Danny at the Grand Canyon
A few days ago, Collin wrote about ways in which experiences get generalized into categories, and mentioned Douglas Hofstadter’s example of Danny at the Grand Canyon. Collin notes that he’s never actaully seen the original example himself, so quotes a second hand account of it. According to that account, Hofstadter uses the exmaple of his one year old son “facing away from the Grand Canyon and starting at ants” as an example of how a very specific experience can be generalized into an abstract idea (in this case, ignoring what others consider special and concentrating on what you find interesting).
Although I couldn’t rememeber the details, I knew immediately that I had encountered this example in Hofstadter and Sander’s Surfaces and Essences. Above all, I remembered it as being one of many (many!) examples in the book, of short narratives that represent specific scenarios that can be grouped together as more or less homologous on a more abstract level. Hofstadter and Sander often present several of these together, with varying degrees of similarity, from only changing small details, to showing only a loose abstract resemblance.
Dusting off my copy, I found Danny at the Grand Canyon via the index. It’s worth quoting the passage in full:
“Doug and Carol arrive with their son Danny, fifteen months old, at the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. While his parents are captivated by the huge chasm, Danny is riveted by a few ants and a leaf on the sandy ground, fifty feet from the canyon’s edge. For a moment Doug is surprised, but then he realizes that such a young child is unable to appreciate entities of dimensions greater than ten or twenty feet, let alone miles (and the Grand Canyon is many miles wide). Although his infant son’s reaction now makes perfect sense, Doug cannot suppress a smile at the irony of the situation.
“Fast forward roughly fifteen years. Doug and his two children get off their cruise ship on the Nile in the city of Luxor. They are with their friends Kellie and Dick, and the whole group sets off on foot for the famed Temple of Karnak. While the other visitors are soon absorbed by the splendor of the great columns that surround them and by the erudition of their guide, Dick is irresistibly drawn to a few bottlecaps he spots lying in the dirt, and he leans down with joy to pick them up, thereby augmenting a modest collection that he’d started when they landed in Egypt just a few days earlier.
“This act, reflecting Dick’s fascination with rusty knickknacks on the ground as opposed to the splendor of the ancient ruins soaring above, reminds Doug of something far back in his past: the time when his tiny son was engrossed by a handful of insects scuttling about on the ground rather than by the awesome sights surrounding him.”
A few things about this are notable. First, we can see that the original text is not explicit who these characters are, though one would still presume it is likely autobiographical if one has read Hofstadter’s other books.1 (And in case there is any doubt, the index makes it explicit.2)
Second, it’s interesting what details get included in the notes, and what gets left out. The notes that Collin quotes only mention the ants, but not the leaf (which is also true of Doug’s own description of his later recollection), and seemingly introduces the detail about “facing away” from the Grand Canyon, which did not exist in the original.3
More importantly, however, we can see that Hofstadter is deploying this narrative in a slightly different way than it was interpreted by Collin, based on his distant encounter with it. Collin emphasises that “it wasn’t generalized by joining an appropriate category; it instantiated a new one”. And yet, in the original text, it seems like Hofstadter’s point is actually that it was only when he encountered a similar situation (but similar how?), fifteen years later, that the combination of the two events, and the resonance between them, became a kind of novel category.4
Even this isn’t quite right, however. Hofstadter notes later that there are many different ways we might generalize from these two situations. For example, both involve a famous tourist site, but is that a necessary part of the abstract concept?
At the most general level, Hofstadter notes a resemblence with the well known expression “casting pearls before swine”, suggesting that in some sense this was not the invention of a new category, but rather a resonance bewteen two experiences leading both to be grouped into a familiar one.
In the meantime, something similar has happened to me in reading and writing about this. As mentioned, there are numerous such stories in Surfaces and Essences (most much shorter than the one quoted above). I’d previously stuggled to find the right term to describe these. They are usually stories, but that doesn’t quite capture their essence. They are something like parables, but the point is typically not a moral lesson (but rather the way in which they exemplify a category).
In seeing Collin’s reference to one particular story, however, I realized that Danny at the Grand Canyon is perhaps now the canonical example of these stories, in part because it explicitly describes the meaning making from examples that is implied by all the others, and in part because of its growing familiarty through references to it.
For me, Danny at the Grand Canyon is now primarily an example of how a brief narrative can be used to illustrate an unusual or nuanced concept. I don’t know that we yet have a name for this phenomenon exactly, but having shared references is a useful starting point.
Perhaps this is to miss the point of the example. After all, for Hofstadter this example presumably has especially deep personal resonance. And yet, I wonder, even for him, to what extent Danny and the Grand Canyon is first and foremost and example of category formation, and only secondarily a sweetly tragic reminiscence.
