I’ve found myself pointing people to Korzybski a lot lately.
It has been troubling me for a while that EY starts with a couple of the most basic statements of Korzybski, and then busies himself reinventing the wheel, instead of at least starting from what Korzybski and the General Semantics crowd has already worked out.
EY is clearing brush through the wilderness, while there’s a paved road 10 feet away, and you’re the first person on the list who has seemed to notice.
There have been other smart people in the world. You can stand on the shoulders of giants, stand on the shoulders of stacks of midgets, or you can just keep on jumping in the air and flapping your arms.
Korzybski, for all his merits, is turgid, repetitive, and full of out of date science. The last is not his fault: he was as up to date for his time as Eliezer is now, but, for example, he was writing before the Bayesian revolution in statistics and mostly before the invention of the computer. Neither topic makes any appearance in his magnum opus, “Science and Sanity”. I wouldn’t recommend him except for historical interest. People should know about him, which is why I referenced him, and his work did start a community that continues to this day. However, having been a member of one of the two main general semantics organisations years back, I cannot say that he and they produced anything to compare with Eliezer’s work here. If Eliezer is reinventing the wheel, compared with Korzybski he’s making it round instead of square, and has thought of adding axle bearings and pneumatic tyres.
EY talks about things they don’t, but on the Map is Not the Territory, I don’t see that EY or the usual discussions here have met Korzybski’s level for consciousness of abstraction, let alone surpassed it. General Semantics provides a tidy metamodel of abstracting, identifies and names important concepts within the model, and adds some basic tools and practices for semantic hygiene. I find them generally useful, and I generally recommend them.
For consciousness of abstraction, where and how has EY exceeded Korzybski? What are new and improved bits? Where was K wrong, and EY right?
On second thoughts, when I said “[not] anything to compare with” that was wildly exaggerated. Of course they’re comparable—we are comparing them, and they are not so far apart that the result is a slam-dunk. But I don’t want to get into a blue vs. green dingdong (despite having already veered in that direction in the grandparent).
Here are some brief remarks towards a comparison on the issues that occur to me. I’m sure there’s a lot more to be said on this, but that would be a top-level post that would take (at least for me) weeks to write, with many hours of re-studying the source materials.
Clarity of exposition. There really is no contest here: E wins hands down, and I have “Science and Sanity” in front of me.
Informed by current science. Inevitably, E wins this one as well, just by being informed of another half-century of science. That doesn’t just mean better examples to illustrate the same ideas, but new ideas to build on. I already mentioned Bayesian reasoning and computers, both unavailable to K.
Consciousness of abstraction. Grokking, to use Heinlein’s word, the map-territory distinction. Both E and K have hammered on this one. K refined it more, treating not merely of map/territory, but our capability for unlimited levels of abstraction, maps-of-maps-of-maps-of-etc to any depth. The more levels, the further removed from contact with reality, and the more scope for losing touch with it. Nested thought-bubbles have appeared in Eliezer’s writings, but as far as I recall the spotlight has never been turned on the phenomenon.
The “cortico-thalamic pause”. The name is based on what I suspect is outdated neuroscience, but the idea is still around, with the currently fashionable name of “System 1 vs. System 2″. The idea is current on LessWrong, but I don’t recall if Eliezer himself has written anything on it. The technique consists of giving yourself time to respond rationally to whatever has just happened, time to perceive it clearly and consider (the “cortical” part) without emotional distraction (the “thalamic” part) what the situation is or might be and what to do about it, deploying consciousness of abstraction in order to be mindful of one’s own flaws and see the emotional responses for what they are. This is in the Null-A books as well, so map ≠ territory isn’t the only real-world actionable idea there.
The unity of “body” and “mind”, of “emotion” and “intellect”, of “senses” and “thought”, of “heredity” and “environment”, etc. Our usual language artificially splits these apart (K uses the word “elementalistic”), when in reality they are indissoluble, and we require “non-elementalistic” language to speak accurately of them, hence his coining of the term “semantic reaction” to refer to the response of the organism-as-a-whole to an event. Not a topic that E has devoted attention to as a topic, but on the elementalistic splitting of “choice” from “physical law” there is this.
Something to protect. K was motivated by the state of the world around him, seeing “the human dangers of the abuse of neuro-semantic and neuro-linguistic mechanisms”, the neglect of those dangers in the democratic West, and their exploitation by totalitarian governments (“Science and Sanity”, introduction to 2nd edition, 1941). “We humans after these millions of years should have learned how to utilize the ‘intelligence’ which we supposedly have, with some predictability, etc., and use it constructively, not destructively, as, for example, the Nazis are doing under the guidance of specialists.” E was originally motivated by the Friendly AGI problem. I do not know to what extent he is motivated by the ordinary, pre-Singularity benefits that “raising the sanity waterline” would bring.
