Downvoted for telling me what I'm arguing for and against, for something like the third time now, when I am fairly certain that our intuitive ideas of how abstraction works are somewhat different. This is one of the few things that breaks my internal set of "rules for a fair argument."t.

(Note: I am NOT downvoting for the paragraph beginning "OF COURSE they do", because it's given me a hunch as to what is going on here, is clearly written, and makes your actual objections to the candy bowl case clearer.

I SHOULD not be downvoting for the first paragraph, but it affected the decision.)

I habsolutely zero intentions. I had hoped that you would be capable of being a rational agent in this dialogue. If, however, that isn't something you care to do, we can end this conversation here and now.

When I tried to work out what you meant by second-order simulacra, you linked me to a cryptic Wikipedia article discussing a vague description of the term, along with confused-looking statements about the nature of reality. I really did NOT know what your intentions were, and I genuinely was getting exasperated.

I am sorry for implying bad faith. I should have said, "I have no clue what I am supposed to take from this article, but it sends extremely dubious signals to me about the validity of this concept."

In a side-note, why did you feel the need to push this particular variation of your question on me when I had already answered it?

Because you hadn't. I presented an example where second-order simulacra fail. Reading the reply, I was unsatisfied to find a description of a different case, followed by a statement that second-order simulacra fail in the candy bowl case, but for reasons that weren't consistent with the example.

What, exactly, did you think the Simulacraton example was?

An example chosen in which your heuristic gave a semi-plausible answer, when I had asked about a place where it ceases to work.

Or did you not make the connection merely because you used candies and ratios and I used people and percents?

I did. I did not conceive, however, that your answer would be:

The stereotypical bowl-candy is perfectly safe. It likely has a neighbor that has a razorblade in it.

The analogy to the population of people was stretched enough - and not just for reasons of ratios and percents - that there was no WAY I'd come to the above answer without questioning it.

1. The scale is vastly too small to allow for abstraction to be useful.
2. The topic at hand focuses on the group in question rather than some other topic to which the group is tangential.

This is getting closer to what I actually am looking for - a situation where I ought to use second-order simulacra. However, I still do not think these are problems for the candy bowl.

1: Abstractions can work on an arbitrarily small sample size. "A bowl of candies, some of which are unsafe" IS an abstraction.. If that is not abstract enough, what about a pie chart showing the proportion of unsafe candies?

1. If a group is truly tangential to a topic, how do you decide which features are important enough to include in your abstraction? Why include ANY features in your abstraction besides "lives in Simulacraton?" It does no good to say that one would abstract the Joneses as being of the plurality race. For example, I could imagine them as being racially indeterminate. But I have trouble imagining them at all.

Good luck getting through life without ever constructing a symbolic representation of anything at any time ever under any circumstances: because that's what you are arguing against.

Generally speaking, that is not representations work in my mind. The phrase "generalizing from one example" is ringing a bell right now.

When I am told "the population of Simulacraton is 40% white," I don't really feel any need to abstractly represent the population with one person, neighbors or no, or to refer to such a person in conversation. I would not say, "People from Simulacraton are {X}," and I tend to react to such statements with skepticism because I see them as unqualified statements about an entire set of people based on weak evidence.

How do I describe the average family in that town? With reluctance. I default to mapping by groups. In fact, I'm not used to visual or instance-based representation in general. It may be developmental - I was born blind and raised blind for a month before surgery. This may have affected my brain development in odd ways; I'm still bad with faces.

It does seem likely to me that a more visual thinker would find it convenient to imagine an average family as having visibly defined properties representing a plurality, rather than properties that can't be visually imagined as easily. But my 'average member' is just a bunch of loosely defined properties tied together with a name, and many of the properties that are needed to visualize a person clearly are missing from that set.

I don't think ONLY in verbally described sets, of course. I also think in free-floating sensory memories that rarely remain in my consciousness for very long. But "thinks in sets defined by verbal descriptions" is a good approximation of what I do.

Example: I have never been to Paris. If I were to talk about the Eiffel Tower, and for some reason felt the need to mention a Parisian in the description, I would likely say "a Parisian." I wouldn't give them a name or any properties unless I had to. If I did, the properties would be based on what I saw in movies, not any properties that reflect a plurality of Parisians, and I would assign them in a miserly way. My second-order simulacrum would be useless for anything but fake local flavor.

What about questions where "a Parisian" is just a tangential feature, where precision in the description of the Parisian is unimportant? Surely I use a second-order simulacrum then, right?

Nope.

For me, it is cognitively cheaper to not reference "a typical Parisian" when asked a question that tangentially involves people from Paris, because that would require me to represent a typical Parisian symbolically, and I have trouble imagining such a thing as "a typical Parisian." Instead, I would simply say, "a random Parisian," and my mental representation of such a Parisian would be the word "Parisian" with attached possible properties, half-formed images, and phrases spoken in movies.

THIS is why qualifiers like "almost always," "generally", "about half of the time," "on occasion", and "almost never" strike me as informative - they are quick and dirty ways to adjust the sets in my head! They are cognitively cheap for me, though not NEARLY as cheap for me as numerical probability estimates, which are great when people actually bother to give them.

Now, I am not naive enough to think that a "set" is part of the territory itself, but once one starts to cluster entities together, using a second-order generalization may reinforce confusion about the properties of entities in that cluster. When I discourage the use of second-order simulacra without disclaimers, it is not because I fail to realize my set-based map is not the territory, but because many people will name a cluster of entities, pick a single entity from that cluster, generalize to the entire cluster, and imagine that they have actually described a lot of territory in a useful way.

People do this constantly in politicized arguments. Context is not enough, and the more unwilling someone is to add a proviso, the more I suspicious I grow of the reasons that they are unwilling to do so. I suspect that my attitude towards unqualified generalizations is very similar to your attitude toward qualified generalizations. They seem like useless maps to me because I don't use them and don't really know how to.