Music Video maker and self professed “Fashion Victim” who is hoping to apply Rationality to problems and decisions in my life and career probably by reevaluating and likely building a new set of beliefs that underpins them.
CstineSublime
I am very surprised that a cursory crtl+f of Anscombe translation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, while containing a few tracts discussing the use of the phrase “I believe”, doesn’t contain a single instance of “I believe in”.
One instance of his discussion of “I believe” in Part 2, section x explores the phrase, wondering how it distinguishes itself from merely stating a given hypothesis. Analogous to prefixing a statement with “I say...” such as “I say it will rain today” (which recalls the Tractatus distinguishing the expression of a proposition from the proposition itself):“At bottom, when I say ‘I believe . . .’ I am describing my own state of mind—but this description is indirectly an assertion of the fact believed.”—As in certain circumstances I describe a photograph in order to describe the thing it is a photograph of. But then I must also be able to say that the photograph is a good one. So here too: “I believe it’s raining and my belief is reliable, so I have confidence in it.”—In that case my belief would be a kind of sense-impression.
One can mistrust one’s own senses, but not one’s own belief.
If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely’, it would not have any significant first person present indicative.
Perhaps I’m overenthusiastic about this post since the topic of advice has been somewhat of a fixation of mine recently but the points about correct advice being specific and the overfitted and underfitted distinction strike me as very useful for querying if what has worked for others will translate over to one’s current situation.
One thing I might quibble with is the phrase “correct solution” and even then it’s not really a quibble, because a correct solution is any solution that has more (relevant) benefits than costs. However there are degrees of correctness, this of course overlaps with overfitting and underfitting. There are often multiple correct solutions to any given problem. Some are better fitted than others. But for advice to be correct all it needs to do is “work”—that is the advisee needs to be better off for having followed the advice than if they didn’t.
An analogy that comes to mind is I often use a swiss army knife to cut things like masking-tape or strings from clothes, whereas a pair of scissors might be more effective and easier. The knife is still a correct solution as it does a satisfactory job. Scissors might be “more correct”.
A flow on thought from this how correct solutions can be arrived at. The more expeditious method is to share the situation with a expert in a relevant domain who will then draw upon their expertise, understanding, and modelling of the world/domain to offer advice, or the slower method of arriving at a correct solution one’s self. Both getting expert advice and discovering it without help as you point out require specific knowledge of the problem.
Repeated experience has taught me vague or underfitted advice is often a symptom of vague descriptions of the problem by the advisee.
The interesting thing is that even in the absence of an expert, the more specific someone can get about defining their problem—the easier it is to find correct solutions.
I have a bad habit of being vague and underfitted: I’ll ask myself a question like “why can’t I network?” to which I might get an answer like “because you don’t promote yourself enough”. Whereas if I focused on a specific problem and gave situational knowledge like “I’ve looked on Facebook and Meetup but cannot find any groups or events which suggest themselves as being appropriate contexts for finding...etc.” the specificity drastically improves the fit of advice and the chance of arriving at a correct solution. Whether the solution concerns which search terms to use. A change in expectation or belief about the idea of appropriateness. Looking on a different website. etc. etc.
Previously I thought that if you ask better questions then you will get better at solving problems. However questions are the shadows or reflections cast from the actual framing of the problem. If you have a well framed problem you will naturally ask better questions. If you haven’t framed the problem well, then you will ask bad questions.
Bad questions are still useful because they are a signal that you are “barking up the wrong tree” or that you need to reformulate the problem.
What marks a bad question and therefore signals a framing of the problem that is unconducive to solving it?
There’s probably a myriad of ways a question can be bad. It appears that most of the questions which signal a failure to frame a problem well are vague. Imagine someone who wants to become a Academy Award winning Cinematographer asks “has anyone every won an Academy Award for Cinematography without going to film school?” the answer is of course “yes”, especially in the early days of the award. But it is not a useful question in that it doesn’t narrow down which actions this aspiring cinematographer should take, avoid, nor clarifies which factors will most impede or expedite their journey. It is only useful in that it shows they are not asking useful questions and therefore their entire formulation of the problem needs work. Better questions are more useful questions.