Etc., as Korzybski would say. Additions to the list welcome.
Thanks for the elaboration. I agree with the comparative aspects.
For 1), I’d say that although Korzybski was a painfully tedious windbag in Science and Sanity, I’ve seen lots of summaries that were concise and well written, though I don’t remember a comprehensive summary of Science and Sanity that fits the bill.
I was mainly getting at 3), with order of abstraction, multi ordinal terms, and the concrete practices of semantic hygiene such as indexing, etc,. and hyphenated non-elementalism.
I’d add to your list that Korzybski’s aversion to the izzes of identity and predication, along with his intensional vs. extensional distinction, really complement Tabooing a Word and Replacing the Symbol with the Substance. AK elaborates the full evaluative response—the intensional response—of a flesh and blood creature, identifies particularly problematic semantic practices which maladaptively evoke that response, and EY gives the practical method for semantic hygiene in terms of what you should be doing instead.
AK always keeps in views the abstracting nervous system in a way that EY doesn’t, and it think that added reductionism helps. A reductionist model which includes the salient points of human abstraction provides a generative method to make sense of the series of narratives that EY provides on different points on rationality.
Also, AK’s insistence on a physical structural differential, and knowledge based in the structure of various sensory modalities is really a gusher of good ideas.
AK stays closer to the wetware, and whatever the relative limits of science available to him, I think that reductionist focus works to provide a deep model for thinking about abstraction. Focus on a reductionist physical reality, and all sorts of supposed conundrums for speciation, life, and mind evaporate.
I’ve been going off on this because there’s just a ton of material from AK on semantic hygiene, which I take as a core method of getting Less Wrong, and all I usually see mentioned on this list is “The Map is not the Territory”. That’s maybe a country in the world of AK, and I think people should do some travelling and see the rest of his world. There’s a lot more to see.
S. I. Hayakawa was a way better writer—that’s where I got all my reprocessed Korzybski as a kid, and that’s where I point people: Language in Thought and Action instead of Science and Sanity. I tried once to read the latter book as a kid, after being referred to it by Null-A. I was probably about… eleven years old? Thirteen? I gave up very, very rapidly, which I did not do for physics texts with math in them.
I won’t argue with the literary analysis; K was stupendously tedious. I can’t think of anyone more tiresome, although I have a feeling that his style was in vogue with various systematizers in the first half of the 20th century. I remember similar pain in reading Buckminster Fuller and Lugwig Von Mises, though I couldn’t finish Fuller (tried him in my teens), and Von Mises wasn’t quite as awful. Someone in the body awareness field as well—Joseph Pilates or Alexander. Less sure on the last one.
I trudged through Science and Sanity, often gritting my teeth, and think it was worth it.
My impression of Hayakawa is that he takes the conclusions but leaves out the metamodel which generates the conclusions and ties them together. I felt that K gave me a way of thinking, while Hayakawa packaged a lot of results, but left out the way of thinking. I read K first, so Hayakawa tasted like relatively weak tea and didn’t leave a big impression.
K was more meaty particularly on the Science/Mathematics side. Mathematics as an abstraction of functional relations of actions in the world—I don’t know if it was literally tossing pebbles in a bucket, but it was close. It was the physical action of counting. Science as a semantic enterprise—finding new semantic structures to model world. Space-Time as providing a static view of dynamic change. There was something good on differential equations too, something like reductionist locality turning nonlinear relations into linear relations. It’s been almost 20 years now, so I’m a little hazy.
Anyway, I’d recommend at least having a serious chat with someone well versed in the mathematical and scientific side of Korzybski and Science and Sanity, as there is a lot of good stuff in there that doesn’t get a lot of attention even from the General Semantics crowd, who, like Hayakawa, focus on the verbal aspects of the theory.
Thank you for this response. This has removed a confusion I’ve had since I’ve come to the site.
You say in the article:
Sometimes it still amazes me to contemplate that this proverb was invented at some point, and some fellow named Korzybski invented it,
At least in my recollection, you refer to AK as the inventor of “The Map is not the Territory” when you bring it up, and that always gave me the impression that you had read him. But then I would be puzzled because many of the other things he said were appropriate to the conversation, and you wouldn’t bring up those at all. And you didn’t even mention Hayakawa in the article.
When someone mentions an author as the originator of an idea they’re talking about, I assume he has read them, and bring that context to a reading of what they have written in turn. It would have been helpful to me if you had identified Hayakawa and Langauge in Thought in Action as where you had been exposed to the idea, distinguishing that from where Hayakawa had gotten the idea—AK. Maybe there aren’t a lot of people who have actually read AK, but I think it would be a good general practice to make your sources clear to your readers.
For me it was Heinlein --> Korzybski --> van Vogt in my early teens. I doggedly ploughed through Korzybski, but the curious thing is, in my early twenties I reread him, and found him, not exactly light reading, but far clearer than he had been on my first attempt.
