The most likely mutation is that the information will be rounded to the nearest cliche. Sometimes people work hard because they are trying to prevent this outcome.
I think there’s room for doubt in that claim but my sense is that most ideas that are thought of are never shared. There’s so much that can be improved everywhere and there’s no culture nurtured where people speak their mind about it to get the discussion going. It’s actually socially awkward to point out points for improvement in things, even if it’s cliche to say it would be helpful. As a consequence, the average conversation is predictable and sterile , and improvements aren’t implemented even if they’re obvious. Improvements don’t happen because people don’t like to entertain ideas.
Although what I really intended to say in the post is that I regret when people don’t speak their ideas because they can’t find the perfect way to say it, or they haven’t fully thought it through. And for instance in discussions, there’s a lot you want to say, and you’d rather take time perfecting the formulation of your thoughts.
You’re trying to communicate a complex idea and you know that what you wrote doesn’t fully capture everything. I think that there’s so much value to putting it out there even in incomplete form and I wish people would do that more, instead of letting it be hidden away.
In terms of mutation, information has more potential to mutate positively when it’s shared than when it sits only in your mind. ______________________________________________________________________________ ”the average conversation is predictable and sterile” I don’t mean this the wrong way, I just couldn’t think of another way to put it in 10 seconds
I guess this depends on the idea and the audience—some audiences are a fertile ground for some ideas. Or you could cultivate the audience, for example by creating a Discord channel, then posting the idea somewhere and inviting the people who are interested to the channel (and kicking out those who mutate the idea in an obviously wrong direction).
But let me give you a specific example where things went horribly wrong, I am trying to make them right because I care about this a lot, and I am very careful about how to present my ideas even on LW...
.
There is this idea in education, originally called “genetic epistemology” by Jean Piaget, but later popularized under the name “constructivism”. Long story short, when people don’t reflect too much on what they are doing, they are prone to assume that education means “throw many facts at the child, and hope that something sticks—if it does not, you either didn’t throw enough facts, or the child is stupid”. This is a bit of a strawman, as today no one would explicitly admit to believing something like this, and yet if you observe what people actually do, their behavior is often consistent with what they would do if they believed this. -- And the new idea was that “actually, children develop a mental model of how things work, and the new information they get, they try to fit into this model, so your #1 priority should be to make sure they got the general model right, otherwise giving them more information will probably just make them confused… until after some time they maybe notice this and fix the model, but that may take a lot of time, and it’s not guaranteed”. (To give you a silly example, if someone believes that Canada is in Africa, and you tell them “Ottawa is the capital of Canada”, they might conclude “Ottawa is a capital somewhere in Africa”. Because their assumption is wrong, even giving them correct information results in more confusion.)
What could possibly go wrong if you release this idea to the public?
For starters, Piaget used a little unfortunate formulation for the summary of his thesis; it was something like “children construct the world in their minds”. Which some people immediately interpreted as “the world does not exist as an objective reality, it’s just something we learn to believe in when we are children”. This interpretation didn’t happen in vacuum. There were already the memes of postmodernism and relativism in the water supply, plus the religious memes how the material world is actually an illusion. So when people heard this sentence, some of them naturally rounded it to the nearest known cliche. Which is absolutely not how Piaget meant it, which would be obvious to those who would read some of the many books he wrote. But most people don’t read books, they just share tweet-sized pieces of wisdom. So the number of people who never read Piaget but strongly believed that they understand the true essence of what he wanted to say vastly exceeded the number of people who actually read Piaget.
