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I am troubled by the vehemence by which people seem to reject the notion of using the language of the second-order simulacrum -- especially in communities that should be intimately aware of the concept that the map is not the territory.
Some forms of accuracy are simply wastes of space; how many digits of Pi does rational!Harry know, as compared to rational!Hermione?
That depends: does it "really" count as "knowing" if they have to consciously divide tau by two first?
ETA: actually, the opposite would make more sense to me, with Harry memorizing fewer digits of tau than Hermione memorized of pi.
I hope so. Because if memorizing a big number that can be combined with a simple algorithm in order to calculate digits of Pi counts as memorizing Pi then I'm claiming I know 'infinity' digits.
No, actually there is a single answer to this. This is a reference to a fanfic/rationality text Yudkowsky wrote - which is excellent by the way.
In his universe Harry has memorized around 6 digits of Pi and Hermione has memorized 100, because that is how many were in the back of her book.
Ah OK, I only read it once and it's been a while. It's never too late to retcon!
The fact is that there are a lot people who do think "women/men want" when they hear someone saying "women/men want", and don't understand that these aren't just statistical trends. And I'm pretty sure that this ends up causing considerable damage. We should whatever we can to avoid strenghtening such views.
And while you may be right that the average commenter will recognize the difference even without it being explicitly stated, I wouldn't be so sure about the average reader. Note that lukeprog has stated that the article is also aimed towards people who don't usually read LW. A random person who gets the link to this article from his Facebook feed is a lot more likely to take such claims literally than someone who has read through every post on LW.
Also, I do feel like there are tendencies towards such over-generalization even among active LW commenters. For instance, there was one case of a commenter acting condescendingly towards people he thought were carrying out preferences that were suboptimal for their sex. (Or so my memory claims: when I went to look up the details, I noticed that the relevant comments had been deleted, so I can only link to my rebuttal.)
Do you mean "The fact is that there are a lot people who do think "women/men all want" when they hear someone saying "women/men want"? Because people who interpret the author as saying something stupid are interpolating in an unwritten determiner to do that just as much as those interpolate "generally" by reading him charitably and correctly figuring out what is meant from context.
Yes.
I'm having difficulty parsing this sentence.
The conscious or subconscious decision to read "women/men want" as "women/men all want" rather than "women/men generally want" is a mental step, just as the conscious or subconscious decision to read "women/men want" as "women/men generally want" rather than "women/men all want" is a step.
It's not obviously the default to read "women/men want" as "women/men all want".
In this context, to do so is a) obviously wrong to me, b) actually wrong according to the intent of the author and c) would result in the author saying something stupid rather than arguably true.
A critical reading skill is to read charitably such that the author is not saying something stupid, and I have trouble sympathizing with what I see as an abandonment of that duty by readers or commenters excusing and/or justifying that.
If I say in passing "men are taller than women", I hope I don't get assailed by people pointing out that at maturity, many women are taller than many men, or that men start as babies less than a foot or so tall, at which point almost every female is taller than they are*.
*And when I say "almost every female is taller than they are," I mean female human, as most females are of smaller species and our babies are taller than they are**.
**And when I say "most females are of smaller species and are babies are taller than they are" I mean of species so far discovered***.
***And when I say "of species so far discovered" I mean "discovered by humans," for other species may have discovered many more large species than we have discovered small species.****
****And when I say "discovered by humans," I mean as far as I know.*****
*****And when I say "as far as I know," I mean as far as I knew when typing this.
I hope that's enough disclaimers to protect from those determined to misread my words.
But this presumes that the reader does already realize that a claim of the type "all men want x" (or even "the overwhelming majority of men want x") is stupid, while my point was that for many people, "all men want x" is a perfectly reasonable claim.
Do you have examples of people agreeing with what they believe to be a claim of the type "all men want x"?
So far I've only seen people a) disagreeing with what they interpret as such claims on the grounds they are unreasonable and b) saying that others will mistakenly agree with the unreasonable interpretation and find it reasonable.
I seem to remember running into such people, but don't remember any particular occasion well enough to give a cite.
You can demonstrate an absurd case, but check this out:
"On average, men are taller than women."
Note the utter dearth of twisted, tortured forced phrasing and the way it totally requires no linguistic effort to generate that context if you just stop to think before you speak. If someone disputes that, they're either clearly wrong or have an interesting study to look at (and probably debunk).
