Mind Projection Fallacy
Followup to: How an Algorithm Feels From Inside
In the dawn days of science fiction, alien invaders would occasionally kidnap a girl in a torn dress and carry her off for intended ravishing, as lovingly depicted on many ancient magazine covers. Oddly enough, the aliens never go after men in torn shirts.
Would a non-humanoid alien, with a different evolutionary history and evolutionary psychology, sexually desire a human female? It seems rather unlikely. To put it mildly.
People don't make mistakes like that by deliberately reasoning: "All possible minds are likely to be wired pretty much the same way, therefore a bug-eyed monster will find human females attractive." Probably the artist did not even think to ask whether an alien perceives human females as attractive. Instead, a human female in a torn dress is sexy—inherently so, as an intrinsic property.
They who went astray did not think about the alien's evolutionary history; they focused on the woman's torn dress. If the dress were not torn, the woman would be less sexy; the alien monster doesn't enter into it.
Apparently we instinctively represent Sexiness as a direct attribute of the Woman object, Woman.sexiness, like Woman.height or Woman.weight.
If your brain uses that data structure, or something metaphorically similar to it, then from the inside it feels like sexiness is an inherent property of the woman, not a property of the alien looking at the woman. Since the woman is attractive, the alien monster will be attracted to her—isn't that logical?
E. T. Jaynes used the term Mind Projection Fallacy to denote the error of projecting your own mind's properties into the external world. Jaynes, as a late grand master of the Bayesian Conspiracy, was most concerned with the mistreatment of probabilities as inherent properties of objects, rather than states of partial knowledge in some particular mind. More about this shortly.
But the Mind Projection Fallacy generalizes as an error. It is in the argument over the real meaning of the word sound, and in the magazine cover of the monster carrying off a woman in the torn dress, and Kant's declaration that space by its very nature is flat, and Hume's definition of a priori ideas as those "discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe"...
(Incidentally, I once read an SF story about a human male who entered into a sexual relationship with a sentient alien plant of appropriately squishy fronds; discovered that it was an androecious (male) plant; agonized about this for a bit; and finally decided that it didn't really matter at that point. And in Foglio and Pollotta's Illegal Aliens, the humans land on a planet inhabited by sentient insects, and see a movie advertisement showing a human carrying off a bug in a delicate chiffon dress. Just thought I'd mention that.)
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Comments (54)
It's not about what the bug-eyed monster considers sexy. It's about what the human reader considers sexy.
Exactly. I never conceived of the alien taking the woman because she was attractive. Weaker perhaps, but not because he found her sexy. Damsel in distress. I think it is your, author of this article, who suffered from mind projection fallacy, not necessarily the creators of the comic or the rest of the audience. To me, from the point of view of the story, it was just a tragic accident that the woman being hauled off was one I found beautiful.
Precisely.
If a bunch of aliens were to start capturing bunch of humans (and other terrestrial animals) for food, or slave labour, or what ever, it would be rational for males to go after the aliens with sexy human females first. The torn clothing would likely be widespread, and selection by torn clothing (as torn clothing improves ability to select for sexiness) may also be rational when one wants to maximize the sexiness of mates that one takes for rebuilding the human race. :-)
edit: One should also look for signs of struggle (such as torn clothing), as one would be interested in the relevant genes for the successful counter-attack by the next generation.
I ask you again - what is the other option? How can we deal with the world other than via "mind-projection?" I claim that you do it too, you just do it in a more sophisticated way. Do you have an alternative in mind?
You could attempt to perceive the universe in all the other viewpoints of every other living being while you perceive it as you would naturally.
Or, to make it extremely simple: Keep in mind that everyone else does not think in the same way that you do.
Yeah, I can't help but think that in many cases there is no implied inference that the alien especially desires the woman, but rather that the reader is especially affected by the fact that the abductee just happens to be an attractive woman. (King Kong would be an exception.) It's the same reason that we rarely if ever see the alien carrying a cow instead; not because of its preferences, but because we wouldn't be especially apprehensive about the cow's fate.
