Certainly it seems to me that if I think and talk about the world without mentioning “frames” (nor any stand-in concept), I will not have any large holes in my portrayal.
I’m curious how you would argue something like 2-Place and 1-Place Words without using frames or a stand-in. [According to me (and another), the word ‘perspective’ is a stand-in.]
When I go through and try to figure out where Eliezer does it, I’m not sure he does, but also I don’t think it really counts as an argument. He simply asserts Fred’s error in treating sexiness as a function of two arguments instead of a function of one argument, or in identifying Fred::Sexiness as the one true Sexiness. But if Fred responds “I’m not making an error, I am using the one true Sexiness”, I think pointing out what failure of imagination Fred is doing will go much faster if talking about ‘perspective’.
[According to me (and another), the word ‘perspective’ is a stand-in.]
Well… I disagree. I guess that’s pretty much my answer?
When I go through and try to figure out where Eliezer does it, I’m not sure he does, but also I don’t think it really counts as an argument.
Well, take this paragraph (and the several after it):
An alternative and equally valid standpoint is that “sexiness” does refer to a one-place function—but each speaker uses a different one-place function to decide who to kidnap and ravish. Who says that just because Fred, the artist, and Bloogah, the bug-eyed monster, both use the word “sexy”, they must mean the same thing by it?
And then again:
And the two 2-place and 1-place views can be unified using the concept of “currying”, named after the mathematician Haskell Curry. … A true purist would insist that all functions should be viewed, by definition, as taking exactly 1 argument. On this view […]
Are these “frames”, or “frame shifts”, etc.? If not: why not? If so: why did you not recognize them as such?
The fact is that “frames” comes with all sorts of conceptual baggage, which, it seems to me, is clearly inapplicable in the case of the linked post (and many—perhaps most?—other cases). Eliezer suggests all sorts of what we might call “perspective shifts” throughout the post; none of them are total or radical shifts; and we could instead just call them “ways of looking at this particular thing”, or just “ideas”, etc.
Or what if I suggested unifying the various (somewhat half-baked) programming analogies Eliezer uses, to take an “object-oriented programming” view of the matter? For example, maybe the right way to look at “Sexiness” is like this: [Fred sexiness:Woman] (Objective C syntax being the appropriate one to use for this, naturally). This would, for instance, make it obvious that Woman.sexiness is nonsense, because sexiness is a method we’re calling on Fred, with the parameter Woman (rather than some sort of “property” “of” Woman); so perhaps there are conceptual advantages to be gained from this re-framing. Aha! I said “re-framing”! So is that a new “frame”? Am I unable to escape talk of “frames” after all?! Eh; it’s a figure of speech, and a fairly “lightweight” one.
Perhaps my problem with “frames” can be thought of (there’s that “we can think of it as” business again!) as objecting to making too big a deal of something. We “play with” ideas, when we think about things like this; we turn them this way and that, adopt various perspectives, phrase things in different ways, apply different metaphors, deploy various analogies. This is fine and normal, and also it is a core feature of our cognition, and it has many aspects, many features—which means that it’s good to retain an “unburdened” view of it, the better to notice its various qualities, and the better to avoid impeding its functioning. I do not think it pays to start scrutinizing this extremely general phenomenon in such a way that we attach to it a “heavyweight” concept like “frames”, with much philosophical baggage and so on. That can only “weigh down” our thinking unnecessarily.
In short, perhaps the real takeaway here is that “frames” is… a bad frame.
Are these “frames”, or “frame shifts”, etc.? If not: why not? If so: why did you not recognize them as such?
Sorry, I think my previous sentence was unclear. I think 2-Place and 1-Place Words uses without formalizing the thing I am trying to point at with “frames”, and so when I imagine that article without any pointers to frames, I don’t think it’s convincing (and I’m not sure how Eliezer would have thought of it in the first place without something like frames).
For example, in the paragraph you quote he uses the word “standpoint.” When I interpret that as “the position and orientation of the metaphorical camera through which the situation is observed”, i.e. a stand-in for frames, the sentence compiles and the paragraph makes sense. When I delete that meaning, the paragraph now seems confused.
[Put another way, if I don’t come into that article with the sense that different observers can assign sexiness differently, the article doesn’t generate that sense. It uses that sense to explain something about language. This would maybe be more obvious if we swapped out ‘sexiness’ for something like ‘justice’, and imagine the article being read by a moral realist who is convinced that there is one true Justice.]
The fact is that “frames” comes with all sorts of conceptual baggage, which, it seems to me, is clearly inapplicable in the case of the linked post (and many—perhaps most?—other cases).