Much like measures better questions are ones that influence decisions—if a change in answer to a question doesn’t change your decision, then it’s not a useful question.
Popular wisdom encourages us to ask open ended questions, especially those which ask “why?” or “how?”.
While this is true for seeking advice or having discussions with experts or building consensus. Better questions even in these circumstances tend to be specific. (i.e. asking for vague help “how can I be a great cinematographer?” versus asking for specific advice “how did Michael Ballhaus light this scene in the nightclub in Under the Cherry Moon? How does it differ to his colour nightclub cinematography in Lola? Why did he make those decisions?” ). However open ended questions may not be better questions in the absence of an expert to ask, however specific they may be.It is less Socratic, more something out of Yes, Minister, in that I don’t know what I don’t know—so if I ask myself rather than an expert “Why does this problem pervade?” all I can answer is a sort of tentative guess or what I believe is not a likely answer. Whereas an expert may be able to plug my knowledge gaps.
I am undecided whether this means why/how questions potentially better suited for assessing our knowledge or at least our confidence in our knowledge concerning the framing of the problem, but in the absence of an expert, not particularly useful.
Counterpoint: the circumstances where the questions appear to be “good” or “better” questions but you’re still solving the wrong problem? They are good for the problem you are mistakenly trying to solve.
To think about:
Shannon Information and cataloguing ‘rushes’ from a documentary. This is not about the actual amount of entropy in any given frame of a uncompressed video. Rather the entropy of all the metadata from all the footage.Eisenstenian film theory was an attempt to marry Marxist Dialectic with film editing. The “highest” type of film cut was “Intellectual Montage” the bone to nuclear-satellite cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps the most iconic example in film history. Eisenstein himself used the more on-the-nose approach of showed crowds of protesters being mowed down by Tsarist troops being interspliced with footage of animals being slaughtered in an abattoir.
The Dialectic of cuts, the juxtaposition between image A and image B—be it the Kuleshov experiment—the actor appearing to look at either soup or a corpse lying in state thereby changing the inferred emotion of the actor—is a critical film language technique.
Documentary Rushes of similar thematic content—i.e. “Shot 1 - mid shot children playing” “Shot 2 - mid shot different children playing” and lower entropy. “Shot 1 - mid shot children playing” “Shot 87 - close up of old man smiling”. We want to avoid homogenous sets.
The problem for a film editor, especially a observational documentary film editor or someone working with archive material (think of the films of Bret Morgan and Asif Kapadia) is every time you create a sequence you have to watch all of the material, again, hoping to find the dialectic or invent a narrative that combines at least two shots together.
Binary Search algorithms are also relevant here.
CLIP and visual Semantic Networks can automate part of the search if the editor has something specific in mind. I want to cultivate serendipity—unforseen juxtapositions.
“Babbling Better” this is a work in progress -and still requires more thinking
In short—need a methodology or at least heuristics for identifying the “right problem” to solve, and noticing when one is solving the “wrong problem”. Better problem framing leads to better and more focused answers to questions and hopefully eventual resolving of problems. I’ve come across two techniques: The Five Whys to understand problems better, and using adverbs of manner to babble more constructively.
So far:
It is easy to babble, babies do it. It is still quite easy to babble comprehensible but wrong sentences, such as LLM hallucinations. Your pruning is only as good as your babble.With regards to problem solving, low quality babble doesn’t contribute to resolving the problem. For example, let’s say the problem is “camera autofocus doesn’t focus on eyes” a low quality “babble” answer might be “Burn a stick of incense and pray to Dionysius”. The acts themselves are feasible and the sentence is comprehensible. But any desired change in the camera’s autofocus performance will be pure coincidence.
Yet, sometimes low quality babble appears to be high quality babble because we simply are not solving the right problem but it appears to be perfectly suited for the problem. Especially if incentives are involved.
My hunch is that to babble better not only do you need better methods of babbling, but you need to better understand what goals you are trying to babble towards. And that requires better understanding of why the problem is a problem.
