Can you explain what this means? In what way might green tea be “reminiscent of grass clippings”, or, for that matter, not “reminiscent of grass clippings”?
I have drunk a lot of green tea in my life, but I am having difficulty mapping this description to any kind of mental image of what I’m supposed to be seeing or not seeing in/with my tea…
Counterpoint (sort of; maybe more of a juxtaposition):
I am aware of at least one academic field where, from the outside, the work looks very original; and from the inside, it also looks original—and this is a bad thing, because the demand that all research should be “novel” largely prevents the field from doing useful work, from developing a corpus of established knowledge and robust models, from developing clever ideas into truly useful and comprehensive solutions to real problems…
To put this vague complaint into perspective: in the field in question, approximately 3% of published papers are replications. 3%! Needless to say, the journals and conference proceedings are littered with abandoned, barely formed ideas and with repeated reinventions of half-baked wheels that’ve been invented before a dozen times, but slightly differently, and never built up into anything except “proofs of novel concepts”…
This is the true price of chasing “originality” and “novelty”!
I agree with your diagnosis, but disagree with your recommended treatment. Yes, we should stop trying to seem like original thinkers. But we should not start trying to be original thinkers.
How can this be, if there are still new truths to be discovered?
In my experience, when setting out to create something, if you aim to do it right, and if you take this goal seriously, then you will inevitably find yourself making something original—without ever making the slightest effort to be original, per se. (If this sounds paradoxical—surely “doing it right” is the most powerful and stable attractor, surely everyone else is also trying to do it right, and will thus converge on the same design?—then I regret to say that you are insufficiently cynical[1].)
Likewise, if you aim to think correctly, and if you take this goal seriously, you will find yourself having original thoughts.
(Is this an original sentiment? Not at all. But does that make it more likely to be true, or less? And surely the latter question is by far the more important one?)
Or, if you like, “have not fully grasped the inadequacy of our civilization”. ↩︎
… I disagree with the claim that the same people have to exist in two possible worlds for me to be able to say which is better, which is what you seem to be implying in your comment.
Not quite—but I would say that it is not possible to describe one world as “better” than another in any quantifiable or reducible way (as distinct from “better, according to my irreducible and arbitrary judgment”—to which you are, of course, entitled), unless the two worlds contain the same people (which, please note, is only a necessary, not a sufficient, criterion).
I do not believe that aggregation of well-being across individuals is possible or coherent.
(Incidentally, I am also fairly sure that most people don’t have utility functions, period, but I imagine that your use of the term was metaphorical, and in practice should be read merely as “preferences” or something similar.)
Without allowing for something like this, I can’t really see a way to construct an ethical model that tells essentially anything interesting about any decisions at all (at least for people who care about other people), as all decisions probably involve choosing between futures with very different sets of moral patients.
Come now, this is not a sensible model of how we make decisions. If I must choose between (a) stealing my mother’s jewelry in order to buy drugs and (b) giving a homeless person a sandwich, there are all sorts of ethical considerations we may bring to bear on this question, but “choosing between futures with very different sets of moral patients” is simply irrelevant to the question. If your decision procedure in a case like this involves the consideration of far-future outcomes, requires the construction of utility aggregation procedures across large numbers of people, etc., etc., then your ethical framework is of no value and is almost certainly nonsense.
You can of course define any metric you like, but what makes it a metric of “goodness” (as opposed to a metric of something else, like “badness”, or “flevness”), unless it is constructed to reflect what some agent or entity considers to be “good”?
It seems to me that, separately from whether we accept or reject premises #1 and/or #2,[1], we should notice that premise #3 has an equivocation built into it.
Namely, it does not specify: better for whom?
After all, it makes no sense to speak of things being simply “better”, without some agent or entity whose evaluations we take to be our metric for goodness. But if we attempt to fully specify premise #3, we run into difficulties.
We could say: “it is better for a person to have more of a good[2] thing than to have less of it”. And, sure, it is. But then where does that leave premise #3? For whom is it better, that we should have more humans who have lives worth living?
For those humans? But surely this is a non sequitur; even if, for any individual person, we accept the idea that it’s better for them that they should exist than that they should not (an idea I find to be nonsensical, but that’s another story), still it’s not clear how we get from that to it being better that there should be more people…
Or are we saying that’s making more humans is a good thing for already existing humans? Well, perhaps it is, but then we also have to claim, and show, that this is the case—and, crucially, this renders premise #2 largely irrelevant, since “how good are the lives of newly created humans” is not necessarily relevant to the question of “how good a thing is it, for already existing humans, that we should make more humans?”