And then in USA someone proposed to reform the education in the spirit of “constructivism”, by which they meant “let’s make textbooks that make sure that children get their basic models right, before we flood them with all the details”. But what happened instead was that people started proposing teaching plans that assumed that reality is not real, it’s all just imagination, so we shouldn’t bother teaching kids the actual knowledge (which isn’t real anyway), but let them invent their own knowledge. So the kids spent a lot of time in schools trying to invent their own reality, then it turned out that they are 13 and still can’t do even basic addition, so the entire project was cancelled. And how you can’t even talk about the idea, because when you say “why don’t we make sure that kids have the correct model of how things work?”, someone will inevitably reply with “oh, you mean constructivism? yeah, that was tried, and it turned out to be an utter disaster”. And when you say “no, no, I don’t mean the crazy thing they tried in USA, but, you know, the real constructivism”, they’ll go “sure comrade, the real socialism has never been tried”. If you keep insisting, everyone knows that you are silly, and no one takes you seriously anymore.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, some people prepared a constructivist mathematical curriculum the right way, they even tried it experimentally in a few randomly selected schools, and so far the results sound encouraging: the children taught this method are learning math better than in the average schools. (Though some people have doubts about the survey methodology. Either way, even if it wouldn’t be an improvement, it is definitely not a disaster.) Unfortunately, these people are good educators but have poor business sense, and therefore a decade later an English version still does not exist, so there is hardly anything for me to share to show that I didn’t make it all up. Even the page I linked contains just some generic slogans, and it’s not obvious how they translate to the everyday reality in the classroom. There are not even good YouTube videos, as these people mostly share the information in person on teachers’ conferences, and they train the new teachers in person. Luckily, someone made a website containing exercises from the textbooks (yes, those are actual exercises from an actual math textbook) and it even has an English version (though some links are broken and I think some translations could be improved).
In the meanwhile, I have actually tested the waters by writing this, this, and this. (And I have also received a bit of the predictable feedback, but not too much, and everyone was gentle to me, because after all this is LW, and because I didn’t try to make statements I couldn’t defend.) There will be more in future, but sadly I procrastinate a lot when writing articles.
But I imagine that in most places outside of LW, mentioning this topic would go horribly wrong; on one side people making jokes about “no true constructivism”, on the other side people trying to take ‘my side’ by saying “but really, reality is not real, it is all just a thing made up by the white patriarchy”, which isn’t really the point I am trying to make.
tl;dr—it is difficult to communicate an idea if something superficially similar but utterly wrong is already popular; most people will just assume that you meant the popular thing
Really appreciate you taking the time to write this. No doubt there’s a lot I can learn from reflecting more on this and I will in my own time. I can better understand what you mean now and I definitely agree. It nuances the proper way to propagate information a bit more. Incomplete ideas could be valuable but you’ll want to develop it enough that it can be understood from first principles and address sources of misunderstandings. There are features of knowledge communication that make ideas less prone to mutating counter-productively
The most likely mutation is that the information will be rounded to the nearest cliche. Sometimes people work hard because they are trying to prevent this outcome.
I think there’s room for doubt in that claim but my sense is that most ideas that are thought of are never shared. There’s so much that can be improved everywhere and there’s no culture nurtured where people speak their mind about it to get the discussion going. It’s actually socially awkward to point out points for improvement in things, even if it’s cliche to say it would be helpful. As a consequence, the average conversation is predictable and sterile , and improvements aren’t implemented even if they’re obvious. Improvements don’t happen because people don’t like to entertain ideas.
Although what I really intended to say in the post is that I regret when people don’t speak their ideas because they can’t find the perfect way to say it, or they haven’t fully thought it through. And for instance in discussions, there’s a lot you want to say, and you’d rather take time perfecting the formulation of your thoughts.
You’re trying to communicate a complex idea and you know that what you wrote doesn’t fully capture everything. I think that there’s so much value to putting it out there even in incomplete form and I wish people would do that more, instead of letting it be hidden away.
In terms of mutation, information has more potential to mutate positively when it’s shared than when it sits only in your mind.
______________________________________________________________________________
”the average conversation is predictable and sterile” I don’t mean this the wrong way, I just couldn’t think of another way to put it in 10 seconds
I guess this depends on the idea and the audience—some audiences are a fertile ground for some ideas. Or you could cultivate the audience, for example by creating a Discord channel, then posting the idea somewhere and inviting the people who are interested to the channel (and kicking out those who mutate the idea in an obviously wrong direction).
But let me give you a specific example where things went horribly wrong, I am trying to make them right because I care about this a lot, and I am very careful about how to present my ideas even on LW...
.
