I think it also makes sense to do it for the purpose of making other people feel safe and sending signals that you are protecting them. In the Charisma framework outlined in the Charisma myth it would be a way to signal high warmth by signaling to someone else, “I want to give you this space, and I am going to protect you from others taking it”. Gift-giving often seems to be associated with making yourself temporarily small, even if you are high status.
Yes, agree. Said, if you didn’t read it before, you may also want to read the long quote I posted from the book where I got this concept—in the quote, Harry’s trying to convey to the filly (completely truthfully) that she is not in danger and he is not going to hurt her.
(To preempt the obvious objection that he’s only doing that so that later he can dominate and exploit her, I say yes, good job being cynical, but I really strongly claim that that’s not how this school of horsemanship works. The best recommendation I have if you’re still skeptical is to watch the documentary “Buck”, which I linked to in the notes after the post. An 80⁄20 of that might be to watch some of the trailers on YouTube.)
Well, to be honest, the horse metaphors/examples/whatever don’t really resonate with me. I’m not sure what to do with them, truth be told. The fact is that people aren’t horses. Dealing with a person—who can think about what you’re doing, and understand your motivations, and modify their own behavior accordingly, and draw on reputation, and prior knowledge, and rumor, and possesses all those wonderful evolved psychological adaptations for dealing with other humans in social situations, etc.—is not like dealing with a horse, or any similar sort of animal. (I mean, if your analogies involved chimpanzees, I’d still be dubious, but less so—but horses…?)
Oh huh, that’s interesting. I was expecting people to resonate less with the horse examples than I do, but it sounds like you don’t find them helpful whatsoever, which I find kind of surprising.
In the specific case of horses, I think my intuition that they can provide helpful info about humans would probably be hard to explain from scratch—it’s based on a lot of small examples of me comparing and testing things in my own experience.
More generally though, I’m curious if you find people talking about our “reptile brain” or “monkey brain” to be similarly useless? I agree with you that chimps are a better approximation of humans than either horses or crocodiles, but “social mammal brain” seems to me to fit naturally between “reptile” and “monkey” in the space of evolutionarily-valid-seeming claims-of-analogy. It’s absolutely true that these analogies are a long way from perfect—a prefrontal cortex changes a huge amount of how we respond to reptilian urges, and language changes a huge amount of how we engage in monkey status games—but that doesn’t seem to me to undercut their usefulness as analogies/inspirations.
(I’ll also note that my previous comment was about a human’s attitude/intention towards a horse, which seems like it *is* relevant to the question in your previous comment about reasons for high/small, but that’s a separate and less fundamental question.)
More generally though, I’m curious if you find people talking about our “reptile brain” or “monkey brain” to be similarly useless?
I do indeed (and in fact I find this verbal/conceptual habit to be rather annoying).
The thing about analogical thinking is that it can be very dangerous—in several ways, but in one particularly insidious one: it’s easy to forget to tie the argument back to the actual thing you’re talking about. In other words, what I often see is that someone will say “ok, now imagine [some analogy]… in this scenario, blah blah… and therefore, blah blah… and so obviously, blah blah…”—and throughout all of this, they’re still talk about the analogy! I read such things, and I think: “ok, yes, now how do all of your claims, arguments, conclusions, etc., look when you translate them back to the real thing that all of this is an analogy for?”
In other words, analogies are good if they’re used as scaffolding, so to speak, to clarify the shape of an argument or a model, to help your interlocutor understand what you’re saying about reality.[1] But you had better actually have a real argument, with claims about real things, etc.! If you just have the analogy, and all your reasoning is in the analogy-world, and all your conclusions are in the analogy-world, then that’s useless at best, and tremendously misleading at worst. Analogical thinking cannot replace reasoning about the real world. If it does that, then it’s detrimental, not helpful.
[1] The proper structure, therefore, goes like this:
“I am making an argument that [insert claim about reality]. As an analogy, consider [analogical scenario]; in that case, we can see that [reasoning in the analogy-world]; and therefore, [conclusion in the analogy-world]. And so in reality: [analogous reasoning in the real world]; and therefore, [conclusion in the real world].”
In the specific case of horses, I think my intuition that they can provide helpful info about humans would probably be hard to explain from scratch—it’s based on a lot of small examples of me comparing and testing things in my own experience.
I sympathize with the difficulty of conveying such experiential knowledge, but then I think that this is the crux of the matter. This might be a situation where you just can’t effectively convey your epistemic state—virtuous though it may be (or not, I don’t know, but certainly I have no specific reason to believe otherwise)—in a blog post.