In particular, Hofstadter writes with great vulnerbaility about his wife, Carol’s, death in I am a Strange Loop.↩︎
“Danny at the Grand Canyon” gets its own entry in the index, which includes “see also Hofstadter, Danny”. That, in turn, includes entires for “eating water”, and “playing with ants and leaves at the edge of Grand Canyon”.↩︎
As per their method, Hofstadter and Sanders include around a dozen such exmaples to illustrate the range of ways in which stories might be similar, such as “A young mother is more absorbed in the photos of her baby than in the baby itself”, “A graphic artist is reading a famous novel but is paying less attention to the plot than to tht typsetting and page layout”, and the possibly also autobiographical “Two intensely motivated scholars spend all their days and nights in a tiny cramped office working on a specialized treatise, when all of Paris, with its magnificent monuments, museums, cafés, and restaurants, is out there, just begging to be explored.”↩︎
Indeed, Hofstadter places greatest weight on the mystery of this a couple of pages later: “While they were on their Nile cruise, the furthest thing from Doug’s mind was this memory. How, then, could such a distant, shadowy memory have been so rapidly and easily brought back to life in Doug’s mind?”↩︎
Danny at the Grand Canyon Douglas Hofstadter Surfaces and Essences examples concepts recursion
Notes on Franke 2013: Game Theoretic Pragmatics
The general logic of a game theoretic explanation of a pragmatic phenomenon is this: (i) the conversational context is modelled as a game between speaker and hearer; (ii) an adequate solution concept then selects the to-be-explained behavior in the game model.
Franke thinks of game theory as the study of strategy games—games where player outcomes depend on the actions of other agents, and thus player decisions hinge on predictions about these future actions. (“Mutual futures modeling.”) He gives a simple example of a coordination game using rubber boots and blue suede shoes, then writes:
Telling stories, giving commands and asking questions, also listening and figuring out what Joe meant when he said ‘‘kind of’’ — all of these linguistic activities have something essential in common with the rubber-or-suede game. Here and there, several agents have to make a decision how best to act given their preferences and their expectations about the others’ behavior. As speakers we usually have a preference for getting our point across, or for persuading our hearers of our point of view. A speaker’s action choices are naturally constituted by the set of possible utterances given by our grammatical competence, or some relevant subset thereof that interlocutors commonly attend to. Hearers may seek entertainment or information.
Grice’s maxim of concision (or “quantity”) falls naturally out of the pragmatic frame—it is less an imperative or norm, and more an expectation that emerges naturally from a desire for efficient, efficacious communication. Given this efficiency, we as listeners can assume that unnecessary information provided is “doing something”—is there for a reason—an idea that sometimes gets called Horn’s division of pragmatic labor:
When a marked (relatively complex or prolix) expression is used, when an alternative (simpler) expression is available, this is typically interpreted as conveying a marked message which the unmarked, simpler alternative would or could not have conveyed.
Franke argues that Schelling was critical in inspiring early game-theoretic linguistics:
David Lewis was the first who applied game theoretic ideas to philosophical questions about language in his seminal work on convention (Lewis 1969). Inspired by the work of Schelling (1960) [Strategy of Conflict], Lewis tried to give a non-circular naturalistic grounding of the notion of conventional meaning in terms of repeated plays of signaling games, thus answering challenges to conventionalism put forward by, among others, Russell (1921) and Quine (1936).
Franke distinguishes between an evolutionary model of game-theoretic pragmatics, and a more rationalistic model. He then further distinguishes between evolutionary microdynamics and macrodynamics. Microdynamics are learned or trained, a “dynamic change in terms of how each agent adapts her behavior over time.” We might alternatively call this training process “cybernetic.” Macrodynamics, meanwhile, involves preferential replication of successful strategies over successive generations—standard natural selection stuff.
Rational pragmatic language theory was pioneered by Prashant Parkih in the 1990s and 2000s. Parkih advances, among other arguments, that (1) for a view of communication in which an “equilibrium between the speaker’s intended meaning and the hearer’s interpretation” is critical; (2) the central task of the listener, in interpreting speech, is disambiguation; (3) the speaker and hearer together construct a “game of partial information.” In the rationalistic frame, behavioral predictions follow from an understanding of speaker beliefs, dispositions, rationality, etc.
game-theoretic pragmatics pragmatism Horn's division of pragmatic labor game theory games communication ACiM mutual futures modeling Prashant Parkih Paul Grice Thomas Schelling
On formless empiricism
The work of the philosopher consists in marshaling recollections for a particular purpose.
-Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, proposition 127
Wittgenstein was hostile to modern philosophy as he found it. He thought it the product of a culture that had come to model everything that matters about our lives on scientific explanation. In its ever-extending observance of the idea that knowledge, not wisdom, is our goal, that what matters is information rather than insight, and that we best address the problems that beset us, not with changes in our heart and spirit but with more data and better theories, our culture is pretty much exactly as Wittgenstein feared it would become.
-Ian Ground, The Relentless Honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein had a particular idea of what the work of philosophers ought to be; our modern culture has become something else. Since we still call the thing we have now “philosophy”, it stands to reason there is some other thing, resembling philosophy but not quite, where the marshaling of recollections is being done to Wittgenstein’s satisfaction. What might that thing be?
