I feel like parables here on LW, especially the longer and more tortured ones, are pretty much fallacy and bias breeding grounds. A couple egregious offenders, to my mind, include
Why do I take issue with them? Because while using analogies, including fanciful ones, can help us take the outside view on a problem where we are irrationally biased, these sorts of parables can also be a selective re-telling of the facts, and conclusions drawn from them simply don’t transfer to the real world because of the way those facts are distorted, elided or transformed. Any argument with the conclusion then has to take us back to whatever the real-world analogue is, and explain why the parable is flawed.
In other words, a parable (particularly the long-winded, over-constructed sort people like to post on LW) can give you an outside view but it often just pulls you away from the only way to actually solve a problem: to engage with the problem, down the the gritty details that will be erased or distorted by a parable.
I’m fairly sure this comment was not exactly intended as a compliment, but I can think of worse insults than having my writing put in the same category as Nick Bostrom. As the author of the first of these parables, even I recognize that these two stories differ very significantly in quality
The Blue and Green Martians parable was an attempt to discuss a question of ethics that is important to many members of this community, and which it is almost impossible to discuss elsewhere. The decision to use an analogy was an attempt to minimize mindkill. This did not succeed. However, I am fairly sure that if I had chosen not to use an analogy, the resulting flamewar would have been immense. This probably means that there are certain topics we just can’t discuss, which feels distinctly suboptimal, but I’m not sure I have a better solution.
Well I don’t like the dragon parable either. It’s overlong, a bit condescending and ignores the core problem that anti-aging research has done a pretty poor job of showing concrete achievements, even if it’s right that it’s under-prioritized. I was not a fan of yours exactly because I think the parable elides the most important parts of the actual topic. Even if a direct discussion would be flamey, it’s not better to discuss a poor proxy. I’m not trying to pick on you, I just think you tried to define the problem with some premises that were well worth dispute.
There are all sorts of other bad analogies out there though: “If canada launched missiles at the US, how would it respond?”, even though the US hasn’t turned Canada into a prison-state over the course of 50 years, is one on the news a lot right now.
Parables about the danger of nuclear weapons that ignore the fact that this danger was successfully handled (there was something on here using it as an analogy for AI).
Also, when parables are kind-of-but-not-really trying to be coy about what they’re actually about is a bit annoying, leading to stilted writing (but that’s the least of my issues).
EY also has a lot of dubious parables, but tackling those is a subject for a bigger post.
And of course there’s the whole genre of parables where two fictional interlocutors are arguing, the strawman ‘loses’ the argument, and that’s supposed to convince us of something. I think LW manages to avoid overt versions of this.
In the realm of politics (both Red/Blue and further-from-mainstream) people often apply “argument by utopia”, which suffers similar issues in that it attempts to prematurely define convenient facts and use a narrative to elide gritty, worthwhile details of an issue.
Parables about the danger of nuclear weapons that ignore the fact that this danger was successfully handled (there was something on here using it as an analogy for AI).
The danger wasn’t successfully handled for a lot of values of “successful”. The fact that you survive playing Russian roulette doesn’t show that you successfully handled danger. Once a nuclear bomb nearly exploded in the US where 3 of 4 safety feature of the bomb failed.
If I remember right it would have needed 3 of 3 people in the Russian submarine in the Cuban missle crisis to lunch a nuclear weapon and 2 of them wanted to lunch it. There are various lost nuclear weapons.
If I remember right it would have needed 3 of 3 people in the Russian submarine in the Cuban missle crisis to lunch a nuclear weapon and 2 of them wanted to lunch it.
Two of them got sick of their jobs and decided to just go to lunch. Luckily the third guy stayed at his post and just snacked on a sandwich.
Well I don’t like the dragon parable either. It’s overlong, a bit condescending and ignores the core problem that anti-aging research has done a pretty poor job of showing concrete achievements, even if it’s right that it’s under-prioritized.
Hmm. I suppose I thought the point of “Dragon Tyrant” was not to narrowly advocate for the anti-aging research program; but rather to get people to take seriously the “naïve” idea that death is bad.
Or, more specifically, to say that even though ① defeating death seems like an insurmountable goal because death has always been around, and ② there are people advocating on a wide variety of grounds against attempting to defeat death, it is nonetheless reasonable and desirable to consider.