I'm a woman and I'm 6'5'' (taller than 99.9999% of women last time I checked), but I can't see what's wrong with stating it that way. Your reply is kind of a straw example of what's being asked.
This was a good example, but I think you probably missed a part of the message. Or maybe I am imagining a part that did not exist.
Generally, people are speaking imprecisely. To state one's opinion with a mathematical precision as you did, is rare. (For example, writing this paragraph I would have a problem to precisely define what "generally" and "rare" mean in this context.) And when normally speaking, people tolerate this. ...uhm, usually.
Asking people to be precise is also a signal of something. We usually don't demand perfect clarity for every sentence we ever read or hear, even on LW. I suppose we usually demand it when we disagree with one's opinion.
Placing a burden of preciseness on some people or some opinions, provides their opponents cheap counter-attacks, when they don't have to discuss the argument, only point out the impreciseness.
Now, carefully crafting one's comments into precise sentences is possible, but has a non-zero cost. So by selectively asking people, whose opinion we don't like, to be more precise than usual, we make them pay for their dissent. All while pretending that we only care about the truth, without taking sides.
Of course, people learn that they are asked for higher precision only when expressing certain opinions, so if they want to avoid the costs of such speech, they avoid the sensitive topics. But that's the point, isn't it? By increasing standards of speech for certain opinion, we gradually make it disappear.
I think that people often feel when this is done to them, but it's kind of difficult for them to express what is happening, without seeming kind of paranoid. Also it's kind of difficult to express your feelings in a situation when an extra dose of preciseness is required.
Summary: It is possible to selectively use demands for precision as a form of censorship.
I don't want "perfect clarity* from people, I want for the people on this site who make declarative statements about groups of people they're not in (especially when the implications shape their behavior toward members of that group) to be factually-accurate and not misleading in their implications. This is not a complex or censorious idea.
I don't want "politically correct", I want actually correct. Do you see the difference? What I want to see is people not committing the ecological fallacy (Population X is statistically Y on average, ergo more members than not will be Y) and nobody pointing it out just because the conclusions are agreeable to a majority on this site.
I do not have the power, let alone the desire, to censor you or any other poster on this site (other than by means of downvoting a comment, and I only get the one downvote).
Precision is a way of fighting availability bias-- if all you see is "women are shorter than men" because most women are in fact shorter than most men, then it can be hard to remember that there are women who are taller than most men.
Agreed; this is also important.
It also seems to lead to treating actual examples (say, of taller women) as irrelevant, simply because they're in a numerical minority.
If this was applied consistently for all low status groups I wouldn't mind it.
I'd certainly prefer it that way myself, and try to implement that in my approach to such discussions.
If your objection is over our perceptions of which groups are low-status and in what contexts, say that.
My point was that I suspect that a presence of "politically incorrect" ideas increases our desire for actual correctness, while an absence of such ideas makes us relax.
Perhaps this bias already has a name; I don't remember it. It means requiring stronger evidence to ideas you disagree with; and not being aware of it.
If you require the same level of proof for both "politically correct" and "politically incorrect" comments, then it is OK. But it seems to me that in many discussions the level of proof rises up at the moment that "politically incorrect" opinions are introduced.
EDIT: Of course, even if my hypothesis is true, this is not an evidence for "politically incorrect" ideas (that would just be trying to reverse stupidity).
EDIT2: I would like to taboo the term "politically incorrect" in this comment, but I can't find a short enough substitute with the same expressive power. I would like to make it more group-dependent, not outside-world-dependent. It is supposed to mean: something that a decent member of this group would hesitate to say, because the morality keepers of this group will obviously disagree.
It's pretty clear that if we're dealing with ideas whose incorrect versions have great potential to do harm, then we should be careful to only disseminate the correct versions. It's a question of epistemic hygiene and minimizing the effects of contaminated mindware.
If we were discussing the recipe for a food that tasted marvelous when prepared correctly, but could cause severe poisoning when prepared incorrectly, then I would want people to be precise and careful in their wording as well. "Requiring stronger evidence for ideas you disagree with" doesn't have much to do with it: it's a straightforward expected utility calculation.
"Taboo" itself actually sounds about right, although it carries connotations of low value that may not be what you're going for.
Misleading-ness isn't a property of a statement, but of a statement-interpreter pair.
So if people claim statements are misleading because some other minds will misinterpret it to the detriment of their in-group, when there is no sign such misinterpreters exist in significant number, that seems like a power grab (independent of the question of whether or not that group should have more power) at the expense of the principle of charity.