5 Why’s on yourself: Asking “why I think this is a problem?” to at least 5 levels
Not to be mistaken for the Burger joint. The “Five Whys” technique was apparently invented at the Toyota Corporation as a system for uncovering the root causes of production faults.
The choice of “why” falls into broader pattern which takes me back to documentary filmmaking and interviewing: you learn more through open ended questions, usually those where the key interrogative is “why” or “how” than through close ended questions. These, as Wittgenstein pointed out, basically seek to affirm or negative a proposition or conditional: “Do you like him?” “Is he still there?” “Would you call that green or turquoise?”.
If I am a manager or investigator, trying to ascertain the cause of a fault on a production line, open ended questions make sense since I will not be in possession of all known or knowable facts.
This still holds if I am a novice or just someone enquiring to an expert for help in achieving some goal. If I ask an experienced cinematographer “how would that scene be light?” even if they don’t know specifically, they have a large body of experience and knowledge that would mean they could probably make useful guesses on how to replicate the effect.If i intend on asking for advice from an expert, I can’t give them the responsibility of figuring out the kind of help I need. The better I can define the problem myself the better and more informative the question I can ask them. Be too vague about your problem and you can only hope to get generic responses like “be confident”.
It seems ridiculous though, doesn’t it? Socratic or even from Yes, Minister: Why should I ask myself open ended questions if I don’t know what I don’t know? While I may not understand the problem, what I can do is at least explain why it’s a problem and how I see it. And one effective way to do that I’ve found is to use the Five Whys Technique.
It is often exceedingly difficult to know what the right problem to solve is, what we may have a better chance of defining is why we perceive it as a problem and why we expect it to cause conflict.
To—Do: add more techniques to my arsenal to better defined problems… the step before babbling
Adverbs and Creativity?
Strategically EfficaciouslyProductively BabblingI have recently come across a technique for higher-quality babble, at least for creative purposes. It is as simply as employing a Adverb of Manner to modify a verb. This is a minor variation on a technique used to allow mime artists to create a character—you take a situation or process like “make breakfast” and do it with an attitude: happy, hungover, lovelorn.
It is surprisingly easy to come up with scenarios and even stories with arcs—goals, conflict, and comedic pay-offs complete with a character who has distinct mannerisms—by just cycling through adverbs. Compare these three adverbs: grumpily, overzealously, nervously.
He bartends grumpily—he tries to avoid eye contact with customers, sighs like a petulant teenager when he does make eye contact, he slams down glasses, he spills drinks, on his face a constant scowl, he waves customers away dismissively. Even a simple glass of beer he treats like one of the labours of Herakles
He bartends overzealously—he invites customers to the bar, he slams down glasses too, he spills them, he accidently breaks glasses in his zeal but always with a smile on his face, he’s more than happy to do a theatrical shake of the mixer, throw it even if it doesn’t quite make it’s landing. He’s always making a chef’s kiss about any cocktail the customer asks for
He bartends nervously—he doesn’t realize when a customer is trying to order, giving a “who me?” reaction, he scratches his head a lot, he takes his time, he fumbles with bottles and glasses, he even takes back drinks and starts again.
These scenarios appear to “write themselves” for the purposes of short pantomime bits. This is the exact type of technique I have spent years searching for.
To do—Does this technique of better babbling through adverbs of manner apply to non-creative applications? If not then develop methodology or at least heuristics for identifying the right problem, noticing a “wrong problem”
Long time lurker introducing myself.
I’m a Music Video Maker who is hoping to use Instrumental Rationality towards accomplishing various creative-aesthetic goals and moving forward on my own personal Hamming Question. The Hammertime sequence has been something I’ve been very curious about but unsuccessful in implementing.
I’ll be scribbling shortform notes which might document my grappling with goals. Most of them will be in some way related to the motion picture production or creativity in general. “Questions” as a topic may creep in, it’s one of my favorite topics. Having trained as a documentary filmmaker in a previous life, I have spent a lot of time interviewing people and loved it. I also curate a list of interesting or good questions. I get joy from being asked interesting questions.
