I don’t know how to simply describe it. I don’t know what even to say here.
One thing I can say is that the post formalized the idea of having “more agency” or “less agency”, in terms of “what facts about the world can I force to be true?”. The more I approach the world by stating things that are going to happen, that I can’t change, the more I’m boxing-in my agency over the world. The more I treat constraints as things I could fight to change, the more I have power and agency over the world. If I can’t imagine a fact being false, I don’t have agency over it. (This applies to mathematical and logical claims too, which ties into logical induction and decision theory.)
Anyway, that was a big deal — the first few times I read the math of cartesian frames I didn’t get the idea at all, then after seeing some examples and reflecting on it, it clicked and helped me understand this whole thing better.
(Also that Scott has formalized it is very valuable and impressive, and even more so is this notion of factorizations of a set and the apparently new sequence he discovered which is insane and can’t be true. Factorization of a set seems like the third thing you’d invent about sets once you thought of the idea, and if Scott discovered it in 2020 I’ll be like wtaf.)
(But this is not the primary reason I’m endorsing it in the review. The primary reason is that it captures something that seems philosophically important to me.)
In retrospect I’m bumping this up to a +9 for the review. I didn’t think about it properly in the early vote, and it’s a lot of technical stuff and I forgot about the core concepts I got from it.
Introduction to Cartesian Frames is a piece that also gave me a new philosophical perspective on my life.
I don’t know how to simply describe it. I don’t know what even to say here.
One thing I can say is that the post formalized the idea of having “more agency” or “less agency”, in terms of “what facts about the world can I force to be true?”. The more I approach the world by stating things that are going to happen, that I can’t change, the more I’m boxing-in my agency over the world. The more I treat constraints as things I could fight to change, the more I have power and agency over the world. If I can’t imagine a fact being false, I don’t have agency over it. (This applies to mathematical and logical claims too, which ties into logical induction and decision theory.)
Writing the last sentence I realize the idea is one with the post I wrote “Taking your environment as object” vs “Being subject to your environment” which is another chunk of this element of growth I’ve experienced in the last year.
Anyway, that was a big deal — the first few times I read the math of cartesian frames I didn’t get the idea at all, then after seeing some examples and reflecting on it, it clicked and helped me understand this whole thing better.
(Also that Scott has formalized it is very valuable and impressive, and even more so is this notion of factorizations of a set and the apparently new sequence he discovered which is insane and can’t be true. Factorization of a set seems like the third thing you’d invent about sets once you thought of the idea, and if Scott discovered it in 2020 I’ll be like wtaf.)
(But this is not the primary reason I’m endorsing it in the review. The primary reason is that it captures something that seems philosophically important to me.)
In retrospect I’m bumping this up to a +9 for the review. I didn’t think about it properly in the early vote, and it’s a lot of technical stuff and I forgot about the core concepts I got from it.
(This review is taken from my post Ben Pace’s Controversial Picks for the 2020 Review.)