Like Ian Ground, I have a general skepticism of modern philosophy, which meant that it’s only been recently that I’ve discovered Wittgenstein. It was hard to get excited about studying philosophy seeing sterile nothing-problems like the Ship of Theseus and the Sorites Paradox (faux-deep questions that are quickly and correctly answered by “who’s asking?” and “who’s asking?”, respectively). But I was also never that interested in placing myself on the attack against philosophy, because I inherently distrusted the company it’d put me in: technically-minded people who go after philosophy for lacking “empiricism”, as though being numerically encoded is the end-all way to imbue something with truth. Since you clearly need something outside of the system to decide what to systemize, I was content to assume that there was some good in philosophy somewhere, that it didn’t feel personally worthwhile to hunt for it, and that I’d just leave it alone.
But now I find that Wittgenstein’s “marshaling of recollections” is an excellent way to parcel out exactly the distinction I’m looking for. He’s asking us to ground out in memories - recollections, not ships that never were or metaphysical piles. But we don’t need to measure the recollections, or create some over-arching theory or ranking system. All he asks is that we recall the right thing at the right time. The demand for rigor is relaxed, and anecdotes are permissible - but we still have to touch the real world. In essence, while measurable rigor and empirical validity are so often assumed to be synonymous, and that a phenomena is supposed to be “real” exactly when it can be “objectively” measured, I’d like to split apart these two concepts and speak of having the latter without the former. We’ll use the phrase “formless empiricism” for this.
In Representation and Uncertainty, I talked about the idea of “loans of meaning”:
Non-indexicality lets us take a sort of loan of meaning, playing with tools that aren’t available in the here and now to broaden the ways we can think about things. But that loan has to be paid off eventually through correspondence work showing that the abstract objects you were acting on are similar enough to what actually exists in a particular situation for the finding to be valid. Otherwise, you’ve just been playing a meaningless game that has no bearing on actual reality.
Think of rigor as a tool to avoid going in to debt. If you’ve done a lot of work making a thermometer and then read the temperature off that thermometer, you don’t have to fear that “it is 70 degrees F outside according to this particular thermometer” will fall in to meaninglessness. That particular example will be embedded in a framework that guarantees it’ll be meaningful, because even if that thermometer isn’t perfectly “accurate”, it’s doing a repeatable and systemic thing that can be understood in a repeatable and systemic way.
By contrast, formlessness entails taking on meaning-debt by removing the requirement that the phenomenon we’re studying coheres to some existing systemization. As mentioned in “Examples of themselves”, some examples are powerful precisely because of their uniqueness, and to prematurely categorize them is to rob them of their power. This lets you pay off your meaning-debt and then some, turning a profit because you reached a more meaningful place (”Danny at the Grand Canyon”) than your previous categorizations allowed (”children being distracted”). Paying off this debt wasn’t trivial, though. It happened to be that the concept ended up being a useful one with general explanatory power. But it really did matter whether it was something that mapped to general lived experience - it could have been the case that “Danny at the Grand Canyon” was a phenomenon no one found familiar, and it would have failed to pay off it’s meaning-debt.
If it so happened that children stopped acting like Danny at the Grand Canyon - that is, if almost no one could remember a case of a child tuning out the supposed-wonder to look at something child-sized - then the idiom of “Danny at the Grand Canyon” would thereby lose its point.
That’s the “empiricism” of “formless empiricism” - make sure that whatever you’re doing has a point. But while all forms (ideally!) have a point to them, not all points have a form to them. So you must reject the rigorous, naively quantitative idea of what a “point” looks like - that’s what philosophy gets right. On the other hand, freed of the burden of form, many philosophers do not spend their meaning-debt wisely but instead go in precisely the other direction, inventing new forms that don’t ground out in anything at all. (Is the ship “really” Theseus’s? Well, where did “really” come from, anyway? Did you find it out in the world somewhere? Can you point at it? If we had some “really” and then lost it, how would we know?)
My hope is that this distinction will let us criticize dead-end speculation without making it sound like formlessness is the problem. Kurt Gödel taught us that we’ll never have enough money on hand to buy every meaningful statement, so meaning-debt is necessary to examine the world and all its detail, and we shouldn’t treat formlessness as a lack of seriousness. But it’s important that we pay out debts somehow, even if that payment is just a metaphor that uncommonly resonates or a way of thinking that makes a group of formerly contentious people come to a consensus. Formless - you need not pay in a way we previously understood as paying - empiricism - but please do pay, all the same. Or, as Crispy Chicken put it when I first floated the phrase to him:
They’re called thought experiments for a reason, assholes.
examples Ludwig Wittgenstein philosophy formless empiricism Danny at the Grand Canyon frames paradox
Near & far view in the inexact sciences
J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Prospects In the Arts & Sciences” 1955:
There are two ways of looking at [the world of the arts and sciences]: One is the view of the traveler, going by horse or foot, from village to village to town, staying in each to talk with those who live there and to gather something of the quality of its life. This is the intimate view, partial, somewhat accidental, limited by the limited life and strength and curiosity of the traveler, but intimate and human, in a human compass. The other is the vast view, showing the earth with its fields and towns and valleys as they appear to a camera carried in a high altitude rocket. In one sense this prospect will be more complete; one will see all branches of knowledge, on will see all the arts, one will see them as part of the vastness and complication of the whole of human life on earth. But one will miss a great deal; the beauty and warmth of human life will largely be gone from that prospect.