Thus wouldn't be the case if people were leaving comments arguing against what they thought were authors' beliefs with them wrong about the author's beliefs, or agreeing with what they thought were the authors' beliefs with them wrong about the author's beliefs.
Now now, insight like that might slow the evaporative cooling that has been happening on Lesswrong when it comes to gender and sexuality (and to a much lesser extent on all unPC matters). Thinkers here used to be much less burdened by this, makes even a fool hard pressed to chuckle.
This comment is shockingly insightful and I would like to thank you for it.
I would tend to be one of them. But no woman or man is a 'women'/'men'. What the group -- as a second-order simulacrum -- wants isn't necessarily what an individual instantiation of the group wants.
Given that all I have to work with is your quoting him as saying "a certain behavior" is suboptimal (in a manner so vague I haven't a clue what position either of you were staking out) -- I cannot begin to make any informed statements on that topic.
Just to play devil's-advocate here -- have you considered the possibility that your feeling here represents an over-generalization about LW'ers over-generalizing?
Maybe. But I didn't make any claims about exactly how common this attitude is among LW'ers, only that it seems to exist.
I can't help but feel that this seems like something of a retraction of what I would refer to as "the informational meaningfulness" of your positional stance. It reduces an interesting statement to a trivial one.
What's that?
A second-order simulacrum is a symbol that doesn't actually represent anything. The concept of 'the number' is a representative symbol (as in, an abstraction) of all numbers -- but isn't actually itself a number; it is a second-order simulacrum.
The proverbial average household with its whitewashed picket fence and that poor .5 of a kid (It's a damned shame what happened to poor .5!Timmy. People should be more careful around asphalt crackign equipment and rutting mules.) is a second-order simulacrum used as a 'conceptual placeholder' to make discussing households far simpler.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Second-order_simulacra
Understanding signaling in communication is almost as basic as understanding the difference between the map and the territory.
A choice of words always contains an element of signaling. Generalizing statements are not always made in order to describe the territory with a simpler map, they are also made in order to signal that the exceptions from the general case are not worth mentioning. This element of signaling is also present, even if the generalization is made out of a simple desire to not "waste space" - indeed the exceptional cases were not mentioned! Thus a sweeping generalization is evidence for the proposition that the speaker doesn't consider the exceptions to the stated general rule worth much (an upper bound is the trouble of mentioning them). And when dealing with matters of personal identity, not all explanations for the small worth of the set of exceptional people are as charitable as a supposedly small size of the set.
Certainly.
However, the simple truth is that communication becomes positively impossible if 'sweeping generalizations' at some level are not made. Is this a trade-off? Sure. But I for one do not find it exceedingly difficult to treat all broad-category generalizations as simulacra representing the whole body. Just like how there's probably not a single person in politics who agrees with the entirety of the DNC or the GOP's platforms, discussing those platforms is still relevant for a reason.
And political identity is arguably one of the most flame-susceptible category of that available for discourse nowadays. So that's saying something significant here.
A statement like "Women want {thing}" leaves it unclear what the map is even supposed to be, barring clear context cues. This can lead to either fake disagreements or fake agreements.
Fake disagreements ("You said that Republicans are against gun control, but I know some who aren't!") are not too dangerous, I think. X makes the generalization, Y points out the exception, X says that it was a broad generalization, Y asks for more clarity in the future, X says Y was not being sufficiently charitable, and so on. Annoying to watch, but not likely to generate bad ideas.
Fake agreements can lead to deeper confusion. If X seriously believes that 99% of women have some property, and Y believes that only 80% of women have some property, then they may both agree with the generalization even if they have completely different ideas about what a charitable reading would be!
It costs next to nothing to say "With very few exceptions, women...", "A strong majority of women...." or "Most women...." The three statements mean different things, and establishing the meaning does not make communication next-to-impossible; it makes communication clearer. This isn't about charity, but clarity.
I in another subthread referenced the "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" 'fanfic' written by Eliezer, when he mentioned how many fewer digits of Pi rational!Harry knew as compared to rational!Hermione.
The point is that I'm concerned not with charity nor with clarity, but rather with sufficiency to the current medium. Each of those little "costs next to nothing" statements actually do have a cost, one that isn't necessarily clear initially.