There seems to be a body of evidence supporting the idea that positive statements require less cognitive load to process than negative statements. These are a couple of examples I could pull up:
https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000057
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10979-007-9103-y
I remember in a Tali Sharot talk, sorry I can’t remember the specific one, where she noted it was easier to get people to press a button at the right time when an incentive is offered than it is to dissuade people from pressing a button with a penalty. Which broadly seems corroborated by Skinnerian “Schedules of Reinforcement” research.
Thank you, then I will try to ask good questions when I feel I am in possession of one.
Would prankster archetype characters like Harpo Marx, Daffy Duck, or Woody Woodpecker be considered Agentic? Or is their lack of discernable goal and sheer hedonic anarchism not agentic?
I just wonder because these characters appear to be extremely appealing to audiences too.
- 28 Feb 2024 4:55 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on CstineSublime’s Shortform by (
What is the functional difference between Agency and having social power? This is likely a question that reflects my ignorance of the connotations of ‘Agency’ in Rationalist circles.
When people say “he’s a powerful man in this industry” does that imply he is greatly Agentic? Can one be Agentic without having social power? Is one the potential and the other the actuality?
I’ll need some clarification:
Does that mean that someone who habitually starts new processes or projects but seldom is able to finish them or see them through to completion has lots of (Rationalist sense) Agency?But also, does that mean in a hypothetical organization where one person has the means to veto any decision others man, but the veto-holder seldom exercises it despite very easily being able to, the veto-holder would not be Agentic?
So by that definition would you consider trickster archetype characters (you can see why I have been wondering) like Harpo Marx or Woody Woodpecker who appear to be very impulsive, albeit not bound by routines or what everyone else is doing because everyone else is doing it would not have Agency because he is highly reactionary and doesn’t plan?
Let me write out my current assumptions as it might make it easier to correct them:Analysis Paralysis is not Agentic because while it involves carefulness and consciously plotting moves towards goals, it lacks action towards them.
Hedonic and Impulsive activity is not agentic because while it does involve action towards one’s goals, it lacks careful planning.
Agency then is making plans and acting upon them irrespective of whether one is able to see them through to completion, provided one has the intention and will, and the forethought.
Is that correct?
How much overlap do you think there is between these coaches did for you and what a Record Producer does for a recording band (logistics and engineering/palette decisions aside)?
Not having been in a band or recorded an album I wouldn’t be able to comment, I don’t know how much of live playing skills translate to the modern recording process.
I realize things aren’t like when Black Sabbath laid down their self-titled in a weekend, basically playing their live set. Comping is more affordable in Post. And even then, I assume, the lack of a live audience to reflect and ‘bounce’ off of changes the playing dynamic, right?
Thank you for taking the time to try and give me a broad overview of the different nuances of the word, unfortunately here the student has failed the teacher. I’m still very confused.
I previously have understood the porridge sense of agency (tangent—I like that phrase ‘porridge word’, reminds me of Minksy’s ‘suitecase word’) to be “an entity that has influence or can affect change”. Here on LW I have been brought to believe it just means acting, verging on thoughtlessly, which I understood to be since acting is the only way to catalyze change (i.e. change towards one’s goals).
So habitually starting things and letting them wither doesn’t cut it, and neither does nominally having some role but never executing it. It’s an inner quality that by its nature must manifest in outward actions.
I failed to explain my confusion: It’s not so much “letting them wither” let me put it another way: if you are in a bunker, there’s a armed conflict overhead, and therefore the smartest thing to do is “nothing” by staying put in the bunker, are you being agentic/acting agentically? The only things they can initiate at that point are unnecessary risk.
Likewise, I don’t mean nominally having some role. Not nominally but actually having the means, the power, the authority, the social status, the lack of negative repercussions to exercise the means, the knowledge but choosing not to exercise it because they evaluate it as not being worthwhile. They could initiate changes, but they rarely see the need, not from fear or reluctance, but from weighing up the pros and cons. Are they being agentic?
Agency here is not “change for the sake of change” but presumedly “acting in a way that materializes the agent’s goals” and that requires initiative, analogous to Aristotle’s Kinoun (Efficient) Cause—the carpenter who takes the initiative of making wood into a table. However the connotation of spunk, hustle, ambition etc. etc. and generally acting with energy and enthusiasm towards goals—knowing that these are not golden tickets to success (Necessary factors? Probably. Sufficient? Probably not.) -- confuses me what this quality is describing.