“Dragon Tyrant” uses the technique, common to sociology and “soft” science fiction (e.g. Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams), of making the familiar strange — taking something that we are so accustomed to that it is unquestioned, and portraying it as alien.
Well, solving death without solving aging wouldn’t be that great, so I tend to look at anti-aging as the main path.
I think that people who don’t get on the “death is bad” train do so because they don’t take seriously the idea that there’s any alternative. And certainly, if you’re 80 years old and in poor health and going around denying your own mortality, you’re probably in a worse mindset than somebody who accepts that they will soon die. Until research gets to a certain point, being a proud anti-deathist is just pretentious windmill-tilting.
In a few decades maybe technology will hold the serious possibility of living indefinitely, and people will be making choices about whether to receive certain therapies or genetically modify their children in some way; and the arguments to make will be much clearer.
But also, “Dragon Tyrant” is definitely kind of narrow because it very transparently calls politicians murderers for not putting more effort and funds into anti-death research, which is a bit more than the broad stuff you’re saying.
I feel like the dragon parable correctly shows, if anything, negative progress being made towards dealing with the dragon, until suddenly, it is dealt with. I suppose one difference is that the anti-dragon projectile seems so much more achievable and imaginable than a cure for aging.
Announce ‘I would like to have conversations about the controversial topic Pick-up Artistry. Because talking about it publicly can result in problems, If you want to talk with me about that topic, please send me a message stating your position on the topic.’
By keeping it open like that and not stating your own position, it seems to be about as not prone to mindkill as you could get.
The downside is, private conversations don’t have as much bounce effects. For instance in the prior mentioned thread, Viliam_Bur essentially created a post which I don’t think would ever get paralleled in a series of private conversations.
The point of a parable is not to de-bias a heated political topic and then draw direct conclusions about the original topic. It is an attempt to extract one or two key ideas that tend to get muddied up by contentious object level issues. It is essentially an extended analogy.
If someone makes an argument of the form “If A is X, then Y”, then a parable is an attempt to extract this idea form the political arena and then test in on new inputs. “B is X, but is it Y?”.
It is not an attempt to get rid of the finer details of an issue, but rather to figure out what those details are, and which details are irrelevant.
I get this. And I think many parables profoundly fail in this. They create a simplistic narrative and conclusion, then make it harder to argue about by transferring the logic over to an analogue.
Then it’s hard to get the discussion back onto important details.
De-biasing and removing words that trigger an immediate emotional response is one major use of analogies too though.
What? One of the main premises of the story is that humans all other things being equal prefer to be tickled by blue martians than to not be tickled and to not be tickled than to be tickled by green martians. Otherwise there would be no ethical problem at all—martians could just tickle whomever they wanted.
Okay, women have a preference along a single axis which they do nothing about and do not express at all. The framework as described is all about what active agenty men could or should do to entirely passive npc women. I’m very far from being a feminist, but come on—this is objectification and “don’t worry your pretty head about it”.
I have a preference for eating tasty food in restaurants. But I am absolutely not interested in teaching chefs how to cook. If I am not satisfied with the food, I will simply never come back to that restaurant again. There are many restaurants to choose from. I don’t really care about what happens to the owner of the bad restaurant; it’s their problem, not mine.
Does this make me an entirely passive NPC, because I completely refuse to participate in this “how to get better at cooking” business and merely evaluate my satisfaction with the results? I don’t think this would be a fair description. I am not waiting helplessly; my strategy is evaluating different restaurants and choosing the best. Yeah, if we assume that each chef can only make a limited amount of food, I am kinda playing a zero-sum game against other customers here. But still, playing zero-sum games is not passivity.
But a naive chef could complain: “All those customers do is criticize. They never help us, never teach us. How are we supposed to learn? Everyone’s first cooked meal is far from perfect. Practice makes perfect, but practice inevitably includes making a few mistakes.” From his point of view, the customers are kinda passive: they want better food, but they are not helping anyone to cook better; they merely avoid those who cook worse, which per se does not make them cook better.
(To make it even worse, in this world vocational schools for chefs have a very bad reputation. People believe they all teach you to use the cheapest ingredients and artificial flavors, because they once read an internet forum where a few chefs debated exactly this. Thus most chefs take a great care to avoid anything that could remind their customers of a vocational school.)