Are you familiar at all with how errors propagate in measurements? Each time you introduce new provisos, those statements affect the "informational value" of each dependent statement in its nest. This creates an analogous situation to the concept of significant digits in discourse.
For a topic like lukeprog's, in other words, the difference between 99% and 80% of women is below the threshold of significance. Eliminating it altogether (until such time as it becomes significant) is an important and valuable practice in communication.
Failure to effectively exercise that practice will result in needless 'clarifications' distracting from the intended message, hampering dialogs with unnecessary cognitive burden resultant from additional nesting of "informational quanta." In other words; if you add too many provisos to a statement, an otherwise meaningful and useful one will become trivially useless. An example of this in action can be found in another subthread of this conversation where someone stated he felt that there is a 'trend among frequent LessWrongers to over-generalize". This has informational meaning. He later added a 'clarification' that he hadn't intended the statement as an indication of population size, which totally reversed the informational value of his statement from an interesting one to a statement so utterly trivial that it is effectively without meaning or usefulness.
And yet, we still say that p(Christianity is correct) is epsilon, rather than zero - and this seems to cause few-to-no problems, even.
Seems is the key here. Any instance where you would use that sort of language, the relevant threshold of significance was such that it was a proper statement to make.
Consider a context where you were making that statement to a Jehovah's Witness trying to hand you a flyer as your 10 o'clock bus was stopping in front of you. You could still make the statement, but if you were being honest with yourself you'd realize that your words would be gibberish, whereas "I'm not Christian" would be contextually appropriate: you would convey a statement with non-zero informational value. "The probability that 'Christianity is correct' is epsilon" on the other hand would not in such a context, quite likely, actually convey any meaning to the audience.
It seems that I've failed to make my point.
It is, as far as I can tell, safe to assume that everyone who reads LW understands enough about probabilities that saying 'zero' would communicate exactly the same concept regarding the probability at hand as saying 'epsilon', if we had a norm of allowing the former. The reason for doing the latter is about signaling, in much the same way that saying 'most women' instead of just 'women' is about signaling. In both cases, the point of the signal is to encourage accurate thought in the long run, rather than letting a small amount of convenience in the near term to outweigh that.
Either you have or I have. As I believe I understand entirely what your position here is, I can't help but wonder.
Here's the thing: nothing I've been saying was tailored at any point to be specific to Less Wrong in particular.
It's also not a safe assumption, by the way, for the simple fact there is at least one person who recommends this community to every budding (or potential) rationalist he encounters -- me. At least one of those persons (my ex-primary of 10 years) has an exceedingly poor capability of grasping mathematics and probabilities. This was one of the reasons she and I didn't make it past that 10 year mark.
See, I suspect there might be a political element to this as well. I for one would strongly prefer that the second-order simulacrum be the standard assumption rather than requiring continued increased cognitive burden in discourse. It is true that we think in language; and therefore the language we use shapes our thoughts -- but language is a memeplex of symbolic representations of semantical content/value. If we adjust the symbol, we adjust the thought. But this is now becoming an altogether different topic of conversation.
Reductively, the long term is nothing more than a collection of near terms. What remains a constant near term burden over the long term becomes a long-term burden.
I remain of the position that constantly adding caveats and provisos to language regardless of where the focus of discourse at a given moment happens to be is a fundamental error in communication. Since we can't seem to agree on this topic, I have to wonder what postulates we aren't sharing in common.
Not judging but... this is a very novel reason for ending a 10-year relationship.
Not adding those statements also has a cost.
Honestly, you don't know how many potential rationalists may find a post seemingly making unchallenged sweeping generalizations about women, and decide that these so-called rationalists are just a group of bigoted idiots that are less rational than your average person-in-the-street.
It's okay for someone to to say that pi is "3.14" if the other person knows that you know in reality it has more digits than that, and you're just being sufficient for your purposes. In short if there's actual transparency, not a double illusion of such.
But if they don't know that, if every post of yours may be perceived as an indication of complete positions (not hasty approximations thereof), it costs less to do things like say "most women" instead of "women" (or add a general disclaimer at the beginning) rather than not do it.
This is trivially true. What does adding them add to a conversation to which they are not relevant or significant?
This is uncontestably true. But the opposite is also true; you don't know how many potential rationalists may find a post filled with provisos and details and, upon discovering a massive gulf of an inferential gap, give up on even attempting to understand.
Certainly.