As someone with the opposite problem, who can babble countless goals that interest me, and is rigidly married to a few interrelated ones (i.e. make music videos, make films) but struggling to execute them anywhere near to my liking, I hope I can provide some insight into how to find goals or what you want.
I believe that big goals are no different than small goals in terms of finding them.
I’ll be happy to write a post on this if any of this seems intriguing or useful but here’s the dotpoints:
If you have heroes, who are they? What adjectives would you use to describe them? For example, I would describe one of my heroes, Miuccia Prada, as “innovative” “insightful” “paradoxical” and “sophisticated”. I could make it my goal to cultivate one of these qualities in myself, and that would require finding an exercise or even enrolling in a course or activity which would allow me to do so?
i.e. the go-to example would be if you want to be more ‘charismatic’ take up public speaking, join a amateur theatre troupe as that is meant to be a means of developing it.
If you don’t have heroes, who among your social group or friends have the traits or manners that you most envy (in a non-destructive way)? Same as above.
Both of these exercises can be inverted by looking at people you detest or at least have a strong aversion to. Pride and Shame are good indicators too of what you want.
Coming up with goals is easy, committing to them is hard. Just babble. Here’s a template: “I would feel proud if I had a reputation based on fixing/making X”. Prune out the ones that don’t elicit a passionate response.
Analyze your Revealed Preferences on groceries as an Economist would. Everything from buying biodegradable dishwashing detergent to anti-aging wrinkle cream to tickets to a UFC match are all commitments to a certain lifestyle or living with certain principals or values. Those commitments should point you towards broader patterns of goals
Okay sure? But what works for me? “How do you come up with goals”. Here’s how I do it.
I’ve known since I was a teenager that I’ve wanted to be involved in motion pictures however last year I asked myself “okay you say you want to make films, but what is a film you would be deliriously proud of look like?” so I brainstormed all the qualities and elements, and made a video-moodboard (a hour long montage of films, music videos, retro TV commercials, even Beckett plays and experimental animations that inspired me) and that too formed the vague outline of a story. Now my goal is to write a screenplay that incorporates all those elements seamlessly, and then the subsequent goal to make that screenplay into a film. There’s certainly a lot of functionary goals and steppingstones that must be met to achieve those goals.
Do I know how to make that film? Not with any confidence. But that’s because coming up with a goal, being specific about what I want, what I’m passionate and dedicated to is the easy part.
Have you tried this technique, “if it was easier/less resource demanding to do it, would I be more inclined to do it?”—if so does the answer change much?
I’m afraid I just have to give up on understanding what Agency means then. Thank you for trying though.
If someone is in a situation where circumstances forestall any effective action, then to ask whether they are being “agentic” in doing nothing is like asking whether an unheard falling tree makes a sound.
Unlike initiative because you can take initiative and it not deliver intended results. But it’s still initiative. While is being Agentic a potential or an actuality? I don’t know.
Perhaps I am misreading you original comment but is your issue not about formulating goals—as the examples with Japanese and something like RPG Maker suggest you can and could even be motivated if conditions were different. But lies with formulating viable or likely-to-succeed goals?
How does this compare to freestyle rapping? While freestyle raps are certainly not the same length of these epics, the ability to compose (and then recall) verses composed on the fly would seem comparable. It seems like a compelling comparison especially in light of the proliferation of hip-hop and it’s integration into online spaces.
A few other questions about these Yugoslavian Epics comes to mind: How much redundancy is there? How many plot-holes or continuity errors are there (akin to Homeric Nods)? How many divergent narrative threads are there?
Would I be right to assume that if the poet can recite their poem again but retaining the same plot holes and discursions that it indicates a superior memory? If they are using a template or formula to create these discursions why wouldn’t they tend to “correct” plot holes or produce different discursions each time? Standup comedians may repeat routines thousands of times, but especially for more improvisational comics like Robin Williams or Gilbert Gottfried you would be hard pressed to find two exactly alike, and like these bards they are entertainers.