I’ve found myself pointing people to Korzybski a lot lately.
It has been troubling me for a while that EY starts with a couple of the most basic statements of Korzybski, and then busies himself reinventing the wheel, instead of at least starting from what Korzybski and the General Semantics crowd has already worked out.
EY is clearing brush through the wilderness, while there’s a paved road 10 feet away, and you’re the first person on the list who has seemed to notice.
There have been other smart people in the world. You can stand on the shoulders of giants, stand on the shoulders of stacks of midgets, or you can just keep on jumping in the air and flapping your arms.
Korzybski, for all his merits, is turgid, repetitive, and full of out of date science. The last is not his fault: he was as up to date for his time as Eliezer is now, but, for example, he was writing before the Bayesian revolution in statistics and mostly before the invention of the computer. Neither topic makes any appearance in his magnum opus, “Science and Sanity”. I wouldn’t recommend him except for historical interest. People should know about him, which is why I referenced him, and his work did start a community that continues to this day. However, having been a member of one of the two main general semantics organisations years back, I cannot say that he and they produced anything to compare with Eliezer’s work here. If Eliezer is reinventing the wheel, compared with Korzybski he’s making it round instead of square, and has thought of adding axle bearings and pneumatic tyres.
Some things should be reinvented.
EY talks about things they don’t, but on the Map is Not the Territory, I don’t see that EY or the usual discussions here have met Korzybski’s level for consciousness of abstraction, let alone surpassed it. General Semantics provides a tidy metamodel of abstracting, identifies and names important concepts within the model, and adds some basic tools and practices for semantic hygiene. I find them generally useful, and I generally recommend them.
For consciousness of abstraction, where and how has EY exceeded Korzybski? What are new and improved bits? Where was K wrong, and EY right?
On second thoughts, when I said “[not] anything to compare with” that was wildly exaggerated. Of course they’re comparable—we are comparing them, and they are not so far apart that the result is a slam-dunk. But I don’t want to get into a blue vs. green dingdong (despite having already veered in that direction in the grandparent).
Here are some brief remarks towards a comparison on the issues that occur to me. I’m sure there’s a lot more to be said on this, but that would be a top-level post that would take (at least for me) weeks to write, with many hours of re-studying the source materials.
Clarity of exposition. There really is no contest here: E wins hands down, and I have “Science and Sanity” in front of me.
Informed by current science. Inevitably, E wins this one as well, just by being informed of another half-century of science. That doesn’t just mean better examples to illustrate the same ideas, but new ideas to build on. I already mentioned Bayesian reasoning and computers, both unavailable to K.
Consciousness of abstraction. Grokking, to use Heinlein’s word, the map-territory distinction. Both E and K have hammered on this one. K refined it more, treating not merely of map/territory, but our capability for unlimited levels of abstraction, maps-of-maps-of-maps-of-etc to any depth. The more levels, the further removed from contact with reality, and the more scope for losing touch with it. Nested thought-bubbles have appeared in Eliezer’s writings, but as far as I recall the spotlight has never been turned on the phenomenon.
The “cortico-thalamic pause”. The name is based on what I suspect is outdated neuroscience, but the idea is still around, with the currently fashionable name of “System 1 vs. System 2″. The idea is current on LessWrong, but I don’t recall if Eliezer himself has written anything on it. The technique consists of giving yourself time to respond rationally to whatever has just happened, time to perceive it clearly and consider (the “cortical” part) without emotional distraction (the “thalamic” part) what the situation is or might be and what to do about it, deploying consciousness of abstraction in order to be mindful of one’s own flaws and see the emotional responses for what they are. This is in the Null-A books as well, so map ≠ territory isn’t the only real-world actionable idea there.
The unity of “body” and “mind”, of “emotion” and “intellect”, of “senses” and “thought”, of “heredity” and “environment”, etc. Our usual language artificially splits these apart (K uses the word “elementalistic”), when in reality they are indissoluble, and we require “non-elementalistic” language to speak accurately of them, hence his coining of the term “semantic reaction” to refer to the response of the organism-as-a-whole to an event. Not a topic that E has devoted attention to as a topic, but on the elementalistic splitting of “choice” from “physical law” there is this.
Something to protect. K was motivated by the state of the world around him, seeing “the human dangers of the abuse of neuro-semantic and neuro-linguistic mechanisms”, the neglect of those dangers in the democratic West, and their exploitation by totalitarian governments (“Science and Sanity”, introduction to 2nd edition, 1941). “We humans after these millions of years should have learned how to utilize the ‘intelligence’ which we supposedly have, with some predictability, etc., and use it constructively, not destructively, as, for example, the Nazis are doing under the guidance of specialists.” E was originally motivated by the Friendly AGI problem. I do not know to what extent he is motivated by the ordinary, pre-Singularity benefits that “raising the sanity waterline” would bring.