This is a gross misrepresentation of my statements, to the point of being nothing remotely like what I advocate. I have repeatedly advocated not the elimination of precision but the application of only the relevant degree of precision to the nature of the discourse at hand.
My point is not restricted to '''"most women" instead of "women"'''. It is a generalized principle which happens to apply here. For any given conversation there are thousands of such details we must choose to parse for relevance to a conversation. Demanding unerring accuracy beyond relevance is simply damaging to dialogue.
The cost of omitting them isn't clear initially, either.
I was generally taught to carry significant figures further than strictly necessary to avoid introducing rounding errors. If my final answer would have 3 significant digits, using a few buffer digits seemed wise. They're cheap.
Propagation of uncertainty is not a reason to drop qualifiers. It's a reason to use them. When reading an argument based on a generalization, I want to know the exceptions BEFORE the argument begins, not afterwards. That way, I can have a sense of how the uncertainties in each step affect the final conclusion.
If I want an answer to three significant figures, I do not begin my reasoning by rounding to two sigfigs, then trying to add in the last sigfig later.
If one person thinks that an argument depends on an assumption that fails in 1 in 100 cases, and someone else thinks the assumption fails in 1 in 5 cases, and they don't even know that they disagree, and pointing out this disagreement is regarded as some kind of map-territory error, they will have trouble even noticing when the disagreement has become significant.
This tends to happen to bad generalizations, yes. Once you consider all of the cases in which they are wrong, suddenly they seem to only be true in the trivial cases!
Good generalizations are still useful even after you have noted places where they are less likely to hold. Adding any number of true provisos will not make them trivial.
As for the cognitive load, why not state assumptions at the beginning of an essay where possible, rather than adding them to each individual statement? If the reader shares the assumptions, they'll just nod and move on. If the reader does NOT share the assumptions, then relieving them of the cognitive burden of being aware of disagreement is not a service.
Which is why I also discussed error propagation, which compounds.
I can only say that you are reading the metaphor too literally given the examples I've given thus far.
Of course!!! This isn't applicable to dialogue, however, as it has the opposite problem: the degree of cognitive burden to retain the informational value of a statement increases with the increased complexity. There is a limit on how much of this can be done in a given conversation.
Increasing complexity of statements to increase their accuracy can cause the ability to comprehend a statement to be reduced.
This statement carries a specific assumption of depth of dialogue which may or may not be valid.
I just now caught this, and... this is, I believe, where we have our fundamental disconnect.
By restricting the dialogue to essays the overwhelming majority of the meaningfulness of what I'm trying to say is entirely eliminated: my statements have been aimed at discussing the heuristic of measuring the cognitive burden per "unit" of information when communicating. The fact is that in a pre-planned document of basically any type one can safely assume a vastly greater available "pool of cognition" in his audience than in, say, a one-off comment in response to it, a youtube video comment, or something said over beers on a Friday night with your drinking-buddies.
I am struck by the thought that this metaphorically very similar to how Newton's classical mechanics equations manifest themselves from quantum mechanics after you introduce enough systems, or how the general relativity equations become effectively conventional at "non-relativistic" speeds: when you change the terms of the equations the apparent behaviors become significantly different. Just like how there's no need to bother considering your own relativistic mass when deciding whether or not to go on a diet, the heuristic I'm trying to discuss is vanishingly irrelevant to anything that one should expect from a thought-out-in advance, unrestricted-in-length, document.
For a moderately loose definition of 'thought out in advance', this describes most text-based, internet-based communication, and certainly the types of communication that can happen on LW.
I disagree with the usage of the term "moderately" here. I do not find it applicable. How many hours do you spend on each comment you make?
I don't see how your question is relevant to the topic at hand. I usually spend less than 15 minutes writing any given comment - most of mine are relatively short - but that's not counting time spent thinking about a topic and figuring out if I have something to say about it at all, which varies wildly and has been known to last days in some cases. But even in instances where I come up with a response near-instantly, it's generally because I've previously spent time thinking about the particular issue, and as a result have a high-quality cached response available, which certainly seems to fit the criteria for 'thought out in advance'!
Upvoted for clear communication.
I'm sort of puzzled, though, as to how I could have possibly interpreted your statements as applying to anything but the post and the comments on it; I saw no context clues suggesting that you meant "in everyday conversation." Did I miss these?
That said, if one of us had added just three or four words of proviso earlier, limiting our generalizations explicitly, we could have figured the disconnect out more quickly. I could have said that my generalizations apply best to essays and edited posts. You could have said that your generalizations apply best to situations where the added cost of qualifiers carries a higher burden.