Really, the problem with this whole category of arguments, this whole style of reasoning, is that it seems to consist of an attempt to take a “view from nowhere” on the subject of goodness, desirability, what is “best”, etc. But such a view is impossible, and any attempt to take a view like this must be incoherent.
Eh? This is a very common idea on Less Wrong and in rationalist spaces. Have you really not encountered it? Like, a lot?
Or am I missing something again?
Perhaps. Consider this scenario:
Your best friend Carol owns a pastry shop. One day you learn that her store manager, Dave, is embezzling large sums of money from the business. What do you do?
Silly question, obvious answer: tell Carol at once! Indeed, failing to do so would be a betrayal—later, when Carol has to close the shop and file for bankruptcy, her beloved business ruined, and she learns that you knew of Dave’s treachery and said nothing—how can you face her? The friendship is over. It’s quite clear: if you know that the guy is stealing, you will tell Carol, period.
Now suppose that Dave, the pastry shop manager, is actually also a friend of yours, and your knowledge of his crime is not accidental but comes because he confides in you, having first sworn you to secrecy. Foolishly, you agreed—a poor decision in retrospect, but such is life.
And now: (a) you have information (Dave is stealing from Carol); (b) ordinarily, having such information dictates your behavior in a clear way (you must take it at once to Carol); (c) yet you have sworn to keep said information secret.
Thus the question: are you obligated to behave as if you know this information (i.e., to inform Carol of Dave’s treachery)? Or, is it morally permissible for you to behave as if you know nothing (and thus to do nothing—and not only that, but to lie if Carol asks “do you know if Dave is stealing from the shop?”, etc.)?
Maybe I am missing the point, but since you do know all information which you do in fact, know, wouldn’t behaving as if you do just mean behaving… the way in which you behave? In which case, isn’t the puzzle meaningless?
This is true in the same technically-correct-but-useless sense that it’s true to say something like “choosing what to do is impossible, since you will in fact do whatever you end up doing”. Unless we believe in substance dualism, or magic, or what have you, we have to conclude that our actions are determined, right? So when you do something, it’s impossible for you to have done something different! Well, ok, but having declared that, we do still have to figure out what to have for dinner, and which outfit to wear to the party, and whether to accept that job offer or not.
Neither do I think that talk of “playing roles” is very illuminating here.
For a better treatment of the topic, see this recent comment by Viliam.
Parfit’s Hitchhiker is not an analogous situation, since it doesn’t take place in a context like “you’re the last person in the universe and will never interact with another agent ever”, nor does paying cause me to burn to death (in which case I wouldn’t pay; note that this would defeat the point of being rescued in the first place!).
But more importantly, in the Parfit’s Hitchhiker situation, you have in fact been provided with value (namely, your life!). Then you’re asked to pay a (vastly smaller!) price for that value.
In the Bomb scenario, on the other hand, you’re asked to give up your life (very painfully), and in exchange you get (and have gotten) absolutely nothing whatsoever.
So I really don’t see the relevance of the question…
Pay.
Hmm, I see, thanks.
This is a tangent (so maybe you prefer to direct this discussion elsewhere), but: what’s with the brackets? I see you using them regularly; what do they signify?
This seems bad, actually. It seems to me like a sign of insecurity and unjustified submission. I, for one, have no interest in having my conversation partners signal that they’re vulnerable to me (nor have I any interest in signaling to that I’m vulnerable to them).
Everyone has vulnerabilities. Showing them and thus becoming vulnerable doesn’t signal insecurity or submission, actually the opposite. It requires high self-confidence (self-acceptance?) and signals openness and honesty to the other person. The benefit is that it leads to significantly deeper interactions.
You didn’t quote the specific thing I was responding to, with the quoted paragraph, so let’s review that. Aella wrote:
So if frame control looks so similar to just being a normal person, what are some signs that someone isn’t doing frame control? Keeping in mind that these are pointers, not absolute, and not doing these doesn’t mean someone is doing frame control.
They give you power over them, like indications that they want your approval or unconditional support in areas you are superior to them. They signal to you that they are vulnerable to you.
What is being described here is unquestionably a signal of submission. (And wanting the approval of someone you just met is absolutely a sign of insecurity.)
“Openness and honesty” are not even slightly the same thing as “want[ing] [someone’s] approval” or giving someone (whom you’ve just met!) “unconditional support”. To equate these things is tendentious, at best.
