That being said, I’m not convinced that the space of concepts is smaller as you get more meta. (Naively speaking, there are ~exponentially more distributions over distributions than distributions, though some strong simplicity biases can cut this down a lot.) I suspect that one reason it seems that the space of concepts is “smaller” is because we’re worse at differentiating concepts at higher levels of meta-ness. For example, it seems that it’s often easier to figure out what the consequences of concrete action X are than the consequences of adopting a particular ethical system, and a lot of philosophy on metaethics seems more confused than philosophy on ethics. I think this is related to the “it’s more difficult to get feedback” intuition, where we have fewer distinct buckets because it’s too hard to distinguish between similar theories at sufficiently high meta-levels.
Yeah, I think I agree with all of that. Perhaps the better way to state my position is, conditional on there being good normative feedback on the meta level, I would expect the space of concepts on the meta-level to be smaller than on the object-level.
I share both of these intuitions.
That being said, I’m not convinced that the space of concepts is smaller as you get more meta. (Naively speaking, there are ~exponentially more distributions over distributions than distributions, though some strong simplicity biases can cut this down a lot.) I suspect that one reason it seems that the space of concepts is “smaller” is because we’re worse at differentiating concepts at higher levels of meta-ness. For example, it seems that it’s often easier to figure out what the consequences of concrete action X are than the consequences of adopting a particular ethical system, and a lot of philosophy on metaethics seems more confused than philosophy on ethics. I think this is related to the “it’s more difficult to get feedback” intuition, where we have fewer distinct buckets because it’s too hard to distinguish between similar theories at sufficiently high meta-levels.
Yeah, I think I agree with all of that. Perhaps the better way to state my position is, conditional on there being good normative feedback on the meta level, I would expect the space of concepts on the meta-level to be smaller than on the object-level.