Getting real
by Neil
The Age of Innocence is a classic love triangle story. A young man is engaged to a respectable young woman. But then he realizes his true love is with another woman — one whose mystery and independence break him out of his unreal upper-class life, and irresistibly attract him. Alas, they are not fated to be together.
Maybe these problems sound familiar to you. Feeling stuck in a relationship out of obligation; feeling like your life isn’t really real life.
One more thing: the young man is a moron.
I.
Our protagonist is Newland Archer, a young(ish) man in high-society 1870s New York, a society rigidly ruled by symbols:
There was no reason why the young man should not have come earlier [to the opera…] But, in the first place, New York was a metropolis, and perfectly aware that in metropolises it was “not the thing” to arrive early at the opera; and what was or was not “the thing” played a part as important in Newland Archer’s New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago.
At the beginning of the book, Newland is newly engaged to May Welland, an accomplished young woman from another prominent family. She has a, hmm, athletic, robust build. Regardless, she has been raised the right way, and will serve him well in high society. This is the girl he’s “supposed” to marry.
Then there’s Ellen Olenska, May’s cousin. Ellen is a controversial figure in Newland’s circles: she has abandoned (although not divorced) her husband Olenski, a Russian count. She fled with the count’s secretary and took him as a lover, but arrives in New York a year later, alone. Worse, once she arrives, she takes up residence in a lower-class neighborhood with artists and writers, and associates with whomever she pleases.
Newland finds himself increasingly drawn to Ellen, who represents a more “real” life than the one that he would have with May. But by the time he understands his own feelings, it is too late to break his engagement with May. He considers fleeing to Europe with Ellen, but when May becomes pregnant, he decides to give up.
This could be just a tragic twist of fate, things happening at the wrong time, but let’s consider a more interesting possibility: that it’s inevitable, indeed, that it’s what he really wanted all along.
II.
What does it mean for something to be “real”? Just like “free,” it’s a word that implies some other, opposite state. If we’re free, we’re free from some kind of bondage; and if something is real, it’s in contrast to something unreal or fake.
So what does Newland think is unreal or fake? The world of symbols that dominates his society.
In what sense is Ellen “real,” then? Newland often observes that Ellen is surprising. “Each time you happen to me all over again,” he says to her. She does and says things that aren’t “the thing,” and she acts in ways that that don’t fit neatly into Newland’s world of symbols.
But if realness is something that surprises us, then what would it mean for a life, or a love, to be real? As we’ve described it, reality isn’t a property of a person or object, it’s something that happens in a moment. We say that something “gets real” when it intrudes on our orderly conception of the world, but then we tumble to a new conception, and we are no longer surprised.
So when Newland becomes increasingly occupied by the “reality” that Ellen represents, something perverse happens. “Reality” itself becomes a symbol to him. We see Newland fantasizing about the concept of reality, as a special, private space he is uniquely sensitive to:
Yet there was a time when Archer had had definite and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems, and when everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance. “And all the while, I suppose,” he thought, “real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them …”
At the very end of the book, thirty years have passed; he has lived a full life with May, and after she passes away, he finds himself standing outside Ellen’s apartment in Paris. She still lives alone. They could finally be together. But:
“It’s more real to me here than if I went up,” he suddenly heard himself say
Strange to say, he’s 100% correct. Newland’s “reality” is a calcified symbol that might not survive an encounter with flesh-and-blood Ellen. His “reality” is the exact opposite of real.
III.
Equally important to understanding Newland is his relationship with May. He thinks of her as hopelessly conservative and stuck in traditional New York ways, but is this really how she is? Or is it just what he wants to believe?
He demonstrates this a few times, subtly — for instance, he shows more interest in indoctrinating May into his beliefs about poetry, rather than cultivating whatever instincts she has. But this happens most pivotally in the book’s central scene.
Newland goes to May to ask her to move forward the date of their wedding. And she says:
“I’ve wanted to tell you that, when two people really love each other, I understand that there may be situations which make it right that they should—should go against public opinion. And if you feel yourself in any way pledged … pledged to the person we’ve spoken of … and if there is any way … any way in which you can fulfill your pledge … even by her getting a divorce … Newland, don’t give her up because of me!”
They are nominally talking about Mrs. Thorley Rushworth, a character so minor I won’t bother describing her further. But the reader might very reasonably suspect that she is, consciously or unconsciously, alluding to Newland’s relationship with Ellen.
The text of the book, which follows Newland, never considers this possibility — because for Newland, this is actually unthinkable. If May can comprehend his love for Ellen, then what would set it apart, make it more “real” than his interactions with May and the rest of New York society? He needs May to be ignorant, so that he can set his enclave of “reality” against her.
IV.
If we recognize something of ourselves in this, what should we do?
One solution is: nothing. Although there is something sad about Newland’s life, once Ellen leaves New York and drifts into a corner of his thoughts, his thirty years with May have many very real joys. He raises three children who all seem charming and independent. He has many of the petty successes in business and public life that we enjoy in our daily lives. He feels that the world has become better than when he entered it.
