I dislike the frame of “charity” & “steelmanning”. It’s not usefwl for me because it assumes I would feel negatively about seeing some patterns in the first place, and that I need to correct for this by overriding my habitual soldier-like attitudes. But the value of “interpreting patterns usefwly” is extremely general, so it’s a distraction to talk as if it’s exclusive to the social realm.
Anyway, this reminded me of what I call “analytic” and “synthetic” thinking. They’re both thinking-modes, but they emphasise different things.
When I process a pattern in analytic mode, I take it apart, rotate it, play with it—it remains the centre of my working memory, and I need stricter control of attention-gates.
When in synthetic mode, the pattern remains mostly what it is, and most of my effort goes to shuffling other patterns in and out of working memory in order to do comparisons, metaphors, propagation. I’m switching between TNN when I need to branch out for more distal connections, and TPN when I need to study the relation between two or more objects in greater detail.
Analytic & synthetic interpretation? It doesn’t map properly on to my interpretation of your ideas here—which btw are amazing and this post is very nice.
Related: assimilation & accommodation. Doesn’t fit perfectly, though, and I want a better (more modular) ontology for all of these things.
I dislike the frame of “charity” & “steelmanning”. It’s not usefwl for me because it assumes I would feel negatively about seeing some patterns in the first place, and that I need to correct for this by overriding my habitual soldier-like attitudes. But the value of “interpreting patterns usefwly” is extremely general, so it’s a distraction to talk as if it’s exclusive to the social realm.
Anyway, this reminded me of what I call “analytic” and “synthetic” thinking. They’re both thinking-modes, but they emphasise different things.
When I process a pattern in analytic mode, I take it apart, rotate it, play with it—it remains the centre of my working memory, and I need stricter control of attention-gates.
When in synthetic mode, the pattern remains mostly what it is, and most of my effort goes to shuffling other patterns in and out of working memory in order to do comparisons, metaphors, propagation. I’m switching between TNN when I need to branch out for more distal connections, and TPN when I need to study the relation between two or more objects in greater detail.
Analytic & synthetic interpretation? It doesn’t map properly on to my interpretation of your ideas here—which btw are amazing and this post is very nice.
Related: assimilation & accommodation. Doesn’t fit perfectly, though, and I want a better (more modular) ontology for all of these things.