning at all costs might be a dick move. Sometimes people don’t agree what winning is.
Here’s a very common case. Suppose I’m playing a game with two friends: Alice has 50 points, Bob has 25 points, and I have 26 points. If I believe that “winning” is only getting first place, I might opt for a strategy that sabotages Alice, even if I have only the slimmest chance of actually overtaking her. But if I think getting second place is “more winning” than getting last, I’ll probably do something that helps me, or even something that sabotages Bob…although Bob might be mad about that!
An extreme example of this arises in the 2012 game Archipelago. It’s a game where people take on the role of, well, basically colonizers, exploring and developing a new land. (Imagine a much-more-complicated Settlers of Catan.) The catch is that your workers and/or the indigenous population will rise up against you, causing everyone to lose, unless all of the players collectively commit resources to quell the uprising.
The catch to the catch is that there’s no personal benefit for committing resources. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma. The best case is for everyone else to take care of it.
So, uh…who takes care of the uprising? If you’re in last place, it might make sense to demand that everyone else takes care of it. After all, you’re losing either way. But then who picks up your slack? The first-place player? What if committing the additional resources to make up for you would push them down to last place? Or what if the second-to-last player really needs all their resources to have a chance at first? Hmm…
This culminates in a big ol’ 12-page flamewar on BoardGameGeek.com where a whole bunch of folks have a not-entirely-civil discussion over whether this game is even playable. OP says:
There’s a very important question that relates to player’s approach to game theory and their goal in a game. Will players consider finishing last in a game that does not explode to be a better personal finish than the table all losing collectively? Or even one other player winning and the rest losing collectively? No one I play with would ever consider coming in last place (with all others finishing higher) better than everyone losing. Finishing position matters.
But not everyone agrees, of course; in fact, this passage is in response to another review, by “Dan D.”:
At the end of the day, you just have to do as I do and play by the “no douche bags allowed” rule. Aside from one player in my group, I can’t see that ever happening with the regulars in my group. Whenever I play with newcomers to the group I will make this an openly discussed issue at the outset and make sure everyone is on board with playing the game properly. Anyone who ruined a game in the aforementioned manner would find themselves quickly on the outside looking in within my gaming group.
Well, you imagine see how this gets heated.
While we’d like to believe games are a separate space, they’re never fully sealed off from the world. They are socially-constructed, in the sense that we must agree to abide by a shared understanding; and there will always be unspoken things in that understanding, things that can come back to haunt us.
Thought sinks
There are certain subjects that keep bubbling up in our thoughts—when we’re taking a walk, cooking dinner, taking a shower, riding the subway to work. Our figurative language for these subjects is well-developed: Certain stones we keep turning over, pebbles we rub smooth in our hands. Questions that eat at us: whether we made the right purchase, whether we’ll get an offer from the company, whether our comment at dinner last night was out of line.
I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.
The therapeutic stance on these subjects is that they need—that they are actively demanding—processing. There is an authority and wisdom in this perpetual surfacing up of the problem: the subject ought to be thought through and dealt with. Not abandoning the line of thought, but following it to its ends.
To the more skeptical, this surfacing is a nervous stimulus, a lack of comfort with the unknowable-ambiguous, an unproductive desire to resolve every indeterminacy. A waste of bandwidth on irresolvable questions, an impatience. If the obsessive pebble-rubber wishes to make progress on a problem, settle the ambivalence one way or the other, they ought wait for (or actively seek out) new information, because right now, there’s not enough to know.
I think there’s a reconciliation of these views that says: At the object-level, you are probably caught in quicksand, and struggling only pulls you further down. Even if you resolved the indeterminacy, it’s often unclear what productively can be pulled from a question like “Did I annoy Marsha last night over lambchop?” BUT, real value can, nonetheless be found in such problems—either by going up a level, by asking Why does this particular ambiguity bother me so bad?, or by generally re-focusing the inquiry along defendably productive avenues.
Consciousness is not strongly emergent
I recently read “Strong and Weak Emergence” by David Chalmers. Among other things, Chalmers suggests that
a system is conscious when there is something it is like to be that system
and that consciousness is a case of strong emergence. Emergence is when unexpected phenomena result from the building blocks of phenomena we believe we understand. Strong emergence, is when the resulting phenomena could not, even in principle, have been predicted from the initial building blocks.
It is my view that there cannot be such a thing as strong emergence. If the results of a process do not result from its building blocks, then from whence do they result? One might suggest a mysterious “missing element”, but why wouldn’t such a “missing element” be considered a building block that was just difficult to observe a priori, rather than fundamentally impossible to observe? This “impossibility” ruins the essential subjectivity that the idea of emergence is founded on. We could invent a formal language for all possible observable outcomes, then say “Each sentence in our formal language for describing possible results is hereby granted the right to predict its own describe outcome. Since at least one of these will occur when we mix the following building blocks, it is clear that at least one entity could predict the outcome.”
Chalmers suggests that it makes sense to think of a world just like our own and functions the exact same way, except without consciousness. This is a very strange argument, because if this world is exactly like our own, with Chalmers walking around talking about consciousness, then why should I believe him in this universe?
We can make recourse to our own experience—that we know what it is like to be ourselves. But I have yet to be presented evidence in any discussion of consciousness that this “feeling of existing” isn’t a natural byproduct of the chemical activities of my brain. Chalmers claims that this physical effect is likely determinative of a conscious state, but does not fully capture it. It is difficult to rule that out if one believes in an ineffable consciousness, but again: Why should we believe in a magic kind of consciousness?
Consciousness, the awareness of one’s subject state of existing, is an interesting phenomena. It is interesting to ask: How much does a dog feel that it is a dog vs. just mechanically act out being a dog the way we feel about a wind-up toy? But to ask the question in earnest, one must be open to the answer: Why, the only difference is that the dog has a negative-feedback system with a sense of “state” because it is so much more complicated to consistently be a dog than a wind-up toy, which falls apart quite easily.
Consciousness as the dark magic of that which could not have been predicted is impossible to rule-out, since the claim is that consciousness is determined by physical state but not equivalent to it. Consciousness is the passenger, stuffed into the trunk of a car that is being driven by Nature.
In that case though, does it much matter? All the consciousness free automatons are going around having the exact same conversation. Listening to their version (which is the exact same as this version), it sounds equally valid. Consciousness defined as such is independent of any observation we could make. In my view, this makes it independent of any discourse we should consider inquiring into.
Year of cotton
Today marks the two-year anniversary of founding TIS with Crispy (soon joined by Snav, first hire par excellence). So I wrote some words for the occasion. We’re entering our terrible twos! We’re learning the language, learning how to play well with others!
Last year I wrote some stuff about all we’d accomplished—the new concepts and paradigms, the podcasts and blogposts—and maybe I’ll still write that. But mainly I wanted to do something different and get personal.
For most of my life, justification has been the leash around my neck, tethering my actions. I clung to a standard of reasonable personhood: my pruning algorithm, the watcher at the gates of the mind which allows some desires to live and smashes others from existence, held itself to a standard of preemptive defensibility to some imagined “reasonable” person. This watcher can still feel the weather in old wounds from past accusations.
I tended to prefer, and preferentially hang around, people with whom I could negotiate by telling the “truth,” rather than putting on a “show”—convincing them with flashy rhetoric, empty glitz, and non sequiturs. People to whom I could explain or defend any action, against any challenge, because they were the “reasonable” people held in mind when I’d acted. Their standards became my own. Those who could not be negotiated with this way were not worth dealing with. I detested the feeling of “playing” a person—thinking in terms of effects and outcomes accomplished, which creative flourishes would “get one past” them. I might mull over the best way to phrase something, but I thought of this as an interest in accuracy; there might be important nuance missing, or a mis-framing to side-step, but I could always tell a reasonable person the truth. This was my personal morality.