But suppose it is unacceptable to us that his “real” love is never consummated, and that he never comes to love the reality in his relationship with his wife. Then what else is there?
The only other idea I have is to cultivate that mysterious quality X —- which has elements of sensitivity, good taste, awareness, and courage, but is not just any of those —- which lets us go out there every day and faceplant into reality. Repeatedly.
Examples of themselves
Suspended Reason and I were chatting recently about knowledge logistics when he was asking me to pitch in to a shared notes document. I’m not generally a big fan of classification systems. Sasha Chapin’s “Notes Against Note-Taking Systems” is a pretty good distillation of my views:
Our natural salience filter is a great determinant of what’s most alive to you. If you begin to rely on any other filter, you will increasingly record what seems like it should be interesting according to some preexisting criteria rather than what organically sticks to your mind. This is a tradeoff. It is often not a worthy tradeoff.
In our conversation, I made the point that I deliberately try to think form-light. To which Suspended responded: but you use words! You can’t escape classification systems, so don’t pretend that you’re above them! And yes, of course I can’t think without classification - but I do think it’s worth going in to detail about what’s going on in my brain when I think of choosing between heavily classified thinking against “form-light” thinking. For context, you’ll need this 2005 Achewood comic:
Yes, my brain is a classification system, and it’s stored <thoughtfully fingers second Onion Offense card> to be deployed when relevant. But when is it relevant? What is it classified as? “Achewood reference”? I’m not going to quote this particular strip every time someone brings up Achewood in general.1 Is it filed under “trolling”, or “moderators”, or “censorship”? None of those really paint a good picture of what this is. As an instance of trolling it’s pretty unremarkable either way, not especially funny or odious. Moderator overreach? I mean, technically speaking, the Onion Offenses are fair warning. Censorship? Pretty obviously tha_snazzle was just there to start shit, and it’s not a moral crime against the whole of free speech to boot him.
So this isn’t a prototypical case of any of those higher level concepts. No, this is sitting in my head as an example of people acting like this specific moderator. The specifying of “volunteer moderator”, preening about about their civic engagement in this minuscule nothing-sphere. Saying they’re “not one to judge” when they’re explicitly spending their time on a Burger King chat zone. The small gasp of vanity breaking through the customer-service affect by adding Æ as an example special character in the FAQ, which you just know they link every single time someone types “AE”. It’s funny to me because I’ve met exactly this sort of person many times in many tiny internet communities, and seeing the pitch-perfect parody from someone else validates that it’s not just me who’s noticing all of these things. It’s an example of itself.
Douglas Hofstadter has this idea of “Danny at the Grand Canyon”, that (perhaps fittingly) I’ve only heard passed orally based on lectures I’ve never personally seen. We’ll use Catherine Ray’s notes to give us something firm to stand on:
Hofstadter’s family traveled to see the Grand Canyon. As Hofstadter turned his entranced gaze away from the great abyss, he rested his eyes on his son. His 1 year old son, Danny, sat facing away from the Grand Canyon and staring at ants. He was a child so young that he had no idea of distance. This situation can be generalized to the idea of focusing on what you’re interested in (and are capable of focusing on), harboring little interest in what others consider as gems.
So, Hofstadter would say that someone tuning out the big picture to obsess on a local detail is “like Danny at the Grand Canyon”. It became a sort of local idiom. But it wasn’t generalized by joining an appropriate category; it instantiated a new one. It was a powerful example precisely because of it’s specificity. If mentally recording it required it to go in a folder that we already conceptually “had around”, it would have to be a more general folder (maybe “examples of people not paying attention”), and it would lose it’s pin-point descriptive power.
But what do we mean by power? Everything is an example of itself, but it’s clearly not correct to say that any event that ever happens is doing the same kind of thing “Danny at the Grand Canyon” is. “Collin eating a cheese sandwich” also specifically happened, but it doesn’t have this same resonance to other specific experiences. So we’re looking for things that have this strong similarity to other lived experiences, but crucially have not yet been generalized. For more clarity on which examples have this property, we’ll turn to Wittgenstein:
And if things were quite different from what they actually are - if there were, for instance, no characteristic expression of pain, of fear, of joy; if rule became exception, and exception rule, or if both became phenomena of roughly equal frequency - our normal language-games would thereby lose their point. - The procedure of putting a lump of cheese on a balance and fixing the price by the turn of the scale would lose its point if it frequently happened that such lumps suddenly grew or shrank with no obvious cause. This remark will become clearer when we discuss such things as the relation of expression of feeling, and similar topics.
If it so happened that children stopped acting like Danny at the Grand Canyon - that is, if almost no one could remember a case of a child tuning out the supposed-wonder to look at something child-sized - then the idiom of “Danny at the Grand Canyon” would thereby lose it’s point. And regardless of the future of trolling, internet moderators, or censorship, if it so happens that we stop seeing people with some volunteer authority on the internet respond to light irreverence by stilted appeals to a supposed authority that’s actually nothing more than a basic rule set posing as a deep civic tradition, then quote-tweeting them with <thoughtfully fingers second Onion Offense card> will also cease to have a point. The humor is derived from seeing an individual behavior in my life repeated by an outsider, making it common knowledge that many of us have noticed this specific kind of guy exists; the effort spent in remembering is a bet that this sort of guy will come up again, and that I should have this example primed.