Because we did not explicitly qualify our generalizations, but instead relied on context, we fell prey to a fake disagreement. However, any vindication I feel at seeing my point supported is nullified by the realization that I, personally, failed to apply the communication strategy that I was promoting.
Oops.
My language throughout was highly generalized. Consider my opening statement: "I am troubled by the vehemence by which people seem to reject the notion of using the language of the second-order simulacrum -- especially in communities that should be intimately aware of the concept that the map is not the territory."
And then also consider the fact that I used the term "discourse".
I didn't mean "everyday communication" specifically -- it simply is the venue where such a heuristic is most overtly valuable and noticeable. I did not qualify my generalizations because there were no qualifications to make: I was meaning the general sense.
Quite frankly, I did. That would be a modifying element to the "threshold of significance". (I.e.; "Is the cost of adding item X to this conversation greater than the value item X provides to the depth or breadth of information I am attempting to convey? If yes, do not add it. If no, do.") Because I was discussing so highly generalized a principle / heuristic, the fact that situations where added cost of qualifiers cost a higher burden is simply an inexorable conclusion from the assertion.
This seems like a context in which that shouldn't be expected to save you from unwarranted criticism and being misunderstood at all. ;-)
True but misleading. One should seek to avoid eliminating relevant meaning in the process of making those generalizations.
If you say "Men are sexually attracted to women" and your intended meaning is "this is true enough often enough to serve as a reliable guide to male behavior", then when someone points out that homosexual men and asexual men exist, the fact that those groups are minorities doesn't change the fact that you were imprecise in misleading ways, even if you didn't explicitly say "always". In addition, the unspoken implications you take out of the the statement (which could be nearly anything depending on what you're talking about) may be apparent but not agreeable to the listener, which is quite relevant if you're depending upon those to support your argument downstream.
So yes, make generalizations, but make good, accurate generalizations with appropriate scope limitations. And try to make the implications you perceive explicit.
(Formatting tip: you need to add two spaces at the end of the previous line to get lesswrong's commenting markup language to "<br>"/"\n". Two newlines will "<p>".)
I follow the convention of thinking that provisos are somwhere betwee standard deviation or significant digits. When someone adds that proviso "asexual/homosexual" -- they are changing the relevant level of precision necessary to the conversation.
For example; if I say "Men and women get married because they love each other", then the fact that some men/women don't marry, or the fact that intersex people aren't necessarily men or women, or the fact that GLBT people who marry are also likely to do so because of love, or the fact that some marriages are loveless is only a distraction to the conversation at hand.
While this seems like a trivial item for a single statement, the thing about this is that such provisos propagate across all dependent statements, meaning that the informational value of all dependent statements is reduced by each such proviso made.
Consider the difference in meaning between "Men and women marry each other because they love each other" and "Men/women/intersex individuals and other men/women/intersex individuals may or may not marry one another in groups as small as two with no upper bound for reasons that can vary depending on the situation."
This is, granted, an extreme example (reductio absurdum) but I make it to demonstrate the value of keeping in mind your threshold of significance when making a statement. Sometimes, as counterintuitively as it may seem, less accurate statements are less misleading.
No, they are pointing out that in order to apply to a case they are interested in, the conversation must be made more precise.
The last one isn't a distraction, it's a counterexample. If you want to meaningfully say that men and women marry out of love, you must implicitly claim that loveless marriages are a small minority. If someone says, "A significant number of of marriages are loveless," they aren't trying to get you to add a trivializing proviso. They're saying that your generalization is false.
This isn't a reductio, it's a strawman. When you add provisos to a statement that is really nontrivial, you do not turn "generally" into "may or may not." You turn "always" into "generally", or "generally" into "in the majority of cases".
In any case, what about "People who marry generally do so out of love?" This retains the substance of the original statement while incorporating the provisos. All that is gained is real clarity. All that is lost is fake clarity. (And if enough people are found who marry for other reasons, it is false.)
I want you to understand that you just agreed with me while appending the word "No" to the beginning of your sentence. This is... a less than positive indicator as to whether I am being understood.
The statement doesn't allow for counterexamples because it's a statement of fact, at bare minimum: the fact is that men and women do marry because they love each other. Other shit happens too, but that itself is a factual statement. Its informational value as a statement can only be derived from within the text of a given conversation.