First, here you are a consumer. You have no relationships with chefs and are not interested in relationships with chefs. You pay your money, you get your product and its qualities is all you care about. If that product came from a kitchen two blocks down the street, or was flown frozen from overseas, or made by a robot chef—you don’t care as long as it’s good.
Second, you are active and make decisions. It is not the case that chefs jump on you as you walk down the street and attempt to stuff their food into your mouth. You pick the restaurant you go to. I see no passivity at all, it’s just teaching chefs cooking is neither your role nor your desire.
It is true that some participants in the analogy are “non-player characters”. That is because some ethical questions only have implications for the choices of a subset of the agents. It should be permissible to discuss these ethical questions. Doing this properly will require adding information about all stakeholders whenever it is relevant, but it does not necessarily require all stakeholders to be “playable” in the sense that they actively make ethical decisions.
It is also true that the women in my story have a preference on a single axis, and that in real life, they also have preferences on other axes. I did not specify those preferences in the analogy, because I did not see the point in adding complications that do not have relevance to the resolution of the ethical question, which is a choice faced only by Martians.
If you feel that there is an additional axis which has important implications for the ethical choice that the Green Martians are facing, please specify what that axis is and why it is important. This would be an important contribution to the discussion. Otherwise, this comes across as saying “you should have added additional complications that were not relevant, in order to sufficiently signal that women are important ethical agents and not objects”.
The fact that women are important ethical agents is so obvious that it is not even worth debating. However, I shouldn’t have to signal this at every opportunity as a precondition for taking part in the discussion, especially not when this would require me to add unnecessary information to the story.
As for why the women don’t express their preference not to be tickled by green martians, this is simply because I took this preference to be obvious and common knowledge to all participants in the analogy.
because I don’t see the point in adding complications that do not have relevance to the discussion
Your parable is flawed at the core because you made a basic category mistake. Flirting is not an action, not something one person does to another one. It is interaction, something two people do together.
Deciding that one person in that interaction controls the encounter and does things, while the other is just a passive receptacle to the extent that not even her consent is required, never mind active participation, is not a useful framework for looking at how men and women interact.
I feel like parables here on LW, especially the longer and more tortured ones, are pretty much fallacy and bias breeding grounds. A couple egregious offenders, to my mind, include
Blue and Green Martians; about pick-up artistry
and
The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant; about death
Why do I take issue with them? Because while using analogies, including fanciful ones, can help us take the outside view on a problem where we are irrationally biased, these sorts of parables can also be a selective re-telling of the facts, and conclusions drawn from them simply don’t transfer to the real world because of the way those facts are distorted, elided or transformed. Any argument with the conclusion then has to take us back to whatever the real-world analogue is, and explain why the parable is flawed.
In other words, a parable (particularly the long-winded, over-constructed sort people like to post on LW) can give you an outside view but it often just pulls you away from the only way to actually solve a problem: to engage with the problem, down the the gritty details that will be erased or distorted by a parable.
I’m fairly sure this comment was not exactly intended as a compliment, but I can think of worse insults than having my writing put in the same category as Nick Bostrom. As the author of the first of these parables, even I recognize that these two stories differ very significantly in quality
The Blue and Green Martians parable was an attempt to discuss a question of ethics that is important to many members of this community, and which it is almost impossible to discuss elsewhere. The decision to use an analogy was an attempt to minimize mindkill. This did not succeed. However, I am fairly sure that if I had chosen not to use an analogy, the resulting flamewar would have been immense. This probably means that there are certain topics we just can’t discuss, which feels distinctly suboptimal, but I’m not sure I have a better solution.
Well I don’t like the dragon parable either. It’s overlong, a bit condescending and ignores the core problem that anti-aging research has done a pretty poor job of showing concrete achievements, even if it’s right that it’s under-prioritized. I was not a fan of yours exactly because I think the parable elides the most important parts of the actual topic. Even if a direct discussion would be flamey, it’s not better to discuss a poor proxy. I’m not trying to pick on you, I just think you tried to define the problem with some premises that were well worth dispute.
There are all sorts of other bad analogies out there though: “If canada launched missiles at the US, how would it respond?”, even though the US hasn’t turned Canada into a prison-state over the course of 50 years, is one on the news a lot right now.