Of course, it’s not the case that this must always remain a self-titled, ungeneralized concept. Maybe someone will make an “overbearing volunteer moderator” starter pack that includes <thoughtfully fingers second Onion Offense card> as one of it’s examples, and that starter pack catches on and forces “overbearing volunteer moderators” into common usage. Maybe that gets abbreviated to OVM and then “ovum” because damn, they must have come out of their eggs just yesterday. My point is that the categorized example-collecting to make a starter pack is a different thing than the example-collecting without categorization where you notice the generality of ideas like “Danny at the Grand Canyon” and <thoughtfully fingers second Onion Offense card>. It’s not impossible to prioritize which “mode” you’re trying to be in when you look at the world. And while you obviously need thinkers all along the conceptualization pipeline to turn pattern into something socially usable, I’m personally happiest here on the starting end of it, collecting examples without bothering myself overmuch about what they’re examples of.
If you have a “general reference” you bring up every time someone mentions a piece of media, you are a tiresome person. I’m sorry you had to learn in this footnote.↩︎
examples Ludwig Wittgenstein knowledge logistics context communication Danny at the Grand Canyon Douglas Hofstadter concepts frequency dependency
Tana French on the selection games of detective work
One of the insights of the selection game is that evaluation is partially adversarial1: candidate and evaluator are not goal-aligned; the candidate’s interest lies in selection (passing the test) and the evaluator’s in selecting the most capable candidate (successfully administering the test, and effectively screening candidates). Thus the evaluator must often be deceptive, must stay illegible. The nature of their tests must stay mysterious, to protect against cheap and degenerate play. They must often hide the very fact that a test is occurring, or mislead candidates as to their epistemic state, or the kind of responses which would constitute passing.2 Thus French’s protagonist, Detective Ryan, writes of the job:
[Truth] is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception. The truth is the most desirable woman in the world and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her… What we do is crude, crass and nasty. A girl gives her boyfriend an alibi for the evening when we suspect him of robbing a north-side Centra and stabbing the clerk. I flirt with her at first, telling her I can see why he would want to stay home when he’s got her… Then I tell her we’ve found marked bills from the till in his classy white tracksuit bottoms, and he’s claiming that she went out that evening and gave them to him when she got back. I do it so convincingly, with such delicate crosshatching of discomfort and compassion at her man’s betrayal, that finally her faith in four shared years disintegrates like a sand castle and through tears and snot, while her man sits with my partner in the next interview room saying nothing except “Fuck off, I was home with Jackie,” she tells me everything from the time he left the house to the details of his sexual shortcomings.
Of course, calling this a pursuit of truth is romanticizing what’s actually be optimized for, which is a confession, a closed case. Because the detective is in a selection game—to keep his job, be promoted up, get better caseloads, better shifts, less gruntwork. He wants respect from his colleagues, his sergeant. Thus the institution forms a nested or hierarchical structure of partially adversarial selection games, each level performing for the level above it.
Tana French selection games legibility degenerate play strategic interaction alignment institutional theory detection
A vocabulary primer to strategic interaction, pt 1
These definitions are in-progress and always evolving, but by laying them out, some clarity will be shed on conversations around here.
superorganism: Any coordinating body of agents or sub-organisms, united by a shared goal, and sequestered by a boundary to keep goal-advancing resources/agents in and goal-stymying resources/agents out. These superorganisms are often hierarchically nested, with a series of boundaries leading to an inner sanctum or top-brass. Nations, companies, clubs, sports teams, etc all fit this pattern.
game: Any interaction between an agent and environment. Agents, by definition, have agendas or goals (preferred states of being, e.g. maintaining homeostasis). These goals instrumentalize the environment into a set of obstacles and affordances. (This environment often consists, at least in part, of other agents.)
strategy game: A game between 2+ agents, which is marked by mixed interests (the agents are neither purely aligned nor misaligned, adversarial nor cooperative). In contrast to games of skill and games of chance, in games of strategy, each player’s best choice of action depends on the actions the other player takes. This leads to mutual modeling of futures (theory of mind), Sicilian reasoning, and anti-inductive dynamics.
selection game: A strategy game in which an evaluator selects candidates from an applicant pool, typically for inclusion in a superorganism, or for advancement up the power hierarchy of a superorganism. Sports teams host try-outs, companies job interviews, a country may only allowed skilled immigrants, etc.
extrinsic v. intrinsic: The outcome of a game is intrinsic insofar as it would have occurred identically sans spectator, and extrinsic insofar as the outcome relies on a spectator. An actual swordfight is extrinsic, in its outcome, insofar as—even if it occurs in a dense patch of fog, or in the dark, or on a desert island, a mortal wound is a mortal wound. Fencing is intrinsic insofar as a judge who fails to witness a blow will fail to score the blow. Extrinsic games are ~opticratic.