This seems interesting to me. Let’s consider the alternative post Aella could have written which talks about “perspective control”; I suspect it hits many of the same points and has many of the same conclusions. [If it seems more or less valid to you, that seems like it would be good to hear!]
In particular, imagine an architect trying to get their building design to win a competition, but they think their building is pretty from the south and ugly from the east; they might make lots of moves that by themselves are innocuous and yet add up to controlling the judges so that they have an overly positive view of the design. If we wanted to talk about what that architect is doing wrong, I think ‘perspective control’ might be a solid label.
I think what happens when we use ‘frame’ instead of ‘perspective’ is that we’re generalizing. Our architect controlled which part of the design the judges saw, but they could also try to control something like “how the judges think about design”; saying something about how minimalism is futuristic might cause the judges to not dock points for the lack of embellishments because they don’t want to be seen as stuck in the past. The strategic aim is roughly the same as the architect trying to not have the judges see the east face of the building, but the tactical methodology is quite different and operating on a different level of cognition. [One could still talk about “minimalism as futuristic” as being part of one’s perspective or standpoint or so on, but this is now clearly in a metaphorical rather than literal sense.]
Possibly this is where the conceptual baggage comes in? Now, rather than just having a simple physical analogy for visual cognition, we have to analogize across the whole cognitive and interpersonal stack. It might be better to keep different layers and regions separate, tho this is genuinely harder because not everyone will have arranged their cognitive and interpersonal stacks in the same way, and organisms live end-to-end in a way that makes the systems less truly modular than the human reverse-engineer would hope.
The thing is, if “frame” is just another way of saying [insert list of various ways of saying “people sometimes think about a thing in one way and sometimes in another way”], then the concept is so diffuse, general, and banal as to not be worth elevating to any special status.
Eliezer’s post “uses without formalizing” this concept, as you say, but consider: what if he had formalized it? Would it be a better post, or a worse one? I say: worse!
Possibly this is where the conceptual baggage comes in? Now, rather than just having a simple physical analogy for visual cognition, we have to analogize across the whole cognitive and interpersonal stack. It might be better to keep different layers and regions separate, tho this is genuinely harder because not everyone will have arranged their cognitive and interpersonal stacks in the same way, and organisms live end-to-end in a way that makes the systems less truly modular than the human reverse-engineer would hope.
I think you have it, yes.
In general I think that abstractions should serve a clear purpose; like beliefs, they should “pay rent” (in compression ratios, for instance, or expressiveness).
And the thing is, “our sort of people”—not “rationalists”, but, shall we say, “the kind of person that [many/most] rationalists are”—generate abstractions instinctively. To us, noticing a pattern, coming up with a clever abstraction, building a mental castle of concepts around it—it’s not even second nature; it’s just plain nature. We don’t have to remind ourselves to do this.
But this means that many abstractions we come up with are going to be superfluous… or, at the very least, while they may be useful in a transient act of cognition, do not deserve to be brought out into the light, ensconced in a public gallery of “community abstractions”, where they can sit around and shape everyone’s thinking for years to come.
“Frames” are like that, I think.
It seems to me that “frames” are quite likely to be delinquent with their rent… precisely because they are so general and so fuzzy a concept, precisely because there are so many “stand-ins”, so many ways of pointing at the same phenomena.
On the other hand, “frame control” is quite a heavyweight concept! This is an odd mismatch, is it not? Notice that “frame control” demands that “frame” have a much more specific meaning than what we’ve been discussing in this subthread. Once you say that someone can “control” your “frame”, you can no longer be talking about something so general and ordinary as “different ways of looking at something”; you’ve got to be positing some more substantive theory of how people see and think about the world, and then adding to that the notion that someone can “control” that, etc.
The thing is, if “frame” is just another way of saying [insert list of various ways of saying “people sometimes think about a thing in one way and sometimes in another way”], then the concept is so diffuse, general, and banal as to not be worth elevating to any special status.
Huh, I find this surprising, mostly because I’m not sure about the “special status” claim.
It seems to me like there’s something of a dilemma here—either the concept is obvious (at which point being diffuse or general is not much of a drawback), and so the problem with the post is that it is ‘reinventing the wheel’, or the concept is nonobvious (and thus we can’t be sure we’re pointing at the same thing, and being diffuse now makes this communication much more difficult). Up until this point, I had gotten the second impression from you (stuff like “Without knowing what you mean by the word, I cannot answer your question.”), and not something like “wait, is this just rediscovering ‘maps’ from the map-territory distinction?”.