I think it also makes sense to do it for the purpose of making other people feel safe and sending signals that you are protecting them. In the Charisma framework outlined in the Charisma myth it would be a way to signal high warmth by signaling to someone else, “I want to give you this space, and I am going to protect you from others taking it”. Gift-giving often seems to be associated with making yourself temporarily small, even if you are high status.
Yes, agree. Said, if you didn’t read it before, you may also want to read the long quote I posted from the book where I got this concept—in the quote, Harry’s trying to convey to the filly (completely truthfully) that she is not in danger and he is not going to hurt her.
(To preempt the obvious objection that he’s only doing that so that later he can dominate and exploit her, I say yes, good job being cynical, but I really strongly claim that that’s not how this school of horsemanship works. The best recommendation I have if you’re still skeptical is to watch the documentary “Buck”, which I linked to in the notes after the post. An 80⁄20 of that might be to watch some of the trailers on YouTube.)
Well, to be honest, the horse metaphors/examples/whatever don’t really resonate with me. I’m not sure what to do with them, truth be told. The fact is that people aren’t horses. Dealing with a person—who can think about what you’re doing, and understand your motivations, and modify their own behavior accordingly, and draw on reputation, and prior knowledge, and rumor, and possesses all those wonderful evolved psychological adaptations for dealing with other humans in social situations, etc.—is not like dealing with a horse, or any similar sort of animal. (I mean, if your analogies involved chimpanzees, I’d still be dubious, but less so—but horses…?)
Oh huh, that’s interesting. I was expecting people to resonate less with the horse examples than I do, but it sounds like you don’t find them helpful whatsoever, which I find kind of surprising.
In the specific case of horses, I think my intuition that they can provide helpful info about humans would probably be hard to explain from scratch—it’s based on a lot of small examples of me comparing and testing things in my own experience.
More generally though, I’m curious if you find people talking about our “reptile brain” or “monkey brain” to be similarly useless? I agree with you that chimps are a better approximation of humans than either horses or crocodiles, but “social mammal brain” seems to me to fit naturally between “reptile” and “monkey” in the space of evolutionarily-valid-seeming claims-of-analogy. It’s absolutely true that these analogies are a long way from perfect—a prefrontal cortex changes a huge amount of how we respond to reptilian urges, and language changes a huge amount of how we engage in monkey status games—but that doesn’t seem to me to undercut their usefulness as analogies/inspirations.
(I’ll also note that my previous comment was about a human’s attitude/intention towards a horse, which seems like it *is* relevant to the question in your previous comment about reasons for high/small, but that’s a separate and less fundamental question.)
I do indeed (and in fact I find this verbal/conceptual habit to be rather annoying).
The thing about analogical thinking is that it can be very dangerous—in several ways, but in one particularly insidious one: it’s easy to forget to tie the argument back to the actual thing you’re talking about. In other words, what I often see is that someone will say “ok, now imagine [some analogy]… in this scenario, blah blah… and therefore, blah blah… and so obviously, blah blah…”—and throughout all of this, they’re still talk about the analogy! I read such things, and I think: “ok, yes, now how do all of your claims, arguments, conclusions, etc., look when you translate them back to the real thing that all of this is an analogy for?”
In other words, analogies are good if they’re used as scaffolding, so to speak, to clarify the shape of an argument or a model, to help your interlocutor understand what you’re saying about reality.[1] But you had better actually have a real argument, with claims about real things, etc.! If you just have the analogy, and all your reasoning is in the analogy-world, and all your conclusions are in the analogy-world, then that’s useless at best, and tremendously misleading at worst. Analogical thinking cannot replace reasoning about the real world. If it does that, then it’s detrimental, not helpful.
[1] The proper structure, therefore, goes like this:
“I am making an argument that [insert claim about reality]. As an analogy, consider [analogical scenario]; in that case, we can see that [reasoning in the analogy-world]; and therefore, [conclusion in the analogy-world]. And so in reality: [analogous reasoning in the real world]; and therefore, [conclusion in the real world].”
Separately:
I sympathize with the difficulty of conveying such experiential knowledge, but then I think that this is the crux of the matter. This might be a situation where you just can’t effectively convey your epistemic state—virtuous though it may be (or not, I don’t know, but certainly I have no specific reason to believe otherwise)—in a blog post.