Nowadays, I feel more intuitively how much a standard of reasonableness depends on shared cultural backgrounds, shared systems of norms and expectations. I’m not sure I believe in a non-pragmatic truth or accuracy of utterances—what might it mean to “give someone the wrong impression” separate from feeling that the actions they take, in light of it, are inappropriate? I still avoid conscious performance, and still seem to hang around “reasonable people,” with whom I can be basically honest—of course witholding certain opinions, or private sources of shame, as we all do. I’ve also started to realize I’m leaving cash on the ground—not just cash that could go in my pocket, but in other people’s wallets—by limiting myself this way.
What was most surprising, over time, was that despite this reasonable personhood standard, the tactics and gameplay of social life didn’t go away. Not just because so-called unreasonable people seemed to be everywhere, and included people I cared about or depended on. But because even the “reasonable” people had “blind spots”—things they got (I thought) weirdly and “irrationally” touchy about. And as time went on, I started to get more comfortable with thinking and talking about the tactics. I was around people whose welfare I felt confident I cared about; I didn’t have to dissimulate to myself, because I was worried deep down I was out for #1. But when I went into situations naively, without preparation, they would frequently blow up in my face. People would get hurt, and I’d be dumbfounded (or play dumb, it’s sometimes hard to tell which). I’d put on spectacles that felt spontaneous and “authentic” but came off to others as disorienting, insulting, or provocative. I’d send a message, with my actions or body language, while repeatedly denying (to myself and others) that I was sending that message. I didn’t intend it, so how could I be?
Sometimes I felt a radical self-mistrust. I thought of the Jacob Clifton line, about how we never do anything by accident, how growing up is a process of getting yourself under control, so you don’t hurt people and fuck up your life. It’s a very psychoanalytic perspective, that your subconscious has these agendas that are constantly leaking out, and you have to own up to the subconscious strategies to get yourself under control. That your conscious is prone to generating propaganda to explain away these subconscious strategies in a more pro-social light. Which is one of the ways I’ve grown, actually, being on the server the past few years: taking compatibilism seriously, realizing not just abstractly but at an intuitive level, by regularly underestimating fields of knowledge and having the error bashed over my head, that there was an enormous amount to be learned from social construction theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, or old German philosophy.
The Clifton line still scares me, about how we never do anything by accident. Oh sure, we all make mistakes, no one is denying we slip on banana peels, but it’s a torque statement; it says: “You are understimating and wilfully blind to the deliberate decisions your subconscious is making on your behalf.” It says, you are motivated to disavow the consequences of your actions even as you go on repeating them. There’s a joke ready to be written here—the guy keeps pressuring the girl to come home with him, and every other sentence he says, “But no pressure!” She, of course, doesn’t believe him.
And once you get comfortable with bringing these dynamics and tensions of the social out into the light, and examining them openly—maybe you see it modeled by gossipy aunts whose noseyness saves the family from a devastating rift; maybe you get it from Austen—it becomes a major part of your conscious life, too. There are communication problems that pop up when you start caring about people, and taking seriously your role in how their life shakes out, like, “How should I bring this delicate subject up, and when?” or “How to get along when someone can’t take a hint?” and “How do you hint in the first place?” where we are not necessarily in the optimal social equilibria. We’ve inherited some ad hoc strategies that we saw modeled in family or friends, and they worked better than not having them at all, but they’re not reliable, and now there are ick zones around whole categories of social interaction. I think there is real coordination technology to be built, that is, tactics of communication and interaction which let us not only be more efficient—a cold, economic term—but to be more free: to not chain ourselves needlessly to expensive communication strategies; to not chain others. Because “painstakingly explaining for the twelfth time the rules of Hold’em” is not expensive communication. So long as you are in the realm of talk, your communication is cheap. So long as it takes you hours or days communication is cheap. Expensive communication lasts a lifetime.
I think there are things that can be figured out, that matter and impact quality of life in both hardline economic and hippy-dippy spiritual ways. Even though the language of strategy and equilibria, bargaining and costly signaling, can feel Spock-esque, there are deep loves that fall apart because people fail to model each other or fail to express themselves, or just because someone asks the wrong question at the wrong time. There are potential loves that never get off the ground because the surrogates were wrong, because of misreads and misunderstandings. Wars are started, friendships end, political conflicts drag for decades, because we cannot understand each other, because we are driven to fight over miscommunications and misrecognitions, because rhetorical tools go unidentified as such.
There is a vast wilderness around social ritual, and we understand in a vague, applied way which of its zones are dangerous or off-limits, which are well-trafficked or lightly populated, which are central and which are on the periphery. But this territory has never been mapped except, perhaps, in Victorian fiction. Notes are rarely exchanged, folks shy around from “meta” talk, gossip is taboo across swathes of male life. You’ve been preparing a pitch for months, a schpiel to give your younger, alcoholic brother. To get him to clean up his act before he loses his job, possibly his family. We have this edginess around “manipulation,” around not wanting to “manipulate” others, but how do we approach this talk? Do we give it our best shot? Do we pick our moment wisely? There are endless wrinkles to the dynamics in play, concerning the morality and social acceptability of persuasion and consent. Pitching someone when they are in certain states of mind might be taboo play—when they are grieving, or suicidal, or intoxicated. But perhaps because your brother is always drunk and suicidal, it’s OK her. Or maybe the time that he is grieving the end of his marriage, maybe that’s the time to present him with the fork in the road that’s facing him, to give your best argument for why he should choose the uphill path towards light. Or maybe it’s the worst time, and he will cut you out of his life and refuse to answer your calls for years.
Sometimes these conversations never happen because the person doesn’t know how to pull it off. There’s something you could say to a friend, which would help them immensely, but you don’t know how to say it without coming off wrong, and it never gets said. Maybe you don’t know how to make them trust your intentions, or let their guard down. Sometimes these conversations happen but get botched and both parties walk away angry and unchanged. Maybe most conversations go this way.
A Lorenz waterwheel is a classic example of sensitivity to initial conditions, the multiplicity of different stable equilibria that are available, the effect of starting conditions on the local minimum we end up at. Cultural evolution drives us into certain stabilities. Intelligence gives us the ability to scope out the levels of the different buckets, rotate the wheel in order to redistribute, get better outcomes. Or to use a hill-climbing metaphor, it gives us some limited but powerful ability (aren’t all powers limited) to see through the fog, across valleys, and locate higher peaks.
“Strategy” is not always—or even often—Machiavellian. “Being strategic” to me has always meant “Not being stupid,” taking seriously the stakes of the game, which is other people’s lives; not hurting people you don’t want to hurt. We’re all so connected now, exchanging information, able to record and remember interactions, and I want to leverage that opportunity to notice trends and develop social technology—build out a vocabulary, help people build intuitions—that gets us to better outcomes. Helps people talk to each other and be understood. I think that just having the concept “logistics” in their heads gives generals an advantage. You don’t need lab studies with impressive p-values, you just need a voice in someone’s head that says “Mind the low-hanging rafters.” Maybe at some point, this stuff becomes enough of a science someone can run studies or advise governments, but for now, vocabularies and intuitions and frameworks for which dynamics to keep in mind—this is enough, and this is everything.
Every once in a while nature shakes the waterwheel into a new equilibrium all on its own. The treadmill of military strategy never slows. But historians of war can map the progression in technologies, goals, considerations, player tactics, how they changed the game and transformed the solutions employed, the common mistakes. There’s no reason we can’t have a similar understanding and relationship to social life. Especially as (for better or for worse) globalization and media homogenize culture such that local diversity fades, and everyone begins to play within the same equilibria, norms, and strategic landscape.
Science is great, but the social—that’s everything. And where it starts is communication.
meta the inexact sciences communication narrative defensibility justifiability reasonableness generalized compatibilism
Being incoherent is lindy
Paradoxes are about incoherency, and they’re usually about misframing things to make them incoherent. Think about “the paradox of choice”, which can be summarized as “When you have too many choices you might end up less happy with your choice.”
Wait. Why is this a paradox? Isn’t that just, like, a model of what’s going on? Why yes it is.
The “paradox” is smuggled in by preconceptualizng the problem as a paradox, e.g. through descriptions such as “more is less”.
This kind of incoherency is selected-for when it comes to philosophical questions.
