Part of the reason “the fallacy of gray” is a thing that happens is that advice like that can be a useful and healthy thing for people who are genuinely not thinking in a great way.
Adding gray to the palette can be a helpful baby step in actual practice.
Then very very similar words to this helpful advice can also be used to “merely score debate points” on people who have a point about “X is good and Y is bad”. This is where the “fallacy” occurs… but I don’t think the fallacy would occur if it didn’t have the “plausible cover” that arises from the helpful version.
A typical fallacy of gray says something like “everything is gray, therefore lets take no action and stop worrying about this stuff entirely”.
One possible difference, that distinguishes “better gray” from “worse gray” is whether you’re advocating for fewer than 2 or more than 2 categories.
Compare: “instead of two categories (black and white), how about more than two categories (black and white and gray), or maybe even five (pure black, dark gray, gray, light gray, pure white), or how about we calculate the actual value of the alternatives with actual axiological math which in some sense gives us infinite categories… oh! and even better the math might be consistent with various standards like VNM rationality and Kelly and so on… this is starting to sound hard… let’s only do this for the really important questions maybe, otherwise we might get bogged down in calculations and never do anything… <does quick math> <acts!>”
My list of “reasons to vote up or down” was provided partly for this reason.
I wanted to be clear that comments could be compared, and if better comments had lower scores than worse comments that implied that the quantitative processes of summing up a bunch of votes might not be super well calibrated, and could be improved via saner aggregate behavior.
Also the raw score is likely less important than the relative score.
Also, numerous factors are relevant and different factors can cut in opposite ways… it depends on framing, and different people bring different frames, and that’s probably OK.
I often have more than one frame in my head at the same time, and it is kinda annoying, but I think maybe it helps me make fewer mistakes? Sometimes? I hope?
Phrasings like “And why would a good and sane person ever [...]” seem to prepare to mark individuals for rejection. And again it has a question word but doesn’t read like a question.
It was a purposefully pointed and slightly unfair question. I didn’t predict that Duncan would be able to answer it well (though I hoped he would chill out give a good answer and then we could high five, or something).
If he answered in various bad ways (that I feared/predicted), then I was ready with secondary and tertiary criticisms.
I wasn’t expecting him to just totally dodge it.
To answer my own question: cops are an example of people who can be good and sane even though they go around hurting people.
However, cops do this mostly only while wearing a certain uniform, while adhering to written standards, and while under the supervision of elected officials who are also following written standards. Also, all the written standards were written by still other people who were elected, and the relevant texts are available for anyone to read. Also, courts have examined many many real world examples, and made judgement calls, with copious commentary, illustrating how the written guidelines can be applied to various complex situations.
The people cops hurt, when they are doing “a good job imposing costs on bad behavior” are people who are committing relatively well defined crimes that judges and juries and so on would agree are bad, and which violate definitions written by people who were elected, etc.
My general theory here is that vigilantism (and many other ways of organizing herds of humans) is relatively bad and “right’s respecting rule of law” (generated by the formal consent of the governed), is the best succinct formula I know of for virtuous people to engage in virtuous self rule.
In general, I think governors should be very very very very careful about imposing costs and imposing sanctions for unclear reasons rather than providing public infrastructure and granting clear freedoms.
There is another phenomenon that also gets referred to as “black and white thinking” that has more to do with rigidity of thought. The mechanisms of that are different. I am bit unsure whether it has a more standard name and wanted to find fact information but only found an opinon piece where at number 5 there is a differential between that and splitting.
I do recognise how the text fills recognition criteria for splitting and the worry seems reasonable but to me it sounds more like splitting hairs. The kind of thing were I would argue that within probability zero there is difference between “almost never” and “actually never” and for some thing it would make or break things.
If you look at some of the neighboring text, I have some mathematical arguments about what the chances are for N people to all independently play “stag” such that no one plays rabbit and everyone gets the “stag reward”.
If 3 people flip coins, all three coins come up “stag” quite often. If a “stag” is worth roughly 8 times as much as a rabbit, you could still sanely “play stag hunt” with 2 other people whose skill at stag was “50% of the time they are perfect”.
But if they are less skilled than that, or there are more of them, the stag had better be very very very valuable.
If 1000 people flip coins then “pure stag” comes up one in every 9.33x10^302 times. Thus, de facto, stag hunts fail at large N except for one of those “dumb and dumber” kind of things where you hear the one possible coin pattern that gives the stag reward and treat this as good news and say “so you’re telling me there’s a chance!”
I think stag hunts are one of these places where the exact same formal mathematical model gives wildly different pragmatic results depending on N, and the probability of success, and the value of the stag… and you have to actually do the math, not rely on emotions and hunches to get the right result via the wisdom one one’s brainstem and subconscious and feelings and so on.
Coin flips are an absolutely inappropriate model for stag hunts; people choosing stag and rabbit are not independent in the way that coin flips are independent; that’s the whole point. Incentives drive everyone toward rabbit; agreements drive people toward stag. All of the reasoning descending from the choice to model things as coin flips is therefore useless.