Behaving in such an overtly insecure fashion, submitting so readily to people you meet, does not lead to “significantly deeper conversations”; it leads to being dominated, exploited, and abused. Likewise, signaling “vulnerability” in this fashion means signaling vulnerability to abuse.
And the benefit of inhabiting another one’s frame? If I use the “camera position and orientation” definition of a frame mentioned by Vaniver, inhabiting other person’s frame allows you to see things that may be occluded from your point of view and thus give you new evidence. The least it can give you is a new interpretation of data that you gathered yourself. But it can possibly introduce genuinely new evidence to you, because frames serve as lenses and by making you focus on one thing they also make you subconsciously ignore other things.
You see, this is what I mean when I say that I’m against fake frameworks.
You’ve taken a metaphor (the “frame” as a “camera position and orientation”); you’ve reasoned within the metaphor to a conclusion (“inhabiting other person’s frame allows you to see things that may be occluded from your point of view”, “it can possibly introduce genuinely new evidence to you”); and then you haven’t checked to see whether what you said makes sense non-metaphorically. You’ve made metaphorical claims (“frames serve as lenses”), but you haven’t translated those back into non-metaphorical language.
So on what basis should we believe these claims? On the strength of the metaphor? On our faith in its close correspondence with reality? But it’s not a very strong metaphor, and its correspondence to reality is tenuous…
This is not an idle objection—even in this specific case! In fact, I think that “inhabiting other person’s frame” almost always does not give you any new evidence—though it can easily deceive you by making you think that you’ve genuinely “considered things from a new perspective”. I think that it is very easy to deceive yourself into imagining that you are being open-minded, that you’re “putting yourself into someone else’s shoes”, that you’re using the “principle of charity” to “pass an Intellectual Turing Test”, etc., when in fact you’re just recapitulating your own biases, and distorting another person’s ideas by forcing them into the mold of your own worldview. (Or, if you like, we could say: frames serve as lenses, but lenses can distort just as easily as they can magnify…)
The best way to learn what another person thinks is to listen to what they say, read what they write, and watch what they do. No amount of “inhabiting their frame” will substitute for that.
Said refuses to try and see the world via the glasses presented in the OP
In other words, Said refuses to inhabit Aella’s frame
Ah yes, the classic rhetorical form: “if you disagree with me, that’s because you refuse even to try to see things my way!”
Yeah, could be. Or, it could be that your interlocutor considered your ideas, and found them wanting. It could be that they actually, upon consideration, disagree with you.
In this case, given that I’ve extensively argued against the claims and ideas presented in the OP, I think that the former hypothesis hardly seems likely.
Said denies the existence of the natural concept frame and denies any usefulness of it even if it were a mere fake concept
I’m not a fan of “fake frameworks” in general. I’m in favor of believing true things, and not false things.
It seems to me that Said is really confident about their frame and is signaling against inhabiting other people’s frames
Given that I don’t think “frames” are a useful concept (in the way that [I think] you mean them), my only answer to this one can be mu.
Most people usually aren’t onto anything good, so this, again, ought to be the default assumption.
It seems to me that Said actually believes there is no value in inhabiting other people’s frames
Most people are idiots, and most people’s ideas are dumb.
That’s not some sort of declaration of all-encompassing misanthropy; it’s a banal statement of a plain (and fairly obvious) fact. (Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap.)
So the default assumption, when you meet someone new and they tell you their amazing ideas, is that this person at best has some boring, ordinary beliefs (that may or may not be true, but are by no means novel to you); and at worst, that they have stumbled into some new form of stupidity.
Now, that’s the default; of course there are exceptions, and plenty of them. (Are exceptions to this rule more or less likely among “rationalists”, and at “rationalist” gatherings? That’s hard to say, and probably there is significant, and non-random, variation based on subcultural context. But that is a matter for another discussion.) One should always be open to the possibility of encountering genuinely novel, interesting, useful ideas. (Else what is the point of talking to other people?)
But the default is what it is. We can bemoan it, but we cannot change it (at least, not yet).
(Reply to second part of parent comment in a sibling comment, for convenience of discussion.)
Hmm… I can’t connect any of these descriptions to any tea I’ve ever drunk. (Probably this is because I don’t have a lot of experience with yards, and mowing grass…)
The practical instruction, sadly, is no longer possible for me to implement, due to COVID-related loss of smell.
Well, I suppose it can’t matter too much, if I couldn’t / can’t tell the difference…