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.
- The scale is vastly too small to allow for abstraction to be useful.
- 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?
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.
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.
Is this a matter of degree or of kind? It seems to me like the issue here is how many qualifications should be made in particular contexts, and so is a question of degree, and not at all one of kind. This means that there is a possible mind with standards analogous to yours to the same degree yours are analogous to Logos01.
For example, where Logos01 thinks an essay with five paragraphs of content needs ...
Years ago, my first girlfriend (let's call her 'Alice') ran into her ex-boyfriend at a coffee shop. They traded anecdotes, felt connected, a spark of intimacy...
And then she left the coffee shop, quickly.
Later she explained: "You have my heart now, Luke."
I felt proud, but even Luke2005 also felt a twinge of "the universe is suboptimal," because Alice hadn't been able to engage that connection any further. The cultural scripts defining our relationship said that only one man owned her heart. But surely that wasn't optimal for producing utilons?
This is an account of some lessons in rationality that I learned during my journeys in romance.* I haven't been very rational in my relationships until recently, but in retrospect I learned a fair bit about rationality from the failures resulting from my irrationality in past relationships.
Early lessons included realizations like the one above — that I wasn't happy with the standard cultural scripts. I hadn't really noticed the cultural scripts up until that point. I was a victim of cached thoughts and a cached self.
Rationality Lesson: Until you explicitly notice the cached rules for what you're doing, you won't start thinking of them as something to be optimized. Ask yourself: Which parts of romance do you currently think of as subjects of optimization? What else should you be optimizing?
Gather data
At the time, I didn't know how to optimize. I decided I needed data. How did relationships work? How did women work? How did attraction work? The value of information was high, so I decided to become a social psychology nerd. I began to spend less time with Alice so I could spend more time studying.
This wasn't easy. She and I had connected in some pretty intimate ways, including a simultaneous deconversion from fundamentalist Christianity. But in the end my studies paid off. Moreover, my studies in personality and relationship styles helped me to realize that I (and therefore she) would have been miserable if I had decided to pursue marriage with her (or anyone at the time). Now that is valuable information to have!
Rationality Lesson: Respond to the value of information. Once you notice you might be running in the wrong direction, don't keep going that way just because you've got momentum. Stop a moment, and invest some energy in the thoughts or information you've now realized is valuable because it might change your policies, i.e., figuring out which direction to go.
Sanity-check yourself
Before long, Alice was always pushing me to spend more time with her, and I was always pushing to spend more time studying psychology. By then I knew I couldn't give her what she wanted: marriage.
So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked. I thought she would appreciate this because she had previously expressed admiration for detailed honesty. Now I realize that there's hardly a more damaging way to break up with someone. She asked that I kindly never speak to her again, and I can't blame her.
This gives you some idea of just how incompetent I was, at the time. I had some idea of how incompetent I was, but not enough of one to avoid badly wounding somebody I loved.
Rationality Lesson: Know your fields of incompetence. If you suspect you may be incompetent, sanity-check yourself by asking others for advice, or by Googling. (E.g. "how to break up with your girlfriend nicely", or "how to not die on a motorcycle" or whatever.)
Study
During the next couple years, I spent no time in (what would have been) sub-par relationships, and instead invested that time optimizing for better relationships in the future. Which meant I was celibate.
Neither Intimate Relationships nor Handbook of Relationship Initiation existed at the time, but I still learned quite a bit from books like The Red Queen and The Moral Animal. I experienced a long series of 'Aha!' moments, like:
Within a few months, I had more dating-relevant head knowledge than any guy I knew.
Lesson: Use scholarship. Especially if you can do it efficiently, scholarship is a quick and cheap way to gain a certain class of experience points.
Just try it / just test yourself
Scholarship was warm and comfy, so I stayed in scholar mode for too long. I hit diminishing returns in what books could teach me. Every book on dating skills told me to go talk to women, but I thought I needed a completed decision tree first: What if she does this? What if she says that? I won't know what to do if I don't have a plan! I should read 10 more books, so I know how to handle every contingency.
The dating books told me I would think that, but I told myself I was unusually analytical, and could actually benefit from completing the decision tree in advance of actually talking to women.
The dating books told me I would think that, too, and that it was just a rationalization. Really, I was just nervous about the blows my ego would receive from newbie mistakes.
Rationality Lesson: Be especially suspicious of rationalizations for not obeying the empiricist rules "try it and see what happens" or "test yourself to see what happens" or "get some concrete experience on the ground". Think of the cost of time happening as a result of rationalizing. Consider the opportunities you are missing if you don't just realize you're wrong right now and change course. How many months or years will your life be less awesome as a result? How many opportunities will you miss while you're still (kinda) young?
Use science, and maybe drugs
The dating books told me to swallow my fear and talk to women. I couldn't swallow my fear, so I tried swallowing brandy instead. That worked.
So I went out and talked to women, mostly at coffee shops or on the street. I learned all kinds of interesting details I hadn't learned in the books about what makes an interaction fun for most women:
After a while, I could talk to women even without the brandy. And a little after that, I had my first one-night stand, which was great because it was exactly what she and I wanted.
But as time passed I was surprised by how much I didn't enjoy casual flings. I didn't feel engaged when I didn't know and didn't have much in common with the girl in my bed. I had gone in thinking all I wanted was sex, but it turned out that I wanted connection to another person. (And sex.)
Rationality Lesson: Use empiricism and do-it-yourself science. Just try things. No, seriously.
Self-modify to succeed
By this time my misgivings about the idea of "owning" another's sexuality had led me to adopt a polyamorous mindset for myself. (I saw many other people apparently happy with monogamy, but it wasn't for me.) But if I was going to be polyamorous, I needed to deprogram my sexual jealousy, which sounded daunting. Sexual jealousy was hard-wired into me by evolution, right?
It turned out to be easier than I had predicted. Tactics that helped me destroy my capacity for sexual jealousy include:
This lack of sexual jealousy came in handy when I later dated a polyamorous girl who was already dating two of my friends.
Rationality Lesson: Have a sense that more is possible. Know that you haven't yet reached the limits of self-modification. Try things. Let your map of what is possible be constrained by evidence, not by popular opinion.
Finale
There might have been a learning curve, but by golly, at the end of all that DIY science and rationality training and scholarship I'm much more romantically capable, I'm free to take up relationships when I want, I know fashion well enough to teach it at rationality camps, and I can build rapport with almost anyone. My hair looks good and I'm happy.
If you're a nerd-at-heart like me, I highly recommend becoming a nerd about romance, so long as you read the right nerd books and you know the nerd rule about being empirical. Rationality is for winning.
* My thanks to everyone who commented on earlier drafts of this post. Here are the biggest changes I made: