I notice that there seem to be two points to this post:
If we define X differently for each person, then everybody can be “above average at X.”
Translators between people’s different ways of expressing themselves are an important social role.
One question I wanted to clear up: is the translator’s role primarily to keep people who actually agree from getting confused over linguistic and cultural differences? Or is it to allow people who have different and contradictory predictive models, as well as different ways of expressing those models, to share and reconcile their models? Both?
Also, I couldn’t quite follow how point (1) relates to point (2). It seems like the key disagreement between Shor and Constance is not over who they think is generally better at real-world reasoning. It was over what should be done in concrete political decisions in Obama’s campaign. The resolution didn’t come from Shor and Constance realizing that they were just competent at two different aspects of “real-world reasoning,” right? It came from Shor realizing that Constance was usually correct in predicting the future, and that he was ignoring her because she didn’t speak his language.
This post also made me think about the ideological Turing test, which strikes me as kind of a crappy bad-faith perversion of translation. Instead of attempting to get past linguistic barriers to share and reconcile predictive models to perform useful work, the participants have no meaningful shared task and instead want to set up a formal display of the emptiness of their respective rhetorics.
Yeah, I agree that the post isn’t quite sequential. Most of Section II isn’t necessary for any of the translator stuff—it’s just that I thought it was an interesting possible explanation of “alike minds think great” bias. (This somewhat disconnected logical structure was a hangup I had about the post; I was considering publishing it as two separate posts but decided not to.)
But, what I was trying to say about Shor and Constance and their need for a translator is: regardless of whether Shor underestimated Constance and vice versa because of this bias, they weren’t in a position to understand each other’s arguments. A translator’s job is to make them understand each other (convert their thoughts into a language that’s easily understandable by the other). This allows for reconciliation, because instead of Shor seeing his own argument and “black box Constance belief which I should update on even though I don’t understand it”, he sees his own argument and “Constance argument translated into Shor language”, which he now has a much better idea what to do with. (And likewise symmetrically for Constance.)
That message seems in step with the theme of the need to better communicate science, anxieties about basing decisions on black-box AI algorithms, and controversy over how much to take expert opinion on faith.
You know, with Scott’s posts, I often get the impression not that he’s translating a thoughtful model in a language I don’t understand, but that he’s modeling social dynamics that the participants themselves don’t understand.
Take the “right is the new left” post. I really doubt that anyone participating in fashion has anything like that model in mind. Instead, a designer has the demands of a specific segment of society in mind, and tailors their product to suit. They’re not analyzing macro trends to decide how to do their shirts. They have a way of putting out clothes that works for their corner of the industry, in terms of how much it changes year to year, what other shops they look to to.
Even if the macro trends in fashion line up perfectly with Scott’s mode, I don’t think anybody in fashion has the equivalent in their head and is thoughtfully using it to base their decision.
By contrast, I think that Shor and Constance probably both do have models in their head, and that Shor’s mature take on Constance’s model does reflect her thought process.
So I’d distinguish between a translator like Shor and someone like Scott, who’s an analyst but not necessarily a translator.
I notice that there seem to be two points to this post:
If we define X differently for each person, then everybody can be “above average at X.”
Translators between people’s different ways of expressing themselves are an important social role.
One question I wanted to clear up: is the translator’s role primarily to keep people who actually agree from getting confused over linguistic and cultural differences? Or is it to allow people who have different and contradictory predictive models, as well as different ways of expressing those models, to share and reconcile their models? Both?
Also, I couldn’t quite follow how point (1) relates to point (2). It seems like the key disagreement between Shor and Constance is not over who they think is generally better at real-world reasoning. It was over what should be done in concrete political decisions in Obama’s campaign. The resolution didn’t come from Shor and Constance realizing that they were just competent at two different aspects of “real-world reasoning,” right? It came from Shor realizing that Constance was usually correct in predicting the future, and that he was ignoring her because she didn’t speak his language.
This post also made me think about the ideological Turing test, which strikes me as kind of a crappy bad-faith perversion of translation. Instead of attempting to get past linguistic barriers to share and reconcile predictive models to perform useful work, the participants have no meaningful shared task and instead want to set up a formal display of the emptiness of their respective rhetorics.
Yeah, I agree that the post isn’t quite sequential. Most of Section II isn’t necessary for any of the translator stuff—it’s just that I thought it was an interesting possible explanation of “alike minds think great” bias. (This somewhat disconnected logical structure was a hangup I had about the post; I was considering publishing it as two separate posts but decided not to.)
But, what I was trying to say about Shor and Constance and their need for a translator is: regardless of whether Shor underestimated Constance and vice versa because of this bias, they weren’t in a position to understand each other’s arguments. A translator’s job is to make them understand each other (convert their thoughts into a language that’s easily understandable by the other). This allows for reconciliation, because instead of Shor seeing his own argument and “black box Constance belief which I should update on even though I don’t understand it”, he sees his own argument and “Constance argument translated into Shor language”, which he now has a much better idea what to do with. (And likewise symmetrically for Constance.)
That message seems in step with the theme of the need to better communicate science, anxieties about basing decisions on black-box AI algorithms, and controversy over how much to take expert opinion on faith.
You know, with Scott’s posts, I often get the impression not that he’s translating a thoughtful model in a language I don’t understand, but that he’s modeling social dynamics that the participants themselves don’t understand.
Take the “right is the new left” post. I really doubt that anyone participating in fashion has anything like that model in mind. Instead, a designer has the demands of a specific segment of society in mind, and tailors their product to suit. They’re not analyzing macro trends to decide how to do their shirts. They have a way of putting out clothes that works for their corner of the industry, in terms of how much it changes year to year, what other shops they look to to.
Even if the macro trends in fashion line up perfectly with Scott’s mode, I don’t think anybody in fashion has the equivalent in their head and is thoughtfully using it to base their decision.
By contrast, I think that Shor and Constance probably both do have models in their head, and that Shor’s mature take on Constance’s model does reflect her thought process.
So I’d distinguish between a translator like Shor and someone like Scott, who’s an analyst but not necessarily a translator.