One thing to remember when talking about distinction/defusion is that it’s not a free operation: if you distinguish two things that you previously considered the same, you need to store at least a bit of information more than before. That is something that demands effort and energy. Sometimes, you need to store a lot more bits. You cannot simply become superintelligent by defusing everything in sight.
Sometimes, making a distinction is important, but some other times, erasing distinctions is more important. Rationality is about creating and erasing distinctions to achieve a more truthful or more useful model.
This is also why I vowed to never object that something is “more complicated” if I cannot offer a better model, because it’s always very easy to inject distinctions, the harder part is to make those distinctions matter.
Yeah. Probably the reason why e.g. the experience of a raw sound and the interpretation of that sound are fused together by default, is that normally it’s only the interpretation we care about, and we need to be able to react to it quickly if it carries any urgent information. I made a similar observation in the essay that Abram is referencing:
Cognitive fusion isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you suddenly notice a car driving towards you at a high speed, you don’t want to get stuck pondering about how the feeling of danger is actually a mental construct produced by your brain. You want to get out of the way as fast as possible, with minimal mental clutter interfering with your actions. Likewise, if you are doing programming or math, you want to become at least partially fused together with your understanding of the domain, taking its axioms as objective facts so that you can focus on figuring out how to work with those axioms and get your desired results. [...]
Cognitive fusion trades flexibility for focus. You will be strongly driven and capable of focusing on just the thing that’s your in mind, at the cost of being less likely to notice when that thing is actually wrong.
Yeah, totally. I think I want to defend something like being capable of drawing as many distinctions as possible (while, of course, focusing more on the more important distinctions).
One of the most distinction-heavy people I know is also one of the hardest to understand. Actually, I think the two people I know who are best at distinctions are also the two most communication-bottlenecked people I know.
Nitpick:
if you distinguish two things that you previously considered the same, you need to store at least a bit of information more than before
Not literally. It depends on the probability of the two things. At 50⁄50, it’s 1 bit. The further it gets from that, the more we can use efficient encodings to average less than 1 bit per instance, approaching zero.
In our community there are people who make a lot of distinction in the uncertainty via putting different probabilities on different claims but fail to distinguish levels of abstration.
In plenty of cases it’s not necessary to do fine distinctions, in others it’s essential for reasoning clearly. It’s worth to be able to go to fine distinctions where the occasion needs clear reasoning.
One thing to remember when talking about distinction/defusion is that it’s not a free operation: if you distinguish two things that you previously considered the same, you need to store at least a bit of information more than before. That is something that demands effort and energy. Sometimes, you need to store a lot more bits. You cannot simply become superintelligent by defusing everything in sight.
Sometimes, making a distinction is important, but some other times, erasing distinctions is more important. Rationality is about creating and erasing distinctions to achieve a more truthful or more useful model.
This is also why I vowed to never object that something is “more complicated” if I cannot offer a better model, because it’s always very easy to inject distinctions, the harder part is to make those distinctions matter.
Yeah. Probably the reason why e.g. the experience of a raw sound and the interpretation of that sound are fused together by default, is that normally it’s only the interpretation we care about, and we need to be able to react to it quickly if it carries any urgent information. I made a similar observation in the essay that Abram is referencing:
Yeah, totally. I think I want to defend something like being capable of drawing as many distinctions as possible (while, of course, focusing more on the more important distinctions).
One of the most distinction-heavy people I know is also one of the hardest to understand. Actually, I think the two people I know who are best at distinctions are also the two most communication-bottlenecked people I know.
Nitpick:
Not literally. It depends on the probability of the two things. At 50⁄50, it’s 1 bit. The further it gets from that, the more we can use efficient encodings to average less than 1 bit per instance, approaching zero.
In our community there are people who make a lot of distinction in the uncertainty via putting different probabilities on different claims but fail to distinguish levels of abstration.
In plenty of cases it’s not necessary to do fine distinctions, in others it’s essential for reasoning clearly. It’s worth to be able to go to fine distinctions where the occasion needs clear reasoning.