There is this idea in education, originally called “genetic epistemology” by Jean Piaget, but later popularized under the name “constructivism”. Long story short, when people don’t reflect too much on what they are doing, they are prone to assume that education means “throw many facts at the child, and hope that something sticks—if it does not, you either didn’t throw enough facts, or the child is stupid”. This is a bit of a strawman, as today no one would explicitly admit to believing something like this, and yet if you observe what people actually do, their behavior is often consistent with what they would do if they believed this. -- And the new idea was that “actually, children develop a mental model of how things work, and the new information they get, they try to fit into this model, so your #1 priority should be to make sure they got the general model right, otherwise giving them more information will probably just make them confused… until after some time they maybe notice this and fix the model, but that may take a lot of time, and it’s not guaranteed”. (To give you a silly example, if someone believes that Canada is in Africa, and you tell them “Ottawa is the capital of Canada”, they might conclude “Ottawa is a capital somewhere in Africa”. Because their assumption is wrong, even giving them correct information results in more confusion.)
What could possibly go wrong if you release this idea to the public?
For starters, Piaget used a little unfortunate formulation for the summary of his thesis; it was something like “children construct the world in their minds”. Which some people immediately interpreted as “the world does not exist as an objective reality, it’s just something we learn to believe in when we are children”. This interpretation didn’t happen in vacuum. There were already the memes of postmodernism and relativism in the water supply, plus the religious memes how the material world is actually an illusion. So when people heard this sentence, some of them naturally rounded it to the nearest known cliche. Which is absolutely not how Piaget meant it, which would be obvious to those who would read some of the many books he wrote. But most people don’t read books, they just share tweet-sized pieces of wisdom. So the number of people who never read Piaget but strongly believed that they understand the true essence of what he wanted to say vastly exceeded the number of people who actually read Piaget.
And then in USA someone proposed to reform the education in the spirit of “constructivism”, by which they meant “let’s make textbooks that make sure that children get their basic models right, before we flood them with all the details”. But what happened instead was that people started proposing teaching plans that assumed that reality is not real, it’s all just imagination, so we shouldn’t bother teaching kids the actual knowledge (which isn’t real anyway), but let them invent their own knowledge. So the kids spent a lot of time in schools trying to invent their own reality, then it turned out that they are 13 and still can’t do even basic addition, so the entire project was cancelled. And how you can’t even talk about the idea, because when you say “why don’t we make sure that kids have the correct model of how things work?”, someone will inevitably reply with “oh, you mean constructivism? yeah, that was tried, and it turned out to be an utter disaster”. And when you say “no, no, I don’t mean the crazy thing they tried in USA, but, you know, the real constructivism”, they’ll go “sure comrade, the real socialism has never been tried”. If you keep insisting, everyone knows that you are silly, and no one takes you seriously anymore.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, some people prepared a constructivist mathematical curriculum the right way, they even tried it experimentally in a few randomly selected schools, and so far the results sound encouraging: the children taught this method are learning math better than in the average schools. (Though some people have doubts about the survey methodology. Either way, even if it wouldn’t be an improvement, it is definitely not a disaster.) Unfortunately, these people are good educators but have poor business sense, and therefore a decade later an English version still does not exist, so there is hardly anything for me to share to show that I didn’t make it all up. Even the page I linked contains just some generic slogans, and it’s not obvious how they translate to the everyday reality in the classroom. There are not even good YouTube videos, as these people mostly share the information in person on teachers’ conferences, and they train the new teachers in person. Luckily, someone made a website containing exercises from the textbooks (yes, those are actual exercises from an actual math textbook) and it even has an English version (though some links are broken and I think some translations could be improved).
In the meanwhile, I have actually tested the waters by writing this, this, and this. (And I have also received a bit of the predictable feedback, but not too much, and everyone was gentle to me, because after all this is LW, and because I didn’t try to make statements I couldn’t defend.) There will be more in future, but sadly I procrastinate a lot when writing articles.
But I imagine that in most places outside of LW, mentioning this topic would go horribly wrong; on one side people making jokes about “no true constructivism”, on the other side people trying to take ‘my side’ by saying “but really, reality is not real, it is all just a thing made up by the white patriarchy”, which isn’t really the point I am trying to make.
tl;dr—it is difficult to communicate an idea if something superficially similar but utterly wrong is already popular; most people will just assume that you meant the popular thing
Really appreciate you taking the time to write this. No doubt there’s a lot I can learn from reflecting more on this and I will in my own time. I can better understand what you mean now and I definitely agree. It nuances the proper way to propagate information a bit more. Incomplete ideas could be valuable but you’ll want to develop it enough that it can be understood from first principles and address sources of misunderstandings. There are features of knowledge communication that make ideas less prone to mutating counter-productively