Parables about the danger of nuclear weapons that ignore the fact that this danger was successfully handled (there was something on here using it as an analogy for AI).
Also, when parables are kind-of-but-not-really trying to be coy about what they’re actually about is a bit annoying, leading to stilted writing (but that’s the least of my issues).
EY also has a lot of dubious parables, but tackling those is a subject for a bigger post.
And of course there’s the whole genre of parables where two fictional interlocutors are arguing, the strawman ‘loses’ the argument, and that’s supposed to convince us of something. I think LW manages to avoid overt versions of this.
In the realm of politics (both Red/Blue and further-from-mainstream) people often apply “argument by utopia”, which suffers similar issues in that it attempts to prematurely define convenient facts and use a narrative to elide gritty, worthwhile details of an issue.
The danger wasn’t successfully handled for a lot of values of “successful”. The fact that you survive playing Russian roulette doesn’t show that you successfully handled danger. Once a nuclear bomb nearly exploded in the US where 3 of 4 safety feature of the bomb failed. If I remember right it would have needed 3 of 3 people in the Russian submarine in the Cuban missle crisis to lunch a nuclear weapon and 2 of them wanted to lunch it. There are various lost nuclear weapons.
Two of them got sick of their jobs and decided to just go to lunch. Luckily the third guy stayed at his post and just snacked on a sandwich.
Hmm. I suppose I thought the point of “Dragon Tyrant” was not to narrowly advocate for the anti-aging research program; but rather to get people to take seriously the “naïve” idea that death is bad.
Or, more specifically, to say that even though ① defeating death seems like an insurmountable goal because death has always been around, and ② there are people advocating on a wide variety of grounds against attempting to defeat death, it is nonetheless reasonable and desirable to consider.
“Dragon Tyrant” uses the technique, common to sociology and “soft” science fiction (e.g. Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams), of making the familiar strange — taking something that we are so accustomed to that it is unquestioned, and portraying it as alien.
Well, solving death without solving aging wouldn’t be that great, so I tend to look at anti-aging as the main path.
I think that people who don’t get on the “death is bad” train do so because they don’t take seriously the idea that there’s any alternative. And certainly, if you’re 80 years old and in poor health and going around denying your own mortality, you’re probably in a worse mindset than somebody who accepts that they will soon die. Until research gets to a certain point, being a proud anti-deathist is just pretentious windmill-tilting.
In a few decades maybe technology will hold the serious possibility of living indefinitely, and people will be making choices about whether to receive certain therapies or genetically modify their children in some way; and the arguments to make will be much clearer.
But also, “Dragon Tyrant” is definitely kind of narrow because it very transparently calls politicians murderers for not putting more effort and funds into anti-death research, which is a bit more than the broad stuff you’re saying.
I feel like the dragon parable correctly shows, if anything, negative progress being made towards dealing with the dragon, until suddenly, it is dealt with. I suppose one difference is that the anti-dragon projectile seems so much more achievable and imaginable than a cure for aging.
Right; literally having a “magic bullet” solve the problem of the story, even if it takes a lot of development, is another flaw of the story.
What would you think of the following solution?
Announce ‘I would like to have conversations about the controversial topic Pick-up Artistry. Because talking about it publicly can result in problems, If you want to talk with me about that topic, please send me a message stating your position on the topic.’
By keeping it open like that and not stating your own position, it seems to be about as not prone to mindkill as you could get.
The downside is, private conversations don’t have as much bounce effects. For instance in the prior mentioned thread, Viliam_Bur essentially created a post which I don’t think would ever get paralleled in a series of private conversations.
(Viliam_Bur’s post for reference: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/klx/ethics_in_a_feedback_loop_a_parable/b5oz
The point of a parable is not to de-bias a heated political topic and then draw direct conclusions about the original topic. It is an attempt to extract one or two key ideas that tend to get muddied up by contentious object level issues. It is essentially an extended analogy.
If someone makes an argument of the form “If A is X, then Y”, then a parable is an attempt to extract this idea form the political arena and then test in on new inputs. “B is X, but is it Y?”.
It is not an attempt to get rid of the finer details of an issue, but rather to figure out what those details are, and which details are irrelevant.
