I don’t necessarily disagree that this dichotomy exists; but this way of looking at it feels exagerated. People tend to do what gets rewarded. We get rewarded for saying factually correct things, so we build maps around what is factually correct. Other people get rewarded for saying emotionally correct things, so they build maps around what is emotionally correct. It is still a map though. I’m not necessarily certain it’s a bad map. It makes them happy, it can build a good sense of community, and generally matches something humans have loved and chased since before we even evolved into humans. I’d bet on about 3:2 odds they average happier than us.
It is useful to have a post detailing how some people use their maps to describe territories other than factuality along with how to talk to those people. This has about two sentences about those interactions and a lot of “did you know the outgroup can’t even think abstractly?”
Insofar as we are “overthinking things,” they seem to agree that they think less in certain ways. That’s purely descriptive, which was my whole purpose. Normal people tend to use system 2 and abstraction less, near as I can tell.
If I were to get prescriptive, I’d agree that nerds tend to use System 2 at some times when they should use System 1. Neither system is unequivocally superior, though, since it’s a spectrum, I wonder if there are some lucky souls who’s dispositions land at the sweet spot in the middle.
As for calling the normal person’s system of caching thoughts according to social advantage...it doesn’t seem very map-like to me. I mean, you can call it a map if you like, but the key distinction to understand is that at one extreme, we have an attempt to accurately describe the universe, and at the other extreme, an attempt to maximize social status, with real people falling somewhere in the middle, and the minority which are strongly biased towards accurately describing the universe called “nerds.”
Oh, and the difficult part is to realize that the status-maximizing answers resemble descriptions of reality, so you have to be careful about interpretation, and remember to consider the status-maximizing hypothesis when you hear someone giving logically contradictory answers without caring to fix the contradictions when they find them.
This seems related to something I’ve been thinking about recently: That the concept of “belief” would benefit from an analysis along the lines of How an Algorithm Feels from the Inside. What we describe as our “beliefs” are sometimes a map of the world (in the beliefs-paying-rent sense), and sometimes a signal to our social group that we share their map of the world, and sometimes a declaration of values, and probably sometimes other (often contradictory) things as well. But we act as if there’s a single mental concept underlying them. The ambiguities are hard to shake out, I think because the signal version is only useful if it pretends to be the map version.
(I feel sour about human nature whenever I start thinking about this, because it leaves me feeling like almost all communication is either speaking in bad faith, or displaying a complete lack of intellectual integrity, or both)
I don’t necessarily disagree that this dichotomy exists; but this way of looking at it feels exagerated. People tend to do what gets rewarded. We get rewarded for saying factually correct things, so we build maps around what is factually correct. Other people get rewarded for saying emotionally correct things, so they build maps around what is emotionally correct. It is still a map though. I’m not necessarily certain it’s a bad map. It makes them happy, it can build a good sense of community, and generally matches something humans have loved and chased since before we even evolved into humans. I’d bet on about 3:2 odds they average happier than us.
It is useful to have a post detailing how some people use their maps to describe territories other than factuality along with how to talk to those people. This has about two sentences about those interactions and a lot of “did you know the outgroup can’t even think abstractly?”
Insofar as we are “overthinking things,” they seem to agree that they think less in certain ways. That’s purely descriptive, which was my whole purpose. Normal people tend to use system 2 and abstraction less, near as I can tell.
If I were to get prescriptive, I’d agree that nerds tend to use System 2 at some times when they should use System 1. Neither system is unequivocally superior, though, since it’s a spectrum, I wonder if there are some lucky souls who’s dispositions land at the sweet spot in the middle.
As for calling the normal person’s system of caching thoughts according to social advantage...it doesn’t seem very map-like to me. I mean, you can call it a map if you like, but the key distinction to understand is that at one extreme, we have an attempt to accurately describe the universe, and at the other extreme, an attempt to maximize social status, with real people falling somewhere in the middle, and the minority which are strongly biased towards accurately describing the universe called “nerds.”
Oh, and the difficult part is to realize that the status-maximizing answers resemble descriptions of reality, so you have to be careful about interpretation, and remember to consider the status-maximizing hypothesis when you hear someone giving logically contradictory answers without caring to fix the contradictions when they find them.
This seems related to something I’ve been thinking about recently: That the concept of “belief” would benefit from an analysis along the lines of How an Algorithm Feels from the Inside. What we describe as our “beliefs” are sometimes a map of the world (in the beliefs-paying-rent sense), and sometimes a signal to our social group that we share their map of the world, and sometimes a declaration of values, and probably sometimes other (often contradictory) things as well. But we act as if there’s a single mental concept underlying them. The ambiguities are hard to shake out, I think because the signal version is only useful if it pretends to be the map version.
(I feel sour about human nature whenever I start thinking about this, because it leaves me feeling like almost all communication is either speaking in bad faith, or displaying a complete lack of intellectual integrity, or both)