Also, I think that while this sort of “noticing maps” is basic rationality, it empirically does not seem obvious to everyone, and I think people finding it non-obvious or difficult to talk about or so on is interesting. That is, I don’t see this post as trying to make “frame” any more special a word than “perspective” or “standpoint” or so on; I see this post as trying to make more people both 1) see frame differences and 2) see frame manipulation, especially the sort of frame manipulation that tries to not be seen as frame manipulation.
[To be clear, I share some of your sense that ‘someone who had traumatic experiences around frame manipulation’ is probably not an unbiased source of information/frames about frames, and is likely more allergic / less likely to see that the same knife can be used constructively and destructively. I nevertheless put frames in the “general, basic, and useful concept” category, whereas you seem pretty sure they’re a bad frame.]
I’m curious how you would argue something like 2-Place and 1-Place Words without using frames or a stand-in. [According to me (and another), the word ‘perspective’ is a stand-in.]
When I go through and try to figure out where Eliezer does it, I’m not sure he does, but also I don’t think it really counts as an argument. He simply asserts Fred’s error in treating sexiness as a function of two arguments instead of a function of one argument, or in identifying Fred::Sexiness as the one true Sexiness. But if Fred responds “I’m not making an error, I am using the one true Sexiness”, I think pointing out what failure of imagination Fred is doing will go much faster if talking about ‘perspective’.
Well… I disagree. I guess that’s pretty much my answer?
Well, take this paragraph (and the several after it):
And then again:
Are these “frames”, or “frame shifts”, etc.? If not: why not? If so: why did you not recognize them as such?
The fact is that “frames” comes with all sorts of conceptual baggage, which, it seems to me, is clearly inapplicable in the case of the linked post (and many—perhaps most?—other cases). Eliezer suggests all sorts of what we might call “perspective shifts” throughout the post; none of them are total or radical shifts; and we could instead just call them “ways of looking at this particular thing”, or just “ideas”, etc.
Or what if I suggested unifying the various (somewhat half-baked) programming analogies Eliezer uses, to take an “object-oriented programming” view of the matter? For example, maybe the right way to look at “Sexiness” is like this:
[Fred sexiness:Woman]
(Objective C syntax being the appropriate one to use for this, naturally). This would, for instance, make it obvious thatWoman.sexiness
is nonsense, becausesexiness
is a method we’re calling onFred
, with the parameterWoman
(rather than some sort of “property” “of”Woman
); so perhaps there are conceptual advantages to be gained from this re-framing. Aha! I said “re-framing”! So is that a new “frame”? Am I unable to escape talk of “frames” after all?! Eh; it’s a figure of speech, and a fairly “lightweight” one.Perhaps my problem with “frames” can be thought of (there’s that “we can think of it as” business again!) as objecting to making too big a deal of something. We “play with” ideas, when we think about things like this; we turn them this way and that, adopt various perspectives, phrase things in different ways, apply different metaphors, deploy various analogies. This is fine and normal, and also it is a core feature of our cognition, and it has many aspects, many features—which means that it’s good to retain an “unburdened” view of it, the better to notice its various qualities, and the better to avoid impeding its functioning. I do not think it pays to start scrutinizing this extremely general phenomenon in such a way that we attach to it a “heavyweight” concept like “frames”, with much philosophical baggage and so on. That can only “weigh down” our thinking unnecessarily.
In short, perhaps the real takeaway here is that “frames” is… a bad frame.
Sorry, I think my previous sentence was unclear. I think 2-Place and 1-Place Words uses without formalizing the thing I am trying to point at with “frames”, and so when I imagine that article without any pointers to frames, I don’t think it’s convincing (and I’m not sure how Eliezer would have thought of it in the first place without something like frames).
For example, in the paragraph you quote he uses the word “standpoint.” When I interpret that as “the position and orientation of the metaphorical camera through which the situation is observed”, i.e. a stand-in for frames, the sentence compiles and the paragraph makes sense. When I delete that meaning, the paragraph now seems confused.
[Put another way, if I don’t come into that article with the sense that different observers can assign sexiness differently, the article doesn’t generate that sense. It uses that sense to explain something about language. This would maybe be more obvious if we swapped out ‘sexiness’ for something like ‘justice’, and imagine the article being read by a moral realist who is convinced that there is one true Justice.]
This seems interesting to me. Let’s consider the alternative post Aella could have written which talks about “perspective control”; I suspect it hits many of the same points and has many of the same conclusions. [If it seems more or less valid to you, that seems like it would be good to hear!]
