I for one don’t plan on using “mechanistic” where I currently talk about “gears-like” simply because I know what intuition the latter is pointing at but I’m much less sure about the former. Maybe down the road they’ll turn out to be equivalent. But I’ll need to see that, and why, before it’ll feel-make sense for me to switch. Sort of like needing to see and grok a math proof that two things are equivalent before I feel comfortable using that fact.
Not that I determine how Less Wrong does or doesn’t use this terminology. I’m just being honest about my intentions here.
A minor aside: To me, “gears-level” doesn’t actually make sense. I think I used to use that phrasing, but it now strikes me as an incoherent metaphor. Level of what? Level of detail of the model? You can add a ton of detail to a model without affecting how gears-like it is. I think it’s self-referential in roughly the style of “This quoted sentence talks about itself.” I think it’s intuitively pointing at how gears-like a model is, and on the scale of “not very many gears at all” to “absolutely transparently made of gears”, it’s on a level where we can talk about how the gears interact.
That said, there is a context in which I’d use a similar phrase and I think it makes perfect sense. “Can we discuss this model at the gears level?” That feels to me like we’re talking about a very gears-like model already but we aren’t yet examining the gears.
I interpret the opening question being about whether the property of being visibly made of gears is the same as “mechanistic”. I think that’s quite plausible, given that “mechanistic” means “like a mechanism”, which is a metaphor pointing at quite literally a clockwork machine made of literal physical gears. The same intuition seems to have inspired both of them.
Same. I think there’s a tendency to see superficially similar names and say “ah, these are the same concept, we should use commonly used phrases to refer to them”, which sometimes miss the nuances that the new concept was actually aiming at.
Yeah, this can be really difficult to bring out. The word “just” is a good noticer for this creeping in.
It’s like a deliberate fallacy of compression: sure you can tilt your view so they look the same and call it “abstraction”, but maybe that view is too lossy for what we’re trying to do! You’re not distilling, you’re corrupting!
I don’t think the usual corrections for fallacies of compression can help either (eg. Taboo) because we’re operating at the subverbal layer here. It’s much harder to taboo cleverness at that layer. Better off meditating on the virtue of The Void instead.
But it is indeed a good habit to try to unify things, for efficiency reasons. Just don’t get caught up on those gains.
I for one don’t plan on using “mechanistic” where I currently talk about “gears-like” simply because I know what intuition the latter is pointing at but I’m much less sure about the former. Maybe down the road they’ll turn out to be equivalent. But I’ll need to see that, and why, before it’ll feel-make sense for me to switch. Sort of like needing to see and grok a math proof that two things are equivalent before I feel comfortable using that fact.
Not that I determine how Less Wrong does or doesn’t use this terminology. I’m just being honest about my intentions here.
A minor aside: To me, “gears-level” doesn’t actually make sense. I think I used to use that phrasing, but it now strikes me as an incoherent metaphor. Level of what? Level of detail of the model? You can add a ton of detail to a model without affecting how gears-like it is. I think it’s self-referential in roughly the style of “This quoted sentence talks about itself.” I think it’s intuitively pointing at how gears-like a model is, and on the scale of “not very many gears at all” to “absolutely transparently made of gears”, it’s on a level where we can talk about how the gears interact.
That said, there is a context in which I’d use a similar phrase and I think it makes perfect sense. “Can we discuss this model at the gears level?” That feels to me like we’re talking about a very gears-like model already but we aren’t yet examining the gears.
I interpret the opening question being about whether the property of being visibly made of gears is the same as “mechanistic”. I think that’s quite plausible, given that “mechanistic” means “like a mechanism”, which is a metaphor pointing at quite literally a clockwork machine made of literal physical gears. The same intuition seems to have inspired both of them.
But as I said, I await the proof.
Same. I think there’s a tendency to see superficially similar names and say “ah, these are the same concept, we should use commonly used phrases to refer to them”, which sometimes miss the nuances that the new concept was actually aiming at.
Yeah, this can be really difficult to bring out. The word “just” is a good noticer for this creeping in.
It’s like a deliberate fallacy of compression: sure you can tilt your view so they look the same and call it “abstraction”, but maybe that view is too lossy for what we’re trying to do! You’re not distilling, you’re corrupting!
I don’t think the usual corrections for fallacies of compression can help either (eg. Taboo) because we’re operating at the subverbal layer here. It’s much harder to taboo cleverness at that layer. Better off meditating on the virtue of The Void instead.
But it is indeed a good habit to try to unify things, for efficiency reasons. Just don’t get caught up on those gains.