opticratic/optikratic: Usually we have an idea that markets, democracies, and Western institutions are “meritocratic,” such that appropriately skilled individuals rise through the ranks. The selection games that gate entry to institutions, or alter stock prices, are not, however, tested against reality at any point, rather, they are tested against appearances. Individuals who appear smart, competent, and hard-working are hired, or rise through the ranks, or elected to office. And the more distance there is between evaluators and candidates, in these selection games, the more opticratic the game becomes—the less tethered appearances are to reality—as it is only through prolonged proximity, and close monitoring, that appearances are kept honest and accountable.
surrogates: In evaluating a candidate (e.g. if we are an evaluator in a selection game), or evaluating the outcome of a game (e.g. if we are its judge), we do not have access to the “truth” or “reality” of the situation—only its appearances. We cannot know, with certainty, whether a date is kind and honest, or a job applicant hard-working and loyal, or a stock a sound investment. We must look instead for signs or cues—surrogates—which we know to correlate with these underlying, hidden, or future-projected qualities. As a result, strategy and selection games often bottleneck around these surrogates, with intense pressure put on players to perform certain token markers of identity.
strategic interaction superorganisms selection games extrinsic-intrinsic opticracy surrogation vocab
Non-literal communication
The strawman background theory of communication is that it’s used to convey information like a pipe is used to convey water. But if it’s not used that way, how is it used?
It’s used like a mat you put out for your dog. At first she doesn’t like it, but you put the mat in a spot she used to sit anyway and she develops an affection for it. It smells like her. It reminds her of what home is. Now, when you need her to be sitting somewhere else because there are guests over and she likes to sit awkwardly close to the table, you can simply move the mat and she’ll end-up sitting there.
That’s what a compliment is.
It’s used like the different nicknames lovers give each other. Some of them are sweet and some are angry and some evoke felt senses for which legibilized descriptions are unavailable. Much of the time when lovers use a name they aren’t aware of the what they’re evoking until it hangs in the air between them—and whether it falls flat, because communication and response is used as a tool of perception.
That’s what sending a friend a picture of you in a “ridiculous” outfit is.
It’s used like a supervisor asking “Do we need to talk about that?” to a subordinate he knows will never say yes for fear of imposing—creating the legibly plausible deniability to the world while communicating unwillingness to the subordinate.
That’s what clicking the checkbox that says: “I have read and agree to the license” on a new service is.
literalism examples pragmatics communication generalized reading information theory
Aligned incentive structures of potlucks
I wrote recently about potlucks, and the more attention I paid them, the more impressed I found myself becoming at such a tight and tidy social technology. Their direct benefits are plenty and obvious, but their role in the social framework of a geographic community or a community of like minds takes advantage of aligned incentives to produce both good potlucks and more tightly bonded communities.
A potluck is any social event where attendees bring food for themselves and each other. The potluck can be the main event, or play a supporting role. Attendees can be tightly bonded (a parish or a family), loosely bonded (a book club or dance group), or variably bonded (coworkers). After each potluck, I assert that these bonds are incrementally ratcheted closer, in ways distinct from and better than gatherings with no food or with catered food.
What it says on the tin
The obvious improvements potlucks bring:
- increased event attendance vs an event with no food
- reduced cost to host or reduced admission cost vs an event with catered food
- attendees can experience variety with low time & travel burden vs catering
- a food table at a social event increases serendipitous mixing opportunities, and offers a shared experience for idle conversation vs no food
Why it’s better than that
- people who are motivated by excellence have an opportunity to serve a delicious dish, and so bring their best
- people who are motivated by social status have an opportunity to be recognized at this event and invited to future events based on the quality of their dish, and so bring their best
- people who are motivated by kindness have an opportunity to make people happy, and so bring their best
- people who are on a tight budget can bring bread or pilaf, and so are not excluded
- people who are meek about their cooking skills or short on time can bring chips and salsa, or grocery store veggie trays, and so are not excluded
- people who are motivated by organizing events and not by cooking can outsource thinking about food
- people who are motivated by tasty food have an opportunity to eat tasty food, and won’t miss the event
Synergistic mini-games
- The excellence-motivated enjoy innovating, honing their skills, and being inspired by their peers. The potluck is at the same time a sandbox and a showcase for them—they can debut a dish they’ve been perfecting while observing new ideas and techniques.
- The social status-motivated enjoy competition and recognition. In the context of the larger potluck, these players recognize each other, and are able to vie for signaled accolades. (“Her dish was the first one killed.” “The picky guy took seconds of mine.” “The host asked him to bring that dish again next month.” “I need to get some of that before it runs out!”)
- The affable might unwittingly serve as materiel in the status games above, but they don’t need to know those are going on. Congenial guests are free to compliment and encourage their peers without becoming mired in competition.
- As long as a “bringing chips & salsa is a valued contribution” attitude prevails, people who are short on cash, time, or skills still feel welcome to the event. They miss out on intrinsically motivating mini-games, but they still show up.
- Event organizers who are able to outsource food face lower activation energy for starting new events, and reduced burnout for ongoing events.
- Foodies (and aren’t we all food-motivated, in addition to whatever else drives us?) all get to reap the rewards of the mini-games above.