If there's a bias here, it's one generated by the desire to tell interesting stories. Projection happens, but I don't find this example terribly compelling.
(Five years on, but whatever)
I don't think the inference is necessary, really; it's fairly explicit that the scenario in which the comment is relevant is one in which the Alien Monster selected the Damsel for some lovin'. A competent writer, given only that cover art as the basis for their film, could get around that. The fact that the story is so frequently told incompetently is what makes it an unfortunately apt example for a much subtler and more insidious fallacy.
As a more contraversial, if slightly less ovious example, is the Christian condemning an Athiest to Hell. Their universe does not include a scenario in which there is any other result in store for someone who disbelieves, even without any objective basis for their claim. Besides Dante Aliegeri, but results have to be independently verifiable, after all.
I take your point about the mind projection fallacy, but actually in the particulars I may have to _slightly_ disagree.
Consider these themes:
Furries Anime tentacle rape Bestiality/zoophilia etc etc etc...
In other words, we already know that there can be humans that find stuff either slightly human but modified, or increasingly alien to also, ahem. "tweak" them.
I bet somewhere either the author of that story (with the plant) that you mentioned, or some reader somewhere found that story _particularly_ enjoyable, or at least the notion of it.
So, it does seem reasonable to suppose that _some_ alien species would contain _some_ mambers that have sufficiently different or broad or... creative... sexuality that they'd even find the scandalous notion of being attracted to a human, well, attractive.
Clearly then the Bug Eyed Monsters coming after the ladies in torn dresses are simply the deviants of that species. They're self selected! (okay, was being somewhat silly throughout this entire comment, such happens when I am on lack of sleep...)
Benquo: Wait... what about Chupucabra? Clearly simply a very confused alien that's simply trying to find a mate! *chuckles*
Actually wanting to bang Anything That Moves is common enough: alien perverts are just over-represented in fiction, because it's more terrifying for us humans.
I for one thought the plant story was a definite turn-on...
If I assume that others have minds like mine I surely would also assume they "project" the same properties, so calling them "mental projection" is not likely to make this error go away. Conversely if I establish that a certain property is a real, non-projected property of an object, that doesn't entitle me to assume that it will be perceived by an alien with a different evolutionary history. After all, humans only perceive a tiny percentage of the actual properties of objects. So I think that the "mind projection error" and the "all minds are alike" error are quite different.
Your error is falsely conclude that he fallacy is essential to human thinking, that the properties projected are always and the same across the board, and that they cannot differ. And what the heck does "human only perceive a tiny percentage of the actual properties of objects" even mean? We certainly don't know all there is about a thing, but what properties are you even talking about and how?
One thing that comes to mind to me is color. We see red green and blue. Aliens might see yellow and ultraviolet instead. We might decide to camouflage ourselves so that they don't see us, and fail completely because we're using the wrong colors to blend in.
Technically, there's no point where this stops and mind projection begins. How sexy you'd find a woman is much more complex than how red you'd find her dress, and it's similarly less likely for an alien to notice, but it's just a matter of degree.
Good post. I have a feeling I've read this very same example before from you Eliezer. I can't remember where.
PK: I think Eliezer made the same point in "Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgement of Global Risks"
At least, I think that's the one.
The aliens and monsters are stand-ins for the traditional fear: men from the other tribe. Since cross-tribal homicide and rape/abduction are quite common, it is no surprise that our Sci-Fi creations do the same thing.
Psy-Kosh,
We share an evolutionary history with different animals on earth. There could be attractive properties in animals that give us a similar representation of sexiness as they do to their own species. Same reason we find you will find different creatures finding other creatures cute e.g. humans to dogs and gorilla to human.
Additionally, there has been cases where dolphins attempted to sexually engage with humans. An intelligent alien will have a shared ancestry and therefore will not have sexiness representations from "sexual properties" exhibited in earth's creatures.
That's a rather weak explanation because you're implying the presence of causes without elucidating them, or you're creating a cause out of evolution, which is not a cause.
From the standpoint of being, we apprehend the accidental properties of a thing first, but from the point of view of the intellect, we apprehend "gorillaness" first, so in the context of gorillaness, sexiness is impossible in relation to human. One cannot find a gorilla sexy unless one is confused in some way. This is why zoophilia is a mental disorder.
You can find something about a gorilla beautiful, certainly, but this is not the same as sexy.
There is of course, the Red Dwarf episode "Camille" with the alien who appears as the projection of whatever you find sexiest.
I'm sure the historians of the recent "Imagining Outer Space, 1900-2000" conference would have a good time with analyzing the various pop cultural strands that came together to produce rote images such as the above cover.
PK: This example is also part of Eliezer's "Hard AI Future Salon" lecture (starting at 1:35:33).
"Hard AI Future Salon" lecture, good talk. Most of the audience's questions however were very poor.
One more comment about the mind projection fallacy. Eliezer, you also have to keep in mind that the goal of a sci-fi writer is to make a compelling story which he can sell. Realism is only important in so far as it helps him achieve this goal. Agreed on the point that it's a fallacy, but don't expect it to change unless the audience demands/expects realism. http://tvtropes.org/ if full of tropes that illustrate stuff like that.
Lior: good point.
The subject of human/alien sex was disposed of rather thoroughly by Larry Niven in "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex".
I think it would be justified in that case. If the alien is of a species that looks exactly like humans, and was raised in a human culture, he would likely find the same females attractive. And that's assuming Lois Lane is attractive by human standards. Is that ever specified?
That was more about human/superhero sex. It would be just as dangerous for a human to sleep with the Flash.
Speaking of interspecies vs intraspecies reproductive fitness evaluation - a human may judge a member of its own species (from a distant end of the genetic spectrum, i.e., whitest of the white vs. blackest of the black) less desirable than some hypothetical alien species with appropriately bulbous forms and necessary orifices or extrusions.
Are you sexually attracted to manikins?
What if the manikins were alive and intelligent?
It's certainly not just sci-fi writers who go for this sort of reasoning. I knew a theology professor who would make mistakes like this on a consistent basis. For example, he would raise questions about whether there was an evolutionary pressure for babies to evolve to be cute, without even considering the possibility that we might evolve to find babies cute. It struck me as being much worse than the sort of unthinking assumption that goes into Attack of the Fifty Foot Whatever sci fi stories, since his preconceptions were actually hindering him in fairly serious attempts to understand the real world.
In case you hadn't noticed, this is a general problem. And you're right, the observer is not some guy speaking from some immutable "neutral point of view" but it's an error made very commonly by certain "scientists" every day. His error was not one of theology, but one commonly made by "evolutionary psychologists". But let's consider this case: if evolution has free dibs on everything, and it lacks any teleological component whatsoever, then what are we to say about your status as a rational being?
First, welcome to Lesswrong! If you'd like to introduce yourself, the 2010 thread is still active.
You've asked some interesting questions on this thread--unfortunately, Desertopa is the only one of your potential interlocutors I know to be active on this site. Even Desertopa may be reluctant to respond because your tone ("In case you haven't noticed") could be construed as combative, and we try to avoid that because emotionally identifying with one side of an argument leads to biases.
Regarding your question in the last sentence: there are a few posts addressing the rationality of intelligences generated by a blind idiot god on LW: The Lens That Sees its Flaws is one of my favorites.
There may also be evolutionary pressure for babies to evolve to be cute.
There's certainly evolutionary pressure for males to be sexy. Some species have pretty bizarre looking males.
> "E. T. Jaynes used the term Mind Projection Fallacy to denote the error of projecting your own mind's properties into the external world."
URL is dead for me: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.40.8618 says "This url does not match any document in our repository."
I don't know what document that link originally pointed to, but this document contains one of Jaynes's earliest (if not the earliest) descriptions of the idea.
I know this is incidental, but I am dying of curiosity about the story of the Plant-Guy/Human-Guy... would you mind giving the reference ?