In particular, imagine an architect trying to get their building design to win a competition, but they think their building is pretty from the south and ugly from the east; they might make lots of moves that by themselves are innocuous and yet add up to controlling the judges so that they have an overly positive view of the design. If we wanted to talk about what that architect is doing wrong, I think ‘perspective control’ might be a solid label.
I think what happens when we use ‘frame’ instead of ‘perspective’ is that we’re generalizing. Our architect controlled which part of the design the judges saw, but they could also try to control something like “how the judges think about design”; saying something about how minimalism is futuristic might cause the judges to not dock points for the lack of embellishments because they don’t want to be seen as stuck in the past. The strategic aim is roughly the same as the architect trying to not have the judges see the east face of the building, but the tactical methodology is quite different and operating on a different level of cognition. [One could still talk about “minimalism as futuristic” as being part of one’s perspective or standpoint or so on, but this is now clearly in a metaphorical rather than literal sense.]
Possibly this is where the conceptual baggage comes in? Now, rather than just having a simple physical analogy for visual cognition, we have to analogize across the whole cognitive and interpersonal stack. It might be better to keep different layers and regions separate, tho this is genuinely harder because not everyone will have arranged their cognitive and interpersonal stacks in the same way, and organisms live end-to-end in a way that makes the systems less truly modular than the human reverse-engineer would hope.
The thing is, if “frame” is just another way of saying [insert list of various ways of saying “people sometimes think about a thing in one way and sometimes in another way”], then the concept is so diffuse, general, and banal as to not be worth elevating to any special status.
Eliezer’s post “uses without formalizing” this concept, as you say, but consider: what if he had formalized it? Would it be a better post, or a worse one? I say: worse!
I think you have it, yes.
In general I think that abstractions should serve a clear purpose; like beliefs, they should “pay rent” (in compression ratios, for instance, or expressiveness).
And the thing is, “our sort of people”—not “rationalists”, but, shall we say, “the kind of person that [many/most] rationalists are”—generate abstractions instinctively. To us, noticing a pattern, coming up with a clever abstraction, building a mental castle of concepts around it—it’s not even second nature; it’s just plain nature. We don’t have to remind ourselves to do this.
But this means that many abstractions we come up with are going to be superfluous… or, at the very least, while they may be useful in a transient act of cognition, do not deserve to be brought out into the light, ensconced in a public gallery of “community abstractions”, where they can sit around and shape everyone’s thinking for years to come.
“Frames” are like that, I think.
It seems to me that “frames” are quite likely to be delinquent with their rent… precisely because they are so general and so fuzzy a concept, precisely because there are so many “stand-ins”, so many ways of pointing at the same phenomena.
On the other hand, “frame control” is quite a heavyweight concept! This is an odd mismatch, is it not? Notice that “frame control” demands that “frame” have a much more specific meaning than what we’ve been discussing in this subthread. Once you say that someone can “control” your “frame”, you can no longer be talking about something so general and ordinary as “different ways of looking at something”; you’ve got to be positing some more substantive theory of how people see and think about the world, and then adding to that the notion that someone can “control” that, etc.
Huh, I find this surprising, mostly because I’m not sure about the “special status” claim.
It seems to me like there’s something of a dilemma here—either the concept is obvious (at which point being diffuse or general is not much of a drawback), and so the problem with the post is that it is ‘reinventing the wheel’, or the concept is nonobvious (and thus we can’t be sure we’re pointing at the same thing, and being diffuse now makes this communication much more difficult). Up until this point, I had gotten the second impression from you (stuff like “Without knowing what you mean by the word, I cannot answer your question.”), and not something like “wait, is this just rediscovering ‘maps’ from the map-territory distinction?”.
Also, I think that while this sort of “noticing maps” is basic rationality, it empirically does not seem obvious to everyone, and I think people finding it non-obvious or difficult to talk about or so on is interesting. That is, I don’t see this post as trying to make “frame” any more special a word than “perspective” or “standpoint” or so on; I see this post as trying to make more people both 1) see frame differences and 2) see frame manipulation, especially the sort of frame manipulation that tries to not be seen as frame manipulation.
[To be clear, I share some of your sense that ‘someone who had traumatic experiences around frame manipulation’ is probably not an unbiased source of information/frames about frames, and is likely more allergic / less likely to see that the same knife can be used constructively and destructively. I nevertheless put frames in the “general, basic, and useful concept” category, whereas you seem pretty sure they’re a bad frame.]