There’s an obvious but cool meta-thing going on with the number 2 that might be useful to pick out. Some pieces of this thing:
All over the place, we speak in terms of dichotomies and not trichotomies or more. The reason is basically that each dichotomy corresponds to doing PCA and projecting space onto a single axis, and a one-dimensional line has two directions. This suggests that much of the interesting conversation about any given topic (i.e. axis) can be picked up by having exactly two people talk about it. Two people will always differ slightly on the axis. Adding any additional people to a conversation has rapidly diminishing returns: you may have more total disagreement, but rarely more total dimensionality in the disagreement.
Duo Talks is the idea that most productive conversations occur between two people. Even with Trio walks, the setup is for one person to stay on the sidelines and wait for a chance to rotate in. A single conversation really only happens along one dimension, and it requires only two distinct people to detect.
I wonder if monogamy is some kind of attractor state because interactions between two people are the most productive.
Applying the Solitaire Principle, for all the same reasons it’s useful to have conversations between two people, it’s most useful to draw dichotomies between two pieces of the mind instead of more. This is why we have Internal Double Crux instead of Triple or more. A conversation/internal conflict is always about something and should have a purpose, and that purpose projects the entire conversation onto the one relevant dimension, so it’s really only necessary to divide into two sides along this axis. Thus we get S1/S2, Elephant/Rider, Episodic/Diachronic, etc.
There are many reasons it’s so tempting to project onto a single axis but maybe the foundational reason is the dichotomy between approaching and avoiding, or if you prefer, between positive and negative reward in reinforcement learning terms. This blows up into good vs. evil, friend vs. enemy, and so forth.
Edit: Also this is why Venkatesh Rao is much more sophisticated than we are; he does PCA but projects onto 2 axes and makes a 2x2 square.
There’s an obvious but cool meta-thing going on with the number 2 that might be useful to pick out. Some pieces of this thing:
All over the place, we speak in terms of dichotomies and not trichotomies or more. The reason is basically that each dichotomy corresponds to doing PCA and projecting space onto a single axis, and a one-dimensional line has two directions. This suggests that much of the interesting conversation about any given topic (i.e. axis) can be picked up by having exactly two people talk about it. Two people will always differ slightly on the axis. Adding any additional people to a conversation has rapidly diminishing returns: you may have more total disagreement, but rarely more total dimensionality in the disagreement.
Duo Talks is the idea that most productive conversations occur between two people. Even with Trio walks, the setup is for one person to stay on the sidelines and wait for a chance to rotate in. A single conversation really only happens along one dimension, and it requires only two distinct people to detect.
I wonder if monogamy is some kind of attractor state because interactions between two people are the most productive.
Applying the Solitaire Principle, for all the same reasons it’s useful to have conversations between two people, it’s most useful to draw dichotomies between two pieces of the mind instead of more. This is why we have Internal Double Crux instead of Triple or more. A conversation/internal conflict is always about something and should have a purpose, and that purpose projects the entire conversation onto the one relevant dimension, so it’s really only necessary to divide into two sides along this axis. Thus we get S1/S2, Elephant/Rider, Episodic/Diachronic, etc.
I like this a lot.
There are many reasons it’s so tempting to project onto a single axis but maybe the foundational reason is the dichotomy between approaching and avoiding, or if you prefer, between positive and negative reward in reinforcement learning terms. This blows up into good vs. evil, friend vs. enemy, and so forth.
Edit: Also this is why Venkatesh Rao is much more sophisticated than we are; he does PCA but projects onto 2 axes and makes a 2x2 square.