That doesn't follow. Where do you get this necessity of implication from? Certainly not from the principle I'm espousing here. (Note: "A small minority" is a different statement from "a minority". In several cities in the US, whites are a minority. And yet the second-order simulacrum of those populations would still be a white person -- because whites, while a minority, are the plurality [largest minority].)
If and only if you meant "always" in the first place and want to be less than perfectly accurate. "In the majority of cases" is an inaccurate method of expressing how S-O S's work -- as I mentioned above, with "the largest minority" being the representative entity of the body. So you'd be better able to most accurately express the situation by stating that X happens Y percent of the time, but that simply isn't language used in ordinary discourse.
That the statement can be revised in this manner does not obviate the example I was pointing to with the previous example. I used an explicit reductio ad absurdum to make the mechanism explicit. From zero to one hundred, as it were.
In a more 'realistic' example for your revision: what is meant by "generally"? What is meant by "love"? What is meant by "people who marry"? These are all imprecise statements. Is "generally" "a large majority"? Is "generally" "a small majority"? Is "generally" "the largest minority"? Etc., etc.. You chose not to go to that level of precision because it was not necessary. And that's just for one sentence. Imagine an entire conversation with such provisos to consider.
Wait, wait, I think I see something here. I think I see why we are incapable of agreeing.
This seems more like a description of how S-O S's fail.
Can you offer any reason why I should treat S-O S's as a useful or realistic representational scheme if my goal is to draw accurate conclusions about actual, existing people?
Let me try to make my confusion clearer:
If I come upon a Halloween basket containing fifty peanut butter cups without razorblades, and ten peanut butter cups with razorblades, what is the second-order simulacrum I use to represent the contents of that basket? "A basket of delicious and safe peanut butter cups?"
Is this even a legitimate question, or am I still not grasping the concept?
There is a town. That town is called Simulacraton. Simulacraton is 40% white, 35% black, and 25% hispanic by population. The Joneses of Simulacraton -- are a semi-affluent suburban couple and live next door to a black man married to a hispanic woman. The Joneses are the second-order simulacrum of the average household in Simulacraton.
Second-order simulacra will always fail when you use them in ways that they are not meant to be used: such as actually being representative of individual instantiations of a thing: I.e.;, when you try to pretend they are anything other than an abstraction, a mapping of the territory designed for use as high-level overview to convey basic information without the need for great depth of inspection of the topic.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Second-order_simulacra
The article says:
If I'm reading this correctly, it leaves me even more leery about the value of second-order simulacra.
Also from the article:
... did you intend for me to read this charitably? At best, it's a descriptive statement that says that people no longer care about the territory, and talk about maps without even realizing that they are not discussing territory. At worst, it says that reality has ceased to be real, which is Not Even Wrong.
If you want me to understand your ideas, please link me to clearer writing.
I am going to avoid using race or sex examples. I appreciate that you used Simulacraton as an object-level example, as it made your meaning much clearer, but I'd rather not discuss race when I am still unhappy with the resolution of the candy bowl problem.
I will revise my question for clarity:
"What is a reasonable second-order simulacrum of the contents of that basket of candy, and why? If no reasonable second-order simulacrum exists, why not?"
True, but none of the above reservations apply to the bowl of candy.
I am not claiming that the second-order simulacrum should represent the individual candies in the bowl. It may be wrong in any individual case. I am simply trying to convey a useful impression of the POPULATION, which is what you claim that SO S's are useful for.
I am not pretending that a simulacrum is anything more than an abstraction. I think it is a kind of abstraction that is not as useful as other kinds of abstraction when talking about populations.
I DO want a high-level overview, not a great depth of information. This overview should ideally reflect one REALLY important feature of the candy bowl.
(The statement that I would use to map the basket's population in detail would be "Ten of the sixty candies in the basket contain razorblades." The statement that I would use to map the basket broadly, without close inspection, would be, "Several of the candies in that basket contain razorblades."
if I had to use a second-order simulacrum, I would choose one of the candies with razorblades as my representative case, not the candy without. But this seems to break the plurality rule. Or perhaps, if feeling particularly perverse, I'd say "The candy in that basket contains one-sixth of a razorblade.")
I believe that second-order simulacra fail badly in the case of the candy basket. And if second-order simulacra can't handle simple hypothetical cases, shouldn't I be at least a little suspicious of this mapping strategy in general?
