Rough and Smooth

J Bostock
Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:31:01 GMT

A load-bearing concept in my mental language is texture-of-experience. This sits on an axis from rough to smooth. I'm writing this here as a handle to look back on.

Here are some examples of rough/smooth pairs. Some are triples, ordered from roughest to smoothest.

Being driven somewhere in an ... Uber/Waymo

Reading a ... book/book review/book review by your favourite reviewer

Having sex with someone for ... the first time/the hundredth time

Getting directions from ... a real map/Google maps

Listening to ... live music/recorded music

Going for a ... cycle/drive

Exercising with ... actual manual labour/free weights/machines

Eating a burger made of ... real meat/fake meat

Rough experiences contain information on many different levels, while smooth experiences (usually) only contain one level of information. This isn't quite the same thing as sensuality; the texture can also come from medium-level information. For example, reading a book review isn't any less sensual than reading a book, but it does screen off some of the author's particular weird word choices and style.

(Experiences might also be rougher by containing more high level information, compared to an experience which only contains low-level information, but it's rare. Maybe watching TikToks of movie clips vs watching the movie itself would count?)

Smoothness is also a distinct concept from whether something is the human equivalent of wireheading. Lots of wireheading-ish things are fairly smooth at the moment (brainrot TikToks, heroin) but this might not always be the case. The closest experience I've ever had to wireheading would count as rough on this scale (no I won't tell you).

An Example

What got me to finally write this post up was a desire to expand on a comment I wrote a few months ago, about one of the usages of AI which upsets me, personally, in an idiosyncratic way which is probably a little stronger than I endorse:

...Merlin, the app which identifies birds from their song (and/or pictures, I think; there's certainly an app which does the latter as well). As an avid birder, I find this app unbelievably offensive for reasons which are deeply embedded in my soul: I have a very strong feeling that one is supposed to learn to identify birds from some mixture of random YouTube videos, one's father's old cassettes, and random old men down the bird hides...

Using Merlin to identify birds is a smooth experience, because the only information you get is the species of bird in the area. Every instance of using it is basically the same. You get screened off from what the bird is doing, its age, sex. Every person using it has basically the same experience.

It's slightly rougher to ID a bird from a photo that you took than from a sound, because you do at least have to successfully take the picture, which requires interacting with some of the world around you.

Another Example

I'm somewhat against rat-style book reviews, especially for fiction. Rationalist-style book reviews aren't really reviews; the point of them isn't to rate the book out of ten and help you decide whether to read them. The point of rat-style book reviews is to try and get 80% of the value of the book in 20% of the time.

This kinda works for non-fiction. Without having read 100 pages of why the author has concluded something, you've just pulled a hanging node into your graph. Your beliefs in the book's assertions won't grow back. Whoops! I've felt this a couple of times when discussing a book (that I've read Scott Alexander's review of) with my partner. I'll say what the book said, and my partner will ask why. And I'll just have to say "uhh, Scott said he gave examples".

It's even worse for fiction. Part of a fiction book's benefit is its higher-order philosophical information, but a lot is the mid-level and low-level information too. Getting inside a character's head, or just actually appreciating the quality prose. Reading a book review of fiction is like reading a description of a painting.

This needs to be balanced against the fact that yes, it does take 1/10th the time to read a review than to read an actual book.

But is Rough Actually Good?

I've been talking about rough experiences as if they're a fundamental good. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. In part it seems like I terminally value the fact that people have high-information-density rough experiences, and get to talk about them. I think I'd like the world less if everyone had much smoother experiences.

One line of argument would go "I don't know why I have this terminal value, but it feels like this is the kind of terminal value which is heuristically pointing at a real, instrumental effect which I don't yet understand."

Another line of argument says that more information input to a learning system is pretty much always good.

Another line of argument goes like this: rougher an experience is, the more frequently it contains small unpleasantnesses (because unpleasantness is a kind of information). Frequent, small, unpleasant experiences end up negatively reinforcing the experience, making one less likely to do it again, therefore the optimal amount of rough experiences might well be higher than what we have today. (I think autistic people have particularly low capacity to handle low-level sensory information)

Another goes like this: you need some rough experiences to build resilience.

Another goes like this: it builds character.

In conclusion: try indexing on rough and smooth to classify your experiences. See if your life is low on rough experiences. Consider whether you would benefit from more rough experiences, if you have the capacity to experience more of them.

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