Is "the world is full of people" an example of the mind-projection fallacy? (Compare to "we can both recognize the pattern 'person' at a high-level in our multi-leveled models of levelless reality")
Why would it be? It's an ontological statement about the existence of many instances of what you have identified as persons. It doesn't attribute anything to them. And following your pseudotechnical jargon, why would you presume the pal you're speaking to ("we both recognize...") is nothing but another instance of this "pattern"? Your biased. You're exempting someone because you want them to be a person.
I just thought the Less Wrong community should know that a few minute ago, I was having trouble remembering the name of this fallacy, but I vaugely remembered the content of this post. So, I decided to use the search engine on this site to find this. I typed in "sexy," and this is the first thing that came up.
Perhaps we should rename it the "sexy search string fallacy" in your honor?
Or, you know... not.
I can only imagine how many people have scrolled up to the search bar to test this since this comment was written.
Just noticed this comment while looking in the archives... You might want to ponder information bubbles caused by website personalization because I suspect you are (or were when you wrote this comment?) inside of one. Something I've found generally useful in the past that seems like it would help is trying to imagine how you would discover "objectively important things to know about that you wouldn't have normally run across".
Oh, this wasn't through a general Google search, just the site's search engine. I would be shocked if a search of "sexy" on the internet returned a Less Wrong result anywhere near the top.
Still, that would be a happy day.
I recall reading a book on Asperger's syndrome in my school library which had an activity in it that is supposed to conclude weather or not a child has 'Theory of Mind'. This is what I immediately thought about while reading this article.
Here is a version of the test, check it out. http://www.asperger-advice.com/sally-and-anne.html
Okay, so your saying that Woman.height makes sense, but Woman.sexiness doesn't really. I'm not sure if you can even say that Woman.height makes sense. The reality is that the knowledge of any attribute is predicated on the perceptual apparatus that an organism has. Perhaps the alien is blind?
You may retort that if the alien is blind, then he most likely has some sort of apparatus to measure size in the world. Perhaps he can send out tenticles to feel the size of objects.
But then, at the same time why couldn't he send out some sort of tenticles to measure the attractiveness of a lady. In humans attractiveness isn't a real thing either. Really what where doing is looking at features such as hip ratio, symmetry, eye color and various attributes like that and that's what creates the sense of attractiveness. These are all things that the alien could measure and combine also.
Yes, this would define "looks attractive to a certain subset of humans" (i.e. those who find this set of features attractive). However, there is no such thing as "looks attractive to all humans and aliens", which is what Woman.sexiness is supposed to represent.
This comment was sitting at -2 when I saw it, which makes me think that maybe I don't understand Eliezer's point. I thought the OP was making the point that when we talk about something being "attractive" or "moral" or maybe even "sapient", we project facts about our minds into the real world. "Attractive" really means "attractive to humans", and if we forget this fact, we can end up inadvertently drawing wrong conclusions about the world. If that's wrong, then what was this post actually about?
It may have just been serial downvoting from people who dislike shminux.
Heck, I dislike him myself.
Papermachine isn't much to write home about either.
The part you highlight about shminux's comment is correct, but this part:
is wrong; attractiveness is psychological reactions to things, not the things themselves. Theoretically you could alter the things and still produce the attractiveness response; not to mention the empirical observation that for any given thing, you can find humans attracted to it. Since that part of the comment is wrong but the rest of it is correct, I can't vote on it; the forces cancel out. But anyway I find that to be a better explanation for its prior downvotation than a cadre of anti-shminux voters.
Mind you I downvoted JohnEPaton's comment because he got all of this wrong.
It is a great example, but one cannot beat the metaphor to death. There are also artistic conventions which develop and self-reinforce (re Manga / Anime) as well as marketing forces - re Why do all female superheroes have giant breasts?
The strength of the metaphor is not that a rational analysis of alien / monster motivations leads the average fan-boy to conclude aliens intend to copulate with abducted females, but the unconscious projection of the fan-boy onto the alien / monster, and of course who would you grab then?
I downvoted, but the second paragraph is okay.
...what was the name of that story?