Consider Zeno’s paradox, which basically boils down to:
If one can infinitely divide “the remaining space” or “the remaining time” till some event happens, how do events even happen?
To which my answer is: What? What the fuck?
The incoherency here comes from the fact that the given data (‘one can infinitely divide “the remaining space” or “the remaining time” till some event happens’) has nothing to do with the given question (‘how do events happen?’). This hijacks assumed relevancy in language (cf. Grice’s Maxim of Relation). It forces one to believe that their is a connection, because it’s phrased to hide the necessity of proving the connection. There is no paradox to resolve: time can be infinitely subdivided (or not, who cares) and events happen. There is no explanatory path, because point A doesn’t hold the information that answers question B. The question simply assumes-away the idea that X can be derived from Y in a mystical enough way that it snipes people who like to have answers.
Yet Zeno’s paradox and many similar ideas stick around and people keep arguing about them.
Why? Because being unresolvable increases an idea’s shelf-life. Resolvable philosophical dilemmas like “How is something solid, like glass, transparent?” become science. Unresolvable philosophical paradoxes stay in the philosophy cannon, don’t require technical knowledge to understand, and accrue power as reference points because so many people refer to them in the literature.
Being incoherent is lindy, because proposition resolution is memetically selected against.
Anti-inductivity is a limit case
In the past, anti-inductivity has been talked about as something a system can or cannot embody. “Markets are anti-inductive”; “authenticity is anti-inductive”; “computer security is anti-inductive.”
But like many abstract descriptors, including “cooperative” and “adversarial,” anti-inductivity is best thought of as an ideal or limit case, with real systems existing on a spectrum in between inductive and anti-inductive.
Our task, then, is to identify and list those compositional attributes that create the conditions for a system to be more or less inductive or anti-inductive.
Brute association—or “babbling”
At the heart of snobbishness is a curation of associations—the idea of pathogen contamination metaphorically applied to the culture sphere.
Previously, I’ve connected the cargocult concept to William James’s idea of brute association.
Here, I want to entertain the idea that language itself is merely an adaptation on top of a built-in “machinery for instituting associative bonds” (Katz & Chomsky 1975).
On the one hand, there is a way in which this may necessarily be the case: to connect sign and signified, we need some sort of associative hardware.
On the other hand, it may not be sufficient. Modern text transformers and neural nets run on pure association, and they don’t make a ton of sense. Robin Hanson notes that writing produced by GPT-2 looks a lot like a C-level college paper on a complex subject. He calls this sort of writing “babbling.”
while I usually try to teach a deep structure of concepts, what the median student actually learns seems to mostly be a set of low order correlations. They know what words to use, which words tend to go together, which combinations tend to have positive associations, and so on.
Let me call styles of talking (or music, etc.) that rely mostly on low order correlations “babbling”. Babbling isn’t meaningless, but to ignorant audiences it often appears to be based on a deeper understanding than is actually the case.
Which prompts the question: What are “higher order” correlations? What is “deep” structure, and what separates it from “superficial” structure? The more statistically minded among us may be needed to formulate an answer. Causality is one approach to an answer, but is it sufficient, and how can it show up in data in the first place?
William James brute association association mechanistic reasoning babbling Robin Hanson causality language cargocult
The pfeilstorch
The unofficial mascot of TIS has, for a while now, been the pfeilstorch.
“Pfeilstorch” is a German word—pronounced “file storage”—that translates to “arrow stork.” Up until very recently, humans had no idea where birds went for winter. The Greeks, following Aristotle, believed that they hibernated, or else changed their form with the seasons (transmogrification). As late as the 1700s, a popular theory held that they flew to the moon.
In the early 1800s, several storks were found or shot down around Germany, each featuring a spear through its neck, the length of a yardstick. When the birds were brought in to local universities, the spears were identified as African in origin, helping ornithologists realize that the storks had been migrating to and from Africa, their wintering grounds.
We have an idea that progress in science requires rigorous, statistically significant data collection and analysis. But often, noticing the right detail can undermine a reigning paradigm, or suggest a new direction forward. This hunt for the right details, through stamp collecting and everyday noticing, is a core part of what I hope TIS might become.