When I previously explored frames, I was mostly thinking through the lens of “how do people fail to communicate.” I like that this post goes into the more positively-focused “what are frames useful for, and how might you design a good frame on purpose?”. Much discussion of frames on LW has been a bit vague and woo-y. I like that this post frames Frames as a technical product, and approaches it from an engineering mindset. (i.e. pushes the Art of Frame Design a bit towards becoming the Science of Frame Design)
The main thing I’d like to see from this post is more examples – it mostly focuses the example of Shannon’s Information Theory. I actually quite liked Said Achmiz’s comment about this which came up in Aella’s Frame Control comments:
One major objection I had when reading was: “aren’t you just talking about discovering various important truths (and then figuring out important consequences of those truths)?” Wentworth gestures at this in one or two places, but does not really grapple with it.
After reading the post, I still don’t see any particularly good reason to think of things in terms of “frames”. (It’s perhaps notable that there are no examples given either of competing “frames” which are, in some sense, both “correct”, nor of any cases of intentionally creating a useful “frame”—this despite the section on creating frames!)
I am increasingly convinced that this “frame” business is a red herring.
I think to push frame-design into a true science/engineering discipline, it’s valuable to be as thorough as Said (implicitly?) asking in this comment. More examples would both make it more persuasive to “frame skeptics”, and more useful to aspiring frame-engineers. My Noticing Frame Differences post and Picture Frames, Window Frames and Frameworks followup did list lots of examples, but the examples weren’t optimized for being the sort of thing you could build an engineering discipline out of.
This post is pretty important to me. “Understanding frames” and “Understanding coordination theory” are like my two favorite things, and this post ties them together.
When I previously explored frames, I was mostly thinking through the lens of “how do people fail to communicate.” I like that this post goes into the more positively-focused “what are frames useful for, and how might you design a good frame on purpose?”. Much discussion of frames on LW has been a bit vague and woo-y. I like that this post frames Frames as a technical product, and approaches it from an engineering mindset. (i.e. pushes the Art of Frame Design a bit towards becoming the Science of Frame Design)
The main thing I’d like to see from this post is more examples – it mostly focuses the example of Shannon’s Information Theory. I actually quite liked Said Achmiz’s comment about this which came up in Aella’s Frame Control comments:
I think to push frame-design into a true science/engineering discipline, it’s valuable to be as thorough as Said (implicitly?) asking in this comment. More examples would both make it more persuasive to “frame skeptics”, and more useful to aspiring frame-engineers. My Noticing Frame Differences post and Picture Frames, Window Frames and Frameworks followup did list lots of examples, but the examples weren’t optimized for being the sort of thing you could build an engineering discipline out of.