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Logos01 comments on Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance - LessWrong
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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 hoping I can butt in and explain all this.
Logos01 probably shouldn't have brought up Baudrillard, who is among the sloppiest and most obscure thinkers of the last century. Baudrillard's model of abstraction is pretty terrible. Much better to user analytic philosophy's terminology rather than post-structuralism's terminology. In analytic philosophy we talk about abstract objects, "types" or "kinds". These are ubiquitous, not especially mysterious, and utterly essential to the representation of knowledge. "Electron", "Homo sapiens", "the combustion engine", "Mozart's 10th Symphony", "the Human Genome", etc. To map without abstract objects one would have to speak only of particulars and extensionally defined sets. And that's just the nouns-- whether one can even use verbs without recourse to abstraction is another issue entirely. Open up any scientific journal article and you will see named entities which are abstract objects. There are schools of thought that hold that kinds can ultimately be reduced to classes determined only by resemblance or predicate-- in an attempt to dissolve the supposed mystery of what abstract objects are. But even the most strident nominalists don't propose to actually do away with their usage.
None of that is particularly controversial and that's basically what Baudrillard means by "second-order simulacra". Now the question is, to what extent is it permissible to make statements about types which are not true of all of the particulars which instantiate that type? Call these "generalizations". We know from the limit cases that it can be both permissible and impermissible. "The Bobcat is found in North America" seems true and informative-- and yet there are bobcats in zoos outside that region. At the other end "Birds can talk" is mis-informative even though there are a few species of bird that can learn to talk.
The criterion for whether a generalization is permissible is chiefly pragamatic. You wouldn't say "The candy is safe" if there were a few razor blades mixed in because people are used to not having any razor blades mixed in at all! The fact about the candy that is worth communicating is that there are razor blades in a few of them. You're trying to warn people!
I think Logos's race examples above are wrong. Whether one specifies the race of the typical family depends on whether or not race is a relevant variable in what you are trying to communicate. If all you want to do is express to a Boston Red Sox fan that he or she shouldn't expect to find other fans in New York you would just say "New Yorkers don't like the Red Sox." There is no reason to say "New Yorkers are white people who don't like the Red Sox"-- even if the vast, vast majority of New Yorkers were white this would be communicating unnecessary detail given the goal of the communication. But if you're trying to constrain someone's expectations about what kind of people they will meet in New York saying "New Yorkers are white people who don't like the Red Sox" is mis-informative if most or a large fraction of New Yorkers aren't white people.
These are all simple examples which can be solved by adding another sentence at most. But in discussions of sufficient complexity additional specificity really does become untenable. At the limit demanding arbitrary precision would require you to use quantum field theory to build an airplane (Newtonian physics can be thought of as a generalization of quantum mechanics).
There are special cases. One is that people should include additional, irrelevant details in cases where not including them reinforces a popular belief that such details don't exist. This is especially true when the additional details are newly discovered. If one is speaking to a crowd that thinks, say, all men are heterosexual, it is worth qualifying statements about men that assume heterosexuality since not saying anything about the existence of homosexuals reinforces the false notion that they don't really exist or are extremely rare. When speaking to crowds who are very familiar with that information, qualifying it may look like additional, irrelevant information. Relatedly, when hearing about social identity no one likes to feel like they've been left out of the map. This is both an understandable feeling and an inevitable problem when trying to talk about issues involving social/cultural identity and experience. Almost always even the most carefully PC essay talking about how group x experience behavior y or institution z will ignore some subset of group x. Social types and kinds are particularly rife with exceptions-- there is simply too much individual variation. But at some point you have to generalize to talk about social identity. I think among respectful, tolerant and educated people it is helpful to maintain a constant policy of "Yes, we all know this isn't true for everyone but this is a useful generalization". Whether or not it makes sense for Less Wrong to adopt that policy is another question.
Using 'x', 'y', and 'z' as labels to represent variable groups reinforces the pernicious stereotype that other letters aren't worthy of being used as labels to represent variables and don't count.
I don't appreciate your attempt to erase the experiences of the Greek alphabet!
I don't appreciate how lazy these jokes are. Once posting on LW one would assume unnecessary tribal signaling in the form of easy, form-fillable potshots at the religious, "political correctness," non-nerd popular culture, &c.
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.
I'm reasonably confident that most intersex people are either men or women. You meant genderqueer.
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."
Or meant to distinguish males, females and intersex persons rather than men, women and intersex persons.