I'm reasonably confident that most intersex people are either men or women. You meant genderqueer.
Or meant to distinguish males, females and intersex persons rather than men, women and intersex persons.
It's tough to get exact numbers on the rate of intersex individuals per thousand, but I do know that the number of intersex individuals I've met and known for some time is far higher than that rate. No, I did not mean "genderqueer". This would be what you might call "too many digits beyond what's significant."
Oooh, perfect example! Because this is probably still not true for a plurality, if not majority of humanity, and it used to be little more than a perk if it occurred in a marriage. For most of human history and for much of humanity today, marriage is more like a business relationship, corporate merger, pragmatic economic decision...
If you confine your statement to Westerners, and especially middle-to-upper class ones, and those who live in societies strongly modelled on the same pattern (urban Chinese often yes; rural Chinese often no) then you are dealing with an acceptable level of accurate to be relatively unobjectionable.
Do you want to try again?
[...]
My statement wasn't ever meant to be representative of the whole. That should have been obvious. If I'd said "only for love" then that'd be a valid objection. As it stands, I have no such problem. Generalizations that are useful for a context need not be without exception or even universally comprehensive.
People in the past or in other cultures are irrelevant to me when discussing social habits I am familiar with.
So, no. My statement is fine as is. Did I leave out a great heaping swath of precisions, provisos, and details? Absolutely!! -- but that was the point from the outset.
And you wouldn't hear a peep out of me if it wasn't depressingly common to see people couch advice, theories and other mental-model-of-the-world stuff in such terms, giving no obvious sign that they've thought about the distinction between "speaking to a specific audience" and just speaking with the assumption that the listeners fit their relatively vague preconception of who they talk to, rather than about.
It's far from clear when an Anglophonic Western man says "Men and women marry each other for romantic love" that he is cognizant of the distinction. After all, that's his default context, other possibilities are barely even mentioned in his expected cultural background (let alone presented as normal), and unless he has much overt contact with people for whom that's not the case, the odds are pretty good it's a thing-over-there, done by some outgroup about whom he knows rather little.
It may not be terribly important if he's just talking among a peer group of like folks, but when he's got access to a wide and relatively unknown audience (it could be anyone reading), and he's trying to frame it in terms of general information about "how people work", it's usually a safe bet he just didn't think about how his own norms influence his advice, and hence how applicable it might be to even, say, an English-speaking, technically-trained man in India (where arranged marriages for purposes other than romantic love are still pretty standard).
Sometimes people on this site even take norms like that and try to infer over all of human evolution. So yeah -- this is not an unreasonable thing to question.
Can you rephrase this for me? It's not parsing my language-interpreter.
Certainly. Arguably, for the majority of cases it's not even relevant whether he is or isn't. In all likelihood whoever he is talking to also shares that set -- as you said, it's his "default context". Now, yes, absolutely failing to recognize that one's default context is not the sole available context can be a significant problem. But that really isn't relevant to the topic of my assertions about cognitive burden per statement of equivalent informational value and the relevance of said burden to knowing when generalizing trivial elements of a statement is a net gain rather than net loss.
You know, after years of making daily calls to workers in India (I do corporate sysadmin work, for a number of various corporations) -- I still have absolutely no clue beyond the vaguest notions gleaned from the "idiot box" (TV, but at least I mean PBS-ish) about the cultural contexts of a modern urban Indian person. I really do feel like I understand more about the unspoken assumptions of Amazonian tribesmen than I do about Indian people.
I do, however, find it both insulting when my offshores co-workers think they can slip insults by me through such expedients as telling me to "do the needful" in a particular tone, but I digress.
Absolutely not an unreasonable thing to question, since any norm not empirically validated to exist in other monkeys (I am of the belief that all modern primates qualify monocladistically as monkeys) is simply not viable material for Evo-Psych theories without significant and rigorous documentation.
By the way, I just made an inaccurate statement for the purposes of making the statement less misleading, as I previously asserted. It has to do with my use of the term "empirically" -- I follow the thinking of Poplerian falsificationism which, while similar to empiricism, does not suffer from the problem of induction. While this one instance is trivial -- keeping up that level of technicality quickly turns casual conversation into cited, researched, thesis papers. And it's just plain impossible to always communicate at that level; ergo, devoting actual thought and consideration to building a rational heuristic for when generalization / inaccuracy is acceptable is a necessary part of the toolkit. Which is what I was saying from the outset.