The last bite
Potlucks propagate both potlucks and the communities that wield them—they are elegant tech.
Cargocult to William James
Cargoculting is a kind of superficial mimicry whereby the “skin” or most sensorily salient features of a system are taken as load-bearing. Cargocults produce ineffectual replicas of their originals, which might look convincing to onlookers, but lack the functionality of the originals because their construction neglected all mechanical consideration.
One way to understand cargoculting is through William James’s conceptual distinction of brute association from mechanistic reasoning. Brute association lacks the real understanding of mechanism present in its counterpart:
Suppose I say, when offered a piece of cloth, “I won’t buy that; it looks as if it would fade,” meaning merely that something about it suggests the idea of fading to my mind—my judgment, though possibly correct, is not reasoned, but purely empirical; but, if I can say that into the color there enters a certain dye which I know to be chemically unstable, and that therefore the color will fade, my judgment is reasoned. The notion of the dye which is one of the parts of the cloth, is the connecting link between the latter and the notion of fading.
Where one mode “simply associates phenomena in their entirety,” reasoning understands causality. The original cargocults, in believing that an emulation of the rituals or garb of American servicemen would bring cargodrops, made the same mistake as the skeptical cloth purchaser above: an association (cloth and fading, servicemen and airdrops) is treated without consideration of its many parts, its complex behavioral emergences, or its causal direction. Rather, the phenomena are treated as if any one might beget the other, as if the appearance of one regular co-occurrence inevitably brings out its colleague. It is to believe that, by making the sound of thunder, lightning will surely result, since the two are so frequently contiguous or proximate.
cargocult William James brute association association mechanistic reasoning
Wireheading is a teleological misnomer
A light rewrite of this post.
As the mistaken belief that AGI is just around the corner gains traction, the discussion around “wireheading” has increased in fervor. The idea is very simple:
What if you designed a robot to mow your lawn, by making sure it gets orgasms from well-cleaned lawns? Except you botch up the entire thing by making the robot so smart it just rewires its own programming to get 10,000 orgasms a second.
Surely this can happen—I don’t mean to deny that this sequence of events can occur. Instead, I would like to say that the view of the robot as “cheating” is a mistake, the same kind of mistake that people make when they think that evolution has “designed” the spleen. Evolution has cutaway and added to what was once not a spleen, till our left abdomens look as they do today; we have named the spleen. In this same sense, the above is not the robot “cheating” but rather the designer not being able to specify the reward structure that gets what they want done.
And when we start looking at it that way, we see that this has been happening non-stop for all of recorded history.
Consider the College Board, which creates and administers standardized tests. Pop Quiz! Is it College Board’s job to make sure high test scores correlate with:
intelligence
competency at school work
good financial outcomes
Astute readers will realize it’s d) none of the above. College Board’s job is to get students to buy tests. They might even have secondary customers, e.g. book deals, tutoring deals, agreements with colleges. I have no idea and frankly I don’t care, the point is that however teleologically you want to view its organizational structure, College Board does not “see” your viewpoint, even though it’s well aware of the general feelings people impose on it. College Board’s instrumental narrative is that more students should be taking more tests, because it is the fattening of the middle class educational apparatus that has allowed it to prosper.
I am not against this, and I think anyone who is morally against it is misguided. A moral attempt at creating standardized tests would be a disaster, and you don’t have to take my word for it: you will see exactly this attempt to happen in the next five years. It will be much like a professor: extremely intellectually lopsided and with a tenuous connection to evidence due to and addiction to leading questions.
The problem is that names are generally teleogical: a “can opener” is meant to open cans. For entities that don’t do much when you’re not using them, this is perfectly fine. For entities with their own thing going on, this is not. Anteaters do not just eat ants.
This problem is in some sense the opposite of the concept Suspended Reason has been developing an extended theory of: surrogation, wherein a metric or indirect percept of a phenomenon comes to stand-in for the “real thing”. Think IQ vs. situated problem-solving ability: there’s no Mensa club for situated problem-solving ability, how would you decide who gets in? If you just thought “What about the Nobel prize?” please close this window.
I struggle with surrogation, because I think in reality most of the time there is no “real thing” from the get go. We were never acquainted and coordinated enough around intersubjective consistency to claim that the deviation is the fault of measurement, so much as our inability to have any idea of what we’re talking about.
Consider the tired argument around which entities are “alive”. I can hardly disagree that what counts as alive will have big implications, but I’m unconvinced that there was ever enough agreement at the edges over what is “really” alive that we have any right to worry that such definitions have betrayed our intuitions. Rather, our use of “that pig is still alive” didn’t shove these edges in our face.
Our lack of respect for the limitations of our definitions has betrayed us. There are many reasons why definitions are slippery, but wireheading reveals the most important one: teleology. We generally use names for a purpose and these names change very easily if they are untethered from that purpose. But we never really had a good understanding of the purpose, that was purpose of the name. Names trick you into “bottoming out” your level of inquiry. They give grounding out of the assumption that the other people you share the name with find the same things salient. When this shared attention vanishes, so does the ground beneath us.