I get this. And I think many parables profoundly fail in this. They create a simplistic narrative and conclusion, then make it harder to argue about by transferring the logic over to an analogue.
Then it’s hard to get the discussion back onto important details.
De-biasing and removing words that trigger an immediate emotional response is one major use of analogies too though.
Given how it portrays women as an undifferentiated passive object with no preferences or any input into the process, I’d say this attempt failed.
What? One of the main premises of the story is that humans all other things being equal prefer to be tickled by blue martians than to not be tickled and to not be tickled than to be tickled by green martians. Otherwise there would be no ethical problem at all—martians could just tickle whomever they wanted.
Okay, women have a preference along a single axis which they do nothing about and do not express at all. The framework as described is all about what active agenty men could or should do to entirely passive npc women. I’m very far from being a feminist, but come on—this is objectification and “don’t worry your pretty head about it”.
I have a preference for eating tasty food in restaurants. But I am absolutely not interested in teaching chefs how to cook. If I am not satisfied with the food, I will simply never come back to that restaurant again. There are many restaurants to choose from. I don’t really care about what happens to the owner of the bad restaurant; it’s their problem, not mine.
Does this make me an entirely passive NPC, because I completely refuse to participate in this “how to get better at cooking” business and merely evaluate my satisfaction with the results? I don’t think this would be a fair description. I am not waiting helplessly; my strategy is evaluating different restaurants and choosing the best. Yeah, if we assume that each chef can only make a limited amount of food, I am kinda playing a zero-sum game against other customers here. But still, playing zero-sum games is not passivity.
But a naive chef could complain: “All those customers do is criticize. They never help us, never teach us. How are we supposed to learn? Everyone’s first cooked meal is far from perfect. Practice makes perfect, but practice inevitably includes making a few mistakes.” From his point of view, the customers are kinda passive: they want better food, but they are not helping anyone to cook better; they merely avoid those who cook worse, which per se does not make them cook better.
(To make it even worse, in this world vocational schools for chefs have a very bad reputation. People believe they all teach you to use the cheapest ingredients and artificial flavors, because they once read an internet forum where a few chefs debated exactly this. Thus most chefs take a great care to avoid anything that could remind their customers of a vocational school.)
I don’t understand your analogy.
First, here you are a consumer. You have no relationships with chefs and are not interested in relationships with chefs. You pay your money, you get your product and its qualities is all you care about. If that product came from a kitchen two blocks down the street, or was flown frozen from overseas, or made by a robot chef—you don’t care as long as it’s good.
Second, you are active and make decisions. It is not the case that chefs jump on you as you walk down the street and attempt to stuff their food into your mouth. You pick the restaurant you go to. I see no passivity at all, it’s just teaching chefs cooking is neither your role nor your desire.
It is true that some participants in the analogy are “non-player characters”. That is because some ethical questions only have implications for the choices of a subset of the agents. It should be permissible to discuss these ethical questions. Doing this properly will require adding information about all stakeholders whenever it is relevant, but it does not necessarily require all stakeholders to be “playable” in the sense that they actively make ethical decisions.
It is also true that the women in my story have a preference on a single axis, and that in real life, they also have preferences on other axes. I did not specify those preferences in the analogy, because I did not see the point in adding complications that do not have relevance to the resolution of the ethical question, which is a choice faced only by Martians.
If you feel that there is an additional axis which has important implications for the ethical choice that the Green Martians are facing, please specify what that axis is and why it is important. This would be an important contribution to the discussion. Otherwise, this comes across as saying “you should have added additional complications that were not relevant, in order to sufficiently signal that women are important ethical agents and not objects”.
The fact that women are important ethical agents is so obvious that it is not even worth debating. However, I shouldn’t have to signal this at every opportunity as a precondition for taking part in the discussion, especially not when this would require me to add unnecessary information to the story.
As for why the women don’t express their preference not to be tickled by green martians, this is simply because I took this preference to be obvious and common knowledge to all participants in the analogy.
Your parable is flawed at the core because you made a basic category mistake. Flirting is not an action, not something one person does to another one. It is interaction, something two people do together.
Deciding that one person in that interaction controls the encounter and does things, while the other is just a passive receptacle to the extent that not even her consent is required, never mind active participation, is not a useful framework for looking at how men and women interact.