Etc., as Korzybski would say. Additions to the list welcome.
Thanks for the elaboration. I agree with the comparative aspects.
For 1), I’d say that although Korzybski was a painfully tedious windbag in Science and Sanity, I’ve seen lots of summaries that were concise and well written, though I don’t remember a comprehensive summary of Science and Sanity that fits the bill.
I was mainly getting at 3), with order of abstraction, multi ordinal terms, and the concrete practices of semantic hygiene such as indexing, etc,. and hyphenated non-elementalism.
I’d add to your list that Korzybski’s aversion to the izzes of identity and predication, along with his intensional vs. extensional distinction, really complement Tabooing a Word and Replacing the Symbol with the Substance. AK elaborates the full evaluative response—the intensional response—of a flesh and blood creature, identifies particularly problematic semantic practices which maladaptively evoke that response, and EY gives the practical method for semantic hygiene in terms of what you should be doing instead.
AK always keeps in views the abstracting nervous system in a way that EY doesn’t, and it think that added reductionism helps. A reductionist model which includes the salient points of human abstraction provides a generative method to make sense of the series of narratives that EY provides on different points on rationality.
Also, AK’s insistence on a physical structural differential, and knowledge based in the structure of various sensory modalities is really a gusher of good ideas.
AK stays closer to the wetware, and whatever the relative limits of science available to him, I think that reductionist focus works to provide a deep model for thinking about abstraction. Focus on a reductionist physical reality, and all sorts of supposed conundrums for speciation, life, and mind evaporate.
I’ve been going off on this because there’s just a ton of material from AK on semantic hygiene, which I take as a core method of getting Less Wrong, and all I usually see mentioned on this list is “The Map is not the Territory”. That’s maybe a country in the world of AK, and I think people should do some travelling and see the rest of his world. There’s a lot more to see.
S. I. Hayakawa was a way better writer—that’s where I got all my reprocessed Korzybski as a kid, and that’s where I point people: Language in Thought and Action instead of Science and Sanity. I tried once to read the latter book as a kid, after being referred to it by Null-A. I was probably about… eleven years old? Thirteen? I gave up very, very rapidly, which I did not do for physics texts with math in them.
I won’t argue with the literary analysis; K was stupendously tedious. I can’t think of anyone more tiresome, although I have a feeling that his style was in vogue with various systematizers in the first half of the 20th century. I remember similar pain in reading Buckminster Fuller and Lugwig Von Mises, though I couldn’t finish Fuller (tried him in my teens), and Von Mises wasn’t quite as awful. Someone in the body awareness field as well—Joseph Pilates or Alexander. Less sure on the last one.
I trudged through Science and Sanity, often gritting my teeth, and think it was worth it.
My impression of Hayakawa is that he takes the conclusions but leaves out the metamodel which generates the conclusions and ties them together. I felt that K gave me a way of thinking, while Hayakawa packaged a lot of results, but left out the way of thinking. I read K first, so Hayakawa tasted like relatively weak tea and didn’t leave a big impression.
K was more meaty particularly on the Science/Mathematics side. Mathematics as an abstraction of functional relations of actions in the world—I don’t know if it was literally tossing pebbles in a bucket, but it was close. It was the physical action of counting. Science as a semantic enterprise—finding new semantic structures to model world. Space-Time as providing a static view of dynamic change. There was something good on differential equations too, something like reductionist locality turning nonlinear relations into linear relations. It’s been almost 20 years now, so I’m a little hazy.
Anyway, I’d recommend at least having a serious chat with someone well versed in the mathematical and scientific side of Korzybski and Science and Sanity, as there is a lot of good stuff in there that doesn’t get a lot of attention even from the General Semantics crowd, who, like Hayakawa, focus on the verbal aspects of the theory.
Thank you for this response. This has removed a confusion I’ve had since I’ve come to the site.
You say in the article:
At least in my recollection, you refer to AK as the inventor of “The Map is not the Territory” when you bring it up, and that always gave me the impression that you had read him. But then I would be puzzled because many of the other things he said were appropriate to the conversation, and you wouldn’t bring up those at all. And you didn’t even mention Hayakawa in the article.
When someone mentions an author as the originator of an idea they’re talking about, I assume he has read them, and bring that context to a reading of what they have written in turn. It would have been helpful to me if you had identified Hayakawa and Langauge in Thought in Action as where you had been exposed to the idea, distinguishing that from where Hayakawa had gotten the idea—AK. Maybe there aren’t a lot of people who have actually read AK, but I think it would be a good general practice to make your sources clear to your readers.
For me it was Heinlein --> Korzybski --> van Vogt in my early teens. I doggedly ploughed through Korzybski, but the curious thing is, in my early twenties I reread him, and found him, not exactly light reading, but far clearer than he had been on my first attempt.