“Black and white thinking” is another name for a reasonably well defined cognitive tendency that often occurs in proximity to reasonably common mental problems.
Part of the reason “the fallacy of gray” is a thing that happens is that advice like that can be a useful and healthy thing for people who are genuinely not thinking in a great way.
Adding gray to the palette can be a helpful baby step in actual practice.
Then very very similar words to this helpful advice can also be used to “merely score debate points” on people who have a point about “X is good and Y is bad”. This is where the “fallacy” occurs… but I don’t think the fallacy would occur if it didn’t have the “plausible cover” that arises from the helpful version.
A typical fallacy of gray says something like “everything is gray, therefore lets take no action and stop worrying about this stuff entirely”.
One possible difference, that distinguishes “better gray” from “worse gray” is whether you’re advocating for fewer than 2 or more than 2 categories.
Compare: “instead of two categories (black and white), how about more than two categories (black and white and gray), or maybe even five (pure black, dark gray, gray, light gray, pure white), or how about we calculate the actual value of the alternatives with actual axiological math which in some sense gives us infinite categories… oh! and even better the math might be consistent with various standards like VNM rationality and Kelly and so on… this is starting to sound hard… let’s only do this for the really important questions maybe, otherwise we might get bogged down in calculations and never do anything… <does quick math> <acts!>”
My list of “reasons to vote up or down” was provided partly for this reason.
I wanted to be clear that comments could be compared, and if better comments had lower scores than worse comments that implied that the quantitative processes of summing up a bunch of votes might not be super well calibrated, and could be improved via saner aggregate behavior.
Also the raw score is likely less important than the relative score.
Also, numerous factors are relevant and different factors can cut in opposite ways… it depends on framing, and different people bring different frames, and that’s probably OK.
I often have more than one frame in my head at the same time, and it is kinda annoying, but I think maybe it helps me make fewer mistakes? Sometimes? I hope?
It was a purposefully pointed and slightly unfair question. I didn’t predict that Duncan would be able to answer it well (though I hoped he would chill out give a good answer and then we could high five, or something).
If he answered in various bad ways (that I feared/predicted), then I was ready with secondary and tertiary criticisms.
I wasn’t expecting him to just totally dodge it.
To answer my own question: cops are an example of people who can be good and sane even though they go around hurting people.
However, cops do this mostly only while wearing a certain uniform, while adhering to written standards, and while under the supervision of elected officials who are also following written standards. Also, all the written standards were written by still other people who were elected, and the relevant texts are available for anyone to read. Also, courts have examined many many real world examples, and made judgement calls, with copious commentary, illustrating how the written guidelines can be applied to various complex situations.
The people cops hurt, when they are doing “a good job imposing costs on bad behavior” are people who are committing relatively well defined crimes that judges and juries and so on would agree are bad, and which violate definitions written by people who were elected, etc.
My general theory here is that vigilantism (and many other ways of organizing herds of humans) is relatively bad and “right’s respecting rule of law” (generated by the formal consent of the governed), is the best succinct formula I know of for virtuous people to engage in virtuous self rule.
In general, I think governors should be very very very very careful about imposing costs and imposing sanctions for unclear reasons rather than providing public infrastructure and granting clear freedoms.
There is another phenomenon that also gets referred to as “black and white thinking” that has more to do with rigidity of thought. The mechanisms of that are different. I am bit unsure whether it has a more standard name and wanted to find fact information but only found an opinon piece where at number 5 there is a differential between that and splitting.
I do recognise how the text fills recognition criteria for splitting and the worry seems reasonable but to me it sounds more like splitting hairs. The kind of thing were I would argue that within probability zero there is difference between “almost never” and “actually never” and for some thing it would make or break things.
If you look at some of the neighboring text, I have some mathematical arguments about what the chances are for N people to all independently play “stag” such that no one plays rabbit and everyone gets the “stag reward”.
If 3 people flip coins, all three coins come up “stag” quite often. If a “stag” is worth roughly 8 times as much as a rabbit, you could still sanely “play stag hunt” with 2 other people whose skill at stag was “50% of the time they are perfect”.
But if they are less skilled than that, or there are more of them, the stag had better be very very very valuable.
If 1000 people flip coins then “pure stag” comes up one in every 9.33x10^302 times. Thus, de facto, stag hunts fail at large N except for one of those “dumb and dumber” kind of things where you hear the one possible coin pattern that gives the stag reward and treat this as good news and say “so you’re telling me there’s a chance!”
I think stag hunts are one of these places where the exact same formal mathematical model gives wildly different pragmatic results depending on N, and the probability of success, and the value of the stag… and you have to actually do the math, not rely on emotions and hunches to get the right result via the wisdom one one’s brainstem and subconscious and feelings and so on.
Coin flips are an absolutely inappropriate model for stag hunts; people choosing stag and rabbit are not independent in the way that coin flips are independent; that’s the whole point. Incentives drive everyone toward rabbit; agreements drive people toward stag. All of the reasoning descending from the choice to model things as coin flips is therefore useless.